Tag: City Council

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News The Fly-By

Give It Some Gas

Alternative fuels are widely available at pumping stations across East Tennessee and in part of Arkansas, but not in Memphis.

The Riverside, a gas station on Riverside Drive, has been selling biodiesel, a fuel made from oils and fats, for almost a year. But no local gas stations offer ethanol, an alternative fuel made from corn. City Council member Dedrick Brittenum’s constituents aren’t happy about it.

“They want to know why they have to drive [so far] to get biofuel,” Brittenum said.

On December 18th, the City Council is expected to vote on an ordinance encouraging local retailers to offer ethanol and biodiesel by 2009 and 2010, respectively. It also requires city vehicles to begin using biofuels, when available, by 2009.

But the original ordinance considered by the council would have done more than just encourage retailers to sell alternative fuels.

Brittenum proposed an ordinance that would have required fuel retailers to sell standard diesel with a minimum mixture of 5 percent biodiesel by January 1, 2010, and a minimum mixture of 10 percent ethanol and 90 percent gasoline by January 1, 2009.

The ordinance passed in its initial two readings before the City Council, but when officials from the Tennessee Petroleum Council, the Tennessee Oil Marketers Association, and the Valero Energy Corporation found out about the ordinance, they wanted a few changes.

“We are not opposed to biofuels, and we have no problem with Memphis making strides in alternative fuels, but we do have a problem with a mandate,” said Mike Williams, executive director of the Tennessee Petroleum Council. “It looks like this ordinance [was] telling our members what to sell and telling customers what to buy.”

At a meeting last week with Brittenum, oil industry representatives echoed those concerns.

“Our concern is availability and cost of product,” said Emily LeRoy, associate director of the Tennessee Oil Marketers Association, a trade organization for petroleum marketers. “The commodities market determines the price of alternative fuels.”

LeRoy said many distributors already sell biofuel blends. But she said mandating biofuel use would cripple businesses when the commodities market drives up the price of corn.

“We don’t want a situation where our hands are tied and we’re unable to be competitive in the marketplace,” Williams added.

Currently, Williams said ethanol must be shipped to the area from factories in East Tennessee. Several ethanol plants are planned for West Tennessee and North Mississippi, and ethanol will be available in Memphis once those plants begin producing fuel. Memphis is already home to two biodiesel producers: Memphis Biofuels and Milagro Biofuels.

After input from the industry, Brittenum edited the ordinance so that the sale of biofuel would be voluntary. The council will establish a committee of citizens, biofuel industry representatives, and petroleum industry officials to oversee its implementation.

Though the final ordinance was diluted, biofuels advocate Andrew Couch of the West Tennessee Clean Cities Coalition said he wasn’t upset with the changes.

“I don’t really want a mandate either. I don’t want to force anything on anybody even if it is a good idea,” Couch said. “While this ordinance won’t necessarily do a whole lot by itself, it sets up a framework that we can work out of.”

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News The Fly-By

Sex and Real Estate

CREDIT: AGG | dreamstime.com

Urban Land Institute trend-watcher Chuck DiRocco says everything comes down to real estate.

“If an adjustable-rate mortgage resets from $600 a month to $900 a month, that’s $300 in disposable income that people are not spending elsewhere,” DiRocco said. “It’s going to affect commercial real estate down the line.”

As one of the authors of the land institute’s Emerging Trends in Real Estate, DiRocco was in Memphis last week to present the study’s findings and to discuss which markets are the “ones to watch.”

And, frankly, Memphis wasn’t one of them.

In terms of commercial and multi-family development potential, the study ranked Memphis 38th out of 45 metropolitan areas. Topping the list were Seattle, New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Boston.

“The top markets to watch fall on the coast,” DiRocco said. “It all comes down to global pathways.”

That and what the study calls “24-hour cities.”

