Tag: Heidi Shafer

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Politics Politics Feature

Short-changing the Schools

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

At one point in the Shelby County Commission’s crash session on aspects of school financing on Monday, the subject of charter schools came up amid a discussion of whether closing schools actually saved taxpayer money. 

Shelby County Schools (SCS) Chair Teresa Jones noted wanly that, while her board can decide on school closures for financial reasons — and has done so frequently — it has no such authority over charter schools, regarding which the Tennessee Board of Education is now the principal overseer, thanks to actions of the Tennessee General Assembly.

That part of the conversation was a reminder of the degree to which local control of public school education has succumbed to the dictates of state government, like so much else that used to be the prerogative of local jurisdictions — control of firearms in municipal parks, for example, or the right to impose wage and anti-discrimination standards in the public sphere.

But nowhere has what many see as the quashing of local choices been more pronounced than in the administration of public education. One of the premises of SCS Superintendent Dorsey Hopson‘s recent request of the county commission for an additional $14.9 million funding had to do with the interruptions and diversions in state outlays caused by the hodge-podge of overlapping of school types and districts that — for better or for worse — have transformed the landscape of local education. 

It may sound progressive and civic-minded when one state school official, such as Candice McQueen, the recently named Tennessee Commissioner of Education, speaks in Memphis on Monday about a new abundance of “choices,” and it may sound decisive when another, Chris Barbic, head of the state’s Achievement School District, boasts that his efforts to revamp student results in the “failing” schools he administers (a majority of which are in Memphis) are not  answerable to any potentially troublesome school board. But the reality in both cases is that local control of education, once a given, has been pre-empted.

The aforementioned session held on Monday by the county commission, in tandem with SCS officials, was largely about the dislocations caused by this shift in responsibility, and a key component of that discussion was the allegation that Nashville has been consistently short-changing the several school districts of Shelby County of the funding levels required by the state’s own Basic Education Program (BEP).

The problem is not Shelby County’s alone. Back in March, the Hamilton County (Chattanooga) Board of Education, after meeting in the state capital with representatives of Tennessee’s other major urban school districts, including SCS, filed suit against the state in Nashville Chancery Court, contending that the state’s underfunding of BEP-ordained levels amounts to the better part of a billion dollars and “shifts the cost of education to local boards of education, schools, teachers, and students, resulting in substantially unequal educational opportunities across the state.”

That, in a nutshell, is the issue that confronts SCS and the county’s six municipal school districts, as well as Shelby County government, which has responsibility for making up the deficits in school funding.

Whatever the result of this legal action, the ever-aggrandizing state educational apparatus, the governor’s office, and the General Assembly have been put on notice.

 

· More from that crash session on Monday: Public school education in Shelby County may never again become the political football it was during the years of merger/de-merger controversy, but it’s begun to move in that direction again, for purely budgetary reasons.

Not quite two weeks after a request for additional funding by SCS Chief Hopson that occasioned a reaction from Shelby County Commission members that several observers described as a “love-fest,” the thrill is definitely gone, and the $14.9 million add-on money sought by Hopson now looks like so much pie in the sky — in a very overcast sky, at that.

The meeting was called by commission budget Chair Heidi Shafer to re-examine the issue of school funding in general (and funding in relation to three initialized considerations — BEP, OPEBs, and MOE — in particular). Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell — who attended the meeting and, along with his CAO, Harvey Kennedy, and CFO, Mike Swift, intervened at key moments — laid it on the line, bluntly: “We cannot afford $18 million [the amount of Hopson’s request, plus an additional amount that would be routed by average-daily-attendance (ADA) formula to the county’s municipal schools].”

Luttrell topped that by adding, as an aside to SCS representatives on hand, “You might try looking at lay-offs.”

One of the issues, clearly, is the mayor’s concern that his proposed 2015-2016 budget of $1.18 billion, which must be acted on by the commission before the fiscal-year deadline of July 1st has been squeezed down to a level that avoids the need for a tax increase this year — although subsequent teasing by various county hands has revealed a de facto surplus of $6 million that is theoretically available for ad hoc needs.

That yields another issue, one alluded to even at the aforementioned love-fest of May 6th — the fact that SCS officials have chosen not to tap that $178 million fund balance of theirs to cover the projects they want paid for. 

School officials have accounted for this reluctance in various ways — some roundabout, some not, some (in defense of maintaining a healthy reserve) even common-sensical — but commission members seem much less inclined to indulge SCS on the point than they were two weeks ago.

Commissioner David Reaves, a former SCS board member himself, put it straightforwardly to the various representatives of SCS — CFO Alicia Lindsey and members Teresa Jones (chair), Kevin Woods (vice chair), and Chris Caldwell (SCS budget chair) — who spent the better part of three hours fielding inquiries from the commission.

Said Reaves: “The reality is, how do you justify having that much money in a savings acccount and asking for $18 million? It’s tough to justify.”

Commissioner Walter Bailey, arguably the most lenient commission member on budgeting for schools, asked the SCS reps a series of questions designed to establish the point that they had already cut their ambitions for next year’s budget to the bone. But he got very little backup from other commission members, even the most SCS-friendly among them.

