Tag: Mayor AC Wharton

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Bobby Lanier, Pillar of Shelby County Government, Dies

CREDIT: JB

Bobby Lanier, one of the most significant figures in Shelby JB

Bobby Lanier in 2015

County political history and one of the most personally revered as well, died on Saturday, December 28th, after several years of failing health (more to come). Hopefully, some measure of the man can be gained from this profile of Lanier in the Memphis Flyer issue of October 17, 2002:

The Man to See (published October 17, 2002)
by Jackson Baker

For decades, Bobby Lanier has been the preeminent behind-the-scenes presence in County government.

It is a small weekday luncheon in the Plaza Club, sponsored by the Greater Memphis Area Chamber of Commerce and featuring the still new mayor of Shelby County, A C Wharton. The audience of engineers, architects, and other construction-industry types listens attentively as the nattily dressed, crisp-looking Wharton expounds on the problems confronting him — a narrowed economy, the issue of school construction, the property-tax threshold, the issue of Interstate 69, what-have-you. After working down the list, he expresses confidence that, “with the help of people like Bobby Lanier,” he can solve them.

This bouquet, he extends with a slight toss of his head toward a distinguished-looking white-haired man sitting at one of the round tables nearby, just to the left of the one seat — the mayor’s — that is unoccupied. Lanier nods his acknowledgment of the compliment ever so slightly, the line of his mouth set tight but ready for mirth, the eyes possessing a watchful twinkle, his focus altogether on Wharton, as ready to indicate a dessert choice for the mayor (cheesecake) as to answer when the mayor wonders out loud which country club “out in Collierville” he had recently visited with 9th District congressman Harold Ford Jr.

“Ridgeway,” says Lanier definitively, and Wharton proceeds with a tale of that visit, the point of which is to express appreciation and awe that, in his and the audience’s lifetime, two African-American officials, a mayor and a congressman, could be making such a joint appearance as the duly elected representatives of a predominantly white suburb.
Wharton does not spell it out, but as denizens of the world of politics know, this, too, was achieved with the help of Bobby Lanier. (In a piece of synchronicity which seems to underscore this fact, Mike Hankins, one of the construction executives attending the luncheon, puts a hand on Lanier’s shoulder on his way out and says to Wharton, “Mayor, this guy has all the locks and all the keys.”)

In a sense, as Wharton had confided to a reporter early this year, Lanier had been the architect of his candidacy and the prime mover of his campaign. “He’s the one who urged me to run,” said the then-Shelby County Public Defender, detailing the several phone calls that passed between the two in the early summer of 2001 as it became obvious to Lanier that incumbent mayor Jim Rout would not be seeking reelection.

Lanier was then serving Rout as executive assistant, a title he held during the several terms of Rout’s predecessor, Bill Morris, and the title he holds today. “He’s the glue,” as mayoral legal counsel Kelly Rayne puts it. “He got things done,” says Morris. “I take care of problems,” says Lanier. In an almost archetypal sense, he’s the man to see in Shelby County government, and he has been since the day in 1978 when Morris invited Lanier, then serving as a Germantown alderman and nearing retirement as a 25-year employee of Memphis Light Gas & Water, into his mayoral campaign as an all-purpose aide and factotum, then, as now, first among equals. (Arguably, he had a peer in the currently embattled Tom Jones, the communications-and-policy aide for Morris and Rout.)

“I remember when Mayor Rout made his announcement in July 2001,” Lanier says. “I took John Bakke aside and said, ‘I’ll tell you who the next mayor’s going to be.'” Bakke, of course, is the communications guru who has had a hand in an astonishing array of successful election efforts, ranging from those of U.S. Rep. Harold Ford Sr. in the ’70s to those of former 7th District congressman and current Tennessee governor Don Sundquist in the ’80s and ’90s. “I can work with him,” Lanier quotes Bakke as saying about Wharton, and so Bakke would.

On the same day that he had that conversation with Bakke, Lanier accompanied Rout to an affair at the Homebuilders headquarters building in Cordova, where, before a large and festive crowd composed largely of political allies and developers, Rout repeated the formal withdrawal announcement he’d already made in the boardroom of his mayoral office.

Lanier recalls, “One of the developers said to me, ‘I guess Harold Byrd’s going to be the next mayor,’ and I said, ‘No, the next mayor hasn’t announced yet.'”

At the time, Bartlett banker Byrd, a Democrat and former state representative and congressional candidate, was already in the field raising money and developing a head of steam as Rout’s putative successor. Not long after Rout had withdrawn, Byrd made a fund-raising call on Millington’s W.S. “Babe” Howard, a wealthy businessman and philanthropist and a pillar of the county Democratic establishment.

“I’d like to help you,” Byrd was reportedly told by Howard, “but I owe Bobby too many times.” Byrd started getting the same message in other places, and he would later, in an agonizing decision made on the eve of the withdrawal deadline earlier this year, be compelled to withdraw, as another prime prospect, state Senator Jim Kyle, had earlier. Wharton would go on to beat easily both state Representative Carol Chumney in the Democratic primary and radiologist/radio magnate George Flinn, the surprise Republican nominee, in the general election.

Though Byrd declines to speak for the record about the matter, his bitterness is well known concerning both Lanier and Wharton, who he believes misled him about his ultimate intentions of running. Lanier gives a different interpretation to the actions of Wharton, who served as Shelby County Public Defender under both Morris and Rout. “He just didn’t want to run against his boss,” as Lanier puts it.

Lawyer Jim Strickland, the former Democratic Party chairman who served as Byrd’s campaign manager, remembers telling his candidate long before Wharton’s entry, when it was assumed that Rout would still be running, “Gee, Bobby’s such a nice guy and so effective. We ought to consider keeping him on after you’re elected.”

But after Lanier, still serving as an aide to Rout, came front and center as Wharton’s chief backer, Strickland and another Byrd supporter, lawyer Richard Fields, charged that Lanier was violating county ethics codes by making fund-raising calls from his office in the county administration building.

