Category: Politics Feature

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Politics Politics Feature

Of Windfalls and Pratfalls

Kash Patel (Photo: www.fbi.gov | Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons)

Over the last several days, local political leaders fell into rhetorical traps, some of their own making.

Example: In an effort to be inspirational in his weekly online column last week, Memphis Mayor Paul Young had this to say: “We’re challenging all graduates and Memphians to take a Negativity Fast from May 17 to June 11: no trash talk about Memphis, share what you love about your city with others and post something positive. Memphis is writing a new chapter — be part of it.”

Within 48 hours, Young was gainsaid by Donald Trump’s FBI Director Kash Patel (to be sure, no Memphian), who, so far from fasting, gorged himself on some quick publicity, announcing to the world at large via a Fox News interview that “I didn’t know this until my confirmation process, but Memphis, Tennessee, is the homicide capital of America, per capita. Didn’t know that. We have a problem there. We’re now addressing it. We’re rolling out one of our task forces to the state of Tennessee.”

So long, Negativity Fast. Many a Memphian, still digesting the outrage over the not-guilty verdict for the Tyre Nichols killers, would end up munching on Patel’s remarks in social media spaces.

The inconvenient segue took some of the shine off Young’s pride on having announced no new tax increase for the 2026 fiscal year, especially since spokesmen for the police were complaining that the Memphis Police Department (MPD), unlike the fire department, had been shorted of a pay-raise in this proposed city budget.

Meanwhile, County Mayor Lee Harris was boasting that his proposed budget, for the seventh straight year, contained no tax increase per se. In fact, said Harris, he was proposing a 20 percent tax cut. That turned out to mean that he wanted to lower the 2026 property tax rate from the current rate of $3.39 per $100 of assessed value to $2.73.  

Harris’ boast was somewhat disingenuous, inasmuch as the proposed rate change was predicated on Tennessee’s “Truth in Taxation” law, also known as the certified tax rate law or the Windfall Law, which aims to prevent local governments from experiencing a revenue windfall (an unexpected increase in revenue) solely due to property reappraisals that increase property values.

In other words, given the fact of a recent countywide reappraisal of property by Assessor Melvin Burgess, the county’s overall tax receipts would remain the same, with some homeowners paying less and many others paying more in accordance with their higher individual property appraisals. 

In any case, Assessor Burgess, one of several candidates known to be running for the term-limited Harris’ job in 2026, moved to outflank the mayor in an open letter with a bizarre boast, which also misrepresented the nature of the tax rate change.

“The reason your taxes went down,” wrote Burgess, “is not because of anything Harris did. Shelby County’s property tax rate will decrease by 20%, from $3.39 to $2.73, because of the growth my staff and I captured in Shelby County.”

In other words, Mr. Homeowner, if you’re one who’ll be paying extra money in property taxes because of a higher reappraisal, that should be understood not as a tax increase but as “growth” captured by the assessor. 

Say thank you, and pony up.

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Politics Politics Feature

Two Verdicts

Photo by @wesleyphotography on Unsplash

With almost complete unanimity, the Memphis community reacted with outrage and dismay to last week’s not-guilty verdict for three MPD officers in the Tyre Nichols case.

What compounded the prevailing sense of justice denied was the fact that the verdict, on a crime committed against a young Black victim, was rendered by a jury that was all white.

That jury was drawn from a Chattanooga pool after a defense objection that an impartial jury could not be drawn from the Memphis area, the site of abundant advance publicity regarding the case.

Hamilton County was adjudged to have the lowest amount of pre-trial publicity of any large Tennessee community with regard to this case. 

Originally the jury contained two non-white jurors — one Black and one of Asian ethnicity — but both these jurors ended up being discharged for health reasons.

Whatever the reason for the imported jurors’ verdict and regardless of their point of origin, the decision was a source of surprise and even astonishment to most observers (DA Steve Mulroy himself professed to be “bewildered”). And it resulted — perversely, perhaps — in a further tarnishing of Memphis’ image, already suffering from the widely seen gruesome images of the officers’ tag-team beating of Nichols that turned out to be lethal.  

