Tag: Jim Strickland

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

What They Said (July 9, 2015) …

About Toby Sells’ post, “Council Could Vote on Forrest Statue’s Removal” …

It’s a sad day when you can remove the remains of a husband and wife and relocate them elsewhere over a so-called race issue. It’s also sad that history is not taught in our schools anymore.

The Confederate flag does not mean the same thing to everyone. The Confederates who fought for their flag should be honored just as anyone else who is killed in war. When will this nonsense stop? There are even those who would like to see the American flag taken down. All I can say is, if you don’t like America, go somewhere else.

Julie

Wait a second, you don’t like the fact that there is a proposal to remove a statue and the remains from a city park? That city park is located in America, and it certainly qualifies as “something happening.” Since you said if a person doesn’t like what’s happening in America, they should leave, shouldn’t you leave? You won’t be missed.

The good general was a slave dealer and slave owner, a war criminal (Fort Pillow Massacre), and a prominent member of a racist, terrorist organization, serving as the first Grand Wizard of the KKK.

Sasha

Thank the gods that all of the other issues Memphis was dealing with have been solved, and that we now have time to take care of these sidebar details.

Smitty1961

About Jen Clarke’s column, “Congrats, Bristol!” …

It’s been a long time since I’ve read anything about Sarah Palin with no mention of Tina Fey’s “I can see Russia from my porch” scripted SNL line. But one thing I’ve never read from Sarah’s critics is that she held an 85 percent approval rating with Alaskans.

I’ve always admired Sarah Palin. She was the only governor that I can think of that had the gall and determination to kick the blue-blood corrupt Republicans in the teeth and ride roughshod over ’em in her state; and her constituents apparently admired her actions, too.

Nightcrawler

Nightcrawler doesn’t point out why Palin had those high approval numbers in her very short time as Alaska’s governor. One reason was that before being pushed into the national spotlight by John McCain, Palin wasn’t the partisan hack she is today. She actually worked with the Democrats in Alaska.

She raised taxes on oil companies. She created a climate-change team, writing: “The sub-cabinet will also be making recommendations to me on how Alaskans can save energy and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.” She also vetoed a bill that would have barred same-sex couples from state employee benefits, saying that it would have been (shock!) unconstitutional. As governor, Palin governed from the middle, explaining her high approval ratings among the residents of Alaska.

Charley Eppes

About Jackson Baker’s Politics column, “A Two-Man Mayor’s Race?” …

Would somebody please tell me what the difference is between a vote for Wharton or a vote for Strickland? They’re both backed by the same power players, and Strickland used to be Wharton’s campaign adviser. They hold hands on almost every issue. If Memphis thinks that these are the only two candidates, then we will just get more of the same come October 8th.

There are other qualified candidates in this race who deserve an equal platform. I am voting for Mike Williams, and I am not alone. I’m a 31-year-old white, single male who works in the film industry. This is not about black or white, rich or poor, or any other divisive contrast someone wants to come up with. We have had enough of this incestuous political wheel here in Memphis. Fresh faces, fresh voices, new ideas, new citizens being elected into office — this is what we want. This lethargic Southern political machine is coming to an end.

Jordan Danelz

Categories
Cover Feature News

We Can’t Drive … I-55!

Pretty soon, Memphis and the Mid-South will be down to one bridge over the Mississippi. At least it will if the Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT) gets to implement its current plan.

TDOT wants to close the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge (what most Mid-Southerners call the “Old Bridge”) for nine months in 2017. Officials say the closure is necessary to expedite work on a new interchange at E.H. Crump Boulevard and Interstate 55. That new interchange is needed because the current one is unsafe and ineffective.

TDOT Commissioner John Schroer

TDOT Commissioner John Schroer calls it “the worst interchange we have in the state of Tennessee.”

But opposition to the TDOT plan is building. TDOT has fielded calls from politicians and many in the business community who are concerned that the closure would cause traffic gridlock and negatively impact the regional economy.

So far, the most visible opposition to the plan is a change.org petition from Arkansas state Senator Keith Ingram that says the closure “will devastate local economies throughout Eastern Arkansas and will cripple emergency services in the event of an accident or natural disaster.” Sources on both sides of the bridge say behind-the-scenes organizing is underway for more formal opposition to TDOT’s plan.

Senator Keith Ingram

Schroer says he considered another plan for the project that had a five-year construction timeline and no bridge closure, but maintains the current plan is the best, safest, and most cost-effective. Schroer says the Hernando de Soto “M bridge” can handle the traffic.

Many think Schroer couldn’t be more wrong, and the idea of limiting the Mid-South to one bridge over the Mississippi pushes their thoughts to worst-case-scenario territory.

The Plan

When asked what he thinks of closing the Old Bridge, Schroer says, “I hate it.”

“It certainly isn’t an option we wanted to pursue, but sometimes you have to look at all your options and pick what is the least evil of them all, the least disruptive for a duration of time, and what is the safest as well,” Schroer says.

Schroer says TDOT picked through a lot of plans, pointing to the fact that all considered plans were listed alphabetically and the plan on the table now is labeled Z-1.

Schroer says he made the final choice on the design and the closure, and they were “probably the toughest decisions I’ll have to make in eight years in office here.”

Courtesy TDOT

This map shows the roundabout (in yellow) and the sweeping curve (in orange) of TDOT’s proposed interchange at E.H. Crump Boulevard and I-55

Z-1 will replace the current cloverleaf design at Crump and I-55 with a roundabout for local traffic and a long, elevated, sweeping curve to keep I-55 traffic flowing without slowing to (or below) the posted speed limit of 25 miles per hour.

The cloverleaf design was built in the mid-1960s. It was meant to handle 28,500 vehicles daily, with 8 percent truck traffic, according to the Federal Highway Adminstration [FHWA]. Today, traffic averages 60,330 vehicles daily with 26 percent trucks. By 2035, the interchange will see 84,500 vehicles per day, according to FHWA projections.

Brandon Dill

Trucks enter the current cloverleaf ramp to I-55, where interstate traffic must slow to 25 miles per hour

Local streets also directly intersect with I-55 at that interchange. “The project needs are to improve interstate safety and traffic operations by improving interstate speeds, managing heavy truck crashes and large traffic volumes, and reducing overall crashes,” an FHWA statement says.

Crash data specific to the Crump/I-55 interchange were not available. But data for the Tennessee stretch of I-55 show 851 total crashes between 2009-2011. Of those, there were five fatalities, 196 injuries, and 650 wrecks that yielded only property damage.

The price tag for the new interchange project has grown from $35 million when it was announced in 2010 to about $60 million now. TDOT officials say the cost rose as the project was reviewed by government and construction officials. Those conversations changed construction methods, materials, and the overall design.

If the plan moves ahead on schedule, the contract for it will be opened for bid this winter.

Phase 1 construction will begin March 2016 and last through February 2017. During that time, TDOT will close the ramp for southbound Riverside traffic, which will be routed from Riverside to Carolina Street to Florida Street to Crump. Crews will build a temporary ramp for I-55 southbound and build noise walls for the French Fort neighborhood.

The ramp for southbound Riverside traffic to the I-55 bridge will also be removed, as well as the ramp for westbound Crump traffic to the ramp for I-55 South. That traffic will also be detoured to Florida Street.

Phase 2 construction will shut down the Old Bridge from March 2017 to the end of November. TDOT will keep one lane across the bridge open for emergency vehicles only during the closure.

The timing was selected to expedite the project, TDOT officials say. “We did that so we can keep this project going during the nine-month construction season of 2017,” says Nichole Lawrence, TDOT’s community relations officer for West Tennessee. “If we start in the summer, then construction will go into the winter, and there will be some dead time.”

