The proposal comes as County Mayor Lee Harris has 46 requests from other countywide elected officials to add positions two weeks into the new fiscal year. Harris also served notice Monday that next budget season he will be back with some kind of proposal to raise revenues to avoid layoffs and cuts in services that are a real possibility this fiscal year.

Some significant amendments to apply the program to private contractors pushed a final vote to July 21.

The proposal would remove from county government employment applications the check box or question that asks whether the applicant has been convicted of a criminal offense. 

The Shelby County Commission will reconsider a proposal they initially voted down: John Porter's Quinn Ridge Development in Collierville. Some commissioners believe the project would yield significant financial gain for the county, but others believe it would be more of a financial burden.

The Wednesday committee sessions drew most of the 13 commissioners, with the remainder attending online. Also debuting was a partitioned commission chambers with glass barriers between the elected officials and masks worn in the booths created for them.

During that span, Shelby County recorded its four highest single-day increases in new cases and exceeded a 10% daily positivity rate in 10 of the past 14 days. 

The commission scorecard includes votes on a property tax hike, a Juneteenth holiday and a resolution recognizing racism as a pandemic.

The measures, effective immediately, include no out-of-county prisoners into the four facilities and more access to visitation and prison programs by video livestream. They follow a testing surge for prisoners and staff earlier in June.

Clerk Wanda Halbert says the seven locations will operate differently. They'll have appointments, and people will wait in their cars before being called into the office. Halbert warns there could be long lines and few employees at the counter until social distancing partitions are installed. The one-week shutdown was the second for the office since the global pandemic was declared in mid-March.

The county mayor also said in a "Behind The Headlines" interview that he has no regrets about his budget proposal that the commission rejected, which included a wheel tax hike with some budget cuts and an ambitious five-year plan to fund new school construction.

This week on WKNO’s Behind the Headlines, Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris joins host Eric Barnes and Bill Dries.   

The new gallery opens in a community rich with history and with plans for exhibits and programs.

The nonbinding resolutions approved by the Shelby County Commission call for adoption of “8 Can’t Wait” use of force measures for law enforcement and call racism a pandemic with associated health issues for people of color. 

Shelby County Property Assessor Melvin Burgess Jr. said the $1.4 million tax abatement Comcast received wasn't what such incentives were intended for. It’s the second time Burgess has criticized EDGE tax incentives.

What was already a challenging budget year was complicated in county government by the pandemic's economic damage and a decision by the County Commission to reject the budget proposal by County Mayor Lee Harris. The commission rejected a proposed 8-cent property tax rate hike.

The commission takes up the budget again Monday, June 22, at its regular meeting, a week after voting to use $16.5 million in the county reserves to balance expenditures and revenues. But since then, questions have emerged about the changes the commission made.

Internal emails show disagreements between the county administration and some of the countywide elected officials outside the administration of Mayor Lee Harris about budget cuts and other changes to the consolidated county budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1. 

Shelby County Sheriff Floyd Bonner said the sheriff’s office SWAT team used C.S. gas, or “tear gas,” in a May 31 protest Downtown after bricks and bottles were thrown at them as they blocked some protesters from trying to get on the Hernando DeSoto Bridge.

The six-hour special meeting Monday sets the stage for a final budget vote in a week. But there are questions about the dollar figures approved by the Commission and how much red ink there is to be dealt with after the moves. Two social media posts during the meeting by County Mayor Lee Harris also complained that there would be layoffs and cutbacks in critical county programs.

The sheriff's appearance comes a week after a clash on the commission over two attempts to cut funding in his budget and reallocate it. The commission appears to be about $5 million away from balancing the budget. But there are lots of questions about whether the movement of line items can be applied to the red ink.

Following an increase in new cases over the past two weeks, the Shelby County Health Department announced Monday plans to delay a move into Phase 3 until at least June 15.

We start an ongoing scorecard of Shelby County Commission votes with a pair of budget season amendments and the latest incursion into a seven-year controversy about who gets the health insurance contract for 5,000 county employees.

The plan to balance the county budget came apart when the commission put too much weight on the idea that federal reimbursements for county dollars spent on the pandemic freed up about $4.8 million. It didn't. Then a move to cut the sheriff's department budget brought two weeks of protest over the George Floyd incident into the discussion.

Shelby County commissioners got within $11 million of rebuilding County Mayor Lee Harris’s consolidated county budget proposal before calling it a day and leaving the rest for a Monday commission meeting.

Mask distribution has been halted until results of an independent test of the Renfro mask and chemicals used in its manufacturing are confirmed.