Tag: Erika Sugarmon

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Politics Politics Feature

A Funding Perplex

Commissioner Erika Sugarmon (Photo: shelbycountytn.gov | Skipworth)

Anyone who has been paying attention to hot-button issues in law enforcement is aware that the matter of incarcerated inmates with mental illnesses is one of them — and one of the most complex as well.

Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris’ ongoing proposal to build an expansive new facility to house and treat those prisoners is one response — and the mayor has come in for much praise for it, especially since he intends to proceed without asking for a tax increase, by accessing federal ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act) funds received by the county at the height of the Covid epidemic.

And Sheriff Floyd Bonner had indicated lately that he was on the verge of issuing an RFP (request for proposal) to local medical facilities for establishing an inpatient treatment program for the most severely impaired, those inmates who have been formally adjudged by the courts to be incompetent to stand trial.

It is such inmates, languishing in jail as a de facto permanent population, who have been the source of numerous disturbances and highly publicized unsanitary behavior noted by the news media and would-be reformers alike. And they are a primary reason for Bonner’s recent decision to back away from supervising youthful offenders to focus on hard-core issues among adult offenders.

As it happens, Bonner is the custodian not only of such issues but of some $2.7 million in allocated and unspent funds for dealing with them, and in testimony last week at the county commission’s committee sessions had floated the idea of the aforementioned RFP.

That money, largely derived from a settlement from drug companies and manufacturers involved in the proliferation of opioids, was set aside by the county as a replacement of sorts for a similar sum originally budgeted in 2022 at the behest of former County Commissioner Van Turner for treatment of those inmates deemed incompetent to stand trial by reason of their impairment.

Much of that original outlay ended up, however, being routed into the coffers of the county’s specialty courts (tribunals focused on drugs, veterans, and, in the most general sense, those with mental health conditions). Some of it was destined for CAAP (Cocaine and Alcohol Awareness Program), where it could be put to useful ends, but not for the original purpose of inpatient treatment of the most seriously incapacitated inmates.

Meanwhile County Commissioner Erika Sugarmon sponsored a resolution that became a core part of the agenda at this commission’s regular public meeting Monday night. She apparently proposed routing another $500,000 to CAAP from the currently available funding stock of $2,700,000.

David Upton, a spokesperson for the original funding plan, which envisioned an inpatient program, made an impassioned plea to retain the $500,000 in the sheriff’s budget.

At one point in the commission’s discussion of the resolution, Commissioner Mick Wright allowed as how he was doing his best to comprehend the overriding issue but was having trouble understanding what funds were available and for what purpose.

He doubtless spoke for many who had difficulty following the money and the competing claimants for it. Ultimately the commission deferred voting on the resolution and will try to unravel the complications of the matter at its next meeting.

To be continued.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Showdown Monday on Voting Machines

From left: Steve Mulroy, Eddie Jones, Erika Sugarmon, Sarah Wilkerson Freeman. (Photo by Jackson Baker)

Proponents of hand-marked paper ballots held a press conference Friday on the eve of Monday’s Shelby County Commission meeting, where a vote is scheduled to approve or reject a rival system employing ballot-marking devices.

The ballot-marking devices are being insisted on by a majority on the Shelby County Election Commission, which pleads that timeliness demands a favorable vote. If the County Commission provides one, the county would spend $5.8 million on new machines supplied by Election Systems & Software, LLC (ES&S) and, says the Election Commission, the ballot-marking devices would be ready in time for the August county election. 

Opposing such a vote at Friday’s press conference (held at Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church) were two active County Commissioners, one former County Commissioner, one County Commissioner-elect, and a member of the Democratic Party’s state committee.

Steve Mulroy, a County Commissioner from 2006 to 2014 and currently a candidate for District Attorney General, characterized the issue to be voted on Monday as follows:  “We are getting ready …to quite possibly decide what election and voting system we’re going to use for the next 20 years. There is a chance that we’ll be making the wrong decision that we will be spending $6 million on an overpriced, glitch-vulnerable, hackable, less secure voting system that will erode further the public’s already low confidence in the integrity of our elections, when there is a much more secure, less expensive, low-tech solution, easily available, that the County Commission has already repeatedly said by resolution they’re in favor of.”

