Tag: Mark Billingsley

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Politics Politics Feature

Shelby County Commission Prepares for New Fiscal Year

WIllie Brooks (Photo: shelbycountytn.gov)

In what amounted to their last public meeting of the expiring fiscal year, the 13 members of the Shelby County Commission resolved several pending issues, more or less clearing the boards for the year to come.

The Commission overwhelmingly endorsed County Mayor Lee Harris’ nomination of Dr. Michelle Taylor to be the new director of the Shelby County Health Department. The vote was 13-0, unanimous, and it included even Republican Commissioner Mark Billingsley, who had questioned the appointment in committee last week and raised doubts about it in a widely circulated email.

Billingsley made a point of apologizing to Taylor before casting his vote on Monday, attributing his former concerns to a feeling that he had been “misled” by Harris. He did not elaborate further. Taylor’s persona and credentials had been extolled by several audience members before the vote, and a sizeable number of attendees were on hand to root for her approval. The mayor had made a spirited speech in her favor in the Commission lobby before the vote.

Early in the meeting, county health officer Dr. Bruce Randolph had offered the Commission some new statistics indicating part of the challenges facing Taylor. As Randolph noted, only 35 percent of Memphis residents are vaccinated, and the rate of new cases, almost all involving the Delta variant, has jumped sixfold in the last month.

The Commission followed its ringing endorsement of Taylor by choosing a new General Sessions judge to replace the retiring John Donald. Danielle Mitchell Sims was selected from a group including Carlos Bibbs, James Jones, Cedrick Wooten, and William Larsha Jr.

Later on, the Commissioners elected Willie Brooks Jr. as new chair of the Commission in fiscal 2021-22, with Michael Whaley to serve as vice chair. A tradition of sorts was dispensed with, as both the new leaders are Democrats. With some deviations over the years, the Commission had adhered to a formula of alternating the party affiliation of chairs, with the vice chair being a member of the other party from the chair.

The Commission now contains eight Democrats and five Republicans, and outgoing Republican Vice Chair Brandon Morrison’s chances were dimmed for either of next year’s positions when her fellow Republicans cold-shouldered her — payback for her win for vice chair last year with Democratic votes against fellow Republican Amber Mills.

An important bit of old business was cleared out, as the Commission roundly defeated by a vote of 8 to 2 the latest of several requests from the Shelby County Election Commission to purchase $4 million of new ballot-marking voting machines from the ESS Corporation. Election Commission Chair Brent Taylor and Election Administrator Linda Phillips were on hand to plead for the Commission’s support.

The Commission, though, has the responsibility for purchasing new voting machines, and a Commission majority has consistently voted its preference for paper-ballot devices, for reasons of both transparency and expenses. The two bodies have been at an impasse for at least a year on the matter — “Your power versus our power,” said County Commissioner Eddie Jones — and the Commission, by an 8 to 2 vote with one abstention, voted late in the meeting to put out its own RFP (request for proposal) for the paper-ballot devices it favors.

Two more pending issues of more recent vintage were dealt with on Monday. The Commission approved a procedure to process by the target date of September 15th bonuses that it had authorized for county employees in the most recent county budget — $5,000 for full-timers and $1,600 for temporaries. And the body approved a new ethics advisory panel for itself, to be constituted by members of the greater community.

The Commission’s newly formed Black Caucus held a brainstorming session in advance of the regular Commission meeting and emerged, under the guidance of caucus Chair Tami Sawyer, with a commitment to focus on economic and health issues. Caucus members also heard a report on environmental hazards in the city’s underserved neighborhoods and agreed to sponsor a blood drive for victims of sickle cell anemia.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

County Commission: Do the Ayes Still Have It?

The formal vocabulary of Shelby County Commission meetings is slowly gravitating from the antique and ornamental to current and ordinary forms of speech.

Until recently, as an example, meetings used to be opened by invocations by the sergeant-at-arms of the venerable Anglo-Norman phrase “oyez, oyez,” (except that the uniformed county officer serving in that role would pronounce the phrase “Oh yes, oh yes.”) These days, the officer says instead, “Hear ye, hear ye,” which happens to be what the archaic phrase “oyez, oyez,” still used in the U.S. Supreme Court and by numerous other tribunals, actually means.