Clearly, the likelihood is that SCS will be forced to scale back its monetary request — much of which is being sought to keep up funding for various educational strategies that were formerly taken care of by expired or expiring grants from the Gates Foundation and the Race to the Top federal competition won by Tennessee.

The fate of SCS’ fund request was really just a sideshow to the meeting’s main purpose — which was to look critically at the county’s school-funding predicament vis-à-vis the aforementioned alphabetized issues: the BEP; OPEBs (Other Post-Employment Benefits), meaning the benefits contractually owed to retirees in addition to pensions; and MOE (maintenance-of-effort funding), the educational-spending minimums prohibited by the state from being reduced for any reason other than drops in student numbers.

It was on the matter of OPEBs that Luttrell had become most didactic, pointing out that, while county government had seen the writing on the wall regarding the escalating unaffordability of such costs, “others had not,” and he specified SCS as a major procrastinator. Memphis, too, had belatedly begun to reduce OPEB costs, almost to the vanishing point, and he suggested SCS did the same.

County Financial Officer Swift turned the screw a little tighter, noting that at current levels of obligation, OPEB expenses would be costing SCS something like $94 million annually — a sum which, he said with classic understatement, did not seem “feasible.”

The status of MOE obligations on Shelby County government at large was treated as a related phenomenon, but any hopes of getting to the bottom of it were fairly well scotched by a consensus view of the administration and county attorneys that MOE amount for a given jurisdiction were predicated on the third year of a scheduled spending cycle — the latest of these beginning with the de-merger brought about by the creation of six suburban school districts.  

The commission will give all these matters another go-round on Wednesday, its regular committee day.

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Politics Politics Feature

As the Memphis election process moves ahead slowly, dramatic events may be brewing on the County Commission.

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

It is a strange and frustrating time for followers of local politics.

Strange, in that the rosters seem fairly complete for all the races to be run this year in the Memphis city election and seemed so even before it became possible for candidates to draw petitions from the Shelby County Election Commission on April 17.

And frustrating because, while there are surely surprises yet to come between now and July 17, the filing deadline for city races (the question of former School Board member’s Kenneth Whalum’s mayoral plans, for instance, or the status of his either-me-or-you agreement with declared mayoral candidate Mike Williams), the pace of change is agonizingly slow, almost glacial.

Oh, there are hot rumors to melt some of that ice (reports that Randy Wade, former Sheriff’s candidate and ex-aide to Congressman Steve Cohen, resume active politics as a candidate for City Council, for example), but for the most part, the sides seem to have been drawn, and we’ll just have to wait out the results, which won’t be final until all the votes are counted on October 8.

That’s anachronistically called “election day,” although active walk-in votes, probably amounting to at least half the total number, will be occurring in the early voting period, stretching from September 18 to September 29).

And, in the case of several of the Council’s seriously contested district races, there’s a whole new election to be had, involving runoffs likely to be completed on November 3.

•This-Just-In Department: An intriguing new development is the likelihood that Scott McCormick, currently executive director of Memphis Botanic Garden, a member of the Shelby County Schools Board, and a former Council member, will seek the Super District 9, Position 2 seat vacated by former member Shea Flinn, who resigned two weeks ago to become a Chamber of Commerce executive.

McCormick confided on Monday, after he and other proposed members of the Shelby County Health Care Corporation’s board of directors were approved by the County Commission, that he intended to draw a petition this week to run for the vacant Position 2 seat. If elected, McCormick would be required to resign from the School Board as of Next January 1, creating a vacancy there.

•And, hark! If the city election as a whole suffers just now from a case of the slows, there is one significant winner-take-all City Council “election” that will be resolved next week. This is the choice to be made on Tuesday, May 19, by the 12 remaining Council members of an interim Council member to replace Flinn.

Deadline for aspirants to that interim position to submit applications to the Council office is noon of Thursday, May 14, this week. And, though several of the candidates who intend also to be on the October 8 regular ballot will be seeking the interim position as well, it is beginning to seem likely that one of several candidates who profess themselves interested in the interim positon only have a better shot at being chosen.<
Among the more prominent of the interim-only candidates to have declared their interest so far are lawyer Alan Crone, a well-connected former chairman of the Shelby County Republican Party, and Fran Triplett, who won recognition over the past year as a citizen advocate for the retention of city employees’ benefits guarantees. Also said to be contemplating a try for the seat is businessman Lester Litt, who previously sought a Council seat in the election of 2007.

•Although the agenda for Monday’s regular meeting of the Shelby County Commission seemed almost harmlessly bland, several matters of fairly serious import developed during discussion.

One such concerned, in the language of Monday’s agenda package, an “Amendment to the existing Planned Development to allow for one payday loan establishment in Parcel 1.” What that turned out to involve was a proposal for continuing to allow “Cash Now,” an existing payday loan company operated by a company called Financial One in Cordova at the intersection of Macon and Houston Levee Rds.

