Tag: Mark Luttrell

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Politics Politics Feature

County Commission Report

Election Commission head Mark Luttrell asked for permission to ditch old voting machines. (Photo: Mark H. Luttrell | Facebook)

Each of the major legislative bodies operating in Shelby County presents challenges to its members, to the various publics that wish to influence it, and to the matrices of other governmental bodies that it must coexist with.

Take the Shelby County Commission meeting of Monday, May 15th, a six-and-a-half-hour affair. The commission opened up its Monday session with an agenda of 21 “consent agenda” items and an additional nine “regular” items. In theory, the consent agenda items are matters whose import has been sufficiently chewed over in committee as to be generally acceptable already, whereas the regular items must be tackled anew.

It doesn’t work out that way. On Monday, a clear majority of items on the commission’s consent agenda were singled out for additional discussion by one or more — a fact clearly indicating that consent had not been reached. Most of these items involved the approval of public grants to this or that person or body to achieve some public purpose.

Commissioner Britney Thornton and, to a different degree, Commissioner Henri Brooks have chosen on a weekly basis to focus on the demographic distribution of these grants, wanting to know if a sufficient number of minority firms were invited to participate in the bidding for these projects. Thornton’s summing up of Monday’ results — “a flat zero” of ultimate participation by minorities.

This is one leitmotif of a typical commission meeting. Another is the dependable insistence of Commissioner Edmund Ford Jr.that commissioners — the “electeds” of county government — must be vigilant in preventing the “appointeds” of Mayor Lee Harris’ administration from usurping commission prerogatives.

At one point, Ford asked a yes-or-no question of administration budget director Michael Thompson, insisting, “Do not give an essay answer. I will cut you off and bust you out.” Mick Wright, one of four Republican commissioners on the 13-member body, challenged the decorum of that.

Wright and Ford bumped heads again on Wright’s proposal to route $3.5 million into needed upgrades for Regional One. Ford successfully insisted the money be spread around among the 13 commission districts for members’ preferred projects.

Ford was also instrumental in deferring action on Mayor Harris’ proposal to raise the county wheel tax to finance work on Regional One as well as two new schools.

The bottom line is that work on an ambitious 2024 budget has been remanded into the future with a target date in mind of June 30th, the end of the current fiscal year.

With surprising unanimity, the commission approved a $3.39 tax rate, as well as a desire to establish a county civilian law-enforcement review board like those now operating in Memphis and Nashville city governments. The commission also gave conditional approval to the Election Commission’s wish to dispose of “useless” old voting machines, so long as significant information from them was retained. Commissioners also approved a $2.7 million budget item providing medical backup resources for the county specialty courts dealing with veterans, mental health, and drug issues. And it readies for future voting a matching proposal to provide psychiatric rehabilitation for prisoners deemed incompetent for trial.

Overall, the import of Monday’s commission meeting was that a lot of cans got kicked down the road. More of this anon.

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Politics Politics Feature

The Swinging Door

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

As one election, a national one, finally heads to an end (with votes still being counted here and there), the next process of electoral transition is underway, locally.

This week, an abbreviated one because of the Thanksgiving holiday, sees the beginning of turnover on the Memphis City Council. Of the body’s 13 available seats, three will be spoken for during the next few weeks. Those are the ones that were scheduled for vacating as of August 2nd, when three council members — Bill Morrison in District 1, Edmund Ford Jr. in District 6, and Janis Fullilove in Super District 8, Position 2 —  won elections for positions in Shelby County government.

Jackson Baker

Jeff Warren

At the Flyer‘s press time on Tuesday, the first of these seats — that of Morrison, who was elected Probate Court clerk — was due for reappointment that evening by vote of council. The applicants were Paul Boyd, Mauricio Calvo, Faye Morrison, Tierra Holloway, Rhonda Logan, Danielle Schonbaum, and Lonnie Treadway.

The seats currently held by Ford and Fullilove will be filled next. Fullilove, now Juvenile Court clerk, has announced her resignation, effective November 23rd, and Ford’s resignation will take effect two days later, on November 25th. Applicants for either seat must submit proof of their residency, a resume, a letter of interest, a sworn affidavit, and a nominating petition with 25 signatures of registered voters in the relevant district.

Registration packets for the two seats will be available as of noon next Monday, November 26th, and the deadline for filing applications is Thursday, December 13th. The council is expected to vote on filling the two seats at its meeting on December 18th.

The seats held by Morrison, Ford, and Fullilove became points of controversy following the August 2nd election, when local activists insisted in vain that the council members resign their positions soon enough to permit the inclusion of their vacated seats on the November 6th election ballot. Instead, the three members chose to continue occupying their council seats for nearly the full 90 days post-election that the city charter permitted — a fact making it necessary to fill the seats by appointment and giving the remaining council members the say-so over replacing the departing members.

Ford, now a member of the Shelby County Commission, was even deputized by commission chair Van Turner to serve as a de facto liaison between the two local legislative bodies.

The councilman’s forthcoming resignation is not the only change on his horizon. He was named financial literacy coordinator for Memphis Public Libraries last week, and, as he informed his fellow commission members on Monday, Ford’s employment as a teacher in the Shelby County Schools system would end on Wednesday of this week — a fact permitting him to vote without recusal on an issue affecting school funding.

Ultimately, all 13 council seats, including the three being filled between now and year’s end, will be up for grabs in the 2019 city election scheduled for next October. At least one seat, the one for Super District 9, Position 3, now held by Councilman Reid Hedgepeth, has already drawn a challenger.

