The Memphis City Council will decide from a long list of projects how to spend a little more than $3 million in tax money set aside for southwest Memphis. But some residents and community advocates say the process that produced the recommendations downplayed their biggest priority: environmental health.
Local lawmakers set aside 25% of the property taxes generated by two of xAI’s data centers. The funds are supposed to benefit the surrounding neighborhoods that have been harmed by years of legacy pollution from nearby industrial facilities.
An advisory board was formed to identify the community’s spending priorities. But their final recommendations, which the City Council recently accepted, were not as specific as some had hoped.
“You all could’ve narrowed it down to those issues that the citizens expressed to you were paramount. People have talked consistently about healthcare,” said community advocate Glenda Hicks. “We know that these citizens have been sorely impacted from the pollution. That should have been No. 1 on the list. It’s not a hard decision.”
Rather than a selection of priority projects, the advisory sent nearly a dozen options. The list included some basic city services, like street paving, public safety and blight remediation.
“We pay city and county taxes. It should look like heaven on earth,” Westwood resident Kimberly Pearson told local lawmakers before the vote. “As a high priority, I understand these recommendations, but blight should be out of our taxes. Roads should be out of our tax money.”
Local lawmakers tried to assure residents that the final decision has not yet been made. This is only the first of many steps toward uplifting those neighborhoods, they said. Lawmakers promised that up to $100 million would be set aside for the communities within a 5-mile radius of the two data centers.
“These are recommendations. These items are not all necessarily going to be implemented,” said Councilwoman Pearl Walker, whose district includes a section of Whitehaven where one of the data centers is located. “It’s a misconception, a misunderstanding, that anything in this list that the city already does, we’re going to use this money in lieu of that.”
Some of the criticism traces back to a survey distributed by the mayor’s office that didn’t include health issues as a community concern.
Residents were asked to rank the importance of different community issues on a scale of 1 to 9.
The questionnaire, which was widely distributed in the community, garnered more than 300 responses. The word health still doesn’t appear in the online version of the form.
It left the impression that the mayor’s office was trying to shape the outcome by focusing on services the city already provides, some residents said.
“With the information that we do have from this survey, one thing that is glaring is the way that the survey was set up still lends itself to the mayor’s priorities,” KeShaun Pearson, who chaired the advisory board, said after the results were presented earlier in the month.
The results favored the public improvements included in the city’s survey. Public safety and crime emerged near the top. Environmental health was ranked fifth.
“Folks had to write in what their concerns were; the concerns that folks have had that we continue to elevate around air pollution and public health,” Pearson said.
As the advisory board neared the deadline to submit recommendations, residents and community advocates grew frustrated with the list of priorities provided to the City Council. Council members on the advisory board tried to assure them that the process was not complete.
“This is the first time that this has ever happened here in Memphis, with big corporations coming that we have been able to capitalize off of tax dollars. But the most important thing is the health of this community,” said Councilwoman Yolanda Cooper-Sutton.
“There has been a (health) problem long before xAI got here. The difference now is we have tax dollars to help the community and the people.”
Michael Finch II is the enterprise reporter for MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. Contact him at mike.finch@mlk50.com
