Led by CEO Philip Satre, the industry's 1998 Casino Executive of the Year, Harrah's is moving its corporate headquarters from Memphis to Las Vegas this year, but the casinos are here to stay. True, Memphis has no major-league professional sports, but gambling is the real entertainment story of the Nineties. Memphis is a bigger city than many people realize, at least in terms of square miles. At more than 300 square miles, Memphis is twice as big as Philadelphia and bigger than St. Louis, Birmingham, and Atlanta combined. Newly annexed areas of Memphis like Hickory Hill are more than 20 miles from City Hall.
Size creates problems for city and county governments.
By the same token, however, the mayors cooperated to put together a landmark deal to extend city sewer service far into the eastern reaches of Shelby County, insuring that development will spread that way for decades to come. A good bet is the funding of school construction, now governed by a complicated formula based on average daily attendance in the city and county systems. Under the leadership of CEO Marc Jordan and automobile dealer Russell Gwatney, the Memphis Area Chamber of Commerce has put forward an alternative plan calling for a tax increase and single-source funding. Growth means opportunity for developers. Along Germantown Parkway, nobody has been more active than Jackie Welch, head of Welch Realty, a firm specializing in land sales and assembling large parcels for county schools and churches.