Each of the major legislative bodies operating in Shelby County presents challenges to its members, to the various publics that wish to influence it, and to the matrices of other governmental bodies that it must coexist with.
Take the Shelby County Commission meeting of Monday, May 15th, a six-and-a-half-hour affair. The commission opened up its Monday session with an agenda of 21 “consent agenda” items and an additional nine “regular” items. In theory, the consent agenda items are matters whose import has been sufficiently chewed over in committee as to be generally acceptable already, whereas the regular items must be tackled anew.
It doesn’t work out that way. On Monday, a clear majority of items on the commission’s consent agenda were singled out for additional discussion by one or more — a fact clearly indicating that consent had not been reached. Most of these items involved the approval of public grants to this or that person or body to achieve some public purpose.
Commissioner Britney Thornton and, to a different degree, Commissioner Henri Brooks have chosen on a weekly basis to focus on the demographic distribution of these grants, wanting to know if a sufficient number of minority firms were invited to participate in the bidding for these projects. Thornton’s summing up of Monday’ results — “a flat zero” of ultimate participation by minorities.
This is one leitmotif of a typical commission meeting. Another is the dependable insistence of Commissioner Edmund Ford Jr.that commissioners — the “electeds” of county government — must be vigilant in preventing the “appointeds” of Mayor Lee Harris’ administration from usurping commission prerogatives.
At one point, Ford asked a yes-or-no question of administration budget director Michael Thompson, insisting, “Do not give an essay answer. I will cut you off and bust you out.” Mick Wright, one of four Republican commissioners on the 13-member body, challenged the decorum of that.
Wright and Ford bumped heads again on Wright’s proposal to route $3.5 million into needed upgrades for Regional One. Ford successfully insisted the money be spread around among the 13 commission districts for members’ preferred projects.
Ford was also instrumental in deferring action on Mayor Harris’ proposal to raise the county wheel tax to finance work on Regional One as well as two new schools.
The bottom line is that work on an ambitious 2024 budget has been remanded into the future with a target date in mind of June 30th, the end of the current fiscal year.
With surprising unanimity, the commission approved a $3.39 tax rate, as well as a desire to establish a county civilian law-enforcement review board like those now operating in Memphis and Nashville city governments. The commission also gave conditional approval to the Election Commission’s wish to dispose of “useless” old voting machines, so long as significant information from them was retained. Commissioners also approved a $2.7 million budget item providing medical backup resources for the county specialty courts dealing with veterans, mental health, and drug issues. And it readies for future voting a matching proposal to provide psychiatric rehabilitation for prisoners deemed incompetent for trial.
Overall, the import of Monday’s commission meeting was that a lot of cans got kicked down the road. More of this anon.
