Tag: Lee Harris

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Politics Politics Feature

Vaccine Crisis Politics: Commission Meeting Previews Next Year’s Election Divide

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Not that it is, or should be, the most significant fact to emerge from last week’s COVID-19 debacle in Shelby County, but, all the same, it’s a fact: The 2022 county election has begun, with the sides  being chosen and the weapons weighed.

Much of that became obvious at a special called meeting of the Shelby County Commission on Friday, February 26th, when the 13 commissioners were given a chance to interrogate County Mayor Lee Harris regarding the Tennessee Department of Health’s charges of mismanagement of COVID-19 vaccination by the Shelby County Health Department, resulting in TDH’s yanking responsibility for allocating vaccines locally and reassigning that function to the city of Memphis.

In the course of two hours of tense and sometimes volatile questioning of Harris, who remained in his upstairs office and appeared virtually via webinar, the commissioners, most of whom were seated in their regular chamber seats in the auditorium of the Vasco Smith County Building, cleaved unmistakably along partisan lines. 

Jackson Baker

Four of the body’s five Republicans — Mick Wright, David Bradford, Amber Mills, and Mark Billingsley — directly challenged the county administration, with Bradford, Mills, and Billingsley questioning the leadership of Harris, a Democrat, and Wright demanding an accounting from Shelby County Health Department Director Alisa Haushalter, who was absent from the session and, in fact, had, as Harris announced at the meeting, tendered her resignation that very day.

Harris — who declined, as he said, to engage in “navel-gazing”— kept a solemn mien as he stressed the need to “remediate” the situation, going forward, and fielded inquiries about the imbroglio and its details, including spoilage and subsequent wastage of an alleged 2,500 doses of Pfizer vaccine, the purported stockpiling of some 30,000 doses, unauthorized vaccination of children, possible theft of vaccine from the Pipkin vaccination site, and much more.

There were references in state documents to a “power struggle” between the county and Memphis city government over vaccine administration. Harris denied knowledge of any such development, but Billingsley reinforced that meme by lengthily extolling what he portrayed as Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland‘s filling a void with a display of “leadership.”

Bllingsley, a former commission chairman, is widely regarded as being a likely GOP candidate in 2022 to oppose Harris’ re-election. Another Republican known to be considering a race for county mayor next year is the well-connected Frank Colvett Jr., the current chairman of the Memphis City Council.

In normal circumstances, partisan differences on the county commission are not hard and fast, and allegiances are formed across party lines. (So are antagonisms: One of Harris’ persistent critics is Democratic member Edmund Ford Jr., who chimed in his discontent Friday along with the aforementioned Republicans.) But there was a drawing together on the Democratic side as well; Democratic Commissioners Van Turner and Reginald Milton rose to Harris’ defense on Friday with expressions of praise for his conduct of the mayoral office.

Turner even seemed to imply that the state’s action reflected a bias of Republican state government against Shelby County as a “step-child,” and noted that equivalent vaccine mishaps in Knox County had largely escaped censure by the TDH.

The current crisis will eventually be resolved or it won’t, but in the meantime it has offered a preview of a partisan divide, which may partially heal over but is bound to become more pronounced the closer we come to election year 2022.

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Politics Politics Feature

Touching the Hot Buttons: County Commission Takes on Trump, PILOTs

The public musings of the Shelby County Commission add up at times to as accurate a bellwether on issues at large as can be found in these parts, and that applies to state and national subjects as well as purely local ones. By definition, the commission represents a larger and more representative hunk of the population than does, say, the Memphis City Council, and, though the body is by no means exclusively partisan in its outlook, the fact that its membership is elected by political party gives it natural polarities on a number of matters.

Four matters taken up by the commission at Monday’s public meeting illustrate the range. The first, sponsored by Commissioner Tami Sawyer, well known as a Democrat from her party’s progressive wing, was a resolution “to prohibit the naming of any Shelby County property after U.S. President Donald John Trump, the 45th President of the United States.”

Tami Sawyer

Clearly occasioned by public outrage and confusion stemming from the catastrophic endgame of Trump’s presidency, the resolution garnered the seven votes necessary for passage, all from Democratic members: Sawyer, Van Turner, Mickell Lowery, Willie Brooks, Edmund Ford, Michael Whaley, and chairman Eddie Jones. Three Republicans — Mick Wright, David Bradford, and Brandon Morrison — and Democrat Reginald Milton abstained. Two Republicans, Amber Mills and Mark Billingsley, cast outright “no” votes.

A companion measure of sorts, coming late in the day, was a resolution “in support of preserving our Republic and condemning the insurrection that took place at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.” That one, sponsored by Wright and Milton, garnered 12 “aye” votes across the board but got a single abstention from Morrison.

In between those two resolutions was a pair of hot-button votes. One was a substitute resolution for one introduced back in the summer by Sawyer designed to curtail the potential acquisition of military-grade materials from federal sources by the Sheriff’s Department. Co-sponsored by Turner and Milton, the revised version acknowledged the fact that current Sheriff Lloyd Bonner desired no such weaponry but gives the Sheriff’s Department and the Office of Emergency Management and Homeland Security the option, via commission approval, to acquire protective equipment such as bulletproof vests, as well as rescue vehicles in case of emergencies.

The original resolution had drawn fire from several members as being what they saw as an unwarranted attack on the character of the sheriff. On Monday, Sawyer addressed those reservations: “You know, why do we need police reform? Sheriff Bonner’s a great guy. … But in 2020, across the country, and right here in Shelby County, we recognize a pandemic of racial injustice that was almost as deadly as COVID-19 that impacts the lives of Black and brown people every day.”

The ultimate vote on that one was 10-3, with Commissioners Billingsley, Mills, and Morrison remaining unmollified.

The other resolution incurring extended debate was also sponsored by Sawyer. It proposed a 180-day moratorium on the issuance of any new PILOT (payment-in-lieu-of-taxes) grants by any of the eight authorities in the county able to issue PILOTs.