During the resultant brouhaha, Lanier chose to resign and work full-time in Wharton’s campaign. “I didn’t want to cause any problems for the mayor [Rout],” he says. It was the first break in his county employment since 1978, when he first occupied the eighth-floor office adjacent to the mayor’s. For the duration of the campaign, he was replaced as a mayoral aide by Rout ally Ron Banks (now working as an administrator in the Juvenile Court office).

This week, Lanier sat in the office chair he was restored to by Wharton and recalled, of the charges made by Strickland and Fields, “I made some calls from here. Sure, I did, but I didn’t raise any money up here.” He shrugged. “I don’t know many politicians that don’t make calls from their office.”

As Rayne said, Bobby Lanier is the glue. Extending that metaphor, she says, “He’s invisible most of the time and keeps things together. He’s also the sander. He smoothes out the rough edges. They don’t know me. I’m just a bureaucrat downtown. They know him, however. He works things out.”

Case in point: Her observation had been preceded by a conversation with Lanier over a vexing land-use issue involving the municipalities of Memphis and Germantown. The two of them had discussed the case at length, and Lanier had evinced not only an understanding of the details, some of them highly technical, but gave her elaborate advice concerning which officials to put in touch with which others to sand out the edges.

“I believe in getting people together to work out things. I always have and always will,” says Lanier, not, by his own testimony, a policy-maker per se but one who can do what it takes to implement a policy, once it’s been decided on. When there was an impasse on the Public Building Authority several months ago as to which contractors should be employed on the city’s new NBA arena, it was Lanier who stepped in, blandishing here and coaxing there, getting the right people together to work things out to the end of an eventual compromise.

Though little seems to vex the mild-mannered Lanier, he is plainly regretful in discussing somebody’s negative reaction to him, whether it be Byrd’s passing by him without speaking at a recent Peabody luncheon for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Phil Bredesen or the outburst of Criminal Court clerk Bill Key during the campaign, when Key, then the target of some unfriendly yard signs tripling the initial of his last name, pointed at Lanier’s “A C” button and made some disparaging remark about “you Democrats.”

Says Lanier, “I told him, ‘Don’t be accusing me of being a Democrat. I’m for A C Wharton.’ And I told him, ‘Bill, you’ve got to stop acting like you’re mad at everybody. You’ll get beat. You can catch more flies with sugar than you can with vinegar.'”

Lanier’s equanimity has also been tested by the reaction of some Shelby County Republicans who, like newly elected county commissioner John Willingham, believe, as Byrd and some other Democrats did, that Lanier is the prime Good Ole Boy in a veritable G.O.B. network that has extended from mayoral regime to mayoral regime, always including the same contractors and developers, the same financial donors, and the same financial beneficiaries.

Willingham and other members of the G.O.P. populist right believe that Wharton was the handpicked candidate of this network and that Lanier was the Machiavelli who made sure he ended up being mayor. They also are convinced that Rout, who publicly endorsed the mayoral candidacy of then-state Representative Larry Scroggs in the Republican primary and was cool to the candidacy of eventual Republican nominee George Flinn, was in on the Wharton plan and that the mayor’s other campaign moves were merely diversionary.
Rout has denied this, as does Lanier, and he maintains about Willingham, “John and I get along fine. If John’s going to pop off, that’s fine, but I make it a point to get along with all the commissioners.”

Bobby Lanier has always got along. Before Morris tapped him for campaign duty in 1978 — on the basis of his experience working with Lanier in the Jaycees — Lanier had served several terms as a Germantown alderman, finishing always at the top of the vote slate. He was head of the city’s volunteer Fire Department and was, as he still is, president of the Germantown Charity Horse Show — one of three nongovernmental institutions (the others being the Mid-South Fair and Germantown Presbyterian Church) that he has always made time for.

Not bad for a dairy farmer’s son who never attended college (though, in adulthood, he took some evening classes offered by the University of Tennessee here). As Morris says, however, “He was a football hero,” the captain of his 1947 Germantown High School team who averaged five yards a carry during his senior year and whose stern mien in his vintage football pictures is some indication, perhaps, of the iron will that some say lies beneath the easy-going exterior.

“All I wanted to do was be a dairy farmer like my father,” says Lanier, who in the aftermath of his father’s death found himself working with MLGW, doing — what else? — community-relations work. He was also a fixture at Germantown City Hall, arriving early in the morning for coffee and staying until late at night, learning what he could about government and not being bashful about giving advice. Black-haired and crew-cut in those days, he soon made himself indispensable.

For all the long hours, though, he never stinted on his family, he and friends say. “I never missed a single one of my son’s football games,” Lanier says of Robert Cox Lanier the Second (that’s how he was christened), now a funeral director in Alabama. And Morris recalls Lanier spending considerable time each day dressing his wife Pat, who was crippled by arthritis and had a long, lingering illness that ended with her death in 1999, one year after the couple’s 50th wedding anniversary. The enormous crowd that filled Memphis Funeral Home in East Memphis on that occasion included a virtual who’s who in Shelby County politics and government.

Wharton is unstinted in his praise of Lanier, both the governmental aide and the campaign guru: “He was invaluable in the campaign, especially in Shelby County, which he knows like the back of his hand. He knew exactly who might be for us and where we’d be wasting our time. He was a perfect liaison to the outer county, and he dispelled everyone’s fears. He told me when he first started talking to me about running that I would end up with 60 percent of the vote, and he knew just how that would come about.”

An aide in one of the other mayoral campaigns saw things from a slightly different angle. “Bobby’s the go-to guy, and that includes the financial end. All those people who have to see him to get things done, he makes a list of, and later on, he calls them and hits them up for campaign money.”

In the 73-year-old Lanier’s own reckoning, he is just a public servant, content to do what he does out of the limelight, the benevolent white-haired presence who has always been just a step behind the mayor of Shelby County, just an office removed. “I’ve heard people say, ‘Why are you, a white man, at your age, working for a little black man?’ The only reason I helped A C Wharton was because I thought he was the best man for Shelby County, the man who can bring us all together.”