The “Cash Now” site has become the focus of controversy, in that several residents of the area, as well as the Land Use Control Board, contend that its very existence is in violation of previously adopted code applying to Gray’s Creek Area Plan. Specifically, the code would seem to prohibit such an enterprise “within 1,320 feet of a residential property.

What critics of the “Cash Now” establishment maintain is that Financial One’s original application, approved by the Office of Planning and Development and the Commission in 2013, misrepresented the nature of the establishment’s business as one related to financial planning or to investments rather than to payday loans.

Some Commission members allege that the issue goes deeper. Heidi Shafer, the Commission’s budget chair, said the process that resulted in the current location of “Cash Now” (which has announced plans to expand its premises) may not be the result of a mere misrepresentation or a bureaucratic oversight but instead “has an unpleasant odor of commissions past.”

She suggested that the Commission was in danger of being “gamed” and invoked the phrase “Tennessee Waltz,” seemingly implying that some sort of backroom arrangement had been responsible for the original approval of “Cash Now” at the location.

The property lies within the Commission district of George Chism, who also objected to the process that led to “Cash Now” being where it is, and is the proverbial stone’s throw from Shafer’s district.

In the end, the Commission voted to defer a vote on the matter until its next regular business meeting of June 1.
There has also been a bit of a blowback from last week’s budget session, in which Commission members seemed so supportive of Shelby County Schools’ request for a $14.9 budget increase that some observers were calling the meeting a love-fest.

Jackson Baker

Bev Shelley makes her appeal

Budget chair Shafer is taking the lead in walking back that enthusiasm. She has announced that she will be scheduling an additional “education-only” budget session “as soon as we can before we vote on the 20th” to discuss the ramifications for local school funding of the state’s Basic Education Plan, as well as future maintenance-of-effort and OPEB (Other Post-Employment Benefits) obligations.

•After Monday’s meeting, members of the Commission had a dinner meeting with staffers of the non-profit organization JIFF (Juvenile Intervention and Faith-Based Follow-Up), which attempts to rehabilitate hard-core offenders in the Juvenile Court System, those with seemingly intractable records involving five or more offenses.

The Commission members were clearly affected by evidence of JIFF’s successes presented by executive director Richard Graham and the organization’s board chair, Lauren Young, and most of all by hearty recommendations of the organization by Juvenile Court Judge Dan Michael and by JIFF board member Bev Shelley, whose husband John in 2013was robbed and then shot and killed by youthful gang members while he was appraising a house in the Parkway Village area for potential renovation.

Bev Shelley has since become a crusader for rehabilitation efforts like those provided by JIFF and made a moving appeal on behalf of “intervening these children’s lives” and giving them “the help that they need” to move away from criminality and into the social mainstream.

The upshot Monday was an apparent consensus among the attending Commissioners to include JIFF’s request for a $150,000 annual funding contract to supplement its limited resources within the budget for Judge Michael’s office.

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Politics Politics Feature

THDA’s Mission

If the new mortgage rate for first-time home-buyers in Shelby County has gone up of late — and it has, a fact important as a juicer for the economy as a whole — much of the credit for that belongs to Ralph Perrey, executive director of the Tennessee Housing Development Agency (THDA), a state agency whose reason for being is to spur such growth.

As Perrey put it on a visit to Memphis on Monday, “The economy comes back when housing comes back, and housing comes back when the first-time buyer returns to the market.”

After years of explosive housing growth in the Nashville area, particularly in the state capital’s surrounding, so-called “donut” counties, Perrey’s mission just now is to ramp up home-buying in West Tennessee and East Tennessee to an equivalent level.

At this point, about 20 percent of THDA’s mortgage business is in Memphis. Up until now, the surrounding donut counties have accounted for a majority of it.

THDA, which was created by the state of Tennessee some 43 years ago, is self-funding and operates within the context of the general housing market and, as an issuer of mortgage loans, plays by the rules of that market. But it serves an overtly public purpose, not only accelerating the growth and accessibility of housing but applying its profits to other useful ends.

Perrey, a baseball fan who watches games wherever he goes, dissertated on the functions of his office at AutoZone Park Monday night, between pitches of the game between the Memphis Redbirds and the Colorado Springs Sky Sox.

“What we hope to do is build our business,” Perrey said. “With every additional loan, if we do our work well, it helps us support more activities through our housing trust fund. We manage nine different federal programs. Here in Memphis, there’s a lot of interest in what you can do to eliminate blight and get rid of eyesores. 

“We’re negotiating with the U.S. Department of the Treasury to use some leftover foreclosure [-prevention] money. We committed all of it we had, but some of it, an unneeded portion, was returned to us. We think, by the fall, we’ll have a few million dollars to use against blight, and that could be very impactful to certain areas of Memphis.”

Before heading to the ball park, Perrey had spent an afternoon hobnobbing with mortgage bankers from the tri-state area, who are holding their annual convention here. “As we tell people, we are being more aggressive in engaging with lenders. That combination has really made a difference. Our loan product is up 58 percent compared to last year,” Perrey said.

