Tag: Heidi Shafer

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Politics Politics Feature

Rocky Issues at Shelby County Commission

Monday’s meeting of the Shelby County Commission began with the attendees under instruction to take a deep breath. This was both because County Mayor Lee Harris had a breath consultant on hand as part of his current public health campaign, and because a controversial — and potentially aggravating — subject was on the agenda. That subject belongs to a type of issue that can be filed under NIMBY (Not in My Back Yard). At question was whether the commission should approve an application from Memphis Stone and Gravel to construct a mine site for gravel excavation in a remote part of the Rosemark community in upper Shelby County, as well as the approaches to that site. (As part of the latter endeavor, the company volunteered to improve an already existing road and to maintain it at the company’s own expense.)

The Office of Planning and Development had given the project a preliminary approval, but the county Land Use and Development Board had turned it down.

The case for the mine was made by lawyer Michael Fay, who told commissioners that Memphis Stone and Gravel, in business locally since 1910, was an indispensable source of gravel for construction purposes in Memphis and Shelby County, that there were no alternative sites in the county for the high-grade gravel required for future projects, and that, if the application should be denied, Memphis Stone and Gravel only had enough such gravel on hand to last three years, after which it might be forced to move out of the county.

“We are the only supplier that can meet the needs of the airport,” Fay warned, adding that if the company were forced to import gravel from elsewhere that would end up adding as much as $2.2 million to the costs of an ongoing construction project of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Various employees of Memphis Stone and Gravel also testified to the importance of the mine for their personal livelihoods.

The opposition to the application consisted mainly of residents of the Rosemark area, including a woman who suffered serious injuries when her car was met on a narrow road by a truck carrying a load from an earlier, smaller gravel plot near the proposed site. Most of the other residents expressed safety concerns, too, as well as quality-of-life issues and potential drops in the value of their properties.

Two former chairs of the commission, Terry Roland and Heidi Shafer, joined the protesters. Roland at one point branded a “bald-faced lie” a claim made by the applicants that no other fully equipped gravel company operated in Shelby County.

Shafer recalled the dilemma she had back in 2011 when a similar proposal came before the commission. She said she deliberated seriously on arguments pro and con and finally opted for the latter.

Shafer’s position of eight years ago was roughly the same as it was this year, said Commissioner Amber Mills, whose District 1 contains the site of the proposed mine.

In the end, the commission majority seemed to reason similarly. The final vote was one for (Commissioner Reginald Milton), eight opposed, and two abstaining.

At the same commission meeting, Jimmy Rout was elected County Historian to succeed the longtime holder of that unpaid position, Jimmy Ogle. Ogle, who is moving to Knoxville, will be honored for his service by the commission at a subsequent meeting.

• Both local political parties are in the throes of reorganization. The Shelby County Republican Party held its precinct caucuses Sunday at Arlington High School, and the delegates elected there will meet at the same location on Sunday, February 24th, to elect new officers, including a chairman to succeed the retiring Lee Mills. The new chair seems certain to be Chris Tutor, a lawyer at the Butler Snow law firm and, so far, the only person seeking the chairmanship.

The Shelby County Democrats are scheduled to hold party caucuses on March 30th, electing the party executive committee and a larger parliamentary body called the “grass roots” committee.

The members of these two bodies will meet one week later and elect a party chair, who may or may not be the current chairman, Corey Strong. It has long been assumed by local Democrats, mainly on word from Strong himself, that he would not seek reelection, but a recent news report suggested (on what evidence is unknown) that Strong has had a change of mind.

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Covington’s Rose Easily Wins GOP Nomination for State Senate District 32

CREDIT: JB

On a flood of Tipton County votes, most of them from  JB

THE AGONY OF DEFEAT: Lonnie Treadaway, who recently lost his bid to join the Memphis City Council, consoles Heidi Shafer as she confronts the numbers at her election-night party at Exline’s Pizza on Stage Road. Shafer was one of three Shelby Countians to lag behind GOP nominee Paul Rose of Tipton County in voting for the Republican nomination for state Senate District 32.

early voting, Covington businessman/farmer Paul Rose easily won the Republican nomination to succeed federal judge Mark Norris in the vacated District 32 state Senate seat.

Three Shelby Countians —former County Commissioners George Chism and Heidi Shafer, and former state Representative Steve McManus — brought up the rear behind Rose, all trailing the Covington candidate even in Shelby County. In Tipton County, Rose’s margin was 83 percent. Cumulatively, he won something like two/thirds of the overall vote in both counties.

None of the Shelby County candidates had anything but marginal vote totals in Tipton. Rose won 4,132 of the 4,632 votes cast there. In Shelby the vote went this way: Rose, 2,266; Chism, 1,512; Shafer, 1,322; McManus, 1,055.

Given the fact of the much larger overall pool of voters in Shelby County, it would seem obvious that a much higher turnout rate in Tipton County, coupled with an apparent determination of voters there to elect one of their own, figured large in the outcome.

