Tag: Bill Oldham

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Editorial Opinion

Should Shelby County Raise Officials’ Salaries?

The old bugaboo of pay raises for public officials rose again at Monday’s regular meeting of the Shelby County Commission, and, perhaps because of the proximity in time to Halloween, enough members of the commission were spooked by the prospect of raising their own salaries and those of several other elected county officials that the proposal — actually, three separate proposals in as many formal ordinances — went nowhere.

Technically, the votes taken Monday were on second reading, and there is one more final reading to come, presumably at the commission’s next meeting, scheduled for November 13th, but nobody needs a crystal ball or consultation with either a pollster or a necromancer to see that the ordinances are doomed to defeat in two weeks’ time, as well.

In point of fact, there is a commission majority in favor of the pay raises, but the county charter prescribes that issues of this kind require a supermajority of the entire commission.

That would be nine votes, and the ordinances fell short Monday by identical votes of seven for, four against, and one abstention. The seven aye votes belonged to six of the seven commission Democrats — Willie Brooks, Walter Bailey, Justin Ford, Reginald Milton, Eddie Jones, and Van Turner — and one Republican, Steve Basar. The four naysayers were Republicans Terry Roland, David Reaves, George Chism, and commission Chair Heidi Shafer. (GOP Commissioner Mark Billingsley would later ask that his vote be added on as a fifth no.) The one abstainer was Democrat Melvin Burgess Jr., who, as a declared candidate for Assessor in 2018, might have been concerned that, as a would-be tax collector for the county, his vote would draw special attention from opponents in next year’s election.

Under the proposed pay hikes, the salary of the county mayor would rise from $142,500 to $172,000; the sheriff salary from $116,995 to $154,890, and those of county clerk, trustee, register (all now pegged at $109,810), and assessor ($110,465) to go to $126,000. The commissioners’ salaries (currently $29,100, with the chair getting $31,100) would go to a uniform $32,000.

The votes essentially fell along predictable lines, with Bailey, speaking for the Democratic contingent of aye voters, pointing out the obvious, that the cost of living was continuing to rise and wondering if the objectors were contending that the pay of officials could never rise accordingly. Roland protested with insistent righteousness that commissioners should serve the public, not themselves, and he and Reaves professed themselves open to a public referendum to change the charter and tie future raises for the affected county officials to pay raises for rank-and-file county employees. As Democrat Turner noted, that was basically a way to put things off for the present.

For the future, such a referendum is not a bad option. Though prospects for passage might be remote, they are no worse, and could be better, than the existing odds for such proposals on the commission itself. We know all the political arguments against pay raises for public officials, and we regard it as unfortunate that the arguments for them cannot be evaluated on their own merits, the same way that pay matters out in the regular marketplace are, or should be.

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Politics Politics Feature

Echoes of Discord

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

As partisan disagreements on pending legislative measures continued to dominate the Washington political scene, there were distinct local echoes.

Even as Democrats in Congress were trying to force open discussion of the Senate’s pending version of an Obamacare repeal-and-replace bill, now being prepared in private by an ad hoc group of Republican Senators, the party faithful across the state held press conferences last Friday protesting the GOP’s close-to-the-vest strategy.

In Memphis, the protest, led by London Lamar, president of the Tennessee Young Democrats and including state Representative Antonio Parkinson, was held in front of the Cliff Davis Federal Building downtown. The group’s call for open discussion of health-care legislation was directed not only at congressional Republicans but at Tennessee Senators Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander and U.S. Rep. David Kustoff specifically.

Though the matter of the federal government’s current direct oversight of mandated improvements in the procedures of Shelby County’s Juvenile Court was not, per se, a partisan issue, local attitudes toward it have tended to cleave along party lines.

Such, at least, was the appearance of things after news accounts surfaced over the weekend detailing recent efforts by three county officials seeking an end to federal oversight of Shelby County Juvenile Court, the result of a 2012 Memorandum of Understanding between the county and the Department of Justice.

The officials — county Mayor Mark Luttrell, Sheriff Bill Oldham, and Juvenile Court Judge Dan Michael — were all elected under the Republican electoral banner. 

The three officials discussed the matter of ending the federal oversight with Attorney General Jeff Sessions during his recent visit to Memphis. As attorney general, Sessions has taken a hard-line approach to law enforcement, focusing on what he sees as a need for more stringent enforcement and stricter penalties.

