Month: March 2008

The third of a three-part series. Read Part One here, and Part Two here.

Memphis
lawyer Dan Norwood, whose practice, oriented to public-service cases, often
brought him into contact with the administrative team of schools superintendent
Willie Herenton, marvels even today at the financial legerdemain on display at
Memphis City Schools headquarters on Avery during the ’80s and early ’90s.

“Those guys could hide the money!” he recalls admiringly, referring not to any
graft or dishonesty but rather to the ability of the superintendent’s financial
advisers – notably then deputy superintendent Ray Holt – to disguise and channel
the various assets of MCS in such a way as to justify annual
budget requests based on scarcity while maintaining emergency “rainy day”
reserves just in case those requests were not accommodated by local government.

Thus it was that the school system during the Herenton years was able to stay in
surplus through lean times and fat, and it was by calling on the same expertise
that a beleaguered superintendent Herenton negotiated a more generous settlement
with the school board – a buyout of his contract, is what it came to – than was
publicly realized at the time.

So masked were
the conditions of Superintendent Herenton’s retirement agreement in 1991 that
even today, almost a score of years after the event, brand-new conspiracy
theories have surfaced, alleging that Mayor Herenton, by resigning and becoming
superintendent once more, would stand thereby to enhance the pension he earned
from his years of service with Memphis City Schools.

Compensation plus a full pension plus two salaries

As the theory goes, since Herenton served 28 years with MCS and was granted
another more or less honorary year as part of his 1991 settlement agreement
with the school board, he would greatly escalate his pension during his first
additional year of service should he get hired again as superintendent.

The problem with that theory is that Herenton has already been credited with 30
years of service, with all the pension benefits which would ensue from the fact.
That was a condition that he negotiated back in 1991 as an essential part of his
retirement agreement with the school board.

That fact escaped public notice at the time but was revealed in a Flyer
cover story of February 13, 1992. The article, entitled “Double Dipping,” was
published barely a month after Willie Herenton, now fully redeemed as a public
figure, had taken the oath as Memphis mayor. Herenton, aided by Get-Out-the-Vote
efforts from then congressman Harold Ford Sr., a political rival, had become
the first African American to gain the office via election — in an upset
victory over incumbent mayor Dick Hackett that was justly regarded as epochal in
its implications.

“Double Dipping” was so titled because of its revelation that during the course
of the same year that he would be serving as the city’s fully salaried chief
executive, Mayor Herenton would continue to be carried, under the classification
“full time, active,” on the books of Memphis City Schools. He would, in fact, be
drawing his former annual MCS salary of $120,717 while being paid $100,000 to run
Memphis city government.

Moreover, this extra year of service was interpreted as being added on to a de
facto severance year – making his total 30 years officially instead of the 29
years’ worth that were announced to the public at the time of Herenton’s
retirement announcement. That “30th” year was added on in the course
of a technical supplement to the retirement package worked out between Herenton
and then acting superintendent Holt, the former deputy who had
temporarily succeeded his boss.

In effect, the buyout package was structured so as to compensate superintendent
Herenton for retirement short of a full 30 years with MCS, while simultaneously granting him
the wherewithal to claim the advantages of a 30-year retirement!

The difference, in pension benefits alone, would amount to at least $500,000
(the sum was subject to adjustments for inflation and cost-of-living increases)
over the course of the next 20 years. The retiring superintendent was also
granted $106, 616 in accrued sick leave – covering both of the extra years of
service, the severance year spoken to in the agreement and the phantom 30th
year.

‘Some of us wanted to fire him outright’

J.C. Williams, the school board president who had signed the buyout package on
behalf of the school system (the only other signatory was Herenton), would
acknowledge the stealth nature of these financial add-on features. “I did not
know that Dr. Herenton intended to remain on the school payroll, and I did not
find out that he was still being carried until late last year,” said Williams in
February 1992, insisting that, had he known, he would not have signed the buyout
agreement.

Herenton himself, when asked in 1992 about the newly unearthed terms of his
retirement package, wondered what all the fuss was about. The agreement was like
any other executive retirement package, he said, in it it was not based on
normal formulas but was “independent of the practices that govern the [school]
board’s employment of other individuals.”