THDA’s “main line,” explained Perrey, is to finance single-family mortgages, which the agency buys from the originating lenders and then administers, with a marginal savings for the home-buyer. “For the lenders, it’s a market-expanding opportunity. We give them a product they can use for customers they might otherwise say no to.” The term “public-private partnership” has gotten a pretty good workout in policy circles in recent years, and it adequately describes the way THDA operates.

“We provide backup,” is how Perrey puts it. “We’re not a poverty program, but we do make it possible for people of limited means to have their own homes, so long as they can demonstrate a certain financial capacity. But we’re not just for poor people.” 

He said that THDA also facilitates loans for people well into what could be described as middle class, such as start-up couples “who may think they don’t have a good enough credit score or are worried about the down payment.”

At present, TDHA can offer a 30-year fixed-rate loan at a 3.99 percentage rate, marginally better than the market at large, and can also offer down-payment closing assistance.

In other words, THDA doesn’t do hand-outs, but it provides a hand up for people in all economic circumstances who, for various reasons, might need a bit of help in getting what they want out of the housing market. Because the agency’s standards for lending include a demonstration of solvency, it has a very low delinquency rate with its loans. “We think there are a lot of people in Tennessee who would qualify for a THDA mortgage, and that’s why we’re here,” said Perrey, who said TDHA will offer a newly configured loan package sometime this summer especially tailored for credit unions and other lenders who may not deal with FHA loans per se.

Perrey is a product of Republican politics, having left a career as a radio newsman to serve former Congressman and Governor Don Sundquist as his entrée into government. But he sees himself as working within the stream of a bipartisan tradition. “There isn’t that much difference in how Republican and Democratic administrations have dealt with THDA. There’s been a great deal of continuity. Everybody likes housing.”

It’s nice to know, especially these days, that some aspects of government are above politics. As Ralph Perrey tells it, the Tennessee Housing Development Agency is one of them.

• Hackles were raised in Democratic Party circles in 2014 over former party Chairman Sidney Chism‘s overt and enthusiastic support of the reelection of Sheriff Bill Oldham, who ran as the Republican nominee. The Shelby County Democratic Executive Committee went so far as to formally censure Chism for not only endorsing Oldham but for allegedly attempting to dissuade the eventual Democratic candidate, Bennie Cobb, from running against him.

Now Chism, a former Shelby County commissioner who was term-limited and could not run again in 2014, is employed by Oldham as a “public information specialist,” and Chism is once again undergoing scrutiny. As part of the commission’s preliminary budget process, the Sheriff’s Department presented its financial prospectus back in mid-April, but the department’s employment of Chism and former county preparedness director, Bob Nations, prompted a callback before the commission’s budget committee on Wednesday of this week.

Budget Committee Chair Heidi Shafer said that further information was needed in the case of both Chism and Nations, the latter of whom, she said, had not become fully vested for pension purposes but would achieve that status in the sheriff’s employ.

“We just want to know if these jobs are really needed in light of the substantial increases the Sheriff’s Departent is seeking elsewhere,” said Shafer.

Also subject to a callback for further accounting on Wednesday were Juvenile Court and the Shelby County Election Commission. Shafer professed a concern over a request for $200,000 as a consultant’s fee to look into revising current election procedures, as well as the Election Commission’s request for a six percent raise in compensation for its emplyees.

“Not many Shelby Countians would find it easy to believe that the Election Commission deserves merit raises,” Shafer said.

• As of Friday, persons interested in filling the Super District, Position 2 seat (if not the shoes) of influential Councilman Shea Flinn, who has resigned, were able to pick up papers at the council office. Applications are due by Thursday, May 14th, and the remaining 12 council members will choose an interim replacement for Flinn’s seat on Tuesday, May 19th.

It will take a majority of seven votes to name the fill-in council member, and that could result in several ballots.

Indications are that all or nearly all of the individuals who had previously drawn petitions to run for the seat in the October 8th election will attempt to gain the interim nod as well. It’s one of those nothing-to-lose situations.

But, given the fact that sitting council members may not wish to offend a possible future colleague by making the wrong choice, they may see as a more appealing option the idea of choosing someone who does not intend to run for the seat in the regular city election. 

Some of those who have already indicated they are candidates for the interim position only are lawyer Alan Crone and activists Frank Triplett and Diane Cambron. That list is sure to grow between now and May 14th.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

In Sync with the Season

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

The Shelby County Commission conducted its last meeting of the year on Monday and, in the process, put off until mid-January any decisions relating to two vexing matters — that of Robert Lipscomb’s proposed Tourist Development Zone (TDZ) project for the Fairgrounds and the supposedly dormant but still-simmering issue of rules changes.

The shelving of the TDZ plan was according to plan. Behind the scenes, key members of the commission, Democrats and Republicans, are working on a compromise version that can be presented to the state building commission.

Jackson Baker

Lipscomb meets the press as Cooper-Young consultant David Upton looks on

A successful agreement could be presented as proof not only that the commission supports the TDZ, which is a city project that must be okayed by the state, but that Republican conservatives on the commission, whose counterparts dominate in the General Assembly, are among the plan’s chief supporters.

