Tag: Jim Strickland

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Politics Politics Feature

Wharton, Strickland Remain Close in Mayoral Race

With three weeks to go, the race for Memphis mayor is still a coin-toss affair. By most reckonings, incumbent Mayor A C Wharton and City Councilman Jim Strickland are running virtually neck and neck.

That circumstance was confirmed by a recent Mason-Dixon poll, published in The Commercial Appeal, which had Wharton at 30 percent and Strickland at 25 percent, with City Councilman Harold Collins and Memphis Police Association President Mike Williams at 12 percent each. Arguments promptly raged as to the nature of the sampling, but the general picture seemed clear enough. And so were candidates’ responses.

Strickland’s support among white voters and along the Poplar Corridor in general was obvious and unlikely to diminish much, if at all, by election day. If anything, came the word from his camp, his standing in the poll was low-balled. Strickland, who has certainly not forsworn the black vote but was lagging there, accelerated his appearances at African-American churches and other predominantly black venues to augment his prospects.

Wharton was maintaining a plurality among black voters, who constitute almost two-thirds of the eligible electorate, and was in the low double-digits among whites. The mayor kept pitching to his strength and was emphasizing support from fellow office-holders and established sources, including The Commercial Appeal, which gave him its endorsement.

Collins and Williams, meanwhile, maintained they were within striking distance and were working hard to present themselves as the change agents of choice in an environment in which voter discontent was obvious, both anecdotally and as measured in the polls.

The four principal mayoral candidates will participate next Tuesday at noon at the University Club in what could be the climactic mayoral forum in what has been a series of them this year. The forum is sponsored under the joint auspices of the Rotary Club of Memphis and the Flyer.

• Politics is politics, and education is education, but all too often, especially in Memphis and Shelby County in recent times, the two have merged. 

Everybody in Shelby County surely got their fill of education politics per se during the the city/county school merger controversy that raged from December 2010 to August 2014, when the six suburban municipalities of Shelby County got their independent school districts up and running, more or less.

But what’s this? Here, in its entirety, is an item reported in the current issue of the Nashville-based Tennessee Journal:

“The Memphis-Shelby County Education Association claimed through its attorney Wednesday to have seceded from the Tennessee Education Association and the National Education Association. Relations had been tense since Keith Williams, a former M-SCEA president whose term ended in July, was hired last month as the new executive director. 

“Ken Foster, the director for 15 years, was ousted. TEA has notified teachers it has set up a new ‘TEA West’ office to serve them, and that despite actions of M-SCEA leaders, they are still members of TEA and NEA. According to a TEA email, TEA West was established ‘after M-SCEA leadership refused to allow NEA officials to conduct an audit, broke the agreement of the Memphis-Shelby County [schools] merger, forced out the long-serving executive director, and now has claimed to disaffiliate from TEA-NEA.'” 

For the record, the Keith Williams mentioned here is the same Keith Williams who is considered one of the main contenders in the race for the District 3 City Council seat being vacated by Harold Collins, now a candidate for mayor.

Williams’ pugnacity as an opponent of the charter surrender that was voted on by a majority of the old Memphis City Schools board on December 20, 2010, was rivaled only by that of then board member Kenneth Whalum Jr., now a candidate for the Super District 9, Position 2 seat.

As previously indicated in this space, Whalum is running as the unofficial head of a like-minded “education slate,” and, unsurprisingly perhaps, Williams is one of the six members of that slate he has endorsed.

By all accounts, the other major candidate for the District 3 seat is Patrice Robinson, who served alongside Whalum on the old MCS board and was a member of the majority which cast the fateful vote to surrender the MCS charter.

Robinson — who has been running hard in the current District 3 race, holding one meet-and-greet affair per week — previously tangled in the race for the District 9 Shelby County Commission seat now held by Justin Ford, who was able to eke out a win in that winner-take-all race.

Unlike that race, this one for city council is subject to a run-off if no one candidate is able to win a majority, and, inasmuch as the field includes five other candidates — some with name recognition from previous races of their own — it is not impossible that this latest showdown between Williams and Robinson will have another chapter beyond October 8th.

The other active contenders for the District 3 seat are Tanya Cooper, also an educator and the daughter of state Representative Barbara Cooper; Kevin Mott; Sherman Kilimanjaro; and Coleman Thompson. Rhonda Banks is listed on the ballot as a candidate, but she has suspended her race and is now supporting Robinson. • Runoffs, if they should be called for in the District 3 race or in any of the other six district races, will not be held on November 8th, as originally scheduled and announced as a runoff date, but on November 19th. This is according to a new clarification by the Shelby County Election Commission of state election law, which calls for runoffs to occur no sooner than 30 days from the posted election day and no longer than 45 days.

