Weekly Update

Friends,

Some items of note here and there on this Friday afternoon…

It takes all of us: As reducing violent crime is our No. 1 priority, you’ve heard me share how we’ve hired more police officers in the past 17 months than the prior six years, how we’re pushing the state for enhanced sentences for road rage shootings, and how we’ve greatly increased what we do for our youth, among many other items.

But that’s just on our end. You can play a part, too — and we can help.

Just last week, MPD awarded $48,000 in crime prevention grants to 20 neighborhoods. That’s real money to take real action on crime on your street. To date, the Neighborhood Crime Prevention Grant program, which is funded by revenue from red light cameras, has awarded $430,000 to 178 neighborhoods.

Want your neighborhood to join the fight? Click here to learn more.

More opportunity: I’ve been saying for some time now that former Gov. Bill Haslam and the Tennessee General Assembly gave our state — and specifically, our city — an amazing leg up in workforce development when they made community and technical college free of charge for anyone.

Gov. Bill Lee is taking it a step further, proposing this week even more access to career and technical education. You can learn more about his proposal here. And, I appreciate the initiative shown by new state Sen. Katrina Robinson, who is sponsoring a bill to introduce career and technical education in middle school. I appreciate the work being done on the state level to provide even more opportunities for our young people.

As always, you can learn about all of the opportunities in our city by visiting the website we created just for that reason — opportunitymemphis.com.

Youth summer jobs: On Wednesday, we held the lottery for our youth summer jobs program (MPLOY), in which 1,750 Memphis teenagers will be paid by the City and work at organizations around the city. This is a 75 percent increase from when we took office three years ago. 

However, more than 8,000 young people applied and were left out of the program. I continue to call on businesses, nonprofits, and faith leaders to join us in finding work for these teens. If you're interested, reply to this email with some details and we will be in touch.

Thank you, GK: Like many of you, I was saddened when I learned Wednesday night of the passing of George Klein, who was simply a Memphis legend. He was a close friend of Elvis Presley’s and a made-in-Memphis success story.

To honor his memory, you can watch some of his best shows on WYPL TV-18 beginning Friday at 7 p.m. and running through Sunday.

Appreciative of the honor: I was humbled this week when Art Gilliam, the legendary owner of the legendary WLOK radio station, honored our team by giving me a Courage in Politics Award.

To be honored by Art was truly a great moment.

Spread the word: Simply by receiving this email each Friday, you know how important that frank, honest conversation about our City’s successes and challenges is to me. We take pride in being the most transparent administration in City Hall history.

Would you help us spread the word we send each Friday? Forward this email to your friends or groups in which you’re involved. Ask them to sign up to be on the list themselves simply by clicking here.

If social media is your thing, we keep a steady feed on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. And if you want to see data on how your City is delivering services to you, there’s all kinds of information available at data.memphistn.gov — a website we specifically built to share the data we use to make decisions.

You deserve to know what’s going on with your tax dollars. I’m glad we can do that here, each and every week.

Yours,