Seeking the seat will be Jeff Warren, a physician who served on the old Memphis City Schools board that went out of existence with the merger of Memphis and Shelby County systems. Warren was a member of the Memphis board minority that resisted the crucial vote of December 20, 2010, to surrender the MCS charter.

“I believe we are on the verge of turning a corner in Memphis,” Warren said in announcing his candidacy. “We  have had many recent successes, despite our long-term challenges. We have been pushing educational growth and do not need to let up. Mayor Strickland will continue to need support and advice to increase job growth.”

• The county commission acted decisively on a number of matters at its Monday meeting. Especially noteworthy were a vote on authorizing a TIF (tax increment financing project) for a forthcoming Lakeland Commons development and a vote resolving a holdover schism regarding the ongoing opioid crisis between former county Mayor Mark Luttrell and the commission that expired with the August 2nd election.

There were several aspects to the divide between Luttrell and the commission, who engaged in a more or less continuous power struggle, but the opioid matter was the matter with the most relevance to the community at large.

The disagreement arose last year when then commission chair Heidi Shafer, supported by other commission members, availed herself of clauses in the county charter that, she argued, allowed her to contract for legal action against various parties, including physicians and pharmaceutical companies, involved in the over-distribution of opioids in Shelby County.

Shafer’s action arose from her conviction, shared by former chair Terry Roland and a majority of other members, that opioid abuse had become rampant to the point of causing serious damage to Shelby Countians and that the Luttrell administration had been slow in pursuing remedial action.

Unsurprisingly, Luttrell disagreed and, putting forth his own plan of action, insisted that the county charter left the authority for pursuing legal remedies entirely in his hands.

What ensued was a back-and-forth between the two branches of county government that required several hearings in Chancery Court and would not be fully resolved until agreement on coordinated action was reached between new Mayor Lee Harris and the new commission, culminating in the vote on Monday, authorizing a settlement.

Shafer, who would receive several testimonials of appreciation from commission members, was present for the vote and expressed her pleasure that no more intramural acrimony would be occurring and “we can concentrate on dealing with the bad guys.”

The Lakeland matter, involving a $48 million development at the site of an abandoned remainder mall, drew attendees from both sides of the recently concluded municipal election in Lakeland, with Mayor-elect Mike Cunningham and supporters asking the commission for a delay of two weeks on approving the TIF, giving the new administration time to acquaint itself with the details of a project that had been strongly favored by the administration of outgoing Mayor Wyatt Bunker.

The commission approved the TIF 9-2, after noting that authority for continuing with the project would still rest with the Lakeland city government.

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Cover Feature News

Lee Harris Looks to Lead

CREDIT: Photographs by Justin Fox Burks

On August 2nd, the voters of Shelby County resoundingly voted for Lee Harris, a law professor at the University of Memphis, a former city councilman, and the Democrats’ leader in the state Senate, to be county mayor for the next four years. Harris, who was sworn in on August 30th in a joint ceremony with other county officials, is still in the early stages of organizing his mayoralty. On Monday, he sat down with the Flyer in his 11th-floor office in the Vasco Smith County Administration building to discuss the prospect of things to come.

Photographs by Justin Fox Burks

You’re going from the position of being a minority legislative leader to being a county executive. What’s it like in those circumstances, going from one branch of government to another?

I think there’s a huge difference. I didn’t realize how big a difference there was until I got here a couple of weeks ago. You really have your hand on the lever in this office, no doubt about it, and you can effectuate change and drive a message and an agenda. That’s much better! No doubt about it.

As a minority leader in the Senate, I had a role in putting messages in the pipeline and putting the brake on some things. But here you get to set the stage for change. And before I was part-time. Now I can do this every single day, all day long, bringing beneficial change for our community. Two early examples have been the opportunity to appoint Patrice Thomas as CAO and Marlinee Iverson as county attorney.

I know you’re aware of the schism that has existed between your predecessor, Mayor Mark Luttrell, and the Shelby County Commission the last couple of years. Can you avoid something like that?

I didn’t realize how bad it was until I won the election and began the process of settling in. It’s even worse than you reported. I don’t think they got along well. I gave Mayor Luttrell high marks in terms of leadership and the team he put together, but he really fell down in terms of relating to the commission.

Like this idea, four years ago, of separate inauguration ceremonies for the mayor and the commission. There was the expectation that I was going to have a separate ceremony. I thought, “Are you kidding me? If we do, we’ll start off on the wrong foot.” This is local government, not Washington, D.C., and all of us in local government should be on the same page. [Outgoing commission chair] Heidi Shafer did a great job working with me to make a unity ceremony, bringing together a lot of stakeholders. So far we’re getting along very well.  

As for why they [Luttrell and commissioners] didn’t get along, part of it was a matter of perspective. On both the 11th floor [site of mayor’s office] and the 6th floor [site of commission offices] it’s too easy to surround yourself with fans feeding your point of view. But I’ve served as a local legislative official on the city council; so I know they [members of the legislative branch] expect somebody to communicate and work with them.

Your profile on the Shelby County website notes, “He has won numerous awards because of his work in politics and government.” What awards do you take most satisfaction from?

I just won one a couple of days ago for environmental justice. I joined with others to point out contamination of water at  TVA’s new power plant and got them to stop drilling. And there are only 10 states that have a law requiring pure water in public schools. Tennessee became the 10th state because of legislation I sponsored. If they find lead contaminant at a school, they’ll have to take that water out of circulation and replace it with water free from contamination. I worked with Senator Bo Watson on that one.