Everything he does is just, says Lanier, a continuation of the habits he formed as a county agent for MLGW, when he was on the same kind of 24-hour call as he is today. “People still call me about Light, Gas & Water problems right now,” he says. “Everybody seems to think I can do anything. Well, I do try to help.” During the 1994 ice storm, he recalls, he asked then-MLGW director Bill Crawford for some repair personnel. “I said, ‘Bill, you give me a crew, and I’ll get these lights on out there in Collierville and the suburbs. And he did, and I did. In three or four days.”

Lanier’s willingness to be of help had sometimes caused him some grief, as when he was indicted along with then-Mayor Morris, during the latter’s 1994 gubernatorial run, for improper use of prison inmates to serve meals at campaign functions. In the shakeout of that scandal — prompted, it was always said, by partisans of rival candidate Phil Bredesen — Lanier ended up the fall guy, with an eventual misdemeanor conviction, which was probated.

He was on the prong of another controversy just last year, when Shelby County Commissioner Michael Hooks was found, by sheriff’s deputies investigating a traffic mishap, to have cocaine paraphernalia in his home. In the fallout, it developed that Hooks had called Lanier, who in turn called then-Chief Deputy Don Wright, who had a misdemeanor citation issued for Hooks, who was spared the embarrassment of arrest. (The commissioner has since staged an apparent full recovery from his acknowledged cocaine addiction.)

Lanier professes the most innocent of motives. “I didn’t even know what it was all about,” he says. “Michael just called me and, without telling me anything, asked for Don Wright’s phone number. Instead of just giving it to him, I called Don and asked him to call Michael, but I never knew what was going on.”
That may strain the credulity of some, but Bobby Lanier seems utterly sincere in the telling of this version.
Lanier has made many an admirer for his willingness to be at the beck and call of Shelby County’s chief executives, picking them up at their homes and personally driving them to their destinations. But all is not self-sacrifice in the saga of Bobby Lanier. His political connections have been useful to him in landing some investment opportunities, most notable in 1973 when he and a number of other local civic and political figures founded the Community Bank of Germantown. Lanier and the others, who included congressman-to-be Sundquist, made what everybody acknowledges was a considerable fortune when they sold the bank in the ’90s to the First Tennessee Corporation.

Septuagenarian Bobby Lanier intends to keep on keeping on, presumably for two full terms of Mayor A C Wharton. And who knows beyond that? Though he rarely has time to do any recreation beyond an occasional charity round of golf, he looks remarkably fit. And he probably hasn’t lost the nerve that once prompted him, for reasons he can’t explain, to stand atop the fiberglass roof of a fire truck and touch two live wires overhead, letting 500,000 volts pass right through him. “You see, I wasn’t grounded,” he says.

His once and future job as right-hand man to the mayors of Shelby County does ground him, of course. “As I tell people, the door’s open all the time. It’s very seldom otherwise. People come up to see the mayor, and when they can’t, I go out to see ’em. They need to see somebody.”

For now, both Bobby Lanier and A C Wharton are quite comfortable with Lanier’s being that somebody.

Go here for original online article.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

The New Convention Center Deal

It was roughly a year and a half ago that Mayor A C Wharton publicly proposed a fallback position regarding possible upgrades of Memphis’ convention facilities. He did so as a follow-up of sorts on what had been less than sanguine

estimates from Convention and Visitors Bureau head Kevin Kane about our city’s having the means to catch up with Nashville’s new glittering and cavernous Music City Center.

In an editorial of March 20, 2014, “A Patchwork Mecca,” we reviewed the mayor’s pitch for a scaled-down convention complex, outlined in a speech to the Rotary Club of Memphis.

From the editorial: “‘We don’t have the money. That’s the bottom line,’ Wharton said, pointing out the obvious. And anyhow, he said, ‘I don’t want to be Nashville or Atlanta.’ He thereupon proposed a method of taking the best advantage of the ‘legacy’ assets our city already has and connecting them in such a way as to be competitive in the tourist and convention markets without breaking the bank.”

The mayor went on to propose spending modest amounts of money ($50 to $60 million) refurbishing the existing convention center, as well as the now dormant Peabody Place, and connecting those two hubs with the then soon-to-be Bass Pro Shops Pyramid, the National Civil Rights Museum, and various other downtown attractions via the city’s trolley system. And “voila!,” as we said, “there you have it, a new convention center complex done on the cheap.”

Well, a funny thing happened between then and now. Several funny things, in fact: one being the discovery that our trolley system was dangerously unstable and fire-prone, requiring a retrofitting process, the dimensions of which remain uncertain. That by itself argued for a change of mind. But there were other factors, too — most of them considerably more upbeat.

The bottom line is that the powers-that-be have apparently decided that, not only do we want to “be Nashville or Atlanta,” we actually are in a position to give those boomtowns a run for their money. The aforesaid Convention and Visitors Bureau in tandem with the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce and the Downtown Memphis Commission have hatched a two-part plan: 1) to spend the aforementioned $50 to $60 million on refurbishing the existing Cook Convention Center; and then 2) to spend another $900 million in the next few years to expand the Convention Center all the way to the Mississippi River basin. All it would take, say the planners, would be a 1.8 percent increase in the city’s hotel/motel tax (which is paid by visitors to Memphis, in the main) and a temporary $2 fee on hotel-room stays of up to 30 days. This would cover a repurposing of the current bed tax in 2017 to pay off FedExForum bonds.

The Memphis City Council is considering the project right now, with every expectation of giving it the go-ahead. And we’re thinking, What! You mean, it’s really that easy? And we wonder why it is that we are always considering these complicated Rube Goldberg-like TDZs and TIFs to lift our urban bootstraps.

And, by the way, have we cleared this with the Grizzlies?

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Memphis Mayor’s Race: Light in August

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

There will be two more joint appearances by mayoral candidates this week. And, as if any more proof were needed that the mayoral race is a tight, tense affair, there was incumbent Mayor A C Wharton out there on Saturday, with the temperature in the 90s, going door to door and asking Whitehaven residents for permission to put his signs in their yards.

