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More County Races Previewed

The Flyer does not endorse candidates, but we hope you’ll use the following thumbnail sketches for an assortment of county races as something of a guide.

Assessor — SCS auditor Melvin Burgess, a Democrat, has proved his merit in two terms as a county commissioner, but the experienced Republican nominee Robert “Chip” Trouy has been a strong right arm for outgoing assessor Cheyenne Johnson and previous holders of the office.

County Clerk — Democrat Wanda Halbert is the virtual definition of an experienced public official, having served both on the now-defunct Memphis School Board and on the Memphis City Council. Republican opponent Donna Creson possibly owed some of her primary vote to name confusion with former clerk Jayne Creson, but has experience in the clerk’s office.

Trustee — Democrat Regina Morrison Newman, who served a partial term as trustee and won awards for her creditable service, was upset for the office in 2010 by David Lenoir, now the Republican candidate for county mayor. The case she makes for a return is probably strong enough to overcome the Republican candidate, County Commissioner George Chism.

Criminal Court Clerk — Democrat Heidi Kuhn is a veteran of several positions in Shelby County government and would doubtless serve ably in this one. She is matched against Richard De Saussure, the Republican incumbent, whose past experience in the office has prepared him well.

Circuit Court Clerk — Changes in the county charter are forcing longtime Register of Deeds Tom Leatherwood, among other incumbents, to consider transitioning to other offices to maintain their careers (and retirement equity). Republican Leatherwood was widely appreciated as register. Democrat Temika Gipson can cite the advantage of her ample experience as an administrator in the Circuit Court clerk’s office.

Register of Deeds — Republican nominee Wayne Mashburn, term-limited after serving two terms as county clerk, a position also held for many years by his father, is presumably well-equipped to replace Leatherwood as Register. His Democratic opponent, Shelandra Ford, has several years of service in county government, but her main hope may be the surviving cachet of her last name, though she is not a member of the political Ford clan.

Probate Court Clerk — Republican Chris Thomas, who served 16 years as probate clerk, famously took a powder in 2010, fearing a Democratic sweep that never occurred, and ran instead for county commission. After serving nearly two terms, he seeks a return to his old job. Standing in his way is Democrat Bill Morrison, who is leaving the Memphis City Council. Independent Jennings Bernard could be a spoiler.

Juvenile Court Clerk — The decision by previous clerk Joy Touliatos to make a mayoral run opened up the position for a newcomer. Vying are Democrat Janis Fullilove, departing the Memphis City Council after a long and often controversial tenure, and the Republican nominee, Bartlett alderman Bobby Simmons, who boasts a lengthy period of service in the sheriff’s office.

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Editorial Opinion

Political Shakeup in Shelby County Politics

Everybody knows by now that the last couple of weeks on the national and international scenes have been unusually crucial ones. In particular, the destructive wanderings of President Donald Trump over the landscapes of our traditional European allies, culminating in his obsequious bow of obedience to Kremlin dictator Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland, may already have upset the traditional balance of power that has existed in the world since 1945.

And, make no mistake about it, that’s a bad thing.

Events that happened in that same time frame within the governmental chambers and courtrooms of Shelby County may have tipped local politics into a new order, as well. And that could be a good thing.

The major circumstance of local politics in that period concerned no particular election race, although there are several ongoing contests of importance, and the outcomes of an unusually large number of them are hard to predict. The seminal event locally was, in one sense, legal, though in another sense it cut to the root of the political process itself.

The issue was that of early voting, in particular, and the very democratic gift of self-government, in general. The early-voting period for county Democratic and Republican primaries, conducted in May at 21 sites countywide, had gone off relatively seamlessly and had even generated a modest uptick in the rate of early voting, something for which neither Shelby County nor Tennessee at large had been noted for up to then. So, when the Shelby County Election Commission, on June 21st, announced that, for early voting prior to the August 2nd county general election and state/federal primaries, it was adding three new sites in the Republican hinterland and designating the Agricenter, located in the heart of suburbia, as a master site of sorts, open for four extra days, local Democrats took umbrage, not merely protesting their belief that the change reflected bias but taking the issue to court.

We’re not necessarily endorsing the validity of their charge nor finding culpability in the actions of the Shelby County Election Commission, but we did take satisfaction in the ultimate verdict from Chancellor JoeDae L. Jenkins that the commission needed to further diversify its add-on sites, providing a truer balance between Democratic voting constituencies and Republican ones.

