Tag: Harold Collins

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Wharton Has Big Crowd for Opening of Second Headquarters on Poplar

CREDIT: JB

JB

The Mayor was feeling his oats on Saturfday.

What a difference a week makes!

Mayor A C Wharton’s opening of a campaign headquarters in Whitehaven last week was a presentable enough affair, and a necessary one, given that one of his two major opponents, Councilman Harold Collins, has an unmistakable presence there.

Btut the Mayor’s opening on Saturday of another headquarters on Poplar Avenue a week later was both quantitatively and qualitatively more ambitious and was beyond doubt a more resounding affair for the Mayor. For one thing, he was more forceful than he had been a week earlier, exuding a great deal of apparently unfeigned confidence.

Buoyed by crowd

This was important, given that the Mayor’s race might well be decided right there, in the Poplar Corridor, where Wharton’s other major opponent, well-funded Councilman Jim Strickland, has already demonstrated real strength.

Buoyed by a big, responsive crowd containing no few influential members, Wharton eschewed the kind of defensiveness that led him, at Whitehaven, to volunteer an unforced denial that his campaign was “ toxic’ to office-holders (thereby putting the idea in heads that may not have previously harbored it).

Too, the logistics on Saturday were far more favorable. As at Whitehaven, the Mayor’s rally was arranged outside, with rows of seating under a tent-roof for some, while others had to stand. But on Poplar there were more chairs, while spreading trees provided ample shade for those standing, and large fans on either side of the assembly kept a strong but gentle breeze circulating.

The rally area on Poplar, moreover, was reachable by just a step or two out the back door of an interior headquarters space that was multi-roomed and cavernous. So the large crowd had no trouble shifting back and forth, more or less compactly, and without discomfort.

How large was the crowd? In the hundreds, easily. The rally group outside numbered at least 200, pushing higher, and extrapolating from the fact that there had to be significant numbers who remained inside, a claim of between 300 and 400 could at least be entertained.

And Saturday’s crowd could fairly be described as racially diverse, much more so than the predominantly African-American one at Whitehaven had been (though Wharton described them both as if they had been veritable UN assemblies).

Different logistics

An article in this space regarding the Whitehaven rally originally estimated the crowd at that rally in and around the tent
[italics mine] to be between 50 and 75. To put it mildly, that figure was objected to, both immediately thereafter and on Saturday at the Poplar headquarters rally, where this reporter encountered an organized tag-team volley of complainants.

(High-ranking ones, too, including, on Saturday, the city’s First Lady, Ruby Wharton, from whom, however, I was actually able to extract a generous-sized smile. Fair trade, that.)

And, though I had indulged the good folks at Whartonville South by amending my account to include their own (carefully attributed) claim of 150-200, I continue to believe my original estimate was correct. (Look again at those italics overhead.)

There may have been a lot of coming and going at Whitehaven that was hard to encompass visually and difficult to enumerate, but the interior headquarters space there appeared to be about the size of a small studio apartment, and at no point did it contain what could be described as a throng.

And the distance from the front door of that modest office space in Whitehaven to the tented area where the rally itself was held was a bare asphalt area that, on HQ day, with temperatures approaching 100, came off as about as vast and unsheltered as Death Valley, California

It was hot on Saturday on Poplar Avenue, too, but not only were the logistics more inviting, so was the format of the rally. There was no elongated waiting-around period, as there had been at Whitehaven, and instead of the ten or so speakers preceding the Mayor’s advent at last week’s opening, there were only three or four on Saturday, most of them concise and well-spoken. (Among them was the ever-gracious co-chair Lois Stockton, inadvertently overlooked at a previous year’s Wharton opening, but a solid plus on Saturday.)

The number of elected officials lending support for the Mayor on Saturday was somewhat larger than it had been a week earlier, and as easy to list, inasmuch as, at one point or another, they were all acknowledged by emcee Bobby White (or “Roberto Blanco,” as he was re-dubbed for the occasion by Councilman Edmund Ford Jr, one of Saturday’s speakers.)

Hot rhetoric

Things got started on Saturday with something of a stem-winder by Mike Carpenter; County Commissioner Reginald Milton had a passably good speech, too, concluding, “We don’t need a new mayor. We got a mayor!”.

On hand were: Municipal Judge Tarik Sugarmon, Council members Wanda Halbert and Ford, state Representatives Barbara Cooper and G.A. Hardaway; County Commissioners Milton, Van Turner, and Willie Brooks; and Probate Judge Kathleen Gomes.

Especially considering that Mayor Wharton had just been through a somewhat devastating week, the key point of which was having to deal with the shooting death and funeral of MPD officer Sean Bolton, he summoned up a collection of exhortations that were no less spirited for being disjointed.

A sampling:

“I know it’s hot out there…[but]we are going to turn op the A C!,,,,[With] people just melting in the sweltering heat of joblessness and hopelessness, why would you turn off the A C?….I think that’s the time your turn it up, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do on October 8!”

The Mayor distinguished between his opponents as “thermomerter people, who tell you what the temperature is” and himself, a “thermostat” who knew how to calibrate things back into balance. The choice, he said, was between “those who crow about problems and talk about a future of doom” and a Mayor who had brought 10,000 new jobs and could “get off his butt” and go get seed money for the city without raising taxes.

“What’s wrong with going to Bloomberg and getting $5 million? What’s wrong with getting on a plane and bringing the money back here?…What’s wrong with saying, ‘Governor, you’ve got $6 million that you cannot spend’” and talking
Bill Haslam into funneling that much to Memphis?

Wharton boasted of recent pieces in The Huffington Post and the Chicago Tribune that called Memphis a “city of promise,” and he concluded with his patented rainbow note: “We can’t work as black folks, we can’t work as white folks, we can’t work as brown folks, we’ve got to work together” toward “the Destiny of One Memphis!”

To repeat: Disjointed but spirited. Somehow, it came off as a tour de force.

And more important than the words was the image of a man of passion and personality (which is what A C Wharton, at his best, is on the stump), determined to see both his campaign and his mayoralty through and, crowd-wise, able to match, if not beat, opponent Jim Strickland, who had pulled a large but more homogeneous crowd of his own at a headquarters opening on Poplar three weeks ago.