This was two weeks after the mayor’s opening of a Whitehaven headquarters on Elvis Presley Boulevard (followed a week later by his opening of a Poplar Avenue HQ).

To hear the mayor say it, Whitehaven has always been a proving ground for him in his various elections, especially when, as in 2011, when one of his opponents was a Ford — in that case, former City Councilman Edmund Ford Sr., a member of the prominent South Memphis-based political family.

Jackson Baker

The Mayor does DIY with yard signs in Whitehaven

“They’ve always said I’d have trouble with Whitehaven, but I always do okay,” said Wharton, as he trundled up Whitworth Road, waiting to rendezvous with an aide in a car, headed his way with more signs. “All you gotta do is look around here and see how many signs we’ve already put up.”

Whitehaven has the potential to be a problem area for Wharton this year, inasmuch as one of his opponents, City Councilman Harold Collins, represents the area on the council. That morning, even as Wharton was doing his door-to-door in Whitehaven, Collins was having a formal headquarters opening at Southbrook Mall, mere blocks away on Shelby Drive at Elvis Presley.

The mayor did not minimize the Collins threat, but, as he said, “Only a Ford is a Ford,” meaning, presumably, that in his view the councilman lacked the well-known political clan’s lingering mystique in the area.

And, as it happens, only days before, Edmund Ford Sr., Wharton’s former opponent, had released to the media a scathing letter accusing Collins of running a diversionary campaign designed not to win but to siphon African-American votes away from Wharton to help the mayoral candidacy of Councilman Jim Strickland.

And, meanwhile, Edmund Ford Jr., who succeeded his father on the city council and represents a part of Whitehaven adjoining Collins’ bailiwick, is one of the mayor’s major backers, speaking on his behalf at various rallies. That sort of help will surely prove useful to the mayor’s reelection campaign.

Although nobody, as of yet, is releasing poll results, those you hear about are said to confirm the fact that Wharton is indeed involved in a competitive race — with Strickland the major threat — and has to meet various percentage figures among both black and white voters in order to prevail.

Wharton and Strickland have enormous campaign treasuries and are in a position to spend anywhere from $200,000 to $300,000 on their campaigns between now and October 8th — much of that on print, radio, and TV advertising. Collins and a fourth candidate regarded as serious, Memphis Police Association director Mike Williams, don’t have resources on that scale, but both got positive exposure on last Monday night’s debate on WMC-TV and stand to claim an ever greater share of public attention, with several more mayoral forums yet to come.

Jackson Baker

Collins with daughters at Southbrook

Collins’ headquarters opening on Saturday took place in a former bank building in the parking lot of Southbrook, the down-at-the-heels shopping mall which has been the subject of an on-again/off-again renovation project that was shelved back in June by the mayor. Days later, Wharton proposed a commission to look into a more ambitious $50 to $70 million renovation of the entire area, though there were cynics who saw that move as purely hypothetical and designed only for its short-term P.R. value.

The mayor has been nothing if not candid about what he sees as the priorities of the city’s voters. Some weeks ago, speaking to women supporters at Waterford Plaza, he expressed regret at the benefit cuts imposed on city employees this year but said polling showed that voters overall were not exercised over the matter, whereas they expressed a great deal of anxiety about the city getting its financial house in order. Recalling the matter on Saturday, Wharton mused, “‘Getting our financial house in order’ got a 9.4 rating on a scale of 10.”

Both Southbrook and the benefits cuts are integral matters to Collins’ platform and got due mention on Saturday — the former with the councilman’s promise to come to the rescue of local entrepreneurs; the latter, when local Firefighters Union president Tommy Malone told the crowd that fire employees had “lost everything that we’ve gained for 30 years” during the Wharton administration.

By contrast, Collins had been the “only candidate who has consistently supported the firefighters,” Malone said. “We’ve got to work this man into office. Or we’ll get four more years of the same thing, and we can’t stand that in this city.”

Collins had been preceded to the mic by his two daughters, who told the crowd how they had been reluctant to return to Memphis after college elsewhere because of limited, low-pay job opportunities back home. The councilman elaborated on that, one of his basic themes, saying that Memphis’ young people “see no future in … pull-it, pick-it, and push-it jobs” at $9 or $10 an hour. He promised, as mayor, to bring in well-paying finance, engineering, and technology jobs.

Recalling last year’s youth mob attack on shoppers at the Poplar Plaza Kroger, Collins cited the specter of urban “terrorism” and said he would “work with the Juvenile Court system to deal with violence, making sure the perpetrators were detained and subjected to a judicial hearing within 24 hours. We will determine whether somebody is the head of some gang or if the valedictorian is at the wrong place at the wrong time,” Collins said.

After pledging, “We won’t have all these CEOs and COOs in our administration,” an obvious dig at the incumbent mayor, Collins ran a few stirring phrases up the flagpole and, in an oblique reference to the Edmund Ford Sr. letter, declared, “We’re in this race to win it. Nor in this race to do anything else, but win. But win. But win!”

While all this was going on, Strickland, like the Mayor, was going door to door, something he does on weekends with fair frequency. The simple yard signs saying “Strickland” are beginning to appear in quantity along such high-visibility thoroughfares as Poplar and Walnut Grove, as are those for Wharton. Collins, too, has a fair number of signs out.

With both Wharton and Strickland about to turn loose gobs of money (their first TV ads have already appeared) and Collins stepping up his fund-raising efforts, the campaign of Williams remains a true variable. He doesn’t yet have anything like the public presence of the others, but last week’s agile debate performance, which seemed to disprove that he’s a one-trick pony, has people watching.

Williams spent most of Saturday at the Agricenter attending a “Pet Expo.” He materialized late in the day at a location off White Station Road, where the Police Association was collecting donations for the family of slain MPD officer Sean Bolton.

