Tag: Amber Mills

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Politics Politics Feature

Which County: Shelby or Fayette?

Lee and Amber Mills’ residence on Shane Hollow Drive in Arlington (Photo: Jackson Baker)

Back in 2015 Tom Leatherwood, as Shelby County register, signed and thereby authenticated the deed of Lee and Amber Mills for a brand-new house at the Shelby County address of 12903 Shane Hollow Drive in Arlington.

In 2022, Lee Mills, an airline pilot and a former chairman of the Shelby County Republican Party, is hoping to unseat Leatherwood in a race for the District 99 state House of Representatives seat.

It would be Mills’ third effort to defeat Leatherwood for the seat, beginning with a decision in 2018 by the county GOP steering committee to designate Leatherwood as the party nominee rather than Mills after the death of the long-term holder of the seat, Ron Lollar. Mills then made an unsuccessful run against the then-incumbent Leatherwood in the 2020 Republican primary.

County line map showing the Mills’ residence in Fayette County (Photo: Courtesy Lee Mills)

But the third time may not, even potentially, be the charm for Mills if a ruling by the state election coordinator, Mark Goins, is sustained in the courts. In a letter to Mills on April 18th, Goins informed Mills that his residence was in Fayette County, not Shelby, and quoted from Article II, Section 9 of the state constitution: “No person shall be a Representative unless he shall be a citizen of the United States, of the age of twenty-one years, and shall have been a citizen of this state for three years, and a resident in the county he represents one year, immediately preceding the election.” (Note: Italics added for emphasis.)

The determination, said Goins, had been made by Doug Himes, an attorney who had worked on the 2020 House redistricting legislation, using census guidelines. And Goins included with the letter a map clearly showing the Mills residence and most of the subdivision that contains it to be in Fayette County.

Lee Mills protests that he and his wife have paid county property taxes on the Shane Hollow dwelling since 2015 and that the premise of a Shelby County address has been accepted as valid in several other civil transactions. He cites Tennessee Code Annotated 5-2-116, a provision of which declares that in “circumstances where a dispute arises concerning the location of a county line for purposes other than property taxation … the state board of equalization shall not have the authority to locate a county line so that property that has been assessed for property taxation purposes in one (1) county for five (5) years or more is located in a different county.”

The Shelby County Election Commission has asked for a declaratory judgment on the matter, which is scheduled for resolution in Chancery Court and has been assigned to Chancellor Jim Kyle. Lee Mills vows that an adverse decision will be appealed.

Meanwhile, a related circumstance is that of Mills’ wife Amber Mills, who has represented District 1 on the Shelby Commission since her election in 2018 and has been certified as a candidate for re-election by the Election Commission. Amber Mills was the only candidate listed on the Republican primary ballot this week.

At this writing, no legal challenge has been made to the validity of Commissioner Mills’ presence on the ballot, and, if she is subsequently certified by the Election Commission as the winner of this week’s primary, that fact will undoubtedly loom large in legal proceedings involving her husband’s case.

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Politics Politics Feature

Shelby County Commission Tackles Issues With State Legislature

The March 3rd Super Tuesday vote, with presidential preference primaries favoring Democrat Joe Biden and President Donald Trump, and nominating Joe Brown and Paul Boyd, respectively, as the Democratic and Republican candidates for General Sessions Court clerk, has come and gone.

But there was still politics to be found locally. In a lengthy, oddly contentious meeting of the Shelby County Commission on Monday, political factors weighed heavily on several controversial issues, most of which were resolved either unanimously or via one-sided votes. A pair of hot-button issues were addressed in the form of late add-on resolutions at the close of Monday’s meeting, which had already generated significant steam via the regular agenda.

One of the add-on resolutions opposed Republican Governor Bill Lee‘s proposal for open-carry legislation, at least for Shelby County, and passed the Commission by a bipartisan 10-1 vote, the lone vote in opposition coming from GOP Commissioner Mick Wright, who chose to let his dissent speak for itself.

