Tag: Heidi Shafer

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Politics Politics Feature

Dueling Visions

The voices of Shelby County commissioners audiby changed during the course of Monday’s special meeting — a  marathon affair that had been called to deal with a budget that was already past its July 1st deadline. Toward the end of a meeting that started at 3 p.m. and adjourned at 10:15 p.m., the commissioners sounded either strident (maybe “strung out” is closer) or exhausted.

What had not changed was the substance of what they were saying. The commissioners — or at least what seems to be a working majority of them — remained fixed on a course that will give their constituents a tax cut of from 1 to 3 cents on a still-to-be-determined tax rate.

Mayor Mark Luttrell, who was as edgy as anybody on Monday, went with the flow and reluctantly consented to budget amendments that cut close into what he sees as a necessary fiscal reserve. But he is clearly resolved to do what he can between now and the fixing of the tax rate to either scale back the amendments or keep the rate close to the level of 4.13 cents, a status-quo figure adjusted to the latest county property assessment and designed to generate the same amount of revenue as the current pre-assessment rate of 4.37 cents.

Luttrell made it clear that he wants to have enough of a discretionary fund on hand to deal with exigencies. That was the case also two years ago, when the administration and the commission had a similar disagreement, one that ultimately saw a win for the mayor in the slowing down of what had been a pell-mell move toward a tax decrease and then the aborting of that tax-cut initiative altogether.

Luttrell had held the line back then, pleading that the county had infrastructure needs (it plainly did), and the tax rate held firm. The mayor’s victory proved to be a pyrrhic one, however — especially as the county’s general fund, even with a good deal of overdue paving and other infrastructure work taken care of, turned out in an ad hoc audit to have a significant and unforeseen surplus: upwards of $20 million. That was enough, contended the commission’s tax relief advocates, to have underwritten the gift to the taxpayers that they had intended but, ultimately, under pressure from the administration, had backed away from.

That was essentially the casus belli for what has turned out to be a two-year power struggle between the mayor and his commissioners. The commission, with two fired-up Republicans, Heidi Shafer of East Memphis and Terry Roland of Millington in the lead, and with a sufficient number of other suburban Republicans, along with fellow-traveling inner-city Democrats, following, began campaigning for new commission perks, including a greater share in budgetary decisions, and to that purpose, the acquisition of an independent commission attorney so as to augment its own oversight.

The commission ultimately got a lawyer approved, former commissioner Julian Bolton, though both his title and his function are more tightly circumscribed than the commissioners preferred. And the battle goes on, with both sides taking as much as they can and giving up as little as they have to. Right now the $4.10 tax rate seems to be holding, but sans a vote, some or all of that hard-earned three-cent discount could vanish in further negotiation, as could other budget goodies voted on on Monday. (More details this week in Politics Beat blog.)

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Editorial Opinion

Disunity

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

Even as it gets ready to take on what could be a contentious fight over the forthcoming county budget and tax rate, a potential slugfest that all principals hope can be resolved and headed off at a May 7th summit retreat, the Shelby

County Commission and the administration of county Mayor Mark Luttrell remain locked in a power struggle over access to and control over surplus county revenues.

The battle was first joined a couple of budget seasons back, when the commission, long after it had locked its planned expenditures in place, got ex post facto information from the administration regarding a hitherto unannounced $20 million surplus. That discovery was the proximate cause of an ongoing power struggle between commissioners and the administration, one that flared up in several of the matters on the agenda of Monday’s public meeting of the commission.

Greg Cravens

Pervading the meeting from item to item were two clear and obvious themes, one having to do with the commission’s efforts to get its own procedures — and those of county government — in line with recent resolves to eliminate a variety of disparities in hiring, contracting, and employee relations. In the process, the gulf between the commission and the administration widened a bit further.

The first case in point was a dispute that arose over what seemed to be a routine federal pass-through grant awarding just under $2 million to Sasaki Associates, Inc. for “various National Disaster Resilience … design projects.” The question was raised, first from the audience, and then from various commission members, whether sufficient allowance had been made for minority subcontracting on the project. Public Works director Tom Needham repeatedly insisted that the issue was moot and implied broadly that any further delay on awarding the grant might result in its being lost to the county.

Questioning from commissioners, and especially an unrelenting point-by-point interrogation from Commissioner Heidi Shafer, commenting that Needham’s reluctance to answer was “yet another case of the administration keeping us in the dark,” finally elicited the fact that no such ill fate was in store. The commission would end up endorsing the grant — along with an add-on clause prepared by Commissioner Van Turner regarding the minority contracting issue.

There were other matters of similar import involving the question of whether the county was seriously undertaking equality of opportunity with women as well as racial minorities, but the pièce de résistance of Monday’s discussion was a resolution that would establish what amounted to a set-aside fund for any unspent surplus — one accessible to and subject to the oversight of the commission. At present, surpluses have been under the exclusive purview of the administration, and county CAO made a point of objecting to the resolution as “unacceptable.”

