Tag: Brandon Morrison

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A Momentous Day for the Commission

Mick Wright: "I hope "God will forgive me if I vote wrong." Photo courtesy Shelby County Government


There are various ways of dividing the efforts of humankind into separate but oddly complementary spheres: sacred vs. profane is one way, ad hoc vs. eternal is another. And who is to say that one sphere exceeds the other in importance?

Maybe not the Shelby County Commission, whose current Democratic-dominated version seems bent on taking direct action wherever it can.

On Wednesday, the Commission spent roughly the same amount of time and energy on two radically differing pending matters — one being how next to try to get the office of the Shelby County Clerk up to snuff (in this case via a “special adviser”), the other being how best to remedy centuries of racial injustice through a system of reparations for the African-American component of local society.
Left pending until the Commission’s next meeting were a series of proposed correctives aimed at preventing another Tyre Nichols situation. 

The matter of County Clerk Wanda Halbert came first on the agenda. Various commissioners made it plain they were fed up with Halbert’s inabilities to deal expeditiously with the duties of her office, which include the processing of auto license tag applications and the distribution of them. Through much of the past  year, during which Halbert twice closed her office so as to do catch-up, long lines of frustrated Shelby Countians turned up daily at the various clerk’s offices in a vain effort to get their plates.

During one of those shut-downs, Halbert conspicuously took time off in Jamaica. She periodically has described herself as a “whistle-blower” and has blamed her office imbroglios on vague insinuations of conspiratorial action on the Commission’s part or on that of County Mayor Lee Harris.

The Commission has tried numerous incentives to help the clerk out, but, as commissioners noted on Wednesday, none of these bore much fruit. Simultaneously, state Representative Mark White has introduced a bill in the General Assembly in Nashville that would facilitate local efforts to recall the clerk.

On Wednesday, Halbert, along with aides, was present in the Commission chamber, behaving more or less meekly as the Commission tossed around a proposal to appropriate $150,000 to hire a special adviser to her. The clerk welcomed the initiative, claiming she had wanted something like that all along.

Much of a lengthy debate on what was clearly being put forth as a “last chance” solution concerned the issue of where the money to hire the adviser should come from. Various commissioners objected to the proposal’s original formulation that the $150,000 should come from the Commission’s own contingency fund, and it was ultimately decided that the clerk herself possessed enough uncommitted funds to foot the bill for the adviser.

In the end, that’s how things were decided. Halbert’s helper, who will be hired by the Commission, will be paid by available funds from the clerk’s office but will answer to the Commission, not to her. The vote was 12 to 1, with Republican Commissioner Brandon Morrison expressing disapproval of the need to spend more taxpayer money to accomplish duties that are part of the express charge of the elected clerk’s office.

Later in Wednesday’s public meeting, which was specially called by chairman Mickell Lowery, the Commission took up the momentous matter of a proposed $5 million outlay to fund a feasibility study on reparations for the African-American population. The “reparations” were not necessarily financial, although at least one successful amendment to the resolution proposed by Commissioner Henri Brooks seemed to call for make-up pay differentials for African-Americans.

Most of several amendments by Brooks addressed directly, as did the resolution itself, the undeniable fact of overall racial disparities in accessing of advantages of American citizenship.

Sponsoring the reparations measure were eight of the Commission’s Democrats, including all of the body’s Black members, most of whom spoke for the measure with various degrees of passionate intensity. 


Reservations were heard from the body’s four Republicans, who tended to see the resolution as “divisive”  or in conflict somehow with the American system of equality. Aligning with them in harboring doubts about the reparations issue was Democrat Michael Whaley, whose mother is Asian-born and who self-identified Wednesday as a “person of col0r.”

Voting for the resolution were chairman Lowery and fellow Commissioners Shante Avant, Brooks, Charlie Caswell, Miska Clay-Bibbs, Ed Ford, Erika Sugarmon, and Britney Thornton, all Democrats.

“No”  votes came from Republicans Amber Mills, Brandon Morrison, and Mick Wright, and abstaining were Democrat Whaley and Republican Bradford.