A parallel phenomenon has been the attrition undergone by the archaic term “aye” as the traditional signifier of an affirmative vote. At some point in the early days of the Commission that was elected and installed in 2018, new Commissioner David Bradford, who represents Collierville and other suburban areas in east Shelby County, began saying simply “yes” when, in a roll call of Commissioners’ vote, he gave his okay to this or that measure.

The other members voting on his side of the issue would continue saying “aye,” an Anglo-Scottich term dating from the 16th century which has got itself lodged in parliamentary idiom ever since. Slowly, though, Bradford’s usage began catching on with other commissioners — fellow Republicans Mark Billingsley and Mick Wright, especially — who are now apt to say “yes” as often as “aye” when they vote in favor.

Though the dominion of the traditional term is slipping on the Commission, the ayes still have it, for the most part, as the word continues its general prevalence in roll calls. Oddly, the symmetrical equivalent to it, “nay,” goes totally unspoken in normal circumstances, except in the occasional summing up of a negative vote outcome, as in “the nays have it.”

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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.

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Politics Politics Feature

Numbed by the Numbers: County Commission Struggles to Agree on Budget

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Separate attempts to produce a budget for Shelby County failed to produce anything resembling a consensus on a marathon meeting day of the County Commission on Monday. Commission Chairman Mark Billingsley said he intends to call a special meeting for next week to see if the process can be expedited.
Jackson Baker

Commission Chairman Mark Billingsley

Billingsley told his fellow commissioners the called meeting would likely be necessary in the interests of reaching agreement on a budget, with the new fiscal year just around the corner on July 1st.

The Memorial Day holiday next week forces an adjustment of the normal schedule, which would mandate a day of committee meetings during the week, preparatory to the next regular commission meeting the week after. The holiday forces the entire sequence to occur a week later, with committee meetings scheduled for June 3rd and the next regular public meeting to be on June 8th.

Hence the need for a called meeting, especially since Monday’s meetings — a special called budget meeting, starting at 11 a.m., followed by the regular Commission meeting at 3 p.m — became embroiled in complications that were still unsnarled when the commission adjourned at nearly midnight.

“We’re getting into another day,” said budget chair Eddie Jones wearily, with the clock moving toward the witching hour and one of the Webinar meeting’s participants, an administration staffer participating from home and having to alternate her contributions with soothing words for a restless two-year-old. “That sounds wonderful,” was the wistful comment of Commissioner Mick Wright on this audible reminder of a domestic life beyond numbers-crunching.

Various formulas have been adduced for dealing with a looming budget deficit that had looked to be as large as $10 million even before the effects of the coronavirus crisis pushed things even further into fiscal crisis.

In mid-April, County Mayor Lee Harris had proposed a $1.4 billion “lean and balanced” budget, with $13.6 million in specified cuts offset by a $16.50 raise in the county’s motor vehicle registration tax, a.k.a. the wheel tax. A majority of commissioners could not be found to agree, and alternative budget proposals, all with different versions of austerity, have since been floated, one by Commissioner Brandon Morrison, another by budget chair Jones, working more or less in tandem with vice chair Edmund Ford.

Among the issues raised by Monday’s day-long discussion was that of whether, as county Chief Financial Officer Mathilde Crosby contended, the proposals offered by Jones and Ford focused overmuch on cuts in administrative departments, thereby paralleling what has been something of a running feud between Harris and Ford based, as more than a few observers see it, as a potential long-term political rivalry between the two.

Crosby also offered criticism that the Jones-Ford proposals for budget-cutting ignored distinctions between the county’s general fund and various dedicated funds for mandated functions.

Another potential issue is that of the county tax rate, currently pegged at $4.05 per $100 of assessed value. Commissioner Reginald Milton, for one, believes that the rate is set artificially low because of simple mathematical error and that this factor is bound to doom the county to endless future variations of the current budget scramble until the rate is recalculated. The current rate has so far been reaffirmed in two of the three readings required for passage.

The budget issue is predominating over other matters, though the commission did reach an agreement Monday on what had been a controversial proposal by Commissioner Tami Sawyer for an ordinance requiring, on penalty of $50 fine, that residents and visitors wear protective face masks in public areas. Sawyer recast her proposal in the form of a resolution requesting such a requirement by the Health Department but providing for no fine. The resolution passed 8-5 on a party-line vote, with the Commission’s Democrats voting for and the Republicans voting against.