The clarification happens incidentally to avoid the awkwardness of holding an election on a date, November 8, which falls on a Sunday.

 

• Meanwhile, one de facto “runoff” election has already been held — that for the chairmanship of the Shelby County Commission. The commission’s original vote for chairman was held a month ago — on August 10th, when East Memphis Republican member Steve Basar won the election by a single vote.

Then, in a bizarre turnabout, one hour after the election, Memphis Democrat Eddie Jones, who had abstained for most of the ballot rounds that day before casting what had turned out to be the decisive vote for Basar, unexpectedly asked for a reconsideration ­— i.e., a revote on the matter.

Parliamentary protocol allows for such a reconsideration if the person seeking it was a member of the prevailing side on the original vote, and Jones, who had in the meantime had several sotto voce conversations with another chairmanship contender, Millington Republican Terry Roland, qualified.

After a vote which narrowly approved reconsideration, another vote was held, in which — thanks largely to a spoiler candidacy by Collierville Republican George Chism — neither the now un-elected Basar nor Roland could prevail, and a new election was called for this week, to accommodate Jones, who said he would be unable to attend the intervening commission meeting on August 14th.

Come Monday, and the new election was the first order of business after the commission’s approval of a consent agenda. With interim chair Van Turner presiding (outgoing chair Ford’s term having formally terminated), new nominations for chairman were called for, and the same three candidates as before — Basar, Roland, and Chism — were put in nomination.

Tellingly, Roland was nominated this time by Jones. In the end, after two ballots, Roland won election on the basis of five Republican votes, including his own, and those of two Democrats, Jones and Ford.

As a preamble to Monday’s rescheduled chairmanship election, several citizens, representing Democratic, Republican, and perhaps independent constituencies, had appeared before the commission, challenging its members to cast their votes on some basis other than deal-making.

Whatever degree of public cynicism that may have represented, victor Roland, whose election was a springboard of sorts for the county mayor’s race he intends to run in 2018, sought to be reassuring. Before the vote, he promised “from my heart” that, if elected, he would “break my neck” on behalf of his colleagues of all persuasions. After the vote, he professed to be humbled.

Basar — who, besides his two recent setbacks, had suffered an unanticipated loss to Ford in last year’s chairmanship vote ­— was sounding philosophical even before Monday’s vote was taken. “Déjà vu all over again,” he said.

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Politics Politics Feature

Election 2015: The Mike Williams Factor

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

All right. The shape of the mayoral race — and perhaps of the City Council races — has changed, and it’s time to take note of it.

It is still true that there are four principal mayoral candidates, though WREG-TV News Channel 3, for purposes of its forthcoming televised debate on September 15th, seems to regard the proper number as three.

Applying a yardstick that limited eligibility for its debate to candidates who had raised at least $50,000 as of August 1st and who maintained a public headquarters, Channel 3 will feature only incumbent Mayor A C Wharton and Councilmen Jim Strickland and Harold Collins.

Left out by that arithmetic was Mike Williams, the Memphis Police Association president-on-sabbatical, who will shortly open a headquarters on Poplar, across the street from East High School, but who had raised well below $50,000 by the designated target date.

Williams still hasn’t raised big-time money, though he’s had a couple of fund-raisers since August 1st. More important to his prospects is the presence he’s developed on social media, on websites of his own, as well as those he seems to share informally with various other rebels against the established system.

Williams’ critics maintain that he’s a one-issue candidate, and while making the case against benefits cuts on behalf of city employees, and of first responders in particular, does seem to have been his motivation in making the race, Williams is increasingly working other issues.

Among them are reform of the city’s oft-challenged animal rescue operation and defense of the Mid-South Coliseum against an existent city blueprint for its demise, and Williams, who insists his first act as mayor would be to institute a rigorous “forensic audit,” calls for a slowdown in what he sees as high-risk economic development schemes.

His campaign has brought him abreast of several council candidates pursuing similar themes, including the potential hot-button issue of de-annexation, and there are several websites — the Facebook “Just the Facts” page prominent among them — where he and they post so regularly as to seem a ticket unto themselves.

Among his de facto fellow travelers are council candidates Jim Tomasik (District 2), Robin Spielberger (Super-District 9, Position 1), and Lynn Moss (Super District 9, Position 2), though other candidates in other races are known to post in the same matrix from time to time.

While everybody recognizes the growing importance of social media in political campaigning — nobody more so than Williams — everybody also recognizes that money and organized support, both of which maximize a candidate’s public exposure, are of paramount importance.

There are ways to offset others’ possession of such advantages, and the kind of free media that comes with public debates, especially televised ones, is one such. Williams has been included in several recent mayoral debates, including two high-visibility ones — a televised debate on WMC Action News 5, and a well-attended one co-sponsored by The Commercial Appeal and the University of Memphis.