“For years, Emerging Trends has extolled the handful of America’s 24-hour cities — multifaceted markets with desirable, walkable residential neighborhoods near commercial cores: New York [City], Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Boston, and Chicago. These markets — along with Southern California’s suburban agglomeration and more recently Seattle — have gained further status as the preeminent U.S. global gateways,” read the report.

With the economy on a downswing, investors want to be safe, not sorry. But DiRocco noted that logistics experts are beginning to look inland for global gateways. And that is where local panelists think Memphis could succeed.

“Though we’re not a port city,” said local panelist Jim Mercer of CB Richard Ellis, “I think we’re probably the next best thing.”

With FedEx’s hub and the busiest cargo airport in the nation, Memphis is uniquely situated to become what experts call an “aerotropolis,” a city built around a bustling airport and aviation-intensive businesses.

But, as DiRocco says, everything depends on real estate.

Which might explain why, later that same day at a public hearing, representatives from airport area businesses and the Memphis medical community spoke against the city’s proposed sexually oriented business ordinance.

The area around the airport includes an unlikely combination of Smith & Nephew, Medtronic, Elvis Presley Enterprises, FedEx, and various adult businesses.

If enacted, the city ordinance would replace a new county ordinance that outlaws topless dancing and prohibits alcohol in the clubs. The city ordinance would allow beer sales and topless dancing.

If the City Council decides to do nothing, the county ordinance will go into effect countywide January 1st.

“We would prefer to adopt stricter guidelines,” said Bill Griffin, a senior vice president with Smith & Nephew. “We want to make the area around the airport a nice place to do business.”

John Lawrence, head of the Airport Area Development Corporation, said member businesses were concerned about the secondary effects of sexually oriented businesses, such as crime and falling property values.

“Today, it’s an area where industry is bringing in prospect after prospect. They’re bringing in doctors, researchers. Do we value these businesses?” Lawrence asked.

It seems strippers are standing (or dancing) in the way of Memphis’ potential in the global economy. But that’s not quite fair. As a representative for the sexually oriented businesses, attorney Edward Bearman pointed out that nothing in the new ordinance makes sexually oriented businesses safer or reduces crime.

“The reason the clubs are located near the airport is because that’s where the zoning will allow them,” he said. “They have money invested in this town, just the same as other businesses.”

I’m not going to get into whether clubs should close at 3 a.m. or midnight or whether they should allow beer sales or brown-bagging, nude dancing or semi-nude dancing.

But if the city’s goal is to encourage global pathways through Memphis, then the airport area is a precious commodity. Elvis Presley Enterprises, for instance, has a $250 million plan to transform the area around Graceland much like Disney did in Anaheim, California.

If the city doesn’t enact an ordinance, the county ordinance might regulate the strip clubs right out of business. I’m not sure that’s right, but lap dances and back rooms don’t seem to fit with a global commercial hub and an international tourist destination.

Adult businesses may offer something to see, but they won’t make Memphis a market to watch.

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Politics Politics Feature

Mayoral Warning of Jurisdictional “Gray Line” Only Discordant Note in First Get-Together with New Council

CREDIT: jb

Though the grins were plentiful as Mayor Willie Herenton and members of his council-to-be in 2008 got together for lunch at The Rendezvous on Wednesday, the smiles may have tightened up a little when His Honor climaxed the get-acquainted event with a speech that warned of a “grey line” and of “certain areas where either branch decided to get into the other branch’s domain.”

A shot across the bow it seemed, a recap of sorts of the mayor’s troubles with past councils — most recently on council staff appointments — on matters where, as Herenton indicated, the legislative and executive branches of city government may have had conflicting ambitions.

But that was as contentious as things got Wednesday as former councilman and Rendezvous owner John Vergos, along with another former council member, the Rev. James Netters, co-hosted the luncheon in which nine newly elected members came together for the first time with the four holdover council members.

Oh, Joe Brown made special mention of “divisiveness,” and Netters referred to even worse times of the past, like the late ‘60s, when he and other members of the city’s first elected council had to deal with “riots, violence, and murder,” in the context of a prolonged sanitation strike and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King.

