Animal Shelter Craziness and Wharton

Two things happened this week that have really irritated me and both are linked to each other. The MCS funding came to a head because the school board didn't believe the city would pay what it owes them. Certainly the school board threw out the biggest number, $150+ million, in order to shock Wharton and the Council into action. It worked. That is effective negotiating. (Well, maybe? MCS agreed to open schools but the City doesn't make a big payment until after the schools have been open a week. We'll see if the City pays because it would be hard for MCS to close the schools down after they already opened.) What seemed to provoke this was Wharton's inability to mail the letter and $3 million check to MCS. The check was apparently sitting there for several days and missed a deadline. (I know I sometimes forget to mail in my $3 million, court order child support bill all the time.) The school board then manufactured a crisis Tuesday night and low and behold Wharton sends the check the next day.

The other thing this week is the privatization of the animal shelter talk. WTF is up with that? Seriously, you think conditions will improve for animals by offering some company money to lock up and euthanize animals? Why stop at pimping poverty with poor people, when we have a huge market of poor animals too? (Hat tip to Brad Watkins)To the privatization advocates, don't confuse the Wharton administration's inability to do anything other than paint lines on roads and sign away millions of dollars to corporations with a need for privatization. The animal shelter has been Wharton's problem for going on close to 20 months. The hiring of Pepper seemed like a good move, but it doesn't appear much support was given to him to clean house or to change the overall nature the problem. House cleaning was the number one priority. It isn't exactly a top secret that animal shelter employees would sell picked up dogs for bait or fighters. This has been pretty widely known in one neighborhood for years, but that neighborhood isn't on the poplar corridor so it is unimportant. Now people are surprised a particularly dumb dog catcher was discovered selling picked up dogs.

This ties into the lack of will/competence/giving 2 shits Wharton has shown for the whole nature of the problem. There are base problems that the animal shelter can not over come. Too many animals and an underground economy of dog fighting. Neither of these are new problems. The city was overrun with dogs and cats 100 years ago. The problem was so bad Senator McKellar got hundreds of thousands of federal dollars to build an animal shelter. In fact it is still there at the northwest corner of Auction and Front. The city picks up 18,000 animals a year and puts down 13,000 of them. 2/3's of the dogs are pit bulls. The city can't even pick up enough animals to keep up with the calls from citizens. I saw in one neighborhood a pack of stray dogs following the trash truck. (Yeah, sanitation workers are so way over compensated. Heat, cold, rain, smelly garabage, drug dealers, prostitutes, the mentally ill, and stray dogs. Almost all can be interacted with by a sanitation worker on any given day.)It may take two weeks to get animal control officers out to pick up strays if they come at all. Where would they put the animals anyway? The shelter is overflowing. Where was Wharton's spay/neuter ordinance initiative? Oh, that's right there wasn't one. The only person to broach the subject was Shea Flinn and it didn't seem to go anywhere. Perhaps the mayor could have weighed in on the subject? Guess not, cut into the constant baby-kissing campaign mode he is locked into. A year on we continue to flood the system with animals leaving no resources to combat the corrupting influence of dog fighting.

So now we are at the point of discussing privatizing the animal shelter because Wharton doesn't either have the will/competence/give 2 shits to address a situation. Mail a check and fix the shelter? No.
Kiss babies 24 hours a day 8 days a week? Hell yes!

Money, Power, & Redistricting

Since everybody is interested in redistricting and checking out my maps, I thought, lets throw in another interesting one. Everyone knows there is a link between political power and money. So check out what it looks like here. 4 council members live in district 5, out of the 6 white council members. Does it not seem crazy to you that a city that is 29% white, 6 out of 13 council seats go to white folks?

You may be wondering why I chose these council members' donors. I'm not picking on them. I just wanted to show that even in a city that is predominantly black, white republicans' political interests are still well represented, especially for folks in Bartlett, Germantown, Arlington, and Collierville.

Allan Wade's City Council Redistristing Epic Fail

This past Friday Allan Wade released a redistricting report for city council districts. There seem to be numerous problems with this redistricting proposal as you will be able to see in the maps below. I am not sure how this redistricting process was done, but from what I can tell it seems as though an outdated precinct map used. Numerous precincts cited in the report do not exist anymore. There are no precincts 15, 71-5, 72-5, 92-2, or Cordova 10. Here is a list of precincts
Several other precincts listed have been consolidated and other precincts have just been left out, particularly in Cordova and southeast Memphis.

Take a look. This is the updated precinct map as of a month ago.



Here is what this map looks like if you use the precincts in Wade's Redistricting Report.



I didn't even bother with the Super Districts since the regular districts are such a mess.

Redistricting is kind of important. Doing this quality of work this close to the filing deadline for the October elections is down right troubling.