In one form or another, the objecting Commissioners wondered where the $5 million to pay for the feasibility study would come from (Ford made the case that such funds were available in the county’s residual share of funds from ARPA, the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021).

The objectors conceded during debate that disparities existed between the races that needed addressing but expressed disagreement with reparations as such as the remedy. Bradford had originally moved that the matter be postponed until the next public Commission meeting but ultimately withdrew his motion (that clearly would have failed) and expressed hopes that the larger effort to alter disparities succeeded.

His fellow Republican, Mick Wright, expressed similar sentiments, concluding with a blessing for his colleagues and the seemingly heartfelt statement, “I hope God will forgive me if I vote wrong.”

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Politics Politics Feature

Discord and Unity

Memphis Suffrage Monument unveiled (Photo: Courtesy Downtown Memphis Commission)

With only days remaining before the financial disclosures of county candidates for the first quarter of 2022 will be made public, Shelby County Commissioner Brandon Morrison says she is satisfied with her fundraising efforts to date and is focusing on meet-the-public events.

Jordan Carpenter, her Republican primary opponent and a political unknown before this race, is meanwhile having as many fundraising events as he can manage. Addressing an audience at a Germantown residence on Sunday, he recalled asking “all the big names” to head up his financial efforts as he planned his race, “and they’re like no, no, we’re not gonna.” So he settled on Jason McCuistion, a banking attorney and his friend “since the eighth grade,” to be his treasurer.

L to r: GOP party chair Cary Vaughn, Jordan Carpenter, and County Commissioner Mick Wright (Photo: Jackson Baker)

The newcomer has the support of the current four Republicans on the commission, three of whom — Amber Mills, Mick Wright, and Mark Billingsley, who is term-limited and leaving office — were present on Sunday. David Bradford, the fourth GOP member, was absent. The newly reapportioned District 4, which Carpenter and Morrison are competing in, is a montage of East Memphis and Germantown precincts.

Contending that Morrison has “failed” to represent the district, Carpenter cited two issues he thought important to suburban Republicans. One was the lingering issue of support for MATA, something Morrison has expressed openness toward by reorienting present funding. “You don’t take county taxpayer money and send it to a Memphis city entity when they’re not using the money that they already have correctly,” he said.

And the challenger took issue with Morrison’s serving last year as vice chair of an ad hoc commission committee to examine a joint city-county proposal on future Metro consolidation. That, Carpenter said, was “an issue that people care about a lot … a forced marriage, where half the residents of the county don’t want to be in it.”

He continued: “And there are people that say that issue is dead. And I say, you shouldn’t believe those people while the political action committees are being formed. And the money is being given in the background. And the swords are being sharpened behind closed doors …”

Apprised of Carpenter’s statement, Morrison, back in Memphis late Monday after a trip to Nashville, where she presented the legislature with a commission’s wish list, said her opponent was “being divisive, and I’m not going to play that game. I’m looking forward.”

• Political acrimony was wholly absent from two other weekend events. One was the opening at Poplar and Highland on Saturday of Sheriff Floyd Bonner’s campaign headquarters. Inasmuch as Bonner is unopposed on the Democratic primary ballot and the Shelby County Republicans are offering no candidate for sheriff, the event was ready-made for a massive turnout, and an enormous number of candidates from both sides of the political aisle, as well as independents, showed up for a share of the dais.

Sheriff Floyd Bonner at HQ opening (Photo: Jackson Baker)

The other big event of the weekend, also crowded, was nonpartisan by design. It was the official unveiling on Sunday of the new Memphis Suffrage Monument on the riverfront in a space behind the University of Memphis Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law. The tribute to the women who worked to extend the ballot to womankind was the brainchild of Memphis activist Paula Casey, who labored 20 years to bring it into being. On hand for the unveiling was a virtual who’s who of local officials and civic figures.

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Politics Politics Feature

The County Commission’s New Map

Source: Shelby County Government

Although various rules of parliamentary order caused Monday’s special called meeting of the Shelby County Commission to open by fits and starts, the needed result, a final vote on commission redistricting, was achieved with relative dispatch. But that was after — in order — a commission meeting, an adjournment, a meeting of the general government committee, another adjournment, and a final commission meeting.

