Tag: Ed Ford

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Shelby Politics Won’t Take a Break After August Election

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

For all the ballyhoo, emailed appeals for more cash, and intensified public rhetoric of recent days, the known world will exist in more or less its usual form after the electon results of this week are digested.

There are more election matters to be decided, for one thing: Someone will have to succeed the late state Representative Ron Lollar as the Republican nominee for state House District 99 on the November ballot. Lollar’s death occurred after the ballot was irrevocably composed, but on August 6th, a GOP caucus will meet to name a successor to run in November against Democratic nominee David Cambron.

The caucus will be made up of the members of the Shelby County Republican Committee who represent District 99. Those are current GOP chair Lee Mills, Mills’ wife Amber Mills, Becky Parsons, and Kenny Crenshaw. Among those interested in becoming the District 99 nominee are chairman Mills himself; Bartlett alderman David Parsons (husband of Becky Parsons); Lakeland Mayor Wyatt Bunker; and County Commissioner David Reaves.

For obvious arithmetical reasons, Lee Mills would seem to have an edge. The chairman has already cleared a prospective leave of absence with FedEx, for whom he is a pilot.

• Still unresolved, too, is the matter of whether residents of three City Council districts in Memphis will have a chance to vote on replacing any of three council members who may have been elected to county positions this week. The three are Bill Morrison of District 1, candidate for Probate Court Clerk; Edmund Ford Jr. of District 6, candidate for the County Commission; and Janis Fullilove of Super District 8, Position 2, candidate for Juvenile Court Clerk.

There had been, as of this week, no definitive answer as to when any of the three, if victorious in their county races, would formally resign their council positions. They could resign immediately upon election to their new posts, but the county charter allows them to retain their current position for as long as 90 days. If they should stay on the council for the entirety of their allotted time, there would be no opportunity to schedule a special election on the November ballot.

Jackson Baker

Janis Fullilove advocating for IRV.

What several local activists fear is that the dominant council faction, which has close ties to the city’s business elite and whose members tend to vote as a bloc, would relish the opportunity to skirt the election process and appoint the successors to any or all of the vacated positions.

Uncertainty on the point has been whetted by the claim of council Chairman Berlin Boyd, a member of the dominant faction, that the city charter does not allow for a replacement election on a November ballot. Council attorney Allan Wade apparently backs Boyd on the issue.The activist group cites charter language specifically licensing a potential November election for the purpose, and the matter is further complicated by ambivalence as to the post-election intentions on the part of the three council members whose seats would be in question. 

While continuing to keep her own counsel on the resignation matter, candidate Fullilove did choose, weekend before last, to make a public break from her council mates on another matter —  the referendum scheduled by the council for November that, if successful, would repudiate an earlier 2008 referendum enabling Ranked Choice Voting (aka Instant Runoff Voting), a process that Election Administrator Linda Phillips had scheduled for the 2019 city election.

Fullilove’s statement: “Back in 2008, as a charter commission member, I voted to support Instant Runoff Voting. I also supported it during the 2008 referendum Campaign, when 71 percent of Memphians voted for it. That was a good idea then, and it’s a good idea now. Last fall, I deferred to some of my colleagues on the city council who expressed concerns about IRV. But I have rethought my position. The people have already voted for this. We ought to give it a try. So I am … announcing my support for instant runoff voting and my opposition to any attempt at repeal. I call on my council colleagues to take both IRV referenda off the November ballot. Thank you.”

So far, there have been no takers on Fullilove’s request, and the referendum still stands. But chalk up at least a partial victory for the activist group, Save IRV Memphis, many of whose members have doubled up on the lobby process concerning the resignation matter.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Undermining the Public Will

We live in a time when elected officials and bodies seem determined to ignore the will of the populations they have been elected to represent. This phenomenon is observable in every governmental sphere — state, local, and national — and it threatens the democratic principle in the abstract and strikes at the core of our functioning democratic machinery at all the aforementioned levels.