Another matter of consequence that awaits the commission is the matter of new voting machines for Shelby County. The commission has twice voted a preference that the county invest in a system of hand-marked paper ballots in time for the August county general election and federal-state primaries, but the Shelby County Election Commission has approved the recommendation of Election Administrator Linda Phillips that new ballot-marking machines from the ES&S Company be purchased instead.

With the elections approaching, the need for a decision soon increases. The process requires that Harris sign an order authorizing the purchase of a new system, after which the commission must vote for its funding. At issue is whether the commission will approve the Phillips/SCEC request or act according to its own preference for the hand-marked system.

A sizable and well-organized group of local activists is pushing for the latter option, on grounds, among others, that a system of hand-marked ballots would be cheaper, more transparent, and less vulnerable to hacking.

Other, related aspects of the controversy include allegations from the activist ranks of potential conflicts of interest involving Phillips and family members and a concern that purchase of the ES&S machines would involve an implicit need to purchase a new voter-registration system from the same company.

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Politics Politics Feature

Commission Gets $1.4 Billion “Lean” Budget from Harris

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Here’s one for you: What’s the difference between $10 million and $13.6 million?
The answer to that is two weeks. In that amount of time, Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris raised the floor on what he considered the minimum amount of spending cuts needed in the county’s 2020-2021 budget year.

On April 6th, Harris presented a plan to the Shelby County Commission calling for $10 million in cuts, spread among various departments of county government. In a lengthy discussion of alternative methods of reducing the budget, the commission decided to put off action on Harris’ plan.

In the meantime, the mayor has recalculated and increased the tab for what he considered necessary as a means, without raising taxes, to get the county through the dismal current reality of continued shutdown followed by uncertainty. Actually, Harris did propose a mite of increased taxpayer obligation to accompany his proposed austerity budget revealed on Monday — a “lean and balanced” one of $1.4 billion. The increase would be in the form of a $16.50 raise in the county’s motor vehicle registration tax, a.k.a., the wheel tax.

This is the second time of late that the wheel tax has figured as a component of a plan by Harris to raise revenue. The first time was earlier in the year when the mayor proposed an incremental increase in the wheel tax to finance a new contribution to the Memphis Area Transit Authority in the interests of expanding MATA’s purview.

Objections to that proposal from various commissioners and members of the public — no few of them noting that the wheel tax, as originally conceived, was meant to be restricted to education — scuttled that approach and forced the county to find other means to fund its MATA contribution.

But now it’s baaack! And, as repurposed in the mayor’s budgetary plan, it drew more tentative fire than before, with Republican Commissioner Brandon Morrison, who said she could support the precedent, nevertheless invoking the dread metaphor of “the slippery slope.”

Firmly but a bit apologetically, Harris pointed out that Shelby County’s property tax, sales tax, and hotel-motel tax were all at levels too high to push any further and that the county’s automobile license tax was at an “average enough level among equivalent state fees” that it had the right amount of give.

The two other components of the mayor’s austerity budget involved the aforementioned $13.6 million in cuts and a $6 million borrowing from the county’s fund balance, leaving that reserve fund at the comfortable go-no-lower level of $85 million.

Under probing from various commissioners, Harris defended his recommendations by saying explicitly that without cuts of the sort he proposed, the county would have to go up on taxes — “it’s one or the other” — and might have to impose layoffs, also.

Democratic Commissioner Tami Sawyer voiced a concern that, even should Harris’ cuts be adopted, layoffs might be around the corner.

The mayor’s proposed budget would shore up the target areas of health, public safety, and the social safety net, and it contains several new or protected expenditures — approximately $4 million to fund 30 new additional patrolman positions in the Sheriff’s Department, needed “to patrol the soon-to-be de-annexed areas” of Memphis; a second dose of $8.5 million to Pre-K and early Pre-K, as well as “$427 million for schools, in addition to $33 million in school construction needs this year.”

The budget also contains commitments for funding continued actions for relief and treatment during the COVID-19 epidemic.

The commissioners, who rejected the specifics of a hiring freeze proposed two weeks ago by Harris and resisted at the time by county department heads, adopted one of their own on Monday — a more lenient version that would freeze hiring and spending through June 30th but contained appeal procedures that Harris said made it a “soft freeze” compared to what had been his “hard stop.”

The freeze adopted Monday was sponsored by Republican commissioners Mick Wright and Morrison and got the seven votes needed for passage, with most Democratic commissioners either voting no or abstaining. 