Williams and the others were scheduled for a debate at the University of Memphis’ Rose Theater at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday and at Central High School for an Evergreen Historic Association forum on Thursday at 6 p.m. We’ll be watching.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Sammons ‘R Us

I have some big news. Really big news. After lots of cajoling and arm-twisting, I’ve managed to convince Jack Sammons (yes!) to become the Flyer‘s new executive editor. Sure, I know he’s a busy man, being the CEO of the hair-product company that makes Shine ‘n Jam and running the Airport Authority and helping run the FedEx St. Jude golf tournament. And I know Mayor Wharton has tapped him as the man to take over as the new city chief administrative officer (CAO), but really, who else is there in town? Sammons, as we all know, is “Mr. Fixit,” and we need him here at the Flyer, just like everybody else does.

And, as everyone knows, Sammons’ resume is second to none. He’s already been city CAO once. He’s a four-term city councilman, a former council chairman, a restaurateur, a bartender, and a man with connections. And, according to several folks quoted in Wayne Risher’s recent Commercial Appeal profile, Sammons is a “master salesman, communicator, and executor … innovative, creative, and bold.”

Whew! Sammons, as is now obvious, not only can do it all, he eventually will do it all. The mayor has now dispatched an emissary to Nashville to convince the GOP-led legislature to overturn a pesky law that prohibits a person who’s running an airport authority from working for that airport’s city administration. But surely that’s just a formality. Sammons, as I may have mentioned, has connections in high places. And it’s just that important that he become Memphis’ CAO.

Sure, there are some nay-sayers, like county Mayor Mark Luttrell, who was quoted in Risher’s story as saying: “I just think that’s too much for one person. I think the airport needs someone who can give their unqualified attention to that situation and the city needs a CAO who can do that as well.”

Pish posh.

Sure, in other cities, there may be lots of qualified folks out there ready to step up and take things in a fresh new direction. But in Memphis, not so much. Around here, it’s pretty much Jack Sammons or nothing. We’re lucky to have him. Otherwise, we’d be screwed.

And that’s why I’m so happy he’s also going to begin running the Flyer. Sure, I could have looked around and found some perky, young forward-thinker. Heck, there are some deserving folks on my own staff, some of them even female, but if you get a chance to get Jack Sammons, you go for it, my friends. That’s just the way it is.

And yes, I’ve heard the rumblings out there — that Sammons is also going to begin running Memphis In May, MIFA, the CVB, the Memphis Grizzlies, Archer-Malmo, The Chris Vernon Show, Muddy’s Bake Shop, and Bass Pro, but he can handle it. He’s Jack Sammons, dammit. If you doubt him, you don’t know Jack.

And frankly (according to what a little birdie just told me), if I were Josh Pastner, I’d be a little nervous right now. Just sayin’.

Categories
News News Feature

No Time for Politics

Revisiting history does not mean that we have the right to rewrite it.

I mention this in light of a recent meeting of the Memphis City Council in which members of my administration and I were criticized about the city’s debt even as our finance director presented a debt-restructuring plan. 

Rather than focusing on the merits of the plan, the discussion descended into a debate on how we somehow misled the council with respect to our 2010 debt plan and our overall finances. In this meeting, one council member went so far as to misrepresent my comments on this matter by selectively editing an audio version of my past remarks.

Given this rather selective amnesia of certain council members and the concern of many citizens in how we got here financially, I am compelled to set the record straight.

There is no way to truly understand our current financial circumstances without speaking to the Memphis City Council’s 2008 vote to cut funding to Memphis City Schools (MCS) and the successful lawsuit against the city to restore this funding. The following points are matters of record:

In July 2008, over the objection of Mayor W. W. Herenton, the Memphis City Council voted to take $65 million per year from the Memphis City Schools. Two months after my election in October 2009, my request to the council to restore the school funding tax rate was refused.         

In August 2010, the Tennessee State Supreme Court affirmed the $57 million lower court ruling in favor of MCS. 

Based on the decisions of the courts in favor of Memphis City Schools, the city restored its annual school funding in 2010. What remained was the amount taken from schools in the 2008-2009 school year that needed to be paid back. The council’s options were rather straightforward: Restore the tax rate that had been dedicated for schools, cut other operating expenses to free up funds for the schools, or some combination of these two items. 

In this context, it is important to underscore that while the mayor has to propose a budget, it is the council that has authority to raise taxes and to set the budget.  

On the matter of raising taxes and making budget cuts to pay Memphis City Schools, the council was hopelessly deadlocked. But, something had to be done.

Against this backdrop, we presented the 2010 Debt Restructuring Plan as a compromise solution for council members to avoid the immediate need to raise taxes and make drastic budget cuts. It was a commonly used “scoop and toss” arrangement that allowed the city to push payments on this financial obligation out into the future.

To be clear, the 2010 Debt Restructuring Plan was essentially done to allow us to comply with the court order to pay the schools. The 2015 Debt Restructuring Plan is largely being proposed for the same lingering issue.  

Those who see the debt plan and those who submitted this plan as the source of our financial challenges are confusing bad-tasting medicine and the administering physician with the issue being treated. This is not meant to place the funding of children’s education in a bad light, but only to highlight the confusion of some on this issue.

The current debt-restructure plan was developed with a team of nationally recognized financial advisors and later vetted and approved by the state comptroller. As a local newspaper article recently outlined, what we are doing is standard for many other major cities faced with varying financial challenges. With the annual pension obligation increasing, the looming debt services bubble, and interest rates that will soon rise, we can no longer afford inaction or delay.

What we need now is action to approve the proposed debt-restructuring plan. Financial realities and past missteps should remind us that we don’t have time for politics on this matter.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

The Sammons Gambit

Eyebrows have been raised big-time this week by Memphis Mayor A C Wharton’s unexpected action in moving to replace his reliable chief administrative officer (CAO), George Little, with Airport Authority head Jack Sammons (a transfer that only Little, of the principals involved, was speaking to as of press time).

Jack Sammons

There is general agreement among various observers (including Little!) that the mayor’s action is motivated by political considerations. Though Little (“Chief,” as he is referred to around City Hall) is an excellent manager, he is manifestly uncomfortable with the political aspects of government, and 2015, with the mayoralty at stake in a showdown city election, is going to be a hothouse political year.