But mostly talk was of the upbeat sort, beginning with Vergos’ mention of a Rhodes College brochure touting Memphis’ virtues and continuing with mutual pledges all around of cooperation in the New Year.

Afterward, the mayor, who announced he would not hold the annual New Year’s Day prayer breakfast on which, customarily in recent years, he would issue policy thunderbolts, gave reporters a list of objectives which included such familiar (but unachieved) standbys as Metro government and bringing the city school system into municipal government as such.

Herenton also pledged to resolve financial and jurisdictional disputes in the operation of the Beale Street tourist quarter. He deferred to the council on the matter of whether it should pass its own version of a county commission ordinance on topless clubs, but it is taken for granted he wants a more lenient ordinance than the county version, which bans beer sales in such establishments and requires pasties of dancers.

Ironically enough, a wall of the basement room in which council members, staffers, and the mayor contained objets d’art, including a rendering of a reclining nude, sans pasties.

The entire complement of the 2008 council membership was on hand, with the exception of new member Reid Hedgepeth. Mayoral aides Keith McGhee and Pete Aviotti also attended.

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News The Fly-By

Time’s Up

CREDIT: MILOSLUZ | dreamstime.com

With City Council committees already running late, Myron Lowery issued a strict edict at last week’s planning and zoning meeting. “My commitment to everyone is that we will end, on time, at 3 o’clock,” he said. “Any item we don’t finish won’t be finished.”

It was an all-too-common reminder for the council that it is running out of time.

Come January, nine members of the 13-member City Council will be gone. Longtime members Jack Sammons and Tom Marshall didn’t run for reelection. Neither did E.C. Jones, Brent Taylor, Edmund Ford, or Dedrick Brittenum. Carol Chumney lost her bid for mayor. And mid-term replacements Madeleine Cooper Taylor and Henry Hooper ran for, but didn’t win, their current seats.

Which means if the council wants to do anything, it needs to do it now.

In October, Marshall, the current chair, proposed 11 items the council should undertake before the year ended, including a tourist development zone around Graceland, an anti-blight initiative, a redevelopment plan for the Fairgrounds, and a revision to the city’s billboard and sign ordinance.

But the billboard and sign ordinance was one of the things that got caught in the crunch last week.

Duncan Associates consultant Eric Kelly was ready to present the proposed changes to the current sign ordinance when Brittenum made a motion to delay the item until it had been heard by the Land Use Control Board. Brittenum read a section from the current zoning regulations that stipulated any changes have to be heard at Land Use before coming to the council.

“My contention is that this matter cannot be heard until the Land Use Control Board hears it. Who knows what Land Use is going to say?” Brittenum said. “If we do it this other truncated way … I’m telling you, we’re subjecting ourselves to legal action.”

But waiting didn’t sit well with other council members.

“It doesn’t say anywhere it cannot be submitted to the council,” Marshall said. “We’re doing it in tandem with the Land Use Control Board.”

The changes are scheduled to come before the Land Use Control Board at its December meeting. The ordinance and Land Use’s recommendation will then be heard by the council December 18th, the last meeting of the year, and for most council members, probably their last meeting.

And since each ordinance has to go through three readings (and be approved in the meeting minutes), that puts the sign ordinance outside the realm of the current council.

“I put in hours of time with [the Office of Planning and Development] and the consultant. The consultant is here today to talk about this thing and to afford this council honest discourse on the subject,” Marshall said. “To simply throw that away because of some sort of bureaucratic glitch … We’re the anti-bureaucracy up here. We’re the guys who are supposed to break the bureaucratic red tape and deal with things, not find reasons not to deal with them.”

But the committee decided against hearing the consultant’s presentation. It will wait for the recommendation from Land Use.

“If there was some urge to get the sign ordinance finished, why didn’t we get it started early enough so that it could go in the proper order?” Brittenum asked.