These tax-abatement grants, which by definition limit property-tax revenues in the interests of industrial recruitment, have long been controversial, as Sawyer noted, denouncing “the organizations that come and promise 1,000 jobs and never offer more than 300, organizations that pay no taxes, recipients whose workforces are 75 percent temporary workers with no healthcare, and no childcare. And then they close when they’re pushed to do anything else. Why don’t these corporations have to invest in the community?”

Ultimately, the PILOT resolution was recast as a proposal to join with the city of Memphis in a task force to study the implications of PILOTs and to consider possible changes in policy. County Mayor Lee Harris supported that proposition, saying, “I am all for trying to figure out how we might reform the system. … It’s probably a good idea to not try to tee up too many questions. But instead, we try as best we can to narrow our scope to what we might be able to handle. So I would try to narrow the scope to bite-sized amounts.” With that understanding, the proposal was referred back to committee for further shaping.

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Cover Feature News

We’ve Got a Shot: How Fast Can the Vaccine Get Us Back to Normal?

CREDIT: St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital

Back to “normal” could take a year, if nothing else changes in Shelby County. COVID-19 vaccines are just now beginning to move us forward through the dark tunnel of death, illness, and disruption that we’ve been trapped in for 10 months. While there’s hope — make no mistake — it’s a long, long tunnel.

That was the takeaway from public health officials in Shelby County last week. Vaccines are scarce, their delivery is unpredictable, and it will take a long time to get the medicine into the arms of enough people here to get us to the point where we can even fantasize about throwing our masks away. If things stay the same, that could take a year, according to Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris. 

Only two vaccines are currently approved for use in the United States: one from Pfizer-BioNTech and another from Moderna, each requiring two doses. Tennessee now expects to get 90,000 collective doses of the vaccines each month. At that rate, immunizing enough of Tennessee’s 6.8 million residents to gain herd immunity would take a year, Harris explained during a public briefing last week from the Memphis and Shelby County COVID-19 Task Force.

But he added that some “game changers” are on the horizon. New vaccines could become available. Some existing vaccines may be approved that would require only a single dose, essentially doubling supply.

None of that is concrete yet, Harris said last week, but it gave him hope: “So there is light at the end of the tunnel; there are reasons to be hopeful, and we are working really hard to get this done. But we do need to recognize, this tunnel is long and it is likely to have twists along the way. It will require all of us to make adjustments.”

What kind of adjustments? Consider that for a good portion of last week, Shelby County officials weren’t sure when they’d even get more vaccine. Their initial 12,000 doses had run out and they simply had no idea when they’d get more.

The Tennessee Department of Health (TDH) confirmed late Friday that Shelby County could expect 8,900 each week for the month of January. The health department would administer 4,000 doses each week, with the remainder going to the county’s hospitals. In a news release issued Friday, the health department announced it had opened appointments for those in priority groups to get the vaccine this month. Another announcement followed about an hour later stating all appointments had been filled. 

The vaccine rollout has been bumpy, lurching, and uneven. But it’s early yet and Shelby Countians will certainly have to adjust their expectations.

To calibrate, dial back to March 23rd, 2020, when just 93 people had tested positive for COVID-19 in the entire county (the figure is higher than 80,000 today). Potential positive tests were screened first to assure they were eligible for testing by a state-run lab. As we know now, testing is widely available — just hop in your car and go — and “anyone who thinks they need a test should get one,” according to the Shelby County Health Department (SCHD). Today’s testing availability surely would have seemed a marvel to Shelby Countians back in March. Perhaps the same will be true for vaccinations in the near future.

Where We Are Now

Vaccines currently flow from two manufacturers to the U.S. government, to the state, and, then, to the various health departments and hospitals in counties across the state. So far, the U.S. has ordered 400 million doses of the vaccine — 200 million from Moderna and 200 million from Pfizer. The country will need at least 655 million total doses to vaccinate more than 328 million American citizens twice.

As of Sunday, January 10th, The Washington Post reported that 6.7 million people had been vaccinated in the U.S. Around 22.1 million vaccine doses had been distributed with 24.1 million more scheduled for delivery this week, all of it designated to vaccinate the 97.4 million Americans (healthcare workers, first responders, the elderly) prioritized to get the vaccine first. The rollout’s reality so far has been well behind the Trump administration’s stated goal to vaccinate 20 million people by the end of 2020.

Tennessee has been allotted 462,650 doses of the vaccines. As of Sunday, 197,000 people had received a shot, covering roughly 3.4 percent of the people prioritized to get the vaccine and about 2.9 percent of the state’s population. The Post said 463,000 more doses were slated for delivery to Tennessee this week.

Shelby County got about 12,000 doses of the state’s first allotment. In the first seven days, healthcare workers here administered doses to 9,500 people. The rest were to be given out this week. Some doses of the vaccine became available as people missed their appointment times — enough so that the health department temporarily opened access to those in lesser priority categories, including those over age 75 and funeral home workers. This practice ended last week as the rest of the doses were given to those in nursing homes or other congregant living settings.

A Vaccination Workforce

Let’s say Shelby County suddenly had 1.3 million doses, enough to vaccinate everyone in the county twice. Overcoming that barrier comes with its own barrier. Who will administer all those shots?

“There is no cavalry coming,” says Dr. Scott Strome, executive dean of the College of Medicine at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC). “It’s just not there.”

Strome explains that flu vaccines, for example, are routinely given at doctors’ offices, drug store chains like Walgreens and CVS, hospitals, and elsewhere. But that’s not the case for the COVID-19 vaccine, specifically the one from Pfizer, which must be stored at a very cold temperature. It comes with a host of specific regulations in order to be able store it and deliver it to patients. Few places are equipped to meet those requirements, certainly not a parking-lot, pop-up type of location like those used with the flu vaccine.