He added that if the ballot-marking machines are approved, “rather than using a 10-cent pen to mark the ballot, we have to use a $5,000 ballot marking device which is touchscreen and computerized and which election experts say can be hacked or is prone to glitches. So we are paying $4 million more for a less secure system. We are here today because the Election Commission has taken yet another run at trying to force the County Commission to fund this overpriced, less secure system.”

As Mulroy indicated, the County Commission has voted repeatedly to use hand-marked paper ballots for the badly needed new machines rather than the ES&S devices. Concurring with Mulroy’s statements and speaking remotely by phone, Commissioner Van Turner said, “The commission has spoken to this issue … I will again be supporting having paper ballots be the primary voting mode in Shelby County.” 

Commissioner Eddie Jones, calling the Election Commission’s action an example of Election Coordinator Linda Phillips’ “Jedi mind tricks,” said of the Election Commission majority, “These are appointed people trying to step beyond their legal authority and go beyond us.”

Although Mulroy had noted, correctly, that the County Commission is majority-Democratic and the Election Commission majority- Republican, County Commissioner-elect Erika Sugarmon declared, “This is a non-partisan issue. Republicans, Democrats, and libertarians have been going to the commissions. We’ve been going to the Election Commission, and the Shelby County Commission, voicing our concerns, and stating our desire to have hand-marked paper ballots. We want hand-marked paper ballots like they have in Knox County.” Sugarmon added, “Ballot-marking devices also are a way to suppress the voters rights. For example, in disadvantaged, marginalized, minoritized, and working class communities, they  cause long lines.”

Sarah Wilkerson Freeman, a member of the Democratic state committee, said the Election Commission’s attempt to force an approval of ballot-marking devices was “troubling, very, very troubling, because it is voters who put the County Commission in, and they have repeatedly said ‘no’ to these proposals from the Election Commission. And what is going on is that the administrator is dragging her heels and dragging our heels until the whole system becomes increasingly broken and broken and broken.”

Mulroy said that the County Commission, on Monday, could not only reject the Election Commission’s desire for ballot-marking devices, it could go ahead and vote for hand-marked paper ballots.  “The state of the law is we have a [Chancery] Court ruling that has not been overturned, [and] the County Commission can go forward, if it wants to. The Election Commission has appealed the Chancery ruling, but the pendency of the appeal does not prevent the county commission from going forward.”

He recommended “that people call their county commissioners between now and Monday, tell them that want to spend less money and be more secure.”

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Politics Politics Feature

A Practical Case for IRV

Reginald Boyce (Photo: Facebook)

Van Turner, the two-term holder of the District 12 seat on the Shelby County Commission, a former commission chair, and one of the body’s most influential members, is term-limited and thus ineligible to run for re-election. Turner, who is also president of the Memphis chapter of the NAACP, has declared himself to be a likely candidate for mayor of Memphis in 2023 and, in the judgment of many observers, is a probable front-runner in the race to succeed Mayor Jim Strickland, who is himself term-limited.

Meanwhile, four candidates have successfully filed for election to the District 12 (southeast Memphis) commission seat, and all of them, at one point or another, had asked Turner for his support — and why shouldn’t they want the backing of the current, much-respected seat-holder?

Erika Sugarmon (Photo: Courtesy Erika Sugarmon)

At least two of them have been publicly rumored to have gained Turner’s support — a fact clearly demanding of some clarification. Which of the two — the Rev. Reginald Boyce, the well-regarded pastor of Riverside Missionary Baptist Church, or Erika Sugarmon, a teacher and voting-rights activist — actually has Turner’s endorsement?

The fact is, they both do. Early on, Boyce asked for, and got, a pledge of support from Turner, who offered him both verbal and financial backing. Then Sugarmon, member of a family renowned for its role in local civil rights history, filed closer to the deadline and reminded Turner of a tentative commitment he had made to her some months earlier.

It was a predicament familiar to many of those Shelby County citizens — in business and civil life in general, as well as in politics — who are asked to underwrite the electoral efforts of others and whose support, in races as close as the one in District 12 is said to be, can be all-important.

Turner decided that he couldn’t renounce the support he’d already offered Boyce, nor could he see himself turning Sugarmon away.

