Heidi Schafer – Memphis Flyer

With the apparent reaching of a compromise on Monday between feuding factions of the Shelby County Commission, a lawsuit may have been resolved and a modus vivendi of sorts achieved, but the ideologically polarized body still has issues.

It took a while, both in the long run (two and a half months since the standoff began, in the immediate wake of the August 7th election) and in the short term (two hours of mind-bending intricacy at Monday’s climactic public meeting), but the commission’s simmering power struggle finally ended — or seemed to — with a win-win solution.

Both of the warring party-line-plus-one factions were claiming victory, in any case — the one composed of six Democrats and one Republican (Steve Basar), and the one containing five Republicans and one Democrat (Justin Ford).

The solution involved a willingness by the D-Plus-Ones to give up their ongoing Chancery Court lawsuit against Chairman Ford (for his seemingly high-handed control of what could be placed on the commission agenda) in return for the R-Plus-Ones’ agreement to drop their appeal of an adverse decision by Chancellor Jim Kyle, coupled with Ford’s acceptance of majority rule in determining agenda items.

Ford and his Republican allies claimed victory because they had fended off what Republicans Heidi Shafer and Terry Roland saw as an effort by the D-Plus-Ones to “overthrow” Ford’s chairmanship. The Democratic coalition — whose ad hoc leaders were newbie Van Turner and the veteran Walter Bailey — claimed victory because they had forced Ford to yield on his arbitrary control of the agenda.

Virtually lost sight of in the two-sided celebration (which followed an exhausting and repetitious squabble settled evidently in an off-to-the-side chat by competing lawyers Turner and Ron Krelstein) was the origin of the dispute, in the chairmanship election held on September 8th by a freshly elected commission with six new members.

Basar, who had been vice chair in 2013-14, had expected to be elected chairman and was shocked when the majority of Republicans opted instead for the candidacy of Roland, then switched to Democrat Ford when the Millington Republican seemed obviously about to fall short.

Ford was ultimately elected on the basis of his own vote and that of the commission’s six Republicans (including the stunned Basar, who would shortly have a change of mind). Bailey, the commission’s senior Democrat, was meanwhile outraged by his second-place finish to Ford, whose long-term chumminess with Republicans and openness to their agenda were no secret.

At the commission’s next meeting, on September 22nd, Bailey and five other Democrats, along with Basar, voted together to block the committee appointments made by Ford. Weeks later, Ford would get his way on the committee matter, but in the meantime, the battle had shifted to the matter of an agenda item that Basar kept proposing and Ford kept rejecting.

That agenda item, which proposed a rules change allowing agenda items to be added on the basis of simple majority votes and not by a two-thirds super-majority, became the basis of a Democratic coalition lawsuit against Ford’s alleged violations of commission rules via his persistent rejections.

Two weeks ago Chancellor Kyle declined to rule outright on the suit, finding instead that the commission had no rules because it had adopted none for the new body and directing commissioners to adopt new rules or to readopt the body’s former rules.

Hence a motion for an amended rules package presented as an add-on by Basar on Monday, igniting another round of the ongoing factional dispute — partly tedious, partly fascinating — and going over all of the same old issues dividing the body.

The amended rules package contained new clauses calling for the majority-rule principle and essentially removing the chairman from any control over agenda items. Deleted from the package, on a finding by County Attorney Marcy Ingram that it conflicted with the county charter, was a clause declaring that the chairman served “at the will and pleasure of the commission.”

When the deal finally came sometime after 6 p.m. on Monday, the two sides had agreed (on a motion by Ford!) to defer the rules matter to the next meeting of the general government committee, to drop their respective legal actions, and to do the trade-off indicated above: Ford can feel secure in his chairmanship, though he has had to sacrifice the power over the agenda that he had previously claimed and employed.

Either both sides won or both sides lost. The question now becomes: Do the two party-line-plus-one coalitions continue to cohere, or do they break apart, a major part of their raison-d’être having dissolved.

• An indicator of whether the coalitions might hold was implicit in another vote taken by the commission on Monday. Two votes, actually, on related ordinances proposed by Roland — to strike language in existing ordinances requiring that contractors with the county observe living wage and prevailing wage standards, respectively.

Roland’s premise is that the existing ordinances are inconsistent with legislation passed by the Republican dominated General Assembly establishing state standards in such matters and prohibiting local requirements that might clash with them. The issue, both in Shelby County and in Nashville, has been a clear divider between Democrats and Republicans.