And things were moving swiftly toward such an agreement, with the GOP’s Heidi Shafer and the Democrats’ Reginald Milton taking leading roles in establishing a commission consensus that, in city planning czar Lipscomb’s words (echoing a title by thriller author Tom Clancy) would resolve “the sum of all our fears.”

Those fears, over the course of several public sessions and private negotiations, had involved three main points:

1) A concern by several commissioners, as well as county Mayor Mark Luttrell, that school funding be insulated from the flow of incremental sales tax revenue to the TDZ’s developmental fund. What is emerging is the concept of a voluntary “set-aside” of what would constitute the schools’ normal portion of incremental sales tax revenue generated within the TDZ.

That amount has been estimated to be as high as $1 million to $2 million annually by Republican Commissioner Steve Basar, who has long been a skeptic regarding the Fairgrounds TDZ (and Lipscomb projects in general) but whose resistance may be softening.

2) An insistence by GOP Commissioner (and former school board member) David Reaves and others that the city of Memphis, as the price of commission support, finally come across with monies long owed the county — notably the court-ordered “maintenance-of-effort” amount stemming from the city council’s decision in 2008 to withhold some $57 million in its customary annual payment to the Memphis school system.

That debt, which is now owed, post-school merger, to Shelby County Schools (SCS), has been the subject of negotiation between the city and SCS, and word is that the wangling principals are within a million dollars or so of a settlement in the general area of $40 million.

3) Guarantees against financial cannibalization by the TDZ — which envisions a combination of athletic facilities and retail enterprises at the Fairgrounds — of other prime commercial and sports areas.

Cases in point are the Cooper-Young and Overton Square shopping/entertainment areas, both of which are in the enlarged TDZ, and such existing athletic operations as Gameday Baseball and the burgeoning sports complex overseen by former University of Memphis basketballer Anfernee Hardaway.

Agreement in all these problem areas by a bipartisan commission majority encompassing both urban and suburban areas is near. It is still far enough away, however, as to ensure slam-dunk passage of a motion to defer action until the January 15th commission meeting. The motion was made formally by Democratic Commissioner Eddie Jones, whose District 11 is directly affected by the proposed TDZ.

On hand Monday to audit proceedings was Lipscomb, who chatted with reporters after the commission’s deferral vote, pointing out that, while commission action on the TDZ was not, strictly speaking, necessary, it would enhance the proposal’s prospects for approval by the state building commission.

Lipscomb welcomed the month-long delay by the commission, saying, “It’s worth taking the time to do things right.”

• The other matter deferred by the commission until January 15th came after a surprise motion by Democrat Walter Bailey to revisit the issue of a rules change for the commission that would basically establish a majority-vote rule for all pending matters, including several that currently require a two-thirds majority vote.

Bailey’s motion was something of a surprise because the commission appeared to have decided on remanding the rules-change issue to an ad hoc committee as one aspect of an agreement to dismiss a lawsuit on the matter brought against Chairman Justin Ford by seven commission members.

The suit had been prompted by Ford’s persistence in rejecting an agenda proposal for the aforementioned rules change from Commissioner Basar. The context of that had been the newly elected commission’s reorganization vote in September, in which Basar, last year’s vice chair, had been denied the chairmanship by a majority vote on behalf of Ford. Though nominally a Democrat, Ford has often joined ranks with the commission’s Republican minority and enjoyed GOP support for the chairmanship.

The bad feeling that persisted from that occasion resulted in a seven-member coalition, comprised of Basar and six Democrats, that challenged Ford’s prerogatives as chairman and, in the judgment of Ford’s Republican supporters, may have also contemplated deposing Ford as chairman.

The objecting members sued Ford in Chancery Court for violation of commission rules in his handling of agenda matters, but Chancellor Jim Kyle ruled that the new commission had not formally adopted rules and needed to do so. In the wash of all that came a compromise agreement in which Ford’s tenure was guaranteed and the rules-change matter was referred to the aforesaid ad hoc committee, which has not yet been activated.

Bailey noted that fact in making his motion to reprise the rules-change matter, but the long and the short of it all was that action was deferred on the matter when Democrat Van Turner, who with Bailey had been co-counsel in the seven commissioners’ lawsuit, called for adherence to the ad hoc committee solution as a matter of good faith.

“We’re all friends here,” said the GOP’s Terry Roland, who, with Shafer, had spoken against Bailey’s motion.

Turner himself will apparently serve as chairman of the ad hoc committee, which presumably will meet and report by the January 15th date.

• Among the other matters dealt with by the commission on Monday was a $14.5 million TIF (tax increment financing plan) to finance the creation of a hotel in the Graceland area. Bailey challenged the plan as “a bad investment [that] could go south,” and one that should have been handled under private auspices.

Bailey asked “who, besides the taxpayers” would be responsible for retiring the bonds on the project if expected proceeds fell short.