“You tell me somebody else who could turn out a crowd like this on a day like this!” Wharton had said in his remarks. And it was no idle boast.

The message on Saturday was clear: Whoever turns this man out will have to go some.

Monday night debate

• Meanwhile, push will come to shove for five mayoral candidates — Wharton, Strickland, Collins, Mike Williams, and Sharon Webb — on Monday night at 7 p,m. at the National Civil Rights Museum for the next in what will be a spate of mayoral debates between now and October 8.

This one is sponsored by WMC-TV, Action News 5; the NCRM; the League of Women Voters; and the Memphis association of Black Journalists..

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Politics Politics Feature

Few Surprises in Memphis Election Filings

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

The probable lineups for various races in the forthcoming Memphis city election have been set for so long — most of them long before last week’s filing deadline — that it was interesting indeed to see some surprises develop before the stroke of noon on Thursday.

• There were no real surprises in the mayor’s race. It remains the case that of the 12 candidates who qualified, only four can be considered viable: incumbent Mayor  A C Wharton, Councilmen Jim Strickland and Harold Collins, and Memphis Police Association head Mike Williams. Wharton and Strickland are, at this point, in the first tier all by themselves.

In any case, the four mentioned candidates, by a general consensus, seem to have been settled on as the four contestants in a series of forthcoming forum/debate events, though all mayoral  candidates and candidates in other races, for that matter, have been invited to Thursday night’s Sierra Club environmental forum at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library. 

There was a genuine surprise in the council District 2 race, however: Frank Colvett‘s last-minute entry after the unexpected withdrawal of incumbent Bill Boyd presents voters with a likely showdown between party-affiliated entries. Colvett, president of GreenScape in Memphis, a custom design firm, is a longtime Republican activist who has served as state party treasurer and has been an active member of the Northeast Shelby Republican Club. He has already lined up backing from several GOP heavyweights.

His major opposition will probably come from newcomer Rachel Knox, who made a name for herself as an audience participant in Memphis City Council debates, especially on behalf of employees facing reductions in their benefits. Knox seems to have solid backing from Democrats, both grassroot and establishment, and is riding a wave of recent fund-raisers, but District 2 traditionally favors Republicans.

There are three other candidates in the race: Detric Golden, who switched from the mayor’s race; Jim Tomasik, who has run partisan races as both a Republican and a Libertarian, and this time is running on a de-annexationist ticket; and Marti Miller.

• Despite the up-to-the-brink aspect of it, there was no great surprise in the filing-day withdrawal of Justin Ford from the mayor’s race. Virtually from the moment of his first announcement, the youthful Shelby County Commission chairman had deported himself less like a real candidate and more like someone exploring the best way to maximize his name identification without committing himself to the serious effort of a campaign. In the vernacular of sport, Ford never made a football move.

The question is, does Ford’s switch to the race for city court clerk mean that a real race can be expected of him for that office? That race already features quite a few name players. Besides one Thomas Long, son of the incumbent, there are Shep Wilbun, a former City Council member and Juvenile Court clerk who has kept his name active; Wanda Halbert, who is just coming off a relatively long incumbency on the council; and, in what may be the real surprise in this race, Kay Spalding Robilio, who was a Circuit Court judge for a quarter century before resigning from the bench last year.

The clerk’s race is a winner-take-all, so even someone like the relatively unknown William Chism Jr., whose last name — a familiar one in local politics (Democrat Sidney, Republican George) — got him the Democratic nomination last year for Probate Court clerk, can hope for a lottery-like score.

• Did the district attorney general’s office stonewall a request by veteran political figure and twice-convicted felon Joe Cooper to have his citizenship rights restored in time to file for the Super District 9, Position 2 seat? Cooper alleges that is the case, and both the D.A.’s office and the state of Tennessee seem to have corroborated their opposition officially in responses to recent court hearings.

In any case, the D.A.’s office professed not to be able to have an attorney present for a hearing on Cooper’s case before Judge Robert Childers in Circuit Court early last week, and Cooper was forced into the expedient of seeking an injunction in Chancery Court for a stay on the filing deadline that would apparently have applied to all candidates in all races.

At that Thursday hearing, not two hours before the filing deadline, Chancellor Jim Kyle told Cooper that he could not rule on the case unless Cooper had actually filed a petition that had been denied. Subsequently, Cooper paid his filing fee at the Election Commission and submitted a petition that had two signatures, 23 less than the 25 required. It will be up to the Election Commission to rule on its admissibility.

Cooper has been campaigning, one way or another, for months. He had engaged professional consultants and had begun putting up campaign signs. To the question of why, in all this time, he hadn’t bothered to acquire at least 25 signatures on a qualifying petition, he answers to the effect that the state had advised him he could not legally do so before having his rights restored. And, for whatever reason, his court challenge on that point waited until very late in the game, indeed.

Though Cooper was talking of strategies ranging from a crash campaign to present signatures to the Election Commission to the launching of appeals to the state attorney general’s office or to the U.S. Justice Department, he acknowledges that his chances of getting anywhere, at least for this election season, seem remote. 

Meanwhile, state Representative G.A. Hardaway is working on a long-range solution to problems of this sort. Hardaway, who made it clear he was not endorsing Cooper but had made himself available as a potential witness for Cooper in Circuit Court, said he would file legislation in the 2016 General Assembly that would automatically restore a convicted defendant’s citizenship rights upon completion of his sentence, putting the burden of subsequent challenge on the state. Even without Cooper, the Super District 9, Position 2 race will not lack from drama. IBEW union leader Paul Shaffer will have significant support from Democrats, while the well-funded Philip Spinosa can count on solid backing from Republicans. Two former School Board members, Stephanie Gatewood and Kenneth Whalum both have appealed to existing, somewhat diverse constituencies. And the two remaining candidates, Tim Cook, who has some name recognition from previous races, and Lynn Moss, who is running on the same de-annexationist platform as Tomasik in District 2, can hope that lightning will strike in this winner-take-all race, which as an at-large position, has no runoff.

Other city races will be briefly previewed next week.