Then I sponsored bills, some with [Senator] Brian Kelsey, to get ourselves into the conversation on the aquifer. We got the Ground Water Control Board to start meeting and write new rules for drilling, and to work with the University of Memphis on aquifer issues. You have to make the effort to get all the stakeholders involved. In Nashville, there are a lot of stakeholders involved on issues all the time. 

You have to deal with a lot of polarities in government, don’t you? Democrats vs. Republicans, cities vs. suburbs, blacks vs. whites, and so forth.

Yes. One of the first persons I talked to in Nashville and tried to befriend was [Representative] Andy Holt. He’s a teacher, a part-time professor, and he  likes to talk about economics, and I don’t mind talking about economics. He likes to talk about Republican orthodoxy, and I love to talk about Republican orthodoxy and what they should be doing, about how they’re concentrating on giveaways instead of being true to the free market. We’ve sponsored bills together. He was skeptical of me for a long time. You can find common ground with anyone.

At your first campaign debate with Republican nominee David Lenoir, you mentioned “segregation” as a major county issue. Would you elaborate on that?

Yes, sure. De facto segregation is still with us — schools and all the major places. How do we combat it? With high-quality schools that everybody wants to go to, that create interaction. Schools like White Station and Central and some others create diversity to a certain extent, and it helps for people to grow up in diversity. When I was growing up, there was no white person in my house, ever. I lived in a segregated neighborhood. My parents and I didn’t ever encounter anybody who didn’t look like us, unless maybe a repair-person. I don’t think I really talked with anybody white until Overton High School. [Smiles ruefully] And then, of course, I went to an all-black college.

Someone has quoted you as saying you want to put $300 million into the schools. What are your plans?

Well I don’t think I said a specific number. But, yes, there’s a lot of need for more investment in our school systems. I don’t want to get into the weeds on specific structural issues. That’s one of those things that’s been a distraction for years. I’m saying that, no matter what, there’s room for investment in education. And I think everybody in the community wants to see more investment. We need both more funding and more accountability. I’m one of the few Democrats, by the way, who say we haven’t made gains fast enough. I’m not a cheerleader unless we’ve been stone-cold successful.

Is the independence of the public schools from direct control by the mayor and commission a barrier?

Yes, and the first thing I’m going to do on Monday will be to announce to the commission my intention to appoint an educational liaison officer. That’s step number one: someone to work with Shelby County Schools and the other stakeholders. Way down the line are structural and legal challenges. First we need to get everybody connected — mayor, county commission, superintendent, school boards, etc.

That sounds like something your opponent David Lenoir talked about. 

Lenoir did talk about it. Oh, yeah, I got it from him. I spent a career as a [law school] teacher. The best teachers in my view are really great students. You learn things from the give-and-take of a conversation. The campaign was a great conversation, and that was a good idea. Schools are a major expense, and we need a liaison. 

What persuaded you to run for County Mayor?

Two friends, Steve Mulroy and David Upton, hounded me about it. They explained to me things about this role, and I became convinced. There were two major considerations: Can you win? And the other is much more service-minded. If you win, would it really make that much of a difference? I concluded “Yes” on both fronts. Even if I didn’t win, I thought I could change the entire conversation, I knew I would force everybody else to talk about things in a totally different way.

My opponent would talk about tax cuts, people leaving the county, made-up stuff. The only way to grow your county is to make your county attractive to move into, with great schools, great neighborhoods and people, and good public transit. If I wasn’t in the race, nobody would talk about those things.
And I think it was right that I could hold on to the Democratic vote and stretch out to get others better than some predecessors. Some people think that to get the urban vote you’ve got to be a certain kind of candidate, that if you’re not behind on your taxes and haven’t piled up bankruptcies, you’re not qualified. Such folk don’t think a lot of the voters. The voters want high-quality representation. I talk the same way in Collierville as I do in Orange Mound.

Lenoir did take you to task on some crime issues.

Well, criminal justice, in my view, is not a bumper sticker. There’s such a thing as being “tough on crime” for the sake of being tough — without making us safer. The “Crooks with Guns” bill he talked about, for example, giving previously convicted felons stiff penalties merely for possessing a gun. If you’ve committed a crime, I’m happy to give you 10 years [in incarceration]. If you’re asleep in town, and a weapon is found under your mattress, I’m not happy about giving you 10 years. That’s more than you’d get if you raped somebody or committed manslaughter.  

And there was my opposition to the Drug-Free School Zones bill, with its dramatically stiffer penalties. I argued we should have incremental reform. My position was supported by both the ACLU and the Koch Brothers, by the way. The 1,000-foot radius of that bill swallows entire communities. Liberally defined, you’re almost always in a school zone in the city of Memphis, which means that a drug sale there can get you eight to 15 years instead of 11 to 29 months if you’re not in a school zone. 

In Tennessee’s four urban counties, you’re almost always in a school zone; in the other 91, you’re almost never in one. So urban violators are penalized enormously and unfairly more than rural ones for exactly the same crimes.

Crime control should be like a three-legged stool. The first leg is arrest and prosecution. The second has to do with education and other preventive efforts to keep people from going down the wrong path. We need to emphasize pre-K, K-12, and teaching vocational skills. The third leg is re-entry. The county runs the re-entry office, and I’m going to have an announcement on that in the next 10 days. We’ve got to make sure we are meaningfully reintegrating people into the community.

Memphis Mayor Strickland has his Memphis 3.0 project. Do you envision doing something similar?

I don’t do a lot of planning, a lot of committees. I talk to people in the communities. I know what they want. In order to bring stakeholders together you may have to do some planning, but it’s not my custom. I usually vote no on them and don’t participate in any of them. Like the city council committee  to rename parks when I was on the council. They formed a committee. I couldn’t believe it! What is there to talk about? I just don’t know what there is to study. You either do something or you don’t. Either you pick up the trash or you don’t. And instead of firing somebody, the school system hires a “consultant” to look into the grading scandal!