It’s a fair question. Marshall has been a member of the council since 1986, or for the mathematically challenged, more than 20 years. His term is old enough to drink.

Sammons has spent a combined, though not consecutive, 16 years on the council. Jones and Taylor have both been council members for more than a decade.

But government is a slow business. Not only does each ordinance take three meetings before it is enacted, there are also countless hours of research and discussion. The ordinances get sent back to committees for more discussion; they get deferred when committees are too busy talking about something else. And that’s how it should be.

But a ticking clock can be a powerful motivator: Think about alarm clocks, bombs, Captain Hook.

With time running out, there seems to be a rededication on the part of the council to getting things done. That’s not to say that what they’ve accomplished before doesn’t count or took too long. I just haven’t seen this much urgency in a while. Frankly, it’s a good argument for term limits.

But, then again, what do writers know about deadlines?

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Herenton to Break Bread with New Council at Wednesday Lunch

CREDIT: jb

In what would seem to be a precedent-setting move, Mayor Willie Herenton is sitting down with his newly elected 13-member council for a get-acquainted lunch on Wednesday at the downtown Rendezvous Restaurant. The luncheon, arranged by former councilman John Vergos, the Rendezvous’s owner, is co-hosted by Vergos and former councilman and mayoral intimate Rev. James Netters.

According to a source, the luncheon is meant, among other things, to be a clear and obvious call for public peace on the part of the mayor, who famously has quarreled with council members over the years and strongly condemned the council at a memorable New Year’s Day prayer breakfast in 2004.

–Jackson Baker

Categories
Opinion

Get Wise: Monetize

Ethics codes are so yesterday. Tennessee Waltz, Main Street Sweeper, Tarnished Blue, Tarnished News, and “Same Game Different Name” have thrown politicians, cops, and journalists into a hopeless state of confusion.

Ethics shmethics. What they need is a fee schedule to help them fairly and honestly value their services in today’s ever-changing marketplace.

Well, Mr. Monetize is here at your service.

Dear Mr. Monetize: What would Kant say about all of this?

Immanuel Kant, a founding member of the Memphis City Council, is famous for his “categorical imperative,” which reads in part: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”

Because of the confusing structure and irregular syntax of this sentence, it was later amended by ordinance on a unanimous vote to read: “Do what you can get away with as long as you can point to somebody else who had an even better deal.”

Dear Mr. Monetize: I’m an elected official who’s bad at math. How many ways can I monetize?

A bunch. There are 13 City Council members and 13 county commissioners plus 14 city and county school board members. Like Kant said back in the day, each one of you is a potential independent contractor or consultant-to-the-max under universal law. Multiply all those numbers and the result is a really big number.

Dear Mr. Monetize: So how much should I charge for services?

It depends on the nature of the service, the timing, and the size of your cojones. But these guidelines should be useful. Prices are subject to change without notice, and holiday discounts may or may not apply. Coupons may not be used in some situations.

Consulting: The sky’s the limit! A monthly retainer of $5,000 is entirely appropriate. On an annual basis, $100,000 and up is more like it. The “contingency fee” or “finder’s fee” of one-half of 1 percent may yield a better return if the contract is large and the client is generous, stupid, or desperate. Step one is to print some business cards that list your occupation as “consultant.”

Setting up a meeting: A fee of $20,000 is standard, plus the cost of food, drinks, and napkins if required. (A mark-up should not be charged on those items, however.) For a simple office meeting, a fee of $1,000 for the first consultation is reasonable and customary.

Phone call to mayor: $100, plus carrier charges.

Phone call to cuss out reporter: $500, plus carrier charges. The fee must be returned if the reporter bites back.

Phone call to constituent: no charge. But remember: leads, leads, leads!

Phone call to assistant U.S. attorney Tim DiScenza: oops! Wrong number.

Personal visit to member of quasi-public board with power to dispense monies in excess of $10 million: $750 per visit. If provider is a member of board, fees are tripled.

