Tag: Mark Luttrell

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Health Department Releases Plan to Make Shelby County Healthier

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County leaders are trying to make Shelby County one of the healthiest places to live.

On a warm Tuesday afternoon, community leaders from various organizations gathered at the Urban Child Institute to hear about the Community Health Improvement Plan (CHIP) for the all of Shelby County.

The plan identifies five priorities for the county: healthy lifestyles, violence as a public health issue, mental health, as well as two “cross-cutting priorities” that overlap — health disparities and social determinants of health, along with increasing collaboration across the local public health system.

The CHIP has been in the works since 2012 in six phases, facilitated by the Shelby County Health Department. The first and second phases, from December 2012 to March 2013, were set to create the overall vision of the project as well as the conductors, including all facets of the public health sector such as academics, government, nonprofits, healthcare systems, and agencies to create the Community Health Assessment (CHA). From March to August 2013, the CHA focused on compiling the community health status, the needs and wants of the community, the capacities and competencies of the public health system, and trends that factor into the overall quality of life and health to Shelby County.

From the fourth phase on, starting two years ago in September 2013, implementation of the plan has been the focus — mostly mobilizing local organizations and institutions to communicate clearly with one another to tackle the issues.

Community Health planners Amy Collier and Angela Moore, who have been called the “A Team” of the health department, presented the plan and process on Tuesday.

“This is a strategic plan addressing key public health issues,” Moore said. “We had 60 community partners … who have actually committed action items within the CHIP.”

Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell also spoke at the event. He talked about changing his own lifestyle into a healthier one and stressing importance of what they called “social determinants of health,” which includes a safe place to live, healthcare access, transportation, social support and norms, and educational access, among others.

Altha J. Stewart, the director of System of Care at the Shelby County Public Defender’s Office, also spoke regarding the public health issues.
“There are multiple ways to cut the pie of social determinants of health,” Stewart said. “One I think is particularly helpful in terms of Shelby County and the discussion around improving overall community health, which has to do with these things: income and social status, social support networks, education and working conditions, social environments, [and] our biology and genetic endowment.”

Child development, particularly involving healthy lifestyles, is also critical in the county to improve the health of Memphians, she said.

“Gender, believe it or not, has a lot to do with how healthy we are or what health issues we face,” Stewart said. “But the real elephant in the room: culture, race, and ethnicity — that’s where people tend to get tripped up because they feel like there’s just so much wrapped up in that. [They believe] it’s too hard to tackle, but it really isn’t.”

The entire CHIP is available to read online from the Shelby County website, or you can read it below.

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News The Fly-By

Prison Reform Task Force Prepares Recommendations

The Governor’s Task Force on Sentencing and Recidivism has been working for a year to make the state’s prison system more effective, and they may be making their first recommendations as soon as next month.

The task force was formed last year with the help of the nonprofit and nonpartisan Vera Institute of Justice out of New York. The task force’s 27 members were appointed by Governor Bill Haslam to reform the prison sentencing structure in Tennessee.

The group is focused on sentencing structure, sentencing classifications and enhancements, programming and treatment, and community supervision.

Among the 27 are seven from the Memphis metro area: John Campbell, criminal court judge; Rep. John DeBerry (D-Memphis); Sen. Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown); Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell; Shelby County Sheriff Bill Oldham; Blair Taylor, president of Memphis Tomorrow; and Shelby County District Attorney General Amy Weirich.

Luttrell, who requested to be considered for the task force, said he believed he could use his previous experience in law enforcement and corrections.

“It’s a comprehensive look at sentencing reform and trying to keep people from returning to prison,” he said.

According to a Vera Institute of Justice report released in June, the prison population is expected to rise by four percent over the next five years, pushing the state’s prison population over maximum capacity.

“It’s not the intent of this task force to increase the [prison] population,” Luttrell said. “If you look at the multitude of recommendations that we’ve been making, we talk about some areas where it doesn’t have sentencing, but then it also talks about a number of areas where we are looking at reducing prison time, more effective ways to deal with behavior, more community-based programs, and establishing commissions and councils that will sustain this initiative going forward.”

At the August 6th meeting of the task force, Luttrell said he hopes they will complete the first draft of recommendations to be sent the governor.

“Certainly, there are instances where we need to enhance sentencing, but there are also areas that we need to ensure that the sentencing accurately reflects the severity of the offense, which would be a reduced sentence in some cases,” Luttrell said.

Kerry Hayes, an adviser to Just City Memphis (a criminal justice reform organization), said the task force may be biased: “The people from Shelby County [on the task force], by-and-large, are fantastic people. On the whole, the entire task force statewide is overwhelmingly oriented around law enforcement, prosecutors, and judges, which means there’s a whole half to the criminal justice system that’s hardly being represented at all, in particular, the public defenders.”

“Any time you have a massive statewide committee like this that is so completely biased in terms of one viewpoint that’s dealing with stuff this sensitive, you run the risk of having recommendations coming out that are tilted, which is what looks like is happening,” Hayes said.

