Tag: Brian Kelsey

Categories
News News Blog

State Lawmakers Review Memphis Hiring Policies

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Jackson Baker

State lawmakers pondered residency requirements for Memphis Police Department (MPD) officers Monday leaving one Senator to ask if a new, pre-emptive state law could help the city hire more cops.

The Senate Judiciary Summer Study committee reviewed residency requirements for hiring policies in Tennessee cities in general. But the review was initiated with Memphis’ shortfall of police officers, lawmakers said. However, there is no pending bill on the matter.

“The city of Memphis now has a 600-officer shortfall and we wanted to meet to see how that can be addressed and is there anything the state can do to address that,” said Sen. Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown), the committee’s chairman.

MPD has a bit more than 1,900 officers and wants a complement of about 2,400. Memphis City Council member Worth Morgan and MPD Deputy Chief Terry Landrum described to lawmakers a police department that is struggling to recruit and retain law enforcement talent.
For example, the latest MPD recruitment class garnered 2,000 applicants but graduated only 85. Also, Landrum said MPD is a target for recruiters from police departments in Dallas, San Antonio, Nashville, Bartlett, and Germantown.

Morgan described city policy on residency requirements, a policy that has changed with several voter referenda going back to 2009. The policy now requires city of Memphis employees to live within Shelby County. However, employees hired before the rule was approved by voters can live as far as two hours away from Memphis.

MPD Deputy Chief Terry Landrum told lawmakers that the patchwork of rules that apply to different MPD employees makes for “difficult” administration issues. But the current residency requirement, he said, “kills us” on recruiting new officers.

Loosening those requirements would help “cast as wide of a net as possible,” Morgan said. The topic is a point of “constant conversation in the hallways and chambers” of Memphis City Hall. However, while he said he was for looser residency requirements, the political climate may not be right in Memphis right now.

“It would be a big fight if we were to try to open it up back to that two-hour window,” Morgan said. “I’d be willing to have it but I’d have to count to seven [get seven votes from other council members]. I’m not sure I could get to that number.”

But he also urged caution from state lawmakers to leave the issue a local matter. Though many Senators seemed to agree, at least one seemed willing to step in.

Sen. Janice Boling (R-Tullahoma) said state lawmakers are sworn to focus on the education, transportation, and public safety needs of state citizens. She asked if the Senate considered legislation that would pre-empt the city charter on residency requirements “would that solve the problem?”

Morgan said state pre-emption “would not be well received” by some in Memphis but he’d “be excited to have as many good applicants as possible.”

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

They’re Back!

As the current session of the Tennessee General Assembly heads toward its conclusion, either late this month or early in May (see cover story, “Nashville Gets Serious”), two questions of serious concern to the Memphis area are about to be revisited.

Up for reconsideration this week are the voucher bill, co-sponsored by state Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown) and state Representative Harry Brooks (R-Knoxville), and a measure enabling de-annexation, sponsored by state Senator Bo Watson (R-Hixson) and state Representative Mike Carter (R-Ooltewah).

The voucher measure, a variant of which has been brought up unsuccessfully by Kelsey for years, may have its best prospects for passage yet — its odds improved by the fact that it is styled as a “pilot program” restricted to the Shelby County Schools district alone.

Brian Kelsey

That fact removes some of the onus from legislators elsewhere in the state who might be deterred by the prospect of immediate blowback affecting their own districts. In much the same manner, the way was cleared in 2012 for the Norris-Todd bill, which eliminated a freeze on new special school districts in Tennessee and allowed new suburban districts in Shelby County, when Norris-Todd was successfully revised to apply only to Shelby County. 

The difference, and it could prove to be major, is that support for Norris-Todd was relatively stout in the major suburbs of Memphis, represented by several key legislators, notably state Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris of Collierville, the bill’s chief author, while a majority of Shelby County legislators, Republican and Democratic and from Memphis and as well as its suburbs, are on record as opposing vouchers.

And the Kelsey bill prompts doubts as to its ultimate constitutionality, inasmuch as it fails to qualify as a “private” bill — i.e., one supported by a county’s chief legislative body. That would be the Shelby County Commission, which voted unanimously in February to oppose the voucher measure.

In any case, the voucher bill, which has been hanging fire on the Senate side for a month awaiting action by the House, was placed on the calendar of the House Government Operations Committee last Thursday. Action was deferred until Wednesday of this week.

The Watson-Carter bill on de-annexation is essentially the same measure that was introduced last year, gaining quick passage in the House and getting immediate traction in the Senate, until an all-out resistance on the part of Memphis city officials, the city’s allies in other Tennessee cities, and the Greater Memphis Area Chamber of Commerce managed to get it postponed in the Senate State and Local Government Committee.

That reprisal was based on the understanding that Memphis deserved the option of proposing its own formula for de-annexation — one presumably kindlier than the Watson-Carter version, which provided a fairly easy means for any area annexed by a city since 1998 to hold a referendum to gain its independence. A hastily appointed city/county task force came up with a formula for “right-sizing” the city and allowing a relatively graceful exit of such hotbeds of de-annexation sentiment as South Cordova and Southwind-Windyke.