Democrat Eric R. Coleman, with 377 votes in Shelby County and 166 in Tipton County won his nomination without opposition and will be matched against Rose on the March 12th general election ballot.

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Politics Politics Feature

Works in Progress

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

“Nine days! That’s all we’ve got!” Thus did George Chism exhort the supporters gathered around him last Wednesday for a meet-and-greet/fund-raiser at the Bank of Bartlett branch on Highway 64. The reference by Chism was somewhat obscure, since voting in the special-election primaries for the vacant District 32 state Senate seat, which he and four others are seeking, won’t end until primary-election day on January 24th.

What former Shelby County Commissioner Chism apparently meant was that the climax of the special-election primary race would occur between January 14th, when ad hoc neighborhood voting sites became active, and January 23rd, election eve.

Chism, former state Representative Steve McManus, and former County Commissioner Heidi Shafer are competing for the Republican nomination for the seat vacated by former state Senate majority leader Mark Norris, a federal judge now, by appointment of President Trump. Meanwhile, the sole Democrat on the primary ballot, Eric Coleman, is assured of a chance to run against the GOP winner on the special general-election date of March 12th.

In any case and by any arithmetic, time is scarce, and all the candidates are hustling up multiple occasions to create or augment voter awareness of their identity and credentials. Chism claims among his supporters several of Shelby County’s suburban mayors, including Bartlett Mayor Keith McDonald, who was on hand for his fund-raiser. Also there was David Reaves, who, like Chism served a single term on the County Commission and, again like Chism, was something of an outlier there, dedicated, or so said both of them, to the gospel of fiscal solvency.

Verbal homage by Chism and several other speakers was paid both to the idea that the seat, formerly held by Republican Norris, should remain in the GOP fold and to the idea that attention should also be paid to the Democratic voters in the district, which incorporates large parts of northern and eastern Shelby County, and Tipton County as well.

Similar concepts were to be heard a day before Chism’s event, when McManus had held a meet-and-greet at the Bartlett household of Republican state Representative Jim Coley. McManus was well aware that Democrats are beginning to gain a foothold in District 32. After all, he had been upset in 2016, losing his seat as state Representative for House District 96, in the southeastern suburbs of Shelby County, to Democrat Dwayne Thompson, who held on to the seat against the GOP’s Scott McCormick in November.

In the judgment of many observers, McManus had started slow in 2016, taking his victory for granted. Not so this time around. Advised by consultant Becky West, he was first among the candidates to air a TV spot and first also to sprout billboards in the district. Among the topics McManus discussed with visitors to his event were non-doctrinaire aspects of his prior service in the General Assembly, like his involvement in the legislation enabling the creation of tax-increment-financing districts (TIFs).

Another Republican candidate, former Commissioner Shafer, would hold a well-attended fund-raiser last Friday in Memphis, where her Commission district was located and where she lived until a family move to Lakeland last year. Like Chism and McManus, Shafer is unmistakably Republican in ideology, but her Commission service, both in 2018, when she served as the body’s chair, and beforehand as well, was marked by an obvious ability to work across the partisan aisle. She was the acknowledged leader of bipartisan efforts to mount the now ongoing legal effort both to curtail the ravages of opioid addiction in Shelby County and to compensate the county for damages caused by careless and unscrupulous over-prescription.

There was a bipartisan flavor, as well, to Shafer’s remarks at her Memphis event, at which she staked out positions for remedial action on both the education and health fronts. While not espousing previous Medicaid-expansion formulations as such, she made it clear that she would seek some means of remedying a circumstance whereby the state had not claimed its share of federal health-care funding, allowing it to go to other states by default.

Perhaps more than the other Republicans running, Shafer has a foothold in Tipton County, especially in the southern portion of it, a de facto bedroom suburb of Memphis. But she, like Chism and McManus, is aware of the vote-pulling power in Tipton County at large of a fourth Republican, Paul Rose of Covington. Rose, a businessman and a well-established presence in Tiption County, is a conservative who has emphasized his strong religious faith.

As of now, Rose is weaker than the others in Shelby County, but he would clearly stand to gain from anything resembling an even vote split between the other three.

Coleman, the sole Democrat running, is a business logistics specialist and evidently quite successful as such. He is an African American and a Navy veteran, severely wounded in the service of his country, and as such has a compelling backstory capable of winning him votes across party lines.

Coleman is not as hyper-active yet as the Republicans seeking the state Senate seat, but he has more time to develop his profile before testing it at the polls in March.

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Politics Politics Feature

Candidates Vie for Vacant Norris Seat

It took a while for Mark Norris to become a federal judge. He was nominated by President Trump last year but was only recently confirmed by the U.S. Senate after numerous gridlock-imposed delays. It took a while, too, for Governor Bill Haslam to call for a special election to replace Norris in his vacated District 32 state Senate seat.