Hayes said there are some task force-recommended reforms that may spell out progress for the criminal justice system, including recommendations to change the threshold for the felony property crime charge to $1,000 from $500. The Vera Institute’s analysis of the task force’s recommendations found causes for concern, including requiring that repeat drug trafficking and aggravated burglary offenders serve 85 percent of their sentences.

“They’re changing some parole policies that we think might increase the population of incarcerated individuals in Tennessee,” Hayes said. “That is really troubling, because that has ripple effects all throughout the rest of the criminal justice system, all the way down to the taxpayer. Suddenly, budgets are increasing, because prisons are increasing in size, and [private prison] companies like [Corrections Corporation of America] are increasing their contracts with governments. The whole criminal justice apparatus becomes more expensive and harder to unwind.”

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Politics Politics Feature

County Commission Power Surge

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Monday’s public meeting of the Shelby County Commission saw the commission, as a whole, still trying to forge a new, more independent role for itself but experiencing a bit of erosion in its resolve.

The meeting began with Chairman Justin Ford continuing in his new mode of permitting audience statements on the front end of proceedings rather than, as was long customary, at the conclusion of business. Commissioners got an earful of complaints about its budgetary provision of $1.3 million to be divided equally between the 13 members of the commission for purposes of making grants within their districts.

“Charity” grants, the critical audience members were calling them, in a bit of a misnomer, inasmuch as the money — amounting to $100,000 per district — had been defined during the course of several recent commission debates as applicable to a district’s infrastructure needs as well as to this or that community organization with a civic or charitable purpose.   

Indeed, Commissioner Terry Roland, of Millington, who had been among a contingent of Republican commissioners who had lobbied hard but without success for a one-cent reduction in the county’s property-tax rate, was able to use that setback to respond to one of the critics, telling her that his share of the grant money would go, at least partly, to “fix your roads.”

Since there hadn’t been enough votes during the budget process to allocate at least some of county Mayor Mark Luttrell‘s $6 million budget surplus to a property-tax cut, the commission could at least use the back-door route of district grants to take care of district needs, Roland said. It was an agile argument and one not without irony, inasmuch as part of Luttrell’s argument against the proposed one-cent tax reduction had been that funding needed to be reserved for infrastructure repairs.

Even so, the audience complaints — apparently the tip of an iceberg that had included numerous phone calls, emails, texts, and personal intercessions from citizens — induced a change of mind in two previous supporters of the grants: budget chair Heidi Shafer and David Reaves, both Republicans. They joined fellow GOP member Mark Billingsley of Germantown — formerly the lone holdout against the grants, as he reminded the audience — in casting a nay vote.

The process was too “subjective,” Billingsley argued. Reaves and Shafer acknowledged that, and while they still thought the district-grant formula was a good idea, they were bowing to the will of their constituents.

Democrat Reginald Milton, author of the grant idea, held firm, insisting that government had “a role and responsibility to serve all its citizens.” Fellow Democrat Melvin Burgess told the two defecting Republicans, “We don’t represent the same districts. I represent District 7. Mine is a poor district.”

The ultimate vote, 10-3 in favor of the grants, indicated that there was still a fair degree of solidarity among the commissioners regarding the issue of self-assertion.

There had been an expected party-line division on the issue of third and final approval of the $4.37 county tax rate, same as the current one, with five Republicans — Shafer, Roland, Billingsley, Reaves, and George Chism — voting no in an 8-5 outcome, but most other issues saw the same degree of unity as was demonstrated on committee day last Wednesday, when the commission took on the Luttrell administration on two issues — an administration switch from Nationwide Insurance to Prudential as administrator of a county deferred-compensation plan for employees and an insistence that the commission had a right to its own attorney.

On Wednesday, commissioners went back and forth with spokespersons for the administration on the attorney matter. After a prolonged executive session, closed to the media, it was agreed that, while the county charter forbade the commission’s having a full-time attorney of its own, it permitted the commission to engage separate counsel for specific ad-hoc purposes, as, for example, during the late school-merger controversy, when the commission hired an outside law firm to litigate for its position.

Otherwise, the charter empowered the county attorney’s staff, headed by Ross Dyer, to represent county government in general, the commission, as well as the administration.

As a final add-on item to Monday’s agenda, Democratic Commissioner Van Turner introduced what was, in effect, a reprise of last Wednesday’s two controversies by proposing that the commission engage an attorney to look into the Nationwide-Prudential matter. The fat was back in the fire.

“It’s hard to serve two masters. It says that in the Bible” was how Roland posed the issue.

As might have been expected, the Turner proposal generated yet another extended back-and-forth, with Dyer and assistant county attorney Kim Koratsky insisting that they needed time to research the matter, which included the side issue of who would pay for an additional attorney. On that latter point, a consensus seemed to develop that the commission’s contingency fund would be the appropriate source.