Without being specific, Democratic Commissioner Edmund Ford Jr., a persistent critic of the mayor, compared Harris’ projected plans to some adopted in 2014 by the Memphis City Council on which both he and Harris served. Those financial arrangements would lower the county’s bond rating and draw the attention of the state comptroller, Ford said.

In related action on Monday, the commission unanimously approved the county tax rate for 2020-2021 — keeping the rate at its current level of $4.05 per assessed value of $100.

The commission also voted 7-4-1 in favor of a resolution, sponsored by Democratic commissioners Tami Sawyer, Michael Whaley, and Van Turner, requesting Governor Bill Lee to sanction no-excuse absentee voting for the duration of the coronavirus shutdown and expressing a preference for machines allowing voter-marked ballots. That vote was more or less along party lines — 7-5-1, with Democrat Ford joining several Republicans in opposition.

Online Glitches
Commissioners and other personnel participating in the commission’s meetings have by now gotten used to the webinar means of virtual electronic communication, whereby each participant tunes in from separate computer stations and discussions proceed more or less along the lines of Robert’s Rules of Order.
Jackson Baker

Mark Billingsley

But their familiarity has another side to it — highly noticeable Monday when a few commissioners allowed their lines to stay open during discussion, thereby picking up traces of private conversation and domestic soundtracks.

That fact, along with technological glitches in the presentation of the Harris budget, complicated the process of communication on Monday and kept GOP commission chair Mark Billingsley calling for order in that regard. 

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Politics Politics Feature

Virtual Deadlock: County Commission Fails to Resolve COVID Funding

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Several things have not changed during the transformation of Shelby County Commission meetings from open affairs held in the public auditorium of the Vasco Smith County Building Downtown to the current audio-visual affairs conducted online, with the commissioners and supporting county personnel all connecting virtually from their own separate computer spaces.

Jackson Baker

Sharing the screen during part of Monday’s prolonged County Commission meeting were (top row) Commission Chair Mark Billingsley and Commissioner Tami Sawyer; (bottom row) County Trustee Regina Morrison Newman, County C.A.O. Dwan Gilliom, and CFO Mathilde Crosby.

The meetings still engender seemingly endless back-and-forth bickering and bartering, still suffer from the longueurs, and still move toward their drawn-out conclusion in the most anti-climactic ways imaginable. 

Which is not to say that grave and significant matters do not get dealt with, along with not-so-momentous but still intriguing matters such as Commissioner Tami Sawyer’s conclusion that someone was “a piss-poor communicator.”

Who did she mean? It was hard to tell, since Sawyer’s opinion was of the open-mic variety, spilled unintentionally and only fragmentally during a lull in the proceedings Monday. Sawyer quickly realized she was being overheard, got her mic turned off, and the agenda item under discussion went on being discussed as it had been.

An hour or so later, however, Commission Chairman Mark Billingsley could not resist saying aloud, “I hope that wasn’t me you were talking about.” Sawyer, who had meanwhile apologized for her lapse, allowed as how “Yeah, it was,” then gave a mischievous chuckle to indicate she was kidding, and never did acknowledge who had actually been the subject of her observation.

Actually, all the commissioners, as each of them has demonstrated more than once, have decent talents for communicating. The problem Monday was that nobody ever quite managed to convince a majority of the others  regarding the one subject that proved most time-consuming and most vexing — how to fund a $2 million commitment to the Shelby County Health Department and the Emergency Management Agency to help deal with the coronavirus emergency, part of $10 million altogether that needed to be pared from a forthcoming county budget that was already threatened with mega-deficit.

Was the money to come out of proportionately deducted portions of monies counted on by the various departments of county government, as County Mayor Lee Harris had proposed? Or could it instead be carved in one big hunk out of the county’s Public Works budget, as Sawyer, Edmund Ford, and budget chair Eddie Jones had all proposed?

The problem with the mayor’s idea quickly became evident in complaints called into the meeting from various elected clerks protesting the potential diminution of their funding. The problem with the Sawyer-Jones-Ford plan was that it would violate two desiderata by causing layoffs and by canceling county contracts. In the end, neither of those alternatives, nor any other, would pass muster with a commission majority, and the solution was postponed until the commission convenes again — virtually — in committee meetings on Wednesday of next week.