The observers’ consensus was that Williams did well on both occasions, raising his profile significantly. Hence, the perils of being excluded from the Channel 3 debate, which is sure to have a large audience.

Outraged, Williams’ supporters first thought to organize a boycott of Channel 3, but cooler heads, including the candidate himself, prevailed, and the Williams entourage will spend the night of September 15th at a “Thank You WREG” debate-watch party-cum-“twitter-thon.”

That show of equanimity might be more useful to Williams than an outright reaction of anger would have been, but more exposure to the candidate’s ever-evolving populist message continues to be what he needs most.

And, even if his support base is kept small, it still might be large enough to influence the fortunes of others. The question is: Whose?

At this point, the naked eye, on the basis of frequent Williams-sightings, will tell you that Williams’ support base, comprising both police and fire employees and populist reformers at large, is almost totally white, though he himself is an African American.

A modest extrapolation from that would indicate that Strickland, who has a few grievances against the Wharton administration in common with Williams, could be a logical second choice for a Williams supporter — though many Williams backers, seeing the well-funded District 5 councilman as yet another establishmentarian, might demur at that prospect.

A more apt corollary is that a certain kind of Voter X— a recently annexed Cordova suburbanite, say — might find himself/herself pondering between candidates Strickland and Williams. In that sense, Williams could function as a voter hedge against Strickland’s ultimate vote total.

Should Strickland be secretly gratified, then, by Channel 3’s decision to exclude Williams from its debate, or by any other action that effectively limits the voter alternatives to incumbent Wharton?

Not necessarily, because Strickland, who is bound to draw a significant share of the city’s white vote (the packed crowd that lined the walls of his Poplar Plaza headquarters opening in July was a revelation in that respect) has an obvious need. His chances of dethroning Wharton would seem to require further inroads on the mayor’s (allegedly) declining black vote — on Strickland’s own or on the part of Collins or Williams.

That the mayor is worried about Collins goes without saying. Financially, the Whitehaven councilman lags well behind Strickland and Wharton (who refreshed his already significant coffers with a Fred Smith-sponsored fund-raiser last week) but is well-to-do enough to have a radio spot and to do some modest paid TV.

Collins has been effective in slamming the mayor’s vaunted economic development agenda for producing only a modest number of low-paid jobs while — or so contends the councilman— ignoring strategies for upgrading the kind of job opportunities in high-tech and financial fields that would keep Memphis’ aspiring youth population from emigrating elsewhere.

Williams not only advocates a slowdown of showy economic development projects per se, he claims that the ongoing shutdown of schools and community centers in African-American neighborhoods is part of an effort by developers, in cahoots with city officials, consciously or unconsciously to gut the inner city in the interests of gentrification.

That kind of pitch could, if given enough exposure, net a substantial upsurge for Williams in the black community. It plays large in his new campaign video circulating via Facebook.

Jackson Baker

“The opponent of my opponent is my friend,” an extrapolation of an old Arab proverb, would seem to apply to the District 2 City Council race, where Rachel Knox (left) and Jim Tomasik, who bumped into each other at the Flying Saucer on Germantown Parkway, face a common foe, the favored Frank Colvett Jr.

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News News Feature

Crime & Punishment

To the untrained ear, Memphis mayoral candidate Jim Strickland’s plan to reduce crime seems reasonable.

“We need to have zero tolerance for violent crime,” said the Memphis City Council member during a debate last month.

But when he elaborates, he stumbles and disappoints.

“And when I say that, I mean right now, if a juvenile commits a violent act on another human being, they are not automatically taken down to juvenile court,” he continued. “That’s not zero tolerance. That’s the exact opposite. They need to be taken down to juvenile court.”

With that statement, Strickland ignores the mountains of research about young minds and the yawning school-to-prison pipeline.

He brushes away this nation’s shameful history of policing black bodies and, worst of all, overlooks recent history at Shelby County Juvenile Court, which treats black children more harshly than white kids.

His rhetoric isn’t quite a dog whistle, but it’s pandering to our basest instincts.

In theory, a civilized society acknowledges that children and teens, their developing brains incapable of consistent impulse control, deserve more care and compassion than adults.

But in practice, the adult instinct to protect children crumbles under the weight of racial stereotypes. In fact, a 2014 study published by the American Psychological Association found that police officers surveyed saw black boys as 4.5 years older than they were and less innocent.

The most recent context for Strickland’s tough-on–crime stance is a handful of videotaped brawls of black “teen mobs,” as branded by local media. One cell phone video captured an attack at an East Memphis Kroger grocery store (read: supposed to be safe). Another video showed a fight at the once-highly regarded White Station High (read: where fights aren’t supposed to happen).