The decision to close the bridge was made March 13th, according to the FHWA, after the Arkansas State Highway and Transportation Department (AHTD), the Arkansas and Tennessee Divisions of the Federal Highway Administration, and construction industry representatives met to discuss the project — with and without an interstate closure.

“Based on the review, the group determined that the project could not be built safely without the closure of I-55 for approximately nine months during the projected three-year construction project,” a statement from FHWA says. “The basis for closure is the limited space available to safely construct the interchange while keeping the road open.”

Paul Degges, TDOT’s deputy commissioner and chief engineer, says those construction issues relate mainly to building the sweeping, elevated curve of the new I-55 ramp. Degges says the new ramp will have to be built farther from the bridge than the current ramp, and that the large construction machinery is not safe to operate around traffic.

I-55 will be closed for an 11.5-mile stretch from the I-55/I-40 split in West Memphis to the McLemore Avenue exit in South Memphis. Southbound I-55 traffic will be detoured across the Hernando de Soto Bridge and then to I-240 Midtown, then to I-55 South near the interchange at Elvis Presley Boulevard. Northbound I-55 traffic will be detoured at that same interchange to I-240, then to I-40 West across the Hernando de Soto Bridge.

The cloverleaf will be demolished. Riverside Drive will be closed from Crump to Carolina. Southbound Riverside traffic will be detoured to Carolina, to Florida, to Crump. Crump will be closed to westbound traffic at Third Street and be detoured north or south on Third.

Phase 3 construction will last from December 2017 to November 2018. Riverside will remain closed from Carolina to Crump. I-55 will be reopened and will be running on new southbound lanes.

Phase 4 construction will last for about three months in the spring of 2019, slated to be completed by May. The project will be “open,” according to TDOT, as crews complete final paving operations.

The total construction project is projected to last three years and two months.

The Opposition 

West Memphian Jim Russell is retired and spends a lot of time tending the irises at the Memphis Botanic Garden. But that may end soon.

“If TDOT’s going create all sorts of traffic problems, I’m not going to do that anymore,” Russell says. “I’m not going to get into that mess every day just to get to where I want to go.”

But Russell has bigger issues with the bridge closure. He has Parkinson’s disease and often has to get across one of the bridges for medical appointments. Last winter, he was stuck on the Hernando de Soto Bridge for hours after accidents stopped traffic on both bridges. Russell worries that if he needs immediate medical help he wouldn’t be able to get it, even with the promise of the emergency lane on I-55.

Concerns like Russell’s have been echoed by many on both sides of the Mississippi River since TDOT announced its plan. Those concerns are gaining momentum, as leaders consider the effects of the closure on individuals, businesses, and neighborhoods around the interchange and the potential broad economic impact on the Mid-South region — and the country.

TDOT is now working on an economic impact study of the bridge closure. But Phil Trenary, president and CEO of the Greater Memphis Chamber, can already put that figure in the ballpark. A post-9/11 study showed that closing all of the city’s bridges would have a negative economic impact of about $11 billion to $15 billion per year, Trenary says. The impact on business would be “significant to not only the local economy but to the national economy.”

Trenary says that closing the bridge is a recent idea, and the chamber is forming a coalition to start a formal discussion with TDOT. “We want to understand what the options are,” Trenary says. “What options can we put on the table that can achieve most of our objectives, like improving the traffic flow without closing the bridge.”

Troy Keeping, president and general manager of Southland Park Gaming and Racing, says the closure’s impact on his company could have a tax impact for Arkansas in the neighborhood of $7 million to $10.5 million. Keeping says the impact is far beyond that number, though, as he sees many Memphians shopping at the West Memphis Walmart and many from both sides of the river crossing the bridges to work and play.

TDOT’s plan is “very shortsighted,” Keeping says, and can likely be done without a closure, much like the current road project underway at the I-40/I-240 juncture.

“[TDOT has] kept that [section] open during the entire construction period, and there are large amounts of traffic through there,” he says. “[TDOT has] been able to reroute the traffic, and they should do the same thing on [the I-55 interchange project].”

“It’s going to cause great inconvenience to a lot of people,” says 9th District Representative Steve Cohen. “It will create traffic problems for Memphians who use the expressway either in Midtown or going downtown. It’s going to really clog it up and make traffic difficult — unbearable — for a long time.”

Schroer told Cohen that closing the bridge was the only way forward on the project. Cohen says he asked Schroer to at least expedite the work.

Jim Strickland

Jim Strickland, Memphis City Council member and a candidate for Memphis mayor, said he had not yet talked with TDOT as of last week but was skeptical that the bridge has to be closed. Other interstates aren’t shut down for months at a time for repairs, he says.

“At a minimum, TDOT needs to fully explain their current position,” Strickland says. “Why do we need to shut the bridge down? Is there no other way to design the interchanges? I have not heard these answers.”

The Wait-and-See Crowd

FedEx Corp. spokesman Jim McCluskey says his company is keeping an eye on the project.

“We are working with local and state officials to assess the effect of the bridge closure and evaluate alternate routing options that will lessen the impact for transportation carriers,” he said in a statement. “FedEx is focusing on and committed to providing the best level of service possible to our customers during this major infrastructure project.”

Lauren T. Crews, managing partner of City South Ventures, has been working for years to transform the abandoned U.S. Marine Hospital in the French Fort neighborhood into a multi-use residential and retail campus. He says he likes the interchange’s current design, but he wishes that TDOT had not announced changes to it years ago.

“When some entity comes along and announces that they’re going to do something but they don’t do anything, it just sort of shuts you down; there’s no progress that can be made,” Crews says. “It shuts the entire community down, as far as any improvements to be made. You can’t borrow money. You’re not going to find investors who are interested if they don’t know where the road systems are going to be.”

Brandon Dill

French Fort neighborhood

Crews say the situation has led to a decay in the French Fort neighborhood. Blight has claimed many buildings, and property values have declined. He sees brighter days ahead for the neighborhood with the coming of the roundabout, which would connect French Fort to downtown. “When you come into this community — if you can get the roundabout done — it may not look like Beirut over here,” Crews says.

The Supporters

Memphis Mayor A C Wharton says he is satisfied TDOT has done due diligence on the project and that they’ll do everything possible to minimize the impacts of the closure.

“I am looking forward to the completion of this project, because it eliminates one of the city’s last ‘malfunction junctions’ on our interstate highways,” Wharton said in a statement. “While the closure will be inconvenient, it’s only temporary, and the benefits of this project are far-reaching and long-term.”

Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell says the closure will be inconvenient but that the project’s time has come. “It’s something that has to be done, and this is the best option we have,” Luttrell says. “To extend it over a multi-year period would be a mistake. We just need to move on with it and close it down.”

U.S. Rep. Stephen Fincher says infrastructure projects have allowed Memphis to become a leader in transportation and that he commends Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam for making the investment in Memphis.

“I am confident that TDOT will do everything in its power to ensure this project is carried out as smoothly and as safely as possible,” Fincher said in a statement.

Traffic City

Tony Bologna, a Memphis architect and developer, said he dreads those nine months when the bridge is closed in 2017.

“It’s going to cause a big overload on the M Bridge if you divert everything that way,” Bologna says. “If there’s a minor accident on that bridge now, traffic is already backed up for miles.”

Transportation consultants CDM Smith studied the new interchange project and said closing the bridge will add 46,850 new vehicles daily to the Hernando de Soto Bridge, for a total of 81,220 vehicles. Along Midtown I-240, the group said the I-55 bridge closure will add around 40,000 new vehicles, increasing daily totals to around 132,000 vehicles.