For now, administering the vaccine is limited to those places with medical staff and proper storage facilities. So, no matter how much we get, Strome says, it’ll have to squeeze through a bottleneck of basic human resources: “You’re going to have to build a workforce to actually vaccinate people.”

Strome says UTHSC, the professional healthcare schools in the area, and other local leaders here are working to do just that. They’re teaming up to train, organize, and mobilize healthcare students, to turn them into a vaccination workforce.

We’ve seen this move from Strome before. He led healthcare students to open one of the first drive-through testing stations at the Mid-South Fairgrounds in March. Back then, he said that the pandemic had interrupted the education of UTHSC’s 700 students and that testing “is their way to give back to the community.”

New Shots, New Doses

Even if Shelby County did have an adequate vaccination team, it doesn’t have 1.3 million doses, not even close. With the promised 8,900 doses for the next three weeks and the original 12,000, we’d be able to vaccinate about 6 percent of Shelby County’s population, about 39,000 of the 656,000 we’d need for herd immunity. But there are some possible game-changers on the horizon. 

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), told the Associated Press (AP) last month that to have enough vaccine to cover up to 85 percent of the population — his projection for herd immunity — “you’re going to need more than two companies” making approved vaccine doses. That is happening.   

The World Health Organization (WHO) said that as of January 6th, 235 vaccines were in development across the globe. Sixty-three of those were in clinical development (human trials) and 172 were in preclinical stages.

The Trump administration promised AstraZeneca’s vaccine would be ready by October 2020 and that 300 million doses (at a cost of $1.3 billion) would be available by January under Operation Warp Speed. That vaccine candidate has not made it through the U.S. approval system but was approved in the U.K. (Officials now say the vaccine might not be ready for American arms until April.)

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital

Dr. Aditya Gaur

The AP said the “next big vaccine news” may come from Johnson & Johnson (J&J), aiming for a one-dose vaccine with help from Memphis. In November, UTHSC and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital offered a testing site for J&J’s Phase 3 clinical trial. Of the global trial’s nearly 45,000-person sample (all 18 and older), 300 of them were tested in Memphis. Enrollment in the trial has closed, says Dr. Aditya Gaur of St. Jude’s infectious diseases department, and participants here are getting routine check-ups, looking for any COVID-19 infections. Results of the trial will be driven by the number of infections, Gaur says, but they could come as soon as a month or two.     

Gaur notes the overall study will last two years. Before then, the vaccine could receive emergency use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), just as the Pfizer and Moderna drugs did, and “then we would have one more vaccine that can become part of what is being offered to individuals around the world,” Gaur says. “It’s a daunting task to provide a vaccine and provide a vaccine quickly, such that one can truncate the trajectory of infections that are there.”

If proved effective, the J&J vaccine, Gaur says, would “be a very good value-add” to drugs already on the market. The reason is simply because it would take only one dose. Achieving that would remove patient volume from the vaccine line, and the complexity of getting patients to come in twice. 

A single-dose vaccine was something that Mayor Harris mentioned in his remarks last week. “It’s possible that one of those companies may get approval for a single-dose vaccine. It is conceivable — theoretically — that if that happened, that we may be able to cut our vaccination process in half.”

While the world waits for more medicines to make it through government approvals, some are looking to stretch what we already have for a wider spread of vaccines. British health officials surprised many public leaders and public health professionals around the world recently when they announced that they would delay the second dose of the vaccine in favor of inoculating more people with a single dose, first.

The British Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) issued a statement on December 31st to note the shift in strategy. Those countries (England, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland) will now vaccinate as many people as possible with the first dose of the vaccine, rather than give two doses to high-priority groups, like healthcare workers and the elderly.

“In terms of protecting priority groups, a model where we can vaccinate twice the number of people in the next two to three months is obviously much more preferable in public health terms than one where we vaccinate half the number but with only slightly greater protection,” reads the letter.

Current protocols approved in the U.S. call for an interval of 21 days between the first and second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. For the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, the interval is 28 days between the first and second dose. U.K. health officials said their review of late-stage, drug-trial results led them to believe it would be okay to wait around three months between the first dose and the second.

They said the first dose of the vaccine is “very important for duration of protection” while “the additional increase of vaccine efficacy from the second dose is likely to be modest.” They noted that the “great majority of the initial protection from clinical disease is after the first dose of the vaccine.” 

The move met skepticism from health officials in other countries. On January 4th, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn said in a letter that any changes to approved vaccine protocols is “premature and not rooted solidly in the available evidence.” Hahn said drug-trial patients who did not get the second dose within three or four weeks weren’t followed closely enough and the FDA could not conclude anything definitive yet about patients getting just one dose.

“If people do not truly know how protective a vaccine is, there is the potential for harm because they may assume that they are fully protected when they are not, and, accordingly, alter their behavior to take unnecessary risks,” Hahn said in the letter.

Similar skepticism on the U.K. move has come from scientists and doctors in Great Britain and in the World Health Organization, all of whom expressed concerns about the science.

The U.S. is reviewing another dosing maneuver that would get the vaccine into more Americans more quickly. Scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are studying the Moderna vaccine to learn whether a half dose would be as effective as a whole dose. If so, the move could double the supply and make the vaccine more widely available.

While a December 17th review of the protocol seemed promising, the FDA’s Hahn, again, did not support it. “We know that some of these discussions about changing the dosing schedule or dose are based on a belief that changing the dose or dosing schedule can help get more vaccine to the public faster,” Hahn said in a statement. “However, making such changes that are not supported by adequate scientific evidence may ultimately be counterproductive to public health.”

The incoming Biden administration, however, appears to be on board with Britain’s one-dose strategy. President-elect Joe Biden said last Friday that he aimed to release nearly every available dose of the coronavirus vaccine when he takes office, a break with the Trump administration’s strategy of holding back half of U.S. vaccine production to ensure second doses are available.