But now that things are under way, Republican candidates to fill the vacancy are wasting no time getting their campaigns under way. Former two-term Shelby County Commissioner Heidi Shafer, who was one of the first to indicate her desire to seek the seat after Norris was nominated, made haste to get out of the gate, filing to run at the Election Commission on Monday morning. She indicated later Monday that she already has three fund-raisers scheduled for the near future.

New Democratic House Leader Karen Camper

Shafer, who represented an East Memphis district on the commission and chaired that body this past year, displayed some serious legislative skills there. Even before the District 32 opportunity opened up, she had expressed a desire to run for the legislature and at one point had her eyes on a race this fall for the District 96 state House seat won in 2016 by Democrat Dwayne Thompson in an upset of then GOP incumbent Steve McManus.

The Norris seat became a more inviting target, however, and she and her husband Carl subsequently turned their Memphis home over to their college-age daughter and moved into a new Lakeland residence, well within the District 32 limits.

In something of an irony, or at the very least an interesting coincidence, one of Shafer’s rivals for the District 32 seat is the aforementioned McManus, who forwent the option of trying to regain his House seat from Thompson (who won again over the GOP’s Scott McCormick) and was himself attracted by the prospect of the Norris vacancy.

McManus, too, is off and running, having already run a commercial for his candidacy on local TV this past weekend. In 2016, he had, in the judgment of many, demonstrated a palpable over-confidence in his race against the hard-working Thompson, and his defeat then may have amounted to something of a wake-up call for his future.

In any case, he is unlikely to be taken by surprise this time around and has significant leftover campaign cash from two years ago that will stand him in good stead for the current race.

Both Shafer and McManus are counting on support in East Shelby County, the heartland of the local Republican constituency, as was demonstrated by the weight of Republican voting in last August’s primary.

Shafer’s commission work, much of it in alliance with Terry Roland of Millington, would appear to give her a headstart with the GOP voters of North Shelby County, and she is also well acquainted with the GOP base in the southern part of Tipton County, also part of District 32.

Both Shafer and McManus have to worry about a third candidate, construction executive Paul Rose of Covington, who is well known in Tipton County and moreover has significant contacts with the Shelby County Republican establishment as well.

Rose has indicated he intends to run hard on conservative themes, stressing Christian values and his support for the 2nd Amendment, a focus that should help him in the district’s rural areas.

Yet a fourth potential GOP candidate, not yet announced, is George Chism of Collierville, who served one term on the Shelby County Commission, then gambled on a run for county trustee this year but was defeated by Democrat Regina Morrison Newman, after winning the Republican primary.

So far, one Democrat, Eric R. Coleman of Bartlett, has picked up a petition to run for the District 32 seat. Coleman, a veteran of Naval service and a Wounded Warrior, is a business logistics specialist.

• Shelby Countians are prominent in legislative leaderships positions, at least among the General Assembly’s minority Democrats. In recent elections, District 87 state Representative Karen Camper was elected as the Democrats’ minority leader in the state House, thereby achieving a dual milestone as the first African-American woman to lead a major party in the legislature.

Shelby County Democrats dominated in leadership elections for the state Senate, capturing three of the spots available for the five Democrats in that body. Raumesh Akbari, a former state representative who won election to the Senate’s District 29 seat in this year’s election, was named caucus chair for the Democrats, while Sara Kyle of District 30 was elected vice chair, and Katrina Robinson of District 33, was named party whip.

• Local Democrats also made an impact, though one they surely regarded as less desirable, with the state Election Registry, drawing fines for late financial disclosures. Incoming freshman House state Representatives London Lamar of District 91 and Jesse Chism of District 85 were fined $8,175 and $5,000 respectively, while veteran state Representative Joe Towns of District 84, a perennial collector of fines from the registry, drew a total of $20,000.

• Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris, who has demonstrated an innovative bent during his first few months in office, has announced a “Health and Fitness Initiative” to begin on Wednesday of this week, with a “City Silo Vegan Barbecue” meal to be served at noon in the 6th floor lobby of the Vasco Smith County Administration Building to members and staffers of the county commission, members of the Healthy Shelby board, and the media.

The initiative will continue in January with what is billed as a “mini” five-minute bootcamp for the commissioners and media members, conducted by Memphis Tiger basketball star Will Coleman.

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Politics Politics Feature

The Swinging Door

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

As one election, a national one, finally heads to an end (with votes still being counted here and there), the next process of electoral transition is underway, locally.

This week, an abbreviated one because of the Thanksgiving holiday, sees the beginning of turnover on the Memphis City Council. Of the body’s 13 available seats, three will be spoken for during the next few weeks. Those are the ones that were scheduled for vacating as of August 2nd, when three council members — Bill Morrison in District 1, Edmund Ford Jr. in District 6, and Janis Fullilove in Super District 8, Position 2 —  won elections for positions in Shelby County government.