But TDOT officials say I-40 and I-55 will look much different (and traffic there will run much more smoothly) on the Arkansas side by the time the Old Bridge is closed. Traffic capacity there has been reduced for years by a seismic retrofit project by the FHWA, and by I-40 improvements that led the Arkansas Times to wonder, “Will Interstate 40, between North Little Rock and West Memphis, be under construction forever?”

TDOT’s Jane Jones, director of project development, says, “We’ve been working with the ASHTD, and we’ve had assurances that their work will be completed [before the bridge is closed] and the seismic retrofit project will be completed. And we’ll have system improvements along the detour route before all that takes place.”

Where It Stands

TDOT Commissioner Schroer says the five-year plan with no closure was not as safe, not as efficient, and “financially a horrible option.” In that scenario, the bridge would be open with one-lane traffic headed in both directions. Roadblocks and temporary closures would be the norm, Schroer says, as equipment and construction materials are moved in and out of what would be an open construction site.

Schroer points to the project’s road-user cost number, a standard measurement in the road-building industry to define the cost of projects for drivers based on gasoline costs, loss of productivity, lost wages, and more.

The five-year, non-closure plan has a user-cost of $871 million, Schroer says. He says the three-year project with bridge closure will have a user-cost of $350 million.

Asked if there was anything anyone could do to change his mind on closing the bridge, Schroer says, “It’s not a case of changing my mind. It’s about making the right decisions, and, in this case, we made the right decisions.”

Schroer says he knows Memphis motorists will probably curse his name when they’re stuck in traffic but that they’ll forget all about it when the new interchange opens up.

While the decision may be a done deal for Schroer, for many others on both sides of the river the decision process is just getting started. Some are awaiting TDOT’s economic impact study for the project and will likely use it as a springboard to begin a formal opposition process.

When told that TDOT’s decision on the closure was “final,” at least in their minds, Senator Ingram remembers another Memphis road project from decades ago.

“TDOT probably didn’t think the Overton Park expressway was going to be stopped, either,” he says.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Chism Backs Strickland for Mayor

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Adherents of City Councilman Jim Strickland‘s campaign for mayor are certainly pleased with their guy’s ability to go fund-raising dollar-for-dollar against incumbent Mayor A C Wharton (both candidates having reported $300,000-plus in their first-quarter disclosures). And they’re counting on a good showing for Strickland in both the Poplar Corridor and Cordova, where his message of public safety and budgetary austerity resonate.

But those predominantly white areas of Memphis (to call them by their right name) are probably not enough, all by themselves, to get Strickland over, especially since Wharton has his own residual strength in the corridor and with the city’s business community, where the mayor can hope to at least break even.

There is also the mayor’s advantage in being able to command free media on a plethora of governmental and ceremonial occasions.

Yes, it’s probably true that A C’s support in predominantly African-American precincts ain’t what it used to be, and it never was what you would call dominating, not this year with all the well-publicized cuts in city services. And not with Mike Williams working the African-American community, along with Whitehaven Councilman Harold Collins and Justin Ford, and with the Rev. Kenneth Whalum ready to grab off a huge chunk of that vote, should he make what is at this point an expected entry into the mayoral field.

Still, Strickland needs to grab a share of the black vote to have a chance to get elected. Where does he get it? Well, he’s attending African-American churches on Sunday, one of the well-worn pathways in local politics. So that will help. But probably not as much as the endorsement he got last Saturday at the annual Sidney Chism Community Picnic on Horn Lake Road from the impresario of that event. Longtime political broker Chism early on announced his support of Strickland from the stage of the sprawling picnic grounds.

Time may have tarnished Chism’s reputation a bit, as it did his longtime ally, former Mayor Willie Herenton (an attendee at the picnic), but the former Teamster leader, Democratic Party chairman, state senator, and county commissioner still has enough influence to have basically put Randa Spears over as Shelby County Democratic chair earlier this year. And he may have enough to give Strickland that extra boost he needs to be fully competitive. We’ll see.

Chism, as it happens, is mired in a couple of controversies at the moment. His employment as a “media specialist” by Sheriff Bill Oldham is regarded with suspicion as a political quid pro quo and pension-inflater by several Republican members of the Shelby County Commission, who at budget-crunch time are making an issue of it, along with an Oldham-provided job for former Shelby County Preparedness director Bob Nations.

And Chism may have reignited another long-smoldering situation when he used the bully pulpit of his picnic to attack an intramural Democratic Party foe, Del Gill, who was runner-up to Spears in the party chairmanship contest. Chism did so at first indirectly, on the front end of the event, while he was acknowledging from the stage the presence in the crowd of party chair Spears.

“She’s been catching a whole lot of flak from one crazy person, but I hope y’all put him out of this city, and he’ll be all right.” Chism chose to be more explicit when he returned to the stage after a series of candidates in the city election had made their public remarks.

“I said something earlier,” Chism said. “I said there was somebody who needed running out of town, and that person, I didn’t call his name, but that person is Del Gill. … He ain’t worth two cents. … He’s been lyin’ on me for 10 years He won’t show up and do it to my face, but he lies all the time.”

In a widely circulated email response, Gill returned fire, reminding his readers that he had taken the lead in having Chism censured by the local Democratic Party executive committee in 2014 for allegedly attempting to subvert the sheriff’s campaign of Democratic nominee Bennie Cobb in favor of Republican Oldham.

Chism used his attack on Gill as a platform from which to launch his recipe for Democratic success at the polls: “We’re not going to win any elections in Shelby County until we get into the mindset that we’ve got to get in the middle. If we get in the middle, we can elect Democrats, qualified Democrats.

“I didn’t say you’ve got to be a super-intelligent magna cum laude educated person. I’m saying you ought to be smart enough to know that the people in this country are in the middle.” He urged his listeners to “vote for the right person, and he ain’t got to look like me; just act like me.”

Actually, the two Chism battlefronts — his employment battle with GOP county commissioners and the Democratic Party fireworks — are connected. Such commission critics of Chism as Heidi Shafer and David Reaves, both Republicans, have made pointed remarks in private about what they claim was Chism’s disservice to fellow Commissioner Reginald Milton, a Democrat, in intervening against Milton’s own bid for party chairmanship. And Milton, perhaps unsurprisingly, has expressed his own skepticism about the sheriff’s budget requests.

Shafer and Reaves, along with GOP Commissioner Terry Roland, are also suspicious that Oldham’s wish to have Chism (and other Chism associates) aboard is related to a potential 2018 campaign by Oldham for county mayor, an office for which Roland, for one, has essentially already announced.

Oldham has been mum on the subject of his future political intentions, if any, but it is a fact that the progression from sheriff to county mayor has been made already by several predecessors — Roy “Skip” Nixon, Bill Morris, and current County Mayor Mark Luttrell.

Random notes: The newly elected president of the Shelby County Young Democrats is Alvin Crook, who made something of a stir last year when, in the course of a public debate, he formally endorsed Van Turner, his Democratic primary opponent for a county commission seat.

Crook, who is employed as a courtroom bailiff, says his group will be making endorsements in the city election this year.

Other new Young Democrat officers: Regina Beale, first vice president; Jim Kyle Jr., 2nd vice president; Matt Pitts, treasurer; Rebekah Hart, secretary; and Justin Askew, parliamentarian.

• Two Shelby Countians, state Senator Mark Norris and attorney Al Harvey, were among three Tennesseans who were invited guests of British royalty at Monday’s ceremony in Runnymede, England, commemorating the 800th anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta there.

Norris was invited in his capacity as immediate past chairman of the Council of State Governments; Harvey, along with General Sessions Judge Lee Bussart Bowles of Marshall County, represented the American Bar Association.