In the final analysis, the matter was referred back to committee, where it may or may not be resolved. Which is to say, the power struggle goes on.

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Politics Politics Feature

Partisanship vs. Solidarity?

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

As is pointed out in this week’s Flyer editorial, the Shelby County Commission, the elective body entrusted with budgetary oversight over public education in the county, has made a point of voting unanimously against the school-voucher bill now moving through the General Assembly.

It did so for both financial and philosophical reasons. And the commission’s unanimous vote was reached in full anticipation that the voucher bill, sponsored by state Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown), would, as has been the custom in legislation on this subject, be among the last measures coming up for a final vote in the current legislative session, due to expire in April.

The commission’s vote was a clear signal of its attitude toward vouchers, and it was made in anticipation of the fact that it would soon have the opportunity to designate an interim successor in state House District 95 to Mark Lovell, the Republican representative who, faced with allegations of sexual misconduct, was recently forced to resign by the leadership of his party.

While a special election to replace Lovell is set to conclude on June 15th, well after the completion of the General Assembly’s work, the commission made haste to set up machinery for the interim appointment whereby applications would be made available from March 21st to March 27th, interviews would be conducted March 29th, and an appointment made April 3rd, in time for the eventual appointee to be serving in the House for the duration of the current session.

Estimates of how long that period could be range from a week to the greater part of a month, but the assumption, again, was that the interim state representative-designate would have an opportunity to vote on the voucher question.

That was how matters stood until a move was initiated among various local Democratic activists to take advantage of the commission’s current composition — seven members elected as Democrats and six elected as Republicans — to appoint a Democrat as the interim state representative from District 5. 

That initiative was first made public in a letter sent to the commission’s seven Democrats by Dave Cambron, president of the Germantown Democratic Club and a member also of the 13-member ad hoc group appointed recently by state Democratic chair Mary Mancini of Nashville to revive the Shelby County Democratic Party. (For a variety of reasons, including what Mancini called “many years of dysfunction,” the dissension-prone local party was formally decertified by the state Democratic executive committee last year.)

Cambron’s letter began with a clarion call: “We have a unique opportunity to send a new progressive voice to the state capitol from Shelby County.” Cambron made the case for local party activist and state Democratic committee member Adrienne Pakis-Gillon, “a leading progressive activist, a club member, and a staunch Democrat who will not hesitate to stand up for the values that we are.”

Cambron said it was “critical that Adrienne is chosen to fill the vacancy for State House District 95” and went on to contend that four of the commission Democrats had committed to support her candidacy, while three — he named Eddie Jones, Justin Ford, and current chairman Melvin Burgess — had not. 

“This is simply not acceptable,” Cambron wrote. “Our Democrats must be unified and stand up against the radical right-wing agenda coming out of the State Capitol.”

In reality, not all of the four Democrats Cambron claimed as committed to Pakis-Gillon would confirm the fact, and at least one made it clear that he resented being put on the spot, as did one of the three Cambron mentioned as uncommitted. 

The Republican members who had put themselves on the record against vouchers began to react negatively to what they saw as the introduction of an extraneous partisan factor. Several of them noted the availability of anti-voucher Republicans among potential applicants for the interim position and said they saw the move to appoint Pakis-Gillon as a conscious rebuff to the constituency of District 95, one of the more consistently Republican-voting areas in the state. 

A motion by GOP Commissioner Terry Roland of Millington to forgo the previously agreed-on appointment schedule achieved only a tie vote in committee and therefore technically failed, but it picked up support from Republican David Reaves of Bartlett, a former Shelby County Schools board member who had spearheaded the commission’s move to appoint an anti-voucher interim state representative. 

As of this week, the situation was fluid, with neither Democrats nor Republicans having a unified position on the matter, and with the body’s previous solidarity on the vouchers issue so riven by disagreement on the partisan issue that there is now serious doubt as to whether an interim appointment can even be made.

The situation will have to be resolved on March 20th, the date of the commission’s next public meeting, or there will not be time for the appointment process to be carried out. Not only would District 95 lack a vote on a matter which is predicted to have a close final outcome, but the commission’s original intent to use the appointment to make a statement on vouchers will be surrendered as well.

Only once before has the commission broken with the tradition of filling a vacancy with a member of the same party as the person being replaced. That was in 2009 when a majority of seven Democrats chose fellow Democrat Matt Kuhn as an interim commissioner to replace Republican David Lillard, who had left to become state treasurer.

That move produced an immediate fallout in Nashville, where Republican legislators from Shelby County protested by imposing a stall on the commission’s legislative agenda, grudgingly relenting somewhat later when Republicans like then GOP Commissioner Mike Carpenter and then District Attorney General Bill Gibbons made public pleas for action on the agenda.

