cronyism – Memphis Flyer

Jackson Baker

Mayor-elect Jim Strickland

Congratulations on your victory, Mr. Strickland. As mayor of Memphis, it will be your job to run a city that has many problems. Unfortunately, there is a finite supply of money available to accomplish that goal. If you are to be successful, many of the unnecessary costs of running our city must be cut in order to free up the money needed to do the necessary work. Mayor Willie Herenton built a huge and unwieldy bureaucracy in order to provide jobs for his cronies. Your predecessor, A C Wharton, did nothing to change that. Simply failing to fill existing jobs is not policy; it is a lack of policy. Announcing a policy and doing nothing to implement it doesn’t accomplish anything.

I lived a good portion of my life under the commission form of government here in Memphis. There is little good that can be said for it. However, instead of the more than 100 departments that Mayor Herenton managed to come up with, the Memphis city commission had only six. The mayor under the city commission (who wasn’t a mayor in anything except name) ran the administrative department. One commissioner was in charge of both the fire department and the police department. Another commissioner ran the department of public works, and still another ran the department of public service. There was another whose job I don’t recall, but the point is that we had six departments instead of more than 100. Furthermore, one man ran two of those six departments.

Today, we have departments that are not even within the purview of city government. The job created for Herenton’s disgraced female bodyguard is a case in point. The office responsible for finding employment for convicted felons should be a minor one in the state employment office. It should not be a city department with a huge salary.

We have other departments that we can get along without and still others that we can’t afford to fund. There are many, many departments that need to be consolidated into major departments and relegated to a minor status within those departments.

Each department that you do away with, either by eliminating it completely or by consolidating it into a larger department, will save money — money that is presently used to pay an exorbitant salary to department heads and assistant department heads.

Money can also be saved by eliminating the costs of office space and other incidentals in situations where departments are eliminated or reduced in size. Eliminating automobiles for the department heads and insurance and the salaries for the lower-ranking employees of those departments that are eliminated will add to that cost-savings total.

Finally, the salaries currently paid to high-ranking city employees are not necessary to get top-notch people to fill those offices. Good managers galore have lost their jobs in private industry and will furnish all the qualified help needed to run the city government. They will take a city job at a more modest salary as an alternative to no job at all or one that is beneath their skill levels. Hire some of those people.

While Mayor Herenton was creating all of those unnecessary departments, he was also giving huge salaries to people to do jobs they couldn’t do well. He and his cronies were like a bunch of hogs feeding at the public trough. Four years ago, Mayor Wharton made a big announcement about taking a hard look at city government departments and staffing, but it simply didn’t happen.

I hope that four years from now, I won’t be saying the same thing about your administration. Cutting down the size of city government and reorganizing it into fewer departments will make it more efficient and easier to control.You have a chance to make some tremendous changes for the better in our city government. Please, seize the initiative, and do it now.

Good luck in the fight to trim the costs of city government. All of your supporters will be looking to you for action. Please, don’t let us down.

William T. Mitchell is a life-long Memphian who has been observing local politics for more than 50 years.

John Branston (“City Beat,” July 5th issue) says Willie Herenton will win. I say: no way.

Put simply, Memphians are tired of Mayor Willie Herenton, including his shenanigans and histrionics. This is not unlike the fatigue the American public is suffering with our current president (and the members of his party), which was substantially responsible for the transfer of power from Republicans to Democrats in last November’s congressional elections.

Just like the W. in the White House, W.W. Herenton has an Iraq. It’s called crime. Memphians are scandalized by an upsurge in violent crime in the Bluff City, a troubling trend that has placed Memphis in the first tier of the most dangerous cities in the country.
History has a way of showing mayors who preside over dangerous trends in their cities to the door. So too will it happen in Memphis where, other than calling for an unfunded and — probably unfundable — dramatic increase in the number of police, our mayor has done little or nothing to stem the advancing tide of criminality in our city.

The second element in Herenton fatigue is also analogous to the national scene. Memphians have watched as an arrogant, aloof, frequently disconnected mayor launched all manner of attacks on those he perceives as his enemies. The last unhinged politician who compiled an “enemies list” was Richard Nixon, and we know how well that turned out for him.

Herenton attacks the media and anyone who dares speak out against him as being racist or, worse, ungodly. One need only look at the recent, surreal press conference conducted by the mayor in which he accused several unnamed “snakes” of mounting a campaign to unseat him. Never reluctant to play the race card when it suits him, the mayor suggested that those out to get him were motivated by racial animus.

Never mind that the Memphis electorate (including black voters) is increasingly showing the ability to discriminate among candidates, not on the basis of race but on the basis of competence — a phenomenon most vividly displayed in the elections of Steve Cohen to Congress and A C Wharton as county mayor. So, where’s the race card in that deck (other than the mayor’s joker)?

The mayor’s credibility is at an all-time low. One clear proof of that comes from the recent thumping that his man, Robert Spence, took in a race for the state Senate seat vacated by Cohen. The fact that voters apparently were more influenced by a circular circulated by lead “snake” Richard Fields calling attention to Spence’s shortcomings than by Spence’s close affiliation with the mayor bodes ill for the voters’ willingness to credulously accept the mayor’s conspiracy theory.

The ultimate factor in Herenton fatigue is doubt about his competence. Whether it’s raising city property taxes to the point where Memphis enjoys the distinction of having the highest property taxes in Tennessee, presiding over a failing public school system, demonstrating the same kind of cronyism in the appointment and retention of city officials (remember Joseph Lee?) or the granting of favors to his pals like the other “W” (remember beer board baron Reginald French?), Herenton has disaffected wide swaths of the Memphis electorate regardless of race, and several early polls (which the mayor predictably discounted) showed that.

Finally, the one potentially superseding force that would assure Herenton’s loss would come when and if Shelby County mayor A C Wharton comes to his senses and realizes that the future of this city is far more important than his sense of loyalty to a man who is dragging down both Memphis and Shelby County.

I predict that 16 years of King Willie will be end up being enough for most voters in Memphis. What’s more, I think black voters are tired of being played by a mayor who has no problem, when it suits him, of cozying up to the same constituency of white businessmen he now accuses of turning on him. I predict they will see through his transparent tirades and turn him out of office.

Marty Aussenberg writes the “Gadfly” column on www.memphisflyer.com.