A sure sign that the city election season is heating up: On Thursday, June 18th, from 5 to 7 p.m., Patrice Robinson, a candidate for city council, District 3, and Mary Wilder, candidate for the council’s District 5, will be holding simultaneous fund-raisers in different parts of town.

Overlapping events of this sort, still uncommon, will at a certain point in the election cycle, become routine.

• In its latest issue, the Tennessee Journal of Nashville takes note of the Tennessee Republican Party’s concerted “Red to the Roots” campaign directed at capturing as many of the state’s county assessor positions as possible next year.

The newsletter also notes that Shelby County Assessor Cheyenne Johnson, a Democrat, will be exempt from the purge attempt, having already won reelection to a four-year term in 2014. Johnson’s being on a different cycle from other state assessors is a consequence of the county commission’s consolidating all county offices into a common election cycle via 2008 revisions to the county charter.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Music Commission Again Targeted for Possible Budget Cut

Each budget season at Memphis City Hall brings a new bullseye for the Memphis & Shelby County Music Commission.

The group is an annual target for Memphis City Councilmembers Shea Flinn and Jim Strickland. Each has called for the commission to be completely cut from the city’s budget each year for the past few years. Flinn’s voice on the matter has been dampened as he resigned his council seat last week. But Strickland’s voice has been amplified in his roles as chairman of the council’s budget committee and as a front-runner candidate for the Memphis mayor’s seat.

Strickland called the music commission an example of non-essential spending during a mayoral candidate forum last week hosted by The Commercial Appeal. He’s been calling for the cut of the commission from the city’s budget at least since 2012 when he told The Memphis Flyer that a private group would better serve the commission’s mission.

Memphis & Shelby County Music Commission

Memphis Mayor A C Wharton has funded the group with $250,000 for the past few years and has the same amount included in his proposed 2016 budget that totals more than $656 million.

“The Memphis Music Commission serves an important role in supporting and furthering the city’s world-renowned music heritage,” Wharton said in a statement. “Through programs like the Musician Healthcare Plan, Memphis Music Monday, and Music Business forum, the commission is making it possible for musicians to develop their careers and showcase their music and learn about the business side of the music industry.”

Tracking the music commission’s funding is tough. In the 2015 budget, the commission is listed under “special services” in the city’s Parks and Neighborhoods budget, not in the expected “grants and agencies” section alongside budgets for the Memphis Film & Television Commission, Urban Art, the Black Business Association, and more. Budgets for the commission, Second Chance, and Community Affairs are lumped together, making it hard to determine exactly which group gets and spends what.

According to the city’s human resources department, the commission’s executive director Johnnie Walker’s salary was a little more than $92,000 in the 2015 budget. Her office assistant’s salary was nearly $37,000. The rest, it is believed, is spent on running the office, buying supplies, and making grants.

The commission is comprised of 22 commissioners appointed by the mayors of Memphis and Shelby County. It “preserves, fosters, and promotes” Memphis music “through education, networking, advocacy, and professional and industry development.” The 2015 budget claims the commission operates 15 programs, though its website lists only nine. One of them — the Memphis Trolley Unplugged series — is on hold until trolley service resumes.

Walker said music is essential to Memphis tourism, and funding the commission puts the city’s money where its mouth is.

“A city that markets itself as ‘Home of the Blues, the Birthplace of Rock-and-Roll,’ that alone says that the city should be involved in the protection of that legacy and providing resources so that legacy can continue,” Walker said.

Walker said the commission does that with legal clinics, a health-care plan for musicians without insurance, weekly radio and television broadcasts of Memphis music, a weekly Memphis music showcase at Hard Rock Cafe, and more.

Strickland said the music industry is “huge” to Memphis but the music commission does not operate efficiently or effectively. He has said the group does not quantify “what it’s doing,” and groups like The Consortium MMT [Memphis Music Town] could do better.

“Their purpose is to develop a viable music industry in Memphis and from all indications they’re doing a very good job,” Strickland said. “Who knows Memphis music more than David Porter and Al Bell [of Consortium MMT]? No one. We ought to get behind their effort, which is privately funded.”

Budget hearings began Tuesday and are scheduled to wrap up on Tuesday, May 26th.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Memphis Mayor’s Race is On

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Janis Fullilove may be feeling lonely, but she’s not going to complain. As of the end of Monday, the Super District 8, Position 2 councilwoman was the only incumbent running for reelection in this year’s city election who did not have a declared opponent. All other city races are contested at this point (which is to say that multiple petitions have been drawn for each of them, actual filing having occurred so far in only a minority of cases). 

The other council seats would seem to be assured of contests, with District 5 and Super District 9, Position 2 — the seats vacated, respectively, by mayoral candidate Jim Strickland and Shea Flinn — attracting the most action. There are eight entries so far for District 5, most of them with enough backing to appear serious, and something of the same situation exists for the Super District 9 vacancy, where six petitions have been drawn up to this point.

By contrast, Position 3 in Super District 8, which, as was recently announced, will be vacated by council Chairman Myron Lowery, has so far seen only three petitions drawn. One of those was by the incumbent’s son Mickell Lowery, and the legacy name may be enough to dissuade most comers. District 4 incumbent Wanda Halbert‘s announcement of non-candidacy (she’s a candidate instead for City Court clerk) is too recent to have occasioned a rush of would-be candidates. Four petitions have so far been drawn for that seat.

Another mayoral candidate, Harold Collins, will be vacating his District 3 seat, and that one has generated a fair amount of action, with five petitions drawn so far.

The race for mayor has seen 13 petitions drawn; and it is a safe bet that more are coming. Meanwhile, the first mayoral debate — or forum, as emcee Kyle Veazey of the sponsoring Commercial Appeal, preferred to call it — of the 2015 city election season took place before a good crowd at the old Tennessee Brewery Monday night, and, while there were no winners as such among the five hopefuls invited, it was possible to make out some distinctions. 

To start with, Justin Ford, the youthful county commission chairman, demonstrated likeability but nothing much to anchor it except a recap of his résumé and prerogatives (“I make appointments.”), a recommended slogan (“Listen, Assist, and Invest.”), and enough platitudes and expressions of good will to start a smarm farm.

This is not to doubt Ford’s capability, merely to suggest that he was short on specifics, no doubt on purpose, and did nothing to counter a widespread impression that he is in the race not so much with expectations of winning it as to extend his name recognition for some future electoral purpose.

By contrast, Memphis Police Association President Mike Williams, generally considered a long shot, was all agenda. Pledged to represent the interests of city employees and ordinary citizens, Williams talked up small business and deplored the strategy of enticing big industries here by means of PILOT (payment-in-lieu-of- taxes) arrangements. Indeed, he went so far as to suggest that Electrolux, a relatively recent acquisition on the city landscape, is already looking to go “out the door” because “they didn’t get the profits they thought.”

Williams suggested that Memphis’ problem was not limited revenue but over-spending. He said the city should stick to basics and hire more fire and police. He also weighed in on behalf of those citizens who want to save the Mid-South Coliseum. More than the other candidates, he had audible boosting from a claque of supporters on hand.

Councilman Collins, whose task is to expand on his sprawling Whitehaven base and to convince voters that he and no one else is the legitimate alternative to incumbent Mayor A C Wharton, sounded notes akin to those of Williams, advocating a focus on education to create the basis for “professional” jobs at a “living wage” and against the “$9- or $10-an-hour jobs” available at “Bass Pro and Mitsubishi.”

Collins also joined with Williams in taking a dim view of bike lanes, an issue that separated the five hopefuls into two camps. Collins and Williams made the point that Memphis has an automobile culture and that bike lanes in what Collins called “major neighborhoods” (meaning Frayser, Raleigh, and Whitehaven) were impediments to necessary transportation.