He determined that both candidates were equally deserving and is at present underwriting both their campaigns, verbally and financially. Moreover, he has kind words as well for the other two candidates in the race — David Walker, a former high school classmate of his, and James Bacchus, a retired principal who served at both Whitehaven High School and Hamilton High School. A fifth possible candidate, who ended up not filing, was Ronald Pope, with whom Turner also had good relations.

“It’s difficult when my friends end up running against each other,” says Turner, and his dilemma is, after all, similar to the one we all have when we look at a candidate list and have a hard time deciding which way to go with it. The fact is, the election roster of 2022 offers several such conundrums — races in which more than one candidate has impressive enough credentials to warrant a vote.

(And, yes, of course, there may be one or two races in which nobody seems to measure up.)

In any case, somebody has to win, and everybody can’t.

There are ways of mitigating the perplexities of choice, and one of them — ranked-choice voting — allows for ranking one’s preferences so as to acknowledge the ambiguities of choosing between alternatives and, collectively, to help resolve them. Our betters in the Tennessee General Assembly have just banned that process, though, taking away a tool that we voters of Shelby County had twice approved at the ballot box without much head-scratching at all.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Administrator Phillips is Target at Zoom Seminar

The minds of most people concerned about essential threats to the country are still focused on the coronavirus outbreak and the harm it can bring, but there is a dedicated band of activists whose concerns are threats to the validity of our elections through the means we provide for voting.

Linda Phillips

This is a group that communicates and compares notes with some regularity — mainly these days through Zoom or some other form of virtual web seminars. No few of them are residents of the Memphis and Shelby County communities, and, joined by sympathizers across the nation, they are focusing on the coming round of elections here scheduled for August 6th and on whatever voting apparatus is chosen to count the ballots.

Almost universally, they are suspicious of those in charge, notably of Shelby County Election Administrator Linda Phillips, and of the voting-machine manufacturer, ES&S, that they fear she will steer the contract for Shelby County’s forthcoming voting devices to.

The group, including both local citizens and ballot activists from around the nation, convened again Tuesday night on a Zoom event billed as National Forum on Government Transparency & Election Security, with the subhead “Lifting the Veil of Secrecy on Shelby County Elections.”

Co-moderating the affair were Erika Sugarmon, locally, and Susan Pynchon of AUDIT Elections USA. Among the participants were, locally, Shelby County election commission member Bennie Smith, former EC members George Monger and Norma Lester, former Shelby County commissioner and University of Memphis law professor Steve Mulroy, and, tuning in nationally, Jennifer Cohn; San Francisco attorney, ballot-security writer, and election-integrity advocate Bev Harris of Black Box Voting; John Brakey, co-founder of AUDIT USA; and TV actress Mimi Kennedy.

Though all of the participants were proponents of hand-marked paper ballots as the safest and most effective election mode and a fair amount of commentary was turned in that direction, a good deal of the conversation concerned the background and presumed current attitudes of Administrator Phillips.

A point raised by several of the speakers was what they saw as potential conflicts of interest on Phillips’ part, citing her alleged affinity for products of the ES&S Co., manufacturers of the kind of ballot-marking devices she has expressed an open preference for, and noting, among other things, that the first major purchase she oversaw after being hired as Shelby County Election Administrator in 2016 was for voter-registration software manufactured by her then most recent employer, a company called Everyone Counts.

Everyone Counts, which Phillips left in the spring of 2016 to take the Shelby County job, was one of five companies bidding on a contract for voter-registration software, and Lester, a Democratic Election Commissioner at the time, remembers Phillips as having put a rush on for purchasing the software and making the selection without polling commission members for their preference. Nor did she disclose the fact of having an immediate past relationship with the company.

Harris characterized the Everyone Counts company as one without a reputation in the field at the time and which went out of business shortly thereafter, selling its assets to another buyer.

Philips was also taken to task by Mulroy and others for making unsubstantiated claims that fraud and voter error are both enhanced or even enabled by the use of hand-marked paper ballots

The Election Commission has a meeting scheduled for 5 p.m. Thursday of this week to hear Phillips’ recommendation for new voting devices for use in Shelby County elections, and participants in Tuesday’s Zoom seminar were encouraged to audit those proceedings and to participate in them to the degree permitted.