The Vaccine’s the Thing

So there is hope for change on the horizon. Mass vaccine plans and other fresh ideas are out there. We’ve come a long way since last March. But we live in a county that just surpassed 1,000 COVID-19-related deaths on Friday, and reports of deaths are rising day to day. The weekly average of positive tests has also risen sharply. Hospitals are jammed. The number of active cases — the number of people known to have COVID-19 in the county — usually hovers around 7,000, a figure that had been at 2,000 in October. Health officials announced last week that COVID-19 was the third-leading cause of death in 2020, just below heart disease and cancer. Even so, Shelby County is doing far better (on a per capita basis) than most of Tennessee, a testament that city and county leaders were right to take aggressive positions early on.

The COVID-19 holy trinity — masks, hand washing, and social distancing — has been preached to residents here time and time again, in speeches, in commercials, in briefings, and on flyers, ads, internet memes, and by politicians, athletes, and celebrity chefs. Has it helped? Probably. But precise data on the effectiveness of the campaign is difficult to determine.

Capacity at gyms has been cut to 50 percent, including staff. Bars are closed. The capacity at restaurants has been cut to 25 percent, and customers must be six feet apart. Even while restaurants remain open, SCHD Health Officer Bruce Randolph says “just because something is legally permitted does not mean that it is medically advisable.”

A new Stay-At-Home order won’t lift until January 22nd, and it hasn’t — so far — changed any key COVID-19 figures in the county. Randolph says data from the change wasn’t expected until this week and, so, “the jury’s still out” on whether Stay At Home has worked this time. With new data, Randolph says a further lockdown order may be needed.

Limits on large groups have also been a bedrock of any health directive issued to ease human contact in Shelby County. At various times, gathering sizes in the county have been limited to 50 people, and even down to 10 on occasion.

Daily Memphian reporter Jane Roberts asked Randolph last week what else was left for the health department to do — after closing businesses, preaching hygiene, and ordering people to stay home. People must “become more responsible and more compliant. We were doing things to educate and reinforce. … but the bottom line is that people themselves must do the right thing,” Randolph told Roberts. “We shouldn’t have to just completely shut everything down in order to get you to do that right thing.”

Asking people to “do that right thing” clearly did not work particularly well in Shelby County over the past few weeks. David Sweat, the health department’s Chief of Epidemiology, says his office was able to track a “sort of normal pattern of people’s behaviors” from March to mid-November. But all bets were off with the three “super spreader events” of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve.

“That’s three waves of a behavior change in a population that have a tendency to supercharge the epidemic,” Sweat says. “The impact of that may make it harder to see the impact of a vaccine because we’re not in a normal [virus] distribution pattern right now.”

Normal won’t happen, Sweat says, until 70 percent of the county’s population — or 655,000 people — can be vaccinated. With the current vaccine supply, getting there could take a year. Before then, though, we could see the impact of the vaccine in decreasing case or transmission rates. Sweat says he’s not sure how many people would need to be vaccinated before we could come to that tipping point.

But Sweat hopes prioritizing healthcare workers, nursing home residents, and vulnerable populations (like the elderly and those with underlying health conditions) will begin to bend down the county’s death rate. “That is absolutely the purpose of targeting and prioritizing those folks,” he says. “There is a lot of evidence that if people — even if they aren’t in those groups — do get COVID and they’ve been vaccinated, that their illness is far less severe, they’re much less likely to go to the hospital, and [the virus is] much less likely to kill them.” 

And that’s a start. That’s where we are. The bottom line is that the vaccine may be the only thing that will ultimately begin to move Shelby County through the dark tunnel toward the light of normalcy. How fast we get there is still the big question.

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Politics Politics Feature

Politics 2020: COVID-19 and a Shaggy-Dog Presidential Election

Politics so often is a matter of timing and deadlines. Such-and-such a date for announcing a candidacy. Such-and-such a date for filing. There’s a withdrawal deadline. A schedule of fundraisers, campaign kickoffs, and headquarters openings. The start of early voting, election day itself. And if all goes well, a time and date for one’s inauguration and/or public swearing-in.

All that regularity and the established calendar of publicly shared functions were skewed big-time in the shaggy-dog story of 2020 — a year in which pestilence stalked the land and drove everyone apart from one another, and the biggest race of all, that for the presidency, was made anti-climactic by the refusal of the loser to admit to the plain and obvious results.

Still and all, some things got accomplished — the most significant of which was the American voters’ decisive rejection of the Trump presidency, a reality-TV show characterized by its total denial of reality, never more so than in an unending election aftermath in which the unfrocked leader, naked as a jaybird, cried foul and continued to clamor for the cloak of high office long after it made any sense to do so.

Indeed, one of the unresolved mysteries at year’s end was the question of whether on January 20th of the new year, Donald Trump will voluntarily take his leave or have to be frog-marched out of  the White House. In any case, Democrat Joe Biden will be inaugurated, and with him, hopefully, an era of comparative sense and empathy.

Another matter yet to be resolved was that of which party would control the U.S. Senate, a question that won’t be answered until January 5th via the outcome of two runoff elections in the state of Georgia, a state that went blue in the presidential election and seems destined to become the kind of political bellwether that Tennessee itself used to be when the tide of power would shift back and forth between Republicans and Democrats.

The Volunteer State itself has become so predictably right-wing and Republican that not only could no ranking Democrat be found to oppose Trump’s hand-picked Senate candidate, former Ambassador and state official Bill Hagerty, but the exemplars of GOP-dominated state government — legislative, executive, and, in the case of the state Attorney General, quasi-judicial — all willingly followed the Trump line, even to the extent of blessing his rebellion against the outcome of a Constitutional election.

Once again, despite spirited challenges by Democrats in legislative races, several of them right here in Shelby County, the Republicans held onto their super-majority in the General Assembly. At the congressional level, both local U.S. Representatives, Democrat Steve Cohen in the 9th District and Republican David Kustoff in the 8th, held serve against what were basically nominal challenges. Cohen and his congressional counterpart in Nashville, Jim Cooper, were the only Democrats to maintain a position of political prominence statewide.