Ford disagreed, pointing out that the bike lanes were paid for by federal “pass-through” money, a point made also by Councilman Strickland, who took Mayor Wharton to task for having “zero bike lanes in the budget” until prodded by the council, after which the mayor allegedly “relented.” Wharton, who had touted the bike lanes early in his remarks as part of his vision of planning for the “city on the move” and the citizens of the future rather than “through the eyes of today,” seemed irate at Strickland’s allegation and insisted that his “plans underway” for the bike lanes were retarded by one city engineer but had been re-established, at the mayor’s insistence, by a “new engineer.”

That bit of sniping seemed more in line with the “debate” that Veazey suggested the CA would be sponsoring down the line than with the informational forum he had in mind for Monday evening. But in fact, everybody but Ford, who was careful to praise his fellow participants, did a little mud-balling. 

The most obvious confrontation was between Strickland, the former two-time budget chairman and self-proclaimed “fiscal conservative” who has been aiming at the mayoralty for years now, and the increasingly beleaguered Wharton, still too spry to be a sitting duck but, clearly, Target Number One for the others in this year’s mayoral race.

Although circumstances could turn out to belie the premise, most observers (and virtually the entire media) see the rest of the mayoral field as being made up of supporting players, while the real drama is the one-on-one between Strickland and Wharton, both well-endowed financially, essentially by donations from the same business interests, and waging an intense battle for the hearts and minds of the Poplar Corridor.

Strickland’s tough-love pitch is to arrest what he sees as the city’s dangerously dwindling population base by practicing fiscal efficiency and focusing on “basic services” and eliminating frills (the city’s “Music Commission” was one he named) and a superfluity of “deputy directors and P.R. people,” while simultaneously attacking blight and crime.

Wharton counters this image of “gloom and doom” with a concept of “revitalizing the entire city in growth mode” and concentrating on “quality of life” issues. This week’s grand opening of the Bass Pro Shop monolith in the Pyramid did not go unspoken for as an exhibit of the mayor’s vision (although the project, brainchild of city housing and community development director Robert Lipscomb, was actually hatched during the mayoralty of Wharton’s predecessor Willie Herenton). 

What gives the notion of a Wharton-Strickland race some validity is the fact that the councilman’s presumed lower profile in African-American communities is balanced by potential inroads there, at Wharton’s expense, by “neighborhood” advocates like Collins and Williams.

There are other candidates, to be sure, including many who were not included in Monday night’s event (several were seated or standing in the audience, however, and Collins gallantly gave shout-outs to several of them), but the distribution of voices Monday night gave some preliminary sense of how this election will play out. If firebrand pastor/former school board member Kenneth Whalum ends up in the race instead of Williams (as per their agreement that one of them, and one only, will run for mayor), the kaleidoscope could shift and radically so.

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Politics Politics Feature

From Nashville to Memphis: A Venue Change

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

In Nashville, things were coming to an end, with the 2015 session of the General Assembly scheduled for a likely finish this week. Meanwhile, in Memphis, things were, in a sense, just getting started. It finally became possible on Friday of last week for would-be contestants in the 2015 Memphis city election to draw candidate petitions from the Shelby County Election Commission.  

On the first day, the most noticeable visitor to the Election Commission’s second-floor office downtown was the Rev. Kenneth Whalum Jr., about whose intentions (particularly as a possible candidate for mayor) a good deal of speculation had swirled. Whalum both satisfied and furthered the suspense by drawing not one but three petitions — for Mayor; for City Council, District 5; and for City Council Super-District 9, Position 2.

The two council positions are those about to be vacated, respectively, by mayoral candidate Jim Strickland and Shea Flinn. As of last week, when District 4 Councilwoman Wanda Halbert announced she would be seeking the City Court clerk’s position instead of seeking reelection, there will be a total of five open seats on this year’s ballot — six if you count, as some observers do, the District 7 council seat, now that of interim Councilman Berlin Boyd and formerly the seat of Lee Harris, now a state Senator.

Whalum made it clear, both at the Election Commission and on Saturday, at a public-education forum in Raleigh, that while he regarded himself as a prospective winner in the mayoral race, he would defer to Memphis Police Association President Mike Williams (an attendee at the Raleigh affair at Bob’s Country BBQ), should the latter choose to run for mayor, as he has previously indicated he would.

“Whatever race I run in, education will be my platform,” said Whalum, a former school board member who advocates that Memphis take steps to resume a de facto city school system.

The known mayoral field so far continues to consist of incumbent A C Wharton, councilmembers Strickland and Harold Collins, County Commission Chairman Justin Ford, Williams, and former University of Memphis basketball player Detric Golden.

 

The Other Brian Kelsey: Whatever his popularity in his own District 31 — which begins in Midtown and extends into East Memphis, Cordova, Bartlett, Germantown, Collierville, and Lakeland, – which continues to reelect the state Senator comfortably, Brian Kelsey has a wholly different reputation elsewhere in Shelby County.

Among those Memphians who consider themselves progressives, for example, Kelsey is about as popular as, say, Dick Cheney or Ted Cruz would be at a Democratic National Convention. At one time or another, he has had his hand in legislation antagonistic to gays, abortion-rights advocates, proponents of living-wage ordinances, income-tax advocates, public-school defenders, believers in gun control, and to supporters of the Affordable Care Act in general, and to Medicaid expansion in particular.

That list should not be regarded as fully inclusive. Kelsey is an equal-opportunity exacerbator. In addition to his perceived offenses against Democrats, he has also taken an abundance of positions considered objectionable to various members of his own Republican Party, notably including Governor Bill Haslam, who has labored to keep Kelsey in check on issues ranging from voucher legislation to restraints on gubernatorial privilege.

It should be said that Kelsey sees himself as a champion of liberty, as he would define that term, and — hark! — there are bills of his that actually do bridge the enormous gap between him and a multitude of others who would define that term wholly differently. 

In last year’s legislative session, Kelsey secured passage of SB 276, which struck down obstacles to employment for reformed felons, and in the session now coming to an end, the senator sponsored SB 6, the “Racial Profiling Prevention Act,” which has now passed both chambers and awaits only the governor’s signature to become law.

The bill defines racial profiling as “the detention or interdiction of an individual in traffic contacts, field contacts, or asset seizure and forfeiture efforts solely on the basis of the individual’s actual or perceived race, color, ethnicity, or national origin” and would require all police departments and sheriff’s departments in Tennessee to adopt by the end of this year a written policy in conformity with the definition.

Kelsey, it seems, can work across the aisle. The racial profiling bill was co-sponsored by Memphis state Representative John DeBerry, and the previous year’s bill on behalf of ex-felons was co-sponsored with state Representative Karen Camper. Both DeBerry and Camper are inner-city Democrats.

Now, an even more striking piece of collaboration may be in the offing. At a meeting Monday night at Celtic Crossing of “Drinking Liberally,” a group of self-styled progressive Democrats, political consultant Liz Rincon, a key member of the group, was sharing portions of some online correspondence with Kelsey, wherein the state senator seemed to be expressing himself open-minded about the prospect of raising the minimum wage for servers in food and drink establishments.

Hmmm. The senator from District 31 could be a work in progress.

…

As the General Assembly prepared to close out 1) without acting on Governor Bill Haslam’s Insure Tennessee Medicaid-expansion proposal; and 2) with House concurrence on a Senate bill that would impose a 48-hour waiting period on abortions among other restrictions, dissenters made their feelings known.  

