Month: January 2005

THE URGE TO MERGE

Consolidation proposals in Memphis are like Super Bowls. They come along every year, generate lots of publicity, and get everyone stirred up for a few weeks. Except the outcome of the Super Bowl is unknown.

In his latest pitch, Mayor Willie Herenton praised the consolidation of Louisville and Jefferson County, Kentucky, which occurred in 2003.

On the surface, Memphis and Louisville are alike. Louisville has UPS, an urban university, Rick Pitino, the Cardinals, Ali, and the Ohio River. Memphis has FedEx, an urban university, John Calipari, the Tigers, Elvis, and the Mississippi River. Louisville’s mayor, Jerry Abramson, has served 14 years; Herenton has served 13 years. Louisville is the nation’s 16th largest city; Memphis is the 18th largest. Louisville and Memphis competed for the Grizzlies.

Ed Glasscock, a Louisville attorney closely involved with the consolidation and NBA drives, has only nice things to say about Memphis.

“I was in the middle of the NBA war and you won,” he said. “You’re doing a very good job with that.”

He also praised Memphis for entertaining 25,000 Louisville fans a few weeks ago at the Liberty Bowl. But details of Louisville’s merger supplied by Glasscock and deputy mayor Joan Riehm show how far Herenton has to go and how unlikely he is to get there. The main reason is that Louisville and Memphis actually are not much alike at all.

The biggest difference is race, which trumps everything short of a municipal bankruptcy. Memphis has a population of about 650,000 and is 62 percent black and 34 percent white. Shelby County (including Memphis) is 49 percent black and 47 percent white. Louisville, before consolidation, had a population of about 250,000 and was 63 percent white and 33 percent black. Metro Louisville (excluding 83 suburban towns left intact) now has a population of 693,000 and is 19 percent black and 77 percent white.

The three peer cities within 600 miles of Memphis that have consolidated since 1960 Louisville, Indianapolis (which consolidated by legislative action, not referendum), and Nashville have majority-white populations. White suburbanites don’t merge with black urbanites unless the numbers are in their favor.

If that’s not the end of the story, there’s more.

Louisville’s biggest revenue source is a payroll tax; Memphis’ is a property tax.

Louisville’s and Jefferson County’s public school systems (both majority white) merged back in 1975. “That wasn’t an issue here,” said Glasscock.

It is in Memphis. Neither the Memphis Board of Education nor the Shelby County Board of Education has shown any willingness to bump itself off. And Memphis superintendent Carol Johnson and Shelby County superintendent Bobby Webb have not backed Herenton.

Louisville’s consolidation effort started in 1997, following two failed consolidation votes in the 1980s. Backers plotted strategy for three years and spent $1.6 million in a carefully monitored campaign of advertising, door-to-door visits, direct mail, and polling.

“We spoke with one voice,” said Glasscock, whose law firm was the wheelhorse of a united front that included the business community, every living mayor and county executive (all white), and state and federal politicians. Consolidation in Memphis-Shelby County also has one voice: Herenton’s.

“With all due respect, it takes the whole community,” Glasscock said. “It can’t be one person.”

Something called Greater Louisville Inc. seized the moral high ground and successfully portrayed political opponents as “only interested in their own elected positions.” Herenton has tried to do that too but is losing the PR war in forums such as the letters page of The Commercial Appeal and the all-white county school board. And by his own admission, the mayor let his critics get under his skin and dictate his agenda in 2004. That’s another big mistake.

“The antis can say anything,” Glasscock noted. “We had to tell the truth.”

Louisville’s merger team targeted the two-thirds of Jefferson County residents that polls showed were either favorably inclined or undecided. They promised no change in taxes or services. They spent $300,000 on television ads in the two weeks before the referendum.

The referendum passed by only a 54-46 margin, about the same as a Cardinals football score.

You can have some fun and kill time playing with consolidation numbers but don’t make any bets. For that, take Tom Brady and the Patriots in the Super Bowl.