At all levels of government in 2020, the specter of COVID-19 made its presence felt, accounting for bursts of financial largesse and sporadic action. Governor Bill Lee monitored the pandemic but proved loath to establish much beyond minimal voluntary safety mandates. The legislature responded to the emergency with a lengthy recess of several months (one which set aside resolution of several controversial matters) and resumed in mid-summer to convert a $200 million infrastructure allotment into a COVID emergency fund. Memphis and Shelby County both profited but had to fight for their share. Both governments also benefited from the federal CARES act and established a joint task force. County government in particular weighed in on anti-COVID efforts via consistent Health Department directives, and at year’s end, amid a new spike in cases, county Mayor Lee Harris and Bartlett Mayor Keith McDonald were leading the drive for a statewide mask mandate.

Efforts to upgrade local election machinery foundered during 2020 due to fundamental disagreements between activists seeking the transparency of paper-ballot voting systems and county election administrator Linda Phillips, who, backed by an Election Commission majority, preferred ballot-marking devices. Meanwhile, vigorous legal efforts by local plaintiffs had broadened the availability of mail-in balloting, providing a way station of sorts toward change in voting procedures.

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Politics Politics Feature

Wish Lists

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

As expected, the Biden-Harris ticket was an easy winner in Democratic-dominated Shelby County last week; also unsurprising was the overwhelming support enjoyed by the Trump-Pence Republican ticket in Tennessee at large.

To the extent that there was any kind of suspense factor, it was in a pair of local races. Even as Democrats nationally made serious inroads on previously Republican suburban areas, the contests for House District 83 and House District 96, both on the suburban fringe, were unusually tight. Republican state Representative Mark White was able to hold off a stout challenge by Democrat Jerri Green, by a margin of 17,682 to 15,063, and the GOP’s John Gillespie had an even closer margin over Democratic candidate Gabby Salinas, 14,697 to 14,212.

Jackson Baker

House Speaker Cameron Sexton

Gillespie, who won the open seat vacated by former Representative Jim Coley, was one of two new members of the Shelby County delegation. The other was Democrat Torrey Harris, who easily won over longtime incumbent John DeBerry, forced to run this year as an independent, in House District 90.

Both Gillespie and Harris were on hand on Monday and Tuesday for the Shelby County legislative delegation’s annual legislative retreat, this year conducted virtually as a Zoom meeting.

Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland, a first-day speaker, said he wants CLERB, the city’s independent civilian review board, to have subpoena powers of its own so that it need not go through the city council in probing accusations of police misconduct. The mayor also wants Memphis to have equity with Nashville in state funding received for mental health services. “We have many more mental health patients than Nashville, but Nashville gets more,” he said Monday.

The annual retreat, at which spokespersons for major local interests state their wish lists for the coming legislative session in Nashville, is normally held in January, just before the session begins, but got a bit of a jump-start this year.

Among the other desiderata on Monday, the first day of the two-day virtual session:

Patrice J. Robinson, chair of the Memphis City Council, asked the legislators to pass a bill banning payday lenders. She also wanted to see the decriminalization of medical marijuana and a continuation of the COVID-era expedient of allowing sales-to-go of alcoholic beverages from storefronts.

Robinson endorsed as well a bill that state Senator Brian Kelsey (R-District 31) said he would introduce increasing the local portion of the state sales tax — this as a means of recouping some of the financial loss to cities from the pending elimination of the state Hall income tax on dividends and investments.

Memphis Police Department director Michael Rallings focused on the gun problem, maintaining that increased prevalence of firearms was the main reason for a rise in certain categories of crime. “Thank goodness permitless carry was not passed,” Rallings said, musing on the last legislative session. Rallings also noted for the lawmakers that he considers Memphis to be “490 to 700 officers down” from an optimum roster number.

The headliner on day two, Tuesday, was state Speaker of the House Cameron Sexton, Republican of Crossville, who promised the legislators that the General Assembly’s calendar would be flexed with the uncertainties of COVID-19 in mind so that, as one example, they would have a little “extra time for filing their bills.”

Asked about his attitude toward marijuana legislation, Sexton said he would feel more comfortable with efforts to legalize medical marijuana if the federal government removed its status as a Schedule 1 drug. Sexton said he was in favor of local jurisdictions making decisions about such issues as school openings and guns on school property. He also said, apropos the dormant Memphis megasite, “We’ve gone too far to pull back.”

During his appearance before the legislators, Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris noted his concern about skeptical statements made by Governor Bill Lee and state Attorney General Herbert Slatery regarding the results of the presidential election won by President-elect Joe Biden. That was one of the few times during the two-day session that partisanship as such became a subject of discussion.

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Politics Politics Feature

No Rubber Stamp: County Commission Flexes Against Election Commission, Harris

One bottom-line message emerged from Monday’s public meeting of the Shelby County Commission: The commission does not intend to function as a rubber stamp — not for the Election Commission and not for County Mayor Lee Harris.

In a much-anticipated vote on a request for a $5,815,405 purchase of voting machinery from the ES&S Company, the momentum of a tense, drama-filled debate tilted against the buy when county commission Chairman Eddie Jones pointedly reminded Election Commissioner Brent Taylor, who was making the pitch, that the county commission had put itself on record, not for ballot-marking machines of the sort marketed by ES&S but for hand-marked voting devices.

Jones was immediately backed up by Commissioner Tami Sawyer, and the commission’s vote, in short order, was 6 ayes, 5 nays, and 2 abstentions — leaving the measure one vote short of the necessary seven. During the debate, Commissioner Willie Brooks had reminded Taylor of his intriguing statement he had made to the Flyer last March: “The process is backwards,” Taylor said then. “The Election Commission should not have initiated the RFP and passed the decision about funding on to the county commission. What we [the Election Commission members] should have done is come to some broad general decision about the kind of machines we wanted and then let the county commission issue an RFP [request for proposal], make the choice, and then vote on the funding.”