Two memorial events highlighted the weekend. On Saturday, former President Bill Clinton delivered a eulogy for Circuit Court Judge D’Army Bailey before a large crowd at Mississippi Boulevard Baptist Church. In his remarks, Clinton paid tribute to Bailey’s chief creation, the National Civil Rights Museum, as an institution whose power would never die.

Clinton concluded with these words: “This man was moving all his life. … He moved. To the very end he moved. And God rest his soul.”

A smaller ceremony was held Saturday at the chapel of Elmwood Cemetery for Pierre Kimsey, producer of several well-watched public affairs programs at WKNO-TV, including Behind the Headlines. One of the features of that event was the showing of several Emmy-winning feature shorts produced and directed by Kimsey.

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Politics Politics Feature

On the Cusp

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Let the record show that Harold Collins, the city council member whose mayoral candidacy is one of the key variables of the 2015 election season, was able to sport the first prominent campaign signs around town.

And Collins’ reported second-quarter financial receipts of $48,812, giving him a total on hand of $61,405, support the idea that his candidacy is feasible, depending on developments in the roughly two-and-a-half months remaining in the city election period. (That’s when, as conventional wisdom has it, people actually start paying attention.)

As will be seen, Collins’ financial assets don’t begin to compare to those of the two presumed mayoral frontrunners (incumbent Mayor A C Wharton and Collins’ council colleague Jim Strickland) or to a couple of unusually well-endowed council candidates, for that matter. His candidacy, of necessity, will focus more on grass-roots activity, especially on his home ground of Whitehaven, one of the areas with a voter population large enough to be one candidate’s base (or the source of another’s swing vote).

From that standpoint, the early campaign signs are a good omen.

And let it be said that Kenneth Whalum, Jr., the New Olivet pastor and former school board member whose will-he or won’t-he attitude toward a mayoral race has made him the great unknown quantity of 2015, had scheduled to announce his plans for 2015 on Tuesday night at Church Park, well after this column must deadline for the week. We’ll catch with up the news online.

In April, Whalum drew petitions for mayor, for city council District 5 seat, and for the council’s Super District 9, Position 2 seat. The fact that he finished a close second in the 2014 Democratic primary for Shelby County mayor, even while being out of the country during the final weeks, has given his announcement a certain suspense value.

Memphis Police Association’s Mike Williams, who filed last week, has, at the very least, a niche following among aggrieved city employees, and especially among fire and police employees. He has a tight but active support group, but his reported second-quarter receipts of $6,204 make his race an uphill battle.   

County Commission chairman Justin Ford has also filed, as has James Harvey, his predecessor, but it remains to be seen how serious their candidacies are.

There is no doubting that Wharton and Strickland are still the big dogs in the race, certainly financially. Strickland raised $140,521 in the second quarter, while Wharton raised $129,700. Each appears to have $400,000 on hand, and their campaign treasuries are still growing. One possible caveat regarding those figures: The mayor has committed more money to date than has Strickland.

The possible relevance of that fact became obvious on Saturday, as Strickland and an aide braved 100-degree weather to go door-knocking on Walnut Grove, looking in particular for places to locate yard signs on that highly visible thoroughfare. Strickland got reasonably good feedback from the homeowners, but he won’t have the signs ready for delivery until August 1st.

Wharton continued last week with a series of modest-sized fund-raisers, located in upscale areas where he faces competition from Strickland. One of these was at Waterford Plaza, where he spoke to a group of women supporters and delivered one of those point-by-point surveys of city projects at which the mayor is both glib and convincing. He also addressed his concern that opponents portray him as “the Grinch” for having to impose austerity measures in response to intractable budget problems.

Thursday is filing deadline for city positions, with the withdrawal deadline a week later. Then we’ll know for sure what we’re dealing with.

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Memphis City Council Approves Budget, Raises for City Employees

After two days and nearly 10 hours of debate in the chamber, the Memphis City Council passed a budget for the next fiscal year Tuesday morning.

When debate opened Tuesday morning, the budget stood at $656 million. The council added 2 percent raises for police officers and fire fighters and 1 percent raises for all other city employees. The raises added $3.1 million to the budget for a total of $656 million.

The raises were the first order of business Tuesday. They were proposed by council member Reid Hedgepeth during last week’s regular meeting. Though raises represent less than 1 percent of the overall budget, they consumed most of the debate on the entire $661 million budget.

Reid’s proposal gave raises of 2 percent to police and fire only. It was amended by a proposal from council member Edmund Ford Jr. to include a 1 percent raise to the rest of the city’s employees.

The money to pay for the raises will come from cutting some funded but unfilled positions in the Memphis Police Department.

The council approved the raises but completely circumvented the impasse process. That process, set up after labor struggles of 1978, give city employee unions a vote by three-member council committees if unions can’t get a deal worked out with the city’s mayor and administration.

Impasse committees approved several raises this year and rejected others. However, those decisions weren’t considered by the council Tuesday. On advice from the city council’s attorney Allan Wade, the group ignored the impasse decisions, allowing the budget vote to supersede them.

This drew the ire of many council members, including Harold Collins and Janis Fullilove.

“I’m not sure what we went through the impasse process when it means absolutely nothing, just to make some time during the day to say we’re doing something?” Fullilove asked. “We are making a joke of our political process. I never thought I’d say this in my life but I am so sorry to be on this council with many of you.”

Collins said the council could vote the impasse decision up or down but they should not circumvent the process.

“We are setting the wrong precedent by what we’re doing here today,” Collins said. “Hedgepeth offered what I considered a worthy alternative (to the impasse decisions). But it is not right. We have to do what the ordinance tells us and the law tells us first, then we have to proceed.”

Many proposals for raises were raised, defeated, and even turned down by labor unions in the chaotic budget season that began in April. In the end, it was the chaos that had many council members “baffled.”

“I am shocked today,” said council member Wanda Halbert. “I’m like some of you (in the audience), I’m baffled by all of this. … This budget seasons had been very different form the rest in the last seven years.”

Halbert then, called for the question, meaning she wished to stop all debate on the budget and take a final vote.