SAME OLD…

NASHVILLE — Everybody knows the famous Will Rogers line: “I don’t belong to an organized political party; I’m a Democrat.” And, sure enough, Democrats sometimes appear to regard the fact of discontent in their ranks as cause for pride. As of the weekend, however, that portion of the party’s honor was being upheld almost exclusively in Tennessee by Democrats from Shelby County.

Consider: Normally, there’s enough ruckus to go around at the biennial meetings of the party’s executive committee, the ones that elect party chairs. Six years ago, when then Vice President Al Gore, about to embark on his presidential run, requested the election of his man Doug Horne, a Knoxville publisher relatively unknown to party members at large, as state party chairman, there was grumbling amongst the rank and file, but they acceded to Gore’s wishes. Four years ago, there were three contenders for the chairmanship (eventually won that year by lawyer William Farmer of Lebanon), as well as a demand that party leaders account for the failure of the Gore campaign to win Tennessee’s electoral votes in 2000.

Then there was the contentious meeting last summer to select delegates to the Democratic convention in Boston. Said state committee member David Upton of Memphis. “That was a tough one. Sometimes we have to play Solomon.”

But Saturday’s meeting was, by contrast, the kind of namby-pamby affair that would have left Will Rogers yawning. Party chair Randy Button of Knoxville was reelected to a second term without opposition or even a breath of complaint, and there was a raft of resolutions — some harmless, some noble — that were passed by acclamation.

The only discord came from Shelby Countians, who took one of their never-ending private disputes before the full committee.

The issue was whether the Shelby County Democratic committee would be permitted to hold its reorganization meeting this year at a different time than Democratic committees elsewhere in the state, who by state party resolution, will be holding local conventions in April, as they did in 2003 and 2001. In those years, Shelby County Democrats also convened in April — though it had been the local party’s practice in previous years to hold their conventions in October.

In Nashville on Saturday, Upton formally requested that Shelby County be allowed to hold its two-part convention (first a round of caucuses; then, a week later, the convention per se) on the dates of July 16th and July 23rd. And he passed out copies of a letter to Button from state Representative Kathryn Bowers of Memphis, the current Shelby County Democratic chair, requesting the change. Since Shelby County is one of five counties in Tennessee empowered both by state law and by party sanction to make such requests, it was a routine matter, right?

Wrong! Gale Jones Carson, the Memphian who serves as state party secretary (and was reelected in that role Saturday), objected that Bowers’ request and Upton’s motion did not represent the will of the Shelby County Democratic committee, who had never voted to put it forth, she said. And Carson, who serves as Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton’s press secretary, also took umbrage at some of Upton’s rhetoric about her boss, who had, as Upton pointed out in his remarks, chosen to support Republican Lamar Alexander for the U.S. Senate in 2002.

After some back-and-forth on the point, it became clear, even to delegates from remote counties in the far corners of Tennessee, that Shelby County Democrats comprised at least two, bitterly competitive factions. There was the one represented by Herentonian Carson, who lost the Shelby County chairmanship to Bowers two years ago by a single vote. And there was the one represented by Upton, Bowers, and other Democrats, who happen — coincidentally or not — to be close to U.S. Rep. Harold Ford. One of the reasons for the date-change request, as Upton noted, was that April was an inconvenient time for members of the state legislature, who would be in session, to take part in the local convention process. Bowers presumably could expect the support of a majority of her legislative colleagues.

No doubt, as both factions contend, some principle is involved in the disagreement, but mainly it comes down to hardball politics and simple head-counting.

For its part, the state Democratic committee played Solomon, voting by acclamation to accommodate Bowers’ request — so long as the Shelby County executive committee, at its next meeting, approves the change. Members of the two Shelby County factions disagree as to whether, and to what extent, the matter got broached at the local committee’s January meeting. There won’t be any doubt that the matter’s up for a vote at the next meeting, on February 3rd, when heads will be counted.

