Tag: Dorsey Hopkins

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Politics Politics Feature

GOP’s Lee Puts His Hat In

Shelby County got a look on Tuesday at Franklin businessman Bill Lee, who formally announced his run for the 2018 governor’s race over the weekend and embarked on what he called a “95-county, 95-day RV tour” of the state.

Lee had acknowledged the likelihood of his candidacy when he appeared, along with other gubernatorial propects, at the Shelby County Republican Party’s Lincoln Day banquet in February. While in Memphis, he met with reporters and pursued a schedule that included a stop at the Memphis Shelby Crime Commission and a visit with Shelby County Schools superintendent Dorsey Hopson, among other local meetings.

“Basically, I’m on a listening tour,” Lee said. His personal bio includes lifetime residence on a cattle farm and management of a company that deals in heating, air conditioning, plumbing, and home improvements. He says he wants to focus on growing jobs and paying attention to overdue rural needs, all while avoiding the expedient of raising taxes.

So far, only Lee and former state director of economic development Randy Boyd, among Republicans, have made official announcements, but other likely GOP gubernatorial candidates are state Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris of Collierville, state House Speaker Beth Harwell of Nashville, and Congresswoman Diane Black of Gallatin.

So far, former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean is the only declared Democratic candidate, though state House Minority Leader Craig Fitzhugh of Ripley is considered a probable entry.

• This week’s Flyer editorial, (p. 10), makes reference to a press conference scheduled for Thursday at the National Civil Rights Museum on behalf of the Lynching Sites Project of Memphis, a nonprofit group whose efforts are coordinated with those of the Equal Justice Initiative, a national organization.

In tandem with the press conference, which relates to the project’s plans to create memorials for victims of lynching (numbering in the neighborhood of 40, according to publicist Howard Robertson), the project has announced a memorial event for one of the victims, Ell Persons, “a 49-year-old black man accused without evidence of murdering Antoinette Rappel, a 16-year-old white girl.”

That event, an “interfaith prayer ceremony,” will take place on May 21st at 3 p.m., “near the site of Summer Avenue and the Wolf River,” where the lynching, not a hanging but a burning at the stake, took place exactly 100 years earlier.

Participants will include representatives of white and black churches, the NAACP, and other individuals and institutions. The public is invited, said Robertson.

• The first of six “community forums” scheduled as part of the effort to re-establish an official Shelby County Democratic Party will take place on Saturday at noon at Black Market Strategies at 5146 Stage Road. The host for that event will be state Representative Antonio Parkinson.

A second event, at 6 p.m. on May 3rd, will be held at the Gallery at 1819 Madison, co-hosted by the Shelby County Young Democrats and the College Democrats. There will be a third forum at the Pickering Center in Germantown on Tuesday, May 9th, hosted by the Germantown Democrats, and a final forum will be held at 6 p.m. on May 15th, at Abyssinian Baptist Church, 3890 Millbranch, under the sponsorship of the Democratic Women of Shelby County.

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News The Fly-By

The Council and the Mayor

When I heard it, I thought, “This is the quote of the year.”

Thomas Malone, the ever outspoken president of the Memphis Firefighters Association, railed in frustration, “The city administration is like an addict on crack. They will buy, steal, and do anything they can from anybody, to get what they want!” So, Tommy, tell us how you really feel, huh?

Based on the events of 2014, there are a lot of Memphians bewitched, bothered, and bewildered by the actions of the administration of Mayor A C Wharton and the Memphis City Council. Malone’s bitter assessment came just days after the council rammed through a surprising vote on the long-debated city employees’ pension plan.

After nearly a year of discussion, with the Wharton administration at first presenting a proposal with Draconian cuts to appease a warning from the state comptroller on addressing a more than $500 million pension deficit, the council decided on a 9-to-4 vote to go with Councilwoman Wanda Halbert’s plan to only apply the benefit cuts to city employees with seven-and-a-half or fewer years of service. It also happens to neatly include council members, as elected officials. Halbert’s plan was a complete reversal of her previously staunch support of city employees seeking no cuts to benefits. Her apparent flip-flop will be the fodder for much discussion as she reportedly will seek to unseat incumbent Thomas Long for the city clerk’s office in 2015.

But, after nearly a year of debate, why was Halbert’s proposal fast-tracked for a vote? As Malone told me, he asked for time for actuaries to run the numbers again on all the plans presented. His request was rejected. It certainly makes you wonder.