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Politics Politics Feature

Democrats Gear Up for Suburban Races in 2020

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Now that the “nonpartisan” city election is over and done with — as presumably it will be after two runoff elections for Memphis City Council seats, in District 1 (incumbent Sherman Greer vs. Rhonda Logan) and District 7 (incumbent Berlin Boyd vs. Michalyn Easter-Thomas), are completed this week — it is high time for local Republicans and Democrats to resume their more or less nonstop competition for influence in public affairs.

Jackson Baker

Michalyn Easter-Thomas

Not that this rivalry really ceased for the city election. Although no candidate in the city general election was listed on the ballot under a party label, there were numerous races that were understood to be cases in which the two parties vied against each other.

One such was the race for Position 1 in Super District 9, between public school teacher Erika Sugarmon, a Democrat supported by Democrats, and developer Chase Carlisle, whose Republican sponsorship was equally obvious. There is a certain overlap between the white/black dichotomy and the partisan one, inasmuch as Shelby County’s whites, by and large, gravitate to the GOP, while African Americans constitute the vital core of the Democratic Party.

That fact makes the neck-and-neck race between Sugarmon and ultimate winner Carlisle all the more revealing. That contest was decided by a mere 531 votes out of 46,311 cast. Given the fact that Super District 9, roughly the eastern half of Memphis, is predominantly white, the obvious message is that of a potential racial and political parity there.

Underscoring the point is the legal matter of the bogus ballots — sample ballots in which endorsement space is sold to candidates on a pay-to-play basis. Carlisle and several other candidates who bore the official endorsement of the Shelby County Republican Party got themselves listed as well on two pay-to-play ballots put out under the auspices, respectively, of the Greater Memphis Democratic Club and the Shelby County Democratic Club, two shell enterprises which had no relationship to the actual Shelby County Democratic Party. Both ballots got heavy distribution, right up to the end of voting on Election Day itself, when, before the polls closed, a judge issued a restraining order on their further circulation.

It takes no great leap of logic to see that in an ostensibly nonpartisan race, the two sample ballots could have confused Democratic voters and accounted for the difference in the Sugarmon-Carlisle contest. (Interestingly, Special Judge William B. Acree of Jackson, who issued the restraining order on October 3rd, has scheduled a hearing in Memphis on Wednesday of this week — one day before the runoffs in District 1 and District 7 — to determine the future legality of pay-to-play ballots.)

In any case, next year, local voters will see overtly partisan contests — for legislative seats, one U.S. Senate seat, and presidential preference primaries. The last time the two parties took on each other directly, there was a much-vaunted “blue wave” nationally that favored Democrats. It didn’t help the party’s statewide candidates: Democrats Phil Bredesen and Karl Dean lost to Republicans Marsha Blackburn and Bill Lee for U.S. senator and governor, respectively. And while Democrats held their own in Memphis and came unexpectedly close in several suburban legislative contests, they failed to unseat Republican incumbents. 

One exception was Democratic State Representative Dwayne Thompson, who was an upset winner in 2016 of the suburban District 96 seat and was re-elected in 2018. Party cadres expect Thompson to prevail again, as they made clear in a strategy session held on Tuesday night of last week in the Great Hall of Germantown and billed under the title, “How Liberal Are You? Winning in 2020 by Unifying the Left, the Far Left, and the Radical Left.”

Three seats in the state House of Representatives received special attention — Thompson’s in District 96 and those in two adjoining districts now held by Republicans. At least one Democrat, Jerri Green, has declared herself as an opponent of GOP incumbent Mark White in District 83. And Allan Creasy, who got 45 percent of the vote in District 97 last year, will try again for that seat, which is being vacated by Republican incumbent Jim Coley. Another possible Democratic contender for the District 97 seat is rumored to be Gabby Salinas, who gave Republican State Senator Brian Kelsey a close race in his 2018 re-election bid.

It would surprise no one to see tight races again.

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Politics Politics Feature

Modernizing the Vote; Bogus Ballots; and a Judgeship Kerfuffle

Shelby County should be able to hold elections with paper-trail capabilities by August 2020. Or so opined County Election Administrator Linda Phillips last week. In a pre-election speech to a luncheon of the Kiwanis Club of Memphis at the University Club, Phillips said the county is in the process of acquiring equipment that would make possible a process combining electronic scanning with paper trail records.