But the right-sizing plan envisioned that implementation would be postponed until 2021, a fact unsettling to local de-annexation activists. And, instead of promptly giving the plan an up-or-down vote, the city council has opted for a more deliberated response, allowing for a series of public meetings in the potentially affected areas and envisioning possible referenda in those areas later on.

Both those facts moved Carter and Watson to schedule new action on their bill, which was first reset for last Thursday’s calendar of the Senate State and Local Government Committee and then postponed for action by the committee on Tuesday of this week.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Tennessee Legislature Trumps Cities’ Laws, Again

As has been amply demonstrated in the Tennessee General Assembly, Memphis is often on the short end of the stick when it comes to legislative actions. One recent case in point, covered in “Politics” this week (p. 8), was the action of both state Senate and state House in rejecting the city’s right to prescribe alternative penalties for the possession of modest amounts of marijuana for recreational use.

In this case, Memphis was not alone in getting the back of the hand from the legislature. The city councils of Nashville and Memphis had passed ordinances allowing their local law-enforcement arms to exercise discretion by way of citing first-time offenders with tickets and modest fines as an alternative to misdemeanor arrests carrying punishments of up to a year in jail.

To some extent, the legislative rebukes reflected a party-line reaction by the Republican super-majority that controls both chambers of the General Assembly. In a sense, both Memphis and Nashville are isolated Democratic enclaves, blue islands in a red sea.

To some extent also, both cities share a cultural matrix toward which the rest of the state is unsympathetic. That fact loomed large a few years ago when the legislature struck down a Nashville ordinance prohibiting hiring and contracting discrimination by local government on the basis of sexual orientation. The legislature’s action nipped in the bud similar action then pending in the Memphis City Council and Shelby County Commission.

In this instance, too, the guiding principle stated by proponents of the restrictive legislation was that state law overrides local law, and that general claim has been stoutly defended by former Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey, among others, against charges of being inconsistent with a parallel insistence on states’ rights in national affairs. The retort by Ramsey and by current spokespersons for the Assembly’s GOP super-majority is that cities and counties within state lines and the federal union itself were brought into being originally by the states. Hence, the doctrine of state government über alles, which is the governing doctrine of the General Assembly at present.

An even more flagrant example of the principle looms in pending legislative action — sponsored, ironically, by a Shelby Countian, state Senator Brian Kelsey — that would impose the constitutionally dubious expedient of taxpayer-funded private-school vouchers on Shelby County alone. The bill, styled as a “pilot program,” is further limited so that its potential financial drain would apply only to existing funding for Shelby County Schools.

Kelsey’s bill advanced through a House education committee last week, despite drawing protests and nay votes from local House members from both parties.

In the long run, such imposition of state authority on matters of clearly local provenance deserve full testing by the courts. In the short run, they merit the stoutest resistance possible.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Voucher and De-Annexation Issues Both Headed for Showdowns

CREDIT: JB

JB

County Commissioners Steve Basar and Terry Roland during deliberations on Wednesday.

Two matters of significant importance to Memphis and Shelby County (considered both separately and as a single geographic unit) are hanging fire as of this week.

One involves the question of school vouchers, which is sure to come to a head in the state General Assembly before it adjourns in April. The other has to do with de-annexation legislation directly affecting Memphis and its suburbs, and this matter, too, is likely to have a reckoning in Nashville before session’s end.

VOUCHERS: Until this week, it seemed reasonably certain that the Shelby County Commission was prepared, on a tight deadline, to establish the machinery for appointing an interim state Representative to fill the state House vacancy created by the resignation last month of Rep. Mark Lovell in District 95 (Germantown, Collierville).

A schedule had already been prepared, calling for applications for the interim position to be made available between March 21st and March 27th, with applicants to be interviewed by the commission on March 29th and an appointment to be made during the Commission’s regular public meeting of April 3rd.

Given that the legislature has plans to adjourn sometime in April, that left little time for an interim Representative to serve. (Governor Bill Haslam had meanwhile issued a writ establishing a schedule for a special election, to be completed in a general election in June — well after the end of the current legislative session.)
The momentum for the Commission’s determination to appoint an interim successor to Lovell was the likelihood that at least one voucher bill, sponsored by state Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown), and possibly another, sponsored by state Rep. Bill Dunn (R-Knoxville), would be among the late measures still requiring a definitive vote in the waning days of the General Assembly.

The Commission had voted unanimously on February 20 to oppose voucher legislation pending in the General Assembly. The Commission’s seven Democrats, all African Americans from Memphis districts, and six Republicans, whites with constituencies in East Memphis and the suburbs, were firm on the issue.

They all saw voucher legislation, which would enable public funding for tuition at private schools, as being a threat to the financial and logistical underpinning of both the Memphis-based Shelby County Schools district and the six independent municipal districts in the suburbs.

