Tag: Justin Ford

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Politics Politics Feature

Partisanship vs. Solidarity?

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Editorial Opinion

The Shelby County Commission Kerfluffle

“It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.” Those lines are familiar to most students of literature as the first words in Charles Dickens’ classic A Tale of Two Cities. After Monday, they may have a somewhat different meaning to Steve Basar, a member of the Shelby County Commission.

Basar, who represents an East Memphis district and has a major concern with economic development, has desired to be chairman of the commission for some time. Two years ago, he was elected to serve as the body’s vice chair, an office which, once upon a time, positioned one to ascend to the chairmanship in a year’s time. Harboring such expectations, which were reinforced by another commission tradition, that the chairmanship should be rotated from year to year by party, Republican Basar made ready for his ascension to the chairmanship a year ago, at the end of outgoing Democrat James Harvey’s one-year term.

Like Harvey before him, Basar even had a speech ready. But, for reasons that have never been fully explained and that may be as much personal as political, Basar was not elected. His fellow Republicans, whom he expected to serve as his base, not only deserted him, they ended up voting in Democratic Commissioner Justin Ford.

Stunned and understandably aggrieved, Basar fell into a pattern of cooperating with the commission’s Democrats on key matters. The positive lure of bipartisanship may have been one of his reasons, but there were other reasons for the de facto alliance, which has held firm for most of the succeeding time. For, just as Basar felt he’d been done wrong by his fellow Republicans, the Democrats on the commission were suspicious that Ford, to gain his chairmanship, had made some deal with the Republicans.

Nobody wants to use the term “payback,” but the ad hoc Basar/Democrat coalition set out on a systematic campaign to depose chairman Ford, and, if not that, then at least to set limits on his powers. They succeeded in the latter aim, reducing from eight to seven the number of commission votes necessary to overrule the chairman’s control of the agenda.

Came Monday, and Basar, more or less on the strength of his Democratic alliance, won election as chairman by the whisker-width of a single vote. The best of times. 

But payback is a two-edged sword, and to the astonishment of Basar (and everyone else, except whoever was in on the deal), the new chairman-elect saw his chairmanship abruptly taken away from him an hour after he got it, when one of his previous voters, whether induced or not, went over to the other side and forced a reconsideration vote that went against Basar. The worst of times.

For the time being, the commission is leaderless and won’t have another chairmanship election until next month. Other people’s ambitions, and other factors, including no doubt some real issues, went into this outcome. But, at root, what it signifies is that political gamesmanship has gotten the upper hand in what is constitutionally the supreme legislative body in Shelby County and which has real business to accomplish. Any more of this hanky-panky just won’t do.

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Politics Politics Feature

County Commission Election Next Week

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Even as candidates for city office gird for an October 8th election, which is still weeks away from its stretch drive, another election of some possible consequence is just around the corner.

On Monday, the Shelby County Commission will elect a chairman to serve  for the 2015-16 period, and, while other commissioners are quite likely considering their options in case of deadlock, at least two members of the commission — Steve Basar and Terry Roland — are more or less publicly running.

Both, interestingly enough, on a 13-member body which has a Democratic majority of one, are Republicans. Basar, however, is a de facto Democratic candidate, hoping to gain through an active coalition with members of the other party an office which he believes himself to have been unfairly deprived of by members of his own party.

A year ago, Basar, an East Memphis Republican who was then serving as commission vice chair, confidently expected elevation to the chairmanship as a matter of course.

For the first several years after the commission became subject to partisan elections in the mid-1990s, the tradition was to elect a chairman from one party in a given year, along with a vice chairman from the other. At the end of that year, the vice chair would be formally elected to become chair for the next year, in a routine whereby the succession to chairman was essentially foreordained, and the commission’s chairmanship was, by what was termed a “gentlemen’s agreement,” rotated by party annually.

That was the format which Basar expected to apply to his own case when a newly elected commission met to select a chairman after the conclusion of the August 2014 county election.

But Basar encountered a body which contained five new members, and the once-predictable rites of succession to the chairmanship had been jimmied and could no longer be depended on.

That all began with the election for chairman in 2011, when then Republican vice chair Mike Carpenter, who had angered his GOP colleagues by what they considered too close a collaboration with the commission’s Democrats, failed to get Republican votes, and Democratic chairman Sidney Chism parlayed the resulting deadlock into reelection for a second consecutive term.

From that point on, even as the principle of rotating chairmanships seemed to have reasserted itself to some degree, there was always an element of suspense in the matter of electing a chair, as well as a fair amount of intrigue.