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Politics Politics Feature

Commission Gets It Together

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

God knows what will happen when the Shelby County Commission tangles with the deannexation issue — as it will, now that the legislature has its eye on the matter. The city of Memphis, self-protectively, has devised its own plan.

County government will, at some point, need to take a position — though in a sense it is passive, a bystander, once more having to absorb leftovers from the city, when and if they come, as they did, for one example, when former Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton ceded the city’s share in management of the Health Department to Shelby County during his last year in office.

Jackson Baker

Terry Roland

Commissioner Heidi Shafer urged her colleagues Monday, at the close of the commission’s meeting, to attend any or all of four information sessions to be held by the city between Thursday, February 23rd, and Wednesday, March 1st, in various neighborhoods that would be affected by the city’s plan.

Shafer, who had been a member of the city/county task force appointed a year ago to study the deannexation matter, reminded her fellow commissioners that they would be “guests and observers only, of what has been disclosed by the city of Memphis.” She pointedly cautioned them: “Just remember, whatever is deannexed by the city … guess who gets to take care of it and pay for it, but us.” 

Whatever discords and discombobulations that issue may yield for the future, however, the rest of the commission’s meeting, Monday, turned into a surprising exercise in harmony — though a few harsh words kept it from being a total love-fest.

Commissioner Terry Roland, an outspoken foe of a proposed county “social media policy,” took proponents of the measure to task and bitterly denounced it as interference in the exercise of the First Amendment, insisting (in some of his milder rhetoric) that “you cannot tell somebody how to think.” 

The proposed policy was devised by the administration at the prior request of the commission and was clearly aimed at curbing such embarrassments as occurred when Corrections Center deputy director David Barber, in last fall’s election aftermath, denounced then President Obama on his Facebook page as being less American than the Ku Klux Klan. Barber was encouraged to retire.

At one point, Roland created something of a mini-sensation of his own when, by way of demonstrating the kinds of things that occur in private discourse of public officials, he talked out of school on colleague Mark Billingsley, whom he quoted as opposing the bid of a candidate for Republican Party chairman on grounds that the aspirant, Cary Vaughn, was “too Baptist.”

Billingsley angrily denied saying any such thing.

As it turned out, Roland was not an outright outlier on the issue, attracting enough other nay votes to make the final outcome 6-4, with one abstention. The proposal needed an absolute majority of the commission — 7 votes — and failed.

The commission’s most compelling — and, in some ways, surprising — demonstration of unity occurred on two matters. One was a 9-2 vote endorsing legislation in the General Assembly to legalize medical marijuana. Only Billingsley and Shafer dissented.

The other matter was SB161/HB126, a bill, essentially authored by state Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown), that applies only to Shelby county and would allow state education funds to be used for private institutions. In the estimation of critics, the measure would deprive public schools in Shelby County of $18 to $20 million annually.

Commissioner David Reaves, a former school board member, led the charge on that one, terming it “an assault” on public education and declaring that, if it passed, “we should be prepared to challenge it.” There was a chorus of agreement from other commissioners, and even Shafer, a supporter of what she calls “school choice,” condemned it for targeting Shelby County alone. The final vote was 10-0, with Shafer abstaining.

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Politics Politics Feature

The Abortion Divide, Again

During Monday’s regular meeting of the Shelby County Commission, a dispute on continuing Planned Parenthood’s involvement in a local, state-funded HIV-prevention program was resolved — sort of — in a fashion that reveals the political fault lines not only of Shelby County but, to some extent, of the state and nation as well.

Van Turner

After a considerable amount of testimony, both pro and con, from an audience that seemingly filled the first-floor auditorium of the Vasco A. Smith Jr. County Administration Building to capacity, the commission finally approved a grant of $115,000 — the first of five scheduled annual ones — to support the renewal of a condom-distribution  program overseen by Planned Parenthood. Three other local agencies had previously been authorized without incident for equivalent shares of a total grant package of $407,000.

Amid warnings from both the Tennessee Department of Health and the county administration that failure to do so might endanger the entire package, the commission approved the Planned Parenthood grant, seven to five, with the vote being a clean split along political lines — the commission’s seven Democrats voting in favor, and the body’s six Republicans demurring, five voting no and one, Commissioner Mark Billingsley, recusing himself on grounds of his professional association with Le Bonheur Community Health and Well-Being, one of the three organizations whose HIV grants had already been endorsed by the commission. The ot

Heidi Shafer

her two were Friends for Life Corp. and Partnership to End AIDS Status.

For the record, voting aye were Van Turner (a Planned Parenthood board member who termed support for Planned Parenthood “a matter of life and death”),Walter Bailey, Reginald Milton, Eddie Jones, Willie Brooks, Justin Ford, and chairman Melvin Burgess — all Democrats (and all African Americans, as are, as was pointedly noted during the debate, a majority of the county’s HIV cases). 