Council members Berlin Boyd, Alan Crone, Kemp Conrad, Ford, Halbert, Hedgepeth, Myron Lowery, Bill Morrison, and Jim Strickland voted for the budget.

Council members Bill Boyd, Joe Brown, Collins, and Fullilove voted against it. 

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Politics Politics Feature

Memphis Mayor’s Race is On

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Janis Fullilove may be feeling lonely, but she’s not going to complain. As of the end of Monday, the Super District 8, Position 2 councilwoman was the only incumbent running for reelection in this year’s city election who did not have a declared opponent. All other city races are contested at this point (which is to say that multiple petitions have been drawn for each of them, actual filing having occurred so far in only a minority of cases). 

The other council seats would seem to be assured of contests, with District 5 and Super District 9, Position 2 — the seats vacated, respectively, by mayoral candidate Jim Strickland and Shea Flinn — attracting the most action. There are eight entries so far for District 5, most of them with enough backing to appear serious, and something of the same situation exists for the Super District 9 vacancy, where six petitions have been drawn up to this point.

By contrast, Position 3 in Super District 8, which, as was recently announced, will be vacated by council Chairman Myron Lowery, has so far seen only three petitions drawn. One of those was by the incumbent’s son Mickell Lowery, and the legacy name may be enough to dissuade most comers. District 4 incumbent Wanda Halbert‘s announcement of non-candidacy (she’s a candidate instead for City Court clerk) is too recent to have occasioned a rush of would-be candidates. Four petitions have so far been drawn for that seat.

Another mayoral candidate, Harold Collins, will be vacating his District 3 seat, and that one has generated a fair amount of action, with five petitions drawn so far.

The race for mayor has seen 13 petitions drawn; and it is a safe bet that more are coming. Meanwhile, the first mayoral debate — or forum, as emcee Kyle Veazey of the sponsoring Commercial Appeal, preferred to call it — of the 2015 city election season took place before a good crowd at the old Tennessee Brewery Monday night, and, while there were no winners as such among the five hopefuls invited, it was possible to make out some distinctions. 

To start with, Justin Ford, the youthful county commission chairman, demonstrated likeability but nothing much to anchor it except a recap of his résumé and prerogatives (“I make appointments.”), a recommended slogan (“Listen, Assist, and Invest.”), and enough platitudes and expressions of good will to start a smarm farm.

This is not to doubt Ford’s capability, merely to suggest that he was short on specifics, no doubt on purpose, and did nothing to counter a widespread impression that he is in the race not so much with expectations of winning it as to extend his name recognition for some future electoral purpose.

By contrast, Memphis Police Association President Mike Williams, generally considered a long shot, was all agenda. Pledged to represent the interests of city employees and ordinary citizens, Williams talked up small business and deplored the strategy of enticing big industries here by means of PILOT (payment-in-lieu-of- taxes) arrangements. Indeed, he went so far as to suggest that Electrolux, a relatively recent acquisition on the city landscape, is already looking to go “out the door” because “they didn’t get the profits they thought.”

Williams suggested that Memphis’ problem was not limited revenue but over-spending. He said the city should stick to basics and hire more fire and police. He also weighed in on behalf of those citizens who want to save the Mid-South Coliseum. More than the other candidates, he had audible boosting from a claque of supporters on hand.

Councilman Collins, whose task is to expand on his sprawling Whitehaven base and to convince voters that he and no one else is the legitimate alternative to incumbent Mayor A C Wharton, sounded notes akin to those of Williams, advocating a focus on education to create the basis for “professional” jobs at a “living wage” and against the “$9- or $10-an-hour jobs” available at “Bass Pro and Mitsubishi.”

Collins also joined with Williams in taking a dim view of bike lanes, an issue that separated the five hopefuls into two camps. Collins and Williams made the point that Memphis has an automobile culture and that bike lanes in what Collins called “major neighborhoods” (meaning Frayser, Raleigh, and Whitehaven) were impediments to necessary transportation.

Ford disagreed, pointing out that the bike lanes were paid for by federal “pass-through” money, a point made also by Councilman Strickland, who took Mayor Wharton to task for having “zero bike lanes in the budget” until prodded by the council, after which the mayor allegedly “relented.” Wharton, who had touted the bike lanes early in his remarks as part of his vision of planning for the “city on the move” and the citizens of the future rather than “through the eyes of today,” seemed irate at Strickland’s allegation and insisted that his “plans underway” for the bike lanes were retarded by one city engineer but had been re-established, at the mayor’s insistence, by a “new engineer.”

That bit of sniping seemed more in line with the “debate” that Veazey suggested the CA would be sponsoring down the line than with the informational forum he had in mind for Monday evening. But in fact, everybody but Ford, who was careful to praise his fellow participants, did a little mud-balling. 

The most obvious confrontation was between Strickland, the former two-time budget chairman and self-proclaimed “fiscal conservative” who has been aiming at the mayoralty for years now, and the increasingly beleaguered Wharton, still too spry to be a sitting duck but, clearly, Target Number One for the others in this year’s mayoral race.

Although circumstances could turn out to belie the premise, most observers (and virtually the entire media) see the rest of the mayoral field as being made up of supporting players, while the real drama is the one-on-one between Strickland and Wharton, both well-endowed financially, essentially by donations from the same business interests, and waging an intense battle for the hearts and minds of the Poplar Corridor.

Strickland’s tough-love pitch is to arrest what he sees as the city’s dangerously dwindling population base by practicing fiscal efficiency and focusing on “basic services” and eliminating frills (the city’s “Music Commission” was one he named) and a superfluity of “deputy directors and P.R. people,” while simultaneously attacking blight and crime.

Wharton counters this image of “gloom and doom” with a concept of “revitalizing the entire city in growth mode” and concentrating on “quality of life” issues. This week’s grand opening of the Bass Pro Shop monolith in the Pyramid did not go unspoken for as an exhibit of the mayor’s vision (although the project, brainchild of city housing and community development director Robert Lipscomb, was actually hatched during the mayoralty of Wharton’s predecessor Willie Herenton). 

