BROWNSVILLE, Tenn.—HTL Advantage is prepared to spend six-figures to gather facts about the Memphis Megasite. The action came Monday, February 24, during a board meeting of the tri-county industrial recruiting organization. Frustrated about recent actions that slow the progress of the development, and concerns that information about its status seem fractured, the group hopes to gather data useful to the Megasite’s progress.
At Monday’s meeting, 82nd District Representative Chris Hurt said there will be no more construction on the Megasite until “more information is put in front of Governor Lee.”
Hurt said Lee isn’t “comfortable” with the proposed wastewater pipeline plan and wants to see other options, but, at least to those conducting Monday’s meeting, who is responsible for providing the information is unclear. Hurt believes it should come from Tennessee’s Department of Economic and Community Development (ECD).
Hurt told the board that he’s seeing information slip through the cracks before making its way to Lee. “[Governor Lee] didn’t even know [the land] wasn’t being farmed this year,” he said. When Tipton County Mayor Jeff Huffman pointed out, “That’s a half million dollars in revenue,” Hurt responded, “Exactly. When I brought that up to him, he was not aware of it.” The megasite includes 4,100 acres, much of it farmland.
Haywood County Mayor David Livingston told the board that he thinks leaders of ECD might not have all of the information themselves. “Anytime you change horses as many times as ECD has changed horses during this project, you don’t know what ECD director or commissioner knows from the prior one … I say that because I get the idea from talking to these people that they’re in the dark. They really don’t know and with Governor Lee being an engineer, I think he wants more brass tacks. Some questions were asked from Governor Lee to the commissioner, ‘Who’s going to manage it?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Who’s going to put the water in?’ … ‘Who’s going to put the gas in?’ … ‘Let’s talk about electricity.’ A lot of the questions were left, ‘I don’t know.’”
Brownsville Mayor Bill Rawls pointed out that last year, consulting firm Gresham-Smith was hired for roughly $500,000 to answer utility management questions, but “we haven’t heard anything from them.”
Hurt said that in conversations he’s had within the state’s political leadership, discussion trends toward putting the project into the hands of locals. “One of the discussions … is to get more local control and to pull away as much as we can from ECD and get it to more local people to start getting information and taking steps forward so we can get something done … Leadership feels, on our end, that if anything’s going to get done, that has to be done. That ECD is not going to be able to do what we need them to do.”
At Monday’s meeting, members of the HTL Board wondered out loud if, under local management, they might have the same apparent troubles as ECD.
For pipeline options, Mayor Livingston posed the theory that HTL Advantage should “go back from scratch and outline for the governor what options we’ve gone through, why those options were proven not acceptable, what that the available options are…”
Lauderdale County Mayor Maurice Gaines agreed that something should be put together so that, no matter who leads, the same information gets relayed. “I came along after the fact, a lot of us have, and the players change but the information stays the same. Wouldn’t it probably behoove us to put a guidebook together with a timeline so we all know and we don’t go over the same thing over again?” he asked. “Something to show this is where we started, this is where we are now, this is where we want to get to. Something that we can keep marketing to our representatives and even ourselves to know where we are and where we want to go six months from now, a year from now, and even later down the road.”
Hurt said recently the state comptroller told him there’s $85.4 million in the bank to “be spent when decisions are made,” but Mayor Huffman said he’s concerned the project has taken so long, engineering cost estimates might be outdated. “Regardless of which option you choose, it’s been 11 or 12 years now and the cost of the project now versus the cost of the project the state was looking at, if you bid any of that right now … with the economy as hot as it is … you’ll pay a premium. One of the unknowns right now is … how much additional costs are you talking about over what was appropriated years ago?”
The board voted to allocate up to $100,000 to gather information, facts and figures about the megasite.
“Hopefully this data we’re going to collect will show facts to the state the best way to move forward,” said Covington Mayor Justin Hansen.
“We talk about the challenges of this thing, and I suppose it ought to be hard – something this big – but the impact on West Tennessee in terms of governmental revenue … not to mention the economic activity … we have to balance the frustration of not having anything done over the last 11 or 12 years with the potential benefit of folks that live in these respective areas. So, we need to keep our eye on the ball,” said Huffman.
HTL Advantage is funded by governments and utilities in Lauderdale, Tipton and Haywood Counties. Mayors David Livingston and Bill Rawls serve on the board.