Through this lens, Strickland’s pleas to enforce the curfew laws sound like smart public policy.

But the relevant context takes a wider view of history, stretching back to Reconstruction and the birth of the nation’s Jim Crow curfew laws, designed to restrict the movement of formerly enslaved men and women.

Follow Strickland’s plan to its logical conclusion in a predominantly black city, and juvenile court will overflow with children whose chief mistake was knuckling up at school or in their neighborhoods.

Private schools, which house the overwhelming majority of the city’s white school-age children, can shield their students’ bad behavior from the public eye.

But for public school students, most of whom in Memphis are black, the hammer of indiscriminate zero tolerance policies falls hard.

According to a recently released report on school suspensions and expulsions in Southern states, researchers found that “[B]lacks were 23 percent of students in school districts across the state [of Tennessee], but comprised 58 percent of suspensions and 71 percent of expulsions.”

Factor in the local evidence, and Strickland’s crime-fighting strategy goes from ill-advised to indefensible.

In 2012, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) determined that Shelby County Juvenile Court treats black children more harshly than white children.

“Black children are more likely to be detained pre-adjudication, less likely to receive warnings and lesser sanctions, and more likely to be transferred to criminal court,” wrote DOJ civil rights investigators in a scathing report.

Just this July, the federal monitor reported that the court has shown a “serious lack of progress” in reducing disproportionate minority contact. “Although the overall number of youth held in secure detention has decreased, a racial gap remains and, in fact, has increased, and race still matters once all other factors are considered,” the monitor wrote.

It gets worse: The Memphis metro area has the nation’s highest rate of “disconnected youth,” defined as people between the ages of 16 and 24 who aren’t in school or employed.

The burden of a criminal record makes residents virtually unemployable and ineligible for many college loans, decimating their chances to build wealth and, in doing so, gain true freedom.

Flawed criminal justice policies have disastrous results for communities of color. Strickland, the only white mayoral candidate with a chance to win, should know this.

He has time to amend his platform before the October election, although a more nuanced approach may alienate his Poplar-corridor base (read: mostly white and more affluent than the rest of the city).

But an informed, evidence-based crime-fighting plan is the responsible thing to do — for Memphis’ children and the city’s future.

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Politics Politics Feature

Memphis Mayor’s Race: Light in August

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

There will be two more joint appearances by mayoral candidates this week. And, as if any more proof were needed that the mayoral race is a tight, tense affair, there was incumbent Mayor A C Wharton out there on Saturday, with the temperature in the 90s, going door to door and asking Whitehaven residents for permission to put his signs in their yards.

This was two weeks after the mayor’s opening of a Whitehaven headquarters on Elvis Presley Boulevard (followed a week later by his opening of a Poplar Avenue HQ).

To hear the mayor say it, Whitehaven has always been a proving ground for him in his various elections, especially when, as in 2011, when one of his opponents was a Ford — in that case, former City Councilman Edmund Ford Sr., a member of the prominent South Memphis-based political family.

Jackson Baker

The Mayor does DIY with yard signs in Whitehaven

“They’ve always said I’d have trouble with Whitehaven, but I always do okay,” said Wharton, as he trundled up Whitworth Road, waiting to rendezvous with an aide in a car, headed his way with more signs. “All you gotta do is look around here and see how many signs we’ve already put up.”

Whitehaven has the potential to be a problem area for Wharton this year, inasmuch as one of his opponents, City Councilman Harold Collins, represents the area on the council. That morning, even as Wharton was doing his door-to-door in Whitehaven, Collins was having a formal headquarters opening at Southbrook Mall, mere blocks away on Shelby Drive at Elvis Presley.

The mayor did not minimize the Collins threat, but, as he said, “Only a Ford is a Ford,” meaning, presumably, that in his view the councilman lacked the well-known political clan’s lingering mystique in the area.

And, as it happens, only days before, Edmund Ford Sr., Wharton’s former opponent, had released to the media a scathing letter accusing Collins of running a diversionary campaign designed not to win but to siphon African-American votes away from Wharton to help the mayoral candidacy of Councilman Jim Strickland.

And, meanwhile, Edmund Ford Jr., who succeeded his father on the city council and represents a part of Whitehaven adjoining Collins’ bailiwick, is one of the mayor’s major backers, speaking on his behalf at various rallies. That sort of help will surely prove useful to the mayor’s reelection campaign.

Although nobody, as of yet, is releasing poll results, those you hear about are said to confirm the fact that Wharton is indeed involved in a competitive race — with Strickland the major threat — and has to meet various percentage figures among both black and white voters in order to prevail.