And we take additional pleasure in noting that the turnout on the first two days of early-voting at the amended roster of early-voting sites was much brisker than usual. Democrats in particular made a point of turning out in large numbers, but it seemed clear that a Republican response in like measure was due to follow.

The bottom line is that the current election has a fair chance of generating authentic results from the community at large. It takes a village, as the saying goes, and it also takes aroused opinion in that village and, if need be, legal action on the part of its tribunals.

And who knows? Maybe an equivalent reaction from an American citizenry fed up and embarrassed by the summit surrender at Helsinki can force some overdue reordering on the national political landscape, as well.

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Editorial Opinion

Fighting the Power — Locally and in the Senate

One of the oldest shibboleths known to mankind — at least to the American branch of it — is that “you can’t fight City Hall.” It is also something of a metaphor for the whole of one’s relationship to governing authorities — meaning, you can’t fight the state, you can’t fight Congress, you can’t fight … fill in the blank.

The saying has special relevance to two aspects of governmental decision this week, one local, another in the national sphere. And the evidence, in the one instance that seems to have concluded, is that you can indeed put up a successful resisrtance to governmental decisions that go against the grain.

In the local case, the Shelby County Electon Commission, had reached an arbitrary decision, as chronicled in Politics, p. 7, on changes in the allocation of times and places for early voting sites, with the August 2nd county general election and key state/federal primary elections just around the corner.

Large swaths of the voting population, primarily in areas of the county with Democratic voting habits, protested that the changes in site distribution were clearly meant to favor Republican voters. Newly added voting locations for the early voting period, June 13-28, did indeed tend to be in places congenially close for GOP voters and not so accessible to working-class Democrats and African American voters.

The official Election Commission explanation for the change was that the new locations were in previously “under-served” areas. Componding these changes was the commission’s designation of the AgriCenter in suburban Shelby Farms as a central site open for extra days.

Take it or leave it? That wasn’t the attitude of groups which saw themselves adversely affected, notably the Shelby County Democratic Party and the NAACP. After first protesting in vain, they sued, and, lo and behold, a Shelby County Chancellor responded to their case and ordered the Election Commission to revamp its plans.

The other case in point is underway in Washington, D.C., where Donald Trump, elected as president by the Electoral College, has set about transforming the U.S. Supreme Court into an ideological arm of the current Republican Party. This week Trump nominated as his second (and perhaps decisive) pick for the Court, Brett Kavanagh, an arch-conservative generally thought to be predisposed against Roe v. Wade, the Affordable Care Act, and other endangered precedents.

Democratic Senators  in certain red states face the Sophie’s Choice of endangering their own reelection by opposing Kavanagh or curbing their opposition and allowing Trump to prevail as a means of avoiding possible retribution from voters loyal to the president. Given the de facto 50-49 odds now favoring Republicans in the Senate, what these beleaguered Senators decide to do is crucial to the outcome.

The bottom line is that they can, if they choose, fight the odds and oppose Trump’s decision. The favorable result of similar resolve in Shelby County’s early-voting case is unlikely to serve as an inspiration to senators in the nation at large. But you can’t win if you don’t try, and, if we had our druthers, we sure would like to see the senators make the effort.

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Editorial Opinion

Memphis City Council Hijinks?

The Memphis City Council is under attack from various disenchanted citizens regarding several alleged pro-incumbent referenda it voted onto the November ballot — one that would counter the council’s current two-term limit for members, another that would negate the Shelby County Election Commission’s plans for ranked choice voting (RCV) in the 2019 city election, and another that would abolish all runoff elections. Now new scrutiny is arising on the question of how and when three council members might be replaced should they win other elected positions they are seeking in the August county general election.

Janis Fullilove

The three members are Janis Fullilove, Democratic nominee for Juvenile Court clerk; Bill Morrison, Democratic nominee for Probate Court clerk; and Edmund Ford, Democratic candidate for the Shelby County Commission’s District 9 position. All are generally favored to win, and all have been urged by a citizens’ group to resign their council positions immediately following the August outcome.

Members of the citizens’ group fear that the three council members, if victorious in their contests, might hold on to their council seats for an additional three months, as is apparently permitted by a literal interpretation of the city charter, thereby overlapping with their new county duties (and double-dipping financially).Most important from the protesters’ point of view, retention of the council seats for that long would stretch the calendar to the point that special elections could not be called for the forthcoming November ballot and would mandate the departing members’ replacement by an appointment process, in which case the replacements named would serve through the city election of 2019.

