Tennessee House Sponsor Bids Adieu to His Proposed Interstate Compact Legislation

Legislation that would have entered Tennessee into an interstate compact with Arkansas and Mississippi for the greater Memphis region was bid adieu Tuesday by the sponsor during a House committee meeting.

State Representative Kevin Vaughan (R-Collierville), at the start of the House Commerce Committee he chairs, announced amidst the status of the 12 bills on the calendar, he wanted to say some words over his HB1989, “Before I bid it adieu.”

“It’s kind of in the vein of, I’m sure some of you as children growing up, your mother may, after behaving badly, she might have said the words, ‘I brought you into this world, don’t make me be the one to take you out,’” Vaughan said.

“That’s what’s going to happen to bill 1989. I brought it into this world and it, too, shall go away,” announced Vaughan.

Explaining further to the committee, Vaughan offered about the genesis of the bill, “It was a bill born out of a spirit of cooperation by Mid-South Council of Mayors that was brought to bring this bill forward for the idea of an interstate compact.”

During his presentation of the bill at a February meeting of the House Business & Utilities Subcommittee, Vaughan said the tri-state compact would allow an opportunity to seek federal funding intended for multi-state compacts in the recent infrastructure bill that included “38 separate pots of money” that such an organization could secure.

Vaughan, as well as the Mississippi state Senate sponsor of the like bill in that state’s legislature, specifically mentioned a bridge over the Mississippi River in light of the three-month closure of the I-40 bridge in mid-2021 due to the discovery of a crack.

During the meeting Tuesday, Vaughan shed a different light on what the additional federal funding would be used for.

“And, it was meant specifically to chase infrastructure dollars for West Tennessee, which is in desperate need of infrastructure to support the Blue Oval City and some of the other items we see. It’s been an agrarian area for so long,” revealed Vaughan.

He went on to explain that, technically, he would be taking the bill off notice so that it will not be heard in committee, and rather honestly stated that the bill was bad policy.

“I’m going to be taking it off notice, because sometimes you just get a hold of things, and I’m one that has people stand before us all the time and I say, ‘You’re filled with great intentions, but the words on your paper do not make good policy.’ That is what I brought to this group, unfortunately,” Vaughan admitted.

The legislation would have created the RegionSmart Development District (District) and the RegionSmart Development Agency of the Greater Memphis Region (Agency).

The district would have included the Tennessee counties of Shelby, Fayette and Tipton; Arkansas counties of Crittenden, Craighead and Mississippi; and the Mississippi county of DeSoto and would have been run by a quasi-governmental public entity of an unelected 15-member commission consisting of five members from each state appointed by the mayors of the respective cities or counties serving staggered three-year terms.

The commission would have been vested with very broad powers, including but not limited to eminent domain and condemnation of any and all rights or property, employment of individuals, contracting for services, owning and operating facilities, charging and collecting fees for use of the facilities, issuing bonds and borrowing money, making plans for infrastructure and services for the development of the district as well as acquiring or disposing of land and infrastructure necessary and convenient to the district, The Tennessee Star reported.

The compact would have gone into effect upon passage of legislation by any two of the three states. Mississippi’s state Senate, The Star reported, without hearing from the bill’s sponsor the quasi-governmental entity’s eminent domain and other powers, unanimously passed the legislation in early February.

According to the RegionSmart website, the tri-state compact had support from political and corporate interests, including mayors in the affected area as well as developers, engineering firms and a local economic development agency.

Critics of the legislation, such as American Policy Center, warn interstate compacts are part of an effort known as regional governance or control by rules, restrictions or regulations, also referred to as regionalism.

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Laura Baigert is a senior reporter at The Star News Network, where she covers stories for The Tennessee Star and The Georgia Star News.
Photo “Kevin Vaughan” by State Representative Kevin Vaughan. Background Photo “Tennessee State Capitol” by Ken Lund. CC BY-SA 2.0.