When Republican Mike Ritz succeeded Democrat Chism as chair in 2012, he in effect became chief strategist for the Democratic majority’s opposition to independent suburban school districts and ran afoul of his GOP colleagues, as Carpenter had done previously.

In 2013, as Chism had done before him, Ritz sought a second consecutive term, but once again the Republican minority coalesced around what they considered a sympathetic Democrat, James Harvey, who won with their support. And, in 2014, GOP members continued with what had seemingly become a strategy of supporting a compliant Democrat over a fellow Republican, backing eventual winner Justin Ford over a stunned Basar.

In the wake of his defeat, Basar entered into a coalition with the commission’s Democrats on key vote after key vote, beginning with their efforts to limit Ford’s chairmanship powers last fall, and continuing through this year’s budget negotiations.

Basar still wants to be commission chairman, though he has also offered himself as a possible successor to Paul Morris, who is stepping down as chairman of the Downtown Memphis Commission.

Meanwhile, Roland makes no bones about it: He wants to be Shelby County Mayor, is essentially already running for that office, which is up again in 2018, and clearly believes that becoming commission chairman would give him a leg up on that race.

Roland hails from Millington, was elected to the commission as a GOP firebrand, and can still comport himself that way, depending on the issue. But he has made an obvious effort to mute his partisanship and work across party lines. He led the effort to put the commission on record as supporting Governor Bill Haslam‘s Insure Tennessee proposal, and the successful resolution to rename the Shelby County Courthose for the late civil rights icon D’Army Bailey was proposed by Roland.

• Meanwhile, on the Wednesday agenda of the commission’s general government committee is the still simmering issue of the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue and Forrest graves in what was formerly Forrest Park (Health Sciences Park).

Again before the commission is a resolution sponsored by Commissioner Walter Bailey that would put the commission on record as supporting the Memphis City Council’s ordinance to remove the statue, which was due for a second reading at this week’s council meeting. The commission’s resolution supporting the council’s intent was deferred from the committee’s July 22nd meeting.

Any action by the commission would be purely symbolic, inasmuch as only the council has authority regarding disposition of the statue. But whatever the commission does would definitely have an effect on public opinion during what is expected to be a lengthy course of litigation over the issue.

The city council’s sentiment has so far remained unanimous for removal, but indications are that reservations by suburban members of the county commission could make for controversy.

The commission’s budget committee is likely to get into something of a thicket, too. Budget chair Heidi Shafer wants the commission to take up the issue of establishing a staff or hiring an individual to perform for the commission the same kind of independent vetting service over financial matters that the Congressional Budget Office does for members of Congress.

Shafer and other members of the commission, on both sides of the party line, were plainly vexed by seemingly disparate accountings issued by the administration of Mayor Mark Luttrell and County Trustee David Lenoir, respectively, on the actual amount of an end-of-fiscal-year surplus.

There is a strong and bipartisan sentiment on the commission to assert the body’s independence vis-à-vis the administration, as was also indicated recently by the commission’s open exploration of the prospect of hiring its own attorney, at least for ad hoc matters.

• It was neither the most surprising action nor the most momentous one of the 2015 Memphis election season, but the joint endorsement of Councilman Harold Collins‘ mayoral campaign on Monday by the Memphis Fire Fighters Association and an independent firefighters’ group was another sign of an apparent recent surge of support for Collins.

The councilman from Whitehaven was fairly universally judged to have acquitted himself well in a four-way mayoral forum last week put on by several local women’s groups at First Congregational Church.

And, though Collins’ financial receipts still lag behind those of Mayor A C Wharton and Councilman Jim Strickland, they have been significant enough to suggest the possibility that talk of a two-man mayoral race between Wharton and Strickland may have been overdone — or, at any rate, premature.

The opening by Mayor Wharton on Sunday of a Whitehaven-based headquarters on Elvis Presley Boulevard, to complement another headquarters on Poplar Avenue (to be inaugurated this coming Sunday), is a clear indication that the mayor has a two-front war on his hands.

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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.

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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.

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Politics Politics Feature

Commission Plays 52-Pickup

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Early on in Monday’s regular business session of the Shelby County Commission, Commissioner  Melvin Burgess, a Democrat, moved to defer for two weeks a vote on appointing someone to fill a Judicial Commission vacancy, on the grounds that a discussion on the matter would crowd out some necessary and potentially lengthy deliberations on the county budget and tax rate for fiscal 2015-16.

That was either a face-value statement, as Burgess insisted, or a political maneuver, as the Republican members of the commission — or most of them — suspected, and very shortly the provisional consensus on a budget/tax rate combination that had apparently been reached in a lengthy commission session on May 20th began to come asunder.