Local officials, in their post-verdict expressions, strained for the right combination of heartfelt concern for the Nichols family, horror or disgust at the outcome, and lip service, or lack of it, for the prevailing legal system.

Some were, in the Orwellian sense, more equal than others.  

On the record of the family’s reaction, and that of their most aggrieved sympathizers, who gathered in the aftermath at the National Civil Rights Museum, the least satisfactory performance was that of Memphis Mayor Paul Young, whose thought was to do an over-platitiudinous and over-produced standup with Police Chief C.J. Davis (the creator of the Scorpion unit), the import of which was to bestow confidence in the predominant good intent of the MPD.

For their pains, the unlucky pair would receive anguished catcalls from the crowd at the NCRM. 

Worse is coming for them and city government in general, with an adverse Department of Justice critique of the MPD sinking in and the family’s $500 million lawsuit coming up.

London Lamar | capitol.tn.gov

• In a longish and impassioned statement Monday on her Facebook page, state Senator London Lamar took critics of the Memphis-Shelby County Schools board to task for their negative attitude regarding the board’s firing of Marie Feagins as schools superintendent.

And she implied that unnamed defenders of Feagins had concrete political motives. “There are political consultants in this city who were helping M.F. stir the drama — and trying to get her to run for County Mayor. WHAT?! Some of these so-called ‘consultants’ don’t care about leadership impact — they only care about the next check or contract. They’ll support anybody who promises power or money.”

“M.F.” — shorthand for an obscene epithet as well as being Feagins’ initials — was how Lamar consistently referred to Feagins in her statement. 

She said anyone who “talked trash about our board members owes them an apology … And not a text or a phone call. I want y’all to march yourselves down to the school board meeting and apologize on the record, just like you marched down there to disrespect and drag them for making THE RIGHT decision!” 

Lamar returned to her charge of political motivation: “[M]any of you even joined with our oppressors to champion the state coming in to dismantle our school system. The same state that destroyed our system with the ASD. The same state that stripped funding for housing and healthcare, put more guns on the streets, attacked Black and Brown communities, and eliminated DEI efforts. Them! Y’all helped them do that. You joined M.F. and the Republicans to divide our city, and now we’ve got to clean up the mess.”

Lamar’s statement urges, “We don’t need to dismantle the board. Y’all need to register to vote — and GO VOTE.”

Her Facebook statement reflects an intensity on Lamar’s part which she has increasingly manifested in her legislative duties and which has resulted in increasing mentions of her as a potential future congressional candidate. 

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Politics Politics Feature

They’re Off!

JB Smiley opens at Halloran Centre (Photo: Jackson Baker)

Nothing official has occurred to signal the beginning of the 2026 Shelby County election, but the principal contest for that election — the race for county mayor — has begun all the same.

Early salvos have been fired by contenders JB Smiley, the city councilman who, as council chair, challenged state disapproval of local gun-safety ordinances, and by Mickell Lowery, who chaired the county commission during a time of resolute action toward building projects.

Both Smiley and Lowery have been working the telephone lines feverishly in fundraising appeals, and each has produced professional-quality videos by way of introducing themselves to the public.

Smiley has also held a lavish public kickoff at which he vowed to provide a level of activist leadership which he decried as having been missing on the local scene in dealing with such phenomena as rampant crime and job and population loss.

Other candidates, all Democrats so far, will surely be stepping up their efforts, mindful that the fundraising reports for the second quarter of the year, due June 30th, will be the first de facto measure of their respective places in the race.

These hopefuls include County Assessor Melvin Burgess, county CAO Harold Collins, Criminal Court Clerk Heidi Kuhn, and businessman philanthropist J.W. Gibson, among others.

A full year in advance of the primaries for county mayor, the race is on.

• During the late legislative session of the Tennessee General Assembly, most public concern about the fate of Memphis-Shelby County Schools (MSCS) turned on a pair of bills — one in the state Senate, another in the House — that would transform the independence of the school board by saddling it with oversight from a state-appointed advisory board.