Soon came another demonstration point, led by Edmund Ford, who wanted to establish commission authority over what he deemed a mayoral overreach: a $1 million expenditure to two local PR agencies to produce an ad promoting face masks as a prophylactic against COVID-19. The ad was commissioned by Harris in August under statutory emergency powers assumed to be his under the federal Cares Act. But Ford insisted that the statute did not give the county mayor authority without commission consent to contract for a sum larger than $50,000. Commissioner Van Turner, who had wanted to withdraw the resolution, said unhappily after a vote of 7 nays and 3 abstentions against it, that the matter had been a “political show,” a case of “wanting to stick it to the mayor.”

Early voting for the November 3rd election begins October 14th and runs through October 29th at the following 26 locations; 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., Monday through Friday; 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., Saturday.

• Abundant Grace Fellowship Church, 1574 E. Shelby Dr., Memphis, 38116

• Agricenter International, 7777 Walnut Grove Rd., Memphis, 38120

• Mississippi Blvd. Church Family Life Center, 70 N. Bellevue Blvd., Memphis, 38104

• New Bethel Missionary Baptist Church, 7786 Poplar Pike, Germantown, 38138 

• Arlington Safe Room, 11842 Otto Ln.,  Arlington, 38002

• Anointed Temple of Praise, 3939 Riverdale Rd., Memphis, 38115

• Baker Community Center, 7942 Church Rd., Millington, 38053

• Berclair Church of Christ, 4536 Summer Ave., Memphis, 38122

• Briarwood Church, 1900 N. Germantown Pkwy., Memphis, 38016

• Collierville Church of Christ, 575 Shelton Dr., Collierville, 38017

• Compassion Church, 3505 S. Houston Levee Rd., Germantown, 38139

• Dave Wells Community Center, 915 Chelsea Ave., Memphis, 38107

• Glenview Community Center, 1141 S. Barksdale St., Memphis, 38114

• Greater Lewis Street Baptist Church, SE Corner of Poplar and E. Parkway N., Memphis, 38104

• Greater Middle Baptist Church, 4982 Knight Arnold Rd., Memphis, 38118

• Harmony Church, 6740 St. Elmo Rd.,  Bartlett, 38135

• Mt. Pisgah Missionary Baptist Church, 1234 Pisgah Rd., Cordova, 38016

• Mt. Zion Baptist Church, 60 S. Parkway E., Memphis, 38106

• Raleigh United Methodist Church, 3295 Powers Rd., Memphis, 38128

• Riverside Missionary Baptist Church, 3560 S. Third St., Memphis, 38109

• Shelby County Election Commission, James Meredith Bldg., 157 Poplar Ave., Memphis, 38103

• Second Baptist Church, 4680 Walnut Grove Blvd., Memphis, 38117

• Solomon Temple MB Church, 1460 Winchester Rd., Memphis, 38116

• The Pursuit of God Church (Bellevue Frayser,) 3759 N. Watkins, Memphis, 38127

• White Station Church of Christ, 1106 Colonial Road, Memphis, 38117

• The Refuge Church, 9817 Huff N Puff Rd., Lakeland, 38002

Categories
Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

Shelby County Bars Eligible for $10,000 ‘Share the Tab’ Grants

Justin Fox Burks

Cady Smith with a blazing cocktail

Limited service restaurants (or bars) impacted by COVID-19 shutdowns can now access $450,000 in grant funding from the Shelby County government’s Share the Tab program.

The program was announced Tuesday, September 22nd, and is supported by federal CARES Act funding. County officials said the $10,000 grants are available for rent/mortgage, payroll, sanitization, expenses related to switching to a full-service restaurant, and more.

“Limited service restaurants, or bars, as they are most commonly referred, have taken a profound and significant hit to their businesses,” said Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris. “These businesses are often locally owned. They employ thousands of workers in our community. They give back to our community in countless ways. This new program is about trying to help these businesses get on the path to recovery. Although we continue to fight COVID, we also have to move towards a safe economic recovery.”

Nearly 45 limited service restaurants were required to close their doors at the beginning of the summer and, for the most part, remain closed. Shelby County Health Department officials announced Tuesday that — thanks to steady virus data here — bars, wine bars, pubs, taprooms, and more could open Wednesday.

“The Share the Tab fund supports the restaurant and hospitality industry in a tangible way,” said Shelby County Commissioner Van Turner. “We know that social distancing requirements make it difficult for social clubs and bars to operate as they did before. I hope that every qualifying business applies for the funds.”

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Kustoff Defends Postal Changes

The U.S. Postal Service cannot “continue to act like Blockbusters in a Netflix world.” So said 8th District U.S. Representative David Kustoff in a Zoom address to the Rotary Club of Memphis. The matter came up in relation to concerns about the effect of reductions of postal services on mail-in ballots.

Speaking from his local office in Ridgeway Loop, Kustoff said those reductions reflected ongoing social changes — mainly the drastic reduction in first-class mail caused by the cyber-revolution — and had begun under President Obama. “The Postal Service will have to adapt,” he said.

On another matter, Kustoff took note of the fact that there has been no congressional follow-up to the original COVID-related stimulus payments and said that the window for passing another stimulus bill had, for practical purposes, shrunk to the dimensions of the next three weeks.

Congressman David Kustoff

Members of Congress stand ready to return to Washington to vote for a solution as soon as one is agreed to by the two parties, he said, but, “once we hit October, everybody will be in their districts and involved with campaigns.”

• COVID-19 has clearly affected the way running for office has proceeded, locally. Certain races that usually involve a significant amount of public appearances or door-to-door contacts are more than usually dependent on social media, mailouts, phone banks, and — not least — polls.

