Month: August 2004

WAS A C OUT OF THE LOOP?

There was a flurry of activity in Shelby County government last week involving Tom Jones, formerly a top aide to three county mayors, who has pleaded guilty to federal and state embezzlement charges.

The controversy over Jones’ retirement benefits featured the personal intervention of Shelby County Mayor A C Wharton. The mayor made a forceful and unscheduled presentation at last week’s meeting of the Shelby County Retirement Board. The board then voted to rescind a previous action which had nearly doubled Jones’ monthly pension based on his being reinstated to a county job for three days in May.

Wharton told the Flyer he only learned in the last two weeks that Jones had been rehired and approved for a change in his pension.

“That came as a shock to me, because my position has been and remains that when it comes to pension considerations, particularly if they would increase someone’s payments, it ought to go to the retirement board, which I chair,” he said.

Jones is scheduled to report to a federal correctional institution in Forrest City, Arkansas next week to begin serving his one-year term. He was notified last week that the retirement board “has determined that an improper determination was made in the processing of your pension benefit.” He can request an appeal hearing. There is no indication of any deception on his part, and the rights he invoked are available to county employees. The error appears to be on the part of current county officials.

The embarrassing episode raises questions about how successfully Wharton has implemented his policies of openness and ethics in county government, which has seen Jones, former Mayor Jim Rout, former Shelby County Commission Administrator Calvin Williams, and former Juvenile Court Clerk and County Commissioner Shep Wilbun indicted or investigated by state and federal grand juries in the last two years. The story was first reported last week by WMC-TV Channel Five and the Flyer on its Web site. Flyer readers would have read it in last week’s paper but for some misinformation from the county.

Jones, head of the office of public affairs, mayoral policy adviser, and a member of several public boards, was suspended in August of 2002, shortly before the end of Rout’s term. He was not reappointed by Wharton. He was indicted in 2003 for misuse of county credit cards and subsequently pleaded guilty. In April, he notified the county that he planned to exercise his reinstatement rights as a former Civil Service employee early in his 26-year government career. The paperwork was processed in May and June, with Wharton apparently out of the loop until two weeks ago.

The Flyer began looking into this in July. Here’s a recap of events, based on public documents provided to us by Shelby County at our request, interviews, and records of the Shelby County Retirement Board.

On April 28th, Jones wrote human resources administrator Janet Shipman that he planned to seek placement in a county government job based on his civil service rights.

Two days later, Shipman, who is a Wharton appointee, acknowledged the request.

“I will begin the process of identifying a position for your return to employment within Shelby County government,” she wrote, adding, however, “I must make you aware that due to your conviction in federal and state court, upon your return to employment, the county intends to pursue charges against you for violations of county policy while in your previous position and to suspend you … .”

Jones was rehired on May 28th to a temporary job to which he never reported and for which he was not paid. Within days, Shipman restated the county’s intention to suspend him. Based on that, Jones notified the county on June 1st that he was resigning immediately. Wharton said he did not know all this until two weeks ago.

“I had naively assumed that since he left as a mayoral appointee it would have to come back to me,” Wharton said. “It turned out that premise was erroneous because he was seeking to come back in a classified division.”

The phantom job had important pension consequences. Under county pension rules, age 55 is a threshold for much higher benefits. Jones was 54 when he was suspended by Rout in 2002. He was 56 when he was rehired for three days. He applied to the retirement board for early retirement benefits effective June 1st. Waverly Seward, manager of retirement, responded to Jones in a letter:

“The Shelby County Retirement Board has approved your application for service retirement benefits effective June 1, 2004,” she wrote on June 17th. “The retirement board has authorized monthly payments to you in the amount of $3,090.49.” That is nearly twice the monthly benefit of $1,595.61 the county now says Jones is entitled to receive.

There is a problem with Seward’s letter. The board did not “approve” or “authorize” Jones’ request at its monthly meeting. The action was apparently taken administratively by Seward, in violation of county policy.