Both of the two similar bills resulted from exasperated reactions by Republican House Speaker Cameron Sexton and other state officials to the apparent chaos of the internal civil war between now deposed school Superintendent Marie Feagins and the MSCS board, which fired her after Feagins had served only a few months.

As it happened, the legislative session ended before the House and Senate versions could be submitted to joint conference that could have ironed out their differences and produced a single bill.

So both bullets were dodged by MSCS, and the so-called state takeover was averted, at least until the next legislative session when the two slightly different versions will likely be successfully merged and reconsidered.

But meanwhile two other developments will be moving school board elections ever further into an overtly political status with partisan overtones.

One factor is the successful passage of SB 1336/HB 1383, which ties school board elections to the same four-year election cycle as county commission races and submits them to the same set of election protocols, including term limits limited to a pair of four-year terms.

Gone is the staggered scheduling of school board elections at two-year intervals, the effect of which was to isolate board elections from the ongoing political circumstances of other races.

The other major development affecting both MSCS elections and school board elections of the county’s six suburban municipalities is the recent decision of the steering committee of the Shelby County Republican Party to petition the Election Commission to permit partisan primaries in school board races, in accordance with enabling legislation passed in the 2021 special session of the General Assembly.

In the immediate wake of that legislation four years ago, neither MSCS nor any of the suburban school systems had evinced an interest in partisan elections.

But now that the local GOP has moved to hold such elections, partisan primaries would seem to be on their way, and, just as was the case, back in 1992, when Republicans began holding primaries for county elections, Democrats will almost certainly be forced to follow suit.

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Politics Politics Feature

A Tragic Loss

(Photo: Jack Boucher, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

As I do every morning, I checked my phone on Monday for early-morning messages and overnight news. To say I was shocked by one piece of news would be an understatement. The venerable Clayborn Temple, where we then-serving members of the Rotary Club of Memphis shifted our weekly meetings for the run-up year to the 2018 MLK commemoration, was gone, consumed by fire. 

The sense of devastation and irredeemable loss was widely shared. One of those reacting was Anasa Troutman, the founder and executive director of Historic Clayborn Temple and founder and CEO of The Big We. Here is an excerpt from a statement she issued: “Early this morning, our beloved Historic Clayborn Temple — a sacred landmark in our city and our nation — suffered a devastating loss due to a fire. Our hearts are heavy with grief. For decades, Clayborn and the iconic I AM A MAN signs born in its basement have stood as an international beacon of resilience, faith, and the work to build beloved communities. It is a living testament of our past sacrifices and our future hope.

“Clayborn’s true spirit was never in the walls alone. It lives in us. Even as we mourn, we must remember: Resilience is our birthright, but so is the space to grieve. Our ancestors endured, grieved, rebuilt, and transcended unimaginable losses. We will do the same.”

Troutman’s statement is followed here by another, recovered from a time of hope, this one including excerpts from a press release written by me in 2017 for the Rotary Club’s imminent venture to inhabit the church, then undergoing restoration, for a season of remembrance and resolve. It explains much about both the club’s purpose and the importance, bordering on sacred, of the venue:

With the MLK commemoration then only months away, Arthur Oliver, Rotary’s then-president, explained: “Our move is meant to help bring attention to the historical importance that Clayborn Temple played in the Civil Rights Movement as our city approaches the 50th anniversary of the sanitation workers’ strike in April.”

That vintage press release continues: “At 124 years old [now 131 years old], Clayborn Temple is already listed as a local architectural treasure on the National Register of Historic Places. Earlier this year [again, in 2017], the temple received additional national recognition from the National Park Service for its historical importance as the central meeting place for the sanitation workers during their strike that took place in February through April of 1968.

“Located at the northeast corner of Hernando and Pontotoc, the temple sits just south of the FedExForum. Second Presbyterian Church constructed the building in 1893. ‘When it first opened, it was the largest church building in America south of the Ohio River,’ explained Rob Thompson, with Clayborn Reborn, a nonprofit group then working on Clayborn Temple’s restoration. 