What gives the notion of a Wharton-Strickland race some validity is the fact that the councilman’s presumed lower profile in African-American communities is balanced by potential inroads there, at Wharton’s expense, by “neighborhood” advocates like Collins and Williams.

There are other candidates, to be sure, including many who were not included in Monday night’s event (several were seated or standing in the audience, however, and Collins gallantly gave shout-outs to several of them), but the distribution of voices Monday night gave some preliminary sense of how this election will play out. If firebrand pastor/former school board member Kenneth Whalum ends up in the race instead of Williams (as per their agreement that one of them, and one only, will run for mayor), the kaleidoscope could shift and radically so.

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Politics Politics Feature

From Nashville to Memphis: A Venue Change

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

In Nashville, things were coming to an end, with the 2015 session of the General Assembly scheduled for a likely finish this week. Meanwhile, in Memphis, things were, in a sense, just getting started. It finally became possible on Friday of last week for would-be contestants in the 2015 Memphis city election to draw candidate petitions from the Shelby County Election Commission.  

On the first day, the most noticeable visitor to the Election Commission’s second-floor office downtown was the Rev. Kenneth Whalum Jr., about whose intentions (particularly as a possible candidate for mayor) a good deal of speculation had swirled. Whalum both satisfied and furthered the suspense by drawing not one but three petitions — for Mayor; for City Council, District 5; and for City Council Super-District 9, Position 2.

The two council positions are those about to be vacated, respectively, by mayoral candidate Jim Strickland and Shea Flinn. As of last week, when District 4 Councilwoman Wanda Halbert announced she would be seeking the City Court clerk’s position instead of seeking reelection, there will be a total of five open seats on this year’s ballot — six if you count, as some observers do, the District 7 council seat, now that of interim Councilman Berlin Boyd and formerly the seat of Lee Harris, now a state Senator.

Whalum made it clear, both at the Election Commission and on Saturday, at a public-education forum in Raleigh, that while he regarded himself as a prospective winner in the mayoral race, he would defer to Memphis Police Association President Mike Williams (an attendee at the Raleigh affair at Bob’s Country BBQ), should the latter choose to run for mayor, as he has previously indicated he would.

“Whatever race I run in, education will be my platform,” said Whalum, a former school board member who advocates that Memphis take steps to resume a de facto city school system.

The known mayoral field so far continues to consist of incumbent A C Wharton, councilmembers Strickland and Harold Collins, County Commission Chairman Justin Ford, Williams, and former University of Memphis basketball player Detric Golden.

 

The Other Brian Kelsey: Whatever his popularity in his own District 31 — which begins in Midtown and extends into East Memphis, Cordova, Bartlett, Germantown, Collierville, and Lakeland, – which continues to reelect the state Senator comfortably, Brian Kelsey has a wholly different reputation elsewhere in Shelby County.

Among those Memphians who consider themselves progressives, for example, Kelsey is about as popular as, say, Dick Cheney or Ted Cruz would be at a Democratic National Convention. At one time or another, he has had his hand in legislation antagonistic to gays, abortion-rights advocates, proponents of living-wage ordinances, income-tax advocates, public-school defenders, believers in gun control, and to supporters of the Affordable Care Act in general, and to Medicaid expansion in particular.

That list should not be regarded as fully inclusive. Kelsey is an equal-opportunity exacerbator. In addition to his perceived offenses against Democrats, he has also taken an abundance of positions considered objectionable to various members of his own Republican Party, notably including Governor Bill Haslam, who has labored to keep Kelsey in check on issues ranging from voucher legislation to restraints on gubernatorial privilege.

It should be said that Kelsey sees himself as a champion of liberty, as he would define that term, and — hark! — there are bills of his that actually do bridge the enormous gap between him and a multitude of others who would define that term wholly differently. 

In last year’s legislative session, Kelsey secured passage of SB 276, which struck down obstacles to employment for reformed felons, and in the session now coming to an end, the senator sponsored SB 6, the “Racial Profiling Prevention Act,” which has now passed both chambers and awaits only the governor’s signature to become law.

The bill defines racial profiling as “the detention or interdiction of an individual in traffic contacts, field contacts, or asset seizure and forfeiture efforts solely on the basis of the individual’s actual or perceived race, color, ethnicity, or national origin” and would require all police departments and sheriff’s departments in Tennessee to adopt by the end of this year a written policy in conformity with the definition.

Kelsey, it seems, can work across the aisle. The racial profiling bill was co-sponsored by Memphis state Representative John DeBerry, and the previous year’s bill on behalf of ex-felons was co-sponsored with state Representative Karen Camper. Both DeBerry and Camper are inner-city Democrats.

Now, an even more striking piece of collaboration may be in the offing. At a meeting Monday night at Celtic Crossing of “Drinking Liberally,” a group of self-styled progressive Democrats, political consultant Liz Rincon, a key member of the group, was sharing portions of some online correspondence with Kelsey, wherein the state senator seemed to be expressing himself open-minded about the prospect of raising the minimum wage for servers in food and drink establishments.

Hmmm. The senator from District 31 could be a work in progress.

…

As the General Assembly prepared to close out 1) without acting on Governor Bill Haslam’s Insure Tennessee Medicaid-expansion proposal; and 2) with House concurrence on a Senate bill that would impose a 48-hour waiting period on abortions among other restrictions, dissenters made their feelings known.  

Jackson Baker

First Baptist Church on Broad pastor Keith Norman (left) and state Representative Joe Towns presided over a press conference last week at Christ Community Health Services adjacent to Norman’s church as part of statewide information session on Insure Tennessee sponsored by the House Democratic Caucus. They vowed to continue efforts to secure passage of the governor’s Medicaid-expansion proposal — in a new special session, if need be.

As the House in Nashville prepared to put its imprimatur on new abortion restrictions, protesters at the Poplar Avenue headquarters of Planned Parenthood, many of whom had made repeated visits to the General Assembly in an effort to dissuade legislators, indicated they, too, would continue their opposition to what they regarded as backward-looking legislation. To make the point, they affected the period dress of pre-Roe v. Wade times. (See picturel, top of page.)