The resolution was co-sponsored by Republican David Bradford and Democrat Tami Sawyer. The minimal discussion of the measure was itself bipartisan, with, for example, Democrat Reginald Milton and Republican Amber Mills making similar declarations of being pro-Second Amendment but citing opposition to the open-carry measure from law enforcement officials.

Specifically, the resolution’s enacting clause asks that any open-carry measure exclude Shelby County: “Now, therefore, be it resolved the Board of County Commissioners of Shelby County Tennessee be carved out of any and all permitless gun carry legislation.”

It should be noted that in a separate action over the weekend, the Shelby County Democratic Executive Committee unanimously passed its own resolution condemning Senate Bill 2671/House Bill 2817, the permitless-carry legislation, citing similar objections — noting that, for example, “the Memphis Mayor, Memphis Police Director, and the Shelby County Sheriff have already spoken out against the bill.”

Another late add-on resolution at Monday’s commission meeting was introduced by Sawyer. It would have repeated the commission’s previous stand in favor of voter-marked paper ballot machines in Shelby County and included an exhortation to the General Assembly to “support legislation for paper ballot on-demand options,” thereby tying into specific ongoing legislation to that end.

Further, and importantly, the resolution provides an alternative to holding a public referendum authorizing new voting machines, as apparently required under a newly unearthed provision of state law. It underscores the authority of the county commission itself, “as the governing body of Shelby County” to purchase new voting machines, and notes the subsequent reallocation last month by the commission of capital improvement funds as a means of doing so. The resolution would not be acted on directly but was by unanimous consent referred to the next meeting of the commission’s general government committee.

Commissioner Sawyer appended to the resolution a copy of a letter signed by five Republican legislators representing Shelby County and addressed to the three Republican members of the Shelby County Election Commission.

The letter, on the official letterhead of state Senator Brian Kelsey, carried two specific “recommendations” to the GOP SCEC members. One directly opposes voter-marked ballots, stating that “[a]llowing voters to handle and mark paper inevitably opens the election process to numerous unnecessary human errors” and that “reverting back to technology from the 1990s would be a huge mistake.”

A second “recommendation” needs  to be quoted in its entirely: “Second, in order to ensure that everyone has the same opportunity to vote and to limit the financial strains on the taxpayers, we recommend seven days of early voting be conducted at all satellite voting locations in Shelby County, preceded by eight days of early voting at the Shelby County Election Commission office. Opening only one early voting location in the Agricenter, as was done in 2018, was wrong and in violation of state law. The solution we propose will fix this problem.”

Buried in this somewhat disingenuous language is the idea of cutting back the amount of time devoted to satellite early voting from two weeks to a single week.

Sawyer was pointed and defiant in the citation of the Kelsey letter, saying that its recommendations and circumlocutions alike, as well as the confinement of the communication to Republican members of the SCEC, constituted an affront to the commission and to the process of resolving the voting-machine issue in an orderly, conscientious manner.

“The letter undermines this board,” she declared, insisting that her condemnation of the letter be given maximum public exposure.

The voting-machine issue was not the only matter to invoke the possibility of cross-purposes between county and state authorities. An unexpected controversy arose over a proposal, advanced by Commissioners Milton and Van Turner at the behest of County Mayor Lee Harris, to allocate $33,799 for a Veterans Service Officer in Shelby County. Commissioner Mills, who with colleague Edmund Ford, had been to Nashville last week to discuss county-government needs with state officials, asked for a postponement of the action, insisting that she had been promised the prospect of not one, but five such officers for Shelby County via state action, and that county action on the matter could scuttle the state effort.

An argument ensued between Mills and Harris, with the mayor, backed by several members of the commission, expressing disbelief that county action on the matter would provoke a punitive reaction in Nashville. But in the end a narrow vote approved a deferral of the issue to the commission meeting of April 20th.