“As the Memphis city limits moved eastward in the 1930s and 1940s, so did the church’s congregation. When Second Presbyterian decided to move to its present location in east Memphis, it sold the building in 1949 to the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. The new congregation then renamed the building after their bishop, Jim Clayborn.

“During the 1960s, Clayborn Temple continued as a house of worship for its congregation but it also began to serve as an important central meeting place for the Civil Rights Movement. But it was during the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike that Clayborn earned its recognition as a place of national significance for the part it played as the headquarters for the striking sanitation workers and their supporters and as a starting point for the strikers to assemble before their solidarity marches. Dr. Martin Luther King visited the temple on multiple occasions during the strike, and it was at Clayborn that the ‘I AM A MAN’ signs were indeed first distributed.”

This week’s catastrophe may have gutted the structure, but the spirit housed within survives and the work continues. 

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Politics Politics Feature

Field Trip

Masters of the House: (l to r) caucus chair Jeremy Faison, Speaker Cameron Sexton, Majority Leader Lamberth (Photo: Jackson Baker)

NASHVILLE — For many years I would make a point of going to the state Capitol during the spring months to look in on the General Assembly. There were times when I was there almost from the opening gavel to the legislative session’s close.

This was especially true during the years of the Income Tax Wars on Capitol Hill, roughly 1999 to 2001. This was a time of protracted conflict arising from Republican Governor Don Sundquist’s heroic if doomed efforts — in tandem, more or less, with elements of the assembly’s Democratic leadership — to modernize Tennessee’s archaic tax structure in a season of severe revenue shortage.

The climax would be Tennessee’s version of what happened in D.C. on January 6, 2021 — a riot in which the state Capitol was invaded by masses of protesters who broke windows, pounded on the heavy oaken doors of the locked legislative chambers, and thoroughly intimidated the trapped lawmakers who had been on the verge of enacting a state income tax.

The assault came about through the efforts of then-state Senator Marsha Blackburn, who notified her allies among right-wing broadcasters who in turn summoned the crowds.

That occasion, during which I was barricaded in the Senate chamber along with the cowed solons themselves, was one of many memorable moments of my annual drop-ins on Capitol Hill.

I was there again last Thursday to spend time with my daughter Julia, who now covers state politics for the Tennessee Journal, a newsletter I used to serve as contributing editor.

We started out in the media box of the state Senate. Things had barely gotten started when, in the wake of a floor appearance by cosplayers wearing Revolutionary War outfits, state Senator Brent Taylor of Shelby County rose to identify me to his fellow senators as someone who “covered the American Revolution.” 

He went on to mention a staff-written MEMernet item in the previous week’s Flyer which took him to task for what he called “spicy remarks.” Mistakenly assuming I was the author, he swore he would “not apologize” for them.

Somehow, in the ad hoc role of introduced visitor, I got a round of applause out of all that.

Later I joined Julia on the House side, where the well-remembered “Tennessee Three” of a 2023 gun-safety debate — Democratic representatives Justin Jones of Nashville, Gloria Johnson of Knoxville, and Justin Pearson of Memphis — were preparing to take on HB222, a GOP bill formally entitled (not making this up) the “Dismantle DEI Act,” an apt description of the bill’s intent to disallow government efforts to “increase diversity, equity, or inclusion in the workplace.” 

Justin Jones: “This bill is about undoing the progress made in the civil rights movement. … This bill is racist; it’s sexist; it’s ableist; it’s religious discrimination as well. … [We should] rename this bill for what it is — the Dismantle Civil Rights Act.”

Gloria Johnson wanted to rename the bill “the White Fragility Act.”

Justin Pearson never even made it to the well. He ended up pounding a rolled-up sheet of paper in his hand in frustration when the supermajority Republicans called the question, and by a vote of 73-24 abruptly passed the bill and terminated debate.

In a press availability after the session, the body’s GOP leaders defended the outcome.

Said Majority Leader William Lamberth: “If DEI stood for diversity, excellence, and inclusion, it’d be perfectly fine, but it stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion, which is a communist, socialist principle that is racist at its very core.”