Wharton and Strickland have enormous campaign treasuries and are in a position to spend anywhere from $200,000 to $300,000 on their campaigns between now and October 8th — much of that on print, radio, and TV advertising. Collins and a fourth candidate regarded as serious, Memphis Police Association director Mike Williams, don’t have resources on that scale, but both got positive exposure on last Monday night’s debate on WMC-TV and stand to claim an ever greater share of public attention, with several more mayoral forums yet to come.

Jackson Baker

Collins with daughters at Southbrook

Collins’ headquarters opening on Saturday took place in a former bank building in the parking lot of Southbrook, the down-at-the-heels shopping mall which has been the subject of an on-again/off-again renovation project that was shelved back in June by the mayor. Days later, Wharton proposed a commission to look into a more ambitious $50 to $70 million renovation of the entire area, though there were cynics who saw that move as purely hypothetical and designed only for its short-term P.R. value.

The mayor has been nothing if not candid about what he sees as the priorities of the city’s voters. Some weeks ago, speaking to women supporters at Waterford Plaza, he expressed regret at the benefit cuts imposed on city employees this year but said polling showed that voters overall were not exercised over the matter, whereas they expressed a great deal of anxiety about the city getting its financial house in order. Recalling the matter on Saturday, Wharton mused, “‘Getting our financial house in order’ got a 9.4 rating on a scale of 10.”

Both Southbrook and the benefits cuts are integral matters to Collins’ platform and got due mention on Saturday — the former with the councilman’s promise to come to the rescue of local entrepreneurs; the latter, when local Firefighters Union president Tommy Malone told the crowd that fire employees had “lost everything that we’ve gained for 30 years” during the Wharton administration.

By contrast, Collins had been the “only candidate who has consistently supported the firefighters,” Malone said. “We’ve got to work this man into office. Or we’ll get four more years of the same thing, and we can’t stand that in this city.”

Collins had been preceded to the mic by his two daughters, who told the crowd how they had been reluctant to return to Memphis after college elsewhere because of limited, low-pay job opportunities back home. The councilman elaborated on that, one of his basic themes, saying that Memphis’ young people “see no future in … pull-it, pick-it, and push-it jobs” at $9 or $10 an hour. He promised, as mayor, to bring in well-paying finance, engineering, and technology jobs.

Recalling last year’s youth mob attack on shoppers at the Poplar Plaza Kroger, Collins cited the specter of urban “terrorism” and said he would “work with the Juvenile Court system to deal with violence, making sure the perpetrators were detained and subjected to a judicial hearing within 24 hours. We will determine whether somebody is the head of some gang or if the valedictorian is at the wrong place at the wrong time,” Collins said.

After pledging, “We won’t have all these CEOs and COOs in our administration,” an obvious dig at the incumbent mayor, Collins ran a few stirring phrases up the flagpole and, in an oblique reference to the Edmund Ford Sr. letter, declared, “We’re in this race to win it. Nor in this race to do anything else, but win. But win. But win!”

While all this was going on, Strickland, like the Mayor, was going door to door, something he does on weekends with fair frequency. The simple yard signs saying “Strickland” are beginning to appear in quantity along such high-visibility thoroughfares as Poplar and Walnut Grove, as are those for Wharton. Collins, too, has a fair number of signs out.

With both Wharton and Strickland about to turn loose gobs of money (their first TV ads have already appeared) and Collins stepping up his fund-raising efforts, the campaign of Williams remains a true variable. He doesn’t yet have anything like the public presence of the others, but last week’s agile debate performance, which seemed to disprove that he’s a one-trick pony, has people watching.

Williams spent most of Saturday at the Agricenter attending a “Pet Expo.” He materialized late in the day at a location off White Station Road, where the Police Association was collecting donations for the family of slain MPD officer Sean Bolton.

Williams and the others were scheduled for a debate at the University of Memphis’ Rose Theater at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday and at Central High School for an Evergreen Historic Association forum on Thursday at 6 p.m. We’ll be watching.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Master Debaters, Near and Far

Boring, boring, boring, boring, TRUMP!, boring, boring, boring, TRUMP!, boring, boring, boring, boring, TRUMP!, boring, boring, TRUMP!

That was the most concise analysis of last week’s GOP presidential candidate debate that I read. And that was on Twitter. It was a lot like the final episode of True Detective, except you’d replace “TRUMP!” with “KA-BLAM!”

The candidates spent most of the debate trying to convince viewers that they would be the best man to control American women’s uteruses, and denying any possibly sensible positions they’d held in the past. I fully expected Chris Wallace to end the debate by saying, “Final question: Which of you is the absolute batshit craziest, and why?”

The aftermath of the GOP debate was almost as much fun as the debate itself, as The Donald seemingly shot himself in the foot with misogynist comments about Fox moderator Megyn Kelly, who had the audacity to ask Trump about his many past mysogynist comments. Pundits immediately proclaimed that Trump had jumped the shark and that his campaign was over, unless he apologized.