Any possible solution to the controversy may have been sidetracked when Turner’s resolution, already a two-in-one, became a de-facto three-in-one, with his suggestion that former Commissioner Julian Bolton could serve as the ad-hoc attorney on the Nationwide-Prudential matter.

That brought on an explosion from Reaves, who pronounced himself “sick and tired” of the whole controversy. “I’ll support the school lawsuit, not this,” he said, referencing a possible action in support of Shelby County Schools’ ongoing effort to challenge alleged underfunding by the state.

And Reaves was especially scornful that Turner’s resolution included the offer of a job to Bolton.

“I can help the commission resolve this impasse. I’m not looking for a job. I just want to help,” responded Bolton.

“Will you serve for free?” shouted Reaves. “You’re asking for money.”

Eventually, that flare-up ended, with other commissioners endorsing Bolton’s ability and integrity. Bolton and Reaves shared a relatively polite tête-à-tête after the meeting.

Meanwhile, though, Turner’s resolution was sidetracked, referred back to the general government committee, which Turner chairs and which had been the starting point of last week’s twin controversy. Dyer and company had gained the leave they sought to research the relevant issues, and the whole thing had bogged down into a truce of sorts.

• Next Thursday, July 16th, is filing deadline for the 2015 Memphis city election — which means that some long-unanswered questions will finally be resolved.

How complete is the field for city mayor? That’s one general question that needs answering. And, in particular, will Kenneth Whalum Jr. run for mayor? And, if not, will he seek one of the other offices — Council District 5 and Council Super District 9, Position 2 — for which he drew petitions last April?

One question involving former school board member and New Olivet pastor Whalum was long ago resolved, with the fraying away of any semblance of an arrangement with Memphis Police Association head Mike Williams, whereby only one of them would be a mayoral candidate. Both Williams, directly, and Whalum, indirectly, have since debunked that idea.

Meanwhile, spiffy new electronic roadside signs have begun to appear advertising the candidacy for the Super District 9, Position 2, seat of Joe Cooper — remember him? — who has also said he will offer free bus transportation to the polls for anyone needing it.

Cooper’s signs pledge his vote to restore the lost benefits of police and fire employees, and he credits Williams with being his authority on the matter.

Another Cooper idea for dealing with fiscal scarcities in city government is to sell naming rights to City Hall, and he cites as precedents the corporate titles adorning football stadiums in Nashville and elsewhere. Er, any potential bidders out there?

By next week, we should also have a fairly complete reckoning of what various candidates’ financial disclosures for the second quarter were. Stay tuned.

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Politics Politics Feature

Commission Plays 52-Pickup

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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News News Blog

Mayor Luttrell Tackles Trash, Litter Offenders

Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell is trying to step up the efforts to clean the streets — literally.

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The county is adding eight inmates to its crews from the Shelby County Corrections Center. These crews will be picking up trash in unincorporated areas of the county near Millington, Cordova, Woodstock, and Northaven, as well as the northeast and southeast areas of the county.

Last year, the county spent $350,000 for roadside trash, covering workers, equipment, fuel, and fees to dump in landfills.

“With more crews on the roadways, those costs are likely to rise this year,” Luttrell said in a media release. “However, we’ve budgeted for the additional resources. The appearance of Shelby County needs to improve in order to retain and attract new businesses and residents.”

According to Bill Gupton, director of the corrections center, 24 inmates will be out every weekday picking up trash. On Saturdays and Mondays, DUI offenders additionally undertake the task.

These inmate crews will also be watching for litter offenders. The Public Works division maintains hidden cameras throughout the unincorporated neighborhoods as well, which are monitored daily for littering and illegal dumping. According to a media release, culprits could be “arrested for illegal dumping and, in some cases, face felony charges for large amounts of trash and other debris.”

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Editorial Opinion

OPED Issues at Shelby County Schools

CREDIT: Danziger

Like probably every other publication in town, as well as any other Memphians and Shelby Countians who have some degree of involvement with or interest in public affairs, we are on retired citizen Joe Saino’s mailing list. Saino, whom we made the subject of a Flyer profile some years ago, keeps a close eye on how taxpayer money gets spent, and he is generous about sharing his research, which almost always runs to the ways that we (and that “we” is our governments) are spending — or have committed to spend — too much, without taking the necessary steps to properly fund our liabilities.

Saino is much like Tennessee’s junior U.S. senator, Bob Corker, in that he not only frets about public spending, he itemizes his anxieties and, as often as not, proposes solutions that are equally itemized. And, further like the senator, who most recently vented his concerns about overspending at the national level at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon in Memphis two weekends ago, Saino sees himself as a voice in the wilderness, a prophet of sorts who isn’t being sufficiently listened to.

The initials OPEB (“other post-employment benefits”) are a familiar element of the public dialogue these days, and Saino, as much as anybody, is responsible for raising public awareness about them. In essence, OPEBs — which include such benefits to retirees as life insurance, health care, and disability payments — were at the root of some painful budget decisions made in city government over the past couple of years (and will figure significantly in this year’s city elections). And they have now come front and center in discussions concerning the budget of Shelby County government for the fiscal year 2015-16.