Luttrell, Oldham, and Michael subsequently elaborated on their request in a formal letter to the DOJ, which maintained that the court’s shortcomings — pinpointed in the DOJ investigation and subsequent MOU — have been rectified.

That claim drew negative reaction, much of it from local Democrats. One critic was state Representative Larry Miller, speaking as a panelist Monday morning at the National Civil Rights Museum.

Answering a question from the audience about legislative action on juvenile justice, Miller noted the county officials’ letter to the DOJ and took issue with it: “They’re saying, ‘We’ve done it. … We no longer need oversight.'” Disagreeing, Miller said, “We’re not there yet. The system is based on incarceration of young black men.”

A more reserved response came from former county Commissioner Sidney Chism, now an employee of the Sheriff’s Department and a declared candidate in next year’s race for county mayor. Said Chism, evidently speaking on behalf of Sheriff Oldham: “He has taken the goals seriously and has worked hard to achieve them, and I think he believes they have been achieved.”

Two legislators who were on Monday’s panel at the NCRM — state representatives Joe Towns and John DeBerry — commented afterward that the MOU should remain in effect but acknowledged, like Chism, that Luttrell, Michael, and Oldham seemed to have made good-faith efforts to raise the standards in effect at Juvenile Court.

But another nay vote came from 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen, who noted in a prepared statement that he had supported the original intervention by the Justice Department and said, “While progress has been made since 2012, there are still reports of race playing a factor in court hearings and reports of the juvenile detention facilities becoming more dangerous.” 

As of Tuesday, Sessions had not formally responded to the officials’ request.

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Politics Politics Feature

Chism Backs Strickland for Mayor

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Adherents of City Councilman Jim Strickland‘s campaign for mayor are certainly pleased with their guy’s ability to go fund-raising dollar-for-dollar against incumbent Mayor A C Wharton (both candidates having reported $300,000-plus in their first-quarter disclosures). And they’re counting on a good showing for Strickland in both the Poplar Corridor and Cordova, where his message of public safety and budgetary austerity resonate.

But those predominantly white areas of Memphis (to call them by their right name) are probably not enough, all by themselves, to get Strickland over, especially since Wharton has his own residual strength in the corridor and with the city’s business community, where the mayor can hope to at least break even.

There is also the mayor’s advantage in being able to command free media on a plethora of governmental and ceremonial occasions.

Yes, it’s probably true that A C’s support in predominantly African-American precincts ain’t what it used to be, and it never was what you would call dominating, not this year with all the well-publicized cuts in city services. And not with Mike Williams working the African-American community, along with Whitehaven Councilman Harold Collins and Justin Ford, and with the Rev. Kenneth Whalum ready to grab off a huge chunk of that vote, should he make what is at this point an expected entry into the mayoral field.

Still, Strickland needs to grab a share of the black vote to have a chance to get elected. Where does he get it? Well, he’s attending African-American churches on Sunday, one of the well-worn pathways in local politics. So that will help. But probably not as much as the endorsement he got last Saturday at the annual Sidney Chism Community Picnic on Horn Lake Road from the impresario of that event. Longtime political broker Chism early on announced his support of Strickland from the stage of the sprawling picnic grounds.

Time may have tarnished Chism’s reputation a bit, as it did his longtime ally, former Mayor Willie Herenton (an attendee at the picnic), but the former Teamster leader, Democratic Party chairman, state senator, and county commissioner still has enough influence to have basically put Randa Spears over as Shelby County Democratic chair earlier this year. And he may have enough to give Strickland that extra boost he needs to be fully competitive. We’ll see.

Chism, as it happens, is mired in a couple of controversies at the moment. His employment as a “media specialist” by Sheriff Bill Oldham is regarded with suspicion as a political quid pro quo and pension-inflater by several Republican members of the Shelby County Commission, who at budget-crunch time are making an issue of it, along with an Oldham-provided job for former Shelby County Preparedness director Bob Nations.

And Chism may have reignited another long-smoldering situation when he used the bully pulpit of his picnic to attack an intramural Democratic Party foe, Del Gill, who was runner-up to Spears in the party chairmanship contest. Chism did so at first indirectly, on the front end of the event, while he was acknowledging from the stage the presence in the crowd of party chair Spears.

