When 20 of the 26 Memphis City Council members and Shelby County Commissioners got together Thursday, March 1, at Beale Street Landing, the idea of county government providing funds to expand access to prekindergarten got resistance on the county side.

The elected officials on both bodies also expressed concerns about how the city and county are approaching workforce development and the types of jobs the are going after.

Berlin Boyd

Heidi Shafer

The session organized by commission chairwoman Heidi Shafer and council chairman Berlin Boyd was for discussion only, with no proposals made and no votes taken among the two bodies.

A city proposal to fund prekindergarten with city funds is due in April. Council members generally support the idea of raising more money for more pre-K classrooms and making up for the potential loss of $8 million in federal grant funding that runs out in 2019. But that didn’t stop the discussion about possible county government funding of the effort.

“The city could take the lead on this,” Shafer said, noting county government is the only local funder of Shelby County Schools and is a local funder of the six suburban school systems. “With all respect, we have a heavy, heavy lift with K-12.”

But commissioners Van Turner and Willie Brooks said the county should do “whatever we can do,” according to Brooks, toward the prekindergarten goal.

“I think we need to look at education as an investment instead of an expense,” council member Martavius Jones said.

Memphis City Council member Philip Spinosa and Shelby County Commissioner Mark Billingsley confer during the Thursday, March 1, joint session of the two elected bodies at Beale Street Landing. (Daily News/Bill Dries)

Jones was critical of county Mayor Mark Luttrell for being too focused on paying down the county’s debt.

“What’s the use of me having an 800 credit score if my child needs ACT prep and I’m not spending the money on ACT prep,” he said. “But I think what has been the priority has been paying down debt. When you do that you are not making investments in children.”

Commissioner Terry Roland countered that “every city in Shelby County is investing in education except Memphis.”

County commissioner David Reaves said Shelby County Schools needs a basic reorganization that focuses on high schools.

“The bigger need now is what’s happening at Westwood and Hamilton and Douglass. We don’t have parity amongst the high schools in Memphis and it’s impacting our kids,” he said. “We have to come together to force the changes in Shelby County Schools … to where we can make educational opportunity equal.”

He also said the county is “hamstrung” by the state law requiring a certain level of county funding for schools called “maintenance of effort” that can’t be reduced.

He specifically mentioned the “windfall” Roland said SCS is getting from charter schools that predicted a higher enrollment than they actually got, resulting in what Roland said is a windfall for SCS.

“Put yourself in our place,” Reaves said. “If you approve a budget and set a tax rate and enrollment numbers are projected low and ultimately they come in higher, the school system gets a windfall. … We have no means to modify the amount we put in.”

He suggested a state law that allows the county to recapture the money and make grants in other areas related to education.

But backers of some county funding for prekindergarten argue the effort requires a revenue stream and not one-time sources of revenue that may not be there in the next fiscal year.

Roland warned against a county property tax increase as the revenue stream.

“South of Collierville is a place called Lewisburg, Mississippi. They just built their third school,” he said. “They pay one-third the property taxes we pay here in Shelby County and they can get on (Highway) 385 and be anywhere in 30 minutes. That’s our competition folks.”

On economic development, Jones immediately renewed his long-held belief that the city and county approach to workforce development is aimed at the wrong kind of work.

“I don’t want to compete with Mississippi,” he said. “For the jobs that will go to Mississippi – let them go.”

The commissioners and council members also questioned the relevance of the Workforce Investment Network and the Greater Memphis Alliance for a Competitive Workforce. WIN is funded with federal grants. GMACW was recently folded into EDGE – the Economic Development Growth Engine for Memphis and Shelby County – the economic development organization that grants tax abatements.

WIN’s director, Kevin Woods, recently left that position and GMACW was folded into EDGE after its director Glen Fenter left the agency.

Shafer said with those changes, a re-examination of both agencies and their relevance is in order.

Reaves said both efforts may have become irrelevant with the start of state government programs like Tennessee Promise that offer a scholarship to any Tennessee high school graduate for two free years of community college or at the Tennessee College of Applied Technology.

That’s recently been extended to Tennesseans who left college before graduation.

“I think the reality is we have so many distribution type of jobs that we’ve abated with PILOTs (payments in lieu of taxes) now that it’s probably time to turn the spigot off,” Reaves added.

City Council member Patrice Robinson agreed.

“I would like to encourage us not to bring another warehouse that pays $8.25 an hour and think we have done something to eradicate poverty in our city,” she said. “It just won’t happen.”

Jobs that pay the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour cannot qualify for PILOTs.

Jones argued that $12-an-hour jobs aren’t enough either for the city to grow economically and for working Memphians to find their way out of poverty.

Boyd said the conversations between the two groups were useful, even with the disagreements.

“We have not collectively worked together. In our city and county we are divided and everyone works in silos,” he said. “If we are to come up with solutions, we must come up with moon missions. How do we progress? How do we work toward a common goal to see our city and county succeed? But one thing we cannot do is eliminate our corporate partners. We need corporate partners to provide our jobs for people to work.”