Modest controversy arose, too, over the commission’s action in approving  a paid parental leave policy for county employees. The annual price tag of the proposal, $830,000, to be paid for by internet sales tax revenues, was objected to by Republican Commissioners Mills and Brandon Morrison, who cited a looming $85 million county deficit, and abstained from an otherwise unanimous vote of approval.

Democrats at the Ready

Jackson Baker

Among those gathered Saturday morning at Kirby High School for preliminary party caucuses before this summer’s Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee were (l to r) Rick Maynard, U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, and David Upton.

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Politics Politics Feature

Grudge Match: Leatherwood vs. Mills

Tom Leatherwood, the Republican state representative in House District 99, was greatly relieved on Tuesday of this week. He had just relocated in a temporary hotel after damage from the tornado that swept through Nashville on Monday night had made his regular hotel unliveable.

But he was forced to take note of a new threat taking place over the course of the current election season. That comes from an ongoing challenge to his renomination from Lee Mills, who, until a change of guard last year, served as chairman of the Shelby County Republican Party.

After former longtime State Representative Ron Lollar unexpectedly died in July 2018, with that year’s election season underway, the local GOP steering committee met to select an alternate candidate for the District 99 position on the general election ballot. Mills was one aspirant; Leatherwood was another, and he ended up prevailing.

“It wasn’t but two weeks or so later that I heard they were getting ready for an effort to see me defeated the next time,” said Leatherwood, the “they” being Mills and his wife, Shelby County Commissioner Amber Mills. “She’s using her office to promote her husband’s political ambitions,” he said.

Friends of Mills are now circulating a story that a delegation from the Shelby County Commission headed by Amber Mills was snubbed by Leatherwood, who allegedly declined to meet with the commissioners when the group was in Nashville last week on the occasion of Shelby County’s official Day on the Hill, an annual pilgrimage to the state capital.

“That’s a lie,” Leatherwood said emphatically, when asked about the story. “No one ever made an appointment to see me.” He said he could affirm that he himself was never contacted by the delegation. Members of his staff, like those of other legislators, could not confirm or deny the fact of an appointment request, having been asked to stay away from the Hill on Tuesday in the wake of the tornado damage.

Leatherwood said he did not fear the challenge from Lee Mills, contrasting his campaign war chest of some $100,000 with a far lesser amount he said had been raised so far by his GOP opponent.

“I’ve never wanted to destroy an opponent the way I want to destroy him,” Leatherwood said of Mills. He boasted his own support from within Republican ranks and said the activities of Lee and Amber Mills could have the effect of indirectly helping Democrats in their designs upon other legislative positions, particularly the open District 97 House seat and the District 83 seat now held by Republican Mark White.

There are Democratic candidates in both of those races, but so far not in District 99.

In District 97, now held by the retiring Republican Jim Coley, two Democrats — Allan Creasy and Gabby Salinas, both veterans of hard-fought but losing races in 2018 — vie for the nomination, along with Ruby Powell-Dennis and Clifford Stockton III. Two Republicans, Brandon Weise and John Gillespie, who has been endorsed by Coley, also seek the seat.

Democrat Jerri Green will oppose White in District 83.

Democrats once dominated the Shelby County legislative contingent but in the last few decades have had to yield the suburbs to Republicans. They have had one signal victory in their recent effort to make inroads in eastern Shelby County: Democrat Dwayne Thompson won House District 96 in 2016 in an upset over then-Republican incumbent Steve McManus; in 2018 Thompson successfully defended the seat against Republican challenger Scott McCormick.

This year, Thompson faces a primary challenge from fellow Democrat Anthony Johnson, while Republican Patricia Possel will seek the office on the Republican side.

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Like duellists, potential general election opponents in House District 96, Dwayne Thompson, Democrat, and Patti Possel, Republican, stood back to back and handed out literature at the AgriCenter during the recently ended Early Voting period.