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Herenton on State of the City

As promised, Mayor Willie Herenton reopened his civic hymnal on Wednesday to the verse marked “consolidation” and suggested that this time others might join him.

“I favor metropolitan consolidation inclusive of schools,” said Herenton, making his annual “state of the city” address to the Kiwanis Club meeting at The Peabody.

The venue was fairly small and so was the crowd, probably under 200 people. They gave the fifth-term mayor a couple of warm standing ovations. Whether that indicated the spirit of the season or support for consolidation remains to be seen.

Herenton said he sees promise in the new membership of the Memphis City Council and Shelby County Commission along with Gov. Phil Bredesen and county mayor A C Wharton.

“Thank God for the new county commission,” he said. “We’ve got some people over there with some new energy and some courage.” He did not name names.

He said he will ask state legislators to, in effect, change the rules on consolidation so that approval from both city and county voters in separate elections is not a prerequisite. Several years before Herenton became mayor in 1991, consolidation votes passed in the city but failed in the county, where signs that say “county schools” and “no city taxes” are still a staple of new subdivisions just outside the borders of Memphis.

As he has on many occasions, Herenton said consolidated government would be more efficient and cost taxpayers less money.

“It pains me to see the waste in schools,” said the former superintendent.

It apparently pains Bredesen too. The governor has shown impatience with Memphis “reform” programs and indicated that a state takeover is possible if Memphis doesn’t do better. Herenton mentioned changing the governing structure of the school system but did not specifically call for abolishing the school board or appointing a new one, as he has on other occasions.

Meeting with reporters after his speech, Herenton said consolidation can only happen with support from key business leaders and other politicians. He said the “economics of government will become so tight” that such supporters will eventually come around.

The sticking points are that Memphis has a higher tax rate than suburbs and unincorporated areas in Shelby County and the Shelby County schools, with more affluent students and fewer poor students, outperform city schools on standardized tests. But Memphis accounts for about 70 percent of the population of Shelby County. By Herenton’s lights, a suburban minority is dictating the rules of the game to the urban majority.

On other subjects, Herenton said Memphis is “financially strong” with a reserve fund of more than $60 million. Memphis, he said, is “on the national radar screen” because of FedEx Forum, AutoZone Park, and other attractions. And he said crime “trend lines” are going “in the right direction” but 500 more police officers are still needed. He will announce new anti-blight measures next week.

Responding to a question from the audience about the lack of a “wow” factor on the riverfront, Herenton said he is open to the possibility of razing The Pyramid if a deal with Bass Pro falls through.

“We could get the wow,” he said. “I still want the wow.”

Herenton seemed to be in a good mood, and there were no real zingers for the press or anyone else with the exception of, “For those of you who want to sit on the sidelines and be critical, we’re not going to be mad at you, we’re just going to pray for you.”

Reaction to the consolidation proposal among Kiwanis members was guarded. Businessman Sam Cantor said he is unconditionally for it but does not expect it to happen in the next four years.

Businessman Calvin Anderson is also for it and says it “can happen” if Herenton can take himself out of the equation, recruit allies, and present a reasonably united Shelby County legislative delegation in Nashville. Greg Duckett, former city chief administrative officer under Dick Hackett, said consolidation needs to happen but he stopped short of saying it will.

“Significant strides to making it happen can occur in the next four years,” he said.

Jim Strickland, sworn in Tuesday as a new member of the City Council, said he supports full consolidation but is willing to compromise on schools if necessary.

He said he is “not sure” if Herenton can muster enough support among suburban mayors and state lawmakers to make any headway.

Consolidation by charter surrender does not appear to be an option, which doesn’t mean it won’t keep coming up for discussion. In 2002, the state attorney general’s office issued an opinion that said “the General Assembly may not revoke the charter, the Memphis City Council is not authorized to surrender the city charter, and no statute authorizes the Memphis city charter to be revoked by a referendum election of the voters.”

Herenton, who was reelected with just 42 percent of the vote, made his speech against a backdrop of glum economic news, locally and nationally. Oil hit the $100-a-barrel mark, the stock of local economic bastions FedEx and First Horizon and others plunged with the Dow Jones Average, the Memphis Grizzlies and Memphis Redbirds are struggling at the gate, and foreclosures are expected to soar this year.

“In order to do all these things our economy must remain strong,” the mayor said.

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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

POLITICS: 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 at a post-mortem following an August election cycle
that was sabotaged by all of the above gremlins and more.

Duckett 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. Though Mayor Willie Herenton made a point of challenging
the accuracy of the Diebold machines being used in this year’s city elections,
he ultimately was unable to deliver convincing examples.

As for last year’s hieroglyphic-like, analysis-defying
election returns, some hope of improvement has been kindled of late by an omen
of sorts. 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. Coupled
with the fact that a fair amount of voting (282) also occurred at Anointed
Temple of Praise, a southeasterly suburban location, that suggested 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. This is the only
runoff race in which demographics could have played a part, though both Gatewood,
an African American, and Morrison, who is white, made a point of pitching voters
across the board.

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.