Tag: Councilman Jim Strickland

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Four-Handed Race, Four-Handed Debate

CREDIT: JB

JB

Before Wednesday night’s debate l to r): Mayor A C Wharton, Mike Williams, Harold Collins, Jim Strickland

JB

Debate moderator Kyle Veazey

Memphis is not about to rival Nashville in the number of mayoral debates, forums, and other ensemble events — 40-odd and counting — held in the state’s capital city this year, but we’re getting there. Several such events have been held by now in our town’s mayoral race, and they seem to be drawing lose attention.

One more is in the can after Wednesday night, a debate co-sponsored by The Commercial Appeal and the University of Memphis at the University’s Rose theatre, and another one is scheduled on Thursday night at Central High School under the auspices of the Evergreen Historic Association.

And people, even in these dog days of summer, seem to be paying attention.

So who’s winning?

One way of answering that is to fall back on the tried and true all-have-won-and-all-must-have-prizes approach. That’s usually an evasion, but so far this year it seems to describe what’s happening in these mayoral-candidate get-togethers.

By common consent, it would seem, the field has settled on four candidates regarded as “viable” — incumbent Mayor A C Wharton, City Councilman Jim Strickland and Harold Collins, and Memphis Police Association Mike Williams.

Former School Board member Sharon Webb was involved in a couple of the early ones, including a widely watched one televised last week on WMC-TV, Action News 5. But there is general agreement that her performance in those encounters was not up to the standard of the others, and she is unlikely to figure in many more debates as such.

As for the other four? Well, yes, they all have “won,” in the sense of staking a legitimate claim to leadership in the city.

THE CASE FOR MIKE WILLIAMS:

Gotta have one winner? Okay, it’s Mike Williams, who, ironically, is not considered to have much of a chance to actually win the Mayor’s race and was not included in one or two early get-togethers. Williams’ fund-raising is miniscule compared to the other three and his support network, while enthusiastic, is — how to say it? — compact.

Moreover, he was long regarded as being a one-trick pony, in the race solely to dramatize the case for restoring lost benefits to city employees — especially first responders and even more especially the dwindling ranks of the city’s police force.

But Williams proved himself a strong, articulate performer in last week’s debate and on the stage of the Rose Theater Wednesday night. And he did so without forsaking his main cause or artificially broadening it but by relating the case for public employees to the core issues of public safety and the economic health of the community and by relating it, too, to other grass-roots concerns, like the ongoing movement to save the Coliseum.

Regarding this or that intractable crisis or malaise that afflicts the city, Williams points out that Mayor Wharton has been in office for six years, and Strickland and Collins for eight years and have been unable to deal with the problem. He suggests with an air of reasonability that maybe he could.

In two short weeks, Williams has transcended a lot of people’s low expectations for his candidacy and demonstrated that he belongs on the debate stage. That’s a win.

THE CASE FOR HAROLD COLLINS:

Similarly, Councilman Collins has been able to enunciate a vision for the city by extrapolating from his achievements within his own Whitehaven-based district — including a massive ongoing redevelopment project on Elvis Presley Boulevard, which, as he demonstrated Wednesday night, began from the level of repairing sewers on up to some wholesale renovation.

Collins has also looked into the nether parts of some of the bright and shiny projects now on display as civic successes for the current regime and seen and described some overlooked tarnish — like the $9 -and $10-an-hour jobs and the filling of positions with temps at Electrolux instead of the high-paying positions the public had been led to expect.

Decrying conditions that lead the city’s youth to seek post-graduate employment elsewhere, Collins, something of an Horatio Alger up-from-nothing case himself, is an apostle for “engineering, finance, and technology” jobs. He has eloquently called the Wharton administration to account for what he calls breaches of faith with city employees and for other alleged inconsistencies affecting the public at large.

nd, like his Council colleague Strickland, Collins emphasizes public safety, calling for swift and punitive reaction to outbreaks of violence.

All in all, the gentleman from Whitehaven has made a good case that his record on the Council merits a promotion.

THE CASE FOR JIM STRICKLAND:


At times, the District 5 Councilman and budget maven, whose district encompasses Midtown, power sectors of  the Poplar Corridor, and relatively humble middle- and working-class residents as well, seems to get snagged on rote repetitions of his bullet-point issues, which can be summed up by the words Safety, Blight, and Accountability.

But Strickland can expand on these basic positions (which, let it be said, are all perfectly sound present-tense concerns) with some interesting improvisations — like his call for a “residential pilot program” of tax abatements for urban residents who would improve their homesteads and his sponsorship of a grant program for those who recover tax-dead properties.