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Politics Politics Feature

The Beat Goes On

As the Election Commission’s April 17th date for making candidate petitions available approaches, the 2015 city election season becomes ever more clearly a case of the old making way for the new. Within the past few weeks, such core pillars of the city council as Chairman Myron Lowery and Councilmen Shea Flinn and Harold Collins have announced they will not be candidates for reelection. Flinn’s future plans remain unknown, although they are rumored to involve some sort of relationship with the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce. Another key councilman, Jim Strickland, announced back in January that he would not run for reelection and would opt instead for a mayoral race, which is now fully underway. Collins’ announcement of non-council candidacy was widely regarded as confirmation of his long-indicated plans to join the widening cast of characters in the contest for mayor. So far the dramatis personae in that race are Strickland, county commission Chairman Justin Ford, Memphis Police Association President Mike Williams, and former University of Memphis basketballer Detrick Golden.

Meanwhile, the incumbent, Mayor A C Wharton, kept himself front and center over the Easter weekend with a “coffee and chat” on Saturday morning at the Midtown IHOP on Union Avenue, followed by a number of appearances at events held in conjunction with the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 assassination.

After the IHOP event, sponsored by Shelby County Commissioners Melvin Burgess Jr. and Reginald Milton, Wharton was asked if the proliferation of opponents in the mayoral field would help or hinder his chances of reelection. “You can’t worry about that,” he answered. “I just have to keep my attention on what I’m doing.”

The mayor shed some light on a bit of verbal zig-zagging he had indulged in earlier this year on the prospect of the city’s gaining a Cheesecake Factory, confirmed last week as coming to Wolfchase Galleria. On the occasion of his State of the City address in January, Wharton had alerted his listeners to the likelihood of the popular restaurant franchise coming to Memphis.

But shortly thereafter, at a well-attended address at Lafayette’s Music Hall, the mayor made an effort to pass off his earlier forecast as having been merely a thinking-out-loud recollection of his daughter’s telling him she’d like to see such a happy event come to pass.

Now that the Cheesecake Factory was definitely on track, had the mayor’s rhetorical fluctuations been something of a screen for the to-and-fro of negotiations, he was asked on Saturday. “You’re very discerning,” was his answer, accompanied by a self-effacing chuckle.

Council Chairman Lowery had long ago dropped hints that he might not be a candidate, and that his son Mickell Lowery, a sales representative at FedEx, might be on the ballot instead as a successor for the Position 3 seat in Super-District 8.

Councilman Lowery had served consecutively since his first election in 1992, with a brief intermission during his three-month service as interim mayor in 2009, following the retirement of longtime Mayor Willie Herenton. And, like the practiced politician that he is, he contrived to get the maximum amount of public notice for his departure and his son’s prospective advent.

First came a press conference in Lowery’s City Hall office last week in which the chairman gave his own bon voyage to the attendant media, expressed gratitude for having been able to serve for so long, and predicted that there would be a spirited race to succeed him, no doubt including many candidates. Wife Mary was on hand for the occasion, and so, conspicuously, were son Mickell Lowery, his wife Chanisa, and young Milan Lowery, the councilman’s granddaughter. Asked his own intentions after the press conference, the younger Lowery indicated only that he would have “something to say” soon. When, he was asked. “It won’t be too long,” was the reply.

Indeed it wasn’t. Mickell announced his own candidacy for the seat on Monday, from the steps of LeMoyne-Owen College, his alma mater, as well as his dad’s. The choice of venue, said the aspiring councilman, was symbolic in that the school represented “advancement in our community,” a quality he saw as consistent with his campaign theme, “New Leadership for a Better Memphis.” 

Candidate Lowery added that he wanted “to make sure that the priorities of City Hall match the priorities of the community.” He named crime reduction as one of his priorities, and may have intended to cite some more. 

But just then a chip off his block — his toddler daughter Milan, who nestled in granddad’s arms — made a bit of a noise, and Daddy Mickell demonstrated his quickness on the uptake with what seemed a relevant segue: “I intend to be talking with students as early as elementary school,” he said.

Asked about his advantages in what might still become a competitive and well-populated race, Mickell stressed what he said were years of “hard work” for the community as a neighborhood football coach and “on various boards.” By way of further emphasizing his community work, he added, “That’s why I didn’t try to run 10 years ago, simply off my last name.”

Even so, his beaming father was on hand again on this second announcement occasion, as well as Mickell’s wife and child and a decent-looking collection of friends and family.

• As had been widely predicted, Flinn’s long-expected announcement of non-candidacy for his Position 2, Super-District 9 seat, opened up the possibility that candidates already announced for Strickland’s District 5 seat might effect a shift of venue into the at-large race.

It may or not signal a trend, but one of the previous District 5 hopefuls has already made the passage over. That would be Joe Cooper, the ever-persistent pol who may ultimately eclipse all existing records for the maximum number of candidacies launched during a lifetime.

In the truest sense, Cooper’s campaign strategies have been out-of-the-box, and so have many of his proposals, such as his advocacy, during a race for county commissioner some years back, that the resident bison at Shelby Farms be moved out to make room for possible development on the rim of the park property. That idea backfired, drawing the wrath of every environmentalist within geographical reach.

Cooper’s latest proposal is equally idiosyncratic. This week, he floated the idea of turning the Coliseum building and its parking lot over to the proprietors of the Wiseacre brewery for the creation of a “tourist attraction” that would simultaneously allow visitors to observe the beer-making process and alternately to spend time with a museum featuring the grunt-and-groaners who once rassled at the Coliseum.

Oh, and the two airplanes owned by the late Elvis Presley and now scheduled for eviction by the new gods of Graceland could find a resting place in the parking lot.

Another frequent political candidate, former County Commissioner George Flinn, has thrown his name in the hat as a would-be successor to state Republican Chairman Chris DeVaney of Chattanooga, who made a surprise announcement recently that he would be departing the position to head up a hometown nonprofit.

Flinn said he would seek, as chairman, to promote unity among the state’s Republicans and to promote “inclusiveness” in party membership.

His most recent electoral run was as the GOP’s 2014 candidate for the state Senate seat vacated by now Chancellor Jim Kyle and won ultimately by Kyle’s wife Sara Kyle, the Democratic nominee.

