Harris focuses on changing the ‘lives of thousands,’ criticizes tax incentives
Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris described a county poised to make changes in the lives of everyday residents.
A large portion of his “State of the County” speech Friday focused on the need to put systems in place that allow people to have and maintain jobs.
One priority is getting the county involved in public transportation in the city. Later this year, Harris will bring forward a plan for the county to invest in funding the Memphis Area Transit Authority for the first time, he said. The funding would begin in the 2021 fiscal year.
“If we can increase revenue to public transit we can change the lives of many, many families,” Harris said during his first ‘State of the County’ address. “Job seekers should have a realistic chance of taking a bus and getting to work on time and getting back home to have dinner with their family, and that means more frequent service.”
Harris also touted the county’s recent decision to raise the pay of parttime employees to $15 an hour. Now the county is pushing to ensure that other public employees, like the cafeteria workers in Shelby County Schools, are also paid a living wage, he said.
Harris also criticized tax breaks given to private companies. Such incentives have been in the news since Electrolux closed its Memphis plant less than a decade of receiving more than $188 million in incentives.
He didn’t mention any company by name, but said the public is right to want scrutiny.
“I don’t believe governments should be in the business of picking winners and losers,” Harris said. “Instead of tax breaks, when it comes to economic development, I believe the focus most of the time should be on investment in public assets and in people. That means we should invest more in workforce.”
That includes prioritizing the Workforce Investment Network and The American Job Center, the third of which opened this week in Shelby County, Harris said. New leadership will be brought in soon to “help set even higher expectations for what we can do to give our citizens the tools they need to succeed in today’s workforce,” he said.
Harris also will ask the County Commission to invest more in the Office of Re-entry, hiring new staff and transforming a building on the program’s property into a vocational classroom for former offenders.
Another way to impact “the lives of thousands and thousands of individuals” will be doing something about unnecessary run-ins with law enforcement over driving without a license, Harris said.
That includes lobbying the state legislature to allow Shelby County to issue licenses to residents who lost them because of an unrelated fee or cost, Harris said, allowing them to get to their jobs.
“Eliminating this vicious cycle is an important county priority,” Harris said.
Other highlights
❚ Harris said the county must deal with the jail population, which is “at levels that could threaten our budget capacity.” That includes ensuring that people who are not a risk to the public do not stay detained out of an inability to pay bond, he said.
❚ A new juvenile detention facility should be smaller and have fewer beds, “to force everyone in this community to look for alternatives to incarceration,” Harris said.
❚ Harris also praised his relationship with the County Commission, saying that so far, they “have all worked well together.”
Katherine Burgess covers county government and the suburbs. She can be reached at katherine.burgess@commercialappeal.com or followed on Twitter @kathsburgess.