Month: March 2004

After 13 years of service as a state legislator, on New Year’s Day I was sworn in as a new member of the Memphis City Council from District 5. Many tell me that in moving from the state legislature to the City Council, I have jumped from the frying pan into the fire. I am starting to believe them.

During the past two months, I have tried to conduct council business in a professional manner while sparks have been flying between the mayor and certain members of the council. We all know that politics can get hot, and the saying goes if you can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen. However, the tone and name-calling by more than one elected official in this city have been divisive and unproductive. (Remember the saying: It takes two to tango.)

I was the only council member who didn’t vote to override the mayor’s veto of the ordinance to limit the funding of interim appointments. I did so for several reasons: One, because this issue of interpretation of the city charter is best put to the people for a vote, not a judge. Two, because a court battle would have cost tax-payer money and proven even more divisive and distracting. Three, and most importantly, because the national search for the new president of our billion-dollar MLGW utility was put on hold by the mayor while the dispute was pending. And four, because this feud is beginning to harm our city’s image across the state and nationally, which can have long-range adverse implications for business development.

Apparently, the mayor has also decided that a court battle (and the feud) is not in the best interest of the citizens of Memphis. That doesn’t mean there isn’t still room for honest disagreement on important policy issues and continued debate and discussion. What it should mean is that the petty infighting stops and the real policy discussions begin.

Improving our schools, reducing crime, revitalizing neighborhoods, developing economically, and consolidating the city and county are hard issues that take thoughtful work and consideration.

Now, while the dust is clearing, it’s time to take up these important issues and move ahead. Leaderless, MLGW is a time bomb ticking, waiting to erupt into a major problem — with investor concerns over the bond issue, with no one in charge to handle another power outage, and without solid leadership to make important customer service improvements. My investigation has found that, almost without exception, every other utility in the nation has a leader with extensive utility industry experience. A search process needs to be commenced to find a new MLGW president who has solid and substantial utility and management experience.

As a new council member, I respectfully believe that, for the good of Memphis, the mayor and the council both need to stop the power struggle and focus on the real issues that will make a difference for the citizens of Memphis. The mayor’s done his mea culpa. Only a few council members have followed suit. And if council members want to exercise greater powers under the charter, then the public should expect them to dedicate more time to the job with greater scrutiny of issues in committee hearings prior to any vote at a full council meeting.

Let’s move ahead and make Memphis a better place to live!

Carol Chumney, who formerly was District 89 representative in the state legislature, now represents District 5 for the city.

It has become the civil case of the year: a custody struggle over 5-year-old Anna Mae He by two couples intent on providing her with their version of the best care. On one side are the girl’s biological parents, Jack and Casey He, who voluntarily placed the child in foster care at three weeks of age while they were having financial difficulties. Since then, the child has lived with foster parents Jerry and Louise Baker, who now want to adopt Anna Mae.

When their financial situation improved, the Hes sought their daughter’s return, but relations had broken down between the two families. Weekly visits made to the Baker home by the Hes were discontinued after a disagreement on the child’s second birthday. For the next five months, the Hes made no visit, following an order they said was given to them by police. The Bakers filed for custody, citing the Hes for abandonment and failure to pay child support. A three-year battle ensued in juvenile and chancery courts, culminating with this week’s trial to determine if the birth parents will lose their parental rights.

While the biological and custodial parents have had their personal lives exumed during testimony and cross-examination, provisions have been made to protect Anna Mae. Judge Robert Childers issued an order to the media covering the case, outlining rules for what images to show, where to place cameras, and initially forbidding the use of the child’s name in court.

For the first few days of the trial, Anna Mae was referred to as the “ward.” But that word doesn’t translate into Chinese, making it confusing for the birth mother, who understands little English. Anna Mae then became “the child in question.” When that got too cumbersome, the plaintiffs’ attorney Larry Parrish began referring to the girl by her initials, AMH — a strategy that worked until Louise Baker took the stand and repeatedly forgot to use the acronym. “It’s just hard [not to use her name] when that’s what I call her every day,” she said.

Unfortunately, what she or any of the parties involved is used to doesn’t matter anymore. What does matter is Childers’ decision: whether or not to terminate the Hes’ parental rights, thereby allowing the Bakers to adopt the child. The child gets no say in the matter. Monday, the court heard from Anna Mae’s spokesperson, court-appointed guardian, Kim Mullins. During testimony, Mullins stated that Anna Mae is “perfectly and completely at home with the Bakers, views them as mother and father, and views their children as her brother and sisters. There’s no distinction between them and her from what I’ve observed.”

The foster parents testified to Anna Mae’s intense relationship with their 4-year-old biological daughter, her outings with Jerry Baker, and her involvement in school, play dates, and family events.

When asked if Anna Mae has seen herself on television, Louise Baker said it was inevitable. “We try to keep her away from [television] when we know something’s going to be on about the case. But yesterday she did manage to see something, and she said, ‘There’s Mommy and Daddy [referring to the Bakers], and there’s Casey [He].'”