Edmund Ford Jr.

The challenging citizens fear that a current council majority will contrive to appoint new members of the same stripe, end-running other options that might surface in a special election.

So far, none of the three council members has committed to a course of action on a time for resignation. Berlin Boyd, the current council chair, and Allan Wade, the council’s attorney, insist that the critics have misread the charter and that special elections to replace departing council members can only take place in August — thereby nullifying the prospect of November elections for the three seats and making the protesters’ wishes moot.

The Rev. Earle Fisher and other citizens seeking a commitment for a timely withdrawal by the departing incumbents, should they win, cite charter language specifically authorizing replacement elections in either August or November.

Regardless of who’s right about charter requirements, the protesting citizens’ point is well taken: The appointment process has become wholly predictable, with a dominant council faction choosing replacements who, though they may be admirably skilled and bastions of integrity, have been suggested by well-placed supporters of the current majority and not subjected to any real public vetting via the election process.

The video archives of last week’s council meeting show that, after four speakers had made their case and had been basically blown off by Boyd, Wade apparently engaged the speakers in an exchange of taunts, somewhat off-mic. We think the protesters have a respectable case to make and should be listened to.

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Editorial Opinion

Trump: No Longer “Leader of the Free World”

CREDIT: Palinchak | Dreamstime

Typically, we use this space to consider matters of local importance — a term whose scope will stretch statewide, as cases dictate. But there is no mistaking that we belong to the national and world communities, as well, and from time to time, events in those larger spheres necessarily dominate in our consciousness. Such a moment is upon us now, when the national leader elected in 2016 is busily out and about remaking the guidelines we live by.

Palinchak | Dreamstime

Donald Trump

It has become something of a cliche for pundits to observe that President Trump is effecting drastic changes in an international order that has persisted for the 70-odd years since the end of World War Two, with the United States at the head of that order and the arbiter of its principles. Trump, with his election as president of the United States, inherited with that office the title of “leader of the free world.” In the wake of the president’s purposeful disruption at last week’s meeting of the G-7 nations in Canada, it appears necessary to question the continuing relevance of the term to the office. It is difficult to function as the leader of a concord, when you a) challenge its premises and disturb its coherence, as Trump did when he arrived at the G-7 summit late and with conspicuous casualness; b) while there, comport yourself insultingly and argumentatively vis-a-vis the representatives of the other nations; and c) depart early, leaving unresolved quarrels in your wake, openly launching trade wars against the other G-7 nations, and refusing to sign on to the ritual communique which, whatever its specific language, essentially merely says, “we are together.”

The fact is, the United States is no longer “together” with its associates in the post-war international order — not with the aforesaid “free world” component of it and not with the larger tribunal of the United Nations, where, for the first time ever, the U.S. representative failed to get a single co-sponsor for a major resolution. This one attempted to fix the blame entirely on the Palestinian side for the wholesale deaths in the Gaza strip of demonstrators who were fired upon as they protested the moving of the United States embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

This tragedy stems essentially from the go-it-alone impulse that spurred Trump, for evident domestic political reasons, to dispense with cautions honored for generations and, with no Mid-East settlement at hand, to tread clumsily and arbitrarily on the diplomatic realm’s most high-voltage third rail.

Meanwhile, the president, on his way to North Korea for the “honor” of what could turn out to be no more than a photo op with that nation’s dictator, has issued a call for the re-admission to what would thereby become an enlarged G-8 of Russia, whose authoritarian ruler, Vladimir Putin, he also honors. This, despite Russia’s continued subjugation of the neighbor nation of Ukraine and its documented attempts to sabotage the Democratic process both here and in Western Europe.

It’s worse than going it alone. Call it what you will, but it’s obvious Trump is more comfortable buddying up with the world’s bad boys than creating accord with our traditional allies. It’s a high-wire adventure in which we are unavoidably trapped, unless the GOP Congress musters enough courage to do something about it.

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Editorial Opinion

Shelby County Commission: A for Effort

There’s no doubt about it. The Shelby County Commission, in a current configuration that is about to expire because of the forthcoming August election, has taken bold steps to confront the established order of things.

