Lakeland mayor Scott Carmichael, county mayoral candidate LarryScroggs, Bartlett mayor Ken Fulmar, Scroggs aide Eliot Cohen, and Germantown mayor Sharon Goldsworthy met Wednesday morning at Bartlett City Hall.
The mayors of Shelby County’s municipalities agree on a few matters, it seems. One is the candidacy for Shelby County mayor of Germantown state Representative Larry Scroggs,who is running in the Republican primary.
Another is that they have increasing doubts about the task-force proposal on single-source funding for city and county schools which was released last week..
Their views about the latter issue are for the most part shared by Scroggs, who was formally endorsed by five of the mayors at a Wednesday morning press conference at Bartlett City Hall. Endorsements came from Bartlett mayor Ken Fulmar, Lakeland mayor Scott Carmichael, and Germantown mayor Sharon Goldsworthy, all of whom were on hand, as well as from Arlington mayor George HortonLinda Kerley, who were absent.
(Millington mayor George Harvell,whose wife is a prospective county school-board candidate, is not endorsing a candidate for mayor.)
What the mayors and Scroggs agreed on Thursday was that initial enthusiasm in the outer county for the task-force proposal should be subjected to serious second thoughts. The mayors on hand had doubts about such matters as a provision in the task-force proposal giving the county commission authority over school bonds. “That in a sense makes the decision unrepresentative of the county school population, since only three commissioners directly represent the area,” Goldsworthy said. She and the others also expressed concern that they were not consulted directly in the formulation of the proposals and that the task-force proposal might shift too much of the schools’ tax burden from business and industry to suburban homeowners.
The mayors’ endorsement of Scroggs followed by two days an endorsement of the legislator’s mayoral candidacy by the Republican members of the General Assembly.