County government bears the brunt of expenditures for local public education, and Shelby County Schools (SCS) has just presented the county a bill for a $14.9 million budget increase that has to do — largely or at least significantly — with the OPEB matter. At least, that’s the opinion of Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell, who saw fit to scold the SCS administration for ignoring the need to limit OPEB expenses while county government, voluntarily, and Memphis city government, more or less involuntarily but realistically, had been dealing with the issue in recent years. Luttrell went so far as to advise SCS, “Maybe you need to look at layoffs.”

In budget committee meetings last week, the Shelby County Commission provisionally agreed to adopt an administration plan that cut the SCS request in half, but that won’t be set in stone until the next public commission meeting of June 1st, if at all. And if it does get final commission approval, the SCS board and administration will have little choice but to make some difficult decisions of their own. A day after the commission reached its preliminary conclusions, an SCS board meeting on Thursday took up the OPEB matter but reached no firm conclusions about what to do.

Should SCS join an ongoing suit by the Chattanooga school system against state underfunding to localities of BEP (Basic Education Program) funds? Of course, it should. But that’s long-term. Hopefully, school officials can reach a Solomonic decision on OPEB cuts by themselves — before June 1st, if possible; before July 1st, by necessity.

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Politics Politics Feature

Short-changing the Schools

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

At one point in the Shelby County Commission’s crash session on aspects of school financing on Monday, the subject of charter schools came up amid a discussion of whether closing schools actually saved taxpayer money. 

Shelby County Schools (SCS) Chair Teresa Jones noted wanly that, while her board can decide on school closures for financial reasons — and has done so frequently — it has no such authority over charter schools, regarding which the Tennessee Board of Education is now the principal overseer, thanks to actions of the Tennessee General Assembly.

That part of the conversation was a reminder of the degree to which local control of public school education has succumbed to the dictates of state government, like so much else that used to be the prerogative of local jurisdictions — control of firearms in municipal parks, for example, or the right to impose wage and anti-discrimination standards in the public sphere.

But nowhere has what many see as the quashing of local choices been more pronounced than in the administration of public education. One of the premises of SCS Superintendent Dorsey Hopson‘s recent request of the county commission for an additional $14.9 million funding had to do with the interruptions and diversions in state outlays caused by the hodge-podge of overlapping of school types and districts that — for better or for worse — have transformed the landscape of local education. 

It may sound progressive and civic-minded when one state school official, such as Candice McQueen, the recently named Tennessee Commissioner of Education, speaks in Memphis on Monday about a new abundance of “choices,” and it may sound decisive when another, Chris Barbic, head of the state’s Achievement School District, boasts that his efforts to revamp student results in the “failing” schools he administers (a majority of which are in Memphis) are not  answerable to any potentially troublesome school board. But the reality in both cases is that local control of education, once a given, has been pre-empted.

The aforementioned session held on Monday by the county commission, in tandem with SCS officials, was largely about the dislocations caused by this shift in responsibility, and a key component of that discussion was the allegation that Nashville has been consistently short-changing the several school districts of Shelby County of the funding levels required by the state’s own Basic Education Program (BEP).

The problem is not Shelby County’s alone. Back in March, the Hamilton County (Chattanooga) Board of Education, after meeting in the state capital with representatives of Tennessee’s other major urban school districts, including SCS, filed suit against the state in Nashville Chancery Court, contending that the state’s underfunding of BEP-ordained levels amounts to the better part of a billion dollars and “shifts the cost of education to local boards of education, schools, teachers, and students, resulting in substantially unequal educational opportunities across the state.”

That, in a nutshell, is the issue that confronts SCS and the county’s six municipal school districts, as well as Shelby County government, which has responsibility for making up the deficits in school funding.

Whatever the result of this legal action, the ever-aggrandizing state educational apparatus, the governor’s office, and the General Assembly have been put on notice.

 

· More from that crash session on Monday: Public school education in Shelby County may never again become the political football it was during the years of merger/de-merger controversy, but it’s begun to move in that direction again, for purely budgetary reasons.

Not quite two weeks after a request for additional funding by SCS Chief Hopson that occasioned a reaction from Shelby County Commission members that several observers described as a “love-fest,” the thrill is definitely gone, and the $14.9 million add-on money sought by Hopson now looks like so much pie in the sky — in a very overcast sky, at that.

The meeting was called by commission budget Chair Heidi Shafer to re-examine the issue of school funding in general (and funding in relation to three initialized considerations — BEP, OPEBs, and MOE — in particular). Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell — who attended the meeting and, along with his CAO, Harvey Kennedy, and CFO, Mike Swift, intervened at key moments — laid it on the line, bluntly: “We cannot afford $18 million [the amount of Hopson’s request, plus an additional amount that would be routed by average-daily-attendance (ADA) formula to the county’s municipal schools].”