As of August, when a minimum of eight members of the 13-member body are due to be replaced because of the county charter’s term-limits provision, the newly elected county legislature may not be so forward about things. But let’s enjoy this rebellion while it lasts and hope that the precedents it sets will inspire the newcomers of the next four-year term to similar innovation.

This commission has achieved results in numerous spheres by challenging custom and by pioneering in new directions. It has established task forces on such problems as the under-representation of women and ethnic minorities in county contracting, and those ad hoc bodies, fueled by the commission’s own disparity report, have made enormous progress in rectifying inequalities that had been taken for granted for decades.

The body elected four years ago, in 2014, has also managed to aggressively re-order its relationship with the county administration, challenging it on matters of financial oversight, among others, and, while neither branch of county government is always right and always deserving of having its opinion honored in the conduct of county business, the commission’s self-assertiveness has forced a more or less continuing dialogue on key matters. The recent establishment of a trans-governmental initiative to combat the plague of opioid addiction had its origins in actions taken by the commission, later court-approved, that forced the hand of the county administration and enticed city government and law enforcement agencies at large to come aboard.

And such re-ordering of priorities that has taken place has left undisturbed the ongoing focus on reducing county debt that Mayor Mark Luttrell has made an overriding administration goal.

This past week has seen yet another bold step by the commission. Confronted by the wish of Elvis Presley Enterprises to expand its campus to include a new, modestly sized arena so as to attract musical acts and other entertainments that would otherwise go south across the Mississippi state line or to Little Rock or Nashville, the commission was faced by the stated reluctance of the Grizzlies, backed by the city of Memphis, to give an inch on the terms of a strictly binding operating agreement that currently would prohibit the construction of an arena, containing more than 5,000 seats, that might be construed as competing with FedExForum, where the Grizzlies have proprietary status.  

Heidi Shafer

Instead of knuckling under on the matter, the commission voted on Monday to upgrade EPE’s share of revenues from an ongoing TIF, thereby allowing the arena construction, contingent (and that’s the operative term) on the courts recognizing the expansion as consistent with the terms of the aforesaid operating agreement with the Grizzlies. That seems both a progressive and a cautious way of probing for a solution that solves the Solomonic problem of having to satisfy what commission Chair Heidi Shafer referred to on Monday as “two favorite children.”

This strategy may work and it may not, but it was worth the effort to give it a try.

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News The Fly-By

Hemp Harvest

CREDIT: Tennessee Hemp Industry Association

State officials want to allow more farmers to grow industrial hemp in Tennessee.

The Tennessee Department of Agriculture (TDA) re-opened the application process for licenses last week. Industrial hemp growers and processors can now apply through June 1st.

Tennessee Hemp Industry Association

Tennessee hemp farmers.

“This is a proactive effort to assist Tennessee farmers who are looking to diversify, and we want to make sure they have every opportunity to do so,” TDA Commissioner Jai Templeton said in a statement. “We are seeing more interest in particular from tobacco growers who recently learned the company that purchases their crops would no longer buy tobacco from the U.S.”

Many Tennessee participants just enjoy growing the plants for making hemp smoothies at home or other personal consumption needs, according to a state hemp report.

State lawmakers legalized hemp production in 2014, though it can only be grown as part of a research or pilot project.

Tennessee issued 170 applications to hemp farmers this year, more than double the number of applications approved for hemp production last year. All of them have the option to grow up to 3,416 acres of industrial hemp.

TDA issued 79 hemp grow licenses last year, according to an agronomic report from the agency. Some decided not to grow hemp, but 54 farmers planted 130 acres in 75 Tennessee fields last year. Most grew hemp for its oil, according to the report.

“The largest market appears to be in hemp oil high in cannabinoids,” reads the report.

In 2016, the Tennessee General Assembly approved the use of cannabidiol (CBD) in the state. The legislation was aimed mainly at patients using the oil for pain relief and to control seizures. But CBD is legal and available for purchase here without a prescription.

Tennessee-legal CBD is derived from hemp, not marijuana. And, unlike marijuana, CBD does not contain the high-inducing cannabinoid tetrahydrocannabinol (THC).

Tennessee has 38 licensed hemp processors, and most are for the extraction of CBD, according to the TDA.

“While most growers are interested in selling a product, many Tennessee participants just enjoy growing the plants for making hemp smoothies at home or other personal consumption needs,” reads the TDA report on hemp production. “Tennessee hemp growers are working on finding different markets for the product.”