But a complication arose over the weekend in the form of a concerted effort among various Shelby County Democrats to persuade the seven Commission Democrats to vote as a bloc to appoint prominent Germantown Democrat Adrienne Pakis-Gillon as the interim appointee from District 95.

Inasmuch as District 95 is, by some reckonings, the most dyed-in-the-wool Republican House district in the state, the GOP members of the Commission expressed concern at this possible breach of what they considered a long-standing gentlemen’s’ agreement that governmental vacancies should be filled by members of the same parties that had occupied the seats previously.

Though that tradition had been flouted once before, in the case of a vacant Commission seat, it never had been in determining interim appointees to the legislature.

Consequently, in Monday’s meeting of the Commission’s general government committee, there came a motion from Republican Commissioner Terry Roland of Millington to abandon the idea of appointing an interim successor to Lovell, leaving the District 95 seat vacant until the 2018 legislative session, come what might on vouchers in 2017.

Roland’s motion failed on a vote of 4 ayes, 4 noes, and one abstention among the committee members present, but, ominously for opponents of the voucher bills, one who supported Roland was GOP Commissioner David Reaves of Bartlett, a former School Board member who had been arguably the most determined opponent of vouchers on the Commission and who had spearheaded the unanimous anti-voucher vote of February 20.

As late as Tuesday morning, Reaves was insisting that, as he told the Flyer, “”We need to appoint somebody to represent the district.” But on Wednesday, with partisanship threatening to supplant vouchers as the issue, Reaves had begun to backtrack on the need for an interim appointee.

He had assumed, along with other Commissioners, that the gentlemen’s’ agreement would hold, and that some moderate Republican (Reaves himself suggested former School Board colleague David Pickler) would fill the void in Nashville long enough to express the will of the Commission on the voucher issue.

Now everything was in doubt, with Democrats and Republicans beginning to eye each other across the partisan divide and a showdown scheduled for Monday, March 20, when the Commission will meet again, with one last chance to begin trying to get someone up to Nashville on behalf of District 95 before legislative adjournment.

Much depends on whether, as of March 20, there is anything resembling bloc unity among the Commission’s seven Democrats on the matter of an interim appointment for Pakis-Gillon or any other Democrat.

An informal survey of the Democratic contingent by the Flyer indicates that such is not the case, that as many as three Democratic members have yet to decide on the matter, and one or two have strong doubts about the propriety of risking long-term bipartisan comity for the sake of a transitory and perhaps Pyrrhic symbolic victory.

Especially for its effect on what looms as a forthcoming extra-tight House vote on vouchers.


DE-ANNEXATION: On Thursday, the day after the inconclusive Commission vote on District 95, the aforesaid Terry Roland was on his way to Nashville, in tandem with a group of suburbanites from the South Cordova and Southwind-Windyke areas desiring to de-annex themselves from Memphis.

The point, as Commissioner Roland explained it, was to force more or less immediate action on a de-annexation measure in the face of what appears to be a dilatory attitude by the Memphis City Council toward acting on a home-grown de-annexation alternative offered up recently by a joint city-county task force.

“They don’t want to wait around until 2020 or 2021 when the Council might or might not have got something done on the task force plan,” Roland said, referring to a “rightsizing” initiative prepared to the City Council last month by Caissa Public Strategies on behalf of the Strategic Footprint Review Task Force, the ad hoc city/county body created to explore formulas for potential voluntary de-annexations.

That report cited six areas considered suitable for de-annexation via City Council action. Several of the areas were large but thinly inhabited land masses where the cost of providing essential city infrastructure was judged to outweigh returns to the city via sales and property tax revenues. But included also and key to the proposal were the South Cordova and Southwind-Windyke areas, both annexed by Memphis relatively recently, both sources of significant revenue for the city, and both hotbeds of de-annexation sentiment.

Some residents of both those areas, while pleased at being included in the “right-sizing” plan, professed themselves at subsequent public meetings to be dissatisfied by the plan’s proposed scheduling, which put off final implementation of their de-annexation until 2020 or 2021.

These residents’ restlessness has been increased further by the apparent disinclination of the Council for a definitive vote on the right-sizing plan before the legislature’s planned adjournment in April, and further yet by a growing consensus on the Council to arrange instead for referenda down the line in the affected city areas.

Hence the decision by the Roland group to exert direct pressure on the legislature to act on its own during the current session. “I’d be fine with having the Council act on it, but it doesn’t look like they’re going to,” declared the Millington Commissioner and declared candidate for County Mayor in 2018.

If the legislature should act on its own, it could well favor a reprise of the 2016 measure proposed by two Hamilton County suburbanites, state Rep. Mike Carter (R-Oooltewah) and state Senator Bo Watson (R-Hixson), whose original measure enabled easy referenda on de-annexation by any community annexed by a city since 1998.

The Carter-Watson measure, considered Draconian by Memphis and other affected cities, passed the House last year and was tabled in a Senate committee only by dint of monumental last-ditch exertions against it by officials of Memphis and other urban areas and by the Greater Memphis Area Chamber of Commerce.