“She’s been catching a whole lot of flak from one crazy person, but I hope y’all put him out of this city, and he’ll be all right.” Chism chose to be more explicit when he returned to the stage after a series of candidates in the city election had made their public remarks.

“I said something earlier,” Chism said. “I said there was somebody who needed running out of town, and that person, I didn’t call his name, but that person is Del Gill. … He ain’t worth two cents. … He’s been lyin’ on me for 10 years He won’t show up and do it to my face, but he lies all the time.”

In a widely circulated email response, Gill returned fire, reminding his readers that he had taken the lead in having Chism censured by the local Democratic Party executive committee in 2014 for allegedly attempting to subvert the sheriff’s campaign of Democratic nominee Bennie Cobb in favor of Republican Oldham.

Chism used his attack on Gill as a platform from which to launch his recipe for Democratic success at the polls: “We’re not going to win any elections in Shelby County until we get into the mindset that we’ve got to get in the middle. If we get in the middle, we can elect Democrats, qualified Democrats.

“I didn’t say you’ve got to be a super-intelligent magna cum laude educated person. I’m saying you ought to be smart enough to know that the people in this country are in the middle.” He urged his listeners to “vote for the right person, and he ain’t got to look like me; just act like me.”

Actually, the two Chism battlefronts — his employment battle with GOP county commissioners and the Democratic Party fireworks — are connected. Such commission critics of Chism as Heidi Shafer and David Reaves, both Republicans, have made pointed remarks in private about what they claim was Chism’s disservice to fellow Commissioner Reginald Milton, a Democrat, in intervening against Milton’s own bid for party chairmanship. And Milton, perhaps unsurprisingly, has expressed his own skepticism about the sheriff’s budget requests.

Shafer and Reaves, along with GOP Commissioner Terry Roland, are also suspicious that Oldham’s wish to have Chism (and other Chism associates) aboard is related to a potential 2018 campaign by Oldham for county mayor, an office for which Roland, for one, has essentially already announced.

Oldham has been mum on the subject of his future political intentions, if any, but it is a fact that the progression from sheriff to county mayor has been made already by several predecessors — Roy “Skip” Nixon, Bill Morris, and current County Mayor Mark Luttrell.

Random notes: The newly elected president of the Shelby County Young Democrats is Alvin Crook, who made something of a stir last year when, in the course of a public debate, he formally endorsed Van Turner, his Democratic primary opponent for a county commission seat.

Crook, who is employed as a courtroom bailiff, says his group will be making endorsements in the city election this year.

Other new Young Democrat officers: Regina Beale, first vice president; Jim Kyle Jr., 2nd vice president; Matt Pitts, treasurer; Rebekah Hart, secretary; and Justin Askew, parliamentarian.

• Two Shelby Countians, state Senator Mark Norris and attorney Al Harvey, were among three Tennesseans who were invited guests of British royalty at Monday’s ceremony in Runnymede, England, commemorating the 800th anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta there.

Norris was invited in his capacity as immediate past chairman of the Council of State Governments; Harvey, along with General Sessions Judge Lee Bussart Bowles of Marshall County, represented the American Bar Association.

A sure sign that the city election season is heating up: On Thursday, June 18th, from 5 to 7 p.m., Patrice Robinson, a candidate for city council, District 3, and Mary Wilder, candidate for the council’s District 5, will be holding simultaneous fund-raisers in different parts of town.

Overlapping events of this sort, still uncommon, will at a certain point in the election cycle, become routine.

• In its latest issue, the Tennessee Journal of Nashville takes note of the Tennessee Republican Party’s concerted “Red to the Roots” campaign directed at capturing as many of the state’s county assessor positions as possible next year.

The newsletter also notes that Shelby County Assessor Cheyenne Johnson, a Democrat, will be exempt from the purge attempt, having already won reelection to a four-year term in 2014. Johnson’s being on a different cycle from other state assessors is a consequence of the county commission’s consolidating all county offices into a common election cycle via 2008 revisions to the county charter.

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Politics Politics Feature

THDA’s Mission

If the new mortgage rate for first-time home-buyers in Shelby County has gone up of late — and it has, a fact important as a juicer for the economy as a whole — much of the credit for that belongs to Ralph Perrey, executive director of the Tennessee Housing Development Agency (THDA), a state agency whose reason for being is to spur such growth.