Still and all, it got done, and on the November 9th deadline set by the Election Commission. Accommodations were made via amendment to oblige commissioners from Germantown and Collierville. Some precincts were shifted around in the area of East Memphis and western Germantown so as to keep incumbents Brandon Morrison, a Republican, and Michael Whaley, a Democrat, from having to run in the same district.

Morrison has a district to herself, though it is fundamentally changed from the old District 13 she has represented — a conglomerate of largely East Memphis precincts. She objected last week that too many precincts from her original district were being shifted to District 4, essentially the Germantown district.

In the amended version, those precincts are still moved east. But at least her own home precinct, the one she lives in, has moved along with them. District 4, containing a reliably Republican voting base, is now her district to run in, for better or for worse.

District 5, Whaley’s designation in the old configuration, has become a brand-new district consisting essentially of Cordova (the creation of a Cordova district being one of the stated aims of Commissioner Van Turner and other members of the Commission majority).

The district Whaley inhabits, meanwhile, renumbered as District 13, is still situated at the junction, more or less, of East Memphis, Midtown, and Binghampton, and its population is presumed to be majority-Democratic, as his old district was.

If the interested parties did not get all of what they wanted, they may have gotten the best of what was possible.

Among the several parliamentary maneuvers pursued during this important but relatively brief commission meeting was a last-ditch effort by Morrison to get a previously discarded map (known for its original sponsor, District 2 Republican David Bradford of Collierville, as “the Bradford map”) up for a vote.

In the amended map, Bradford had gotten the return of the Collierville High School precinct from its earlier proposed relocation in District 12. But he and Morrison evidently felt obliged, for the record, to get a more idealized version of their hopes up for a vote.

They did, but “Map 4,” as it was entitled, unsupported by any precinct data, went down to defeat predictably, with only 5 votes, only those of the commission’s Republicans, supporting it. (In the debate over Map 4, Democrat Tami Sawyer charged that the map had been shaped by Brian Stephens of Caissa Public Strategy, a conservative-oriented consulting firm.)

The final vote for the amended redistricting map, a version of the CC4A3 map voted on last week, was 8-5, with Democrat Edmund Ford Jr. joining four Republicans as naysayers. The approved map will probably yield nine Democrats and four Republicans in the next elected commission.

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Politics Politics Feature

Out of the Past: Joe Cooper Mulls a Re-emergence

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Joe Cooper is a name from the political past: He called this past week to suggest that he was thinking seriously of running for the Shelby County Commission next year. Most of us, myself included, had lost track of Cooper, who was a squire on the old Shelby County Court back in the 1970s, and once considered a player.

That was before a run of bad luck and/or bad conduct that would see him bereft of his first wife and his office and, temporarily, of his freedom. At that time, Cooper received the first of two felony convictions, this one for acquiring bank loans circuitously, in the names of influential friends. That mischance, arguably, may have owed something to simple politics. Cooper, then a nominal Republican when the GOP controlled the Justice Department, had ostentatiously tried to do some impolitic public brokering on behalf of Democrats.

Jackson Baker

Joe Cooper in 2012

Though he thereafter attempted to regain his equilibrium in politics (this time as a Democrat) and as a businessman, Cooper never quite got back on his feet, though he maintained enough connections and savoir faire to be an advisor and back-room wheeler-dealer on behalf of other public figures.

If you needed an autographed photo of Grover Cleveland by 3 p.m. tomorrow, Cooper could get it for you. He proved useful in an administrative position here and there, and for years arranged an annual Thanksgiving turkey giveaway on Beale Street for the homeless and indigent.

As the late state senator and Juvenile Court Judge Curtis Person Jr., one of several prominent Memphians who had a soft spot for Cooper, used to say, “Joe has a good heart.” In recent years, he partnered with Jerry “the King” Lawler in several valid commercial ventures.