The clincher was provided by Republican caucus chair Jeremy Faison who said straight-facedly: “Dr. King said it the best when he said that he wants people to judge us on the content of our character. The content of your character would be the equity portion.”

And with that the penultimate week of the 2025 legislative session was over. 

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Politics Politics Feature

Bonfire!

Official portrait of President Donald J. Trump, Friday, October 6, 2017. (Official White House photo by Shealah Craighead)

It’s been a matter of weeks since President Donald Trump single-handedly deprived the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) board of its quorum, and the giant semi-public utility may come to figure in crucial decisions regarding Elon Musk’s controversial Colossus xAI project in Memphis.

When Trump issued walking papers to two members of an already truncated TVA board, he effectively deprived the board of its ability to vote on policy shifts and other matters of consequence. 

The utility’s rules require the presence of five active and voting members to constitute a quorum. At full strength, the board would number nine directors, but attrition of various kinds over the years had previously reduced the board’s membership to five.

That membership now stands at only four after Trump, in successive acts, fired both Michelle Moore, a well-known “clean power” advocate, and Board Chairman Joe Ritch. The president gave no reasons for either firing, but coincidentally or not, his actions came in the immediate wake of public prodding from Tennessee’s two Republican senators for changes in the Authority’s leadership.

In an op-ed that appeared in the industry periodical Power magazine on March 24th, senators Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty had expressed doubt that the TVA leadership, as then constituted, was up to the need, as they saw it, of jump-starting a new era of reinvigorated nuclear power.  

“With the right courageous leadership, TVA could lead the way in our nation’s nuclear energy revival, empower us to dominate the 21st century’s global technology competition, and cement President Trump’s legacy as ‘America’s Nuclear President,’” the senators wrote. 

Within days of the op-ed’s publication, the TVA board, then still at quorum strength, if only barely, named the utility’s chief operating officer, Don Moul, to serve as the CEO of TVA. (For what it’s worth, the two senators had wanted a new CEO from outside the Authority’s ranks.) Almost immediately after Moul’s appointment, Trump would fire the two board members, thereby stalling any immediate initiatives on TVA’s part beyond matters of basic maintenance. That would include oversight activity vis-à-vis the energy situation of Memphis.

Ultimately Trump will have the prerogative of restocking the board to quorum strength, with his nominations in theory drawn from all reaches of the Authority’s operating area, which comprises all of Tennessee, portions of Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky, and small areas of Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia. Members, subject to confirmation by the U.S. Senate, serve five-year terms. 

Created under FDR, TVA is no longer taxpayer-funded but is still federally owned. One way or another, politics plays a major role in its operation, and critics of Musk are increasingly conscious that the contours of the Trump ally’s giant xAI program are rapidly expanding, with its demands on available energy from MLGW mounting well beyond what the original estimates were when Musk acquired the vacant Electrolux property to house the supercomputer last year.

Memphis Mayor Paul Young is now finding himself under fire for his apparent acquiescence with the Musk project. In a blistering letter to Young, Shelby County Health Department Director Michelle Taylor criticized the mayor for not imposing stricter air-quality controls on the Colossus project, which is requiring the use of even more gas turbines — potentially as many as 35.

Amid an upsurge in various forums and ad hoc opposition groups, one leader of a burgeoning citizen revolt is Representative Justin Pearson, immersing himself in anti-xAI activities in the manner of his successful 2021 opposition to a gas pipeline. 

More and more obviously, the xAI matter is rising to a potentially dominant status politically, almost on a scale with the city’s No. 1 bugaboo, crime. And uneasiness about the Trump-Musk alliance could be a major part of that concern. 

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Politics Politics Feature

The Cycle Starts Anew

A freed Kelsey with well-wisher Naser Fazlullah at celebration party (Photo: Courtesy Naser Fazlullah)

King Arthur was not present. In fact, the ranking attendee at the Roundtable in East Memphis last Saturday night for Brian Kelsey’s out-of-prison celebration was Brent Taylor, the fellow Republican who won a special election to succeed Kelsey in the state Senate.