Some of those markets for hemp products include fibers, livestock feed additives, and hempcrete, which is exactly what it sounds like.

One thing about industrial hemp — and, especially, CBD — in Tennessee is that Tennesseans remain unclear about it all. For proof, please turn to Exhibit A: Operation Candy Crush.

In February, police raided and padlocked 23 stores across Rutherford County because “illegal” gummies were being sold there.

Police clandestinely purchased some of the products and then sent them off for testing to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) crime lab.

Tests proved the products contained cannabidiol, or CBD, which was perfectly legal. Still, Operation Candy Crush mobilized police across the county with surprise raids, seizing cash, seizing products, and padlocking stores behind them.

Twenty-one people were indicted and court cases were set. All charges were dropped about two weeks later.

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Editorial Opinion

Waffling Bill Haslam

In 2013, when Governor Bill Haslam was presented with the opportunity to accept upwards of $1 billion in federal funding for Medicaid expansion under the terms of the Affordable Care Act, then about to be activated nationwide, he thought about it for months. He dithered. There is no other, more polite word for what Tennessee’s Republican executive did, at a time when he could have, on his own volition, turned thumbs up or thumbs down on the ACA.

Faced with a legislature whose partisan GOP majority abhorred what they called “Obamacare,” Haslam opted not to accept Medicaid expansion for Tennessee, a decision that arguably has since resulted in the closing of four financially beleaguered hospitals in the state.

The governor attempted to cover his tracks, announcing that he intended ultimately to ask the federal CMS (Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services) to issue a waiver permitting as a substitute a home-grown Medicaid expansion of his own, tentatively entitled “The Tennessee Plan,” its details still in development.

Meanwhile, however, state Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown), one of the General Assembly’s most determined foes of Medicaid expansion, took Haslam’s announcement as an incentive to sponsor and rush through the legislature a bill requiring any such plan to be approved by both chambers of the legislature, in effect imposing a death sentence in advance.

In late 2014, Haslam did in fact propose a compromise Medicaid-expansion plan called Insure Tennessee, which received a waiver from CMS. With sad predictability, however, watchdog committees of the state legislature, by now dominated by a Republican super-majority, rejected the plan, keeping it from even getting a floor vote in either Senate or House. Such were the fruits of gubernatorial vacillation in the face of a civil emergency.

The basic plot of this movie is about to be reprised. The state’s legislature has over the years passed numerous bills aimed at repressing such elements of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness as might have been made available to Tennessee’s migrant-worker population. (The people enticed into the state from Mexico and elsewhere by developers needing someone to work hard at low-wage construction jobs.)

The Trump administration has escalated this war against those whom it calls “illegal immigrants,” even to the point of stripping DACA protections from those residents, long since assimilated and become productive members of society, who were brought here as children. The federal Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been issued orders to find and expel these “illegals,” even, if necessary, to break up settled families in the process. To their credit, several local governments (though none in Tennessee) have declared themselves “sanctuary cities” and have declined to cooperate with ICE raids.

So what did our custodians of virtue in the legislature do? Why, they passed House Bill 2315, prohibiting Tennessee municpalities from functioning as sanctuary cities and requiring them to cooperate fully with the ICE raids. Haslam split the difference, announcing he would not sign the bill into law, but, er, wouldn’t veto it, either — meaning that it will now become law without his signature.

Whatever happens next, Tennesseans will in effect be watching a rerun, thanks to our ever-waffling governor.

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Editorial Opinion

Strickland Cites Accomplishments, Plans at Downtown Rotary

Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland, who famously utilized the slogan, “Brilliant at the Basics,” as the hallmark phrase of his administration at its beginning, was deprived by a sequence of bad weather days from delivering a planned “State of the City” address to members of the Rotary Club of Memphis back in January. By this week, the weather in these parts had finally come around to being a semblance of spring (just in time for Memphis in May), and the mayor had a chance to cash in his rain check with the Rotarians.

Calling it a “State of the City Update,” Strickland’s speech used up-to-the-minute information to outline what he regarded as instances of the aforementioned brilliance. The city’s commitment to a functional program of pre-K education had been realized, said the mayor, and most of the rest of his update consisted of reconfigured statistics.