Since this was the second reading for both Roland ordinances, and since the commission was girding for the later clash on the rules matter, it was tacitly agreed that there would be no extended debate and that any knock-down, drag-out clash between factions would be postponed until the crucial third reading of the ordinances, at the commission’s next full public session.

Both the Roland ordinances got a tentative okay by the margin of 7-6, with Basar voting along with other Republicans and Democrat Ford voting with them as well.

On that evidence of Ford’s continued solidarity with his Republican supporters, coupled with Basar’s reversion to ideological form on a power-neutral issue, it would seem that the GOP may have come out ahead in the power struggle. It remains to be seen how long that state of affairs exists.

• One other matter of both short- and long-term significance was taken by the commission on Monday. This concerned a resolution from GOP member David Reaves putting the commission on record as wanting to see the matter of a court-ordered payment to Shelby County Schools (SCS) resolved as a precondition for any vote to approve a city-sponsored Fairgrounds Tourist Development Zone (TDZ) proposal by city housing and community development director Robert Lipscomb.

The TDZ proposal, outlined by Lipscomb to the commission during its committee sessions last week, had been favorably received in general. The commission’s approval of the proposal is not required but would clearly assist the TDZ’s chances in being okayed by the Tennessee Building Commission, where the submitted proposal has lingered for at least a year.

The matter of the city’s debt to SCS — inherited from a 2008 default of $57 million owed to the former Memphis City Schools system — has periodically accounted for controversy between the city of Memphis and Shelby County governments, inasmuch as the county is now responsible for all public-school funding including the delinquent maintenance-of-effort amount incurred by the city.

Reaves’ resolution passed 8-4, with four Democrats — Bailey, Turner, Reginald Milton, and Eddie Jones — dissenting and another Democrat, Willie Brooks, abstaining.

• A former Memphis media personality had a role in a controversy that flared up last week regarding the possibility that Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges may have flashed a gang sign while posing for a news photo with a volunteer in a get-out-the-vote campaign during the week before the November 4th election.

The picture shows Hodges and the volunteer, who has something of a criminal record, pointing at each other, as a sign of solidarity on the GOTV effort. An official of the Minneapolis police union, noting that both Hodges and the volunteer had raised thumbs while pointing, charged that they had thereby exchanged a known gang greeting.

The charge has been the source of much derision in the national media, a good deal of which was directed at KSTP-TV, an ABC affiliate that first aired it. Bill Lunn, a former longtime anchor with Memphis’ Channel 24, was a co-anchor of the KSTP broadcast.

In an exchange of texts, Lunn told the Flyer that Hodges may have “unknowingly” flashed the gang sign while reciprocating the volunteer’s gesture but, without elaborating further, said the station had done a good deal of “vetting” before airing the original segment.

The final meeting of the version of the county commission that was elected four years ago began on Monday with a show of harmony, with mutual compliments, and some last commemorative poetry by limerick-writing Commissioner Steve Mulroy, and expired with a last sputter of disputation. In between, it advanced on two fronts and retreated on another.

Though it might not have appeared so to those unversed in the habits and ways of the county legislative body, this culminating session of the Class of 2010 also offered a symbolic forecast of better times ahead economically. It was during the heyday of the housing boom that went bust in the late aughts — leaving the county, the state, and the nation in financial doldrums — that ace zoning lawyers Ron Harkavy and Homer “Scrappy” Brannan were omnipresent figures in the Vasco Smith County Administration Building.

It seemed like years, and probably was, when the two of them had last appeared at the same commission meeting, each serving as attorneys for clients seeking commissioners’ approval for ambitious building plans. But there they were on Monday, reprising their joint presence at last week’s committee meetings — Harkavy representing the Belz Investment Company on behalf of a new residential development in southeast Shelby County; Brannan representing the Bank of Bartlett in upholding another development further north.

Both were successful, and it was a reminder of old times — say, the early 2000s, when the building boom so dominated commission meetings that worried commissioners actually had to propose a moratorium to slow down the proliferation of sprawl.

The matter of residence was, in yet another way, a major focus of Monday’s meeting, in its overwhelming approval of a resolution on residency requirements for commission members proposed by Mulroy, a Democrat and the body’s leading liberal, and amended by Republican Commissioners Heidi Shafer and Terry Roland. The commission thereby wrote the final chapter of the Henri Brooks saga and set precedents for the future.