James McLaren, attorney for Elvis Presley Enterprises (EPE), assured that EPE would be responsible for any shortfall, and the commission gave its approval to the plan by a 9-1 vote.

(This week’s Flyer “Viewpoint,” by businessman Taylor Berger, p. 17, provides a less than favorable view of both the Graceland proposal and the Fairgrounds TDZ.)

• The local political component of the Christmas season got under way with holiday parties sponsored by the Democratic and Republican parties of Shelby County. Whatever the ratio of political support claimed by the two parties, they managed to provide equally festive occasions.

The Shelby County Democrats’ official party took place last Thursday night, simultaneously with two candidate events related to the forthcoming 2015 city election season.

Councilman Edmund Ford Jr., a candidate for reelection, was the beneficiary of a well-attended fund-raiser at the river-bluff residence of Karl and Gail Schledwitz. Architect Chooch Pickard, who is considering a run for the council, held a preliminary meet-and-greet at the Jay Etkin gallery on Cooper.

Pickard, who espoused a preservationist platform, said he was meditating on a candidacy for the District 5 seat now held by Jim Strickland, if Strickland should run for mayor. Crowd-wise, he undoubtedly benefited from the fact that his event was held just prior to, and next door to, the Democrats’ party at Alchemy.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

County Commission, Chairman Ford Cut a Deal on Power-Sharing (Finally)

CREDIT: JB

JB

Attorney Krelstein and Justin Ford confer just prior to chairman Ford’s agreeing to deal with plaintiffs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That agenda item, which proposed a rules change allowing agenda items to be added on the basis of simple majority votes and not by a 2/3 super-majority, became the basis of a Democratic coalition lawsuit against Ford’s alleged violations of Commission rules via his persistent rejections.

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

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

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

[pdf-1]

When the deal finally came sometime after 6:00 p.m. on Monday, the two sides had agreed (on a motion by Ford!) to refer the rules matter to the next meeting of the general government committee, resolved to drop their respective legal actions, and to do the trade-off indicated in Paragraph Three above: Ford can feel secure in his chairmanship, though he has had to sacrifice the power over the agenda which he had previously claimed and employed.

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

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Lester, Democratic Election Commission Member, Slams Justin Ford “Betrayal”

Norma Lester

The battle over the Shelby County Commission may have come to an end with last Wednesday’s preliminary vote to accept the committee appointments of chairman Justin Ford, but with that vote, by the Commission’s general government committee, due to be ratified by the full Commission on Monday,the fallout continues in other parts of the local political universe.

Even as Republicans hashed out their internal disagreements on the appointments issue at a GOP steering committee meeting week before last, Democrats showed signs of beginning their own internal debate on the issue.

Norma Lester, a vocal Democratic representative on the Shelby County Election Commission, has issued an “open letter” to her party-mates, expressing her view that Ford, who was elected chairman on the strength of his own vote, plus those of six Republicans, had subsequently fulfilled GOP wishes in the manner of the committee appointments.

Essentially, Lester’s public missive puts her in solidarity with Democratic Commissioner Walter Bailey, who has charged that Ford’s committee assignments were made as part of a “deal” with the Commission’s Republican contingent.
The text of Lester’s letter:

My fellow Democrats, in reflecting upon recent activities, I am of the opinion it is time to WAKE UP!!

Personally, I applaud Republican Leadership in holding firm to keeping members in line, for that is as it should be. I am also a strong proponent of bipartisan decisions, HOWEVER, when Republicans court Democrats to get in bed with them but see it as taboo to get in bed with Democrats that should send a resounding wake up call!!! Carefully read the following recent statements by Republican Commissioner Steve Basar who was “bullied” for doing the exact same thing Republicans had gotten Democrat Commissioner Justin Ford to do. What a slap in the face DEMOCRATS!!!!

“Commissioner Steve Basar spoke to the “bullying” tactics of his fellow Republicans after he voted with Bailey and five other Democrats during the last commission meeting, sending the appointments back to committee, an unprecedented tactic. Basar argued that when six Republicans and one Democrat vote together, “that’s a bipartisan victory” but when a Republican sides with Democrats, the Republican should be thrown out”. (Memphis Flyer, October 8, 2014)

Getting in bed with Republicans is NOT new and not a bad thing “IF” they are willing to do likewise. I am reminded of friends who not long ago did the same thing. There is however a difference in cutting a deal and blatant betrayal, which is what happened with young Ford and the basis for the contempt amongst fellow Democrats. His behavior far exceeds that of Democratic State Senator Rosalind Kurita several years ago which resulted in her being out cast! I was in the audience the day the Ford votes were taken and it honestly looked as if the six Democrat Commissioners were in need of resuscitation! It was overwhelming being blind-sided by one someone reneging on a “gentlemen’s agreement.” Deal cutting when necessary should be for the overall benefit of those you serve NOT for personal gain. That seems to be forgotten by far too many elected officials and unfortunately without consequences. Where pray tell is the trust factor?