Several of the GOP members — conspicuously excluding Steve Basar, who supported Burgess’ motion — objected that most of the 15 applicants for Judicial Commissioner were sitting in the commission audience and had cleared their personal slates in order to be present for the scheduled vote.

; Privately, they began to sense that some deal had been made that involved trade-offs of various kinds, and Basar’s support of the Burgess motion convinced some of them, at least, of something that Commissioner David Reaves, a GOP member from Bartlett, was willing to voice later on:

“It all goes back to the chairmanship vote,” Reaves said, referring to a reorganizational vote of the newly elected commission last fall. Basar, who had been vice chair of the previous commission, had expected to be elected chairman but was stunned to find that most of his fellow Republicans were committed to other candidates. In the end, a majority of Republicans united behind Democrat Justin Ford, who had often voted with the GOP contingent during his first term.

Whatever the reason for that reversal — and they were probably as much personal as political — it made for a commission divided along clearly partisan lines, with the body’s Democrats, plus Basar, on one side, and the Republicans, plus Ford, on the other.

For weeks last fall, the two factions waged procedural warfare, with the Democratic/Basar coalition seeking either to unseat Ford as chairman or to drastically limit his authority. In the end, Ford survived, though with modestly curtailed prerogatives, and the showdown eased up. It, indeed, had been largely forgotten, until Monday, when Burgess made his motion. 

Ford, as chairman, attempted to disallow any deferral, but in the resultant vote, Burgess’ fellow Democrats, plus Basar, prevailed.

“Basar tipped his hand,” Reaves said. “He’s looking toward September, for the next chairman’s vote and trying to gain some leverage. Why else would he vote that way? It allowed us to figure out quickly that he had flopped.”

Basar denied any such motive, but he agreed that the Republicans began to shift, more or less in unison, to a common strategy, “once they saw me voting again with the Democrats.”

One consequence was a defeat for a long-pending ordinance proposed by Basar to apply pedestrian safety laws to unincorporated areas of Shelby County. Basar needed nine votes, but Republicans Reaves and Terry Roland, who had agreed to help him meet his quota, withdrew their support.

Subsequently, the old arithmetic of Democrats-plus-Basar versus Republicans-plus-Ford reasserted itself on vote after vote, preventing agreement on matters that, as of the marathon commission meeting of May 20th, had seemed either settled or within easy reach. 

The commissioners had then seemed to agree on a formula dividing some $1.8 million equally between each of the 13 commissioners for them to distribute to non-profit organizations in their districts. That matter, now involving a lesser sum of $1.3 million and altered to include other services and recipients beyond non-profits, was referred back to committee on Monday.

More importantly, a sense of distrust had arisen among the commission Republicans regarding what they thought had been a common commitment to use part of a $6 million surplus claimed by the administration of Mayor Mark Luttrell to lower the county tax rate one cent, from $4.37 to $4.36. 

The GOP members now began to suspect behind-the-scenes collusion between the administration, which had never been sold on the tax decrease, preferring to use any left-over differential on infrastructure, and Democratic members, who, now supported by Basar, were proposing to raise several sums apparently agreed upon on May 20th — notably for the Sheriff’s Department and Juvenile Court, each of which were seeking significant increases.

Consequently, Roland proposed a 4-cent reduction in the tax rate (“as a way of getting one cent,” he would later acknowledge).That went down, by the same quasi-party line vote as before, as did a follow-up vote for the 1-cent reduction.

In the end, a “flat” or stable tax rate at the current level of $4.37 received the same 7-6 vote distribution for the first of three required votes, and all budget items were deferred or referred back to committee.

In a true sense, nothing got resolved on Monday, though several commission meetings, both scheduled and ad hoc, are sure to revisit the budget/tax rate matters between now and the July 1st fiscal-year deadline. And several members, seeing the prospect of consensus slipping further way, are foreseeing that an official arbitration process will need to be invoked.

“Irresponsible,” was Chairman Ford’s verdict on Monday’s meeting.

• On the mayoral-race front, most observers are now betting that the Rev. Kenneth Whalum Jr., the New Olivet Baptist Church pastor and former school board member, will run for mayor, despite his insistence that he will defer to Memphis Police Association President Mike Williams, a declared candidate.

“He’s making noise like he is,” said Williams last week at Broadway Pizza, after one in a series of what will be several organizational meetings, noting that “I have never asked Whalum about not running. …  I’m just moving at my pace. Even if he runs, we’re still going to be friends. … My destiny has nothing to do with his destiny.”


•Oh, and make room for Robert “Prince Mongo” Hodges on your tout sheet. The Zambodian prince, a frequent mayoral candidate in the past, says he’ll pull a petition for mayor next week.