But there were lapses. Cooper got nailed by the FBI in a money-laundering scheme and ended up having to shill for a federal sting against city politicians in order to reduce his own time in a new conviction. As he said in 2012, when he was mulling over a commission race: “I know I’ve got some baggage, but I also know how to get things done.” If he follows through this time around, Cooper would likely be seeking the East Memphis commission seat now held by Republican member Brandon Morrison.

• In an online post last week, I noted that Shelby County Commissioner David Bradford of Collierville has the habit, which has been contagious to other members, of voting “yes” instead of the venerable “aye” in answering roll calls.

This week comes Bradford’s explanation of the practice, which is worth repeating:

“I was wondering if anyone had picked up on my ‘yeses,'” he wrote. “It was a conscious choice to use ‘yes’ instead of ‘aye,’ and honestly I thought I might get reprimanded by the parliamentarian the first time I used it. I’ve strived to stay with the ‘yeses’ throughout my term. I wish I could say my ‘yeses’ were some sort of stand against 16th century [parliamentary precedent], but, alas, they are not. 

“The reason I chose ‘yes’ over ‘aye’ is three-fold:

“1) About 20 percent of it is that I prefer the less formal. I think using ‘aye’ makes the whole system seem more complex, when the simple ‘yes’ conveys the same meaning. I hope less formal and less complex provides a system that is more approachable and understandable to all.

“2) About 75 percent has to do with clear communication. The buttons on our screens that we use to vote don’t say ‘aye.’ They say ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ So the engineer in me that likes everything to be orderly, drives me to say what’s on the screen before me. 

“3) That last 5 percent is just to see who’s listening and who catches on. Bravo to you, sir!”

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Rumblings on the Commission

It is the City Council that grabs most of the headlines and TV attention, but it must be remembered that the Shelby County Commission not only represents more constitutionally ordained authority than does the Council, it is the body that ultimately calls the shots on such important aspects of our collective life as public education and public health.

Eddie Jones

Not that the Commission controls the public schools; it just pays for them on behalf of the taxpayers. It can’t dictate on matters of curriculum — those are entirely to be worked out between the School Board and the superintendent’s office — but the Commissioners can, if they choose, withhold funding for the schools if they don’t like the drift of things.

Once in a while, in the heat of debate on the Commission, action of that sort gets threatened. One of the most persistent critics of the Shelby County Schools system is current County Commissioner Edmund Ford Jr., an educator himself and one who, in particular, is forever suspicious of S.C.S. spending plans and demands to see the fine print and the bottom line regarding virtually everything representatives of the school system bring to the Commission to get funded.

And now the Commission, which already is responsible for monitoring the county Health Department, is — in the crush of the ongoing pandemic — attempting to ground its authority even deeper, with the proposed creation of a Shelby County Health Board. The recent proposal to do so, which seemed at first to be uncontroversial, has become anything but.

Two key members of the Commission, outgoing chairman Mark Billingsley and Edmund Ford Jr., withdrew their sponsorship of the enabling ordinance at Monday’s Commission meeting amid reported pressure from city government and suburban municipalities — both of which entities are said to view the proposed new Board as threatening to their own power concerns. “We don’t like people trying to pre-empt us. We don’t like the state to pre-empt us, and we don’t like anybody else doing it, either,” said a well-placed source in Memphis city government.

The city, of course, is the driving force behind the Memphis-Shelby County COVID-19 Task Force, though virtually everyone of importance in local medicine, not to mention representatives of all the municipalities and first-responder agencies, is a member of that sprawling body which, for all the honorific nature of its cast of characters, does hard work and holds at least two valuable public information sessions during the week.

What the Task Force does not have is the power to compel policy throughout the county, and that is what the proposed Board would have, and that is why city and suburban officials were resistant to it right away. Van Turner, the low-keyed but highly influential inner-city Democratic commissioner and former chairman, is the remaining major sponsor, and he indicates he is amenable to broadening the composition of the Board — certainly not to the dimensions of the Task Force but in ways inclusive of the concerned separate jurisdictions.

After a preliminary 7-3 vote on the Board proposition and a decision to send it back to committee, the process of compromise and overhaul has begun. As it proceeds to the point necessary for passage, the concept of the Board seems likely to become that of an advisory body rather than a prescriptive one, and, in that case, its relevance as an add-on to the Task Force may cease to be obvious.

