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Politics Politics Feature

Splitting Legal Hairs

On residency requirements for Memphis mayor; plus: Shelby Dems to reorganize.

The matter of residency requirements for election to the office of Memphis mayor and service in that position has suddenly become enormously significant. It has, in fact, become the crux of the election matter, even as three of the most highly touted mayoral candidates have for several months already been competing and raising money feverishly for the right to serve.

Those candidates are Shelby County Sheriff Floyd Bonner, NAACP president and former County Commissioner Van Turner, and former longtime Mayor Willie Herenton. Though each of them has lived many years in Memphis prior to this election year, each of them also has, at some point in the recent past, lived outside the city limits of Memphis and would be ineligible to serve as mayor under an 1895 city charter clause explicitly requiring mayoral candidates to have lived within the city for five years “next preceding” their election.

That charter would be amended in 1966, a year before Memphis held a city election for a newly adopted mayor-council form of government. The new charter did not use the words “next preceding” to define the terms of residential eligibility, nor did a judicial decree of 1991 regarding election criteria, nor did a subsequent 1996 voter referendum based on that decree explicitly define mayoral residency requirements in the sense of the 1895 charter.

Since then, there has remained a sense of ambiguity regarding the residency requirements for a mayoral candidacy, and an opinion last year by city council attorney Allan Wade became the de facto ruling on the matter.

Addressing queries from county Election Administrator Linda Phillips, Wade argued that the 1996 referendum — technically a home rule amendment — changed the residency requirements for city council members, eliminating any specific prior term of residency, and that the prior charter of 1966 linked the mayor’s residency requirements to those of the city council.

In another opinion made public last week, however, former Election Commission Chairman Robert Meyers, responding to city attorney Jennifer Sink, argues that voters in 1996 voted merely to change the residency requirement for city council, and were not aware that such a change would trigger the mayor’s residency requirements as well. His bottom line was that a mayoral candidate still had to abide by the need to have lived within the city for five years preceding an election.

Both opinions split more legal hairs than can be indicated in this space, but clearly the aforementioned candidates for mayor (and their opponents) have a vested interest in what a court might rule on the matter, and suits to force a definitive ruling can be expected, probably in short order.

• Partisans of the Shelby County Democratic Party will convene at First Baptist Church on Broad this Saturday to elect new members of the party’s grassroots council and its executive committee.

Those persons so elected will meet again at the same site on Saturday, April 1st, to elect a new party head to succeed current chair Gabby Salinas, who is not running for reelection.

The two known candidates for party chair are activists Jesse Huseth and Lexie Carter. They, or whoever else might seek the chairmanship, will take part in a public forum, probably on the intervening Saturday, March 25th.