One word of caution for the politically ambitious Roland from a Council source: “Curry Todd (R-Collierville) and [Steve] McManus (R-Cordova) got a message last year” — the idea being that former state Representatives Todd and McManus may have lost their reelection battles last year at least partly due to their zeal for the Carter-Watson bill and the resultant disaffection of influential donors in commercial and financial circles.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

The Buddy System

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

In both our editorial and in this week’s cover story there are a few oblique references to a phenomenon that seems to be on the rise, in Nashville as well as in Washington. And that is an increased readiness of elected public officials to shake somewhat loose from their ideological preoccupations and habits of gridlock — long enough, anyhow, to work effectively to the public good across party lines.

A first-class example of this is the recent joining together for a worthy purpose of two local state senators, each with some claim to political prominence and each with a past record of intense partisan loyalty.

It is still too early to determine just what concrete results might be achieved from the joint efforts of Senator Lee Harris, a Memphis Democrat, and Senator Brian Kelsey, a Germantown Republican, in publicly challenging the intentions of the Tennessee Valley Authority to employ five newly constructed wells in siphoning off from three to five million gallons of water a day from the Memphis Sand aquifer.

TVA’s stated purpose with the wells is to use the water pumped up from the aquifer to cool the machinery of their soon-to-be natural-gas power plant on President’s Island, currently under construction and slated to go online in 2018, replacing the authority’s existing coal-powered plant.

Environmentally knowledgeable citizens, like Ward Archer of the ad hoc Protect Our Aquifer organization and Scott Banbury of the Sierra Club, have been waging a campaign of resistance to TVA’s plans, warning of posssible damage to the clay layers surrounding the aquifer and potential contamination of its contents, the famously pure Memphis drinking water.

They, aided by experts like Brian Waldron, director of the Center for Applied Earth Science and Engineering Research (CAESER) at the University of Memphis, have done their best to make sure that such possible consequences are recognized and taken into account, and have argued that TVA has several alternative sources for its cooling water, all readily at hand — in the Mississippi River, in a nearby alluvial basin, and from the Maxson Wastewater Treatment plant.

And TVA also has the option of purchasing the water it needs directly from MLGW. Arguing that all of these methods would be costlier than drilling water directly from the Sand aquifer, TVA has plugged on with its plans and won approval to do so from the Shelby County Groundwater Quality Control Board, which levied its judgment not on the pros and cons of the matter but essentially on whether TVA had gone through the right protocols in applying for its drilling permits.

Enter Harris and Kelsey, who joined such other public officials as Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland and 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen, in calling for TVA to take no chances with the Memphis aquifer and to pursue one of the other aforementioned options to secure its coolant water.

Harris and Kelsey did more than merely protest; they led a pilgrimage of local media last week to several of the local sources relevant to the TVA/aquifer controversy, including an MLGW water-processing plant, the site of one of the newly drilled wells, and the TVA’s naural-gas facility, nearing completion.

At the latter site, Kelsey noted for the attendant media that the new TVA plant would be “a great thing,” given its ability to operate without the gross air pollutants produced by the coal-operated plant it will replace. But, he warned, the gains in environmental safety could be offset by a “bad thing,” the danger of contamination to the source of Memphis drinking water, should TVA follow through on its plans for drilling into the Sand aquifer.

As Kelsey put it earlier, succinctly, “There’s no point in trading bad air for bad water.”

Even those in the environmental movement who had mistrusted some of Kelsey’s other political positions as being overly conservative are grateful for his intercession, and for his active ad hoc alliance with Harris, a political opposite number in every sense. The two of them together are using a bully pulpit to make their concerns known, and it remains to be seen what the results of that will be.

And, given his political connections and concerns about pollution, Kelsey might well be a source of corrective advice for the Trump administration, which, according to a news item last week, has the option of making enough new appointments to the TVA board this year to form a governing majority on it.

According to sources, the new administration is said to favor TVA’s continuing with coal-burning plants. Memphis has moved beyond that stage, but other sites in TVA’s coverage area haven’t.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Good Signs, Bad Signs

Last week, the Flyer threw a party to celebrate its 20<30 Class of 2017. It was held at the Old Dominick Distillery on Front Street, yet another old downtown building being beautifully and creatively retrofitted. Three hundred folks showed up, most of them young and full of sass, hope, and dreams.

And Memphis has a lot to be hopeful about, if these young people are an indication of the talent pool living here. I was blown away by the diversity, the brains, and the ambition on display in that room.

And then I met Senator Brian Kelsey. I’m kidding. Well, not about meeting Brian Kelsey. We did meet, and it wasn’t as awkward as either of us probably expected, given that I have written some less than complimentary things about the man’s politics. I congratulated him on his work with fellow senator — and Democrat — Lee Harris on behalf preserving our Memphis Sand aquifer, and we chatted pleasantly for a few moments with a mutual friend.