Besides the initial aversion of Memphis and suburban officialdom to the idea of the Health Board, there was another inherent obstacle to its creation — the ever-widening gap between Mayor Lee Harris and the Commission itself. There has always been a certain tension between the two power centers of mayor and Commission. In a sense the relationship is based on a balance of power, and relations between the two have always swung pendulum-like between common purpose and rivalry.

It was the latter state that dominated things during the last two or three years of the administration of former Mayor Mark Luttrell. A jurisdictional dispute that had begun in 2015 over the amount and disposition of a county fiscal surplus would harden into long-term enmity. A pair of Repubican commissioners — Terry Roland of Millington and Heidi Shafer of East Memphis — would each serve a term as Commission chair during the crucial period and the two of them, working with each other and with a technical Democratic majority, would supervise a rebellion against the GOP mayor that would erode his authority significantly and see him, at the end of his two terms in 2018, unable or unwilling even to oversee the details of transition to the newly elected Democratic mayor, Lee Harris.

Harris came into office with an 8 to 5 Democratic majority and resolved to avoid any schism with the Commission. Yet here he is, two years later, with the Commission having seized the initiative on producing the budget — and not tenderly, either — exactly as the previous Commission had done with Luttrell at the very start of their mutual alienation.

Brandon Morrison

It is this Mayor-Commission dichotomy and not partisan bickering that had seemingly become the major determinant of disagreements in county government. Yet that may be changing, as partisanship certainly reared up as a reality in the course of Monday’s election of chair and vice chair.

The Shelby County Commission has, more than most bodies elected by partisan election, been able to enjoy cooperation across party lines — certainly more so than Congress or the state legislature in Nashville. As already noted, the case can be made that Republicans Roland and Shafer (neither of whom can be described as a moderate) provided the guidelines for group action in the previous version of the Commission, a majority-Democrat one like the present version, which lines up 8 to 5 Democratic.

Which is not to say that Shafer and Roland imposed GOP ideology; except for their efforts on behalf of a tax cut, the main Commission emphasis during that period arguably was on behalf of MWBE (Minority and Women-owned Business Enterprises). That and resistance to Nashville on matters like school vouchers.

Two Democrats — Eddie Jones and Edmund Ford Jr. — have experienced no problem working back and forth across the political aisle, in much the same manner as Jones and Justin Ford did in the previous Commission. The occasional vote on a partisan matter has often seen either or both of them voting with the body’s GOP members. Up until now, there has been no equivalent among Republicans.

That all changed on Monday, when, after a unanimous vote of all Commissioners for Jones as the body’s next chairman, East Memphis Republican Brandon Morrison joined six Democrats in a vote to make herself vice chair and defeat fellow Republican Amber Mills, a north county member who tilts significantly to the right and was the preferred candidate of the other GOP members. The significance of the vote is the bearing it is likely to have a year from now when the vice chair will presumably be in the catbird seat for the next vote for chair.

Mark Billingsley, a Republican from Germantown and the outgoing chairman, has reacted with outrage to what he sees as devious and disloyal action on the part of Morrison (whose conservative voting record, incidentally, has not been radically dissimilar from Mills’), and he declined to consider a motion from Democrat Tami Sawyer to make Morrison’s election unanimous.

While Democrats like Van Turner and Reginald Milton saw the matter as no big deal, except as a good-for-the-goose, good-for-the-gander bit of parallelism, the outgoing chair remained unappeased. Given that Billingsley himself had, during his chairmanship, clearly attempted to position himself as a conciliator of factions, his reaction could signal a sea change in future relations between the parties. All that remains to be seen.

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Politics Politics Feature

Commission Gets $1.4 Billion “Lean” Budget from Harris

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Here’s one for you: What’s the difference between $10 million and $13.6 million?
The answer to that is two weeks. In that amount of time, Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris raised the floor on what he considered the minimum amount of spending cuts needed in the county’s 2020-2021 budget year.