The mayor’s move (which would keep Little employed as city operating officer) engages at least two political fronts. State law prohibits members of a metropolitan airport authority from serving with the government that supervises it — in this case the City of Memphis. Consequently, emergency legislation to make Sammons’ city appointment valid must be filed, and the office of state Senator Mark Norris (R-Collierville) confirmed that he was working something up.

The task of doing so was complicated by the fact that the deadline for filing new legislation has long since passed. But Norris, who is Senate majority leader, is also vice chair of the three-member Senate Calendar Committee, which has oversight on all bills and apparently can authorize exceptions to the rule.

It is no secret, either, that FedEx founder Fred Smith, whose political influence on both sides of the political aisle is huge and who has both professional and family ties to Sammons and, to say the least, a major interest in Airport Authority matters, is urging such an outcome.

If Little has, by his own statement, little taste for the game of politics, Sammons might have been born for it. An ingratiating presence, he served several influential terms on the city council and, for two months in 2009, was the appointed CAO  for interim Mayor Myron Lowery when the abrupt retirement of then Mayor Willie Herenton forced a special mayor election and the temporary elevation of then-council Chairman Lowery.

Sammons might have forged even further in local political significance, but for a tactical misstep in 1994 when he embraced an alliance with then-Congressman Harold Ford Sr., a major Democratic power broker, in a bid as an independent  for Shelby County Mayor in a race that Republican nominee Jim Rout eventually won.

Angered, the local  Republican establishment returned the favor by successfully backing lawyer/businessman John Bobango against Sammons for the latter’s council seat in the 1995 city election. Such was Sammons’ resilience and political skill that, instead of sulking over his defeat, he mended fences with the GOP, took his medicine, and offered effective service for the next four years as local Republican treasurer.

By 1999, Bobango chose to retire, and Sammons had no difficulty in regaining his seat. He was appointed chairman of the Memphis-Shelby County Airport authority two years ago. Meanwhile, he continues as president of Ampro Industries, a maker of hair-care products.

Sammons, a gifted administrator, has good residual connections with the mini-universe of City Hall, including the city council, where Wharton sorely needs some help. (See “Opinion,” next page.) Perhaps unsurprisingly, though, two members of the Council who have mayoral ambitions — Jim Strickland and Harold Collins — professed themselves concerned about issues, largely technical, associated with Sammons’ pending appointment.

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Editorial Opinion

Leading From the Top

So far in 2015, we have  been sufficiently dosed with annual “State of …” speeches delivered by the heads of government of most direct importance to us — the governor of Tennessee and the mayors of Memphis and Shelby County.

And we have heard both preamble and follow-up speeches from all three officials. Though, as expected, all three, Governor Bill Haslam, Memphis Mayor A C Wharton, and Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell, found much to boast about, they all also, with varying degrees of frankness, touched upon some dire needs — for more money, more efficiency, more ingenuity, or whatever — to avoid a curtailment of vital governmental services, including provisions for public safety, that all citizens, regardless of ideology, insist on.

All three chief executives can, with some justification, state a claim that serious efforts have been made within their jurisdictions over the past several years to operate their governments in accordance with the dictates of economy and the needs of hard-pressed taxpayers. But, even amidst the boasting, all three conceded the degree of difficulty they’re operating under.

As Wharton acknowledged on Tuesday, the strain of keeping the city in the black has been considerable. Speaking of the wrenching changes he deemed necessary in the benefits package of city employees, Wharton said, “We’re all scarred, but our city is better off as a result.”

And Luttrell has confessed that the incentives offered to potential new businesses by the EDGE (Economic Development and Growth Engine) board supervised by himself and Wharton are under fire and very likely — like the board itself — in need of review.

Meanwhile, Haslam also has his problems. He is fresh from having offered a special session of the Tennessee General Assembly an unusual bargain — some $1.4 billion annually in federal funding (a measurable part of it derived from this state’s taxpayers in the first place) in order to facilitate health-care insurance for an estimated 200,000 Tennesseans who have not been able to afford such coverage. 

Temporarily, anyhow, this bonanza — based on a carefully structured plan with numerous free-market components — has been denied to these citizens, as well as to the state’s over-burdened hospitals, by an ad hoc state Senate committee. The committee was stacked in advance by Senate Speaker Ron Ramsey with opponents of the governor’s plan for Medicaid expansion, called Insure Tennessee, and denounced by them as synonymous with the imagined excesses of “Obamacare.” This, despite the fact that the Haslam’s plan has numerous distinguishing features and was designed to spare the state of Tennessee and its taxpayers any expense whatsoever.   

Perhaps the General Assembly, meeting now in regular session, will revive Insure Tennessee. We hope so. The Shelby County Commission, in two bipartisan votes, has urged just that in no uncertain terms. So have our two mayors. We hope, too, that the scars spoken of by Wharton will heal, and that his and Luttrell’s devices for attracting new jobs, and for developing the workforce to assume those jobs, can reach the right kind of equilibrium to satisfy all components of what is still a seriously divided community.

We agree that these leaders have all managed to get some roses to bloom. But the thorns are still there, too, and somehow have to be plucked.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Surprise! Mayoral-Race Rival Takes Issue With Wharton Claims

CREDIT: Toby Sells

Toby Sells

JIM STRICKLAND

Jim Strickland, a Memphis City Council member and a 2015 Memphis mayoral candidate, says Memphis Mayor A C Wharton is “likable” and “friendly” but  he hasn’t delivered on many promises in his term as mayor.

Strickland served up his criticism of the mayor in a rebuttal to Wharton’s State of the City address Thursday.

Wharton’s address was delivered inside Hatiloo Theater. Strickland chose to deliver his rebuttal on the nearby Overton Square courtyard. For television reasons, the rebuttal was moved to the sidewalk adjacent to the Overton Square parking garage. Either way, the setting was intentional on Strickland’s part.

Below is a transcript of Strickland’s formal remarks:

I find it odd and I’m amazed the mayor staged the State of the City address here in Overton Square because he actually opposed the city’s involvement in the redevelopment here, the parking garage and the underground retention area. I am saying he opposed it.