I called Seward on Friday July 30th and Monday August 2nd, the day before the scheduled meeting of the retirement board. I asked if Jones was on the agenda or if he had been on the previous month’s agenda. Seward said no, and referred additional questions to Susan Adler Thorp, head of public affairs for Shelby County. Jones was not on the printed agenda for the meeting. Therefore we did not attend the August 3rd meeting of the retirement board. On Tuesday, Flyer deadline day, Thorp fielded our question about Jones being rehired. She said she would have someone get back to us. Chief Administrative Officer John Fowlkes called on Thursday and talked to us on Friday. Fowlkes said Wharton did not learn about Jones’ higher pension until late July.

“Jones’ action of retiring after 55 did not go before the retirement board originally,” said Fowlkes, a former federal prosecutor in Memphis who was picked by Wharton to be CAO. “The mayor was unaware of it. He asked me to find out what happened.”

That led Wharton to decide the night before the retirement board meeting that he, Fowlkes, and attorney Susan Callison would bring up the Jones pension.

“In the mayor’s view it was not an administrative act, it was significant enough to require the board to review the facts,” Fowlkes said.

Callison, an attorney with the Bogatin Law Firm, is attorney for the retirement board. She provided Wharton and Fowlkes with a four-page letter, the gist of which was that “an error was made” and the Jones case “should have been submitted to the board for a vote.”

The mayor said Seward did not know until Tuesday that he was going to bring up Jones. What Seward did know Ñ almost two months before Wharton, the chairman of the retirement board, knew it Ñ was that Jones was already receiving $3,090 a month in early retirement benefits instead of the deferred pension at age 65 the mayor says he distinctly recalls being approved by the board in September of 2003.

The board then voted 7-1 to rescind the higher benefits package.

On August 6th, Shipman notified Jones that “an improper determination was made in the processing of your pension benefit.” He will have to repay $2,989.77 in excess benefits paid to him in June and July, according to Shipman’s letter.

How could Wharton have been out of the loop for so long on such a controversial matter at a time when public spending and public pensions in particular are under scrutiny? Only last week a group of citizens moved to put city government’s pension system to a public referendum in November, and MLGW pensions made news earlier this year.

In an interview Monday, Wharton, formerly the Shelby County public defender, put some of the blame on himself and some on other county officials.

“Should I have known earlier? Yes,” he said. “Anybody knows it should have been brought to my attention whether I agreed with it or disagreed with it.”

The mayor said he began to get the picture shortly before leaving for the Democratic National Convention in Boston on July 30th when two people he did not identify sent him “a word of thanks for helping Tom.”

“I had no idea what it was about,” Wharton said. He wondered if Jones had gone to another elected county official about getting rehired, “which was his prerogative.”

He found out last Thursday that the actions had been taken administratively and, what’s more, involved the retirement board which he chairs. But after meeting with Fowlkes, he said he realized he could not undo anything without taking it to the board at its meeting on August 3rd “so the board would not think something had been kept from them.”

As for Seward’s letter stating that the “board has approved your application,” Wharton said, “This gets into a legal question. My personal view is that that is not correct.”

Wharton came into the mayor’s office pledging that honesty and openness would replace the culture of entitlement. Now there is a culture of suspicion instead. The suspicion is that there is a regular way of getting things done in county government and a back-door way for insiders. And the mayor himself doesn’t seem to know whom he can trust.

ATHENIAN RHAPSODY

Don’t ask me why, but the Olympic Games tend to sneak up on me. Yes, a worldwide sports extravaganza that costs in excess of $7 billion to present . . . sneaks up on me. I suppose this has much to do with the overstuffed calendar of games we Americans enjoy year after year. When you add the fact that the summer Games are played every fourth year — directly in line with a presidential election here in the States — well, again, they sneak up on me.

But just like that college buddy you’ve lost track of until he shows up on your front porch at dinner time, I tend to welcome most of what the Olympics bring. Baron Pierre de Coubertin’s ideal for reviving the Games in 1896 — a conflicted world unified, if only briefly, on the athletic field — seems rather quaint today, maybe even corny. I’d argue, however, that the day we give up Olympic hopes and dreams, all will truly be lost.

