VOL. 133 | NO. 56 | Monday, March 19, 2018
Last Word
Bill Dries
Last Word: Preparing for 5G, The City's Pre-K Plan and Beyond the Classics
By Bill Dries
The East High and Hamilton High basketball teams are state champions at the end of the weekend. Much of the attention here has been on the East division because with that decided, East High coach Penny Hardaway is now free to be named coach of the Tigers. And it looks like Tuesday will be the day for that.
Meanwhile the Grizz won one over the weekend which means the longest losing streak since the team came to Memphis is now in the books at 19 games with the win Saturday evening over the Denver Nuggets. And the record is safe since the Grizz don’t have that many games left in the season.
The 19 straight is not the franchise record, however. That would be 23 straight games the Grizz lost in 1996 in its second season in Vancouver. The year before, in season one up north, the Grizz dropped 19 in a row.
Our Nashville correspondent Sam Stockard reports on the Tennessee Legislature’s move to prepare for 5G – the next generation for wireless communication. The legislation would set grounds rules for telecoms and similar providers to work with local government on small-cell installation in public rights of way. We might also note that the Memphis City Council has already approved an ordinance for such work in city rights of way through an amendment to its existing rules for telecoms that came a few years ago with much discussion and litigation.
Shelby County commissioners consider the upcoming county elections as they prepare for the budget season that begins in May on the county side and budget committee chairman Eddie Jones has a lean and mean schedule that goes right to the increases being requested and Shelby County Schools at the top of the list for budget hearings.
The last in a series of three meetings to gather public input on the move of the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art to the riverfront is Tuesday at the Downtown Fire Station that is the site for the museum's move out of Overton Park in five years.
Ballet Memphis is among the art institutions in the city challenging themselves to reflect the city's diversity and the experiences that come with that in its art.
The elections which will include a new county mayor and at least seven new county commissioners also came up over the weekend as the city unveiled its proposal to provide $6 million toward universal prekindergarten and avoided taking another sales tax referendum to the public to fund it.
The Brooks holds the third of three hearings Tuesday on its planned move from Overton Park to the riverfront and the meeting is at the site they plan to move to in five years.
The city’s arts scene continues to challenge itself to reflect the city’s diversity especially in art forms where the classics have reigned. The discovery, as chronicled in the cover story by Andy Meek in our weekly, The Memphis News, is that there is more than the classics and classical to reflect the experiences of a diverse city like Memphis.
Here’s the rest of The Week Ahead.
Politico on U.S. Sen. Bob Corker on the Sunday talk shows saying President Donald Trump could pull the U.S. out of the Iran nuclear deal.
The Oxford American on MLK50 in Memphis. The piece is included in our Around Memphis reading list at the top of the week along with other thoughts on the coming anniversary as well as the change of coaches at the University of Memphis and a Washington Post piece on the Mississippi River just in time for the river’s drop.
The Memphis News Almanac includes a plan to close the Cossitt, Peabody incentives, Alta Vista Drugs, the Claridge prepares to open and 100 stills destroyed.