Jackson Baker

First Baptist Church on Broad pastor Keith Norman (left) and state Representative Joe Towns presided over a press conference last week at Christ Community Health Services adjacent to Norman’s church as part of statewide information session on Insure Tennessee sponsored by the House Democratic Caucus. They vowed to continue efforts to secure passage of the governor’s Medicaid-expansion proposal — in a new special session, if need be.

As the House in Nashville prepared to put its imprimatur on new abortion restrictions, protesters at the Poplar Avenue headquarters of Planned Parenthood, many of whom had made repeated visits to the General Assembly in an effort to dissuade legislators, indicated they, too, would continue their opposition to what they regarded as backward-looking legislation. To make the point, they affected the period dress of pre-Roe v. Wade times. (See picturel, top of page.)

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Politics Politics Feature

The Beat Goes On

As the Election Commission’s April 17th date for making candidate petitions available approaches, the 2015 city election season becomes ever more clearly a case of the old making way for the new. Within the past few weeks, such core pillars of the city council as Chairman Myron Lowery and Councilmen Shea Flinn and Harold Collins have announced they will not be candidates for reelection. Flinn’s future plans remain unknown, although they are rumored to involve some sort of relationship with the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce. Another key councilman, Jim Strickland, announced back in January that he would not run for reelection and would opt instead for a mayoral race, which is now fully underway. Collins’ announcement of non-council candidacy was widely regarded as confirmation of his long-indicated plans to join the widening cast of characters in the contest for mayor. So far the dramatis personae in that race are Strickland, county commission Chairman Justin Ford, Memphis Police Association President Mike Williams, and former University of Memphis basketballer Detrick Golden.

Meanwhile, the incumbent, Mayor A C Wharton, kept himself front and center over the Easter weekend with a “coffee and chat” on Saturday morning at the Midtown IHOP on Union Avenue, followed by a number of appearances at events held in conjunction with the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 assassination.

After the IHOP event, sponsored by Shelby County Commissioners Melvin Burgess Jr. and Reginald Milton, Wharton was asked if the proliferation of opponents in the mayoral field would help or hinder his chances of reelection. “You can’t worry about that,” he answered. “I just have to keep my attention on what I’m doing.”

The mayor shed some light on a bit of verbal zig-zagging he had indulged in earlier this year on the prospect of the city’s gaining a Cheesecake Factory, confirmed last week as coming to Wolfchase Galleria. On the occasion of his State of the City address in January, Wharton had alerted his listeners to the likelihood of the popular restaurant franchise coming to Memphis.

But shortly thereafter, at a well-attended address at Lafayette’s Music Hall, the mayor made an effort to pass off his earlier forecast as having been merely a thinking-out-loud recollection of his daughter’s telling him she’d like to see such a happy event come to pass.

Now that the Cheesecake Factory was definitely on track, had the mayor’s rhetorical fluctuations been something of a screen for the to-and-fro of negotiations, he was asked on Saturday. “You’re very discerning,” was his answer, accompanied by a self-effacing chuckle.

Council Chairman Lowery had long ago dropped hints that he might not be a candidate, and that his son Mickell Lowery, a sales representative at FedEx, might be on the ballot instead as a successor for the Position 3 seat in Super-District 8.

Councilman Lowery had served consecutively since his first election in 1992, with a brief intermission during his three-month service as interim mayor in 2009, following the retirement of longtime Mayor Willie Herenton. And, like the practiced politician that he is, he contrived to get the maximum amount of public notice for his departure and his son’s prospective advent.

First came a press conference in Lowery’s City Hall office last week in which the chairman gave his own bon voyage to the attendant media, expressed gratitude for having been able to serve for so long, and predicted that there would be a spirited race to succeed him, no doubt including many candidates. Wife Mary was on hand for the occasion, and so, conspicuously, were son Mickell Lowery, his wife Chanisa, and young Milan Lowery, the councilman’s granddaughter. Asked his own intentions after the press conference, the younger Lowery indicated only that he would have “something to say” soon. When, he was asked. “It won’t be too long,” was the reply.

Indeed it wasn’t. Mickell announced his own candidacy for the seat on Monday, from the steps of LeMoyne-Owen College, his alma mater, as well as his dad’s. The choice of venue, said the aspiring councilman, was symbolic in that the school represented “advancement in our community,” a quality he saw as consistent with his campaign theme, “New Leadership for a Better Memphis.” 

Candidate Lowery added that he wanted “to make sure that the priorities of City Hall match the priorities of the community.” He named crime reduction as one of his priorities, and may have intended to cite some more. 

But just then a chip off his block — his toddler daughter Milan, who nestled in granddad’s arms — made a bit of a noise, and Daddy Mickell demonstrated his quickness on the uptake with what seemed a relevant segue: “I intend to be talking with students as early as elementary school,” he said.

Asked about his advantages in what might still become a competitive and well-populated race, Mickell stressed what he said were years of “hard work” for the community as a neighborhood football coach and “on various boards.” By way of further emphasizing his community work, he added, “That’s why I didn’t try to run 10 years ago, simply off my last name.”

Even so, his beaming father was on hand again on this second announcement occasion, as well as Mickell’s wife and child and a decent-looking collection of friends and family.

• As had been widely predicted, Flinn’s long-expected announcement of non-candidacy for his Position 2, Super-District 9 seat, opened up the possibility that candidates already announced for Strickland’s District 5 seat might effect a shift of venue into the at-large race.

It may or not signal a trend, but one of the previous District 5 hopefuls has already made the passage over. That would be Joe Cooper, the ever-persistent pol who may ultimately eclipse all existing records for the maximum number of candidacies launched during a lifetime.

In the truest sense, Cooper’s campaign strategies have been out-of-the-box, and so have many of his proposals, such as his advocacy, during a race for county commissioner some years back, that the resident bison at Shelby Farms be moved out to make room for possible development on the rim of the park property. That idea backfired, drawing the wrath of every environmentalist within geographical reach.

Cooper’s latest proposal is equally idiosyncratic. This week, he floated the idea of turning the Coliseum building and its parking lot over to the proprietors of the Wiseacre brewery for the creation of a “tourist attraction” that would simultaneously allow visitors to observe the beer-making process and alternately to spend time with a museum featuring the grunt-and-groaners who once rassled at the Coliseum.

Oh, and the two airplanes owned by the late Elvis Presley and now scheduled for eviction by the new gods of Graceland could find a resting place in the parking lot.

Another frequent political candidate, former County Commissioner George Flinn, has thrown his name in the hat as a would-be successor to state Republican Chairman Chris DeVaney of Chattanooga, who made a surprise announcement recently that he would be departing the position to head up a hometown nonprofit.

Flinn said he would seek, as chairman, to promote unity among the state’s Republicans and to promote “inclusiveness” in party membership.

His most recent electoral run was as the GOP’s 2014 candidate for the state Senate seat vacated by now Chancellor Jim Kyle and won ultimately by Kyle’s wife Sara Kyle, the Democratic nominee.

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Politics Politics Feature

The Council District 5 Race

The District 5 City Council seat, which has been occupied for two terms by Jim Strickland, who is vacating it to make a mayoral run, is a crucial one for several reasons, including the fact that the Midtown/East Memphis district contains both substantial commercial and residential turf and several different hotbeds of politically active citizens.

It bears repeating that it will be a solid month before April 17th, the first date on which candidate petitions can even be drawn, and that any list of candidates is, of necessity, only a preliminary one. But there are several individuals who are campaigning already and have to be taken seriously.

There is Mary Wilder, for example, a veteran political and civic activist and longtime presence in the Evergreen Vollintine neighborhood, who has political credibility and name recognition from a previous race or two and from having served as an interim state Representative in state House District 89.