Certainly the communication gap between the mayor’s office and the council has never been more obvious than with the proposed settlement agreement Wharton and Shelby County School (SCS) Superintendent Dorsey Hopson privately reached. The facts are that two courts have ruled against the city’s counterclaim that they are owed the interest on $100 million given to legacy Memphis City Schools for buildings. They alleged their claim trumps the $57 million both courts ruled the city owes the school system, dating back to 2008. Councilman Myron Lowery told me last week the majority of his colleagues feel their counterclaim will win out as both sides continue mediation efforts. Two glaring discrepancies come to mind as the battle lines are drawn for the upcoming showdown over whether the council will approve funding for the school settlement in early January.

It doesn’t surprise me that Wharton, Hopson, and the SCS board members are happy with this deal that essentially amounts to $43 million in cash and other amenities, such as $2.6 million in police protection for schools and a balloon payment of $6 million in February. What bothers me is how Wharton decided to communicate this agreement to the council in a terse, written memorandum delivered just as the pension vote was about to be made. He apparently hadn’t even told those council members on the mediation team he’d reached a deal. It’s an example of Wharton’s confounding “lawyers know best” mentality. He comes from the world of plea bargains and deals in criminal justice. But, as the city’s chief executive, he has to be more open and candid about his dealings, especially when the final approval for funding lies with the council.

And speaking of the council: Back in 2008, tired of the “maintenance of effort” in voluntarily funding city schools for years, they went rogue. That proved to be a costly mistake for all concerned. It can be reasonably argued that their failure to pay the $57 million led to the collapse of the legacy Memphis City Schools two years later. Their decision to divest themselves of that obligation led to millions of taxpayer dollars being wasted on the protracted litigation between the city and the county that followed.

Now the ball is in their court again. A second chance to begin to right the foolish mistake the city council committed six years ago. If council-members decide to reject this settlement because of bruised egos or personal agendas, then they should be made to pay the price at the ballot box in 2015. It will be a fitting answer for those we elect who once in office suffer from the “addiction” of power. If we as voters don’t respond? Maybe we’re on crack.

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Editorial Opinion

Finals Prep

CREDIT: Danziger

Yes, it’s back-to-school time, and those teachers who survived a recent pruning of their ranks, no matter their brilliance, would be hard put to unravel a state of confusion which is bound to prevail in the minds of those — students, parents, fellow teachers, administrators, and just plain citizens — who will be interacting, one way or another, with the new unified Shelby County public school system.

The certainties regarding the new system are few, but one of them is that the system — in its current form, anyhow — is foredoomed to expire after a single year in existence. Two events have occurred this week that underscore the imminent and quite predictable dissolution of the system. One was the fact that Shelby County’s six suburban municipalities, fresh from voting (for the second year in a row) to create their own independent school systems, raced to pass ordinances enabling the next step — the election of their own school boards in November.

That means that, unless they run into further snags — legal, bureaucratic, or the financial ones predicted by outgoing Shelby County Commission chairman Mike Ritz — they will have opted out of the “unified” system by this time next year. No one has dwelled on it overmuch, but, when that happens, the problems associated with the de-merger, including the reshuffling of both students and teachers, may come to dwarf those which have bedeviled the much-plagued merger process.

Between now and then, there will be efforts by all parties to resolve several other unanswered questions, two of which loom foremost: How (if at all) and at what cost (if any) will the new suburban school systems acquire the use of existing school buildings, currently the property of the unified system? And who gets the students in the unincorporated areas of Shelby County, each of whom will bring state money into the receiving system, on a per capita basis?

Meanwhile, during the same week that municipalities prepared the way to elect their school boards, the Shelby County Commission ran afoul of various complications in deciding how to go about filling a single vacancy on the board of the unified system. (See Politics, p. 12.) That’s not even to mention the forthcoming legal wrangles over just who should be represented on the unified board when that board, as planned, expands from seven to 13 members this fall. It will be remembered that when the old Shelby County system, representing only those areas outside the city of Memphis, switched in the 1990s from an appointed to an elected board, the courts decided that only suburban voters should vote for board members. How will that precedent come into play a year from now, assuming a 13-member system is, in fact, created?

The headmaster who gets to resolve all this is, as always before in this merger process, presiding federal judge Hardy Mays, who will have to remember everything he ever learned in school — not just the legal stuff, but the math, the sociology, and the political science that are bound to underlie the ultimate solution. We wish him well in all his run-up tests and in the final exam itself, whenever and however that comes.