Jackson Baker

Jeff Warren

At the Flyer‘s press time on Tuesday, the first of these seats — that of Morrison, who was elected Probate Court clerk — was due for reappointment that evening by vote of council. The applicants were Paul Boyd, Mauricio Calvo, Faye Morrison, Tierra Holloway, Rhonda Logan, Danielle Schonbaum, and Lonnie Treadway.

The seats currently held by Ford and Fullilove will be filled next. Fullilove, now Juvenile Court clerk, has announced her resignation, effective November 23rd, and Ford’s resignation will take effect two days later, on November 25th. Applicants for either seat must submit proof of their residency, a resume, a letter of interest, a sworn affidavit, and a nominating petition with 25 signatures of registered voters in the relevant district.

Registration packets for the two seats will be available as of noon next Monday, November 26th, and the deadline for filing applications is Thursday, December 13th. The council is expected to vote on filling the two seats at its meeting on December 18th.

The seats held by Morrison, Ford, and Fullilove became points of controversy following the August 2nd election, when local activists insisted in vain that the council members resign their positions soon enough to permit the inclusion of their vacated seats on the November 6th election ballot. Instead, the three members chose to continue occupying their council seats for nearly the full 90 days post-election that the city charter permitted — a fact making it necessary to fill the seats by appointment and giving the remaining council members the say-so over replacing the departing members.

Ford, now a member of the Shelby County Commission, was even deputized by commission chair Van Turner to serve as a de facto liaison between the two local legislative bodies.

The councilman’s forthcoming resignation is not the only change on his horizon. He was named financial literacy coordinator for Memphis Public Libraries last week, and, as he informed his fellow commission members on Monday, Ford’s employment as a teacher in the Shelby County Schools system would end on Wednesday of this week — a fact permitting him to vote without recusal on an issue affecting school funding.

Ultimately, all 13 council seats, including the three being filled between now and year’s end, will be up for grabs in the 2019 city election scheduled for next October. At least one seat, the one for Super District 9, Position 3, now held by Councilman Reid Hedgepeth, has already drawn a challenger.

Seeking the seat will be Jeff Warren, a physician who served on the old Memphis City Schools board that went out of existence with the merger of Memphis and Shelby County systems. Warren was a member of the Memphis board minority that resisted the crucial vote of December 20, 2010, to surrender the MCS charter.

“I believe we are on the verge of turning a corner in Memphis,” Warren said in announcing his candidacy. “We  have had many recent successes, despite our long-term challenges. We have been pushing educational growth and do not need to let up. Mayor Strickland will continue to need support and advice to increase job growth.”

• The county commission acted decisively on a number of matters at its Monday meeting. Especially noteworthy were a vote on authorizing a TIF (tax increment financing project) for a forthcoming Lakeland Commons development and a vote resolving a holdover schism regarding the ongoing opioid crisis between former county Mayor Mark Luttrell and the commission that expired with the August 2nd election.

There were several aspects to the divide between Luttrell and the commission, who engaged in a more or less continuous power struggle, but the opioid matter was the matter with the most relevance to the community at large.

The disagreement arose last year when then commission chair Heidi Shafer, supported by other commission members, availed herself of clauses in the county charter that, she argued, allowed her to contract for legal action against various parties, including physicians and pharmaceutical companies, involved in the over-distribution of opioids in Shelby County.

Shafer’s action arose from her conviction, shared by former chair Terry Roland and a majority of other members, that opioid abuse had become rampant to the point of causing serious damage to Shelby Countians and that the Luttrell administration had been slow in pursuing remedial action.

Unsurprisingly, Luttrell disagreed and, putting forth his own plan of action, insisted that the county charter left the authority for pursuing legal remedies entirely in his hands.

What ensued was a back-and-forth between the two branches of county government that required several hearings in Chancery Court and would not be fully resolved until agreement on coordinated action was reached between new Mayor Lee Harris and the new commission, culminating in the vote on Monday, authorizing a settlement.

Shafer, who would receive several testimonials of appreciation from commission members, was present for the vote and expressed her pleasure that no more intramural acrimony would be occurring and “we can concentrate on dealing with the bad guys.”

The Lakeland matter, involving a $48 million development at the site of an abandoned remainder mall, drew attendees from both sides of the recently concluded municipal election in Lakeland, with Mayor-elect Mike Cunningham and supporters asking the commission for a delay of two weeks on approving the TIF, giving the new administration time to acquaint itself with the details of a project that had been strongly favored by the administration of outgoing Mayor Wyatt Bunker.

The commission approved the TIF 9-2, after noting that authority for continuing with the project would still rest with the Lakeland city government.

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Politics Politics Feature

Starting Over

The change has come. There is a new Shelby County Mayor, Lee Harris, and he will serve along with a Shelby County Commission that numbers eight new members on the 13-member body.

And all these newcomers will inherit some old business — two issues that were apparently resolved last Monday, on the final meeting day of the old Commission, but became unresolved late Friday when outgoing Mayor Mark Luttrell — timing his action for the last possible moment so as to avoid a possible override — vetoed two resolutions.

Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris

One of these resolutions gave the go-ahead to a 390-unit subdivision, to be built in the southeastern corner of the county, adjacent to Collierville. The other resolution served to restore some post-retirement benefits, curtailed a decade ago, for county employees who serve a minimum of eight years. (Perhaps not coincidentally, eight years is the amount of time in office just served by the outgoing term-limited members of the Commission.)

In conferring his veto, Luttrell cited the expenses to Shelby County government of the two resolutions — the unspecified costs of providing county services and infrastructure in the case of the subdivision, an estimated $6 to $10 million in direct annual outlays in the case of the post-retirement benefits. The financial sum was the estimate of Harvey Kennedy, Luttrell’s CAO, and Luttrell said that, at the very least, some actuarial study ought to be given the project before final approval.

That, in a public-policy sense, was the crux of the matter as Luttrell saw it. There was, additionally, a highly private side to the disagreement between mayor and commission, and, in taking his veto action, Luttrell had managed to strike the last blow in what had amounted to a nearly three-year power struggle between himself and the commission — one that, on Thursday of last week, only a day previously, had seen him conspicuously on the losing end.

That had been the occasion of the public swearing-in at the Cannon Center of mayor-elect Harris, along with the eight new commissioners and the clerks and charter officials who had been elected, along with them in the county general election of August 2nd. The ceremony had been pointedly organized and conducted under commission auspices, after, it was said, Luttrell himself had declined to commit resources to it from the county’s general fund.

Some confusion persists on that latter point. Luttrell later maintained that he had authorized a disbursement from the general fund to pay for the ceremony, while outgoing commission chair Heidi Shafer said that commission funds had paid for it and that Luttrell’s offer of funding had come too late and only after he had received inquiries from the media about responsibility for the event.

It was Shafer — who, along with Commissioner Terry Roland, had been the chief organizer of resistance to Luttrell over the years — who was front and center for the swearing-in ceremony, and who made it clear to the large audience that the event was a commission project. She identified the outgoing mayor only as “Mark Luttrell,” sans title, when, at the request of two of the new officials, he assisted in administering the oath of office.

What was it that lay behind this schism? Political partisanship? That wouldn’t seem to be the case; while the commission’s Democrats quite often voted against the mayor’s will on particular cases, there was no doubting that the rebellion against Luttrell, a Republican, was led by Shafer and Terry Roland, both GOP members. Nor were personality differences the reason, though they existed. Ditto with govermental ideology. True, Luttrell’s main concern as mayor seemed to be that of debt retirement über alles, while commission members tended to be freer spenders. But beyond all that, what separated mayor and commissioners in recent years seemed to be honest disagreement about the balance of power between branches of government. The Commission saw itself as entitled to a greater degree of oversight, especially over financial matters, while Luttrell saw his executive responsibilities to be dependent on the kind of strong-mayor role that the county charter, as currently constituted, may not fully license.

It seems clear that, as county government goes forward with a new mayor and new commissioners, the argument is likely to rear again. Further change may be called for, and not only in two leftover resolutions.

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Politics Politics Feature

Solitary Man: Reflections on John McCain

CREDIT: Traceywood | Dreamstime.com

I first encountered John McCain in 1983 when I was a newish grunt on the Washington scene, then serving as an aide to a Democratic congressman, Bill Alexander of Arkansas. McCain himself was in his first year as a member of the House, not yet the iconic presence that the world would get to know so well.

My only awareness of McCain was gained from seeing the occasional appearances on the House floor of the then relatively unknown Arizonan, from my perch in the office of the Chief Deputy Majority Whip (that was Alexander) in the Capitol. One of the major issues confronting the House that year was President Ronald Reagan‘s decision to infuse American military forces as “peacekeepers” into the cauldron of Lebanon, at the time the focus of an ongoing civil war involving guerilla-level combat between factions and near anarchy.

Like most Democrats — in particular the party leadership, which he represented — my boss viewed the situation with alarm. Republicans, on the other hand, tended to fall in line behind the president. The debate on the floor followed that all-too-predictable binary course, until McCain, a freshman GOP member, took the floor and stated his unequivocal opposition to what he viewed as an unnecessary and dangerous course.

Traceywood | Dreamstime.com

Senator John McCain

McCain was no peacenik. He had been a military careerist until leaving the Navy in the wake of an active career as a pilot who, as we all would subsequently learn, had been downed in a mission over North Vietnam and confined and tortured for years as a P.O.W. His opposition to the Lebanese involvement was a matter of Realpolitik, earned via experience. It turned out to be prescient when hundreds of Marines were killed in their barracks by a truck-driving suicide bomber. Shortly thereafter, Reagan withdrew the remainder of the American military contingent.