Sucking up to mayor: job paying at least $80,000 a year plus pension benefits.

Insulting or cussing out mayor: $50 per television interview, with an additional $50 each time the clip airs. Get residuals!

Dear Mr. Monetize: I’m a cop who knows some bad shit that went down in the department. What should I do?

Get in line.

Dear Mr. Monetize: I am a print journalist. Recent actions of the City Council, the County Commission, and federal prosecutors regarding so-called strip clubs have caused a certain amount of shrinkage, if you know what I mean, in our publication, which used to feature full-page pictures of sexy young women with huge monetizers. What can I do?

You could start with that picture at the top of this page.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Blue City

CREDIT: DORIY | dreamstime.com

When they say Memphis is the Home of the Blues, they’re not talking about blue laws. But maybe they should be. The City Council voted last week to prohibit beer sales for off-premise consumption within 500 feet of churches, schools, and most residential areas. Though stores currently selling beer will be grandfathered in, any new stores wanting to locate within the 500-foot restriction will have to be located on a state or federal highway.

“We’ve got a crime problem, and this is the catalyst,” Councilman Joe Brown said during a recent committee meeting, adding that he was speaking from a moral perspective. “That’s why this is so important.”

But the ordinance wasn’t easy for everyone to swallow.

“As I understand it,” said Councilman Dedrick Brittenum at a full council meeting, “the existing stores that sell beer have a problem with people loitering around those establishments and selling beer to minors and that sort of thing. The original ordinance on the floor would do nothing to stop that.”

As initially proposed by Brown, the ordinance banned off-premise beer sales at stores near single-family homes and duplexes, as well as near schools and churches. Under that scenario, only 8,000 parcels of land would qualify for off-premise beer consumption, compared to more than 25,000 currently eligible.

“It tended to exclude a large portion of the city,” said Brittenum.

Citing economic and development reasons, Brittenum offered an alternative that removed residential areas from the ordinance but added a penalty phase.

“We’re trying to go to a more livable, walkable, smart-growth city. If that’s the case, we may need some stores close to residential areas,” Brittenum told fellow council members.

Under smart-growth principles, developments are often built as mixed-use, with residences near, next to, or even above retail stores. A draft of the new Unified Development Code, which lays out zoning and subdivision regulations, has provisions for just such mixed-use areas. In addition, many smaller stores see a large portion of their profit from beer sales.

“If you don’t leave out [residences],” Brittenum said, “no new stores will open in residential areas that will sell bread, sugar, your staples. The economics just won’t work.”

Brittenum also pointed out that the ordinance — as originally proposed — would essentially create a territorial monopoly for existing stores.

“We would be forever grandfathering in those businesses because they will be so valuable they’ll never go out of business. Ever,” he said.

To solve that particular problem, he suggested a penalty phase to the ordinance: If a store gets three violations in two years, it would lose the privilege of having a beer license. The licensee would lose the right to apply for a new beer license anywhere in the city for the following two years.

Other council members liked the penalty provision but could not be convinced to remove residential areas from the ordinance. In fact, when it was pointed out that the ordinance inexplicably left out a distance requirement for apartments, those areas were added, too.

“I do understand that we’re talking about livable communities and walkable communities, but we’re also talking about communities where our children are,” said Barbara Swearengen Ware during a committee meeting.

Brown said he thought the council was “in the business of eliminating crime.”

“There is a lot of criminal activity [at convenience stores]. People who walk to stores for beer have [alcohol and drug] problems,” Brown said. “Let’s stop this thing, and we can live in a good city.”

In a compromise, Brittenum suggested that the ordinance exempt those stores on interstates and state and federal highways, and the measure passed. The ordinance also gives applicants who are rejected by the beer board a chance to appeal directly to the City Council.

Even so, adding residential to the ordinance is an extensive change. Frankly, considering how many areas are now off-limits, I’m surprised that the measure didn’t meet with more resistance.