On April 6th, Harris presented a plan to the Shelby County Commission calling for $10 million in cuts, spread among various departments of county government. In a lengthy discussion of alternative methods of reducing the budget, the commission decided to put off action on Harris’ plan.

In the meantime, the mayor has recalculated and increased the tab for what he considered necessary as a means, without raising taxes, to get the county through the dismal current reality of continued shutdown followed by uncertainty. Actually, Harris did propose a mite of increased taxpayer obligation to accompany his proposed austerity budget revealed on Monday — a “lean and balanced” one of $1.4 billion. The increase would be in the form of a $16.50 raise in the county’s motor vehicle registration tax, a.k.a., the wheel tax.

This is the second time of late that the wheel tax has figured as a component of a plan by Harris to raise revenue. The first time was earlier in the year when the mayor proposed an incremental increase in the wheel tax to finance a new contribution to the Memphis Area Transit Authority in the interests of expanding MATA’s purview.

Objections to that proposal from various commissioners and members of the public — no few of them noting that the wheel tax, as originally conceived, was meant to be restricted to education — scuttled that approach and forced the county to find other means to fund its MATA contribution.

But now it’s baaack! And, as repurposed in the mayor’s budgetary plan, it drew more tentative fire than before, with Republican Commissioner Brandon Morrison, who said she could support the precedent, nevertheless invoking the dread metaphor of “the slippery slope.”

Firmly but a bit apologetically, Harris pointed out that Shelby County’s property tax, sales tax, and hotel-motel tax were all at levels too high to push any further and that the county’s automobile license tax was at an “average enough level among equivalent state fees” that it had the right amount of give.

The two other components of the mayor’s austerity budget involved the aforementioned $13.6 million in cuts and a $6 million borrowing from the county’s fund balance, leaving that reserve fund at the comfortable go-no-lower level of $85 million.

Under probing from various commissioners, Harris defended his recommendations by saying explicitly that without cuts of the sort he proposed, the county would have to go up on taxes — “it’s one or the other” — and might have to impose layoffs, also.

Democratic Commissioner Tami Sawyer voiced a concern that, even should Harris’ cuts be adopted, layoffs might be around the corner.

The mayor’s proposed budget would shore up the target areas of health, public safety, and the social safety net, and it contains several new or protected expenditures — approximately $4 million to fund 30 new additional patrolman positions in the Sheriff’s Department, needed “to patrol the soon-to-be de-annexed areas” of Memphis; a second dose of $8.5 million to Pre-K and early Pre-K, as well as “$427 million for schools, in addition to $33 million in school construction needs this year.”

The budget also contains commitments for funding continued actions for relief and treatment during the COVID-19 epidemic.

The commissioners, who rejected the specifics of a hiring freeze proposed two weeks ago by Harris and resisted at the time by county department heads, adopted one of their own on Monday — a more lenient version that would freeze hiring and spending through June 30th but contained appeal procedures that Harris said made it a “soft freeze” compared to what had been his “hard stop.”

The freeze adopted Monday was sponsored by Republican commissioners Mick Wright and Morrison and got the seven votes needed for passage, with most Democratic commissioners either voting no or abstaining. 

Without being specific, Democratic Commissioner Edmund Ford Jr., a persistent critic of the mayor, compared Harris’ projected plans to some adopted in 2014 by the Memphis City Council on which both he and Harris served. Those financial arrangements would lower the county’s bond rating and draw the attention of the state comptroller, Ford said.

In related action on Monday, the commission unanimously approved the county tax rate for 2020-2021 — keeping the rate at its current level of $4.05 per assessed value of $100.

The commission also voted 7-4-1 in favor of a resolution, sponsored by Democratic commissioners Tami Sawyer, Michael Whaley, and Van Turner, requesting Governor Bill Lee to sanction no-excuse absentee voting for the duration of the coronavirus shutdown and expressing a preference for machines allowing voter-marked ballots. That vote was more or less along party lines — 7-5-1, with Democrat Ford joining several Republicans in opposition.