As impediments to crime, Strickland couples his emphasis on stepped-up “Blue Crush” police activity with proposals for reviving community centers and using Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs as outreach to troubled youth. A mite idealistic-sounding, perhaps, but worth a try.

Strickland should be thankful to Mayor Wharton, who, mindful of the general sense that he is the Mayor’s chief rival, has launched head-on attacks on him in the last two debates. These have allowed Strickland to respond in ways that demonstrate he is something other than the “generic white man” that one wag has called him and can Do the Dozens with the best of them.

A rock star might have envied the audience squeals Strickland got from his animated thrust at Wharton during a back-and-forth Wednesday night on civic economy. “He increased the debt to 47 million dollars, He did it! Do not believe the slick maneuvers and the corny stories!”

In sum, a worthy challenger.

 

THE CASE FOR A C WHARTON:

Perhaps the most admirable thing about the current Mayor, who knows from polls and other sources that he’s got a real race on his hands, is that he is unabashed about putting forth policy rationales that may have questionable payoff value with the electorate at large but seem to him worth stating.

One case in point is his running against the tide on the issue of public safety. Wharton defends his record on the issue, contending that, high-profile incidents to the contrary notwithstanding, the rate of violent crime is down. But, even conceding there is a problem, the Mayor insists that “locking ‘em up” is not the solution. As he said Wednesday night, he’s for “keeping the children out” rather than “taking more and more of them in.”

And, to calls from opponents Collins and Strickland to strengthen the hand of Juvenile Court, Wharton assumes an air of injured patience and suggests they are not aware of Department of Justice mandates that would decree otherwise.

Similarly, the Mayor’s attitude toward the city’s straitened budget is that, as he repeated Wednesday night, “we can’t cut our way out of this, nor tax our way out.” He maintains that “growth, growth, growth” is the only solution and touts his success in bringing in money from outside granting sources and his administration’s zealous recruitment of new industry via PILOTs (payment-in-lieu-of-taxes) and other inducements.

The policy, scoffed at by some of his opponents, of catering to the needs of “millennials” via bike lanes and other innovations is justifiable because it will attract young trained professionals to the city, says Wharton, who insists that statistics show the policy is working.

Wharton can be brazenly realistic in defending his administration’s cuts in employee benefits (“There are substitutes for health care, but there’s no substitute for the pension plan”), and he responds to charges from Collins and Strickland regarding everything from the slow restoration of money owed the school system to the winnowing down of police ranks to the holding back of tax levies already authorized by turning the argument around and blaming the Council.

At bottom, the Mayor’s case for reelection is that he’s succeeding more than people realize on jobs and other issues and certainly more that his critics acknowledge.

Beyond the cases made in public exchanges and elsewhere by the various contenders for the office of Mayor (and expect further details here and in subsequent articles), there are demographic and pre-existing political facts of life that will go toward determining an ultimate winner. But be assured: This race is truly competitive, and all members of the current Front Four are credible candidates. Stay tuned.

 

Meanwhile, to get a sense of some of the sass and vinegar of the Wednesday night debate, look at these two video examples. In the first, Mayor Wharton takes off rhetorically against opponent Jim Strickland. In the second, Councilman Collins returns the favor to the Mayor: (Mike Williams bides his rime as a spectator in both frames.)



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Politics Politics Feature

A Two-Man Mayor’s Race?

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

As this week’s second-quarter deadline for financial disclosures approached, it was a near certainty that Mayor A C Wharton and City Councilman Jim Strickland would lead the rest of the field in funds received by a large margin. The Memphis mayoral contest could not yet be considered a two-man race, but both candidates had defining moments that set them apart.

The horrific events in Charleston, South Carolina, two weeks ago, still resonated and cried out for a dramatic response — in Memphis, no less than elsewhere in an outraged nation. To give him credit, Wharton had provided one last week when he proposed to end a long-simmering controversy and demanded the removal from what is now Health Sciences Park a statue of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest mounted on his warhorse, as well as the graves of the general and his wife.

The statue, which had stood in that prime downtown acreage for a century, would be remanded to the custody of the presumably still-extant Forrest Monument Association, which had originally placed it there, and the remains of the Forrests could be returned to Elmwood Cemetery, the vintage resting place from which they had long ago been disinterred and transplanted to the Union Avenue site.

It would not do, said Wharton, for African-American children to picnic in the shadow of a man who had been accused of numerous offenses on the wrong side of history, including pre-Civil War slave trading, an alleged massacre of black Union troops during the war, and the post-war founding of the Ku Klux Klan. 