Much polling is, of course, carried out by disinterested parties and seeks genuine opinion sampling. But increasingly candidates invest in polling, including “push polls” that are phrased so as to insinuate various points of views, for or against. And there are “benchmark” polls, designed to elicit public attitudes on various issues so as to guide the campaign strategy of a given candidate.

Two polls that were dropped last week indicate the range. One, arriving in people’s message boxes, is entitled “The Voter Survey,” and, despite its generalized name, is not so anodyne as all that, including as it does several leading questions that “push” in the direction of some candidates as against others.

The other poll, on Facebook, asks a wide variety of questions about various candidates and offices, and, to the degree that it deals with positions, phrases those positions more or less fairly. It, like the other poll, seems to focus ultimately on the state House District 83 race between incumbent Republican Mark White and Democratic challenger Jerri Green — indicating that the District 83 race is considered up for grabs. More on these two polls anon.

• The Shelby County Commission is scheduled to meet next in committee on September 9th, and, if all goes as County Mayor Lee Harris has indicated, they’ll finally have a budget book from the administration to pore over. Uncertainty over the final shape of the 2020-21 budget has vexed the last several meetings of the commission, and the budget book, which has been firmly promised for delivery on September 8th by Deputy Mayor Dwan Gillom, could go far toward resolving several issues or opening up new questions. Or both.

In recent meetings, the commission has been asked to lift a freeze on new hiring for several departments, both in the purview of elected officials and elsewhere. Those departments seeking relief from the freeze have pointed out that the proposed new positions would remain within fiscal limits voted on earlier. The commission has agreed to lift the freeze in one or two instances but in other cases has held judgment, pending receipt of the budget book.

Budget issues have been complicated by disagreements between the commission and the administration over an abundance of matters — ranging from the actual status and amount of funds on hand to the matter of authority over revising specific allocations. The original budget proposal submitted by Harris for the new fiscal year was rejected by the commission, which, after a lengthy series of meetings, proposed and voted on a different sort of budget altogether. In several areas, implementation of the budget has awaited the final details in the aforesaid administration budget book.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

“I’m No Newcomer”

Who is Marquita Bradshaw? That question got asked a lot last Thursday night, when the Memphis woman took the lead in the Democratic primary’s field of five for United States Senate and kept it all the way until the last votes were counted.

Marquita Bradshaw

That race was supposed by most political observers to be in the bag for Nashville lawyer and Iraq war vet James Mackler, who had been campaigning for two years and raised some $2 million.

Bradshaw, whose receipts were in the low thousands, is surprised that anybody was surprised and seems offended at those who attributed her win to her name being atop the ballot.

“I’ve been an organizer within my community for over 25 years, working on environmental justice issues. And that wasn’t just within Memphis, but that was across the nation and internationally,” she said this week in a telephone interview. “I went through the AFL-CIO Organizing Institute, and I became a union organizer. But before then I was working with an environmental justice network with people across the United States on issues of environmental racism.”

She added: “I’ve been around. I’ve just been an organizer. It’s not a surprise to anybody in the social justice community, or anybody that’s in labor, that we’re here right now.”

She also can claim a long history as an environmentalist: “I’m on the Sierra Club executive committee, and I also serve on the Chickasaw Group.” She also went through the Leaders of Color education initiative.

And, as far as political campaigns go, this was not her first rodeo. Bradshaw has experience working in political races. She is the daughter of Doris DeBerry-Bradshaw, who has been a political candidate, and she is the niece of John DeBerry, the longtime incumbent State Representative from House District 90.

So it is clear that, unlike so many people’s assumptions, she is not a complete novice, and Democrats, who haven’t had much success with statewide elections in recent years, can only hope that her name recognition — along with sources of support — continues to expand as she faces the GOP’s well-heeled Senatorial nominee, the Trump-supported Bill Hagerty.

• At a point well into the 2020-21 fiscal year, the Shelby County budget situation is still in confusion, with members of the county commission still uncertain as to whether funds are on hand for a variety of county programs.

One persistent issue during the commission’s regular public meeting on Monday was the matter of a finished budget book, which could spell out in some specificity the county’s assets, liabilities, and available funds. But, just as during what seemed an interminable struggle to produce a budget in early summer, the commission and the administration of Mayor Lee Harris are having difficulty agreeing on means and ends and on what the facts are.

An early resolution on the commission’s Monday agenda attempted to open the way toward terminating a current hiring freeze and to establish August 19th as the date for receipt of a budget book from the administration. Dwan Gilliom, the administration CAO, could promise no date for the book other than “early September,” while county financial officer Mathilde Crosby indicated that no additional funds could be freed up and no exchange could be worked out whereby federal funding for COVID purposes could be “swapped out” to enable equivalent funding opportunities in the county’s general fund.

Commissioner Edmund Ford Jr. noted that the Memphis City Council had done something similar with its federal COVID funds and wondered why the commission couldn’t do the same. Commissioner Van Turner followed up by prodding the administration to “show some cooperation.”

• Ninth District Congressman Steve Cohen, in the first Zoom press availability since his renomination in last week’s election, told reporters Tuesday that President Trump and Republicans in Congress continue to be unserious in negotiations for a renewed coronavirus aid package, and stressed that, in addition to such matters as unemployment insurance and another stimulus round, funding for the U.S. Postal Service, election security, and public nutrition is at stake.

“I think they lie about everything,” Cohen said, including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in the sweep of his remarks. The Congressman also continued in his criticism of the Tennessee Valley Authority, saying, “TVA is not what it used to be. It isn’t what Franklin D. Roosevelt created. Their electric rates are among the highest in the country.”

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Rumblings on the Commission

It is the City Council that grabs most of the headlines and TV attention, but it must be remembered that the Shelby County Commission not only represents more constitutionally ordained authority than does the Council, it is the body that ultimately calls the shots on such important aspects of our collective life as public education and public health.