Thankfully, Anna Mae is too young to read newspapers. If she could, she would have read unsettling things: questions about Jack He’s paternity of the child; Casey He’s numerous breakdowns and outbursts; a journal kept by Louise Baker recording every visit made to her home by the Hes; and Jerry Baker’s offer to pay the Hes $3,000 to give up custody. Throw in Jack He’s criminal assault charge (which he was acquitted of in February 2003), the couple’s immigration woes, and the Bakers’ financial straits, and the waters get murky. Whether or not all the accusations hurled between the couples are true, the long-term damage to their reputations has been done.

Adult and child psychologists and Chinese cultural experts have testified that removal of Anna Mae from one family to the other will be difficult. Witnesses on each side cited cases in which children have been negatively impacted during such transitions or cases in which children grow up resenting their foster families for denying them access to their ethnic background. Some observers view the case as cultural racism, with the Bakers as “Bible-thumping” Christians intent on enforcing their will and religion on the child. Still, the fact remains that for five years Anna Mae has known nothing else.

Casey He opened the trial by telling a Chinese story: Two women fight over a child, and in the end the biological mother gives up to keep the child from suffering. In this case, neither side so far is willing to give up.

When she becomes old enough to fully grasp the events that marked the first few years of her life, maybe Anna Mae will understand that it was all in her “best interest.” Hopefully by then, she’ll be too happy to care.

E-mail: jdavis@memphisflyer.com

Brave and burly, the hardhatted lineman is an icon of MLGW, risking life and limb to keep the power on in all kinds of foul weather.

Politicians argue about who should be the president of MLGW and how the president and board should be chosen. Customers gripe about surprise increases in their bills and long waits on the phone. The media question whether more outside workers should have been brought in last summer to fix the damage from the big windstorm. But linemen are almost unanimously praised.

For Glenn Higgs, who underwent a terrifying near-death experience while working as a 31-year-old journeyman lineman for MLGW in 1992, it’s not quite that simple. The job that almost killed him still fascinates him, but his old employer doesn’t want him back.

Able-bodied and fully recovered, and with a tattered union card still in his wallet, Higgs finds himself blackballed by the company he left in 1996 with nearly $750,000 in his pockets from the settlement of a lawsuit stemming from his accident.

“I’d just like to practice my trade,” says Higgs, a husky, redheaded man with a goatee. “I figure I’ve still got a good 15 years or so left in me.”

Higgs offers a unique perspective on a company that inspires conflicting emotions in a lot of people. By his own appraisal, Higgs could be one hard-headed hardhat. The Craigmont High School graduate relished the macho image of the lineman and the satisfaction he got from doing a tough job that most people can’t do.

“We were not choir boys,” he says. “We spoke our minds. We were union. We were taught not to take any shit off of anyone. I’m sure I wasn’t the most pleasant someone to work around, but my overall record was good.”

On April 28, 1992, his crew was working near Shelby Forest on a routine job called an overbuild, which involves stringing new lines over existing ones to keep power running without disruption. It was, Higgs remembers, a beautifully clear spring day.

Higgs was helping pull a dead wire banjo-tight over a hot wire. He was standing on something called a tensioneer machine when it malfunctioned and the dead wire dropped down to a hot circuit, sending 12,000 volts through his body.

“I’m on the machine with smoke coming off of me thinking I’ve got to get off this thing or I’ll be dead,” he recalls.

He tumbled to the ground but remained hot-wired by a 12-foot radio cord on his shirt. An apprentice named Tommy Hughes grabbed a fiberglass “hot stick” and pulled the cord off. The crew found him flopping like a fish.

He was flown by chopper to the burn center at The Med, where he had 13 skin grafts and underwent “debridement” — a lineman’s nightmare that involves immersion in a hot tub while dead skin is picked off. He had a hole the size of a dinner plate in his chest and stomach and gruesome burns on his hands and arms. His left buttock was burned off.

Two years later, he went back to work, calling himself a “half-assed lineman.” MLGW joined his lawsuit against a company called Tension Stringing Equipment, which settled out of court for $1.25 million. Court records and Higgs’ attorney, Will Heaton, confirm the story. After MLGW and Heaton took their shares, Higgs had roughly $750,000.

He worked two more years, struggling through a divorce and reconciliation, then quit and moved with his wife and children to Florida to work on a charter fishing boat. When his wife’s mother got cancer, they returned to Memphis in 2000.

Higgs asked for his old job but was told no thanks, then no way. A union lawyer confirmed to Higgs that MLGW did not have to hire him. He could not even get work from MLGW subcontractors during emergencies. He says two of his three supervisors gave him positive recommendations, but one wrote that he “causes disruptions on the truck and has physical limitations.”

“I begged them to let me come back last summer during the storm, but they said no,” he says. Instead he has found part-time jobs working as a utility lineman in South Carolina, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Jackson, Tennessee. The pay averages about $27 an hour, but the work is sporadic and Higgs is restless.

He’s been keeping up with the news about MLGW’s bond deals and the mayor’s charges of mismanagement and overspending and wonders “why I am being crucified.”

“I risked my life for this company, and they effectively blackballed me out of my trade,” he says. “I’m 43 years old, and I want to go back to work. I don’t want to sit on my ass. My wife thinks I’m insane, but I’m an adrenaline junkie. It’s a fascinating trade.”

E-mail: branston@MemphisFlyer.com