All that was in the future on the day of McCain’s speech in the House. Later that day, I was walking from one point to another on the grounds of Capitol Hill when I saw McCain treading the same pathway, more or less, and coming in my direction.

As we crossed paths, I spoke to him, identified myself, and told him how impressed I had been by his speech. McCain gave me that grateful, vaguely mischievous, and somewhat self-satisfied smile that would later become so familiar on national television, and thanked me. There were many times later on when I would reflect on the fact of my getting so early a glimpse of the great contrarian — and on the occasion of his first official maverick act, no less.

Subsequently, of course, McCain moved on to the Senate, became a truly national figure, and made an upstart race for president in 2000 aboard his famously media-friendly “Straight Talk Express” presidential-campaign tour bus, winning the New Hampshire primary but later falling short to the well-endowed establishment campaign of George W. Bush.

McCain was well aware of the corrupting power of big money, having suffered from it in that first presidential race. Working in harness with Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, a Democrat, McCain sponsored the McCain-Feingold Act, which imposed reasonable curbs on campaign fund-raising, until a conservative Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision in 2010 in effect nullified it. 

Meanwhile, McCain warmed up for another presidential run in 2008 and, as part of that mission, came to Memphis in April 2007 to address the Economics Club. Before a turnaway crowd at the University of Memphis Holiday Inn, he unveiled an economics program that was hardcore conservative Republican — all laissez-faire and belt-tightening measures. 

Not very exciting, but the kind of thing, he might have hoped, that would soften the GOP establishment’s  memory of him as the reform-minded party-line-crossing outlier who had almost stolen the party’s presidential nomination away from Bush in 2000.

The fact was, McCain’s second presidential campaign was slumping badly, and at a press conference after his economics speech, encouraged by his courtly manner as he insisted on shaking hands in advance with each member of the attendant media, I made bold to ask him to account for his relatively dismal fund-raising thus far (he was in third place in Republican ranks, behind both Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani).  

The senator said flatly, “Because I didn’t do a better job.” Asked why that was, McCain answered, “Because I’m not competent enough, I guess.” It’s hard to imagine another candidate being quite that self-effacing — or candid.

Competent fund-raiser or not, McCain had the staying power, or the stature, or the what-have-you to endure in that race, even when most of his money ran out and his staff evaporated. Not quite a year later, he had won the New Hampshire primary again, would go on to win the Republican nomination and ran an honorable race for the presidency against Barack Obama.

Along with his defiant independent streak and his compulsive truth-telling, McCain was also blessed, it is reliably said, with a short fuse and an explosive, near-volcanic temper. Hearing about this, I made it a point to ask each of Tennessee’s two U.S. Senators if they had ever been on the receiving end of it. 

Said Lamar Alexander: “Yes, I have,” adding after a pause, “There are very few of us [senators] who haven’t.”  Said Bob Corker: “Yes. Very early on, I was a party to that. It’s not an urban myth. It’s just a fact.”

Corker added: “But at the same time, John has been a true American hero, and he feels very strongly about the positions he holds, and when he disagrees with you, he lets you know.” 

It is well known, surely,  that McCain had serious disagreements with Donald Trump, and equally well known that he let the president know — most recently after Trump’s Helsinki summit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, when, bravely waiting out his inevitable death from incurable brain cancer in Arizona, McCain issued a statement lamenting that, in “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president,” Trump had “abased himself … abjectly before a tyrant.”

John McCain never abased himself, not in captivity in Hanoi and not in his distinguished public life thereafter. We should salute this solitary, honorable man, even if Trump won’t.  

• With several of its newly elected eight members-to-be looking on, the 13-member Shelby County Commission that was elected in 2014 held its last public meeting on Monday. They voted to override the veto of outgoing county Mayor Mark Luttrell of a commission ordinance prohibiting the mayor’s office from hiring special counsel to sue the commission — one last shot in a two-year battle between the legislative and executive powers. 

And, with time running out, the commission shelved a resolution calling for change in the functioning of EDGE, the city/county board charged with spurring economic growth. As one of her last acts, outgoing Commission chair Heidi Shafer has appointed a blue-ribbon task force of returning commissioners and community leaders to begin meeting with an eye toward making recommendations for further action.

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Editorial Opinion

Shelby County Commission: A for Effort

There’s no doubt about it. The Shelby County Commission, in a current configuration that is about to expire because of the forthcoming August election, has taken bold steps to confront the established order of things.

As of August, when a minimum of eight members of the 13-member body are due to be replaced because of the county charter’s term-limits provision, the newly elected county legislature may not be so forward about things. But let’s enjoy this rebellion while it lasts and hope that the precedents it sets will inspire the newcomers of the next four-year term to similar innovation.

This commission has achieved results in numerous spheres by challenging custom and by pioneering in new directions. It has established task forces on such problems as the under-representation of women and ethnic minorities in county contracting, and those ad hoc bodies, fueled by the commission’s own disparity report, have made enormous progress in rectifying inequalities that had been taken for granted for decades.