I refuse to accept being treated less than equal and for those in leadership positions that choose to do otherwise, the Democratic Party needs to hold them accountable and Democrats as a whole should not forget! Business as usual should no longer be acceptable. We should never settle for anything less than fair and equal treatment! To do otherwise desecrates the blood and tears of those that paved the way for us. We cannot forget!!

Democratically Yours,

Norma Lester

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Kroger Trouble Breeds Unity

CREDIT: Jackson baker

As was true of the rest of Memphis in the aftermath of the horrific mob beating of three random victims in the parking lot of Poplar Plaza Saturday night, members of the newly constituted Shelby County Commission were clearly preoccupied with the subject and made it one of the first main matters of discussion on Monday.

Toward the end of the meeting, Republican Mark Billingsley, who represents Germantown, raised the issue: “We need a discussion of public safety,” he said, and that became the basis for a spirited discussion in which the ominous import of the mob violence at a key Poplar corridor crossroads was acknowledged around the board.

Billingsley pointed out the impact of the event on suburban points east and the likelihood of even further fissures in a longstanding city/suburban divide that had been stretched to the breaking point by years of bitter disagreement over the school merger issue. Fellow Republican Terry Roland, who hails from Millington, said, “Crime doesn’t have borders,” and he was seconded on the point by Democrat Reginald Milton. Heidi Shafer, another GOP member, pointed out that the outrage at Poplar Plaza — a follow-up to a previous one that occurred there the weekend before — took place at a popular shopping venue within a residential area that was thickly populated with representatives of local government, Democratic and Republican, black and white.

“We have to have a little bit of muscle,” she said, and it was finally agreed that the commission would seek a meeting with county Mayor Mark Luttrell, Sheriff Bill Oldham, and — per the suggeston of Democrat Melvin Burgess — Gerald Darling, the chief of security at Shelby County Schools, along with perhaps other officials, to hammer out a response.

Jackson baker

Commissioners Billingsley (left) and Shafer discussing the Poplar Plaza incident.

For an elective body known more for disagreement than concord, there was a striking sense of unanimity in the commission’s action — one reflective, no doubt, of attitudes in the community at large.

 

• It would seem that the former practice of commission members rotating their chairmanship back and forth between Republicans and Democrats is a thing of the past — and so is the value of a vice chairmanship in establishing the succession of chairs.

Justin Ford, a Democrat, was elected commission chair Monday for the commission year 2014-15, besting three other nominees, fellow Democrat Walter Bailey and Republicans Roland and Steve Basar. All were holdovers on the 13-member county legislative body, newly elected from 13 single-member districts.

Roland would end up with the consolation prize of the vice chairmanship — an office that, in times of yore, would have put him in the line of succession to the chairmanship, but hasn’t done so for the past several vice chairs, including Basar, who was last year’s vice chair (aka chairman pro tem).

It is true in a sense, as Republican Shafer said during the debate, that Ford’s election is a triumph for bipartisanship. No other Democratic member, with the possible exception of the now departed James Harvey, sided with Republicans as often during the previous commission session as did Ford.

But the real meaning of the outcome is that Democrats, whose current 7-6 majority on the commission is, if anything, likely to expand in years to come, are in control of the commission and its agenda whenever they can agree on something.

The chairmanship vote occurred early on in Monday’s meeting and was overseen by Ford, who in a prefigurement of sorts, was elected temporary chair by a single vote over Shafer.

The proceedings began with an interesting wrinkle, when, after the original four nominations were made from the 13 commissioners themselves, Ford allowed speeches of support from members of the audience. Roland won that straw vote hands down, with four testifiers to his virtue compared to one for Bailey.

But it was Bailey who would lead the pack through the first two ballots, garnering six votes and ending only a vote shy both times. His nearest competitor, early on, was Roland, who essentially split the GOP vote with Basar, getting as many as four votes until Shafer, toward the end of the second round, shifted her vote from Roland to Ford, who thereby survived into the third ballot when the field, according to commission rules regarding such matters, was pared down to a final twosome.

Shafer, who had championed Roland’s cause beforehand, would acknowledge later that her vote change was in recognition that a Bailey vs. Roland runoff would end in victory for the Democrat on a straight party-line vote, while Ford vs. Bailey would allow Republicans to influence the outcome.

And so it came to pass that Ford, with considerable backing from Republican members, prevailed by a single vote over the venerable Bailey, whose positions on issues are more likely to be fixed in longstanding Democratic doctrine.

• Another important decision was reached Monday — this one occurring in the evening, as the Shelby County Democratic Executive Committee met at the IBEW meeting hall on Madison to nominate a candidate for state Senate District 30 on the November 4th county ballot.

A vacancy was created last month when the longtime seat holder, Jim Kyle, was elected chancellor on  August 7th and formally resigned on the 29th. Three candidates, all women, vied for the honor of the nomination, which, as state Attorney General Robert Cooper had ruled, had to be filled by a given political party’s governing committee.

In Shelby County, the relevant organizations were the Democrats’ executive committee and the Shelby County Republicans’ steering committee. Though District 30, which encompasses much of North Memphis, Frayser, and Raleigh, is heavily Democratic, it was the GOP that filled its place on the ballot first, having nominated physician/broadcast executive George Flinn as its nominee at a steering committee meeting last week.