Voting no were Republicans Heidi Shafer, Terry Roland, David Reaves, George Chism, and Steve Basar.

The difference between Planned Parenthood’s treatment and that of the other three state-designated grant recipients clearly had to do with Planned Parenthood’s long-term status as an abortion provider, although the agency’s opponents on the commission tended to couch their opposition — for tactical reasons, it would seem — on their stated belief that the county Health Department could better carry out the services required by the grant.

Planned Parenthood has frequently been the subject of controversy in commission votes over the years — notably in 2011, when a commission majority narrowly supported a recommendation by Republican Mayor Mark Luttrell that Christ Community Health Centers supplant Planned Parenthood, which had been the traditional recipient of new federal Title X funds to administer a variety of women’s medical services. 

Abortion had been the elephant in the room for that debate, too, though proponents of the change over stressed such other points as the greater number of physical venues available through Christ Community Health Centers. In the final reckoning, CCHC’s religious orientation may also have attracted enough Democratic votes to join with Republicans in determining the outcome.

It was no secret then, however, and is no secret now that governmental defunding of Planned Parenthood programs at local, state, and federal levels is essentially a Republican goal, with Democrats tending to support the agency, and differing attitudes toward abortion determining the divide. Over the years, that fact of political life has been as crucial as economic factors in determining the two parties’ working coalitions.

Though Luttrell’s administration had matter-of-factly included Planned Parenthood as a recipient back in December, when the grants were first announced publicly and the controversy was ignited, the mayor and county CAO Harvey Kennedy played a middle role of sorts in Monday’s debate.

Both argued stoutly that the county Health Department could perform HIV prevention services as well as, if not better than, Planned Parenthood. But both, significantly, urged caution in view of a letter from the state Department of Health advising that denial of Planned Parenthood for “extraneous,” (i.e., political) reasons might invite judicial intervention that could invalidate the totality of the $407,000 grant — a sum that all parties agreed was needed in view of mounting HIV and STD cases in Shelby County.

Monday’s debate was spirited among audience members, a majority favoring Planned Parenthood for stated reasons of public health, while a minority opposed the grant, some boosting the Health Department, while others spoke to the formally unspoken issue: abortion.

Some of the latter were graphic in the extreme, with one opponent contending that Planned Parenthood was “founded by racists … and killed more than the Nazis and KKK combined.” Another, Don Ware, who frequently testifies at public meetings on behalf of conservative causes, drew jeers and dismissive laughter when he said that “the business of Planned Parenthood is legalized murder.”

There was an ironic moment, pointing up the varying secular and religious motives among disputants, when, after Ware contended that “God is opposed” to Planned Parenthood’s activities, a voice was heard from the audience counterpointing that with a sardonic “Oh, God!”

The Almighty, it would seem, kept His own counsel in the matter.

• Another matter on which local opinions are sharply divided surfaced anew last Thursday with the presentation in the City Hall conference room of a voluntary de-annexation proposal for Memphis by the Strategic Footprint Review Task Force.

The city/county group was appointed last year after a near-miss in the General Assembly of a far-reaching bill that would have authorized relatively easy and extensive ways for communities to detach themselves from the state’s major cities.

Details of the task force proposal are covered online in “Political Beat” on the Memphis Flyer website.

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Politics Politics Feature

Key Political Moves Underway in Memphis and Nashville (UPDATED)

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

A statement made by state Senator Mark Norris (R-Collierville) in Nashville last week all but put the Senate Majority Leader in the running for the governorship in 2018.

Norris, who for years has made no secret of his gubernatorial ambitions, told reporters that he was “more than mulling” about a race and was actively making plans, though he emphasized that he still had a job to attend to in the legislature. He later told the Flyer that he had discussed organizational plans with a local campaign consultant but had not yet finalized a deal.

Norris, as a sitting state legislator, is prohibited from active fund-raising for the duration of the current session of the General Assembly, just convened. So are two potential rivals for the Republican nomination, state Senator Mark Green (R-Clarksville), who has declared his intentions of running, and Beth Harwell (R-Nashville), speaker of the state House of Representatives, who held a recent pre-session fund-raiser at $2,500 a head.

Other Republicans known to be considering a race are Nashville industrialist Bill Lee and Randy Boyd, who just announced that on February 1st he would take leave of his current position as state commissioner of Community and Economic Development. 

Though most attention has so far been focused on the possible GOP candidates, there are no fewer than four Democrats who are considered possible entrants in the governor’s race, as well.

One is wealthy real estate tycoon Bill Freeman of Nashville, who has served as the state Democratic Party’s treasurer and for years has been a major donor to numerous Democratic campaigns and causes. Freeman, who ran unsuccessfully for Nashville mayor in 2015, made a trip to Memphis last year on behalf of Hillary Clinton‘s presidential campaign that doubled as a fund-raiser for state Senator Lee Harris (D-Memphis) and functioned also as a scouting expedition for a governor’s race.