Wilder was the beneficiary last Thursday of a well-attended fund-raiser at Annesdale Mansion, hosted by former state Senator Beverly Marrero (whose vacated House seat Wilder assumed temporarily in 2007), and longtime progressive activist Happy Jones, who noted that Annesdale was an ancestral home. Between the two of them, Marrero and Jones symbolized the broad appeal Wilder hopes to demonstrate along the Poplar Corridor.

In brief remarks, Wilder cited her 11 years as United Methodist services director and her work on behalf of preservation initiatives and environmental causes. She also served as facilities director at MIFA.

A candidate with similar appeal and who, like Wilder, was an early entry is Charles “Chooch” Pickard, an architect who also has evinced a strong interest in preservationist issues and strategies for dealing with blight. Pickard has served as executive director of the Memphis Regional Design Center and currently serves on the MATA board. He has signed on some seasoned campaign pros to help his race.

In her introduction of Wilder last week, Marrero challenged Wilder’s supporters to work hard because, as she said, “there’s a lot of money on the other side.” 

There are several candidates that remark could describe, but one of them is certainly Worth Morgan, a member of a well-known brokerage family, if at this point still something of an unknown quantity. Morgan is an executive at SunStar Insurance of Memphis, and word is that his campaign will be well-endowed financially.

In that sense, with his themes unspoken to so far, his campaign could resemble the one successfully run in 2007 by current Councilman Reid Hedgepeth, whose race was in a sense under the radar but who had similar sources of support.

Another candidate who can count on significant financial backing and whose political profile is somewhat more developed, is Dan Springer, who has served as an aide to both Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell and U.S. Senator Bob Corker.

Springer, who currently serves as communications director for Evolve Bank and Trust, has begun making the rounds of local civic and political clubs to introduce himself.

Coming from a totally different political corner is Paul Shaffer, business manager for IBEW Local 474 and a long-established presence in local Democratic Party politics. The well-liked Shaffer can count on serious backing from organized labor, but his support does not end there. In past races for a council super-district, he has enjoyed good across-the-board support from Democratic political figures of note, and he could well get a lion’s share of them this time, too.

As other political observers have noted, the District 5 picture could be complicated by the recently much-rumored prospect of a retirement from the Council by Super District 9 member Shea Flinn, to assume executive duties with the Greater Memphis Area Chamber of Commerce. If that should come to pass, several of the names mentioned here, along with various others, could well end up on the ballot as potential successors to Flinn.

In any case, the District 5 field indicated here is likely to experience both pluses and minuses, and several other potential candidates have floated preliminary trial balloons. (Candidates omitted in this list should fear not; as indicated, we’ve got time, and they shall get their due.)

One of those who talked about making a District 5 race early on but who has been dormant of late is Mike Ritz, the former two-term county commissioner from Germantown who, as commission chairman, played a major role in important stages of the school merger/de-merger controversy.

On the eve of a move into Memphis last year, Ritz, a sometime businessman-banker with a long-term pedigree in both city and county governmental affairs, discussed his desire to seek the District 5 seat in the event that Strickland, as expected, chose to vacate it for a mayoral run.

Ritz has, however, decided against a council race. The reason? “I couldn’t find much interest out there — not only for my race but for anybody’s race.”

On the supposition that all of you reading this are sitting down, I can announce that, er, somewhat to my surprise, I was informed this week that yet another contestant — and an unexpected one, at that — is waiting in the wings with a definite hankering to enter the already crowded District 5 City Council race.

Joe Cooper.

Wow, that was noisy — all those chairs falling! Well, pick yourselves up, and I’ll say it again. Joe Cooper.

“I don’t want anybody thinking this is a joke” said Cooper, on the telephone. And I can assure you, Cooper is no joke.

Yes, Cooper has taken some hits — more than his share, maybe. He has two felony convictions, and there’s no hiding that. The first one, back in the 1970s, when he was a ubiquitous and influential member of the county court, is regarded in some quarters as having been payback for breaking ranks with a local Republican Party that was just beginning to feel its oats as a political force.

The offense was technically a species of mail fraud, in which Cooper, clearly hard up for cash, arranged some personal loans for himself in the name of friends, many of them influential government players. Irregular, to be sure, and he (but not they) got nailed for it by an unsympathetic D.A.’s office.

Cooper did some time, and for several years afterward divided his time between attempts at reestablishing a political career and several business start-ups, none of which endured for very long. He remained knowledgeable about government, however, and served in other people’s campaigns and offices and as a man-to-see about working the system and as an all-purposes resource — “the world’s greatest concierge” — as he called himself.

Do you need an autographed picture of President Chester A. Arthur by 2 p.m. tomorrow? Cooper is your best bet to get it. And much else.

In 2008, he got nailed again for selling Cadillacs to drug dealers, who paid cash for contracts that bore other people’s names — money laundering. While Cooper ended up doing more time, his punishment was mitigated by his subsequent assistance to the FBI in making bribery cases against local officials, and his cooperation netted him a sentence of only six months on the money laundering charges.

Besides treading these dangerous legal waters, Cooper has survived some significant physical ailments in recent years, and he, unquestionably and in a very unique sense, bears the aura of a survivor. For all his derogators — and they are many — he has his defenders, also numerous, although many of them, perhaps most, may be loath about boasting the fact publicly.

Cooper is what he is. He can make the case that he’s learned the hard way about staying on the beaten path, and it’s a path that he knows something about. He isn’t likely to win, but, in the crowded field that the District 5 race is becoming, who knows? He can at least hope to make a runoff (permitted in district races, though not for at-large positions).

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Politics Politics Feature

Spring Training

It’s still a little less than two months — April 17th, to be exact — before candidates for city offices can even pull a qualifying petition from the Election Commission. And it’s nearly five months after that until the November 3rd election itself — seven month total.

For emphasis, let’s put that last figure in Arabic numerals: 7 months before Memphis voters can finish signaling their intentions on city offices — encompassing the lengthy span from now, when major league baseball teams are beginning spring training, to a date when the World Series is likely to still be happening.

And yet the roster is rapidly filling up for the most important race on this year’s election calendar — that for Memphis mayor. With the formal announcement of candidacy on Monday of this week by Memphis Police Association President Mike Williams, the number of well-known names still expected to be on the mayoral ballot has shrunk to two — City Councilman Harold Collins, who appointed an exploratory committee last fall and former Memphis School Board member and New Olivet Baptist church pastor Kenneth Whalum Jr.

[IMAGE-1]Whalum is forthright about his own plans, which to a great extent are based on an understanding with Williams, whose views on city matters overlap with his own. It boils down to this: “If Mike follows through and picks up a petition when the time comes and files, I won’t run,” says Whalum. “If he doesn’t, it’s 100-percent certain that I will.”

Already declared, besides Williams, are incumbent Mayor A C Wharton, City Councilman Jim Strickland, former County Commission Chairman James Harvey, current commission Chairman Justin Ford, and former University of Memphis basketball player Detric Golden.

And, while Ford, who has commission business to attend to, has not yet finished stockpiling his artillery, and Harvey has not yet begun to fight, the others are already doing battle. Strickland is speaking lots and firing away at Wharton on an almost daily basis via Facebook and Twitter; Williams and his supporters are active on the same social media; and the mayor is playing his bully pulpit for all it’s worth, materializing in numerous speech appearances and press conference formats that allow him to do double duty as city official and candidate for reelection.

And Golden, who has yet to demonstrate what his political base is, is turning up at public events, including those held by other candidates, and for well over a year has been conspicuous by driving around town in a car that is tricked-out with signs advertising his candidacy.

