Where the Shelby County Commission is concerned, some issues would seem to be eternal. Several of them got their latest looking-over Monday, September 27th, at the body’s regular Monday meeting.
There was the issue of city-county governmental consolidation, an issue also being discussed on the City Council these days. Somehow a proposal from Commissioner Reginald Milton to develop potential concrete remedies for historically blighted Memphis neighborhoods had transmogrified into a discussion about the prospect of consolidation — one in which the usual discords and divisiveness associated with that issue came to the fore.
Milton listened patiently to the querulous back-and-forthing, and, as the matter devolved into a question of establishing a powerless ad hoc committee on consolidation, with himself as chair, Milton finally had enough.
As he saw it, the opportunity to come up with hard and practical solutions to an eternally intractable array of socioeconomic problems was being steered into the see-no-evil, do-no-good timidity of a study group.
“To hell with every one of you who let this happen, forget it! I’m out!” Milton said.
And so was the agenda item, never even subjected to a vote.
A vote did occur on another revived matter, this one the question of whether federal monitors should return to Shelby County to re-examine the status of Juvenile Court, which the Department of Justice had investigated and found riddled with bureaucratic and race-based issues. A 2012 Memorandum of Understanding between the county and the DOJ had resulted in specific remedies for improvement spelled out.
Some changes were made in accordance with the MOA, and in 2018, a request that had been initiated by then Mayor Mark Luttrell to remove the monitors was accepted by the DOJ.
A local group, the Shelby County Juvenile Justice Consortium (CJJC), which was dissatisfied with the rate and extent of reform in the court, had urged that the monitors return to re-evaluate court operations “as … relates to protecting the Constitutional Rights of the children of Shelby County, Tennessee,” and that request came to the County Commission for its approval.
After several citizens, including members of the CJJC, testified to continuing abuses at Juvenile Court, including an “appalling” rate of prisoner transfers to Criminal Court, members of the commission took sides on the matter, with the body’s conservatives tending to see the new charges as overstated and based on incomplete information, and others seeing that very lack of complete information to be suspicious in itself.
In the end, the commission voted 8 to 4 in favor of the federal monitors’ return with the four dissenters being Commissioners Brandon Morrison, Mark Billingsley, David Bradford, and Amber Mills, and with Commissioner Mark Wright abstaining.
Another revived issue on Monday was that of the creation of a “blue-ribbon” advisory committee on mayoral appointments to the Shelby County Ethics Commission, a controversial proposal which, in its final form, had been seriously watered down.