The body elected four years ago, in 2014, has also managed to aggressively re-order its relationship with the county administration, challenging it on matters of financial oversight, among others, and, while neither branch of county government is always right and always deserving of having its opinion honored in the conduct of county business, the commission’s self-assertiveness has forced a more or less continuing dialogue on key matters. The recent establishment of a trans-governmental initiative to combat the plague of opioid addiction had its origins in actions taken by the commission, later court-approved, that forced the hand of the county administration and enticed city government and law enforcement agencies at large to come aboard.

And such re-ordering of priorities that has taken place has left undisturbed the ongoing focus on reducing county debt that Mayor Mark Luttrell has made an overriding administration goal.

This past week has seen yet another bold step by the commission. Confronted by the wish of Elvis Presley Enterprises to expand its campus to include a new, modestly sized arena so as to attract musical acts and other entertainments that would otherwise go south across the Mississippi state line or to Little Rock or Nashville, the commission was faced by the stated reluctance of the Grizzlies, backed by the city of Memphis, to give an inch on the terms of a strictly binding operating agreement that currently would prohibit the construction of an arena, containing more than 5,000 seats, that might be construed as competing with FedExForum, where the Grizzlies have proprietary status.  

Heidi Shafer

Instead of knuckling under on the matter, the commission voted on Monday to upgrade EPE’s share of revenues from an ongoing TIF, thereby allowing the arena construction, contingent (and that’s the operative term) on the courts recognizing the expansion as consistent with the terms of the aforesaid operating agreement with the Grizzlies. That seems both a progressive and a cautious way of probing for a solution that solves the Solomonic problem of having to satisfy what commission Chair Heidi Shafer referred to on Monday as “two favorite children.”

This strategy may work and it may not, but it was worth the effort to give it a try.

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Politics Politics Feature

Truce, Sort Of, Between Luttrell and County Commission

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Anyone who attended the regular committee meetings of the Shelby County Commission last Wednesday, May 9th, and followed that up with a visit to the full commission’s regular public meeting on Monday, May 14th, might be mildly confused about the resolution of a long-running power struggle between the commission and the county mayor’s office.

Jackson Baker

Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell

At the Wednesday meeting, Mayor Mark Luttrell, term-limited and experiencing what he called his “long goodbye” to public office, heard himself applauded by commissioners in attendance and extolled by one commissioner after another for his achievements over his eight years in office, in maintaining essential county services while at the same time lowering county debt to a significant degree — by as much as a billion dollars, to a level below $900 million.

Given that May 9th was also the day on which Luttrell chose to present a $1.254 billion budget for the coming year that, if executed, would shave the county’s recalculated  tax rate by a penny, to a target rate of $4.05, which is six full cents off the current rate, the hosannas might seem very much in order — especially since the proposed Luttrell budget also contains more money for schools, law enforcement, and employees at large, the latter to be provided with the $15-an-hour minimum wage which was at such extended issue during the 2016 presidential campaign.

There was none of the truculence from dissenting commissioners that had become a regular chorus during the past two years, although, as commission budget chairman Eddie Jones and others pointed out, there would be ample opportunity during the next couple of months to make such revisions as might be worth debating.

In prior weeks, and again, to some degree, on Monday, notes were sounded that were at variance with the Hakuna Matata of the May 9th meeting.

A regular feature of recent commission meetings has been a series of votes on expenditures in proposed county  contracts greater than $50,000 in value. Several weeks back, the commission voted to impose the $50,000 limit as a way of limiting the mayor’s spending power and curbing his general contractual authority, in line with a charter for county government that, unlike that for the city of Memphis, restricts the chief executive to a “weak mayor” role.

That action was one outcome of the power struggle that began with disagreements during budget deliberations in 2015. In that budget year, several commissioners, dealing with what they were told would be a projected surplus, insisted on using it to fund a tax decrease. Luttrell, pleading a concern for unanticipated infrastructure needs as well as the need to reduce the county debt, resisted and ultimately prevailed. What followed was a commission resentment that would increase as members learned that the surplus was far greater than expected — a discovery that led to ever more demands for a greater share of fiscal oversight.

Other matters of contention included the commission’s desire to hire former Commissioner Julian Bolton as its own attorney. After much fuss and bother and argumentation, Bolton was allowed on as a “policy advisor,” but the official legal representative for all organs of Shelby County government would remain, under the provisions of the county charter, the mayor’s  appointee as county attorney, currently, Kathryn Pascover.

At the moment, Bolton’s status is in limbo, with Luttrell poised to veto an ordinance for his reappointment — something he did once already but will have to repeat because the ordinance he received, due to a clerical error, was not the one ultimately adopted by the commission.

Starting again from scratch, the commission completed work Monday on a correct version of the reappointment ordinance that would extend Bolton’s tenure through September 30th, leaving it to a newly reelected group of commissioners to decide what to do next.