Phillips said, however, that there would be disadvantages to any return to voting by paper ballot alone, a course advocated in some quarters. The chief problem, she said, would be the high rate of voter error. As an example, she said that “4 to 5 percent” of absentee ballots, which are executed on paper, contain some kind of error. “And how many elections can you recall in which the margin of victory was 5 percent or less?”

The administrator said one of the biggest challenges faced by her office is that “we don’t have enough full-time employees.” Shelby County has 18 full-time employees but needs at least 26, she said, pointing out that Davidson County (Nashville) has 29 employees to service a voting population two-thirds the size of that of Memphis. She plans to transition her office away from what she considers its present over-reliance on temporary workers. 

Jackson Baker

Congressman Steve Cohen ( r) with Council endorsee Erika Sugarmon

Another need is more pollworkers, she said. Shelby County employs 1,800 pollworkers at present, but their average age is 70-something, and “each year we lose more of them.”

Asked about the efficacy of Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), also called Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), Phillips said the county has the capability to use the method, in which voters specify their ballot choices in order of preference, so that resampling of the votes can designate a majority winner without need for a runoff.

“The biggest problem is that the city council has not given us guidelines,” she said. Shelby County voters have twice approved the process via referendum vote, and her office was prepared to use RCV in the current election, but a council majority, in tandem with the state election coordinator’s office, has by one means or another managed to forestall use of the method so far.

At some point in the future, technological advances such as facial recognition could be employed to enable voter check-ins, Phillips said. “That’s probably several decades away. That’s not because the technology isn’t there, but because it takes the legislature a long time to embrace change. Some day we’ll have it.”

• Ballot Battles (cont’d): It wouldn’t be a local election without at least one sample-ballot kerfuffle. And, sure enough, alarms have been raised, especially in local Democratic circles about a ballot being mailed to households and passed out at early-voting polls bearing the imprimatur of the “Greater Memphis Democratic Club,” a shell organization that apparently exists only to turn out sample ballots at election time.

Jackson Baker

Election Administrator Linda Phillips

The ballot in question, whose chief proprietor is entrepreneur Greg Grant, is one of several such ballots that appear at election time, and it is no secret that many, if not all, of the endorsees for office listed on them paid good money to get there.

City Council candidate John Marek, who first called public attention to the ballot last week, says, in fact, that he himself was solicited to purchase a place on the ballot and declined.

Despite being designated as being under “Democratic” auspices, the ballot features several candidates with known or suspected Republican identities — including council candidates Chase Carlisle, Ford Canale, and Worth Morgan, the latter, an incumbent, being Marek’s opponent.

Grant’s sample ballot also pictures several of the favored candidates with facsimiles of the city of Memphis official logo on their mugshots — a possible violation of city and state laws, Marek says.

Along with several pay-for-play ballots in circulation, there are also, as was noted in this space last week, various not-for-profit sample ballots in distribution locally, including a familiar one published online by Paula Casey, Jocelyn Wurzburg, and Dottie Jones (successor in that regard to her late mother, Happy Jones).

And 9th District U.S. Representative Steve Cohen, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of sample ballots put out in years past by congressional predecessor Harold Ford Sr., is a party to one —  “The Most Qualified Democrats for Change” voters’ guide — expressing his preferences and those of County Commissioner Van Turner and former local party chair David Cocke, all bona fide Democrats. Cohen has in the past backed litigation against misappropriation of the name “Democratic” by purveyors of the pay-for-play ballots.

• As noted this week in the “Politics Beat Blog” at memphisflyer.com, sparks flew during a weekend forum featuring candidates for the two contested races for municipal judge.

Unexpectedly, incumbent Division Three Judge Jayne Chandler charged her opponent, Magistrate David Pool, with “dishonesty” in alleging that she was “unfair” in her conduct of her court, and that that was a reason for his several endorsements by various organizations. Pool denied making any such insinuations.

Chandler also denied rumors that she had a hand in making sure that her Division One counterpart, Judge Teresa Jones, had an opponent — lawyer LaTrena Davis-Ingram. Judge Jones, for her part, launched an attack on Davis-Ingram, who had, she said, resided, worked, and voted in Collierville right up to the point of declaring her candidacy for the Memphis judgeship. Davis-Ingram did not directly respond to the charge.