And that gives me hope, too. I’m sure that I’ll have plenty of reasons to criticize Kelsey’s politics in the future, but it’s always a good thing when political opponents can find common ground — or water, in this case. That’s the way things used to work, before we all got funneled into our ideological information silos, before the era of fake news and “alternative facts.”

A couple days later, on Saturday, the Memphis Women’s March brought hope to thousands more people in downtown Memphis. It was a cathartic and energizing demonstration, one that was replicated all over the globe, as women and their allies served notice they wouldn’t quietly surrender to the forces of regression that have taken power in the nation’s capitol.

It’s easy to discount the power of protests, but people taking to the streets drove President Lyndon Johnson into retirement — and eventually ended the Vietnam War and helped bring down Richard Nixon. Change can happen from the bottom up. Sometimes we forget that.

Now we have a president who lies like others breathe. I don’t think it’s a moral failing in Donald Trump’s case; I think it’s a mental illness, a crippling narcissistic disorder. How else to explain his going into CIA headquarters and trying to gaslight intelligence workers? Who does that? Trump told them he hadn’t attacked or disparaged them. A lie. He said his Inauguration crowd was the largest in history. A lie. He said he’d been on the cover of Time magazine more than anyone else. A lie. He even lied about whether it rained while he was giving his Inaugural speech.

He left thinking he’d won them over, but post-speech interviews with CIA leaders and workers revealed that he’d done just the opposite. People, this president’s disconnect with reality is a serious liability for all of us — liberal and conservative. He doesn’t have any discernible principles, except self-aggrandizement. Spouting alternative facts doesn’t work when you’re running a country. This will come to a head. It may take weeks. It may take months. But this level of madness won’t stand for four years.

There is precedent. In December 1973, conservative Republican Senator Barry Goldwater wrote a private note that said, “I have reason to suspect that all might not be well mentally in the White House. This is the only copy that will ever be made of this; it will be locked in my safe.” In 1974, after nearly two years of investigations and hearings, it had become clear that Nixon had ordered the Watergate break-in to Democratic headquarters and tried to cover it up. Goldwater led a delegation to the White House to tell Nixon it was over, that he’d lost Congress and needed to resign. I will not be surprised if history repeats itself.

For the country’s sake, I hope it’s sooner than later. I don’t agree with Vice President Mike Pence on much, but I’d much rather have a president with whom I disagree politically than one who is of questionable sanity.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Unfinished Shelby County Business: Aquifer, EDGE, and Weed.

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

The issue of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s drilling wells into the Memphis Sand aquifer may not be a done deal, after all. Though TVA’s application to complete four wells into the aquifer to acquire water to use as coolant for its forthcoming natural-gas plant was seemingly given the go-ahead in November by the Shelby County Board of Water Quality Control, concerns remain in important political places — on the Memphis City Council and the Shelby County Commission — and in the Tennessee General Assembly.

A bipartisan duo of state senators from Shelby County — Democrat Lee Harris of Memphis and Republican Brian Kelsey of Germantown — last year made a point of expressing solidarity with local environmentalists on their fears of possible contamination of the aquifer and the need to resist the TVA drilling. On Tuesday, in tandem with a media contingent, they began a “fact-finding trip,” which began at the Center for Applied Earth Science and Engineering Research at the University of Memphis and included stops at MLGW’s Sheahan Pumping Station,and the current coal-burning TVA plant on President’s Island and TVA’s soon-to-be natural-gas plant there.

Jackson Baker

Ward Archer and state Senators Lee Harris and Brian Kelsey at site of new TVA plant

 • The final form of the Shelby County Commission’s legislative agenda, to be presented to the General Assembly by the county’s lobbyists, was achieved on Monday, with the unanimous approval of a brief addendum, apropos the city-county EDGE board, which is responsible for making industrial-development decisions. The resolution called for “a member of the governing body of the municipality where the Industrial Development Board (IDB) was created to serve as a voting board member of the IDB.” Currently, the city council and county commission each have a non-voting member on the EDGE board.

Conspicuously absent from the final legislative agenda, due to unresolved discord, was a previously floated item calling for approval of medical marijuana and a “second chance” policy for persons arrested for possession of minor amounts of pot. The General Assembly is expected to take up the issue of legalizing medical marijuana.

Put off again were two resolutions having to do with the Shelby County Board of Education’s efforts to balance its books. One resolution was to receive and file the board’s first quarter report for the year ending June 30th. Another would ratify and approve amendments to the board’s budget for fiscal year 2017, adding on expenditures of $217,389. Neither had achieved any consensus from the commission’s education committee last Wednesday.

• Citing what he said was a “critical need” for infrastructure improvements in the county and its municipalities, Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell endorsed Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam‘s  proposed seven percent increase in the state’s gasoline tax in an appearance at the commission’s Monday meeting. The proposed tax hike would enable work to begin on a backlog of $10 billion worth of infrastructure projects that Haslam and Commissioner John Schroer of the Tennessee Department of Transportation deem long overdue but undone for lack of funding. 