As Perrey put it on a visit to Memphis on Monday, “The economy comes back when housing comes back, and housing comes back when the first-time buyer returns to the market.”

After years of explosive housing growth in the Nashville area, particularly in the state capital’s surrounding, so-called “donut” counties, Perrey’s mission just now is to ramp up home-buying in West Tennessee and East Tennessee to an equivalent level.

At this point, about 20 percent of THDA’s mortgage business is in Memphis. Up until now, the surrounding donut counties have accounted for a majority of it.

THDA, which was created by the state of Tennessee some 43 years ago, is self-funding and operates within the context of the general housing market and, as an issuer of mortgage loans, plays by the rules of that market. But it serves an overtly public purpose, not only accelerating the growth and accessibility of housing but applying its profits to other useful ends.

Perrey, a baseball fan who watches games wherever he goes, dissertated on the functions of his office at AutoZone Park Monday night, between pitches of the game between the Memphis Redbirds and the Colorado Springs Sky Sox.

“What we hope to do is build our business,” Perrey said. “With every additional loan, if we do our work well, it helps us support more activities through our housing trust fund. We manage nine different federal programs. Here in Memphis, there’s a lot of interest in what you can do to eliminate blight and get rid of eyesores. 

“We’re negotiating with the U.S. Department of the Treasury to use some leftover foreclosure [-prevention] money. We committed all of it we had, but some of it, an unneeded portion, was returned to us. We think, by the fall, we’ll have a few million dollars to use against blight, and that could be very impactful to certain areas of Memphis.”

Before heading to the ball park, Perrey had spent an afternoon hobnobbing with mortgage bankers from the tri-state area, who are holding their annual convention here. “As we tell people, we are being more aggressive in engaging with lenders. That combination has really made a difference. Our loan product is up 58 percent compared to last year,” Perrey said.

THDA’s “main line,” explained Perrey, is to finance single-family mortgages, which the agency buys from the originating lenders and then administers, with a marginal savings for the home-buyer. “For the lenders, it’s a market-expanding opportunity. We give them a product they can use for customers they might otherwise say no to.” The term “public-private partnership” has gotten a pretty good workout in policy circles in recent years, and it adequately describes the way THDA operates.

“We provide backup,” is how Perrey puts it. “We’re not a poverty program, but we do make it possible for people of limited means to have their own homes, so long as they can demonstrate a certain financial capacity. But we’re not just for poor people.” 

He said that THDA also facilitates loans for people well into what could be described as middle class, such as start-up couples “who may think they don’t have a good enough credit score or are worried about the down payment.”

At present, TDHA can offer a 30-year fixed-rate loan at a 3.99 percentage rate, marginally better than the market at large, and can also offer down-payment closing assistance.

In other words, THDA doesn’t do hand-outs, but it provides a hand up for people in all economic circumstances who, for various reasons, might need a bit of help in getting what they want out of the housing market. Because the agency’s standards for lending include a demonstration of solvency, it has a very low delinquency rate with its loans. “We think there are a lot of people in Tennessee who would qualify for a THDA mortgage, and that’s why we’re here,” said Perrey, who said TDHA will offer a newly configured loan package sometime this summer especially tailored for credit unions and other lenders who may not deal with FHA loans per se.

Perrey is a product of Republican politics, having left a career as a radio newsman to serve former Congressman and Governor Don Sundquist as his entrée into government. But he sees himself as working within the stream of a bipartisan tradition. “There isn’t that much difference in how Republican and Democratic administrations have dealt with THDA. There’s been a great deal of continuity. Everybody likes housing.”

It’s nice to know, especially these days, that some aspects of government are above politics. As Ralph Perrey tells it, the Tennessee Housing Development Agency is one of them.

• Hackles were raised in Democratic Party circles in 2014 over former party Chairman Sidney Chism‘s overt and enthusiastic support of the reelection of Sheriff Bill Oldham, who ran as the Republican nominee. The Shelby County Democratic Executive Committee went so far as to formally censure Chism for not only endorsing Oldham but for allegedly attempting to dissuade the eventual Democratic candidate, Bennie Cobb, from running against him.