We have just seen the House of Representatives and Senate in Washington, D.C., willfully ignore public sentiment, expressed in virtually every imaginable kind of opinion sampling, by passing an unpopular tax-cut giveaway for corporations and the wealthy few that will be paid for at the expense of the middle class — in the loss of accustomed deductions now, in the raising of future insurance premiums due to a provision of the bill weakening the mandates of the Affordable Care Act, and in the probable reduction of entitlement benefits down the line in the name of “economy.”

Similarly, during the past decade, we have often seen the Tennessee legislature behave with contemptuous indifference to the public’s unmistakeable disapproval of a plethora of gun bills that have ended up being enacted at the behest the NRA and other like-minded interests in the firearms industry. At the same time, the General Assembly, for naked partisan reasons, has turned its back on the expressed needs of individuals and the state’s financially distressed hospitals by refusing billions in federal aid for Medicaid expansion.

And now we find Memphis city government flouting public need and citizen opinion with a series of proposals, some of which directly contravene the results of referenda carried out at the ballot box. There is a questionable ordinance proposed by Councilman Reid Hedgepeth, reportedly favored by the Strickland administration, as well, that would restrict the rights of public assembly under cover of assuring “order.” There is the proposal by Councilman Ed Ford and others that would revoke the public’s right, already expressed via referendum, to a fair trial of instant runoff voting (IRV) in the next city election, and there is an effort by Councilman Berlin Boyd on behalf of replacing a two-term limit for council members that was only recently approved by the voters.

There is room for concern, too, in county government, where a power struggle currently rages between a majority of the Shelby County Commission and the administration of county Mayor Mark Luttrell. The issues here are not as clear-cut, though the core matter of the moment is the need to sue for damages resulting from the over-proliferation of opioids in Shelby county. Sadly, all that is being litigated in Chancery Court is the incidental question of who has the authority to direct such legal efforts. A suit challenging the distributors of opioids is on file in Circuit Court but cannot go forward until the two branches of county government mediate an end to their jurisdictional dispute. Meanwhile,  the public continues to suffer.

Surely, it is no big thing to ask the various governments we elect to represent the public will, but it seems a tenuous prospect just now.

Categories
Opinion

Penny tax for MATA Gets Endorsements

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Got any spare change? MATA would like to have it. Your pennies from a penny-a-gallon tax increase could add up to $3 million for the transit agency.

Memphis City Councilman Edmund Ford Jr. says the “minimal tax” will “help some of the city’s most vulnerable citizens maintain their independence and provide access to much needed jobs throughout the community.”

The Sierra Club and Livable Memphis are among the groups supporting the referendum and rallying Friday afternoon at the bus station at the north end of downtown.

If successful, MATA will use the funds to increase frequency on eight major bus routes around the area and on the downtown trolley.

A penny-a-gallon increase would add up to $5 for a person driving 10,000 miles a year and getting 20 miles per gallon on his or her vehicle. The price of gas has fallen since it topped $4 a gallon this summer. With the current price varying from $3.09 to $3.40 or more in the Memphis area, it is possible to save $5 on a single fill-up by shopping around.

But no tax increase is a cinch. MATA, some voters will remember, is the agency responsible for the Midtown trolley extension via Madison Avenue and a proposed $400 million light rail line to Memphis International Airport.

Atlanta-area voters in July defeated a proposed 1-cent sales tax that would have raised an estimated $7.2 billion for transportation projects. Voters in St. Louis in 2010 approved a half-cent sales tax increase to help fund the regional transit agency after defeating it in earlier votes.

The gas tax referendum is one of two tax referendums on the ballot in Memphis. The other is a proposed countywide half-cent increase in the sales tax.

Ford said he is unaware of any organized opposition to the gas tax. The sales tax has caused some grumbling from suburban residents who are not allowed to vote on it because they previously approved a sales tax increase for suburban school systems.