Just two years ago, after a Wal-Mart opened in Whitehaven and wasn’t allowed to sell beer at that location, the council considered lowering the distance requirement from schools and churches because members felt it was hampering economic growth.

There might be a lot of churches in this city, but there are a lot more houses, duplexes, and apartment buildings. The stores I can think of that sell beer for off-premise consumption — gas stations, drug stores, places like Miss Cordelia’s on Mud Island — are often located close to residential areas.

And for many areas, it’s already last call.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

The Final Four Council Winners: Morrison, Boyd, Collins, Ford

CREDIT: jb (w/Ron Williams)

The fat lady of legend has sung her song. The 2007 Memphis
city election is over – a fact that’s music to the ears of newly elected council
members Bill Morrison in District 1, Bill Boyd in District 2,
Harold Collins in District 3, and Edmund Ford Jr., in District 6.

The three latter races were relatively close, with Boyd
beating Brian Stephens by 54 percent to 46 percent; Collins defeating
Ike Griffith by the same percentage, and Ford prevailing over James
Catchings by 53 percent to 47 percent.

The only real blowout occurred in District 1 with the
unexpectedly lopsided victory of Morrison, one of the spunkiest, sunniest, and
most determined new faces of recent political history, who beat school board member
Stephanie Gatewood, no slouch herself, by a margin of almost two to one.

Morrison had help from a talented and seasoned corps of
Democratic activists, many of whom were also active in Stephens’ District 2
candidacy. Aside from former assessor Boyd’s longtime political history, what
may have made the difference for him was the fact of last-minute robo-calls from
former political eminences Bill Morris and Dick Hackett.

Griffith, who has neighborhood cachet in District 3, ran
Collins close, but the latter’s support from established political figures,
including mayors Willie Herenton and A C Wharton, was enough to
give Collins his first leg up as an active candidate in his own right.

Similarly, Ford’s victory, entitling him to succeed his
father, retiring councilman Edmund Ford Sr. in District 6, owed much to
legacy considerations related to his extended family’s prominence in local
politics.

The well-liked Boyd, who is in his 60s, is the anomaly in
the new council, which is overwhelmingly youth-oriented.

With all 122 affected precincts reported, unofficial totals
in the four races were:

DISTRICT 1
(31 Precincts )

  • Morrison
    – 1479 Votes
  • Gatewood – 816 Votes

DISTRICT 2(31 Precinct)


  • Boyd- 2337 Votes
  • Stephens- 1958 Votes

DISTRICT 3(26 Precincts)


  • Collins- 865 Votes
  • Griffith- 741 Votes

DISTRICT 6(34
Precincts)

  • Ford
    – 1751 Votes

Catchings – 1556 Votes

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

The Final Four

Say this for the 2007 incarnation of the Shelby County Election Commission: Its members are trying. Right or wrong, that’s something that various critics doubted about the 2006 version of the commission, plagued by late and lost returns, ineffective software, erratic machines, incorrect election screens, and post-election printouts whose totals were entered in some kind of unintelligible Martian algebra.

“We got started on a rough, rough road,” acknowledged then chairman Greg Duckett, who has moved on since then to the state Election Commission. Another Democratic commissioner, Maura Black Sullivan, was not reappointed by her party’s General Assembly contingent. The Democratic legislators opted to fill the two vacancies with two Democrats who, coincidentally or not, had past grievances related to the commission.

One was Shep Wilbun, a defeated candidate for Juvenile Court clerk who had unsuccessfully challenged the 2006 election results. The other was former longtime commissioner Myra Styles, returning after being purged four years earlier.

Completing the cycle of reconstruction, Styles was promptly named chairman. The third Democrat on the commission was yet another vindicated retread, O.C. Pleasant, who had been replaced as chairman a term earlier by the now-departed Duckett. The two Republican members, Rich Holden and Nancye Hines, were holdovers.