Now Chism, a former Shelby County commissioner who was term-limited and could not run again in 2014, is employed by Oldham as a “public information specialist,” and Chism is once again undergoing scrutiny. As part of the commission’s preliminary budget process, the Sheriff’s Department presented its financial prospectus back in mid-April, but the department’s employment of Chism and former county preparedness director, Bob Nations, prompted a callback before the commission’s budget committee on Wednesday of this week.

Budget Committee Chair Heidi Shafer said that further information was needed in the case of both Chism and Nations, the latter of whom, she said, had not become fully vested for pension purposes but would achieve that status in the sheriff’s employ.

“We just want to know if these jobs are really needed in light of the substantial increases the Sheriff’s Departent is seeking elsewhere,” said Shafer.

Also subject to a callback for further accounting on Wednesday were Juvenile Court and the Shelby County Election Commission. Shafer professed a concern over a request for $200,000 as a consultant’s fee to look into revising current election procedures, as well as the Election Commission’s request for a six percent raise in compensation for its emplyees.

“Not many Shelby Countians would find it easy to believe that the Election Commission deserves merit raises,” Shafer said.

• As of Friday, persons interested in filling the Super District, Position 2 seat (if not the shoes) of influential Councilman Shea Flinn, who has resigned, were able to pick up papers at the council office. Applications are due by Thursday, May 14th, and the remaining 12 council members will choose an interim replacement for Flinn’s seat on Tuesday, May 19th.

It will take a majority of seven votes to name the fill-in council member, and that could result in several ballots.

Indications are that all or nearly all of the individuals who had previously drawn petitions to run for the seat in the October 8th election will attempt to gain the interim nod as well. It’s one of those nothing-to-lose situations.

But, given the fact that sitting council members may not wish to offend a possible future colleague by making the wrong choice, they may see as a more appealing option the idea of choosing someone who does not intend to run for the seat in the regular city election. 

Some of those who have already indicated they are candidates for the interim position only are lawyer Alan Crone and activists Frank Triplett and Diane Cambron. That list is sure to grow between now and May 14th.

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Politics Politics Feature

Dotting the ‘”I” in Memphis Politics

CREDIT: JB

JB

Sidney Chism and small fan at last year’s picnic.

Attendees at the Sidney Chism political picnic, held two weekends ago at the usual stomping grounds on Horn Lake, would have observed this scribe doing his annual duty there for several hours, and may have since wondered if and when I would publish an account.

For a variety of reasons, I have delayed posting my observations. I do indeed have some, along with a variety of interesting photographs from the event, and I’ll be putting samples of both online shortly, along with snapshots and notes about other aspects of the recent political season.

There has been what the late poet T. S. Eliot would call an “objective correlative” to my wait on dealing with the picnic. On the day of the event, Saturday, June 21st, I was leaving the picnic when my left foot sank deep into a perfectly disguised hole on the property, a good foot deeper than its surroundings but topped with the same deceptive flow of green grass.

I thought I’d wrenched a knee but was able to walk out on my own, and, since nothing except a little soreness occurred over the next few days, thought I must have gotten off light. Last Thursday night, however, after I’d been to two political events (moderating one), I started feeling punk enough to beg off on a third.

Starting about nine o’clock Thursday and continuing through the weekend, the left knee gave me its delayed constituent reaction, swelling up to double its usual size, hollering at me vigorously through the available nerve circuits and stiffening up so as to make me bed-ridden even before I got doctor’s orders to that effect.

I got the knee drained of fluid and shot with cortisone on Sunday, and that seems to have restored me to the ranks of the ambient. Knock knock.

And, being a respector of what may have been a karmic message, I shall delay no longer in shedding some light on what happened at the picnic (though the balance of my observations will be published in the “Political Beat Blog” online).

The most remarkable single circumstance was the apparent endorsement by host Chism of several candidates — two of them outright: Democratic nominee Deidre Malone and, most vociferously, Sheriff Bill Oldham, the Republican nominee for a position also sought by Democrat Bennie Cobb.

It will be remembered that Chism was actually censured some time back by his Democratic Party mates at a meeting of the party’s executive committee for his support of Oldham. Chism was not bashful about giving Oldham his best shout-out at the picnic, and he — the county commissioner who was given so often to denouncing Republicans as marching always “in lockstep” — was now boasting defiantly about his having “friends” in both parties.