The Athens Games of 2004 (opening this Friday) will be nothing remotely similar to the Athens Games of 1896. At those first, revived, Games, there were all of 14 countries in competition, and precisely 13 American athletes (remember Tom Burke?). Come Friday, 202 flags and 531 U.S. athletes will parade into Olympic Stadium for the opening ceremonies. And as for the charming, idyllic foundation of amateurism drawn up by the good Baron, I’ve got two words for you: Allen Iverson.

There are elements to the Olympics I can do without, starting with the jingoism. If I were president of the International Olympic Committee, flags would be displayed at the opening and closing ceremonies, and nowhere in between. I honestly don’t care about the “medal standings.” With more than 500 athletes in the field, the U.S. had better claim more hardware than, say, Turkey. But it’s nothing to boast of. Then there’s the endless stream of numerical standards: American record, Olympic record, world record. Please, NBC, tell us when a record is broken. Otherwise, keep the story focused . . . on today’s athletes.

I was 15 and traveling with my family in New York City when Mary Lou Retton vaulted into American hearts with her thighs by Butkus and smile by Disney. In 1988, while you were pointing fingers at Ben Johnson, my jaw was dropping over Matt Biondi’s five gold medals in the pool. (Greatest swimmer in history not named Spitz.) In 1992, I pinched myself when Magic, Bird, and Jordan shared a uniform for the (one and only!) Dream Team. Four years later in Atlanta, Carl Lewis won his FOURTH consecutive Olympic gold medal in the long jump. (Bank on this: DiMaggio’s hitting streak will be topped before Lewis’s leaping four-peat.) During the 2000 Games in Sydney, Rocky Balboa came to life when Rulon Gardner out-wrestled the (almost literally) unbeatable Russian super heavyweight, Alexander Karelin. Yes, Gardner is American, but on that mat in Australia . . . he was Olympian.

So which athletes will add their names to the list of Super Memories? You might coordinate your viewing around the men’s 200-meter freestyle swimming finals, when two of the greatest swimmers ever to fill a Speedo — Australia’s Ian Thorpe and 18-year-old American Michael Phelps — cut the water as part of Phelps’s attempt to match Mark Spitz’s record of seven gold medals in a single Games. Pay attention, also, to any swim race featuring four-time Olympian (and 10-time medalist), Jenny Thompson. (Any Olympian that pretty simply HAS to be in prime time. She’s an Ivy League med student, to boot.)

Track and field will have a stink to it, considering all the speculation over doping and who exactly is on what. I’m interested in the men’s 1,500 meters, where one of the alltime greats — Morocco’s Hicham El Guerrouj — aims for his first gold medal . . . in his third Olympics. And there’s always gymnastics, the summer equivalent of ladies figure skating, where Americans find their quadrennial “darling” in tights. Who’s the next Retton? The next Strug?

These Olympics will be on television for more hours than any other in history, and there will be the inevitable discussions on security measures and international impact. Here’s hoping whatever distractions there may be are of the mild, talking-head variety. Here’s hoping the world can, indeed, get along — for a couple of weeks anyway — in a part of the world where it seems so difficult. And here’s hoping, yes, that a hero or two manages to sneak up on us all.

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO MRS. WEATHERS

I just spent a week with my 89-year-old mother, Elsie Weathers. After a week with Mom, I think John Kerry has a chance against George W. Bush, but I worry for the future of the United States. What will happen to our politics when those who remember life before 1932 are dead?

My mother is not a swing voter. She is not undecided. She is not an independent. Elsie Weathers is a Democrat. Let me amend that: Elsie Weathers is a DEMOCRAT! The first president my mother ever voted for was FDR. So was the second. And the third. And the fourth. She would like to vote for FDR this year. She’ll settle for John Kerry.

Politics for my mother is simple: The Republicans are the party of the greedy, the Democrats are the party of the needy, and the most important role of government is to protect the needy poor from the greedy rich. My mother has never voted for a Republican.