Whether because of improved oversight or simple good luck, the new commission seems to have had better results than their snake-bit predecessors. Concise, easy-to-read reports have been regularly circulated to the media concerning early voting for the four City Council positions that are at stake in Thursday’s runoff elections.

Cumulatively, these reports have yielded the information that, after a sluggish start on October 19th, certain of the 27 early-voting locations had late spurts.

Leading all locations as of Saturday, when early voting ended, was Cordova’s Bert Ferguson Community Center, with 952 voters. A fair amount of voting (282) also occurred at Anointed Temple of Praise, a southeasterly suburban location, suggesting reasonably organized voting in the District 2 contest between Bill Boyd and Brian Stephens.

Heading into Thursday, Stephens, a businessman/lawyer/neighborhood activist with Republican affiliations, was getting a surprising amount of support from influential local Democrats, while longtime political figure Boyd, endorsed by the Shelby County GOP, boasted endorsements from most of the seven other candidates eliminated in general-election voting on October 4th.

Relatively stout voting at Pyramid Recovery Center (544) and Bishop Byrne School (674) indicated the level of voter interest in District 6 (riverfront, South Memphis) and District 3 (Whitehaven), respectively.

The District 6 race was between Edmund Ford Jr. and James O. Catchings, the former a beneficiary of legacy voting habits, the latter depending on support from declared reformists. The District 3 contestants were youngish governmental veteran Harold Collins, who was favored, and educator Ike Griffith.

A turnout of 453 at Raleigh United Methodist Church documented the tight race expected in District 1 between school board member Stephanie Gatewood and teacher Bill Morrison. Gatewood, the only female candidate in the runoff roster, stood to benefit if gender voting patterns, 60 percent female and 40 percent male in early voting, continued on Thursday. Participation in early voting by acknowledged African Americans was at the same level (47.1 percent) as their percentage in the available voting pool. Apparent white participation in early voting was at the level of 37.6 percent, compared to the corresponding figure of 26.3 percent in the pool of registered voters for the four districts.

What made precise demographic reckoning difficult, however, was general confusion as to just who made up the category of voters self-described as “other,” a grouping that accounts for 26.6 percent of the registered-voter pool but only 15.3 percent of early voters.

And what made predictions of any kind difficult was the fact that only 1.5 percent of available registered voters took part in early voting. As always in the case of special elections or runoffs, final victory would belong to whichever candidates mounted the most effective get-out-the-vote efforts.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

From the 2007 Campaign Annals: The Case of the Horrified Partisan

Bob Schreiber, the financial professional and environmental
activist who just finished a remote second to winner Jim Strickland in the
District 5 city council race, says that he nevertheless enjoyed the experience,
even the daily grind of going door-to-door to promote his candidacy.

He tells this story: At one house, the occupant who
answered his knock, “this lady who was 55 or 60-ish,” immediately demanded,
“What are you, a Republican or a Democrat?” Schreiber says he told her he tried
to be independent, making up his own mind about issues, regardless of party
considerations.

The woman was skeptical and responded tersely, according to
Schreiber. “She said, ‘I am a Republican, and I never in my life voted for a
Democrat! What’s more, I early-voted, and I didn’t vote for you!’ Just
like that. So I said, ‘Well, who did you vote for?'”

Schreiber says the woman immediately answered: “David
Kustoff told me who to vote for.” and that he responded, “Did you by any
chance vote for Jim Strickland?” to which the voter replied with a satisfied nod
and the firm answer, “Yes!” He waited a beat and then said, “Do you realize you
just voted for the past chairman of the Democratic Party?”

The woman, said Schreiber, responded with open-mouthed
shock, as if she’d swallowed poison unknowingly.

As it happens,
Strickland, who indeed was chairman of the Shelby County Democrats a decade or
so back, is the law partner of Kustoff, a former Republican chairman who, as a Bush
appointee, is serving these days as U.S. Attorney for the Western District of
Tennessee.

And, for the record, Strickland clearly had ample support across party lines, polling 73 percent of the District 5 vote.