Former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean has traveled widely in the state after leaving office and is thought to be serious about a governor’s race. 

Two other Democrats frequently mentioned as possibilities are state House Minority Leader Craig Fitzhugh (D-Ripley), a highly regarded party figure who would also have to vacate his legislative seat to make the race, and Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke, a former state senator who is now running for reelection.

• Shelby County Commissioner Terry Roland, who has taken the lead in trying to create a seat for suburban Shelby County on the MLGW board, has switched tracks on that initiative. Confronted by city of Memphis resistance and stymied by a split between city and county members from including the matter in the county commission’s official legislative request package, Roland wants to put the matter before the Tennessee Regulatory Authority.

Meanwhile, state senators Norris and Ron Lollar (R-Bartlett) are studying the option of taking the matter up legislatively.

Commissioner Heidi Shafer, a supporter of Roland’s initiative, said the matter wasn’t dead but was sure to surface again, “when the weather for it is right.” (See Editorial, p. 10.)

Even if the issue of county participation on the MLGW board ended up not being a part of the official county wish list approved by the county commission for its legislative package, other once controversial matters have apparently made the package.

Foremost among them is a call for a limited but profound change in the status of marijuana. In the language of the final commission resolution: “The Shelby County Board of Commissioners urges the Tennessee General Assembly, Governor Bill Haslam, and the federal government to authorize medical marijuana in Tennessee.” There are at least two bills to that effect already introduced in the General Assembly, both from mainstream members of the Republican super-majority.

A concomitant resolution by the commission reads: “The Shelby County Board of Commissioners urges the Tennessee General Assembly and Governor Bill Haslam to implement or expand a second-chance program for individuals using less than half an ounce of marijuana.”

These are first steps, to be sure, but meaningful ones that could not have been anticipated even a few short years ago.

[UPDATE: The words “have apparently made the package”in the paragraphs about the Commission’s attitude toward medical marijuana and second-chance legislation were, as it turms out, premature. In committee action on Wednesday, sponsor Terry Roland successfully moved for a deferral on voting for those parts of the legislative package.]

 

• Memphis Congressman Steve Cohen joined civil rights icon John Lewis (D-GA) and what may be a substantial number of other political figures in announcing Monday that he will not attend the Friday inauguration of Donald Trump as President.

Cohen, who has represented the 9th District since 2006, made the announcement Monday morning at Mason Temple of God in Christ during a commemorative celebration on MLK Day.

Telling the Flyer that a series of insulting tweets from Trump about Lewis became “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Cohen praised the Georgia congressman as someone who had “risked his life” for human rights, adding that Trump’s attacks on Lewis were particularly egregious coming on the eve of the Martin Luther King weekend. Cohen cited “an accumulation of distressing remarks, actions, and appointments” on Trump’s part, including “his questioning President Obama’s birth, the racist, misogynistic statements he made during the campaign, his inability to tell the truth, and his mocking of a disabled person,” as well as the President-elect’s attacks on Senator John McCain and actress Meryl Streep.

“This is a president who does not act presidential.” Cohen said. Cohen said further he had attended confidential briefings about Trump’s compromised behavior and circumstances and said that “there’s more to it than Russia.”

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Editorial Opinion

The MLGW Groundhog

The issue of county participation on the board of the city-owned Memphis Light, Gas & Water is, for the time being, moot. Or as Shelby County Commissioner Heidi Shafer, one of the supporters of the now lapsed proposal, puts it, it’s a Groundhog Day matter that will surface again when the political weather changes.

The weather wasn’t right on the commission when Commissioner Terry Roland raised the issue of a county member on the MLGW board in an effort to include it on the commission’s official wish list to present to the Tennessee General Assembly, now in session. 

It became a city vs. county controversy, with commissioners representing inner-city districts, like Reginald Milton, defending the right of Memphis, which owns the giant utility, to operate it strictly according to the terms of its current charter, which limits direct participation in the administration of MLGW to a five-member board appointed by the mayor of Memphis. The board oversees a management corps that handles the utility’s various operations.

Milton and other Memphis members of the commission objected to Roland’s proposal for county participation because they saw the idea, in Milton’s words, as “a slippery slope,” something which could lead to further demands for direct participation from each of the county’s six separate suburban municipalities — Germantown, Collierville, Millington, Arlington, Lakeland, and Bartlett.

The Roland proposal met with resistance also from Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland and with some concern from the county administration of Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell.

Given that MLGW is owned and operated by the city and is governed by a charter that specifically limits the manner of its administration, the kind of change sought by Roland and his allies would unquestionably transform the nature of MLGW governance. Roland invokes the vintage term “taxation without representation” to describe the voiceless nature of county representatives who pay the fees and submit to MLGW policies without having input into either.