Luttrell topped that by adding, as an aside to SCS representatives on hand, “You might try looking at lay-offs.”

One of the issues, clearly, is the mayor’s concern that his proposed 2015-2016 budget of $1.18 billion, which must be acted on by the commission before the fiscal-year deadline of July 1st has been squeezed down to a level that avoids the need for a tax increase this year — although subsequent teasing by various county hands has revealed a de facto surplus of $6 million that is theoretically available for ad hoc needs.

That yields another issue, one alluded to even at the aforementioned love-fest of May 6th — the fact that SCS officials have chosen not to tap that $178 million fund balance of theirs to cover the projects they want paid for. 

School officials have accounted for this reluctance in various ways — some roundabout, some not, some (in defense of maintaining a healthy reserve) even common-sensical — but commission members seem much less inclined to indulge SCS on the point than they were two weeks ago.

Commissioner David Reaves, a former SCS board member himself, put it straightforwardly to the various representatives of SCS — CFO Alicia Lindsey and members Teresa Jones (chair), Kevin Woods (vice chair), and Chris Caldwell (SCS budget chair) — who spent the better part of three hours fielding inquiries from the commission.

Said Reaves: “The reality is, how do you justify having that much money in a savings acccount and asking for $18 million? It’s tough to justify.”

Commissioner Walter Bailey, arguably the most lenient commission member on budgeting for schools, asked the SCS reps a series of questions designed to establish the point that they had already cut their ambitions for next year’s budget to the bone. But he got very little backup from other commission members, even the most SCS-friendly among them.

Clearly, the likelihood is that SCS will be forced to scale back its monetary request — much of which is being sought to keep up funding for various educational strategies that were formerly taken care of by expired or expiring grants from the Gates Foundation and the Race to the Top federal competition won by Tennessee.

The fate of SCS’ fund request was really just a sideshow to the meeting’s main purpose — which was to look critically at the county’s school-funding predicament vis-à-vis the aforementioned alphabetized issues: the BEP; OPEBs (Other Post-Employment Benefits), meaning the benefits contractually owed to retirees in addition to pensions; and MOE (maintenance-of-effort funding), the educational-spending minimums prohibited by the state from being reduced for any reason other than drops in student numbers.

It was on the matter of OPEBs that Luttrell had become most didactic, pointing out that, while county government had seen the writing on the wall regarding the escalating unaffordability of such costs, “others had not,” and he specified SCS as a major procrastinator. Memphis, too, had belatedly begun to reduce OPEB costs, almost to the vanishing point, and he suggested SCS did the same.

County Financial Officer Swift turned the screw a little tighter, noting that at current levels of obligation, OPEB expenses would be costing SCS something like $94 million annually — a sum which, he said with classic understatement, did not seem “feasible.”

The status of MOE obligations on Shelby County government at large was treated as a related phenomenon, but any hopes of getting to the bottom of it were fairly well scotched by a consensus view of the administration and county attorneys that MOE amount for a given jurisdiction were predicated on the third year of a scheduled spending cycle — the latest of these beginning with the de-merger brought about by the creation of six suburban school districts.  

The commission will give all these matters another go-round on Wednesday, its regular committee day.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

County Sausage

In a somewhat surprising take on the nature of his job, Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell on Tuesday described his relationship with his legislative body, the Shelby County Commission, as an “adversary relationship.” In

an address to the members of the Rotary Club of Memphis at the University Club, Luttrell said he’d offered that description as an alternative way of looking at things to an observer who’d asked him about his “contentious relationship” with the commission. 

“We do get worked over,” the mayor acknowledged about the relationship between his administration and the commission (which, it must be said, has often nursed a fair number of feuds and internal divisions within itself). “But,” said the mayor, and it was a crucial “but,” that kind of relationship “is in concert with what the founding fathers devised.”

In other words, the system of checks and balances that was built into the Constitution seems to have carried over into the governing practices of our nation’s various subordinate institutions, as well. Everybody is everybody else’s watchdog.

A case in point was Monday’s commission meeting, when the bone of contention was a plan devised by the county administration, faced with forthcoming reductions of $1.9 million annually in state funding for the county’s incarceration here of state prisoners. The administration had presented a plan whereby it would recoup most of that expected deficit by outsourcing Corrections Center food services to the Aramark Corporation, which would endeavor “in good faith” to re-employ as many as possible of the current 31 workers employed in food services, while the administration would seek to relocate those who were not rehired in jobs elsewhere in county government.

The commission’s discussion of this plan was touch-and-go, especially since sincere and vociferous complaints were heard early on from some of the affected employees, and since the issue, by its nature, was the sort that would invite party-line differences on the commission, divided 7-6 between majority Democrats and minority Republicans. There was a tendency among the Republicans to mount stiff upper lips, sigh, and describe the situation as one of making the best of a bad situation. That was balanced by an outcry among several Democrats that the workers were being thrown under the bus. But there was a middle ground, made evident from the start by the fact that one Republican, Terry Roland, and two Democrats, Van Turner and Willie Brooks, headed in opposite rhetorical directions from those of their party-mates.