What’s your take on the current dissatisfaction with EDGE [the city/county industrial recruitment board]?

I don’t plan to get involved in that unless the county commission really desires my presence on this new task force. We do need new leadership in the Chamber of Commerce, though, and new leadership all over the place. But EDGE is a priority for special interests. Of the 950,000 people in the county, 949,000 of them do not care about EDGE — absolutely, positively do not care about this issue at all. Things that people really care about are education, health care, and transit issues.

We need to do something to improve health care and to take care of Regional One [aka The Med], our only public hospital. Utilities are a big issue for everybody, and MLGW functions as an instrument of taxation, also. Should there be voting representatives from the county at large on the MLGW board? Probably. 

And the EDGE board should have some regular people on it, too, just people from the neighborhoods. It’s the quintessential special interest. PILOTs [payments-in-lieu-of-taxes as an incentive for business] surrender too much revenue. Of course, businesses come here in order to make profits. To get them here, we’ve got to make this an attractive place to live. We need to invest in neighborhoods, invest in education, workforce development. I don’t think anybody seriously thought we were in competition for Amazon.

Frankly, we could shut down EDGE and give everybody a tax cut. If you cut taxes on everybody, we’d get more investment and more economic activity. If there’s a county commissioner out there who wants to take the lead on a tax cut, have at it! I’m not taking a position, other than to say I’m not for raising taxes. Tax cuts benefit everybody. A lot of this other stuff does not register.

Going forward, I think we’re going to be talking about education, public safety, and taxes. I don’t think people want to get distracted about these sideshow issues. 

Looking ahead, do you think two terms as mayor are going to be necessary?

Yes. I think there are lots of things that can be done in the short term, but lots of things, too, that are going to take more than four years. 

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Politics Politics Feature

Starting Over

The change has come. There is a new Shelby County Mayor, Lee Harris, and he will serve along with a Shelby County Commission that numbers eight new members on the 13-member body.

And all these newcomers will inherit some old business — two issues that were apparently resolved last Monday, on the final meeting day of the old Commission, but became unresolved late Friday when outgoing Mayor Mark Luttrell — timing his action for the last possible moment so as to avoid a possible override — vetoed two resolutions.

Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris

One of these resolutions gave the go-ahead to a 390-unit subdivision, to be built in the southeastern corner of the county, adjacent to Collierville. The other resolution served to restore some post-retirement benefits, curtailed a decade ago, for county employees who serve a minimum of eight years. (Perhaps not coincidentally, eight years is the amount of time in office just served by the outgoing term-limited members of the Commission.)

In conferring his veto, Luttrell cited the expenses to Shelby County government of the two resolutions — the unspecified costs of providing county services and infrastructure in the case of the subdivision, an estimated $6 to $10 million in direct annual outlays in the case of the post-retirement benefits. The financial sum was the estimate of Harvey Kennedy, Luttrell’s CAO, and Luttrell said that, at the very least, some actuarial study ought to be given the project before final approval.

That, in a public-policy sense, was the crux of the matter as Luttrell saw it. There was, additionally, a highly private side to the disagreement between mayor and commission, and, in taking his veto action, Luttrell had managed to strike the last blow in what had amounted to a nearly three-year power struggle between himself and the commission — one that, on Thursday of last week, only a day previously, had seen him conspicuously on the losing end.

That had been the occasion of the public swearing-in at the Cannon Center of mayor-elect Harris, along with the eight new commissioners and the clerks and charter officials who had been elected, along with them in the county general election of August 2nd. The ceremony had been pointedly organized and conducted under commission auspices, after, it was said, Luttrell himself had declined to commit resources to it from the county’s general fund.

Some confusion persists on that latter point. Luttrell later maintained that he had authorized a disbursement from the general fund to pay for the ceremony, while outgoing commission chair Heidi Shafer said that commission funds had paid for it and that Luttrell’s offer of funding had come too late and only after he had received inquiries from the media about responsibility for the event.

It was Shafer — who, along with Commissioner Terry Roland, had been the chief organizer of resistance to Luttrell over the years — who was front and center for the swearing-in ceremony, and who made it clear to the large audience that the event was a commission project. She identified the outgoing mayor only as “Mark Luttrell,” sans title, when, at the request of two of the new officials, he assisted in administering the oath of office.

What was it that lay behind this schism? Political partisanship? That wouldn’t seem to be the case; while the commission’s Democrats quite often voted against the mayor’s will on particular cases, there was no doubting that the rebellion against Luttrell, a Republican, was led by Shafer and Terry Roland, both GOP members. Nor were personality differences the reason, though they existed. Ditto with govermental ideology. True, Luttrell’s main concern as mayor seemed to be that of debt retirement über alles, while commission members tended to be freer spenders. But beyond all that, what separated mayor and commissioners in recent years seemed to be honest disagreement about the balance of power between branches of government. The Commission saw itself as entitled to a greater degree of oversight, especially over financial matters, while Luttrell saw his executive responsibilities to be dependent on the kind of strong-mayor role that the county charter, as currently constituted, may not fully license.

It seems clear that, as county government goes forward with a new mayor and new commissioners, the argument is likely to rear again. Further change may be called for, and not only in two leftover resolutions.

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Politics Politics Feature

Solitary Man: Reflections on John McCain

CREDIT: Traceywood | Dreamstime.com

I first encountered John McCain in 1983 when I was a newish grunt on the Washington scene, then serving as an aide to a Democratic congressman, Bill Alexander of Arkansas. McCain himself was in his first year as a member of the House, not yet the iconic presence that the world would get to know so well.