One matter that exacerbates the issue is city council member Patrice Robinson’s proposal that customers’ bills be rounded off to the nearest dollar, with the additional revenues, estimated at $2.5 million annually, going to help the city’s low-income residents weatherize their homes. Roland cites the proposal — which has been amended to allow county residents to decline the rounding-off on their bills — as the very kind of matter that county customers should have a direct voice in. There may be equivalent needs among disadvantaged county residents, he and others note.

Though his effort to put the commission on record as lobbying for a change has failed, Roland says that state Senator Mark Norris and state Representative Ron Lollar (R-Bartlett) are even now looking into possible legislative remedies. And he himself intends to make an appeal for change to the Tennessee Regulatory Authority. One way or another, this groundhog is an issue that hasn’t gone away.

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Editorial Opinion

Van Turner: The Compromiser

In the course of years, individuals in organized groups start to differentiate into what anthropologists call “archetypes” — specific behavior types that can be discerned to recur periodically over the long span of human history. One of the best-known archetypes is that of the messiah — the would-be savior who emerges to attempt drastic alterations in the pattern or fate of a body politic. The scale for that archetype runs from benevolent saintly figures to charismatic demagogues. There has been no dearth of either sort in political history.

Van Turner

And then there is something we might call the Henry Clay archetype. Known as the “Great Compromiser,” Clay was a towering figure in American politics during the early 19th century, famous for resolving seemingly intractable disputes by finding and advocating middle-ground positions.

The Henry Clay of the Shelby County Commission is Van Turner, a Memphis Democrat who consistently interposes between squabbling factions and finds compromise solutions that resolve the quarrel. Such was the case again Monday when an intervention by Turner made it possible for the commission to approve an MWBE program requiring the county to give African Americans and Caucasian women special consideration to remedy what Equal Opportunity Compliance director Carolyn Watkins had determined to be discrimination in contracts and purchasing.

The measure almost hit a snag when Commissioner Heidi Shafer objected that, by not specifying all women as such, including Asians and Hispanics, the measure was “actually regressive.” Various other members of the commission insisted on an immediate vote on the measure as written, seeing Shafer’s objections as essentially semantic, but enough fellow Republicans sided with her to ensure further discussion. A largely unspoken issue was that, if the ordinance were amended, it would require an additional reading — meaning that the issue would have to be held off until the new year.

It was then that Turner materialized with a resolution that bridged the gap between the two contending factions, leaving the existing classifications of the ordinance intact but adding a provision that gave the EOC director Watkins free rein to apply the terms of the ordinance to such other groups as she deemed appropriate.

More debate ensued, but the key moment came when Shafer said she found the provisions of the resolution satisfactory. That allowed for a final vote approving the ordinance by a decisive 11-2 vote. The commission went on, by a 12-1 vote to approve a companion measure applying similar remedial provisions to locally owned businesses, strengthening their potential future share of county purchases and contracts.

The two ordinances together allowed the commission to end the year on a positive note and, temporarily at least, resolved a long-standing wrangle over the disparity issue. As audience member James Johnson said, appropriating a famous World War II quote from Winston Churchill, “This is not the end. It’s not even the beginning of the end. But it’s the end of the beginning.”

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

It Took a Collaborative Effort, but Shelby County Passed a Budget

CREDIT: JB

JB

Administration figures Luttrell, Kennedy, and Swift huddle as the bargaining gets intense.

On Wednesday, the Shelby County Commission met for seven hours —nonstop except for brief “recesses” — and finally voted for a solution to the county’s budget dilemma that could probably have been arrived at within the first several minutes.

But the longer time period was doubtless necessary to iron out wrinkles and wear down some stubbornness and misgivings among the principals, both on the Commission and within the administration. The only given, as the day started, was that the persistent issue of school funding would be resolved via a $3.5 million add-on allocation to Shelby County Schools. (SCS’s total allocation is $22 million, and the county’s municipal-district schools will receive a pro-rated $6.2 millionl.)

The school-funding increase was one matter that Chairman Terry Roland (and most other participants) was insistent about. Every other possible increase was a variable in what turned out to be a $1.4 billion operating budget.

At roughly 3 p.m., the Commission resorted to a procedure that the administration of Mayor Mark Luttrell had persistently warned against and voted resoundingly to tap the county’s fund balance for $5 million to round out a budget deal that included some $13.5 million of add-on expenditures.

At various times in the proceedings, which began with committee meetings at 8 a.m. and continued with a special full-commission meeting that started at 11 a.m., Luttrell and two aides — CAO Harvey Kennedy and CFO Mike Swift — had seemingly convinced the Commission to pare down or eliminate some of the add-ons, which were earmarked for a variety of county departments, but in the end only a pair of add-on allocations were modestly trimmed.

