AC Wharton – Page 6 – Memphis Flyer

Two things that are often not what they seem to be: close votes in the Memphis City Council and polls showing the standing of Memphis mayoral candidates five months before the election.

Last Friday, a committee of the council voted 3-2 to withdraw funding for the $29 million Beale Street Landing project. But that doesn’t mean the proposed riverboat landing and architectural monument at Beale Street and Riverside Drive is dead. The full council will have opportunities to replace the funding, perhaps as early as this week.

One of the three votes against Beale Street Landing was cast by Carol Chumney, who also happens to be leading Mayor Willie Herenton and challengers Herman Morris and John Willingham in the election polls.

Neither the committee vote nor the polls matter very much, but here are four reasons why I think Chumney will continue to make news this summer.

First, she is independent to a fault, which suits her fine, even if her colleagues see it as counterproductive and grandstanding. Her supporters see a diligent council member who is demonstrably not better off financially for having been a public servant.

Second, she favors upending the status quo. She is a radical in a way that has nothing to do with feminism or war or national issues and everything to do with local issues and priorities.

Third, when she takes a position, you may not agree with it but you know what it is. Her refusal to join in the censure resolution of Joseph Lee because it was irrelevant was unpopular but turned out to be correct.

And, fourth, unlike her fellow council members and the Memphis business establishment that supports Herenton with its money but not its mouth, she accepts the fact that this year you are either with the incumbent or you are against him. You’re in as a mayoral candidate or you’re out. And she’s in.

Does this mean that Chumney would be an electable and effective mayor or that she is even an effective council member? Not necessarily, although my personal view is “no” on the first count and “yes” on the second.

But it does mean that Chumney, by being Chumney, brings clarity to issues and helps put them in clearer perspective?

Beale Street Landing, for instance, is a signature Herenton project. The Riverfront Development Corporation (RDC) is a Herenton creation staffed by former Herenton division directors and their spouses and supported by a board of Herenton appointees. Herenton and the RDC say the landing would bring more local and out-of-town visitors to Tom Lee Park and downtown. Chumney calls it a “boondoggle” in the tradition of Mud Island and The Pyramid.

Both Chumney and her colleague Scott McCormick, one of the two committee members who supported Beale Street Landing, correctly see that the funding vote is really a referendum on both the project and the RDC. Without a big project — the Front Street Promenade, the land bridge, relocating the University of Memphis law school, Beale Street Landing — the RDC is the “Riverfront Maintenance Corporation.” You don’t need three former division directors and a full-time PR person to do that.

Beale Street Landing and the RDC will probably survive because the City Council is also hooked on big projects. They make headlines and photo opportunities. They get federal funds. They create jobs and goodies and opportunities to repay favors to campaign contributors and fellow council members. This is the stuff of politics and, sad to say, the news business. On New Year’s Day, Herenton proposed a new stadium and a new program to fight blight. Heard much about blight since then?

Many of the votes that make headlines at the City Council never amount to anything — think Lee’s non-censure and the investigation of MLGW, the non-removal of Edmund Ford and Rickey Peete, the non-reuse of the Fairgrounds and The Pyramid, the non-annexation of 2006, and the 2007 efficiency study that will wind up on the shelf. So much of what goes on at the council is just for show.

Herenton knows that, just as he knows that a telephone poll putting his support at 20 percent or less reflects “free” votes that don’t really count. The vote that counts will be in the October election.

It took a good deal of jawing, maneuvering, and bargaining back and forth, but the Shelby County Commission ultimately passed a Living Wage Ordinance Monday.

The vote was seven ayes, four nays, and one recusal. What the ordinance does is mandate a minimum wage of $10.02 (with benefits) or $12.01 (without benefits) for employees of county government as well as “of businesses receiving service contracts” from county government.

The ordinance, sponsored by Commissioner Steve Mulroy, was amended by its author to exclude locally owned small businesses employing fewer than 10 employees. “That was the best way to ensure passage. It’s not perfect, not ideal, but it was a matter of being realistic and getting something done,” Mulroy said.

The measure requires only the signature of county mayor A C Wharton to become law.

• The newly elected chairman of the Shelby County Election Commission is Myra Stiles, who was returned to the commission as a Democratic member last month, following the second of two brief intermissions in her longtime service, which began in 1987.

Stiles has been administrator of the law firm Farris Mathews Branan Bobango & Hellen, PLC since 1982 and previously served as special assistant to the late William Farris, chairman of the Tennessee Democratic Party in 1978-81.

She has also been president of the Democratic Women of Shelby County and of the Tennessee Federation of Democratic Women.

• Though some consider as evasive his action last week in deflecting a move to purge lawyer Richard Fields from the local Democratic committee, others grant new party chairman Keith Norman points for finesse.

What Norman did was, first, allow committee member Jennings Bernard to make his case against Fields (for previous actions benefiting Republicans, essentially) and member Fields to respond — both briefly. Then, committee members were allowed to ask point-blank questions of either.

Afterward, Norman cited local party bylaws and state Democratic Party rulings to the effect that Fields’ alleged offenses occurred prior to his election to the committee in late March. The chairman then declined to allow a vote on Bernard’s resolution of expulsion. In effect, what Norman had done was allow a pro forma venting of opinions before closing out the potentially explosive issue.

• Though Jeannie Richardson is compiling an impressive endorsement list, and both she and her chief sponsor, activist David Upton, are going door to door in her special Democratic primary campaign for the vacant state House District 89 seat, opponent Kevin Gallagher got a major boost to his campaign last week.

Confirming what Gallagher had long predicted, 9th District congressman Steve Cohen made his own endorsement known by posting a Gallagher campaign sign prominently in his front yard. Cohen is also said to have made a major financial contribution to Gallagher, who managed the congressman’s own campaign last year.

• Some call it a masterstroke for Memphis mayor Willie Herenton, some call it an acknowledgement of a major blemish on his administration, and others merely note that Herenton did what he had to do last week by firing both MLGW president Joseph Lee and the utility’s general counsel, Odell Horton Jr.

Already an albatross after months of various accusations against him for an assortment of alleged misdeeds, Lee became the subject of renewed controversy during an imbroglio over whether taxpayers should pay his legal fees. (Horton’s evident openness to that prospect proved fatal to his own tenure.)

But the last straw for Lee was MLGW board member Nick Clark‘s formal complaint that Lee had attempted to blackmail him. Compounding that, a crime in itself if true, was that the alleged threat was based on patent misinformation about Clark’s past.

Two of Herenton’s mayoral opponents acted quickly to prevent the issue from ultimately going away, as a few observers predicted would happen.

Former MLGW head Herman Morris called a press conference to propose a “moratorium” on filling Lee’s position (held provisionally by former city CAO Rick Masson) until after this year’s mayoral election, while City Council member Carol Chumney issued a reminder that a much-discussed recent resolution of hers that was not acted upon by her fellow council members had specified that only Herenton could discharge Lee.