Anyhow, he contended, the package was consistent with roll-over provisions
contained in his existing contract with the school board.

The new mayor could certainly not be faulted for having negotiated such
unexpectedly favorable terms. He was free to, and, in a way, it spoke to an
innate shrewdness that might serve him well in his new and challenging job as
mayor of a major urban metropolis.

Mal Mauney, who, as chairman of the school board’s personnel committee at the
time, did much of he negotiating with Herenton, commented wryly in 1992:
“Frankly, there were some of us who wanted to fire him outright. But let’s face
it, unless we struck a bargain which we could get him to agree to, he was
unassailable.”

Mauney went on to elaborate that Herenton’s support base in the city’s
African-American community was strong and loyal and that a negative reaction from
these constituents was “something we had to take seriously.”

Regardless, that’s how one career ended, and another began – perhaps, after 16
mayoral years that have been both widely admired and widely criticized, to
recycle into a reprise of that first career.

This concludes a Three-Part series on how superintendent, later mayor, Willie Herenton came to part the ways with Memphis City Schools after what could turn out to have been his first stint with MCS.

Read Part One.

Read Part Two.

Marsha Blackburn, the Republican congressman (her preferred term) for Tennessee’s 7th congressional district, would seem unassailable at the polls. Since her first — relatively easy — primary victory in 2002 over a field of mainly well-known fellow Republicans, she has basically had nominal opposition — and that from self-sacrificing no-name Democrats in the fall.

But suddenly, with next week’s filing deadline beckoning, Blackburn faces primary opposition from a GOP office-holder, Shelby County register and former state senator Tom Leatherwood, who reckons that his day job, which isn’t up for election again until 2010, will serve as a satisfactory “parachute,” is ready to take Blackburn on this year.

“I told somebody, ‘It’s not a steep hill. I’ve just walked up to the face of the cliff,” Leatherwood jests self-effacingly. But he believes the risk (which includes possible estrangement from certain fellow Republicans) is worth taking.

Why does he think Blackburn, a rising star in Republican ranks as an assistant whip in the House of Representatives, should be opposed? “Two things. Effectiveness and ethics,” he says. He regards Blackburn as ineffective on policy matters like the national deficit (about her ranking position, he says, “We have nothing to show for it”), and he cites her “twenty private special-interest trips” to places like Aspen, Colorado, as evidence of questionable ethics.

Leatherwood has enough chutzpah to have suggested to Blackburn in a recent telephone conversation that “it’s time for her to go home.” Unsurprisingly, she declined to agree.

A substitute teacher before he upset venerable Republican state Senator Leonard Dunavant in the 1992 Republican primary, Leatherwood, who won the register’s seat in 2000, recalls being told, “You have to wait your time.” He says, “If I had ‘waited my time,’ I’d still be waiting.”

Obviously, he decided not to wait for a better time to run for Congress. “The issues facing the country are too great,” he says.

Part Two of a Series. Read Part One here.

So the Herenton mayoralty has morphed into Groundhog Day
— with a difference. Instead of the main character’s beginning and ending each
day the same way, with the events in between being identical from day to day,
Mayor Herenton is making the same bombshell announcement every day – but each
time with a distinct variation.

In Monday’s version, the mayor was still offering to resign
– sort of – but only on condition that he gets back the superintendent’s job
which, on Day Two or Three of this saga, had become the rationale for casting
off his City Hall job. Otherwise, apparently, he stays in the saddle. For better
or for worse.

And at day’s end, as if impatient to spring his revised
Tuesday version of this soap opera, Herenton was letting it slip, via a Channel
3 TV tease, that he had already met with School Board members — “behind closed
doors,” as the expression went. Those meetings turned out to have been with
selected members on an alleged one-on-one basis, as reported in a
Tuesday-morning article in The Commercial Appeal.

Leaving aside the question of whether these surreptitious
gatherings skirted the edge of the state Sunshine Law, they certainly seemed to
underline the seriousness of the Superintendency Hypothesis. And it made it all
the more imperative to review Willie Herenton’s history with the Memphis City
Schools – and particularly the stormy, unsettling way in which he and MCS parted
company back in 1991.