The forum fireworks seemed to  constitute a confirmation of sorts that bad feelings persist between Jones and Chandler. The third municipal Judge, Tarik Sugarmon in Division 2, is unopposed.

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Politics Politics Feature

Sugarmon, Carlisle, Greer, and Logan Battle for Council Seats

Erika Sugarmon resembles her father, the late political and legal eminence Russell Sugarmon, in her determination to set aside initial setbacks as a candidate. The elder Sugarmon ran for a seat on the old Memphis City Commission back in the last days of Jim Crow. He didn’t make it, but persisted until, years later, he won elections for the state legislature and General Sessions Court.

His daughter is 0-for-1 as a candidate, having been a runner-up to Ford Canale last year in a special election for the Super District 9, Position 2, City Council seat. But that loss was a close one, and Erika Sugarmon’s second-place finish in a race where she was having to share an anti-establishment constituency with several other challengers was strong enough to encourage her to make a second try for the council.

This year, instead of taking another shot at Position 2 incumbent Canale, Sugarmon is going for the Position 1 seat in District 9. That’s an open seat, and, instead of six opponents, she has one — developer Chase Carlisle, whom she sees as one more specimen of an elitist constituency that is already over-represented on the council.

Photographs by Jackson Baker

Rhonda Logan (l), Sherman Greer

As she explained to a group of supporters at a fund-raising event at Halle Plantation in Collierville Saturday night, Sugarmon sees herself as a people’s candidate, proud to have several endorsements from labor groups. And, with a nod to her family tradition, she said, “I’m a fighter. I’m for Memphis first.”

She professes to be alarmed at the number of city contracts that go “outside our state” and wants to “keep the money in Memphis.” She talks up affordable housing, a more equitable awarding of city contracts, and the rights of citizens to have a greater say in matters of neighborhood development. These and other issues have a familiar ring in a council race. But Sugarmon has some specialty issues as well. She promises to pay specific heed to the needs of foster parents, the repurposing of the Mid-South Coliseum, and the plight of the hard of hearing, whom she sees as an underserved population.

Her concern for the latter was dramatized at the event Saturday night by a trio of young women who illustrated a musical number, “The Song of Peace,” with choreographed signing gestures, as well as by the fact that the remarks of Sugarmon, a social studies and government teacher at White Station High School, were “interpreted” for the audience in sign language by a White Station colleague Sherry McCrory at her side.

Sugarmon with signer McCrory

The attendees were treated also to offerings from a saxophonist and a ballet dancer and to a formal dinner. The settings may have seemed a bit elaborate, even eccentric, as did the venue, in a relatively remote section of suburban Collierville. But, as Sugarmon explained, “You go where you can.” She is somewhat at the mercy, as was the case on Saturday, of venues offered up as in-kind donations.

That was one reason for the location. Another was, quite simply, that she says she intends to carry her message to all corners of her sprawling super-district — from Idlewild to Raleigh to East Memphis to Hickory Hill. It remains to be seen if opponent Carlisle can match her visibility or chooses instead to run like various other well-funded candidates represented in the past by the Caissa consulting firm — via thickets of yard signs and heavy advertising.

• The council race in District 1, which is based in north Memphis, Frayser, and Raleigh, isn’t exactly a pure one-on-one like that between Sugarmon and Carlisle. There’s a “but” clause to that reality, though.

There are three candidates of record in District 1: Dawn Bonner, Rhonda Logan, and Sherman Greer, and the latter two are considered to be in a de facto one-on-one situation, with the greatest likelihood of ending up in a matchup against each other if the October 3rd vote totals require a runoff.

When it came time last year for the remaining council members to appoint replacements for colleagues who vacated their seats to assume other offices, Logan, it will be remembered, was the preferred candidate for the District 1 seat of various long-term activists in the city’s northern tier — notably state Representative Antonio Parkinson.

There were other applicants, though, and something of a stalemate set in among council members. In the final analysis, after weeks of indecision, the appointment went to Greer, who had a lengthy record of service as an aide to 9th District Congressman Harold Ford Jr., and later to Ford’s successor Steve Cohen.