U .S. representative Harold Ford Jr., the 9th District Democrat and prospective U.S. Senate candidate who has been under fire this week for his positions, real or alleged, on Social Security, is at pains to distance himself from various proposals to create private investment accounts from the Social Security fund.

Ford suggests (see “Tilting Right?”) that his positions have been misunderstood or misrepresented and offers as an example of the kind of innovative entitlement reform he does support a bill he introduced last July, entitled “The America Saving for Personal Investment, Retirement, and Education Act (ASPIRE).”

What the act would do is establish a “KIDS” saving account for every newborn, who would be issued a Social Security number. Accounts in the amount of $500 each would be opened for them automatically, with children below the national median income eligible for a supplementary grant of up to another $500.

The accounts, indexed for inflation, would be paid out of the government’s general revenues fund, and provisions would be established allowing for matching grants from private sources.

In the language of the bill, the purpose of the measure would be “to encourage savings, promote financial literacy, and expand opportunities for young adults.” Although hardship exceptions could be applied, the bill calls for repayment of the initial investment at the time the recipient reaches the age of 30.

The bill would also establish “a range of investment options similar to those offered by the Thrift Savings Plan, including a government securities fund, a fixed income investment fund, a common stock fund, and other funds that may be created by the Board.”

No action was taken on the bill last summer, but the bill, co-sponsored in the Senate by Pennsylvania’s Rick Santorum, the Republican Conference chair, will be re-introduced in the current session, said Ford’s spokesperson, Mark Schuermann.

Ford, who, as this week’s cover story documents, suffered some direct hits from various members of the blogosphere last week, also got some indirect — and presumably undeserved — shrapnel from the revelation that black commentator Armstrong Williams had been paid $240,000 in federal funds for shilling for the Bush administraton’s No Child Left Behind program.

Though Ford had no relation to that circumstance, his name ended up being mentioned on some of the established blogs and e-mail networks by virtue of the fact that Williams had from time to time praised the Memphis congressman. As they say, with friends like that … .

At the precise moment that members of the Shelby County Commission were locked into a debate Monday on partial privatization of local corrections services, Governor Phil Bredesen was holding a press conference in Nashville to announce significant reductions in the scope of TennCare, the state’s medical insurance system.

There was an eerie parallel between the two situations. In the same half-hour that an audience member in the county building was pleading that the privatization measure would cost “1,500 union jobs, affecting 1,500 families,” Bredesen was detailing his plans for cutting 323,000 adult Tennesseans off the TennCare rolls — a fact which was duly announced to the commission by Shelby County mayor A C Wharton in his somewhat later testimony concerning what he saw as an urgent need for the commission to approve a local privilege tax for legislative consideration.

The two situations had a common bottom line: namely, that revenues for public services are drying up.

During commission debate, a proposal was advanced by Cleo Kirk that state senator Roscoe Dixon, now an aide to Wharton, be prevailed upon not to resign his Senate seat this Friday, as commission chairman Michael Hooks had announced. Kirk said it was because of Dixon’s expertise and the fact that legislators with his precise knowledge of the county’s proposals don’t grow on trees.

Hooks, who wishes to run for the seat when it becomes vacant but doesn’t seek an interim appointment, said he would take the matter up with Kirk and Wharton.

State representative Kathryn Bowers, another aspirant for Dixon’s District 33 seat, was the beneficiary of a busy round of four fund-raisers held in Memphis and in Nashville over the weekend. After the beginning of the legislative session this week, fund-raising by members of the General Assembly is prohibited — yet another reason why Hooks doesn’t covet an appointment just now.

Quote of the week: “Get some devastation in the back,” said by Tennessee senator Bill Frist to a staff photographer getting a picture of him as he prepared to leave a tsunami-devastated region of Sri Lanka. The photographer had easy pickings.