My mother grew up on a hardscrabble farm in upstate New York. She was the daughter of Finnish immigrants who never learned to speak English. Her family was poor. She tells many stories of how poor. My favorite is this: My mother has always loved animals. When she was a little girl, she desperately wanted a lamb for Christmas. She begged and begged her parents for a lamb. On Christmas Day she ran downstairs expecting to find her lamb under the Christmas tree. What she got instead was woolen underwear.

For my mother, all politics is personal. It is all about stories like the lamb and the underwear.

Socialized medicine? My mother is all for it. After all, she spent four years in a state-subsidized tuberculosis sanitorium in the 1940s. Despite the fact that she nearly died of the disease, my mother remembers that period almost fondly. The doctors and nurses were, in her mind, angels. The government paid for it all. That, my mother believes, is what a government should do.

Worker protection laws? OSHA? My mother is all for them. She tells of her brother-in-law, Eino, who contracted silicosis in the coal mines of Pennsylvania. He died of it–slowly, agonizingly. The coal mine company never considered protecting him when he worked or helping him after he got sick. They threw him aside and hired someone else they could exploit and sicken.

Unions? My late sainted father was a union man. My mother still believes it was the reason the phone company never promoted him. She still remembers what the world was like before unions were strong. She repeats the story my father used to tell, of when he was a teenager working for a coal company in Kentucky. His job was to serve food to the workers, who were largely “paid” in food and company-owned housing. (Feeding and housing them was, Mom points out, a way for the coal company to keep the workers under its control. Actual wages the workers could have saved, so they could have improved themselves and maybe moved on to other jobs. The company didn’t like that possibility.) My father told of how the hungry workers would ask him, as he dished out their food, “Just one mo’ poke chop, young mister? Just one?” But he would have been fired if he gave them one.

Laissez-faire capitalism? My mother tells the story of the January day my father (still a boy working for the coal company) saw one of the workers pick up a piece of coal by the railroad tracks leading out of the coal plant and put it in his pocket, to take home to warm his family. Another worker also witnessed the incident and reported the worker who pocketed the coal. My father was forced to testify against the coal-taker, who was fired. My father felt horrible about it to the day he died. In my mother’s mind, a capitalist is a person who, if not restrained by law, will kill his workers slowly and refuse a lump of coal to a sick and freezing man in order to make an extra buck.

Abortion? A relation of my mother’s got his girlfriend pregnant in the 1930s. The girl decided to have an abortion, illegal at the time. The abortion was botched. The man watched his girlfriend slowly bleed to death on the backroom bed of an abortion house. My mother also tells of all the girls she knew who kept their babies and were forced by (presumably Republican) social pressure into marriages they hated for a lifetime. My mother believes in clean, safe, legal abortions.

“Preventive” wars? My mother and my father would have drugged me, put me in the trunk of the car, and driven me across the border into Canada themselves to keep me out of the Vietnam War. The war was about me. She bleeds for every soldier and every child killed in Iraq, one at a time. She lingers over every newspaper story about the boy who enlists against his mother’s wishes and then dies in action. War, like politics, is personal for my mother.

Liberals? My mother plays bridge with a group of women who rarely discuss politics, but occasionally one of them, usually a generation younger, will begin to rail against liberals. My mother is a shy little stooped-over woman. She never initiates talk about politics. But she will not countenance criticism of liberals, especially in her liberated old age. “I’m a liberal,” she’ll declare, her voice trembling with anger. “And I’m proud of it. In fact, if you want to call me a bleeding-heart liberal, you go right ahead. Because that’s what I am.” Then, if you put her to the test, she will tell you how it was the “liberals” who came up with social security, worker-protection laws, consumer-protection laws, environmental-protection laws, and Medicare, and how it was the Republicans who, consistently and repeatedly, opposed them.

Protect the needy from the greedy.