My only awareness of McCain was gained from seeing the occasional appearances on the House floor of the then relatively unknown Arizonan, from my perch in the office of the Chief Deputy Majority Whip (that was Alexander) in the Capitol. One of the major issues confronting the House that year was President Ronald Reagan‘s decision to infuse American military forces as “peacekeepers” into the cauldron of Lebanon, at the time the focus of an ongoing civil war involving guerilla-level combat between factions and near anarchy.

Like most Democrats — in particular the party leadership, which he represented — my boss viewed the situation with alarm. Republicans, on the other hand, tended to fall in line behind the president. The debate on the floor followed that all-too-predictable binary course, until McCain, a freshman GOP member, took the floor and stated his unequivocal opposition to what he viewed as an unnecessary and dangerous course.

Traceywood | Dreamstime.com

Senator John McCain

McCain was no peacenik. He had been a military careerist until leaving the Navy in the wake of an active career as a pilot who, as we all would subsequently learn, had been downed in a mission over North Vietnam and confined and tortured for years as a P.O.W. His opposition to the Lebanese involvement was a matter of Realpolitik, earned via experience. It turned out to be prescient when hundreds of Marines were killed in their barracks by a truck-driving suicide bomber. Shortly thereafter, Reagan withdrew the remainder of the American military contingent.

All that was in the future on the day of McCain’s speech in the House. Later that day, I was walking from one point to another on the grounds of Capitol Hill when I saw McCain treading the same pathway, more or less, and coming in my direction.

As we crossed paths, I spoke to him, identified myself, and told him how impressed I had been by his speech. McCain gave me that grateful, vaguely mischievous, and somewhat self-satisfied smile that would later become so familiar on national television, and thanked me. There were many times later on when I would reflect on the fact of my getting so early a glimpse of the great contrarian — and on the occasion of his first official maverick act, no less.

Subsequently, of course, McCain moved on to the Senate, became a truly national figure, and made an upstart race for president in 2000 aboard his famously media-friendly “Straight Talk Express” presidential-campaign tour bus, winning the New Hampshire primary but later falling short to the well-endowed establishment campaign of George W. Bush.

McCain was well aware of the corrupting power of big money, having suffered from it in that first presidential race. Working in harness with Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, a Democrat, McCain sponsored the McCain-Feingold Act, which imposed reasonable curbs on campaign fund-raising, until a conservative Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision in 2010 in effect nullified it. 

Meanwhile, McCain warmed up for another presidential run in 2008 and, as part of that mission, came to Memphis in April 2007 to address the Economics Club. Before a turnaway crowd at the University of Memphis Holiday Inn, he unveiled an economics program that was hardcore conservative Republican — all laissez-faire and belt-tightening measures. 

Not very exciting, but the kind of thing, he might have hoped, that would soften the GOP establishment’s  memory of him as the reform-minded party-line-crossing outlier who had almost stolen the party’s presidential nomination away from Bush in 2000.

The fact was, McCain’s second presidential campaign was slumping badly, and at a press conference after his economics speech, encouraged by his courtly manner as he insisted on shaking hands in advance with each member of the attendant media, I made bold to ask him to account for his relatively dismal fund-raising thus far (he was in third place in Republican ranks, behind both Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani).  

The senator said flatly, “Because I didn’t do a better job.” Asked why that was, McCain answered, “Because I’m not competent enough, I guess.” It’s hard to imagine another candidate being quite that self-effacing — or candid.

Competent fund-raiser or not, McCain had the staying power, or the stature, or the what-have-you to endure in that race, even when most of his money ran out and his staff evaporated. Not quite a year later, he had won the New Hampshire primary again, would go on to win the Republican nomination and ran an honorable race for the presidency against Barack Obama.

Along with his defiant independent streak and his compulsive truth-telling, McCain was also blessed, it is reliably said, with a short fuse and an explosive, near-volcanic temper. Hearing about this, I made it a point to ask each of Tennessee’s two U.S. Senators if they had ever been on the receiving end of it. 

Said Lamar Alexander: “Yes, I have,” adding after a pause, “There are very few of us [senators] who haven’t.”  Said Bob Corker: “Yes. Very early on, I was a party to that. It’s not an urban myth. It’s just a fact.”

Corker added: “But at the same time, John has been a true American hero, and he feels very strongly about the positions he holds, and when he disagrees with you, he lets you know.” 

It is well known, surely,  that McCain had serious disagreements with Donald Trump, and equally well known that he let the president know — most recently after Trump’s Helsinki summit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, when, bravely waiting out his inevitable death from incurable brain cancer in Arizona, McCain issued a statement lamenting that, in “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president,” Trump had “abased himself … abjectly before a tyrant.”

John McCain never abased himself, not in captivity in Hanoi and not in his distinguished public life thereafter. We should salute this solitary, honorable man, even if Trump won’t.  

• With several of its newly elected eight members-to-be looking on, the 13-member Shelby County Commission that was elected in 2014 held its last public meeting on Monday. They voted to override the veto of outgoing county Mayor Mark Luttrell of a commission ordinance prohibiting the mayor’s office from hiring special counsel to sue the commission — one last shot in a two-year battle between the legislative and executive powers. 

And, with time running out, the commission shelved a resolution calling for change in the functioning of EDGE, the city/county board charged with spurring economic growth. As one of her last acts, outgoing Commission chair Heidi Shafer has appointed a blue-ribbon task force of returning commissioners and community leaders to begin meeting with an eye toward making recommendations for further action.