The resolution, which provides a checklist of items to satisfy the county charter’s existing residency requirements, was strongly resisted by senior Democrat Walter Bailey, who had been the commission’s major defender of Brooks in her successful effort to stave off legal eviction from the commission after the apparent discovery that she no longer lived in the district she was elected to serve.

Bailey, who has called the Brooks affair a “witch hunt,” has continued to maintain that the commission has no authority to impose or enforce such rules, citing a decision last month by Chancellor Kenny Armstrong upholding Brooks’ appeal of a finding by County Attorney Marcy Ingram that vacated Brooks’ seat in conformity with the county charter. Other commissioners pointed out that Armstrong had actually ruled that it was the commission, rather than the county attorney, that could decide on the matter, thereby affirming the body’s authority.

In any case, Bailey said the commission should operate on the principle of “good faith” and not pursue vendettas. He was backed up in that by Commissioner Sidney Chism, who went so far as to suggest that his colleagues were out to “kill” Brooks.

Most commissioners, though, clearly felt such thinking was over-protective and counter not only to the county charter but to the same traditions of residency enforcement that governs the placement of school children and the right to vote in a given precinct.

Moreover, they had just as clearly soured on Brooks. Commissioner Mark Billingsley said his constituents had concluded that some members of the commission were “not trustworthy.” And according to Mike Ritz, Brooks had “cheated” her constituents by not attending any commission meetings since her attorneys had managed to ensure that she could remain on the body until the end of her term this month. “She’s been cheating them for years,” he added. Shafer said pointedly that the rules up for adoption were meant to prevent efforts “to defraud the voters.”

Jackson Baker

Back on the scene Monday were zoning lawyers Ron Harkavy (top, with Commissioner Heidi Shafer), and “Scrappy” Branan (bottom, left, with Bank of Bartlett president Harold Byrd and Commissioner Terry Roland);

Essentially, the amended resolution provided 10 different items to determine a challenged commissioner’s residency — ranging from utility bills to drivers licenses to documents certifying public assistance or government benefits — and required that only three of them be produced. The resolution passed 8-to-3, though it was understood that it might be met down the line with court challenges.

The commission took another important concrete step in approving a third and final reading of an ordinance proposed by Commissioner Ritz raising the pay of Shelby County Schools board members to $15,000, with the board chairman to receive $16,000. Though that amount was roughly only half the compensation received by county commission members and should be regarded as a “stipend” rather than a salary, it was still a three-fold increase for school board members.

In evident agreement with Ritz that such an increase was overdue, particularly in a “post-controversy” (meaning post-merger) environment, the commission approved the ordinance by the lopsided margin of 10-to-1.

But if comity was to be had in most ways Monday, it fell short on the last item of the day — and of this commission’s tenure. Despite the presence of numerous citizens and clergy members testifying on its behalf, a resolution co-sponsored by Mulroy and Bailey “amending and clarifying the personnel policy of Shelby County regarding nondiscrimination,” fell short by one vote of the seven votes required for passage.

The same resolution, which specifically added language safeguarding county government employment rights for gay and transgendered persons, had been given preliminary approval by the commission’s general government committee last week. A highlight of the often tempestuous debate on Monday was an angry exchange between Democrat Chism, a supporter of the resolution, and Millington Republican Roland, who opposed it.

The specific language of the resolution was needed in the same way that specific language had been needed in civil rights legislation to end discrimination against blacks, said Chism, an African American. Discrimination, said Chism, “happened to me all of my life. Nobody saw it until the law changed.” Roland shouted back that the resolution was but the vanguard of a homosexual agenda. “It’s an agenda!” he repeated.

In the aftermath of the resolution’s near-miss, a disappointed Mulroy, who had authored the original nondiscrimination resolution of 2009, noted that Brooks, had she been there, would likely have been the necessary seventh vote, and that Chairman James Harvey, who abstained from voting, had proclaimed on multiple occasions, in front of numerous witnesses, that the resolution should be passed but that he, Harvey, who aspires to run for Memphis mayor next year, might have to abstain for “political” reasons.

Another term-limited commissioner, Ritz, may be a principal in the city election, as well. The former commission chairman, who has moved from Germantown into Memphis, said he is eying a possible Memphis City Council race. There is, it would seem, life after county commission service.