The beneficiaries of the Commission’s largesse were Shelby County Schools ($3.5 million); the Sheriff’s Department ($3.1 million, with another $1.3 million possible down the road); Juvenile Court ($1 million); Shelby County Department of Corrections ($1 million); Regional One Health ($1 million) the District Attorney General’s office ($1,300,000); the Shelby County Election Commission ($8,216); General Sessions Criminal Court ($228,238); General Sessions Enviro
JB

Commissioner Eddie Jones

nmental Court ($8,233); $169,000 for JIFF (Juvenile Intervention & Faith-based Fellowship); and $64,590 for the Commission’s own budget.

To offset these increases, the Commission availed itself of several cost-cutting remedies, some suggested by Kennedy for the administration, some of its own devising.

Among the former were a cap on life insurance payouts for county retirees, for a savings of $2 million; the inclusion of an estimated $1 million windfall addition to the county wheel tax, which will be routed exclusively to the schools for fiscal 2016-17; and a pledge from Kennedy to “find” another $1.2 million in random funds. Among the latter were a re-allocation to the fiscal 2016-17 budget of surplus Sheriff’s Department budget funds from fiscal 2015-16, and the aforementioned $5 million transfer from the fund balance.
Before the final budget formula was reached, various other alternatives were considered and discarded, including a proposal by David Reaves to eliminate blight-reduction funding so as to shift funds elsewhere; and a comprehensive amendment by Steve Basar that would have freed up several millions by re-classifying a number of pay-as-you-go capital-construction projects as debt-incurring cases.
Acceptance of Basar’s amendment, which was rejected after a recess, would have funded all the intended projects but would have left the county budget out of balance, with a need for the Commission to make later revisions in either the budget, which had to be passed by July 1, or the county tax rate, which got the second of three readings Wednesday, remaining at $4.37 per $100 of assessed value. The tax rate, which as of now balances with the budget, will get its third and final reading on July 27.

Although several of the votes along the way of Wednesday’s elongated bargaining sessions were contested, the margins of acceptance seemed to grow as the day wore on, with several commissioners accepting procedures they had earlier balked at (e.g., David Reaves on several expenditure increases he eventually accepted, or at least tolerated; and Reginald Milton on the retirees’ insurance caps).

The administration’s acceptance of the Commission’s tapping the county balance was passive and grudging, at best, with Kennedy acknowledging, “We didn’t like it, but we couldn’t stop it, and at least we managed to mitigate it.” As Heidi Shafer noted, the delving into the fund balance may have reduced the intensiveness of the county’s debt-retirement policy somewhat, but it still left it in acceptable order.

Implicit in Wednesday’s bargaining was the continuation of a power struggle
JB

Commissioners Walter Bailey and David Reaves

 between the Commission and the administration on matters of governance. Shafer voiced the issue during the day’s deliberations as a matter of whether the Commission’s responsibility was limited to approving a tax rate to cover the administration’s budget allocations or involved a more active license to collaborate on determining those allocations.

By definition, Wednesday’s negotiations, as well as the final outcome, resolved the issue in favor of a broader interpretation of the Commission’s mission.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Is Terry Roland a Bully?

Tempers flared during Monday’s regular meeting of the Shelby County Commission. Big time.

And the surface turbulence led to the uncovering of a behind-the-scenes matter involving a claim by several other commissioners that commission chairman Terry Roland has engaged in threatening behavior toward them.

The precipitating issue was the commission’s consideration of a proposal from former Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton to build two educational residence facilities for convicted juvenile offenders in Frayser and in Millington.

The commission voted 8-2 to endorse the project, a sort of combination charter school/incarceration model that would locate juveniles in a dormitory situation close to their families. Called the NewPath Restorative Campuses, the proposed facilities would be run by a nonprofit group and would be privately funded, for the most part, requiring no outlay of county money.

The project would be boosted by an allocation of state funding — some $17.5 million that is now going to the Wilder detention facility in Fayette County — and that fact was cited by Roland as a reason for his support.

“He’s not asking us for any money,” Roland noted about Herenton, a former school superintendent who is now executive director of the W.E.B. DuBois Consortium of Charter Schools and who would direct the facilities’ educational operations. “They’d be spending $47 million for each facility,” said Roland, and would be generating 600 jobs for his own community of Millington.

The commission’s vote of approval indicates that most commissioners bought into that reasoning. Commissioner Walter Bailey was one who did not, however.

Though he praised Herenton as an individual and a professional, Bailey demurred, citing what he said was incomplete information about the project, as well as his aversion to what was basically a privatization of functions that were traditionally public.

Herenton became visibly angry, criticizing Bailey for having “the audacity to pontificate” and telling the commissioner, an African American like himself, that 85 percent of the juveniles to be housed “look like you and me,” and would be the beneficiaries of superior educational and wraparound services currently unavailable to them.