Along with new fees on electric vehicles and rental cars, the proposed tax increase would pay for an overhaul plan, which the governor has given the name “The IMPROVE Act” (“Improving Manufacturing, Public Roads, and Opportunities for a Vibrant Economy”). 

The governor’s proposal calls for the gasoline-tax increase to be accompanied by a half-cent reduction in the state sales tax on groceries, by $113 million in cuts to the state’s business taxes, and by cuts to the Hall Income Tax.

Luttrell said that Haslam’s proposal called for more than $9 million to be spent in Shelby County and in the county’s several municipalities. “There will be some opposition to it in the General Assembly,” Luttrell cautioned, adding that he would be coming back to the commission seeking “a more formal resolution for support” once the proposed measure was in its final form.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Kelsey, Harris: Bipartisan Effort on Aquifer Issue

“There’s no point in trading bad air to get bad water.”

That was a comment made this past weekend by state Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown) in support of his intention to make common cause with fellow state Senator Lee Harris (D-Memphis). The two legislators — one an ideological Republican of the hard right, the other a self-professed progressive and the leader of his party in the Senate — agree on very little, but they share a concern about the impact of five proposed Tennessee Valley Authoirity wells being drilled into Memphis’ Sand aquifer.

Brian Kelsey and Lee Harris

Although it wasn’t immediately obvious just how the aquifer issue could be affected at the state legislative level — a fact granted by both Kelsey and Harris — the prospect of a bully-pulpit effort across political lines could not fail to hearten the sizable (and growing) corps of environmentally conscious citizens opposing TVA’s drilling plans.

Technically the issue has already been resolved in TVA’s favor, as the result of a hearing two weeks ago by the Shelby County Water Quality Health Board affirming the authority’s right to drill the final two wells of the five it envisions in order to acquire a supply of water for coolant purposes at its forthcoming natural-gas power plant on Presidents Island. In 2018, that plant is scheduled to replace TVA’s current coal-burning plant (the source of the “bad air” mentioned by Kelsey).

Scott Banbury, conservation program coordinator for the Sierra Club in Tennessee, had filed an appeal with the board in September to block the two wells after learning that permits for the first three proposed wells had already been granted by the Shelby County Health Department and that a 15-day period for appealing them had already passed. Contending that there had been no public notice of those wells, he resolved to act on the final two, which were still eligible for appeal.

Virtually overnight, a sizeable movement under the name of Protect the Aquifer and led by Memphis advertising executive Ward Archer, sprang up to back Banbury’s appeal. The group held several public-information sessions and turned up en masse for the appeal, held November 30th.

But the appellant group saw themselves impeded by procedural rules preventing them from presenting their expert witnesses but allowing TVA ample scope for its own experts. They felt hampered too by the hearing’s focus on checklist matters rather than the specific issues raised by the environmentalist coalition — namely, that the Memphis area’s long-treasured supply of pure drinking water might be endangered in numerous ways by the intrusion of the TVA wells.

The appellants pointed out that TVA itself had first proposed to use treated water from the nearby Maxson wastewater plant as its coolant agent but had discarded that plan as overly expensive and had not considered another option, that of using water from the Mississippi River’s alluvial aquifer. Drilling into Memphis’ Sand aquifer, they said, meant risking the seepage into it of polluted water through unstable adjacent clay layers.

The board, however, citing the adherence by TVA and the health department to the aforementioned checklist procedures, turned down the appeal, leaving opponents two further options — appealing to Chancery Court and petitioning the Shelby County Commission to alter the rules governing permits for future drilling into the aquifer.

Add to that whatever other options might come from what both Kelsey and Harris see as a bipartisan coalition to raise public consciousness on environmental consequences of the TVA drilling and to explore alternative procedures — both short- and long-term — for vetting water issues. In an interview with Channel 24, broadcast on Sunday, Democrat Harris made public his partnership with Kelsey on the matter and declared, “We have to say that some things are sacred, and our water supply is one of them.”

• Youthful activists from all across America turned up in Memphis over the weekend for the annual Young Democrats of America Winter Conference, hosted this year by the Tennessee Young Democrats. As a bonus, they got a first-hand look at U.S. Representative Keith Ellison (D-MN), who is regarded as the front-runner to become the next chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

Ellison, a diminutive fireplug of a man, had previously impressed Tennesseans at this year’s Democratic convention in Cleveland with a breakfast address to a joint meeting of the Tennesse and Minnesota delegations, and the rousing remarks he delivered on Friday night at the conference’s welcome reception at Bluefin Restaurant on South Main did not disappoint the gathered Young Democrats and a sizeable group of local attendees.

Introduced by Tennessee Young Democrat president London Lamar of Memphis and by Louis Elrod of Atlanta, president of the Young Democrats of America, Ellison called for an “all-hands-on-deck moment” and for a “24/7, 365-days-a-year” effort to revitalize Democratic Party efforts. “As bad as you may have felt on election day, you can feel just that good in 2018, if we get out and organize right now,” he said to the assembled YDs. He likened them to “the young people who fought the civil rights movement” and told them that they and “no chair, no big shot from Washington” would determine the shape of the future.