Not that there wasn’t some invective thrown about, along with charges of duplicity and deceit, along with intermittently serious tension between the two sides and between county CAO Harvey Kennedy and Democratic critic Eddie Jones. But in the end, with some amendments attached to the proposition that cemented the guarantees of continued employment for the food-services employees, the adversarial atmosphere had served to clarify and complete the proposed arrangement in the form of a legitimate compromise.

Critics of American government often make the comparison to law-making to the unpleasant process of sausage-making. But ideally that very process is what makes the end result digestible and, with any luck, easy on the system.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Government on Ice

So the bad weather came. Not as bad as was advertised, frankly, and not as bad as hit many other points in the nation, including parts of Tennessee to the east of us. Still, it was enough to halt, here as elsewhere, the momentum of politics and government for a couple of days.

“Parts of Tennessee to the east of us,” I said. Okay, Nashville, for instance. Tuesday was wiped off the calendar in state government, and at press time there seemed a real possibility that the General Assembly could have a de facto shutdown all week, even should the schedule of events (committee meetings and floor sessions) be formally reinstated.

East Tennessee proper, which supplies a generous share of human fodder for the legislature, was hardest hit by the storm and seemed destined to remain weather-bound. Conditions there were the primary cause of a state of emergency declared Monday evening by the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency (TEMA). But power outages and road closures were abounding in Middle Tennessee counties like Davidson, Hickman, Humphreys, and Williamson, as well.

Some urgent things, of course, had already been put on ice by the General Assembly — the most notable of which was Governor Bill Haslam‘s Insure Tennessee proposal for Medicaid expansion. That happened week before last, with the proposal’s rejection by a 7-4 vote in an ad hoc Senate committee meeting in special session.

Not to mince words, the proposal, which would have poured into state coffers some $1.5 billion annually — much of it destined for Tennessee hospitals struggling with the costs of uncompensated medical care for the uninsured (estimated to number at least 280,000 in the state) — was defeated because it could be linked to the Affordable Care Act, aka “Obamacare.”

Other arguments — that the federal government would eventually welsh on its commitment to fund the lion’s share of long-term funding or that Tennessee would be stuck in a “Hotel California” commitment it could never check out of — were demolished over and over by the governor or the attorney general or legislative supporters (including Democrats and Republicans), but they kept resurfacing — as a smoke-screen, backers of Insure Tennessee maintained.

Parenthesis: Late in that first week, state Representative Steve McManus (R-Cordova) expressed disappointment that many press reports up Nashville way had wrongly credited a fellow Shelby Countian, state Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown) with authoring the “Hotel California” trope. McManus is correct. As the Flyer reported on its website on January 9th, McManus, a sometime thespian, was indeed the originator of that metaphor.

Kelsey had merely borrowed the phrase — along with predictions of a special-session “bloodletting” by state Representative Curry Todd (R-Collierville) — for his own numerous attacks on the governor’s Medicaid proposal. The senator from Germantown can lay claim to one original argument of his own, however — that, as he said during the fateful hearing by the ad hoc Senate Health and Welfare Committee, Insure Tennessee amounted to nothing more than a “bailout” for the state’s foolishly miscalculating hospitals.

Democrats in the House and Senate, more a remnant than a real force, have introduced legislation to renew consideration of Insure Tennessee in the regular session, now begun, but there seems little hope of that coming to pass. In his post-mortem with the press after the failure of the special session, Haslam said that he’d like to try again, but hinted it might not be possible until the election of a new president.

That same theme was noted directly last week by House Speaker Beth Harwell (R-Nashville), who declined to support Insure Tennessee in the special session and was quoted by The Commercial Appeal‘s Rick Locker as saying, “It might be that two years from now, we wake up with a Republican president, look at going after it again and coming back with a block grant. … Do I think we want to spend a lot of time during the regular session? Nah, I don’t think that.”

People wonder what presidents’ legacies will be. Barack Obama‘s might be that he was the first president who saw every proposal even remotely connected with him — good, bad, or indifferent — relentlessly stonewalled by his political opposition, not only at the congressional level but at the level of state government, as well.

So we wait two years. Right. That’s roughly $3 billion worth of waiting, and God only knows how many of the 280,000 uninsured Tennesseans could have health emergencies in the meantime.

Obama-bashing may work for GOP members in the legislature, but not for those Republicans with responsibility for actual governing in the affected localities of Tennessee. In two overwhelming votes, one in advance of the special legislative session, another afterward, the Shelby County Commission has endorsed Republican member Terry Roland‘s resolution calling for passage of Insure Tennessee.