In Part One of this series, we reviewed the Eliot
Spitzer-like incident of 1989 in which an estranged paramour – a math teacher
in the school system- filed suit against the then schools superintendent,
accusing him of sexual improprieties, battery, and reneging on promises of
marriage and promotions.

Almost certainly, this misadventure damaged Herenton’s
chances of landing either of the two choice superintendent’s positions, in New
York and Chicago, for which he had been a prime – perhaps the prime –
candidate that year.

The OCI Report — and Sisson

Later in 1989, the suit brought by this plaintiff, Mahnaz
Bahrmand, was settled, and its terms and provisions have remained sealed to the
present day. But the charges brought by Bahrmand – especially those involving
Herenton’s alleged promises of favoritism toward her – begat suspicion of the
superintendent on the part of a School Board that had been mostly supportive up
to that point.

In
the wake of Bahrmand’s suit, the board had commissioned a study of the school
system’s management by a North Carolina firm, Organization Consultants Inc.
That firm submitted a report on Sept. 25, 1989 which enumerated abundant
instances of waste and mismanagement and which documented low morale among
teachers and pervasive distrust of the MCS administration.

More or less simultaneously, then Shelby County Commissioner Pete Sisson,
chairman of the commission’s education committee, launched his own investigation
into the school system, one which lasted, in one form or another, until the time
of superintendent Herenton’s resignation from the system, announced October 30,
1990, effective June 30, 1991.

Sisson requisitioned documents concerning purported over-expenditures for
equipment, much of which allegedly remained unused or duplicated functions
already accounted for. The commissioner amassed evidence seeming to show
excessive travel and preferential treatment of MCS personnel favored by Herenton
and other administrators. Complaints from disgruntled teachers flowed in,
charging everything from ineffective educational programs to misuse of funds to
extra-curricular hanky-panky on the part of the superintendent and others.

‘Losing Control of the Classroom’

All of this negative attention did much to undermine the status of Herenton, who
had enjoyed a relatively high degree of prestige throughout most of his
administration. He had been named to a variety of corporate boards and was seen
in much he same light locally as elsewhere in the nation, where he was a coveted
speaker on the banquet circuit and, as previously indicated, a leading contender
for vacant superintendent’s positions in major urban districts like New York,
Chicago, and Atlanta.

Much of this celebrity and respect was due to the same air of command which,
combined with controlled affability and his professional manner, would
contribute to Herenton’s political success in subsequent years. But much, too,
could be attributed to his actual accomplishments.

Some of the superintendent’s innovations – ranging from site-based planning to
an emphasis on optional schools – endure to the present day. Test scores of the
district’s largely impoverished student base improved marginally, both with
regard to a local baseline and in comparison with demographically similar
districts elsewhere in the nation. A move to raise the number of black teachers
and administrators relative to whites generated tensions here and there but was
largely applauded as being in keeping with the predominantly African-American
makeup of the district.

Despite allegations from his critics of over-spending, Herenton was able to
maintain surpluses from year to year, even though he usually had less funding to
deal with than he had requested to meet the district’s needs. In the post-Bahrmand
atmosphere and with allegations flying in the wake of the OIC study and Sisson’s
investigation, the superintendent’s budget battles with the school board and
with increasingly skeptical local government bodies intensified.

As
the ’80s turned into the ’90s, push was so obviously coming to shove that the once
high-flying superintendent’s days were clearly numbered. Public suspicion and
criticism of his tenure – much of it exacerbated by an ever implicit racial
dividing line – increased exponentially.

In
the idiom of education, Willie Herenton had begun to lose control of his
classroom.

It
was within this mood of mounting crisis that the superintendent, in 1990, began
behind-the-scenes negotiations with his board that would result in a de facto
buyout of his contract – one containing controversial clauses and conditions
that were withheld from the public when Herenton’s retirement was announced in
late 1990.

Next:
How mystery clauses magically turned 28 years of service into 30 years for salary and pension
purposes; “Double Dipping,” as the ex-superintendent, even more magically,
became mayor of Memphis.

To be continued…

Go to Part Three.

Read Part One.