“What we really need is solidarity,” he said. “Men for women, straights for gays, and all working together for economic justice and for ‘our revolution.'”

Ellison confirmed reports that he had decided, if elected DNC chair, to relinquish his Congressional seat in order to devote full time to DNC leadership efforts.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Mixed Signals on Trump

Summing up from a variety of reactions, there would seem to be a consensus that Republican nominee Donald Trump fared better in his second nationally televised Game of the Dozens (read: presidential debate) with opponent Hillary Clinton than he did in their first encounter. 

That’s basically an evaluation of Trump’s improved level of coherence, the semblance of an organized game plan on his part, and his use of an effective zinger or two — all that coupled with a diminished level of poise on the part of Clinton, who still scored high on logic and policy points but who, in contrast to her gleefully confident, shimmy-prone self of the first debate, seemed at least slightly unnerved.

But Trump’s “comeback,” if it is one, would seem in the long run to come at his own expense. His best riposte — “because you’d be in jail” — was delivered in response to a dismissive line of hers expressing relief that someone like Trump hadn’t gotten his hands on the nation’s legal machinery. 

That echo of the “Lock her up!” refrain from the GOP conventioneers’ chant in Cleveland — aimed at Clinton’s email issues and a host of other alleged misprisions — had to be greatly satisfying to Trump’s populist base, the 40-odd percent who stick with him in poll after poll, regardless of policy muffs and salacious “locker room” asides about women.

But the line, auguring a heavy-handed use of presidential power, linked up in the minds of a good many others with the bullying tactics so often on display with Trump, sounded troubling. 

The reaction of two key Tennessee Republicans is indicative of Trump’s dilemma.

Governor Bill Haslam this week lent his voice to the chorus of Republicans who’ve had enough of Trump: “It is time for the good of the nation and the Republican Party for Donald Trump to step aside and let [vice-presidential nominee] Governor Mike Pence assume the role as the party’s nominee,” Haslam said.

A more indulgent and salutary view of Trump’s circumstances came from one of Memphis’ — and the nation’s — ranking members of the GOP, Republican National Committee general counsel John Ryder. After last weekend’s release of an 11-year-old videotape of Trump’s unguarded, sexually explicit conversation with Access Hollywood principal Billy Bush, Ryder had referred to Trump as a “flawed messenger” but insisted the “message” Trump channeled of unrest and desire for change in national policy was still valid, live, and well.

Ryder also theorized that the rush to the exits by numerous Republicans — some, like Haslam, calling for Trump to step down as nominee, others, in Tennessee as elsewhere, merely withholding their support — would likely abate. He cited the technical obstacles to bringing about a change in the ticket as insuperable, especially since early voting had already started in many places.

And, while acknowledging that Sunday night’s encounter between Trump and Clinton in St. Louis “was one of the meanest debates I’ve ever seen,” the RNC counsel thought the meanness worked both ways. And, while Ryder was hesitant to comment on Trump’s chances of winning the presidency, he was confident that the nominee had managed to “stop the bleeding” in Republican ranks internally and that any likelihood of the presidential race’s adversely affecting down-ballot races involving other Republicans had been made more remote. 

Not so sure of that, clearly, is GOP Speaker of the House Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, who has sworn off campaigning with or for Trump and is pointedly focusing his efforts on shoring up Republican congressional campaigns.

• One of the more active public-policy groups on the political scene is the Tennessee Nurses Association, which regularly holds seminars, forums, and information sessions on medical, veterans, and other issues it regards as significant to the public realm.

The TNA was scheduled to host several of the candidates in the November 8th election at its latest legislative forum at Jason’s Deli on Poplar, Wednesday, October 12th. Attending, besides an extensive corps of TNA members, will be various candidates for state, local, regional, and federal offices, including aldermens’ and school board races, and spokespersons for the campaigns of presidential candidates Trump and Clinton. 

• The matter may have more voyeuristic than political consequence, but the legislators mentioned in that report by Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery about the sordid sexual escapades of now disgraced and expelled state Representative Jeremy Durham (R-Franklin) have now been outed.

The Nashville Scene has published a full list of the state representatives who were cited in the report as either Jane Doe or John Doe, with a number assigned to them to establish their place in the narrative.

Whatever the embarrassment quotient to them, most of the legislators so named do not figure in ways that could be considered incriminating. But the Democrats on Capitol Hill in Nashville are having fun all the same, turning the spit on their named colleagues, all of whom happen to be Republicans.

The most inconvenienced legislator in the list would have to be Representative Mary Littleton (R-Dickson), who is described in the attorney general’s report as firing a staff assistant, one of the non-legislative Jane Does mentioned as having had some sort of relationship with Durham or at least as having had a place on his hit list.

As written, the AG report doesn’t make Littleton’s motives clear, though it does state that she and Durham were considered to be good friends and frequent companions in their own right.