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News The Fly-By

Biker Organization Launches Safe House in Gang Neighborhood

An abandoned South Memphis building will soon be demolished and replaced with a facility that will provide youth in that community with an alternative to gang activity.

Details of the nearly 3,000 square-foot “Safe House” were provided during a press conference at the Riverview Community Center last week. It will feature computer workstations, a music room, and a reading area, as well as meeting and office space. Youth will also be able to receive mentorship and apply for scholarship programs there. Plans are for the facility to operate 24 hours a day. 

It’s the first of several Safe Houses that the Bikers and Social Clubs 4 Change (BSC4C) — a nonprofit organization comprised of motorcyclists who are combating issues impacting urban communities — hope to establish in disadvantaged areas throughout the city. 

“We want people to see that the choice is yours,” said BSC4C’s Clark “Preacha” Chambers. “We don’t want [kids] to think that they’re bound anymore to [gangs]. Our whole objective is to make a difference and [encourage] people to make a change.”

The Shelby County Land Bank provided BSC4C with the property for its first Safe House. It will be located on Florida Street near Mallory.

In September 2013, the area was identified by law enforcement as one of the spots used by the Riverside Rollin’ 90’s Crips. A 4.6-mile radius of Riverside bordered by South Parkway, West Mallory, I-55, and Florida Street was declared a “Safety Zone” by the Multi-Agency Gang Unit. Gang members in those areas are prohibited from associating in public, intimidating or assaulting witnesses to gang activity, possessing guns, and any other form of illicit activity.

Members of the biker group say they hope to collaborate with neighborhood gang members to maintain safety around the forthcoming Safe House in South Memphis.

“We want to embark on a relationship with them so with these Safe Houses, people will be able to come and go,” Chambers said. “We’re looking for them to allow us the opportunity because these gangs are in these communities [all the time], and we’re not necessarily in these communities.

“We want them to help police these Safe Houses and keep them safe,” Chambers said. “But that doesn’t mean that the computers need to walk out. We don’t want any fights [or] any killing. We don’t want to create more of a problem. We want to bring solutions to the problems that exist.”

The first Safe House is projected to cost $560,000. The organization plans to raise the bulk of that money through its upcoming Memphis Bike Fest, along with private donations. The five-day event takes place July 22nd through the 26th at Tiger Lane. 

BSC4C hopes to help change the stereotypical image of bikers through efforts such as its Safe House initiative.

“These young men and women, with these biker jackets on, could give us a feel of intimidation, but look at what they’re doing in our community,” said Councilman Harold Collins. “This work is hard, and many times we meet resistance because we have a lack of resources, lack of opportunities, and a lack of commitment. But these men and women who ride these bikes are steadfast in their commitment. For that, we, as a city and community ought to be truly grateful for what they do.”

The organization plans to establish additional Safe Houses in the Frayser, New Chicago, Smokey City, and Lauderdale Courts communities.

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Politics Politics Feature

Spring Training

It’s still a little less than two months — April 17th, to be exact — before candidates for city offices can even pull a qualifying petition from the Election Commission. And it’s nearly five months after that until the November 3rd election itself — seven month total.

For emphasis, let’s put that last figure in Arabic numerals: 7 months before Memphis voters can finish signaling their intentions on city offices — encompassing the lengthy span from now, when major league baseball teams are beginning spring training, to a date when the World Series is likely to still be happening.

And yet the roster is rapidly filling up for the most important race on this year’s election calendar — that for Memphis mayor. With the formal announcement of candidacy on Monday of this week by Memphis Police Association President Mike Williams, the number of well-known names still expected to be on the mayoral ballot has shrunk to two — City Councilman Harold Collins, who appointed an exploratory committee last fall and former Memphis School Board member and New Olivet Baptist church pastor Kenneth Whalum Jr.

[IMAGE-1]Whalum is forthright about his own plans, which to a great extent are based on an understanding with Williams, whose views on city matters overlap with his own. It boils down to this: “If Mike follows through and picks up a petition when the time comes and files, I won’t run,” says Whalum. “If he doesn’t, it’s 100-percent certain that I will.”

Already declared, besides Williams, are incumbent Mayor A C Wharton, City Councilman Jim Strickland, former County Commission Chairman James Harvey, current commission Chairman Justin Ford, and former University of Memphis basketball player Detric Golden.

And, while Ford, who has commission business to attend to, has not yet finished stockpiling his artillery, and Harvey has not yet begun to fight, the others are already doing battle. Strickland is speaking lots and firing away at Wharton on an almost daily basis via Facebook and Twitter; Williams and his supporters are active on the same social media; and the mayor is playing his bully pulpit for all it’s worth, materializing in numerous speech appearances and press conference formats that allow him to do double duty as city official and candidate for reelection.

And Golden, who has yet to demonstrate what his political base is, is turning up at public events, including those held by other candidates, and for well over a year has been conspicuous by driving around town in a car that is tricked-out with signs advertising his candidacy.

The mayoral-campaign activity so far is a form of spring training, and, like its baseball equivalent, it is a way of working the kinks out, finding a groove, and getting the jump on the competition. For that reason, Collins and Whalum won’t be able to procrastinate much longer on revealing their own intentions, and an announcement from one or both of them may well beat this issue to the printer.

There’s another reason why time is of the essence: money, which is a finite resource, especially here in hard-pressed Memphis, and won’t stretch far enough to cover every candidate’s needs. In a certain sense, it’s a matter of first come, first served, and the most accomplished self-servers so far are Wharton and Strickland. Both of them have been at it for a while — with receipts through January 15th showing a campaign balance for Wharton of $201,088 and for Strickland of $181,595.

The others have some catching up to do.

• As one of the first commenters to the Flyer‘s online coverage of the event said, “A very sad day, indeed, for the Shelby County Democratic Party in more ways than one.”

The event in question was the forced resignation on Saturday of Shelby County Democratic Party Chairman Bryan Carson, well-liked in his own right and the son of the widely admired Gale Jones Carson, a former local party chair herself and the longtime secretary of the state Democratic Party.