At the moment of the mayor’s announcement, he appeared resolute and forceful and, most important, sincere. He had caught the spirit of the moment, it seemed, and there seemed to be little downside. Public reaction to the name changes of Forrest Park and two other Confederate-themed parks in 2013 had ranged from enthusiasm to acceptance, with resistance largely confined to memorial societies — such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans, an organization that many thought had precipitated that crisis and broken a tenuous truce with an indiscreetly bold (and unauthorized) granite sign proclaiming the name “FORREST PARK.”

The mood of two years ago was nothing compared to the universal revulsion, in Memphis as everywhere else, that came in the aftermath of the horrendous murders of nine African-American members of a bible-study class by a deluded fanatic who wrapped himself in Confederate imagery. The feeling was summed up in a single word: enough!

That African Americans, in particular, could be expected to back the mayor’s action was a given — though it would surely be wrong to suggest that dividends at the polls on October 8th constituted a significant motive. In any case, Councilman Strickland, widely considered Wharton’s main opponent, wasted no time in conferring his approval of the mayor’s proposal. “I’m for it!” he said decisively, just before making something of a watershed speech last Thursday at Overton Square’s Zebra Lounge at a meet-and-greet that targeted black voters.

Jackson Baker

Jim Strickland at Zebra Lounge

Could Strickland, well-financed and known to be strong along the Poplar Corridor and in recently annexed suburbs like Cordova, garner enough African-American votes in a majority black city to be elected? Jerry Hall, the veteran black operative who introduced Strickland at Zebra Lounge, raised the question rhetorically and then answered it: “Hell, yes!” Memphis needed to move beyond issues of race, said Hall. “We need a new direction in City Hall.”

In his speech, Strickland laid out his most detailed recipe yet for that new direction. “We have a tsunami of a challenge on the horizon,” the challenger said, and he gave it a name: population loss. Strickland promised to reverse an exodus that had accounted for a net loss of 12,000 residents in the first decade of this century, despite annexations. He would be a “strong mayor who will run an efficient and effective city government.”

Strickland proposed a three-pronged strategy for establishing and maintaining a safe, clean, and desirable place for people and businesses: 1) drastic reduction of violent crime through resurrection of Blue Crush policing of trouble spots and “zero tolerance”; 2) elimination of blight and repair of infrastructure; and 3) strictly holding officials accountable.

If all that sounded a bit abstract, Strickland floated some new specifics: a privately supported fund that would help allay the costs of expunging criminal records of citizens resuming productive lives; a residential “PILOT” program granting tax breaks for people undertaking urban infill; and publication of city administrators’ performance records.

A bit technocratic, perhaps, but it expanded on Strickland’s reputation as a budgetary maven and gave him a larger theme of general competence to juxtapose against Wharton’s undoubted flair in using his mayoral bully pulpit.

There was still time for other candidates — notably Councilman Harold Collins, County Commission chair Justin Ford, and Memphis Police Association head Mike Williams — to make a move, but with every passing week, the bar gets moved a little higher.

• Meanwhile, the sheer drama of successive news-waves — abetted by a pair of U.S. Supreme Court decisions — kept shifting public attention. The sense of a racial crossroads lingered, but a court decision in King v. Burwell eliminated a threat to the Affordable Care Act and highlighted local and statewide efforts to revive Governor Bill Haslam‘s so-far-stymied Insure Tennessee plan. These included a showcase press conference in Raleigh featuring state Democratic Party chair Mary Mancini with legislative Democrats and local health-care advocates.

And the LGBT community had its rainbow moment, basking in a second SCOTUS decision legalizing same-sex marriage in all 50 states, and given further mainstream momentum via the endorsement of President Obama, who, having articulated the nation’s outrage and sorrow over the horror in Charleston, was having a major moment himself.

Governor Haslam came to town on two occasions: on Friday to grace the opening of a new Nike distribution center, and on Monday to announce a half-million-dollar grant for tech training and to help Youth Villages celebrate successes in its work with former foster youth.

During both visits, the governor made it clear that he intended to push ahead with Insure Tennessee (though not with an immediate special legislative session) and that the state would comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage. His reluctance on the second score, however, was underscored on Monday with a statement supporting “protection” of pastors who opt out of performing same-sex ceremonies for religious reasons.

Haslam endorsed the idea of removing a bust of General Forrest from the state capitol and said he saw no impediment to Wharton’s plans for Health Sciences Park. Others noted, however, that state law seemed to contain obstacles to the removal of the graves without the express permission of the Forrest family, and state legislation passed in 2013 on behalf of war memorials may complicate any attempt to remove the general’s statue.