Online Glitches
Commissioners and other personnel participating in the commission’s meetings have by now gotten used to the webinar means of virtual electronic communication, whereby each participant tunes in from separate computer stations and discussions proceed more or less along the lines of Robert’s Rules of Order.
Jackson Baker

Mark Billingsley

But their familiarity has another side to it — highly noticeable Monday when a few commissioners allowed their lines to stay open during discussion, thereby picking up traces of private conversation and domestic soundtracks.

That fact, along with technological glitches in the presentation of the Harris budget, complicated the process of communication on Monday and kept GOP commission chair Mark Billingsley calling for order in that regard. 

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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 Beat Blog

A Race to Watch in County Commission District 13

CREDIT: District 13 Commissioner Basar

District 13 Commissioner Basar

For the third time in his relatively brief political career, Shelby County Commissioner Steve Basar is up against a determined political  woman. His  batting average so far is .500, with 1 win out of 2 tries, but he’s up  against what would appear to be a serious challenge in his reelection effort this year in the Republican primary for District 13.

Basar won his seat in 2012 after defeating the comeback bid of once-influential social conservative Marilyn Loeffel in the GOP primary for a Commission seat vacated by Mike Carpenter. In the general, he would win an expected victory in his preponderantly Republican multi-member district over blogger/high-tech professional Steve Ross, the Democratic nominee.

GOP challenger Brandon Morrison

Once in office, Basar became chair of the Commission’s economic development committee and made a point of opposing some well-backed high-profile developments in the downtown area while cheerleading for others, incurring controversy both ways.

He would become Commission vice chair and began to harbor ambitions for the Commission’s budget-committee chairmanship, a fact which did him no good with a onetime supporter, then committee chair Commissioner Heidi Shafer, also a Republican. For that reason among others, Shafer would devote her considerable influence to blocking what Basar had thought to be his automatic elevation to the chairmanship in 2014. Democrat Justin Ford would become chairman instead.

In the fallout from that defeat, Republican Basar entered into an operative alliance with the Commission’s Democrats on a series of procedural issues, then lost a second bid for the chairmanship in 2015 when fellow Republican Terry Roland pried away the vote of Eddie Jones, one of Basar’s Democratic allies.

Here it is 2018, and Basar assumed he could at least count on a safe reelection in his East Memphis/suburban District 13. There was no sign of anxiety on his part during a well-attended fundraiser of his last week at East Memphis restaurant Owen Brennan’s. Basar seemed unconcerned at the prospect of businessman George Monger and newcomer Charlie Belenky publicly competing for the Democratic nomination.

But it is now obvious that Basar has serious trouble in his own party primary from the previously unheralded Brandon Morrison, a political novice herself but a woman with good standing in social and civic circles, well-steered by seasoned consultant Brian Stephens, and with increasingly visible support from Republicans — and well-heeled ones at that — in District 13. Indeed, as yard signs bearing her name began to sprout, the word was getting out — and fast — that she might actually be the favorite in the GOP primary J B

Monger (l) with supporters at Novel fundraiser

Democrat Monger is a former Election Commissioner and business/political prodigy of sorts who is the clear favorite in his own primary (though Belenky, a newcomer to Memphis, is certainly working hard). As Monger, a fiscal conservative capable of appealing to moderate Republicans, noted to supporters at a Friday fundraiser at the Novel bookstore, “We started out thinking we had a ‘Bye-bye Steve’ campaign to run, but now it looks like he’ll be taken care of before we can get to him.”

Democrat Belenky

Whoever wins out in the Democratic primary may find it necessary to compete hard for crossover votes in the general election. Basar himself is considered a moderate, and, while Morrison is still something of a mystery to the general public, her campaign website makes a point of underscoring the principle of “diversity” and contains this passage:

“…We are a city with soul, offering a wonderful and welcoming vibe that appeals to young people. We must work hard to keep them here.

“We also face serious challenges, such as crime and poverty. It is unthinkable that so many Shelby County School students live in extreme poverty. About 40,000 of our 115,000 Shelby County School students live in a household earning less than $10,000 annually. We must do better….”

Whatever happens, the race for District 13, a swing district of sorts in the narrowly divided Commission, is going to be one worth watching.