On the congressional scene, Chism gave Ricky Wilkins, the Democratic challenger to incumbent Steve Cohen in the 9th district, what seemed to be at least an indirect nod, allowing (or encouraging) event emcee Leon Gray to introduce the challenger with Wilkins’ own billboard slogan, “our next congressman.”            

• The current congressman, Cohen, was conspicuously absent from the Chism event, but he is making his presence felt in other ways.

Undeniably stung by this past weekend’s announcement of a Wilkins endorsement by the Memphis Police Association, Cohen, who early in his career was the legal adviser to the Memphis Police Department, put on a show of force on Monday, backed by almost a score of union representatives trumpeting their own or the Memphis Labor Council’s endorsement of the incumbent congressman, who has normally enjoyed wall-to-wall support from local  unions.

• For the record, there’s been some feedback about that August 2013 letter (see Politics, June 26th) from Imad Abdullah, the then president of the Ben F. Jones chapter of the National Bar Association (NBA), to chapter members soliciting “attorneys of color” to come forth as candidates in the 2014 judicial election with the goal of running “one member per race.”

There were numerous reactions to the premise of that item — especially from current office-holders irked at having to devote a summer to running against what they consider to be premature or unqualified candidates. One comes from Criminal Court Judge James Beasley (who is himself unopposed in this election) in this week’s Flyer Viewpoint, p. 12.

Another came from David E. McKinney, the current president of the Jones chapter of the NBA. In a letter notable for its courtesy, McKinney insists, “I vehemently reject the notion that this chapter is engaged in endorsing judicial candidates in the upcoming election based upon their race or ethnicity.”

And, indeed, as he and others have pointed out, there has of yet been no slate of endorsees released by the Ben F. Jones chapter. One who has made this point was lawyer/congressional candidate Wilkins, who (with Charles Carpenter) was mentioned as follows in Abdullah’s letter:

“Thus, to keep us on an organized path, we have established a separate committee that is co-chaired by Charles E. Carpenter and Ricky E. Wilkins. This committee has been hard at work establishing a mechanism to reach a consensus candidate for each race.”

Wilkins spoke to the Flyer on Thursday and strongly denied that he had been part of any action to prepare a black candidates’ slate for this year’s election, though he acknowledged he had been briefed in general about plans to interest African-American lawyers in seeking judicial office and had responded with encouragement.

Whatever the case, the number of contested races in this year’s judicial election is reasonably high (though maybe not unprecedentedly so), and it would seem that incumbents, for the most part, are getting the better of it so far — at least in the Memphis Bar Association’s lawyers’ poll of judicial candidates, released on Monday.

(Those recommendations are available online at memphisflyer.com‘s “Political Beat Blog” and will be available in their entirety in future print issues.)

• Note to judicial candidate Alicia Howard, who has asked me for a retraction of my report last week, based on public commentary by former Democratic Chairman Van Turner and on a citation from the state Board of Professional Responsibility regarding her erstwhile suspension: 

It is a matter of record that the board in 2011 gave attorney Howard an 18-month suspension for “signing and notarizing her client’s signature to [a] petition without indicating the client’s permission to do so” and for submitting “applications to the AOC [Administrative Office of the Courts] billing for work not performed.” 

Those two findings were the heart of the case against her and the reason why Howard was cited by the board for seven separate breaches in categories ranging from “truthfulness” to “fairness” to “misconduct.”

Howard objected to my saying that she “was held liable for forging a client’s name to a document without authorization” and for “obtain[ing] payment from the state Administrative Office of the Courts under false pretenses.” I will gladly withdraw that attempt at layman’s summary in favor of the Board’s carefully parsed statements quoted above.

She points out also that she “practiced for over twenty years with absolutely no discipline history,” that she “disagreed with certain findings” and accepted “the harsh nature of the penalty” only after “considering the expense of prolonged litigation and the toll on my family and my personal health.”

Howard also contends that 12 months was lopped off her suspension time and that she was able to resume practice in January 2012.

 

• The Master Meal of the East Shelby County Republican Club, which normally has some out-of-county designate as its featured speaker (past example: former Arkansas Governor/TV host Mike Huckabee) got by on local talent this year — the party’s major county-wide candidates on the August election ballot, plus state GOP chairman Chris Devaney of Nashville.

But that was enough to swell the turnout to several hundred at the Great Hall of Germantown last Tuesday night. Included were candidates galore for other races, including not a few Democrats. An omen for what comes next?