“We’ve got lawyers working on it,” Wharton said on Saturday when asked about such obstacles during a drop-in at a Democratic Party breakfast at the IBEW building on Madison.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

On Eve of Budget Talks, Strickland Warns against Property Tax Increase

CREDIT: JB

Strickland at Dutch Treat Luncheon

  • JB
  • Strickland at Dutch Treat Luncheon

That proposal made by City Councilmen Jim Strickland and Shea Flinn for a sales tax referendum, coupled with a reduction in the city’s property tax rate? It’s on indefinite hold, destined to remain there permanently if Mayor A C Wharton is able to convince the City Council to raise the property tax rate in budget negotiations about to get under way.

That was the word from Strickland, the featured speaker Saturday at the monthly Dutch Treat Luncheon, a surviving spinoff of the old Loeb Dutch Treat Luncheons once presided over by former Mayor Henry Loeb and by the late Charley Peete, who took them over after Loeb’s death.

As in Loeb’s time and Peete’s, the attendees tend to be arch-conservative or seriously libertarian, and Strickland, who boasted at Saturday’s meeting at Pancho’s Restaurant on White Station that he was “the only Council member who has never voted for a tax increase, not one,” was well received. When one woman gave voice to a common assumption that Strickland intends a mayoral race at some point, the Councilman merely gave a faint smile, as if in confirmation.

As he has on other occasions, Strickland expressed a concern that the greatest danger facing Memphis is that of population loss. “People are voting with their tail-lights,’ he said. He attributed the problem to people’s anxieties about three areas — crime, education, and taxes. For the most part, he confined his remarks to crime and taxes, both of which, unlike schools, he said he as a Council member had some direct responsibility for.

Strickland seemed guardedly optimistic about crime control in Memphis. He said the city’s crime rate had declined in recent years under the influence of “Blue Crush” tactics, first introduced by former police director Larry Godwin after the model of an approach by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani that located an increased police presence in statistically high crime areas.

According to Strickland, there was a bit of a relapse after Godwin’s departure in 20111 to become a deputy to state Safety Commissioner Bill Gibbons and as new police director Toney Armstrong took up the reins. Members of the Council noted a 10 percent increase in crime under a new, modified policy instituted by Armstrong “that did away with the biggest part of Blue Crush.” Things have since stabilized as Armstrong has begun to restore the former policy. “Blue Crush works,” Strickland said.

Turning to budgetary matters, Strickland, who chairs the Council’s budget committee, told his audience they “probably won’t believe it,” but the city’s tax rate has in recent years decreased by about 10 percent. He reminded them that the amount of property tax paid is a combination of two elements, “the tax rate and the value of your homes.”

Inasmuch as the most recent assessment shows a dramatic downturn in property values for most Memphians, he said, there is pressure to increase the tax rate so as to maintain revenue. Hence, a budget proposal from Wharton last week calling for an increase from a $3.11 rate to one of $3.39.

Strickland noted that the combined city and county tax rates for Memphians are already 50 percent higher than the property tax rates imposed by Nashville Metro government. Given that the county rate is going to go up, largely because of the unanticipated transitional costs of school consolidation, Strickland forecast the possibility that local tax rates could increase to a level 75 percent higher than Nashville’s.

He further noted that Mayor Wharton’s proposed budget would spend $622 million, an increase over last year’s budget of $597 million and said, “We need to reverse that.” The bottom line, said Strickland, was that “we have to spend less.”

The problem is one of where to cut, and Strickland made known his preference for maintaining projected expenditures for pre-K education. “Pre-K works,” said Strickland. “If Pre-K didn’t work, I wouldn’t have sent my kids to Pre-K.” He said statistics demonstrate that Pre-K instruction causes literacy rates among children to rise dramatically.

Strickland said some of the remedies frequently called for (and expressed by members of his audience on Saturday) would have no effect on the tax rate per se. Included in that category were the idea of privatizing city sanitation services, which are subsidized by fees, not taxes, and proposed pension reforms involving a change from a defined-benefits system to a defined contribution (or 401-K) system. Strickland agreed that pension reform needed to be discussed, but he argued that an immediate switch “would not save tax dollars” and that there were would be transitional costs involved in maintaining the city pension fund.

As an example of the kind of thing that might be cut, Strickland mentioned the Memphis Music Commission, the work of which is paralleled by the privately funded Memphis Music Foundation, “which probably does it better.”

An aspect of Wharton’s proposed budget that Strickland did not specifically discuss but one which may be featured in budget deliberations next week is the mayor’s call for a 2.3 percent pay raise for all city employees to take place in January as a start in restoring a 4.6 percent pay cut imposed on city employees two years ago.

“We need to go over the budget line by line” looking for opportunities to cut, Strickland said, and he called for public participation in the process of looking for reductions, noting that the facts and figures of the budget process are available for inspection on the city’s website, memphistn.gov.