Trump, as anyone who has observed his career could predict, didn’t apologize, and instead ramped up his rhetoric another notch. Naturally, his lead in the polls grew and Fox groveled, withering under Trump’s verbal assaults on the network.

I fully expect Trump to pull out a bunch of bills at the next debate and “make it rain” on the other candidates. What could it hurt at this point? He’s the Teflon Man.

It was a big week for debates, with Monday night’s Memphis mayoral forum coming just on the heels of the GOP’s extravaganza. Five candidates — Mayor A C Wharton, Jim Strickland, Harold Collins, Mike Williams, and Sharon Webb — vied to impress Memphis voters with their rhetoric and political acumen.

Well, except for Webb, who appeared to have wandered onstage by accident. As one person tweeted: “I’m sure Dr. Sharon is a sweet woman with a great heart, but this is not her element.” That would be correct, if by “her element,” you mean Earth. Prediction: You will not read or hear the term “Webb-mentum” in the next few weeks.

Each of the other four candidates made some points and took some shots at their opponents. Wharton gave as good as he got (and he got fired upon more than Detective Ray Velcoro in that True Detective finale).

I still think the race is going to come down to Wharton and Strickland, based primarily on the fact that they are by far the best-financed, and that beating an incumbent in a field split four ways is tough without serious cash. I don’t think race-based voting will be much of a factor. Memphis voters have shown time and time again that when it comes to city-wide races, crossover voting is the rule rather than the exception, especially when party affiliation is not a factor.

One thing is certain: This fall in Memphis will not be boring.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Spreading Blessings

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Monday’s televised debate involving five Memphis mayoral candidates may have a significant effect on public attitudes toward the contestants. It certainly gave them all greater currency.

As almost all the initial media coverage indicated, the central event of the forum was a one-on-one verbal slugfest between Mayor A C Wharton and Councilman Jim Strickland, whom Wharton and most observers regard as the the major challenger to the mayor’s incumbency.

But each of the other candidates involved — Councilman Harold Collins, Memphis Police Association president Mike Williams, and former Memphis School Board member Sharon Webb — had an opportunity, as well, to define themselves to a general audience that, for the most part, has been unfamiliar with them.

Collins and Williams, both of whom proved to be articulate and knowledgeable about the issues confronting city government, probably enhanced their vote potential.

Webb’s case is harder to evaluate. In her favor is the fact of being the only woman in the race, coupled with a likable presence and a way of making the case that “it’s time for a woman to take over” that is both eloquent and passionate. Detracting from her prospects, though, is her obvious unfamiliarity with city issues, the same weakness that caused her to draw a blank in a TV debate the last time she ran for mayor in the special election of 2009.

The exchange of attacks and insults between Wharton and Strickland clearly provided the most intense moments of the forum, which was televised by WMC-TV, Action News 5, and was co-sponsored by the Memphis Association of Black Journalists and the League of Women Voters.

Oddly, for an incumbent facing a challenge to his reelection, the mayor was the more aggressive in seeking out points of difference, and his assertiveness was nicely complemented with periodic references to the value of experience and a show of wit — as when he dubbed Strickland “Dr. No” for favoring clamps on police funding as budget chairman.

Contrasting that with Strickland’s emphasis on public safety as a campaign theme, the mayor said, “I think candidate Strickland ought to be introduced to Councilman Strickland, because they are two different people.”

Strickland responded by putting the blame for a reduced police presence on budgets prepared by the mayor, and he showed some polemical skill of his own in attacking redundancies in Wharton’s administration, by suggesting that the mayor was trying to be “Noah,” making allowances for two of everything.

Strickland and Wharton also quarreled over their relative support for summer jobs for youth, with each claiming credit for what appeared to be different programs in different eras.

While the bickering between the two may have shed some light on areas of city government, it also drew out both men as able combatants, with the normally easy-going Wharton showing some unaccustomed swagger — as well as the kind of agility that allowed him to co-opt emcee Joe Birch’s introductory description of Memphis as “a city on the move” as a motto for his administration.

Strickland, meanwhile, seemed to flourish under the mayor’s goading, which forced him away from his usual bullet-point recitations — that can turn into rote — into some impressively vigorous improvisations.

The Wharton-Strickland duel also gave Collins and Williams some good moments, allowing Collins, for example, to appear statesman-like in commenting on the “Tom and Jerry Show” aspects of the scrap, while Williams, commenting on the exchange of accusations between Wharton and Strickland on police issues, made the plague-on-both-their-houses observation that the city’s active police force had shrunk from 2,500 to 2,000 on their watch. He was enabled thereby to tilt the police debate away from self-serving arguments about benefits into the realm of public safety.