Councilman Shea Flinn and I proposed this garage because it doubled as a water retention (facility) for Lick Creek, which has devastated Midtown through its flooding over the years.

Mayor Wharton told us he supported us. But behind the scenes he and his staff were asking other city council members to vote against it. We found that out the day of the vote. Fortunately, the Overton Square redevelopment supporters and we won that vote down at city council.

I know that Mayor Wharton is a very likable and friendly man and his promises and his proposals make you feel good and you want to believe him. But when you’re running the day to day efforts at city hall, results have to matter. And, frankly, the results for the last three years have been very disappointing out of city hall.

Violent crime is up. Blight and litter are very common in many neighborhoods throughout the city and potholes are everywhere. Most of our citizens feel the city is heading in the wrong direction.

For example, we found out this week that an honor student in Westwood feels that she, to walk to school safely, she has to carry a box cutter. The Hispanic community this week has been pleading for more police protection in their neighborhoods. And a man in Frayser has repeatedly told me that he wishes the mayor would enforce the curfew law because he and his neighbors don’t feel safe when they’re walking around the neighborhood.

That is the state of the city that many of our residents are living through.

The mayor made many promises today but we’ve heard them before. In the State of the City address in 2012, the mayor promised a thorough review of the Memphis Police Department. And I quote: “This review will guarantee the police department is operating at peak performance.”

What happened to that review? What happened to that guarantee? Nothing. No action.

The police department is not operating at peak performance. Their budget may be up but the number of police officers is down over a three year period of time. And I remind you again – violent crime has increased.

I believe in Memphis. I believe we can clean this city up and reduce crime. I believe we can increase our population and increase the number of jobs we have here in Memphis.

But we have to have action and not just words. We have to focus on the basics of city government services.

We can do that by, once again, making our police department important and vital to the health of the city and making sure their number one priority is reducing violent crime.

I know the city has the resources and the ability to clean up the blight through our neighborhoods, pick up litter on our streets, and pave our roads. But what we don’t have is leadership in this administration.

We need a leader who will not only tell us what he’s going to do, but actually do it. Leadership is not making promises that make you feel good. Leadership is results. Thank you.

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Politics Politics Feature

Lowery’s Breakfast Boner

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Regardless of how some current situations come out — Mayor A C Wharton‘s public endorsement of higher salaries for city employees or his “settlement” of the city’s debt to Shelby County Schools (SCS) or, for that matter, his early-bird announcement of IKEA’s coming to Memphis — Wharton’s credibility and his standing with his city council are at serious risk.

Beyond that, while all of the foregoing matters may have constituted an immediate political plus for the mayor as the 2015 city election season gets under way, his political situation could be gravely threatened if any or all of them go south.

The IKEA outcome, for better or for worse, would be shared with other public officials and with the city/county Economic Development Growth Engine (EDGE) board. And the chief impediments to what would appear to be a done deal are the valid questions of whether a) EDGE decides to engage in its first-ever payment-in-lieu-of-taxes (PILOT) arrangement with a purely retail enterprise; and b) whether state guidelines permit as much. The odds are that “yes” is the answer to both questions.

Score one for the mayor, especially if the whole IKEA/H&M/Trader Joe’s new-business package pans out.

The other two circumstances are different: While there is at least a theoretical prospect of concurrence on the pay-raise matter by some council members, the majority are surely inclined to say no, especially in light of the well-known budget dilemma that caused such agonizing cuts in employee benefits in recent months. Not only does the mayor’s suggestion, made during his remarks at Councilman Myron Lowery‘s New Year’s Day prayer breakfast, not bear logical muster, it also seems to put the council, already bruised and tattered, on the spot one more time.

So, for that matter, has Wharton’s announcement last month of an agreement with SCS Superintendent Dorsey Hopson (and an eagerly compliant SCS board) of a $43 million payout in settlement of the city’s court-ordered liability of $57 million in maintenance-of-effort funding, owed from 2008. But sentiment is building on the council that Wharton did indeed undermine ongoing mediation efforts with SCS, as charged by Councilman Shea Flinn, who was involved in the mediation process.

Flinn and others promptly complained that Wharton’s arbitrary effort sacrificed what many on the council believe is a substantial financial counter-claim. And they pointedly reminded the mayor that, while he had authority over lawsuits involving the city, he would have to come to the council for approval of the financial package.

Even as this state of affairs was settling into focus, an unexpected disruption further jostled the equilibrium of the mayoral race. This one, like the mayor’s pay-raise suggestion, took place at Lowery’s New Year’s Day event at the Airport Hotel.

This was the 24th and latest version of the annual New Year’s Prayer Breakfasts, which Lowery began on January 1, 1992 (coincident with the inauguration of former Mayor Willie Herenton as the first elected black chief executive in Memphis history).

As is his annual wont, Lowery, this year’s council chairman-designate, was closing out the breakfast with some parting words, in the wake of speeches by other political figures — Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell and Wharton, and 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen — interspersed with songs, sermonettes, and prayers by various lay and clerical folks.

Lowery’s prayer breakfasts have often been occasions for collectively thinking out loud and taking stock regarding political directions, and even for the launching of useful initiatives by one or more of those taking part. The breakfasts are, in that sense, traditional events for the larger community, though let us be clear: They are fund-raising events, and there is definitely a self-serving side to them. 

Lowery told his council colleague and chairmanship predecessor Jim Strickland, who was getting ready to take his leave well before the end of the breakfast, not to go, that if he did he would miss some “nice things” Lowery had to say about him.

When the time came for Lowery to conclude the event, he did indeed have some compliments for Strickland, who had dutifully stayed around. In fact, Lowery made a point of asking his colleague, a persistent critic of Wharton whose hopes of running for the city’s premier office himself have been well known (and well underway) for years, to stand. 

“He’s done a great job as chairman during a very difficult year,” said Lowery, amid other words of praise. “I like him. He’s got the potential to be a future mayor of Memphis.” Hmmm, the crowd had to be wondering, what was coming? An endorsement? Even Strickland, who was reasonably sure that Lowery, himself a 2009 loser to Wharton, was committed to supporting the mayor’s reelection, found himself wondering.