• And, almost unnoticed, Joe Cooper (yes, that Joe Cooper) has put together a potentially effective campaign team in his latest quest for a political comeback as a candidate for the City Council Super District 9, Position 2 seat.

Cooper says he expects to spend $100,000 on his race and has engaged the professional consulting team of Matt Kuhn and Mike Lipe to help him do it. Gene Buehler and Karla Willingham Templeton are Cooper’s campaign co-chairs.

Cooper, who serves wrestling legend Jerry Lawler as an agent and manager, says that Thursday of this week will be officially recognized as “Jerry Lawler Day” in both Memphis and Jackson, Tennessee, with Mayor A C Wharton said to be ready to issue a proclamation in his City Hall office on Thursday and Jackson Mayor Jerry Gist honoring Lawler similarly on Thursday night.


• So, guess who else is being touted for Mayor. Yep, Harold Ford Jr.

But not of Memphis, Ford’s erstwhile home base. No, the transplanted former 9th District congressman and 2006 U.S. Senate candidate, is apparently being talked up for mayor of New York, his current abode — the most recent hints of such a prospect coming from Bloomberg Business, which reported last week on a Lincoln Center “American Songbook” gala that, according to the periodical, honored Ford for his fund-raising efforts on behalf of the center.

Said the article: “‘Mayor’ was on the lips of some guests, though not Ford’s. Asked about his interest in leading the city, Ford, who once considered a run for a U.S. Senate seat from New York and has endorsed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race, said ‘I’m a new father for the second time, that’s what I’m focused on.'” 

The next mayoral race in New York will occur in 2017. Current Mayor Bill de Blasio, an avowed liberal, is in some quarters considered vulnerable to a challenge from the center or right.

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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

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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Politics Politics Feature

A Mayoral Battle Royale in Memphis?

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Now, this is getting interesting!

Within the past couple of weeks, the roster of candidates for Memphis mayor in 2015 has gotten more complete, more complicated, and maybe more competitive. And there’s obviously room for more in all the above categories.

First, there was the announcement, the week before last, of Jim Strickland, the District 5 city councilman whose support along the Poplar Corridor is generally understood to be deep enough to give incumbent Mayor A C Wharton a run for his money.

Then there was the almost simultaneous announcement from Shelby County Commission Chairman Justin Ford that he, too, is considering a run for mayor. Dropping hints of running such-and-such a race is a standard means of raising one’s name recognition for all kinds of future-tense political possibilities, but there are several reasons why such a declaration from the 20-something Ford, a second-termer on the commission, has to be regarded as more than fanciful ego-tripping.

First of all, he is a Ford, and that political clan still counts for something. Secondly, he demonstrated with his surprise election this year as commission chairman — an outcome that depended on Democrat Ford’s building a bridge to the commission’s Republican minority for support — that he possesses an ability to politick.

Then, too, Ford has nothing to lose by running. As he demonstrated by his strong — if ultimately unsuccessful — lobbying two years ago for the commission to redistrict itself according to the old formula of large, multi-member districts, he is interested in obtaining the maximum possible arena for expanding his name recognition.

To say the least, a mayoral campaign would give him that. Meanwhile, a loss would leave him still in possession of his current bully pulpit on the commission. And who knows? If the mayoral field proliferates as it might, the campaign might take on battle-royale proportions with fair chances for several candidates to win.

Councilman Harold Collins, who appointed an exploratory committee last fall, is likely to throw his hat in, and he will have a fair degree of clout, especially in Whitehaven and South Memphis, where Ford also has strength.

Another who is likely to enter the race is the Rev. Kenneth Whalum, former Memphis School Board member and pastor of New Olivet Baptist Church, whose strong showing in last year’s Democratic primary for Shelby County mayor surprised even him.

And still another is Mike Williams, whose lengthy tenure as president of the Memphis Police Association over the past several stormy years of confrontation with City Hall have made him a figure to reckon with.

Williams addressed a standing-room-only crowd Monday night at a “Campaign for Liberty” event at Jason’s Deli on Poplar. The audience was oriented toward Tea Party concerns about govermental interventions and corporate rip-offs, and seemed receptive to Williams’ free-wheeling populist remarks on themes of chicanery in city government, loss of citizen influence, and predatory actions by moneyed interests.

Throw in former county commission Chairman James Harvey, already declared, and you have the makings of a field that could split unpredictably in numerous ways.

Understand: Incumbent Mayor Wharton may be increasingly under fire, but he has serious financial support. He has dedicated followers and a seasoned political organization. And, most importantly, he has the office, with all its potential for commanding public attention. But he isn’t taking anything for granted. Nor should we.