Month: January 2002

Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton, who many suggest could be Mayor for Life, indicated Tuesday that he might harbor some such notion as well, unveiling the general outlines of a “five-year plan,” adding as a sort of modest footnote “if I am reelected in 2003 — I don’t want to be presumptuous.”

The de facto announcement of reelection plans was but one highlight of Herenton’s annual speech at The Peabody to participants at city councilman Myron Lowery‘s New Year’s Prayer Breakfast. The mayor also hinted that he might choose to intervene in the forthcoming Shelby County Mayor’s race and reiterated his determination to push for city-county consolidation, with the important exception of city and county schools.

Consolidation was, in fact, the key component of the five-year plan (along with a stated intent to shore up education and the criminal justice system) and, Herenton seemed to suggest, the possible determinant in deciding whom he might support for county mayor.

The mayor proposed to begin immediate — but unspecified — measures to bring about consolidation in the realm of law enforcement but said he intended to “say No to the consolidation of city and county schools.” He proposed instead to “freeze school system boundaries” for the existing Memphis and Shelby County systems and to institute “single-source” funding for the two systems.

As an apparent response to continued complaints from county officials and suburbanites about the current method of routing state funding to the two systems through an average-daily-attendance (ADA) formula favoring the city schools by a 3 to 1 ratio, Herenton proposed “equalized expenditures,” so long as special provision was made for “at-risk youngsters.”

After his public remarks, the mayor would condemn as “divisive” a recent proposal for separate special school districts made to a state legislative committee in Nashville recently by county school board chairman David Pickler.

Though he did not target specific individuals in his speech, Herenton also professed to be outraged by the inability of officials at the state and county levels to solve looming financial problems and at the weaknesses in the Memphis school system revealed by the city system’s disproportionately poor showing in recent state testing.

After the mayor’s speech, various members of his audience, ranging from members of his own circle to participants in this or that mayoral campaign, indicated they thought Herenton’s prospective intervention in the 2002 county mayor’s race would not occur before the end of the primary process, which so far includes State Representative Larry Scroggs on the Republican side, and, on the Democratic side, Shelby County Public Defender A C Wharton; Bartlett banker Harold Byrd, and State Representative Carol Chumney.

Herenton said he would make no endorsement “at this time,” adding that, aside from his judging candidates on their integrity, experience, and ability — and on their commitment to consolidation — he would not be bound, in deciding on an ultimate endorsement, by restrictions of gender, race, or party.

“I loved Ophelia…forty thousand brothers could not, with all their quantity of love, make up my sum.” – Hamlet, in the Shakespeare play of the same name.

There once was a popular superstition that the Ford family of Memphis had a monolithic hold on Democratic politics in the inner city. Despite some isolated election results that might have disproved this, some Memphians still believe it. The fact is, as the recent mayoral filing by 27-year-old Isaac Ford suggested, there is not even a single party line within the family itself. That fact was newly demonstrated at the Election Commission Wednesday by the picking up of a petition for the County Commission by Ophelia Ford.

Ophelia Ford is the sister of Harold Ford Sr., the family patriarch, and of several other Ford brothers who have been active politically – including former city councilman Joe Ford and current councilman Edmund Ford. In 1999, she was beat to the punch by brother Edmund, who filed to succeed brother Joe, who would run an unsuccessful race for mayor. For a while, they were both candidates, but eventually Ophelia yielded to her brother and withdrew.

Not this trip. Since the death last month of Dr. James Ford, a member of the Shelby County Commission, the supposition in the family – and in the political community at large — has been that Joe Ford would run to succeed his brother. Indeed, Commissioner Michael Hooks Sr. made a moving speech at the next commission meeting in which he said in effect that it had been one of Dr. Ford’s dying wishes that brother Joe Ford succeed him on the commission.

Sister Ophelia scoffs at that. “It was extremely poor judgment for Michael to go public talking about our deceased brother’s wishes. We don’t need Michael to tell our family what our wishes are.” So she picked up a petition to run for brother James’ District 3, Position 1 seat as soon as the commission had resolved all district boundaries and it was legal to do so. She thereby beat brother Joe to the punch this time, and that was no accident.

“I’m borrowing the style of my younger brothers,” explained the 51-year-old Ophelia, who said she had been trying to get into government since at least 1984 but had found herself — a jilted soul like her namesake in Shakespeare’s Hamlet — in the position of deferring to one brother after another, sometimes being taken by surprise after she had confided her ambitions. Brother Joe, for example, had picked up and filed his council petitionin 1995 after she had first expressed interest, she said.

“This time they can read in the paper,” said Ophelia, who quoted Joe as having informed her of his unexpected filing back then by saying, “Oh, you must not have read the paper!”

Reasoning that it was better to sandbag a sibling than to be sandbagged, Ophelia explained Wednesday, “I didn’t tell any of my family members I was going to pick up a petition.” She maintained,however, that “I had told most of my family members that I was going to go for the next ting available, especially after he [Joe]messed up his stuff with the mayor’s situation. I’ll be interested to see what reaction is.”

(Joe Ford might indeed have been taken by surprise; he was doubtless looking in the other direction, for a threatened primary challenge from family political rival Sidney Chism.)

Ophelia Ford’s decision to go for the Commission seat followed several months of waiting for another brother, State Senator James Ford, to abandon his own seat. Ophelia maintains that brother John had expressed a sense of weariness with continued service in the state Senate.

“If I don’t get in this time, I’ll probably relocate,” said Ophelia, who – ironically or not – had expressed chagrin at the recent decision of nephew Isaac, a son of of Harold Ford Sr. and brother of U.S. Rep. Harold Ford Jr., to run as an independent for mayor,thereby breaking an emerging family consensus for Democratic mayoral candidate A C Wharton.

Ophelia Ford has worked in the fields of public relations, communications, and product development with a variety of enterprises. She is a veteran of service with Blue Cross/Blue Shield, radio station WLOK, the Memphis Board of Education, Memphis Area Legal Services (where she was an aide to Wharton); and the family business, N.J. Ford Funeral Parlor, where she is an accredited undertaker.