In a nutshell, the younger Carson had, on the fateful Saturday, faced a no-holds-barred interrogation into his oversight of party finances by the party’s executive committee — 76 strong, at peak, with roughly 50 on hand for the occasion, which was closed to the press and public. Saturday’s meeting followed two prior closed-door meetings with Carson last week by the party’s smaller 11-member steering committee, the second of which had resulted in a unanimous vote of “no confidence.”

All three meetings had been called out of a sense of crisis that developed from Carson’s repeated failure either to address party members’ concerns about the state of party finances or to deal satisfactorily with ominous promptings for an accounting from the Tennessee Bureau of Ethics and Campaign Finance. The bureau had already levied three $500 fines on the local party for late or incomplete submissions of financial disclosure statements and threatened another of $10,000, along with a showdown meeting in Nashville in March.

There were two immediate issues: The first was a disclosure statement that had been overdue since October 28th. Carson would hurriedly prepare one and submit it, such as it was, to the bureau on Wednesday, February 18th, the same day as his second meeting with the party steering committee and their vote of no confidence.

The other issue was even more troubling. It concerned an ad hoc audit, prepared at the request of the steering committee by Diane Cambron, wife of David Cambron, the local party’s first vice chair, and Dick Klenz, longtime president of the Germantown Democratic Club — both with unimpeachable reputations for fair-mindedness.

The audit showed that, since last September, Carson had made 63 withdrawals from the party’s bank account, in an amount totaling $8,437.89, and could produce no receipts for what he contended had been cash payments on behalf of the party. Even allowing for figures submitted in what Carson called a “self audit” (again, unaccompanied by receipts and made difficult to trace by virtue of the chairman’s having arbitrarily switched the party banking account), there seemed to be an amount of $6,091.16, which the Cambron-Klenz audit referred to as “unsubstantiated.”

Carson maintained in all three meetings with party committees that he had done nothing wrong and that the apparent discrepancies were the result of an overload of activity during the 2014 campaign year, coupled with the fact that he had been compelled, he said, to try to function as his own party treasurer.

That last was another fact that confounded committee members, who had thought that party member Jonathan Lewis was functioning as party treasurer. It turned out during the week’s discussions that Lewis had shied away from the service and had not registered with the state after being given a glimpse by Carson into the actual state of party finances.

In any case, the predominant mood of the party executive committee on Saturday was to reject Carson’s explanations, as well as his expressed wish to maintain at least a titular hold on the office of chairman (while handing over actual control to first Vice Chair David Cambron) through the party’s scheduled March caucus-convention rounds that are scheduled to produce a new executive committee and chairman on March 28th.

Vice Chair Cambron has been named acting chair, and he announced that one of his first acts would be to open a new party banking account this week, so as to provide a revised and reliable financing accounting from the ground up.

Beyond that, there has been no word from anyone speaking for the party to take further action or pursue legal remedies and no apparent appetite for doing so.

Various online commenters on the matter have made a point of noting that the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office has issued a warrant of “theft over $500” against Axl David, former treasurer of the Young Republicans in that Middle Tennessee county, for what Sheriff Robert Arnold called “several discrepancies in the management of Club funds.” But no one has demonstrated any analogy between that situation and the one in Shelby County.

Bryan Carson, meanwhile, apparently still intends to seek the open District 7 City Council seat in this year’s city election. In January, he finished one vote behind Berlin Boyd in a council vote to name an interim District 7 councilman to succeed Lee Harris, who had resigned to assume his new duties as a state Senator.

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News The Fly-By

Council Gets First Look at MATA Trolley Plan

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

Changes may be ahead for the Memphis trolley system as city leaders weigh in next week on the plan to bring the trolleys back.

The trolley system was shut down last June after two trolley cars caught fire on the Madison Line in separate events only seven months apart. Trolley 452 caught fire in November 2013. Trolley 553 caught fire on April 7th of last year. Both trolleys were burned beyond repair.

After the shutdown, the Memphis Area Transit Authority (MATA) brought in a team of rail and transportation safety experts to review the system and help get it back on track. MATA leaders have said they would reveal the trolley plan to the public once the consultants finished their work. But the plan hasn’t surfaced yet.

Even though trolleys haven’t rumbled past Memphis City Hall in nearly eight months, they were on the minds of Memphis City Council members last week. 

Justin Fox Burks

MATA President Ron Garrison

MATA President Ron Garrison asked council members to approve the use of $1.1 million in pre-approved capital funds last week for rail facility improvements. But council members asked Garrison to bring his request back to city hall next week, along with his plan for the trolley system.

Councilmembers Harold Collins and Shea Flinn expressed concerns about the system, especially the Madison Line. Flinn said he and Collins were “far from alone” about questions of trolleys on Madison and called the route a “difficult situation.”

Flinn said there have long been problems with trolley utilization overall but especially on the Madison Line. 

“While we’re in repair and rebuild mode, we should be in rethink mode,” Flinn said. “The city has exhausted a lot of resources on this amenity, and I’m not sure we’re getting the bang for the buck from it that we could be. As we have this forced stoppage, we need to try and think of how we can make this a more-utilized asset.”

Collins said he’s seen and heard about problems of dependability on the trolley system. Any continuing trolley service needs to simply work for the citizens of Memphis, tourists, and business owners, he said.

“If we’re thinking about investing an enormous, no … if we’re going to reinvest potentially an enormous amount of money on this project [we should see a plan],” Collins said. “But nobody seems to agree on or like what they’re doing now.”

When asked what potential changes he’d like to see in the trolley system, Collins said he wanted better connectivity across the city. He recalled a former plan to take a trolley or even a bus from the end of the Madison Line all the way to the corner of Madison and Cooper. The move would help better connect downtown and Midtown.

MATA’s work is focused now on the repair and recertification of five trolley cars, all of them the larger cars. MATA says those are in the best condition and can also carry the most people. 

When they are ready for service, the trolleys will bring service first to the Main Street Line. As more trolleys are repaired, they will be launched on the Riverfront Line and the Madison Line. 

Garrison is scheduled to bring MATA’s trolley plan to city hall next Tuesday, February 3rd for a review by the council’s Public Works and Transportation Committee at 8:45 a.m.