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Editorial Opinion

Shelby County Commission: A for Effort

There’s no doubt about it. The Shelby County Commission, in a current configuration that is about to expire because of the forthcoming August election, has taken bold steps to confront the established order of things.

As of August, when a minimum of eight members of the 13-member body are due to be replaced because of the county charter’s term-limits provision, the newly elected county legislature may not be so forward about things. But let’s enjoy this rebellion while it lasts and hope that the precedents it sets will inspire the newcomers of the next four-year term to similar innovation.

This commission has achieved results in numerous spheres by challenging custom and by pioneering in new directions. It has established task forces on such problems as the under-representation of women and ethnic minorities in county contracting, and those ad hoc bodies, fueled by the commission’s own disparity report, have made enormous progress in rectifying inequalities that had been taken for granted for decades.

The body elected four years ago, in 2014, has also managed to aggressively re-order its relationship with the county administration, challenging it on matters of financial oversight, among others, and, while neither branch of county government is always right and always deserving of having its opinion honored in the conduct of county business, the commission’s self-assertiveness has forced a more or less continuing dialogue on key matters. The recent establishment of a trans-governmental initiative to combat the plague of opioid addiction had its origins in actions taken by the commission, later court-approved, that forced the hand of the county administration and enticed city government and law enforcement agencies at large to come aboard.

And such re-ordering of priorities that has taken place has left undisturbed the ongoing focus on reducing county debt that Mayor Mark Luttrell has made an overriding administration goal.

This past week has seen yet another bold step by the commission. Confronted by the wish of Elvis Presley Enterprises to expand its campus to include a new, modestly sized arena so as to attract musical acts and other entertainments that would otherwise go south across the Mississippi state line or to Little Rock or Nashville, the commission was faced by the stated reluctance of the Grizzlies, backed by the city of Memphis, to give an inch on the terms of a strictly binding operating agreement that currently would prohibit the construction of an arena, containing more than 5,000 seats, that might be construed as competing with FedExForum, where the Grizzlies have proprietary status.  

Heidi Shafer

Instead of knuckling under on the matter, the commission voted on Monday to upgrade EPE’s share of revenues from an ongoing TIF, thereby allowing the arena construction, contingent (and that’s the operative term) on the courts recognizing the expansion as consistent with the terms of the aforesaid operating agreement with the Grizzlies. That seems both a progressive and a cautious way of probing for a solution that solves the Solomonic problem of having to satisfy what commission Chair Heidi Shafer referred to on Monday as “two favorite children.”

This strategy may work and it may not, but it was worth the effort to give it a try.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Shelby GOP Does Another Lincoln Day, With a Few Differences

CREDIT: JB

JB

Senators Tim Scott and Bob Corker at Lincoln Day

As usual, the ballroom of the University of Memphis Holiday Inn on Saturday was filled to capacity for this year’s version of the Shelby County Republican Party’s Lincoln Day banquet. But, in what is shaping up as a year of serious competition in GOP primary races, there were some interesting deviations in party harmony.

A couple of them came from the event’s keynote speaker, U.S. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who told an odd joke that was probably meant affectionately but came off, no doubt inadvertently, as seeming to be at the expense of U.S. Rep. Diane Black, who had introduced him and whom Scott had acknowledged to be a friend.

The joke’s beginning was itself inauspicious. Scott began to describe a “dream” in which U.S. Senator Bob Corker, U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn, and Black had all died the same day. As “big shots,” they were all instructed by St. Peter about the special rules of Heaven. Corker, caught trying to turn a real estate deal, was the first to be charged with a transgression.

The Senator ended up being chained to Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer as a punishment, while “a voice that sounded like thunder” proclaimed: “Bob Corker,you have broken the rules of Heaven, and this is your punishment, for all eternity!”

Next, Blackburn was chained to House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi for some obsure misprision, and the same voice thundered, “Marsha Blackburn,you have broken the rules of Heaven, and this is your punishment, for all eternity!”

Then the clincher. In the dream Scott saw Rep. Black chained to Super Bowl quarterback Tom Brady, and, inevitably, the thunderous voice began to sound again: “Tom Brady, you have broken the rules of Heaven….” Etc., etc.

That quirky knee-slapper was followed immediately with a sentimental recollection by Scott, an African-American and the first Republican of his race to be elected to the Senate from South Carolina, of his grandfather’s being enabled to cast a vote for Barack Obama as the first African American to be elected President. The fact that Obama was a Democrat apparently compelled the Senator to tell the Republican audience, “Of course, I canceled his vote out.”

All of that was the fun stuff. But there was some intra-party dissension for real, in the course of the evening — some of it stemming from the fact of Black, one of several Republican candidates for Governor, being asked to introduce Scott, whose presence she had been helpful in arranging.

That didn’t sit well with the camp of at least one other candidate, former state Economic Development Commissioner Randy Boyd. According to several accounts, Chip Saltsman, Boyd’s campaign manager, confronted County Republican chair Lee Mills, impresario for this year’s Lincoln Day affair, and upbraided him for what the Boyd people saw as giving Black an unfair advantage. Saltsman allegedly used the ‘p’ word.

Meanwhile, Boyd’s press aide, Bonnie Brezina, got into something of a tangle with Shelby County Commissioner Terry Roland, a candidate for County Mayor who had purchased three tables at the banquet for friends and supporters. According to Roland and others, Brezina attempted to claim one of the tables, close to the dais, for Boyd and supporters, and an argument ensued before she relented.