A crowd of some 50 family members and well-wishers braved street floods and a thunderstorm of generational ferocity to help Kelsey rejoice at his recent pardon by President Trump — a circumstance that a grateful Kelsey  kept referring to as a “miracle” in the course of a 15-minute speech to the gathering.

Kelsey had been convicted of conspiring with others in a scheme to illegally funnel campaign finance money from his state account into his unsuccessful 2016 congressional race. He consented to a plea arrangement of guilty but later tried and failed to get his plea rescinded.

Ultimately, he would surrender and had spent two weeks in a federal prison in Kentucky before getting the surprise pardon from President Trump two weeks ago. After his indictment, he had contended that he was being unjustly targeted by then-President Joe Biden. Though the claim appeared far-fetched to many observers, Trump may have regarded it as credible. In any case, Kelsey had a network of GOP supporters who had kept up his fight for vindication.

On the morning that he learned of his pardon, Kelsey told the crowd, guards were conducting a shakedown of the prison population, looking for illicit drugs.

Kelsey said that he was writing a book about his brush with the law, presumably including information about his trial as well as his incarceration.

• Another Go
Mark Billingsley, the once and possibly future county commissioner, speaking with KWAM on Monday morning, announced his candidacy in 2026 for the District Four commission seat, now held by the term-limited Brandon Morrison, saying, “The last couple of years I’ve been really concerned with our leadership. The way we change things is getting involved. People are voting with their taillights, they are leaving, and I want them to have better opportunities in Shelby County for young and old.”

Republican Billingsley mentioned a dilapidated jail and a defective educational system as things in need of remedy. 

“All Shelby County residents deserve better, and they should demand more common sense and real accountability from their elected officials, no matter their party affiliation,” he said, pledging to work across the aisle with the commission’s majority Democrats.

And Terry Roland, who served as commission chair during his two terms on the body, wants to return to his old District One seat, now held by the also term-limited Amber Mills.

Roland, another Republican, is well known to followers of local politics as a colorful ideologue with pronounced MAGA sympathies. But, like Billingsley, he boasts his record of working across the aisle and was in the forefront of efforts to resolve racial disparities in the county workforce.

A specialist in economic development tools, Roland is the immediate past president of the Millington Area Chamber of Commerce. He recently cofounded a consultancy group with Cary Vaughn and Jon Crisp to focus on development issues. 

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Politics Politics Feature

Of This and That

State Representative Justin Pearson, whose presence during this year’s legislative session has been fragmentary, has resumed regular attendance as the General Assembly heads into its stretch drive.

Pearson, who has avowedly been dealing with the aftereffects of his brother’s death in December, was a speaker at the meeting of the Shelby County Democratic Party (SCDP) convened Saturday at Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church to elect new party officers. 

Things went downhill after rousing unity speeches by Pearson and others, as the assembled Democrats could not reach agreement on the bylaws needed to continue with the meeting, which was to have elected a new chairman and other officers. Amid chaos, the meeting was aborted, with the professed intent by those present of reconvening within 30 days.

The Tennessee Democratic Party (TNDP), whose chair Rachel Campbell of Chattanooga was on hand, temporarily decommissioned the local party, as it had nearly 10 years earlier during a previous period of public disorder in the SCDP.

• The Democrats’ foreshortened meeting was the site for a fair amount of schmoozing from potential near-term political candidates. One such was Michael Pope, a former sheriff’s department deputy who served a brief tenure as the SCDP’s last nominal chair before its previous shutdown by the state party in 2016.

Pope later became police chief in West Memphis. He resigned during a controversy over allegedly suppressed evidence in the case of the West Memphis Three, who were subsequently released after serving several years for a notorious murder.

Pope is now an announced candidate for sheriff in 2026. An expected opponent is Anthony Buckner, the current chief deputy to Sheriff Floyd Bonner.

• Former state Senator Brian Kelsey will hold a celebration in East Memphis on Saturday for his recent release from prison. “It’s time to party!” say the invites. Kelsey, who had been convicted of campaign finance violations and served only two weeks at a federal prison in Kentucky, was pardoned last month by Trump.