Concern for imminent strain on the medical and financial resources of Region One Health (aka The Med) was cited by members of both parties. Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell has been outspoken in his disappointment, forecasting in a series of appearances lately that the defeat of Insure Tennessee could lead to a 10 percent county property tax increase. On last week’s Behind the Headlines broadcast on WKNO-TV, Luttrell bit down hard on that bullet:

“The opposition framed it as being an extension of the president. Those Republicans that dared to kind of step out and support it in the General Assembly were vilified.”

It should be noted that not every measure introduced in the current legislative session has met with a cold shoulder. Nah. As one example, a bill (HB677/SB0783) introduced by state Representative James Van Huss (R-Jonesborough) and state Senator Mae Beavers (R-Mt. Juliet), seems on its way to being fast-tracked. This bill would establish the Barrett Model 82A1 50-caliber semi-automatic rifle, manufactured in Murfreesboro, as Tennessee’s “official state firearm.” First things first.

• Another political situation which may have experienced a brief freeze since last week was the rush of candidate declarations for various city offices.

The announcement last Monday by commission chairman Justin Ford that he would seek the office of Memphis mayor further filled out a candidate roster that is ultimately expected to include a generous number of candidates besides those already declared, who include Councilman Jim Strickland, former county commission chairman James Harvey, former University of Memphis basketballer Detric Golden, and, of course, incumbent Mayor A C Wharton.

Councilman Harold Collins is considered a good bet to enter the mayoral field, and another likely possibility is Memphis Police Association director Mike Williams. Expect others before the Election Commission allows petitions to be formally pulled on April 17th. The election itself won’t happen until October 29th.

Other relevant dates: Filing deadline, July 17th. Withdrawal deadline, July 24th. Start of early voting, October 14th. Voter registration deadline, October 5th.

One of those still mulling over a city race and inclined, she says, to give the matter a good bit of time before deciding, is Kemba Ford, the daughter of former state Senator John Ford and an increasing presence in local civil and political affairs. Ford, who has run previous races for the city council and the state legislature, may be a candidate for the council’s District 7 position, but she’s involved at the moment with cousin Joe Ford Jr., a resident of Los Angeles, in an archival multimedia research project on Memphis politics during the civil rights era, focusing on the Ford family’s involvement.

Kemba Ford herself was a longtime resident of L.A., where she pursued an acting career until her father’s arrest, conviction, and imprisonment as a result of the FBI’s Tennessee Waltz sting brought her back to Memphis to provide him with moral support. (Former Senator Ford, long since released, accompanied his daughter to the Tennessee Equality Project’s fund-raising Gumbo Contest at Bridges downtown weekend before last.)

The District 7 position was formerly occupied by Lee Harris, who vacated it after his election year to the state Senate, where he is now that body’s Democratic leader. The seat is currently held on an interim basis by Berlin Boyd, sure to be a candidate in October.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Can “Insure Tennessee” Rise Again?

NASHVILLE — By means of what many supporters of Medicaid expansion in Tennessee see as a stacked deck, an ad hoc state Senate Health and Welfare Committee last week aborted Governor Bill Haslam‘s special session and seemingly killed his Insure Tennessee proposal last week with a 7-4 vote against it on Wednesday — not quite two days after the special session had kicked off with an optimistic address by Haslam.

That vote, from a committee whose normal membership had been altered by Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey, the Senate speaker, effectively halted what would have been a gauntlet run for the proposal through a series of other committees, and prevented the proposal — which was couched in the form of a joint resolution — from reaching the floor of either the House or the Senate for a floor vote.

In the immediate aftermath of the committee vote, supporters of Insure Tennessee pointed out that the regular nine-member Senate Health Committee, which will reconstitute for the regular session that began this week, contains five members presumed to have been for the Insure Tennessee proposal, including the Senate sponsor, Doug Overbey (R-Maryville).

Ramsey’s ad hoc version — reshuffled, according to the Senate speaker, so as to insure that all 33 members of the Senate were evenly apportioned on the three committees that could potentially hear the bill — contained from the start a preponderance of skeptics regarding Haslam’s proposed plan. 

That hurt the proposal’s prospects, and so did the reluctance to endorse the bill of key Republican leaders — Ramsey and Majority Leader Mark Norris (R-Collierville) in the Senate and Speaker Beth Harwell (R-Nashville) in the House.

Much of the resistance to the Haslam proposal was clearly based on the opponents’ ideological hostility to the Affordable Care Act, the health-care system designed by the Obama administration to expand insurance coverage — in partnership, essentially, with private insurors. A component of the act has been the provision of billions of dollars in annual grants to participating states to expand their Medicaid programs. In Tennessee, as Haslam and others pointed out, that would have meant outlays of $1.4 billion annually to TennCare, the state’s version of Medicaid.