Both Logan and Greer were on hand Monday for a ceremonial announcement by Parkinson and Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland of plans for a new Raleigh Farmers Market on a former storage site for the Tennessee Department of Transportation. The site may also include facilities for organized athletics and other community needs, said Parkinson, who emceed the ceremony and had largely brokered the project.

Logan was there as director of the Raleigh Community Development Corporation, as was Greer as councilman for the affected area. Both spoke at the event, and both were introduced by Parkinson, who noticeably stumbled over Greer’s name and made a point of profusely apologizing.

No harm, no foul — except that later, when Parkinson posted a video of the event on his Facebook page, he did so over the following text: “State Representative Antonio Parkinson, Rhonda Logan for Memphis City Council District 1, Willie Brooks For County Commission, Announce Plans for New Raleigh Farmers Market.”

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News News Blog

Emergency Hearing to Halt Council Media Campaign on Referenda

UPDATE: Chancellor Kyle issued a temporary injunction against spending of public money, pending an opportunity for him to study the parties’ respective briefs. He will reconvene the case on Tuesday at 10 a.m. DETAILS TO COME

An emergency hearing has been set for 4 p.m. Friday in the courtroom of Chancellor Jim Kyle to hear a request by a group of plaintiffs for a temporary restraining order and injunction against the expenditure of $30,000 to 40,000 in taxpayer funds by the Memphis City Council to advocate publicly for the passage of three referenda on the November 6th ballot.

By a vote of 5 to 3, the council passed a previously unannounced add-on resolution by Councilman/County Commissioner Edmund Ford Jr. on Tuesday to provide the sum for “a public information campaign concerning the referenda” to explain their “potential benefits to the citizens of Memphis.” After passage, the council hastily voted for a “same-night minutes” process to safely embed the vote in the permanent record.

The referenda, which have been and remain controversial, ask voters to nullify previous actions approved by the city’s electorate — including a two-term limit for mayor and council members, which would be increased to three terms, and the repeal of a prior referendum calling for instant runoff voting (IRV). Another referendum proposes to nullify the district-runoff provisions of a 1993 court decree.

The request for injunction alleges that the expenditure of public funds for such a one-sided propaganda campaign would constitute “distinct and palpable injury” upon the “general citizenry.”

The plaintiffs also allege that the council’s action lacked proper mayoral authorization or opportunity to veto and that state law does not authorize the use of public funds to advertise on behalf of either side of a ballot referendum. The request for declaratory judgment further states that emergency judicial action is needed to forestall the proposed advertising campaign because voting on the aforesaid referenda is already under way.

Plaintiffs are Erika Sugarmon, John Marek, Sam Goff, and Save IRV, Inc.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Notes on Council, School Board Races

CREDIT: JB

Not to be forgotten (but largely overlooked, all the same) as we approach the August 2nd election date is a race to fill a vacancy on the Memphis City Council and four races for positions on the Shelby County Schools board.

By definition, these positions apply exclusively to Memphis, in the case of the council seat, and mainly so for the school board positions.

CITY COUNCIL, SUPER-DISTRICT 9, POSITION 2: The council seat, an at-large position for roughly the eastern half of the city, was formerly occupied by Philip Spinosa, who resigned in May to take a job with the Greater Memphis Area Chamber of Commerce. The seat is now occupied, on an interim basis, by funeral home director Ford Canale, who was appointed to the vacancy by a majority of the other council members. Canale and six other candidates are now seeking the right to fill out the duration of Spinosa’s term.
JB

Council Candidates at Woodland Hills: from left, Erika Sugarmon, Lisa Moore, Tim Ware, Charley Burch (at mic)

The other six are Charley Burch, Tyrone Romeo Franklin, Lisa Moore, Erika Sugarmon, Tim Ware, and David Winston. There have been two public forums to which all the candidates have been invited. Both were held last week — one at the Olivet Worship Center at Woodland Hills on Tuesday, the other at Mt.Olive C.M.E. Church on Thursday. Only candidates Burch, Moore, Sugarmon, and Ware took part, and, while no one bothered to mention Franklin and Winston, the absence of interim Councilman Canale drew significant attention from those present.

In fact, Canale’s ears had to be burning on Tuesday night. Music producer/realtor Burch talked about him at length, casting him as the “plant” in a saga whereby a cabal of business elitists, special interests, and council incumbents are determining who is and can be on the council — and pretty much everything the council does.