• State Senator Brent Taylor is trying again after his bill seeking the legislative removal from office of DA Steve Mulroy failed to gain traction and was taken off notice. 

Taylor and state Senate Speaker Randy McNally made public their request that the state Supreme Court create a panel to investigate Mulroy, Nashville DA Glenn Funk, and Warren County DA Chris Stanford. Like Mulroy, Funk is a liberal who has ruffled the ideological feathers of the state’s GOP supermajority. Stanford is something of a throw-in. He is under indictment on charges of reckless endangerment after firing a pistol in pedestrian pursuit of an accused serial killer.

The shift in tactics from legislative to judicial was an effort to avoid the appearance of being politically partisan, said Taylor, who acknowledged that any action on the new proposal would be delayed at least thorough the summer.  

• Entities in Memphis and Shelby County seem to have done well in their entreaties for financial aid from the state. Included either in Governor Bill Lee’s original budget or his supplemental budget, announced last week, were such petitioners as the city of Memphis, the Memphis Zoo, the Memphis Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum, Agape Child & Family Services, Youth Villages, Memphis Allies, Operation Taking Back 901, Church of God in Christ (COGIC), PURE Academy, YMCA of Memphis & the Mid-South, Tech901, Moore Tech, Southern College of Optometry, Hospitality Hub, Memphis Teacher Residency, Memphis City Seminary, Africa in April, Stax Music Academy, and Tennessee College of Applied Technology (for the Memphis aviation campus).

Also included was funding for an audit of Memphis-Shelby County Schools. Conspicuously missing so far are allotments for Regional One Health and the Metal Museum. Additions and subtractions are to be expected before the session ends.

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Politics Politics Feature

Taylor Resolution Limping

Young at Kiwanis: Leery of “BS” issues (Photo: Jackson Baker)

After a lengthy period of inaction on it, state Senator Brent Taylor’s much-vaunted legislative resolution to remove Shelby County DA Steve Mulroy from office was scheduled for a hearing in the state House Criminal Justice Subcommittee on Wednesday of this week.

Asked about the matter following his appearance before the Downtown Kiwanis Club last week, Mayor Paul Young had this to say: “I don’t think they should remove a duly elected individual. I told Brent that, but I opt not to get into all of the public back-and-forth on DA Mulroy or the school board because I believe that Memphis needs a leader that can stay above the fray. And I get so sick of the drama. It’s just nauseating. Every day is some BS that people want us to respond to that’s all personality-driven that does not help our people, so I stay out of it and let them figure it out.”

What the House subcommittee will try to figure out was expressed this way in Taylor’s original Senate resolution: “General Assembly, Statement of Intent or Position – Authorizes the Speaker of Senate to appoint a committee to meet with a like committee from the House of Representatives to consider the removal of Steven J. Mulroy from the office of District Attorney General for the Thirtieth Judicial District by the Tennessee General Assembly acting pursuant to Article VI, Section 6 of the Constitution of Tennessee.” 

The Senate resolution has not so far advanced. It is the House version, more or less identically worded and co-sponsored by state Representative Kevin Vaughn, that will be considered on Wednesday, to be regarded either (in Young’s phrase) as “BS” or, as Senator Taylor has argued, as an important element of his soi-disant “Make Memphis Matter” campaign.

Taylor has issued a lengthy, if somewhat sketchy, bill of particulars to justify his essential claim that Mulroy’s tenure is injurious to the prospects for crime control in Memphis. 

Word to this point has been that few members of the legislature’s leadership or its rank and file have shared Taylor’s sense of urgency or timing.

The issue will be vying for attention with such matters as a pending measure authorizing state takeover of the Memphis Shelby County School Board and Governor Bill Lee’s announcement this week of a supplement to his budget.

And both Mulroy and Young, in his remarks to Kiwanis last week, have cited figures showing dramatic recent decreases in the incidence of crime in the city.

The mayor presented figures showing a 13.3 percent decrease in crime overall since 2022, with reductions occurring in every ZIP code except two. Homicides were down 30 percent, and motor vehicle thefts were down 39 percent, he said.