Examples: $19 million worth of street paving; $13 billion in new development, (most of it within city limits); a 5 percent decrease in violent crime and a 38 percent decrease in murders, both numbers owing something to what Strickland said was a reversal (finally) in the decline of the number of MPD officers. Similarly, Strickland said, a response of eight seconds or less to 911 calls has been maintained for four consecutive years. Strickland also promised that every pothole reported to the city would be filled within five days. And so forth.

The mayor further stated that the city had managed to bolster — from 12 percent to 21 percent — the amount of business it contracts with enterprises owned by women and/or minorities. The mayor basked in the success of last month’s MLK50 commemoration and looked forward to the city’s bicentennial celebration, planned for next year. (In what can only be regarded as an act of grace, Strickland heaped praise on Tennessee state government for its cooperation with various city projects, omitting any mention of the state legislature’s tawdry act of canceling a promised $250,000 grant for the bicentennial, as punishment for the city’s actions in ridding itself of Confederate statuaries.)

As one result, the city was able to join with county government, in a project announced on Monday, to combat the ongoing opioid-addiction epidemic. The city’s commitment includes a guarantee of “real-time” mapping of overdoses as they happen, coupled with instant response. (The county’s law-enforcement entities, first responders, and other formal units of government are also pledged to the project, which was midwifed into being, Strickland noted, by county commission Chair Heidi Shafer.)

Strickland touted his 3.0 comprehensive plan for the city — the first in more than four decades — which included a policy of “growing up, not out.” He declared that his announced policy of ending new sewer connections outside the city was a de facto termination of one of the ways the city had been contributing to its own population loss.

The mayor told the Rotarians that what he had intended to do with his remarks was twofold — to “celebrate momentum” and to be “clear-eyed about development.” The main thing, he said, was to have a plan.

It would appear that he has one, the aforementioned 3.0, which Memphians will have a chance to pass judgment on in next year’s city election.

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Editorial Opinion

On Saving IRV

President Trump’s act of political sabotage by his cavalier scuttling on Tuesday afternoon of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), more familiarly known as “the Iran Nuclear Deal,” is not the only ongoing case of official political vandalism. There is some in our own midst.

There is, for example, the fact that important local initiatives passed overwhelmingly by popular referendum within the past decade are in grave peril of being abrogated. A press conference held Tuesday morning at the IBEW Union Hall by a bipartisan citizens’ group calling itself Save IRV Memphis noted for the record that a 2008 city referendum in favor of IRV (Instant Runoff Voting, aka Ranked Choice Voting) had passed by a 71 percent vote in its favor. In a nutshell, what the IRV process would do is eliminate the costly and ill-attended runoff elections required under the present system in district elections without a first-round majority winner.

In the words of a Save IRV Memphis press release, “IRV requires only one trip to the polls, yet still elects officials with broad bases of support. Voters rank the candidates in order of preference. If no candidate wins a majority of the first place votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and those ballots are redistributed according to the preferences of the voter.”

Recounting subsequent history, the group pointed out that various opponents of the process, both locally and in the state capital of Nashville, had, through artificial obstacles, including overt misinformation campaigns, contrived to delay implementation of the process ever since; and that a new county Election Coordinator Linda Phillips had swept these misconceptions aside and scheduled a trial of the IRV or RCV process for next year’s Memphis city election.

Thereupon, as the Save IRV group indicated, the incumbent members of the current Memphis City Council adopted a policy of blocking the IRV process at all costs, voting unanimously for a new referendum on the subject this November and meanwhile underhandedly instructing city lobbyists to try to get the General Assembly in Nashville to pass legislation voiding the process statewide. Luckily the legislative sabotage effort failed.

What caused the council to act so perversely? Former Councilman Myron Lowery, one of the IRV supporters at the IBEW press conference, provided the answer: incumbent protection, pure and simple. The council members acted against IRV for the same reason they have attempted to subvert another prior citizen referendum establishing a limit of two terms for elected city officials. Lowery, the longest-serving African-American council member ever, also debunked a spurious claim that IRV would be counter to the political needs of blacks. “Race has nothing to do with this process,” Lowery said, conclusively disposing of this red herring.

We wish godspeed to the campaign launched Tuesday by Lowery and the other participating members of the Save IRV group, including spokesperson Theryn C. Bond; Tami Sawyer and Sam Goff, the Democratic and Republican candidates for the District 7 County Commission seat; and lawyer John Marek. The bipartisan nature of the Save IRV movement is further indicated by the support given it by Democratic 9th District congressman Steve Cohen and GOP state Senate majority leader Mark Norris.