Sensing all but certain victory in November, several Democrats considered throwing their hats in the ring, but in the end it was three of the party’s prominent women who vied for the nomination. They were Sara Kyle, wife of the former senator, and a former city judge and member of the state Regulatory Authority; Beverly Marrero, a former state senator who had lost a 2012 race to Jim Kyle in District 30; and Carol Chumney, a former state representative, city councilmember, and mayoral candidate.

Present for the occasion was state Democratic Chairman Roy Herron of Nashville, who delivered encouraging remarks before the committee’s vote, as did newly elected District 29 state Senator Lee Harris and former county commissioner and county mayoral candidate Steve Mulroy.

All three struck a note of harmony, as did the three candidates, who made brief speeches before the vote was taken. The only surprise came when Chumney announced that she was withdrawing and throwing her support to Marrero.

Kyle prevailed by a margin of 18-to-16, with only those committee members voting who represented districts encompassed by or within District 30.

For all the well-known schisms within local Democratic ranks, Monday night’s meeting had less contentiousness, at least on the surface, than the GOP equivalent.

On that occasion, which took place at Clark Tower last Thursday night, steering committee member John Niven had nominated Flinn, and Justin Joy, the Shelby County Republican chairman, had been about to call the nomination process over when Colonel Gene Billingsley, the party’s nominee for state House District 93, unexpectedly interjected, “Somebody nominate me!”

When no one responded, Billingsley, who has a well-deserved reputation in party circles as being eccentric and was at the meeting as a spectator, groused loudly, “What? A bunch of wimps?” Committee member Wayne West did point out, in an apparent attempt to settle down the interloper, that Billingsley already had a place on the November ballot. 

More would be forthcoming, however, from the Colonel, who kept up something of a running commentary, even as Flinn, clearly a consensus choice, was addressing committee members, pledging his usual earnest (and no doubt well-financed, also as usual) electioneering effort and calling for their support.

As Flinn was finishing up with his remarks, Billingsley had one more taunt. “I’m not going to vote for you!” he yelled out. He seemed all by himself with that sentiment, however. Flinn received a hearty round of applause when Chairman Joy pronounced him the party’s nominee.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Poplar and Highland

Perhaps the most celebrated and important thoroughfare in Shelby County is Poplar Avenue. It begins on Memphis’ western rim, on the banks of the mighty Mississippi River, among the sturdy buildings of our governmental

complex, and continues eastward through some of the city’s oldest and most scenic areas, along the long edge of Overton Park and continuing past the Parkway, bisecting thereafter, mile upon mile of choice commercial and residential territory. Eventually it escapes Memphis proper and cuts a swath through the vital centers of Memphis’ two most upscale suburbs, Germantown and Collierville, before finally crossing into Mississippi in the far southeast corner of the county.

Poplar can truly be called the Main Street of Shelby County, and a key point of it, a connecting link of sorts, about midway on its path through the county, is the intersection of Poplar and Highland, just past the monumental Benjamin Hooks Public Library on the north and the now-secluded stretch that shelters Chickasaw Gardens to the immediate south. The corner serves as an entrance into the University of Memphis area and to the nearby expanse of the Links of Galloway golf course. It is surrounded with prime shopping and residential areas.

On the northwest corner of the intersection is the busy Poplar Plaza shopping area, home to numerous popular restaurants and stores, and most notably the enormous (and enormously popular) new state-of-the-art Kroger Supermarket.

On each of the past two weekends, the vast parking area of Poplar Plaza has been the scene of mob violence. As surely as everybody reading this knows, the second of these outbreaks, during which a would-be Kroger shopper barely managed a gauntlet run from where he’d parked his car to the relative safety of the big store’s interior, was captured on video via an employee’s cellphone camera. As the video also makes clear, two other Kroger employees, both young teens, were beaten unconscious by the marauders, who may or may not have been playing the thuggish “game” called Point ‘Em Out, Knock ‘Em Out, which targets people at random who have the misfortune to be in the mob’s path.

Mayor A C Wharton and Police Director Toney Armstrong have responded promptly to the latest incident with strong words and promises of strong action. Several arrests have already been made. In their own way, though, they have been a bit like President Obama, who has so far struggled to counter the horrific surge of the ISIS caliphate with impressive rhetoric but with uncertain action.

This latest urban crisis similarly confronts Memphis. Occurring at a time of reduced benefits and troubled prospects for the city’s first responders, it would be difficult to deal with even by a fully staffed law enforcement corps with high morale.

But we know what we’re up against — a virulent strain of youth violence that, if left unchecked, could beget more such incidents, generate vigilante responses, and sunder permanently the links that still hold Shelby County together — literally and figuratively, physically and spiritually.

The way to confront the problem must be found, and it will need the full support of all of us. If one of the pillars of Memphis commerce is allowed to fall prey to this sort of lawless behavior, everyone loses, regardless of race, class, or place of residence.