He also cited figures demonstrating that crimes in the FedExForum area were substantially lower than equivalent areas in Downtown Nashville.

“Results,” he said when asked why the city council, which failed to approve his reappointment of Police Chief C.J. Davis in 2024, had unanimously approved her this year.

• The appointment of Circuit Court Judge Valerie Smith to replace the retiring Judge Arnold Goldin on the state  Court of Appeals was finalized by the legislature on Monday.

• Inspired by the ongoing series of angry popular protests of Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) actions at congressional town halls nationwide, Shelby County Democrats made ready to organize a protest action last Saturday at a scheduled local appearance by 8th District Republican Congressman David Kustoff.

The action had to be called off, however, when Kustoff’s speech to the men’s club at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic Church in Germantown was canceled because of what church officials called “safety concerns.” 

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Politics Politics Feature

Fallout

Pastor Ricky Floyd (Photo: Pursuit of God Church Memphis | Facebook)

In a scenario occasioned by the tragic shooting death this past week of revered pastor Ricky Floyd, two prominent members of the Memphis political community found themselves at loggerheads.

The two were Javier “Jay” Bailey, CAO in the office of Assessor Melvin Burgess and newly announced candidate for assessor to succeed his term-limited boss, and Antonio “Two-Shay” Parkinson, influential state representative from District 98 in North Memphis and longtime chair of the legislature’s Black Caucus.

There was already a certain amount of bad blood between the two as a result of what Parkinson felt was an innuendo from Bailey that he had sided with the Memphis-Shelby County Schools (MSCS) board in the firing of former schools Superintendent Marie Feagins. But the dispute rose to incendiary dimensions when Bailey chose to comment on the Floyd killing on his Facebook page.  

His commentary began with a seemingly uncontroversial sentiment: “Pastor Ricky Floyd was my friend. I am absolutely saddened by his death and this community will suffer the loss of a great man concerned about more than himself.”

Bailey would continue with an admonition for people to avoid passing judgment on Floyd’s accused slayer Samantha Marion, who was arrested for shooting Floyd after the two quarreled outside a South Memphis restaurant and bar in the early hours of Wednesday, March 12th.

“[L]et us take caution and not turn this sister into a villain or a demon,” Bailey wrote. “There are facts that most of you have not heard.” Although Bailey did not go on to divulge any “facts” per se, he seemed to Parkinson to be implying that the quarrel and the shooting stemmed from the existence of a prior relationship between Floyd and Marion, who was charged with manslaughter in his death. 

That was enough to enrage Parkinson, well-known to be close to the deceased minister and his partner in many a public activism. In a Facebook post of his own, Parkinson noted that follow-up investigation appeared to show that Floyd and Marion had not known each other and wrote: “Many people who claimed to be Ricky Floyd[’s] friend, like Javier Bailey and others, that was posting for clout, comments and likes are about to feel real stupid now.”

Between the two of them, these Facebook posts generated several hundred responses from Facebook perusers, who exploded with expletives, high emotion, and every conceivable surmise as to the fatal confrontation between Floyd and Marion — the cause of which remains mysterious as of this writing.

The killing of Floyd was mourned among every social stratum of his home city, and especially among the members of Memphis’ African-American population, where the reverend was increasingly regarded as someone between a hero and a saint.

Nor were the denizens of the state’s General Assembly unaffected when the late pastor was honored with a moment of silence on the House floor.

The heated interchange between Parkinson and Bailey was in a sense just another symptom of the toll and human dimensions of the drama. 

A commemoration of the Reverend Floyd, under the heading “Celebration Service,” will be held at Greater Imani Church on Austin Peay on the morning of Friday, March 28th, with visitation on the preceding date at R.S. Lewis & Sons Funeral Home. 

• The aforementioned Marie Feagins affair and this week’s showdown in the General Assembly on a proposed state takeover of the MSCS school board were footnoted during Monday’s meeting of the Shelby County Commission in a suggestion by Commissioner Shante Avant that the commission’s vote several weeks ago of “no confidence” in the board had been an influence in the introduction of the takeover legislation.