Meanwhile, the most spectacular show of commission independence was evinced just before Monday’s meeting, in a ceremony in the Shelby County Building, in which commission Chair Heidi Shafer — joined by Luttrell, Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland, and representatives of local law enforcement and medical interests — announced an ambitious $2.5 million task force plan for combating the county’s current opioid epidemic. (See Editorial, p. 8) The plan is the outgrowth of a commission initiative that Luttrell, though initially claiming authority over the matter, was induced to become a party to, via a series of court tests.

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Politics Politics Feature

Democrats Doubling Up in Primary Races

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Tennessee may be a certifiably red (i.e., Republican) state, and, indeed election results in recent years, even in Shelby County, which has a theoretical Democratic majority, have generally been disappointments to the once-dominant Democratic Party.

And the official Party itself has only been reconstituted in the county for a few months after various internal fissures and dissensions caused it to be decertified by the state party in mid-2016.

But none of that has stopped a veritable flood of would-be Democratic office-holders from declaring their candidacies for election year 2018 as the filing season gets going in earnest. Most unusually for a minority party, in fact, many of the races on the ballot this year are being contested by multiple Democratic entries.

That starts at the top of the ballot, as two name Democrats — former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean and current state House minority leader Craig Fitzhugh of Ripley — are vying for the office of governor. (Even more Republicans are running: six gubernatorial candidates in all, most of them with serious networks and campaign funding at their disposal.)

Jackson Baker

Forrest fan Jenna Bernstein taking her leave

It seemed for a while that there might be a Democratic primary contest for U.S. Senator as well, until the well-backed entry of former two-term Governor Phil Bredesen convinced a promising newcomer, Nashville lawyer James Mackler, to withdraw in favor of Bredesen, whose second gubernatorial win in 2006 was his party’s most recent statewide hurrah. (At least two name Republicans — 7th District U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn and former 8th District congressman Stephen Fincher are vying for the GOP nomination.)

In any case, Democrats are also doubling up — and not just in the marquee races. There are competitive Democratic primary races at virtually every election level.

Take the case of state Senator Brian Kelsey‘s reelection bid in Senate District 31. The long-serving Germantown Republican sent out several S.O.S. emails to supporters this week informing them that he has a Democratic challenger and asking for campaign donations.

The opponent Kelsey had in mind was Democratic activist Gabriela “Gabby” Salinas, who did indeed announce her availability last week as a Democratic candidate in District 31. And she has a backstory that gives Kelsey reason for his concern. Salinas, who survived childhood cancer as a patient at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and went on to do research work herself at St. Jude, was also a survivor later on of an automobile accident that took the lives of family members.

Nor is Salinas the only Democrat seeking to unseat Kelsey. Another declared candidate for the seat is David Weatherspoon, one of several first-time office-seekers on the Democratic side.

On Monday, one of the Democratic Party’s recognized stars in Nashville, state Representative Raumesh Akbari, announced she would seek to fill the state Senate seat left vacant by Lee Harris, who is running for Shelby County mayor. And Akbari has a Democratic opponent in the primary, her House colleague, Joe Towns.

There are numerous other races on the ballot in which Democrats are competing with each other for the honor or capturing an open seat or one currently held by a Republican. One such case is the Shelby County Commission District 13 seat, a swing seat now occupied by Republican Steve Basar.

Both former Election Commissioner George Monger and political newcomer Charles Belenky are competing for that one. Monger, a former boy wonder who became a music manager at 15 and ran for the City Council at 18, declared his candidacy over the weekend, while Belenky turned up as a citizen critic of a purchasing contract at the commission’s regular public meeting.

And where a seat is traditionally considered Democratic, the infighting can be brisk indeed; two Democrats — Eric Dunn and Tami Sawyer — are vying for the Commission District 7 seat; four seek the seat in Commission District 8: David Vinciarelli, Daryl Lewis, J.B. Smiley Jr., and Mickell Lowery; while Commission District 9, vacated this year by the term-limited Justin Ford, is being sought by no fewer than five Democrats — Edmund Ford Jr., Ian Jeffries, Jonathan L. Smith, Jonathan M. Lewis, and Rosalyn R. Nichols.

• Monday’s first county commission meeting of the year was an abbreviated affair, starting at the late hour of 4 p.m. to accommodate attendees at the well-attended funeral at Idlewild Presbyterian church of the late public figure, Lewis Donelson.

On a day when the city was visited by groups of protesters partial to the now-removed statue of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, the commission was the site of one such protest — from one Jenna Bernstein of Tampa, who said she had come all the way from Florida to call for the expulsion from the commission of Van Turner, head of Memphis Greenspace Inc., which purchased two parks from the city prior to removing their Confederate monuments.

Bernstein’s mission received fairly short shrift, resulting only in a brief debate between Commission chair Heidi Shafer (nay) and Commissioner Walter Bailey (yea) as to the right of a non-resident to be heard. Shafer’s view prevailed.