“The council knows how they’re voting before they come into the room [the City Hall auditorium],” Burch asserted. “There’s empirical evidence of it.” And Canale’s appointment was a case in point. “The fix was in,” said Burch. “I’m not running against one great candidate up here” he said, a sweep of his arm indicating the fellow candidates on stage with him at Woodland Hills. “But I am running against Canale, because he has a plan to keep us out. … I’m the main one they don’t want elected.”

Moore, who runs a non-profit called Girls, Inc., was of similar mind on Tuesday, speaking of active “collusion” between the council and City Hall on behalf of “a well-orchestrated plan,” where “the rich get richer and the rest of us just watch and struggle.” She called for “equity” efforts in every neighborhood, a crash program in public transportation, and a developed educational plan. Former teacher Sugarmon, the daughter of Memphis civil rights pioneer Russell Sugarmon and a self-proclaimed “people’s candidate,” called for community development programs that would “trickle up” economic progress. Tim Ware, who has had a lengthy career as an education consultant, called for the city to resume its spending on public schools, an idea that the others approved as well.

There was more from all four, much of it sound, some of it more freely speculative, and most of it was repeated at Mt. Olive on Thursday in a program sponsored by the NAACP via its VIP901 election-year campaign and shared with school board candidates. Burch, who has union support and promised to restore the lost pension arrangements of the city’s first responders, and Moore had sounded the leitmotif: that city government was in the clutches of a self-aggrandizing clique, for whom the newly named Canale was just the latest tool.

The Rev. Kenneth Whalum, pastor of the church sponsoring the first council forum and a former school board member, had joined in the verbal abuse of Canale, whom he ridiculed for the fact that the not yet elected councilman’s picture was said to have been mounted already on the City Hall auditorium wall.

Congratulating the other candidates, Whalum said, “All of them were very impressive. They‘re all eminently more qualified than Ford Canale, who didn’t think enough of you to show up. Vote for anybody but Ford Canale. … Put one of these people on the city council and make them take that picture down.”

SHELBY COUNTY SCHOOLS BOARD

At stake on August 2nd are the SCS seats for District 1, 6, 8, and 9. The candidates who turned up for the second half of the NAACP bill at Mt. Olive were basically the same ones who had been at a forum the week before at Bridges downtown. They were: incumbent Chris Caldwell and Michelle Robinson McKissick in District 1; incumbent Shante Avant in District 6; and incumbent Mike Kernell, Kori Hamner, and Joyce Dorse-Coleman in District 8.

The school board seminar at Mt. Olive was lively and reasonably thorough, though it lacked some of the spice that had been contributed at the earlier Bridges affair by candidates Michael Scruggs in District 1; Minnie Hunter and Percy M. Hunter in District 6; Jerry A. Cunningham in District 8; and Rhonnie Brewer in District 9. Incumbent Billy Orgel of District 8 did not attend either forum.

At Bridges, the questions given the candidates were more numerous and more pointed, including one about how to deal with the factor of LGBTQ students that some candidates circled around and others answered with sentiments of simple acceptance. Another question at Bridges that received some lip service at Mt. Olive was that of whether the School Board should be enlarged to include at least one student member. At neither venue was there an outright endorsement of that idea.

[Note for future forum planners. Bridges is an inviting place to have an assembly, but its acoustics, at least when hand mics are being swapped around, are far from ideal]

At both Bridges and Mt. Olive, the school board candidates stressed the importance of involving students’ families in the schooling process, but all of them made the case for increasing resources, from any or all of the funding sources. They all, as well, called for more wrap-around services and such auxiliary personnel as counselors, social workers, behavioral specialists, and the like. And everybody thought teachers deserved more rewards. JB

Board candidates, from left, Mike Kernell, Joyce Dorse-Coleman, Kori Hamner, Rhonnie Brewer

Other notions that found general favor were that of after-school activities and programs to combat what incumbent Avant called the “summer slide.” Though the issue of the district’s optional-schools program was not addressed systematically, there was a certain sentiment, voiced most specifically by McKissack, that the curricula of non-optional schools should be upgraded. As for the problem of differing school formulas — including charter schools and IZone and ASD institutions — the candidates favored some version of sharing resources but tilted toward preserving the norm.