Still steaming after the vote, Herenton was heard to mutter the word “bullshit” in regard to Bailey’s objection.

Other commissioners had misgivings, as well. Mark Billingsley, who joined Bailey in abstaining on the vote, and George Chism and David Reaves, both of whom voted no, all cited what they said was a lack of specific information about the project.

After the vote, Reaves became involved in a disagreement with Roland that resulted in an actual physical altercation. It took place off the main commission chamber in a back room that is often used for conferences.

Roland and Reaves differ in their accounts of what happened. According to Roland, Reaves approached him and “put his finger on my nose.” The commission chairman said that Reaves then accused him of “selling out my race” by supporting the Herenton proposal.

Both commissioners agree on what came next. Roland shoved Reaves.

“All I did was get him out of my face,” Roland said. “I was clearly in the right. The dude came up on me.”

“I never touched the man,” said Reaves, who further denies mentioning the word “race” in the context claimed by Roland. “I told Terry he was selling out his constituents,” said Reaves, who added that he was confident that, based on the political history of Memphis and Shelby County, people in Millington, like those in Bartlett, would object to giving former Mayor Herenton an unconditional approval for his project.

He said that if he mentioned the word “race,” it was probably to suggest that Roland, an announced candidate for county mayor in 2018, was using his support for the project to play politics on behalf of his political race.

Commissioner Heidi Shafer, who was in the back room conferring on a matter with Kim Hackney, assistant CAO for the county administration, became aware of the fracas and rushed out to locate a deputy sheriff serving as bailiff, returning with him to find the disturbance apparently over.

“I couldn’t really tell who did what to whom,” Shafer said. About Roland, she said, “Terry’s definitely not a turn-the-other-cheek kind.”

Reaves later identified Billingsley and Chism as other commissioners toward whom Roland had displayed “bullying” and threatening behavior. Both confirmed having had such experiences.

Said Billingsley: “Terry has threatened to beat me up in front of several county staffers in the hallway. He consistently displays bullying behavior. Anybody who disagrees with him about anything is met with great hostility. That’s unbelievably unprofessional. There’s no place for it in government, and it sets a very poor example for a community that already has too much hostility on its hands.”

Chism had a similar account: “Terry once lost his temper with me. He was very aggressive, and there were people in the office that heard it. It was all over a resolution that I wouldn’t co-sponsor, but he insisted he wanted my name on it.” Chism said Roland was “way over the line,” but that he “immediately apologized.”

These new claims of belligerent behavior on Roland’s part are reminders of previous circumstances involving the Millington commissioner and his colleagues. Former Commissioner Steve Mulroy said back in 2011 that Roland had cornered him in the commission library and said, “You and I are never going to agree. There’s only one way to settle things. We’re going downstairs, and I’m going to whip your ass!”

At the time, Roland said, “Aw, heck, I was just kidding with him,” and, though Mulroy still insists he believes Roland was serious in his threat, the two commissioners would ultimately let the matter subside with jocular references to a potential boxing match for charity.

In 2012, Roland was the featured speaker at a meeting of the Collierville Republican Club when several fellow GOP Commissioners, who favored another approach, began heckling him.

Interpreting a muttered phrase from then-Commissioner Chris Thomas as a disrespectful jibe about his late father (Thomas denied saying anything of the sort), Roland threatened to “knock you out of that chair.” Then-Commissioner Wyatt Bunker called the Collierville police, who arrived after the meeting was over but found nothing amiss.

On that occasion, Roland insisted he was the one being bullied, and he had similar words for his disagreement with Reaves Monday. “I’m not going to let politics get in the way of making a good decision to help our people,” he said. “I’m not going to be bullied. I’m trying to do what’s good for everybody.”

And Roland reciprocated Reaves’ charges of political motivation by accusing Reaves, Billingsley, and Chism of being partisans of Roland’s potential mayoral opponent, current county Trustee David Lenoir. He said the three also were supporters of former U.S. Attorney David Kustoff in the 8th Congressional District GOP primary and that he, by contrast, intended to remain neutral.

Meanwhile, Billingsley revealed that in April he had queried then-County Attorney (now appellate Judge-designate) Ross Dyer, as follows: “It is unfortunate I have to inquire for a county attorney opinion, but I have no other choice. If a Shelby County commissioner contacts another Shelby County commissioner … and threatens their ability to put items on the… Commission agenda, threatens lack of funding, and threatens their ability to serve in their [elected] capacity, based on their personal animosity [toward] that individual, would this be considered official misconduct? Additionally, is there a process for reporting?”

Dyer, whose investiture as a Judge in the Court of Criminal Appeals will take place this Thursday, promised at the time that an answer would be forthcoming at some point from himself or from his staff.