Of the 10 legislators whose identities were supplied by the Scene, none of them represent any part of Shelby County, though one of them, Representative Gerald McCormick (R-Chattanooga), is a native Memphian who attended high school in Germantown. His role, as described in the report, can fairly be described as one of fact-finding — consistent with his position, since relinquished, as GOP majority leader in the House. 

Once expelled from office, Durham — who, previous to expulsion, had been defeated in a reelection race this year, closed down his Political Action Committee and transferred its financial contents to his campaign committee.  

Looking through his report, The Tennessee Journal newsletter commented on two matters therein — an expenditure of $956 for University of Tennessee football tickets and a $999 contribution to the unsuccessful 8th District congressional campaign of state Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown). Though he himself was not involved in the altercation, Kelsey was Durham’s companion at the recent Vols-Florida Gators game in Neyland Stadium from which Durham was evicted for slugging a Florida fan in the face.

• After breezing through a series of more or less pro forma committee sessions last Wednesday, the Shelby County Commission may well indulge its well-established taste for controversy on Monday when, after a week off for Columbus Day, the commission holds its next regular public meeting.

One of the matters scheduled for consideration is County Mayor Mark Luttrell‘s nomination of lawyer Kathryn Pascover, formerly of the FordHarrison law firm, to be county attorney. In something of a surprise move, Pascover, a specialist in labor/management law, was named interim attorney last month, succeeding in that role Marcy Ingram, whom several commissioners had thought was in line to become permanent county attorney.

Pascover probably has enough votes to pass muster, including some from members of the apparent commission majority backing two pending measures to restrict the mayor’s appointive powers. But she can expect some hard questioning during the debate on her nomination from one or two members who are seriously dialed into the body’s ongoing power struggle with Luttrell.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Crap Shoot in the 8th

I’m thinking of moving to Tennessee’s 8th Congressional District so I can vote for Karen Free Spirit Talley-Lane. Karen, or “Free” as I like to call her, is an independent candidate, one of 20 people vying to become GOP Congressman Stephen Fincher’s replacement, including four other independents, two Democrats, and 13(!) Republicans.

There are 13 Republicans running because the 8th District has been gerrymandered into a lockdown seat for the GOP. All one of these 13 boys has to do is win, say, 20 percent of the votes and they’re on their way to Washington, D.C. The actual election in November is a foregone conclusion.

And thanks to the GOP gerrymandering of the 8th District that occurred after the 2010 census, I wouldn’t have to move very far to vote for Free — just to the “finger” on the map that juts its way deep into east Memphis, into the heart of what used to be Democratic 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen’s district, including the area where many of the city’s Jewish voters live. Huh, what could they have been thinking?

No problem, they gave Cohen Millington in exchange. Seems fair, right?

Gerrymandering is the source of our congressional gridlock. It’s a system that allows office-holders to literally pick who gets to vote for (and against) them. The majority party in power after the census obtains the right to draw the borders of our districts and other various political bailiwicks. They almost always do so in a way that splits and scatters the opposition party’s voters and solidifies their own. That’s why members of Congress are very seldom defeated, unless it’s by a member of their own party in a primary. Since they don’t have to work across party lines in their home districts, there’s very little inclination to do so once they get to Washington. They just have to keep the homefolks in their own party happy.

And that’s why there is a mad scramble among 13 Republicans to win the GOP nomination in the 8th. Once they’re in, they’re in for as long as they want to be there.

Just eight years ago, things were reversed. Longtime Democratic Congressman John Tanner controlled the 8th District, winning election after election. In 2008, the GOP didn’t even field a candidate. Tanner won the general election with 180,000 votes to his write-in opponent’s 54 — almost literally 100 percent of the electorate!

Then Tanner retired, and in the 2010 “wave” election, Fincher beat Democrat Roy Herron. In the post-census redistricting, the 8th District got gerrymandered to ensure that it would remain Republican, at least until the next census. That was done by moving much of eastern Shelby County, a GOP stronghold, from the 9th District to the 8th.

Which is why the Memphis television and radio airwaves are now filled with ads from Republicans, each trying to outdo the others with their red, white, and blue credentials. David Kustoff is going to end Islamic terrorism; George Flinn is going to abolish Obamacare (with the help of those two white-haired biddies who love him so); and real conservative Brian Kelsey is going to be the most conservative conservative who ever conserved. It’s why we are being visited by the dregs of the recent GOP presidential nomination process — Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, and others — who are pitching for one or the other of the Goopsters. It’s why city boys are putting on their best button-down plaid shirts and visiting tractor pulls and county fairs.

There’s been little independent polling, making this race a crapshoot in the most literal and metaphorical sense. The early thinking was that Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell had the inside track, which would be fine with me, frankly. He at least tried to push for Governor Haslam’s expansion of Medicare, indicating that he has a brain and actually cares about the area’s uninsured population and Shelby County’s overburdened hospitals. Having another congressman from Memphis couldn’t hurt. It certainly beats having one from Frog Jump, like Fincher.

I mean, as long as Karen Free Spirit Talley-Lane is out of the running …