Eddie Jones

Not that the Commission controls the public schools; it just pays for them on behalf of the taxpayers. It can’t dictate on matters of curriculum — those are entirely to be worked out between the School Board and the superintendent’s office — but the Commissioners can, if they choose, withhold funding for the schools if they don’t like the drift of things.

Once in a while, in the heat of debate on the Commission, action of that sort gets threatened. One of the most persistent critics of the Shelby County Schools system is current County Commissioner Edmund Ford Jr., an educator himself and one who, in particular, is forever suspicious of S.C.S. spending plans and demands to see the fine print and the bottom line regarding virtually everything representatives of the school system bring to the Commission to get funded.

And now the Commission, which already is responsible for monitoring the county Health Department, is — in the crush of the ongoing pandemic — attempting to ground its authority even deeper, with the proposed creation of a Shelby County Health Board. The recent proposal to do so, which seemed at first to be uncontroversial, has become anything but.

Two key members of the Commission, outgoing chairman Mark Billingsley and Edmund Ford Jr., withdrew their sponsorship of the enabling ordinance at Monday’s Commission meeting amid reported pressure from city government and suburban municipalities — both of which entities are said to view the proposed new Board as threatening to their own power concerns. “We don’t like people trying to pre-empt us. We don’t like the state to pre-empt us, and we don’t like anybody else doing it, either,” said a well-placed source in Memphis city government.

The city, of course, is the driving force behind the Memphis-Shelby County COVID-19 Task Force, though virtually everyone of importance in local medicine, not to mention representatives of all the municipalities and first-responder agencies, is a member of that sprawling body which, for all the honorific nature of its cast of characters, does hard work and holds at least two valuable public information sessions during the week.

What the Task Force does not have is the power to compel policy throughout the county, and that is what the proposed Board would have, and that is why city and suburban officials were resistant to it right away. Van Turner, the low-keyed but highly influential inner-city Democratic commissioner and former chairman, is the remaining major sponsor, and he indicates he is amenable to broadening the composition of the Board — certainly not to the dimensions of the Task Force but in ways inclusive of the concerned separate jurisdictions.

After a preliminary 7-3 vote on the Board proposition and a decision to send it back to committee, the process of compromise and overhaul has begun. As it proceeds to the point necessary for passage, the concept of the Board seems likely to become that of an advisory body rather than a prescriptive one, and, in that case, its relevance as an add-on to the Task Force may cease to be obvious.

Besides the initial aversion of Memphis and suburban officialdom to the idea of the Health Board, there was another inherent obstacle to its creation — the ever-widening gap between Mayor Lee Harris and the Commission itself. There has always been a certain tension between the two power centers of mayor and Commission. In a sense the relationship is based on a balance of power, and relations between the two have always swung pendulum-like between common purpose and rivalry.

It was the latter state that dominated things during the last two or three years of the administration of former Mayor Mark Luttrell. A jurisdictional dispute that had begun in 2015 over the amount and disposition of a county fiscal surplus would harden into long-term enmity. A pair of Repubican commissioners — Terry Roland of Millington and Heidi Shafer of East Memphis — would each serve a term as Commission chair during the crucial period and the two of them, working with each other and with a technical Democratic majority, would supervise a rebellion against the GOP mayor that would erode his authority significantly and see him, at the end of his two terms in 2018, unable or unwilling even to oversee the details of transition to the newly elected Democratic mayor, Lee Harris.

Harris came into office with an 8 to 5 Democratic majority and resolved to avoid any schism with the Commission. Yet here he is, two years later, with the Commission having seized the initiative on producing the budget — and not tenderly, either — exactly as the previous Commission had done with Luttrell at the very start of their mutual alienation.

Brandon Morrison

It is this Mayor-Commission dichotomy and not partisan bickering that had seemingly become the major determinant of disagreements in county government. Yet that may be changing, as partisanship certainly reared up as a reality in the course of Monday’s election of chair and vice chair.

The Shelby County Commission has, more than most bodies elected by partisan election, been able to enjoy cooperation across party lines — certainly more so than Congress or the state legislature in Nashville. As already noted, the case can be made that Republicans Roland and Shafer (neither of whom can be described as a moderate) provided the guidelines for group action in the previous version of the Commission, a majority-Democrat one like the present version, which lines up 8 to 5 Democratic.

Which is not to say that Shafer and Roland imposed GOP ideology; except for their efforts on behalf of a tax cut, the main Commission emphasis during that period arguably was on behalf of MWBE (Minority and Women-owned Business Enterprises). That and resistance to Nashville on matters like school vouchers.

Two Democrats — Eddie Jones and Edmund Ford Jr. — have experienced no problem working back and forth across the political aisle, in much the same manner as Jones and Justin Ford did in the previous Commission. The occasional vote on a partisan matter has often seen either or both of them voting with the body’s GOP members. Up until now, there has been no equivalent among Republicans.

That all changed on Monday, when, after a unanimous vote of all Commissioners for Jones as the body’s next chairman, East Memphis Republican Brandon Morrison joined six Democrats in a vote to make herself vice chair and defeat fellow Republican Amber Mills, a north county member who tilts significantly to the right and was the preferred candidate of the other GOP members. The significance of the vote is the bearing it is likely to have a year from now when the vice chair will presumably be in the catbird seat for the next vote for chair.

Mark Billingsley, a Republican from Germantown and the outgoing chairman, has reacted with outrage to what he sees as devious and disloyal action on the part of Morrison (whose conservative voting record, incidentally, has not been radically dissimilar from Mills’), and he declined to consider a motion from Democrat Tami Sawyer to make Morrison’s election unanimous.

While Democrats like Van Turner and Reginald Milton saw the matter as no big deal, except as a good-for-the-goose, good-for-the-gander bit of parallelism, the outgoing chair remained unappeased. Given that Billingsley himself had, during his chairmanship, clearly attempted to position himself as a conciliator of factions, his reaction could signal a sea change in future relations between the parties. All that remains to be seen.