Saturday was otherwise a good day for Boyd, Saltsman, and Brazina, who opened up a Shelby County headquarters for the gubernatorial candidate in the same Poplar Plaza space that had been used by Jim Strickland in his victorious 2015 race for Mayor. On hand for the affair were such supporters as Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell and two new Boyd endorsers, Germantown Mayor Mike Palazzolo and County Commissioner David Reaves, all three of whom delivered extended statements of praise for Boyd.

Another candidate who did a previous event in Memphis before attending the Lincoln Day festivities was Beth Harwell, the Speaker of the state House of Representatives. At the request of former Memphis Mayor A C Wharton and Shelby County Defender Stephen Busch, both principals of the Adverse Childhood Experiences Foundation, Harwell went to the South Memphis headquarters of the Foundation to discuss with them the Foundation’s activities in mitigating the effects on children of adverse experience early in life.

From a news-media point of view, the dominant point of interest at Lincoln Day was the chance to ask Senator Corker about newly prevalent rumors that he is reconsidering his previously expressed decision not to run for reelection. To several reporters individually, and to a whole scrum of them after the banquet, Corker said he had nothing new to say about the matter and disclaimed any adverse feeling about either Rep. Blackburn, who has become the obvious frontrunner in the GOP primary, or “the Democrat running,” former Governor Phil Bredesen.

JB

Germantown Mayor Mike Palazzolo, gubernatorial candidate Randy Boyd, Commissioner David Reaves, Mayor Mark Luttrell, and Boyd aide Bonnie Brezina at the candidate’s Memphis headquarters opening

JB

House Speaker/gubernatorial candidate Beth Harwell, Public Defender Stephen Busch and former Mayor A C Wharton discuss the work of the ACE foundation on Saturday.

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Editorial Opinion

Undermining the Public Will

We live in a time when elected officials and bodies seem determined to ignore the will of the populations they have been elected to represent. This phenomenon is observable in every governmental sphere — state, local, and national — and it threatens the democratic principle in the abstract and strikes at the core of our functioning democratic machinery at all the aforementioned levels.

We have just seen the House of Representatives and Senate in Washington, D.C., willfully ignore public sentiment, expressed in virtually every imaginable kind of opinion sampling, by passing an unpopular tax-cut giveaway for corporations and the wealthy few that will be paid for at the expense of the middle class — in the loss of accustomed deductions now, in the raising of future insurance premiums due to a provision of the bill weakening the mandates of the Affordable Care Act, and in the probable reduction of entitlement benefits down the line in the name of “economy.”

Similarly, during the past decade, we have often seen the Tennessee legislature behave with contemptuous indifference to the public’s unmistakeable disapproval of a plethora of gun bills that have ended up being enacted at the behest the NRA and other like-minded interests in the firearms industry. At the same time, the General Assembly, for naked partisan reasons, has turned its back on the expressed needs of individuals and the state’s financially distressed hospitals by refusing billions in federal aid for Medicaid expansion.

And now we find Memphis city government flouting public need and citizen opinion with a series of proposals, some of which directly contravene the results of referenda carried out at the ballot box. There is a questionable ordinance proposed by Councilman Reid Hedgepeth, reportedly favored by the Strickland administration, as well, that would restrict the rights of public assembly under cover of assuring “order.” There is the proposal by Councilman Ed Ford and others that would revoke the public’s right, already expressed via referendum, to a fair trial of instant runoff voting (IRV) in the next city election, and there is an effort by Councilman Berlin Boyd on behalf of replacing a two-term limit for council members that was only recently approved by the voters.

There is room for concern, too, in county government, where a power struggle currently rages between a majority of the Shelby County Commission and the administration of county Mayor Mark Luttrell. The issues here are not as clear-cut, though the core matter of the moment is the need to sue for damages resulting from the over-proliferation of opioids in Shelby county. Sadly, all that is being litigated in Chancery Court is the incidental question of who has the authority to direct such legal efforts. A suit challenging the distributors of opioids is on file in Circuit Court but cannot go forward until the two branches of county government mediate an end to their jurisdictional dispute. Meanwhile,  the public continues to suffer.

Surely, it is no big thing to ask the various governments we elect to represent the public will, but it seems a tenuous prospect just now.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Busting Some Moves

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Jackson Baker

Craig Fitzhugh addresses a Collierville crowd.

Shelby County Democrats are continuing with their efforts to spread their party’s influence. The most recent instance was a fund-raising dinner Sunday night at the 148 North Restaurant in Collierville featuring several speakers — including state Representative Craig Fitzhugh, the state House minority leader and currently a candidate for governor; James Mackler, candidate for U.S. Senator; Floyd Bonner, candidate for sheriff; state Senator Lee Harris, now running for Shelby County mayor; John Boatner Jr., candidate for the District 8 congressional seat; and Sanjeev Memula, candidate for state House District 95.

• Another local gathering attracting a sizeable number of political figures was the Christmas party of the Tennessee Nurses Association, held Monday night at Coletta’s in Cordova. A good mix of Republicans and Democrats was on hand, including District 33 state Senator Reginald Tate, an inner-city Democrat who confided that he had felt compelled to resign his longstanding affiliation with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a national organization, largely funded by conservative donors, which grinds out sample bills and disseminates them to state legislatures.

Tate, who had been listed as a member of ALEC’s Tax and Fiscal Policy Task Force, told the Flyer he had been pressured by fellow Democrats to sunder his ties with the organization, for which he expressed no particular ideological affinity.

• The confrontation between a Shelby County Commission majority and County Mayor Mark Luttrell over the circumstances of proposed litigation against distributors of opioids went up another notch on Monday. 