The most remarkable thing about Monday’s meeting, a “Webinar” affair as indicated, was that, despite various technical glitches, such as people’s mics going off — or on — at the wrong time, the meeting developed its themes in the same slowly accretive way as always, threats, like Ed Ford’s to start calling out administrative improprieties, got made the same way as before. Tempers flared and subsided in familiar ways, and key players determined the political flavor of certain outcomes merely by shifting from one partisan group to the ranks of the other in the case of a particular vote. All of this, according to the long-established patterns characteristic of boisterous public meetings with everybody on hand to stare everybody else down.

And, just as it was when they were all together in one place, they had difficulty in finding a place in the proceedings to hang up and say goodbye. Somebody always had some last words that had to be said. And that’s how bare-bones agendas, like Monday’s, become five-hour meetings.

In all fairness, the time and energy spent in trying — and failing — to devise a framework for making truly serious financial cuts for the sake of a cause so urgent as confronting the worldwide scourge of COVID-19, to pay for the PPEs and other paraphernalia of constructive self-defense, was not wasted. They’ll get it right next time now that they’ve worked out the kinks.

Meantime another thorny matter, that of what to do about the issue of paper ballots in forthcoming county elections, was postponed on the quite logical grounds that the Shelby County Election Commission has not yet crossed its own Rubicon on the matter. It will, though, and almost certainly in time for the Commission’s next installment of Webinar.

The August 6 Election Roster as of Now
SHELBY COUNTY SCHOOLS BOARD: Five of the nine Positions are up. 
District 2: Incumbent Althea Green is unopposed.
District 3: Incumbent Stephanie Love has opposition from Aaron Youngblood and Jesse Jeff.
District 4: Incumbent Kevin Woods is opposed by Kristy Sullivan,  Tamarques Porter, Allison Fouche, Clyde W. Pinkston, and Joann Massey.
District 5: Incumbent Scott McCormick will be opposed by Paul Evelyn Allen, Sheleah Harris, April Ghueder, and, if his signatures check out, Mauricio Calvo.
District 7: Incumbent Miska Clay Bibbs will apparently be opposed by Trevor Johnson Banks, whose signatures are undergoing verification.

LEGISLATIVE PRIMARY RACES
State House, District 83: Republican Mark White (incumbent) is unopposed in his primary, as is Democrat Jerri Green in hers.
State House, District 84: Democrat Joe E. Towns (incumbent) has two known primary opponents, Dominique Primer and Phyllis Parks, with another, William Frazier, awaiting verification of his nominating signatures.
State House District 85: Challenger Alvin Crooke is challenging first-term incumbent Jesse Chism.
State House District 86: Long-term incumbent Barbara Cooper has four Democratic challengers: Dominique Frost, Daryl Lewis, Rob White, and Austin A. Crowder. Kenny Lee has filed as an Independent.
State House District 87: Democratic Minority Leader Karen Camper has the primary to herself.
State House District 88: Incumbent Democrat Larry Miller is opposed by Orrden W. Williams, Jr.
State House District 90: Incumbent Democrat John J. Deberry Jr. had three Democratic challengers, Torrey Harris, Anya Parker, and Catrina L. Smith.
State House District 91: Incumbent Democrat London Lamar has a possible challenger if Doris DeBerry Bradshaw’s signatures check out.
State House District 93: Incumbent G.A. Hardaway has the primary to himself.
State House District 95: Incumbent Republican Kevin Vaughan is unopposed in his primary, as Democrat Lynette Williams is in hers.
State House District 96: Incumbent Democrat Dwayne Thompson and Republican challenger Patti Possel are unopposed in their respective primaries and await a rematch November.
State House District 97: For Democrats — Allan Creasy, Gabby Salinas, Clifford Stockton III, Ruby Powell-Dennis — seek their party’s nod for this open seat, while Republicans John Gillespie and Brandon Weise seem destined to tangle in their primary.
State House District 98: Democratic incumbent Antonio Parkinson may have a primary challenger if Charles A. Thompson’s signatures check out.
State House District 99: Republican incumbent Tom Leatherwood has a serious challenger in his primary, former Shelby County GOP chair Lee Mills.
State Senate District 30: Democratic incumbent Sara Kyle has a party challenger in perennial candidate M. LaTroy Alexandria-Williams.
State Senate District 31: First-term Republican Paul Rose has primary opposition from Scott Throckmorton, while Democrat Julie Byrd Ashworth’s signatures are being checked for verification in her primary.

GENERAL SESSIONS COURT CLERK: Democratic nominee Joe Brown and Republican nominee Paul Boyd are matched.