Collins, too, had a telling retort to the mayor’s experience factor, adding Wharton’s seven years as Shelby County mayor to the six he has served as mayor of Memphis and contending that those 13 years have not netted much for the community.

All things considered, the debate did not occasion any major breakaways in the direction of a particular candidate. If anything, it tended to equalize things, in the direction of all-have-won-all-must-have-prizes.

But there are several more mayoral forums planned, all of them — like the one Monday night — good free-media opportunities for the less well-endowed candidates to catch up to the ones with bankrolls.

• In a bizarre turnaround, the Shelby County Commission elected a new chairman, Steve Basar, as its first order of business Monday, withdrew the honor an hour later in a reconsideration vote, then decided to defer further action on the chairmanship until next month.

Basar, a Republican member who served as vice chair of the commission last year, suffered his second consecutive disappointment. He had expected to be named chairmen last year, only to lose out to Democrat Justin Ford when Basar’s GOP colleagues withheld their support from him.

This one had to feel all the more crushing, since Basar had believed himself to be the chairman-elect and was clearly savoring the triumph, until the reconsideration vote was called for by Democrat Eddie Jones, whose vote for Basar on a final ballot had originally broken a deadlock in Basar’s favor.

Jones offered no explanation for his change of heart, though Basar would note to reporters afterward that “you saw who was sitting next to each other.” Basar sat on one side of Jones; on the other side was fellow Republican Terry Roland, who had also sought the chairmanship and served notice that, given another shot at it, he was prepared to try again.

In deference to Jones, who will be absent at the commission meeting of August 24th, the next chairmanship vote will take place on September 14th, with current vice chair Van Turner, a Democrat, presiding. As County Attorney Ross Dyer noted on Monday, current chair Justin Ford’s term will run out at the end of August. The unexpected — and unprecedented — circumstance of Monday had its roots in the shifting alliance structure of the commission, which, ever since last year’s post-election reorganization, had drifted into a quasi-party-line division in which six Democrats, plus Republican Basar, had been one faction, with the other faction consisting of five Republicans plus Ford, who won his chairmanship with GOP support.

Jackson Baker

Former Chattanooga congressman Zach Wamp was in Memphis on Monday, convening a meeting at Owen Brennan’s Restaurant of supporters of the presidential candidacy of Florida Senator Mario Rubio. Here, Wamp consults with Rubio’s West Tennessee chairman, Germantown state Senator Brian Kelsey.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Wharton Has Big Crowd for Opening of Second Headquarters on Poplar

CREDIT: JB

JB

The Mayor was feeling his oats on Saturfday.

What a difference a week makes!

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

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

Buoyed by crowd

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

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

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

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

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

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

Different logistics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hot rhetoric

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

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

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

A sampling:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday night debate

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

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

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Few Surprises in Memphis Election Filings

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other city races will be briefly previewed next week.

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

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

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

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

On the Cusp

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

County Commission Power Surge

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Monday’s public meeting of the Shelby County Commission saw the commission, as a whole, still trying to forge a new, more independent role for itself but experiencing a bit of erosion in its resolve.

The meeting began with Chairman Justin Ford continuing in his new mode of permitting audience statements on the front end of proceedings rather than, as was long customary, at the conclusion of business. Commissioners got an earful of complaints about its budgetary provision of $1.3 million to be divided equally between the 13 members of the commission for purposes of making grants within their districts.

“Charity” grants, the critical audience members were calling them, in a bit of a misnomer, inasmuch as the money — amounting to $100,000 per district — had been defined during the course of several recent commission debates as applicable to a district’s infrastructure needs as well as to this or that community organization with a civic or charitable purpose.   

Indeed, Commissioner Terry Roland, of Millington, who had been among a contingent of Republican commissioners who had lobbied hard but without success for a one-cent reduction in the county’s property-tax rate, was able to use that setback to respond to one of the critics, telling her that his share of the grant money would go, at least partly, to “fix your roads.”

Since there hadn’t been enough votes during the budget process to allocate at least some of county Mayor Mark Luttrell‘s $6 million budget surplus to a property-tax cut, the commission could at least use the back-door route of district grants to take care of district needs, Roland said. It was an agile argument and one not without irony, inasmuch as part of Luttrell’s argument against the proposed one-cent tax reduction had been that funding needed to be reserved for infrastructure repairs.

Even so, the audience complaints — apparently the tip of an iceberg that had included numerous phone calls, emails, texts, and personal intercessions from citizens — induced a change of mind in two previous supporters of the grants: budget chair Heidi Shafer and David Reaves, both Republicans. They joined fellow GOP member Mark Billingsley of Germantown — formerly the lone holdout against the grants, as he reminded the audience — in casting a nay vote.