The mayoral-campaign activity so far is a form of spring training, and, like its baseball equivalent, it is a way of working the kinks out, finding a groove, and getting the jump on the competition. For that reason, Collins and Whalum won’t be able to procrastinate much longer on revealing their own intentions, and an announcement from one or both of them may well beat this issue to the printer.

There’s another reason why time is of the essence: money, which is a finite resource, especially here in hard-pressed Memphis, and won’t stretch far enough to cover every candidate’s needs. In a certain sense, it’s a matter of first come, first served, and the most accomplished self-servers so far are Wharton and Strickland. Both of them have been at it for a while — with receipts through January 15th showing a campaign balance for Wharton of $201,088 and for Strickland of $181,595.

The others have some catching up to do.

• As one of the first commenters to the Flyer‘s online coverage of the event said, “A very sad day, indeed, for the Shelby County Democratic Party in more ways than one.”

The event in question was the forced resignation on Saturday of Shelby County Democratic Party Chairman Bryan Carson, well-liked in his own right and the son of the widely admired Gale Jones Carson, a former local party chair herself and the longtime secretary of the state Democratic Party.

In a nutshell, the younger Carson had, on the fateful Saturday, faced a no-holds-barred interrogation into his oversight of party finances by the party’s executive committee — 76 strong, at peak, with roughly 50 on hand for the occasion, which was closed to the press and public. Saturday’s meeting followed two prior closed-door meetings with Carson last week by the party’s smaller 11-member steering committee, the second of which had resulted in a unanimous vote of “no confidence.”

All three meetings had been called out of a sense of crisis that developed from Carson’s repeated failure either to address party members’ concerns about the state of party finances or to deal satisfactorily with ominous promptings for an accounting from the Tennessee Bureau of Ethics and Campaign Finance. The bureau had already levied three $500 fines on the local party for late or incomplete submissions of financial disclosure statements and threatened another of $10,000, along with a showdown meeting in Nashville in March.

There were two immediate issues: The first was a disclosure statement that had been overdue since October 28th. Carson would hurriedly prepare one and submit it, such as it was, to the bureau on Wednesday, February 18th, the same day as his second meeting with the party steering committee and their vote of no confidence.

The other issue was even more troubling. It concerned an ad hoc audit, prepared at the request of the steering committee by Diane Cambron, wife of David Cambron, the local party’s first vice chair, and Dick Klenz, longtime president of the Germantown Democratic Club — both with unimpeachable reputations for fair-mindedness.

The audit showed that, since last September, Carson had made 63 withdrawals from the party’s bank account, in an amount totaling $8,437.89, and could produce no receipts for what he contended had been cash payments on behalf of the party. Even allowing for figures submitted in what Carson called a “self audit” (again, unaccompanied by receipts and made difficult to trace by virtue of the chairman’s having arbitrarily switched the party banking account), there seemed to be an amount of $6,091.16, which the Cambron-Klenz audit referred to as “unsubstantiated.”

Carson maintained in all three meetings with party committees that he had done nothing wrong and that the apparent discrepancies were the result of an overload of activity during the 2014 campaign year, coupled with the fact that he had been compelled, he said, to try to function as his own party treasurer.

That last was another fact that confounded committee members, who had thought that party member Jonathan Lewis was functioning as party treasurer. It turned out during the week’s discussions that Lewis had shied away from the service and had not registered with the state after being given a glimpse by Carson into the actual state of party finances.

In any case, the predominant mood of the party executive committee on Saturday was to reject Carson’s explanations, as well as his expressed wish to maintain at least a titular hold on the office of chairman (while handing over actual control to first Vice Chair David Cambron) through the party’s scheduled March caucus-convention rounds that are scheduled to produce a new executive committee and chairman on March 28th.

Vice Chair Cambron has been named acting chair, and he announced that one of his first acts would be to open a new party banking account this week, so as to provide a revised and reliable financing accounting from the ground up.

Beyond that, there has been no word from anyone speaking for the party to take further action or pursue legal remedies and no apparent appetite for doing so.

Various online commenters on the matter have made a point of noting that the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office has issued a warrant of “theft over $500” against Axl David, former treasurer of the Young Republicans in that Middle Tennessee county, for what Sheriff Robert Arnold called “several discrepancies in the management of Club funds.” But no one has demonstrated any analogy between that situation and the one in Shelby County.

Bryan Carson, meanwhile, apparently still intends to seek the open District 7 City Council seat in this year’s city election. In January, he finished one vote behind Berlin Boyd in a council vote to name an interim District 7 councilman to succeed Lee Harris, who had resigned to assume his new duties as a state Senator.

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News The Fly-By

Wharton Priorities Revealed in State of the City Address

“Sound and strong.”  That’s the overall state of the city at the beginning of 2015, according to Memphis Mayor A C Wharton in his annual State of the City address last week. 

Wharton looked back at 2014 during his speech last Thursday at the Hattiloo Theatre but also gave Memphians a glimpse of his plans for the coming year.  

That year could be cut short for Wharton, of course, depending on the outcome of October’s mayoral election. So far, Wharton’s front-running opponent in the race is Jim Strickland, a Memphis city councilmember. 

Strickland formally rebutted Wharton’s speech after it concluded. He noted many here don’t feel safe in their communities and that, he said, “is the state of the city many of our residents are living through.” 

Nevertheless, Wharton has time on the clock as mayor, and here are his big three ideas for his time remaining:

1. Fighting Crime — In his speech, Wharton said he will emphasize “old-fashioned community policing and new, cutting-edge technology.”

On the old-school side, Wharton said he’ll activate neighborhood leaders, especially in areas with high violent crime, to work at the “grassroots level” to reduce crime. 

On the high-tech side, he said the city will add police car dash cameras, automatic vehicle location technology, and body cameras for officers this year. 

Also, new officers are on the way to move the Memphis Police Department ranks closer to the “optimal force of 2,500.”

“We have increased the budget for the Memphis Police Department by nearly $40 million. We have intensified our anti-gang programs. We have toughened sentences for violent crimes. We have targeted crimes in apartment complexes, and we are fighting gun crimes by young offenders,” Wharton said.

In Strickland’s speech, he said he would have a “100 percent commitment to Blue Crush,” work with state legislators to get higher penalties for violent criminals (and hold parents accountable for violent crimes committed by their children), and work with community leaders to help children “who are picking the wrong path.”

“Crime needs to be the absolute focal point for the future adminstration, and I will, like a laser beam, focus on that in the next four years,” Strickland said.

2. Minority Business — Wharton said it was “simply unacceptable” that only one percent of business receipts in Memphis are with minority businesses. 

To increase that number, he proposed a new division of city government, what he called the Division of Minority Business Services. The agency would “manage all city agencies and services related to minority businesses” and create partnerships with groups like Memphis Light, Gas and Water, the Memphis Area Transit Authority, and other agencies that receive city grants. 

“Our ultimate goal as a result is to put in place a process that is just as entrepreneurial as the entrepreneurs we hope to create and support,” Wharton said. 

But Strickland said Wharton already has this authority, and minority contracts have actually fallen during his term. 

“The mayor is the sole contracting authority for city government,” Strickland said. “That means he controls all contracts. They all have to come through city hall. Minority contracting with the City of Memphis has actually decreased over the last two years.”

3. Poverty — Wharton’s overall plan to fight poverty is to promote prosperity. 

His “Blueprint for Prosperity” was revealed in May and came with one major goal: to reduce poverty in Memphis by 10 percentage points in the next 10 years. 

The blueprint is a massive document designed by the Chicago-based Center for Neighborhood Technology. It is crammed with data and theory, but Wharton said last week that he will begin implementing the plan over the next six months.