My mother does not trust the rich. In his capacity as president of the New York State School Boards Association (a voluntary job), my father had some school-aid dealings with Nelson Rockefeller when Rockefeller, a Republican, was governor of New York. My father respected Rockefeller, who, by current standards, was something of a liberal himself. (The current Rockefeller in the Senate is a Democrat.) But my mother never trusted Rockefeller, because he was rich. She felt vindicated when he reportedly died in a fancy Park Avenue penthouse while in the arms of a woman who was not his wife.

Last week, my mother said she didn’t really like John Kerry’s wife Teresa. “He needs to keep her quiet until after the election,” my mother says, unliberatedly. It is Teresa Kerry’s hint of arrogance and condescension, not her candor, that most bothers my mother. “She always has that little smile,” my mother says. It is the smirk of the rich, I think, that my mother objects to. Kerry would do well to listen to my mother.

When my mother thinks of politicians, she rarely thinks in terms of their policies. (Why consider policies? Democratic policies are good. Republican policies are bad. Q.E.D.) Mrs. Weathers thinks instead in terms of personality. She began despising Richard Nixon in the 1940s, when he first used Red Scare tactics to win a seat in the Senate. His demise in the 1970s was almost an anti-climax for her, she had hated him for so long. She felt disdain, but not disgust, for Ronald Reagan, whom she dismissed as little more than a script-reader. She is even capable (though rarely) of disliking a Democrat; she abhorred Lyndon Johnson. My mother has a fine eye, almost a sixth sense, for spotting the morally corrupt.

I can almost exactly calibrate how a Presidential election will go by observing how much my mother hates the Republican candidate and loves the Democratic candidate, then factoring in current events. If she doesn’t dislike the Republican candidate too much (Eisenhower, Reagan, Bush the Elder), then he has a good chance of winning, especially if she is tepid about the Democratic candidate (McGovern, Dukakis, Gore). If she hates the Republican candidate (Nixon) and adores the Democratic candidate (Hubert Humphrey, John Kennedy), the race will be, at worst, close. Other than FDR, her favorite all-time presidential candidate was Adlai Stevenson, because he had integrity and gave great speeches. She would have enjoyed voting for Mario Cuomo and is disappointed that she never got the chance.

Mrs. Weathers loathes George W. Bush. He embodies for her everything she hates about Republicans: knee-jerk militarism, flag-waving jingoism, narrow-minded moralism, smug wealth, and especially economic elitism. He is for the fat cats (an expression that is vivid and real for my mother), and he oppresses the underdog (an equally vivid expression for this woman who still sees the world from the perspective of animals–dogs, cats, lambs). Bush, my mother is convinced, just wants the rich to get richer. John Edwards’ speech about “two Americas–one for the rich, another for the poor and middle class” resonates deeply with her. According to Mrs. Weathers, George W. Bush is a liar and a fraud. He is killing American soldiers to make his friends richer. He is corrupt. As I said, my mother has a sixth sense about corruption.

This is good news for the Democrats, but of course it is not news at all to political analysts. People like my mother are the heart of the Democratic Party, and we all know that the Democrats have been spurred to almost unprecedented heights of political action by their dislike of George W. Bush.

The question, then, is, How does my mother feel about John Kerry?

Well, she likes him pretty well, but she doesn’t adore him the way she adored Stevenson and JFK and Humphrey. I asked her how she liked Kerry’s speech at the Democratic Convention. “I think he did very well,” she replied. This is rather tepid praise from my mother when speaking of a Democrat. Asked how she liked the keynote speech of Barack Obama, she replied, “Oh, he was wonderful!” There are a lot of votes between Kerry’s period and Obama’s exclamation mark.

In her old age, my mother doesn’t follow politics too closely anymore. She knew almost nothing about Howard Dean’s campaign last year, and very little about Kerry until the convention. Let’s hope Kerry earns an exclamation mark from her before November. It could mean the election.

But as important as the election is, what is even more important is what America will be like after my mother’s generation dies off–the generation that knew first-hand the world as it was before government put the reins on capitalist greed. After my mother dies, who will replace her? Let’s hope that the world replaces her with others who study a bit of history so they can understand her point of view. But I worry that that won’t happen. I worry about that a lot.