Although there were numerous Republicans prepared to vote for the bill, particularly in the House, GOP ideologues denounced the measure as “Obamacare,” despite numerous nods to marketplace methods in the Haslam version and kept on repeating discredited assertions (e.g., that the federal government would ultimately default on funding, sticking Tennessee with the bill, or that the state would not be able to extricate itself from Insure Tennessee, even though Haslam devised it as a two-year pilot program with an automatic fail-safe cut-off mechanism should assumptions prove incorrect or circumstances turn even slightly adverse).

Opponents were aided by a show of force in the hearing rooms by red-shirted representatives of “Americans for Prosperity,” a shell organization funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, who also paid for ads accusing Republican supporters of Insure Tennessee-like state Representative Jimmy Eldridge (R-Jackson) — of having “betrayed” Tennessee.

Predictably, there was a firestorm of criticism in the aftermath of the bill’s rejection, from legislative Democrats and from some Republicans as well, from representatives of Chambers of Commerce and from the Tennessee Hospital Association, whose member institutions had guaranteed to pay whatever future expenses for Insure Tennessee that the federal funding did not directly cover.

The Shelby County Commission, which had voted 12-0 to encourage legislative support for Insure Tennessee three weeks ago, reacted to the proposal’s defeat with a 10-1-1 vote for a fresh resolution on Monday, sponsored by conservative Republican Terry Roland of Millington, urging that the Haslam proposal be reconsidered in the regular session now begun. The desperate financial needs of The Med (now known as Regional One Health) and the predicament of Tennessee’s uninsured population were cited by another GOP conservative, Mark Billingsley of Germantown.

Weighing in at some length also was Republican County Mayor Mark Luttrell, who said, among other things, “I think our citizens in Shelby County deserve more. There should have been a full hearing before the Tennessee General Assembly.”

And, amid calls in the General Assembly itself for renewed consideration of Insure Tennessee, Governor Haslam, whose initial statements following rejection of his proposal were fatalistic, included some determined, even upbeat-sounding statements in his “State of the State” address to a joint session Monday night.

From the governor’s speech: “Last week, the decision was made not to move forward with Insure Tennessee. However, that does not mean the issues around health care go away. Too many Tennesseans are still not getting health coverage they need in the right way, in the right place, at the right time. An emergency room is not the place where so many Tennesseans should be going for health-care services. It’s not the best health care for them, and it’s costing us a lot more in the long run.

“Health-care costs are still eating up too much of our state’s budget and impacting the federal deficit and nation’s debt. According to the Congressional Budget Office, if we maintained health-care costs at their current levels, which we know are inflated, for the next eight years — just kept them flat — we’d eliminate the nation’s deficit. To do that, we can’t keep doing what we have been doing.

“So, though the special session has ended, I hope we can find a way to work together to address those problems.”

• The Memphis mayoral race, just as many expected, and just as some — existing candidates included — were hoping, is filling up. The latest to declare a candidacy is Shelby County Commission Chairman Justin Ford, who had promised the media he would reveal his decision to them on February 9th. And, came Monday, February 9th, Ford did just that.

In a conversation with reporters during breaks in Monday’s commission meeting at the County Building, Ford said he’d been thinking about a mayoral race for four or five years (or about the time he was first elected to the commission in 2010), and, after paying brief homage to the Ford family’s commitment to public service, made special note that his father, former councilman, commissioner, and interim county mayor Joe Ford, was able to raise “half a million dollars” in a race against then Mayor Willie Herenton in 1999. “It won’t be [any] different this time,” avowed Ford, who said he would run on issues of economic development, health care, education, and public safety.

Asked about the fact that the mayoral field was fast multiplying, Ford said, “The more the merrier. When you look at any type of race, especially in this democracy, in the city of Memphis, we’re accustomed to change. The more people in the race the better. They bring different perspectives [for] the opportunity for people to make the decision whether or not they want some change.”

Victory, he said, could come to “whoever has a resounding message, goes door to door, and also raises the right amount of money.”

Ford said he was aware that both Mayor A C Wharton and Councilman Jim Strickland, a declared mayoral candidate, had already raised prodigious amounts of money. “I’ve seen their financial disclosures,” he said.

As an incumbent, Wharton had a head start, Ford acknowledged. “Incumbents are hard to beat, so at the end of the day, if you don’t have a focus and have a real plan, you might not be successful.” But, he noted, “We’re a long, long way from the finish line.” And a few months, for that matter, before petitions for the October election become available in April.

Other candidates already declared are Wharton, Strickland, former Commissioner James Harvey, and former U of M athlete Detric Golden. Considered likely to enter the race are Councilman Harold Collins, New Olivet Baptist Church Pastor and former School Board member Kenneth Whalum Jr., and Memphis Police Association President Mike Williams.

• An effort last Wednesday by county Commissioner Steve Basar to hold a review of the joint city/county EDGE (Economic Development and Growth Engine) board — billed as an “update” on the published Commission agenda for Basar’s economic development committee — was forestalled, with several members insisting on the presence of EDGE board members before having such a discussion. Basar agreed to defer the discussion until the presence of board members, who had not been invited to last week’s commission session, could be arranged, likely in March.