The process was too “subjective,” Billingsley argued. Reaves and Shafer acknowledged that, and while they still thought the district-grant formula was a good idea, they were bowing to the will of their constituents.

Democrat Reginald Milton, author of the grant idea, held firm, insisting that government had “a role and responsibility to serve all its citizens.” Fellow Democrat Melvin Burgess told the two defecting Republicans, “We don’t represent the same districts. I represent District 7. Mine is a poor district.”

The ultimate vote, 10-3 in favor of the grants, indicated that there was still a fair degree of solidarity among the commissioners regarding the issue of self-assertion.

There had been an expected party-line division on the issue of third and final approval of the $4.37 county tax rate, same as the current one, with five Republicans — Shafer, Roland, Billingsley, Reaves, and George Chism — voting no in an 8-5 outcome, but most other issues saw the same degree of unity as was demonstrated on committee day last Wednesday, when the commission took on the Luttrell administration on two issues — an administration switch from Nationwide Insurance to Prudential as administrator of a county deferred-compensation plan for employees and an insistence that the commission had a right to its own attorney.

On Wednesday, commissioners went back and forth with spokespersons for the administration on the attorney matter. After a prolonged executive session, closed to the media, it was agreed that, while the county charter forbade the commission’s having a full-time attorney of its own, it permitted the commission to engage separate counsel for specific ad-hoc purposes, as, for example, during the late school-merger controversy, when the commission hired an outside law firm to litigate for its position.

Otherwise, the charter empowered the county attorney’s staff, headed by Ross Dyer, to represent county government in general, the commission, as well as the administration.

As a final add-on item to Monday’s agenda, Democratic Commissioner Van Turner introduced what was, in effect, a reprise of last Wednesday’s two controversies by proposing that the commission engage an attorney to look into the Nationwide-Prudential matter. The fat was back in the fire.

“It’s hard to serve two masters. It says that in the Bible” was how Roland posed the issue.

As might have been expected, the Turner proposal generated yet another extended back-and-forth, with Dyer and assistant county attorney Kim Koratsky insisting that they needed time to research the matter, which included the side issue of who would pay for an additional attorney. On that latter point, a consensus seemed to develop that the commission’s contingency fund would be the appropriate source.

Any possible solution to the controversy may have been sidetracked when Turner’s resolution, already a two-in-one, became a de-facto three-in-one, with his suggestion that former Commissioner Julian Bolton could serve as the ad-hoc attorney on the Nationwide-Prudential matter.

That brought on an explosion from Reaves, who pronounced himself “sick and tired” of the whole controversy. “I’ll support the school lawsuit, not this,” he said, referencing a possible action in support of Shelby County Schools’ ongoing effort to challenge alleged underfunding by the state.

And Reaves was especially scornful that Turner’s resolution included the offer of a job to Bolton.

“I can help the commission resolve this impasse. I’m not looking for a job. I just want to help,” responded Bolton.

“Will you serve for free?” shouted Reaves. “You’re asking for money.”

Eventually, that flare-up ended, with other commissioners endorsing Bolton’s ability and integrity. Bolton and Reaves shared a relatively polite tête-à-tête after the meeting.

Meanwhile, though, Turner’s resolution was sidetracked, referred back to the general government committee, which Turner chairs and which had been the starting point of last week’s twin controversy. Dyer and company had gained the leave they sought to research the relevant issues, and the whole thing had bogged down into a truce of sorts.

• Next Thursday, July 16th, is filing deadline for the 2015 Memphis city election — which means that some long-unanswered questions will finally be resolved.

How complete is the field for city mayor? That’s one general question that needs answering. And, in particular, will Kenneth Whalum Jr. run for mayor? And, if not, will he seek one of the other offices — Council District 5 and Council Super District 9, Position 2 — for which he drew petitions last April?

One question involving former school board member and New Olivet pastor Whalum was long ago resolved, with the fraying away of any semblance of an arrangement with Memphis Police Association head Mike Williams, whereby only one of them would be a mayoral candidate. Both Williams, directly, and Whalum, indirectly, have since debunked that idea.

Meanwhile, spiffy new electronic roadside signs have begun to appear advertising the candidacy for the Super District 9, Position 2, seat of Joe Cooper — remember him? — who has also said he will offer free bus transportation to the polls for anyone needing it.

Cooper’s signs pledge his vote to restore the lost benefits of police and fire employees, and he credits Williams with being his authority on the matter.

Another Cooper idea for dealing with fiscal scarcities in city government is to sell naming rights to City Hall, and he cites as precedents the corporate titles adorning football stadiums in Nashville and elsewhere. Er, any potential bidders out there?

By next week, we should also have a fairly complete reckoning of what various candidates’ financial disclosures for the second quarter were. Stay tuned.