An eight-member commission majority — Republicans Heidi Shafer (the current commission chair) and Terry Roland, and Democrats Van Turner, Willie Brooks, Justin Ford, Reginald Milton, Melvin Burgess, and Eddie Jones — are supporting a Shafer initiative to force Luttrell’s hand on proposed litigation by the county against an extensive network of physicians, pharmacists, and others involved, both legally and illegally, in distribution of opioids, which, in the estimation of Shafer and the commission, have resulted in damaging levels of addiction in Shelby County.

Chancellor Jim Kyle recently ruled that Luttrell, who sued to block Shafer’s unilateral engaging of a law firm, had rightful authority over litigation by the county but declined to intervene in the lawsuit itself, now in limbo in Circuit Court. The chancellor suggested that the suit was in the public interest but recommended mediation between the commission and the mayor.

Meanwhile, Luttrell, who has floated the alternative idea of deferring to a statewide legal action against the opioid network, is still in formal (if suspended) litigation in Chancery Court against the commission. The eight-member coalition at odds with the mayor on the matter voted Monday to hire Allan Wade, who represents the Memphis City Council, as its “special legal counsel” in the matter.

That action carried, but it aroused opposition among a five-member commission minority consisting of Democrat Walter Bailey and Republicans Mark Billingsley, George Chism, Steve Basar, and David Reaves.

Typical of this group’s sentiments were Billingsley’s complaints that outside attorneys were enriching themselves at county expense and that the proposed ongoing action against the alleged opioid-distribution network was too extensive, involving well-established name-brand companies like Johnson & Johnson.

Roland, among others, responded that the proposed legal actions against opioid distributors were pro bono and would cost the county nothing, while Luttrell’s action did in fact “cost the county.”

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Attorney Wade Joins Commission Team in Battle with County Mayor

CREDIT: JB

JB

Wade at Commission on Monday

The war between a Shelby County Commission majority and County M ayor Mark Luttrell acquired a new front and a new warrior on Monday — the latter being Allan Wade, who was hired by a Commission majority to represent the body in its various legal responses to Luttrell on the still-festering matter of proposed litigation against opioid distributors.

(Wade, who functions as the City Council’s attorney, is much in the spotlight these days, having been a point man a day later in the Council’s controversial decision on Tuesday to call for a second referendum on the the use of IRV — instant-runoff-voting — procedures in the forthcoming 2019 city election.)

Meanwhile, the newest confrontation in the Commission-Luttrell battle concerned a technically unrelated matter of take-home pay. And it was the proverbial case of adding insult to injury.

Actually, the latest controversy was an outgrowth of sorts from the existing one. Early in Monday’s regular meeting, Commissioner David Reaves requested the opportunity to reconsider a vote, taken during the previous Commission meeting, on an item to raise the pay of both the Sheriff and the Mayor.

Two weeks ago, the item was defeated, but Reaves, who had been on the prevailing side then, said he had felt constrained to change his vote because of his increasing awareness of the severity of the opioid crisis and the burden of combatting it that would fall upon the Sheriff’s office. Reaves said he’d also come to realize that the Sheriff might be under-paid relative to counterparts elsewhere in the state.

So he wanted, after all, to raise the Sheriff’s pay, from its existing level of $116,000. But he wanted to do so in a way that didn’t automatically raise the pay level of the Mayor, which is proportionally linked to the Sheriff’s by the county charter.

After a fair amount of debate and back-and-forth with County Attorney Kathryn Pascover, the Commission availed itself of a loophole that allowed it to raise the Sheriff’s pay to 95 percent of the Mayor’s pay, leaving the latter at his current level but boosting the Sheriff to $35,575.

In fairness, Reaves is not a full-time member of the coalition arrayed against Luttrell, and his motive in holding down an equivalent pay increase for the Mayor was probably unrelated to the ongoing power struggle. It was doubtless otherwise with the eight members of the aforesaid coalition: Republicans Heidi Shafer (the current Commission chair) and Terry Roland, and Democrats Van Turner, Willie Brooks, Justin Ford, Reginald Milton, Melvin Burgess, and Eddie Jones.

Those eight Commissioners are the ones supporting chairman Shafer in her initiative to force Luttrell’s hand on proposed litigation by the County against an extensive network of physicians, pharmacists, and others involved, both legally and illegally, in distribution of opioids, which, in the estimation of Shafer et al., have proliferated to dangerous and damaging levels in Shelby County

Chancellor Jim Kyle recently ruled that Luttrell, who sued to block Shafer’s unilateral engaging of a law firm, had rightful authority over litigation by the county but declined to intervene in the lawsuit itself, now in limbo in Circuit Court .

The Chancellor, who suggested that the suit was in the public interest, recommended mediation between the Commission and the Mayor, going forward.

Meanwhile, Mayor Luttrell, who has floated the alternative dea of deferring to a statewide legal action against the opioid network, is still in formal (if suspended) litigation in Chancery Court against the Commission, and the eight-member coalition at odds with the Mayor on the matter, voted Monday to hire Wade as its “special legal counsel” in the matter.

That action would carry, but it aroused intense opposition among a five-member Commission minority consisting of Democrat Walter Bailey and Republicans Mark Bilingsley, George Chism, Steve Basar, and Reaves.

Typical of this group’s sentiments were Billingsley’s complaints that outside attorneys were enriching themselves at county expense and that the proposed ongoing action against the alleged opioid-distribution network was too extensive, involving well-established name-brand companies like Johnson and Johnson.

Roland, among others, responded to the effect that “we’re the ones getting sued” and that the proposed legal actions against opioid distributors were pro bono and would cost the county nothing, while Luttrell’s action did in fact “cost the county.”