After all: He’s got the potential to be a future mayor of Memphis. “But not just yet,” Lowery said, suddenly undercutting the premise he himself had raised. There is no way to describe what came next as anything other than setting his council colleague up for a fall. The mortified Strickland, still standing and the focus of everyone’s gaze, would surely see it that way.

“I have to be honest,” Lowery was saying. “I’m with the mayor. … He’s controversial. He may not do everything right all the time. But his heart’s in the right place, and he’s done a good job.”

Lowery then began, with Strickland still standing there, a full-fledged endorsement of Wharton: “I know a lot of people,” Lowery kept saying, and what else was this meant to be but the boast of a kingmaker?

Strickland, meanwhile, had had enough. Lowery was still going strong when his understandably offended colleague pointedly began to walk. Intercepted midway by a reporter on his passage out, Strickland shook his head and said, in amazement as much as in anger, “He asked me to stick around to hear that!”

Lowery now has an ambivalent status with his fellow council members. A highly chameleon-like figure, emotionally and issue-wise, he is politically ambidextrous enough to have positioned himself on the council as a conciliatory figure, a maker of compromises between factions and, for that matter, across the occasional racial divide. For that, and for his experience, gained from nearly six full council terms, he has been able to maintain a fair degree of confidence from his peers — enough to have earned repeated elections as council chair, most recently for the year to come.

But there is such a thing as, metaphorically, throwing your weight around, and Lowery’s New Year’s Day gaffe seemed to numerous colleagues and other onlookers to be just that. That was especially so at a time when Lowery has made known his hopes of promoting his son, Mickell Lowery, to succeed him on the council, perhaps as early as this year. For the record, the younger Lowery, a management consultant, shared moderating duties with his father at this year’s prayer breakfast and was arguably the abler and certainly the more discreet of the two.

That Lowery, at a time when at least two of his council colleagues, Strickland and Harold Collins, have openly nursed serious ambitions for mayor, publicly proclaimed his endorsement of Wharton’s reelection — at a putatively neutral “prayer breakfast” — was bizarre enough. That he did so while having contender Strickland stand at full attention was widely regarded as outrageous — no matter the praise he had heaped on his colleague (which seemed patronizing in the after-taste) and no matter the sorry-if-I-offended-you non-apology apology he reportedly made to Strickland later.

Though no one on the council has said much publicly, there is definite sentiment among Lowery’s colleagues to call him to account on his fidelity to a mayor who is increasingly in disfavor with the council (and whom, ironically, Lowery himself, then serving as interim mayor, opposed in the 2009 special election that followed Mayor Herenton’s retirement). There has even been an exploratory balloon or two regarding the prospect of reconsidering the chairmanship.

And, whatever his intent, the one definite result of Lowery’s New Year’s Day gaffe has been to make the prospects for contesting Wharton’s reelection more likely.

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News The Fly-By

The Council and the Mayor

When I heard it, I thought, “This is the quote of the year.”

Thomas Malone, the ever outspoken president of the Memphis Firefighters Association, railed in frustration, “The city administration is like an addict on crack. They will buy, steal, and do anything they can from anybody, to get what they want!” So, Tommy, tell us how you really feel, huh?

Based on the events of 2014, there are a lot of Memphians bewitched, bothered, and bewildered by the actions of the administration of Mayor A C Wharton and the Memphis City Council. Malone’s bitter assessment came just days after the council rammed through a surprising vote on the long-debated city employees’ pension plan.

After nearly a year of discussion, with the Wharton administration at first presenting a proposal with Draconian cuts to appease a warning from the state comptroller on addressing a more than $500 million pension deficit, the council decided on a 9-to-4 vote to go with Councilwoman Wanda Halbert’s plan to only apply the benefit cuts to city employees with seven-and-a-half or fewer years of service. It also happens to neatly include council members, as elected officials. Halbert’s plan was a complete reversal of her previously staunch support of city employees seeking no cuts to benefits. Her apparent flip-flop will be the fodder for much discussion as she reportedly will seek to unseat incumbent Thomas Long for the city clerk’s office in 2015.

But, after nearly a year of debate, why was Halbert’s proposal fast-tracked for a vote? As Malone told me, he asked for time for actuaries to run the numbers again on all the plans presented. His request was rejected. It certainly makes you wonder.

Certainly the communication gap between the mayor’s office and the council has never been more obvious than with the proposed settlement agreement Wharton and Shelby County School (SCS) Superintendent Dorsey Hopson privately reached. The facts are that two courts have ruled against the city’s counterclaim that they are owed the interest on $100 million given to legacy Memphis City Schools for buildings. They alleged their claim trumps the $57 million both courts ruled the city owes the school system, dating back to 2008. Councilman Myron Lowery told me last week the majority of his colleagues feel their counterclaim will win out as both sides continue mediation efforts. Two glaring discrepancies come to mind as the battle lines are drawn for the upcoming showdown over whether the council will approve funding for the school settlement in early January.

It doesn’t surprise me that Wharton, Hopson, and the SCS board members are happy with this deal that essentially amounts to $43 million in cash and other amenities, such as $2.6 million in police protection for schools and a balloon payment of $6 million in February. What bothers me is how Wharton decided to communicate this agreement to the council in a terse, written memorandum delivered just as the pension vote was about to be made. He apparently hadn’t even told those council members on the mediation team he’d reached a deal. It’s an example of Wharton’s confounding “lawyers know best” mentality. He comes from the world of plea bargains and deals in criminal justice. But, as the city’s chief executive, he has to be more open and candid about his dealings, especially when the final approval for funding lies with the council.

And speaking of the council: Back in 2008, tired of the “maintenance of effort” in voluntarily funding city schools for years, they went rogue. That proved to be a costly mistake for all concerned. It can be reasonably argued that their failure to pay the $57 million led to the collapse of the legacy Memphis City Schools two years later. Their decision to divest themselves of that obligation led to millions of taxpayer dollars being wasted on the protracted litigation between the city and the county that followed.

Now the ball is in their court again. A second chance to begin to right the foolish mistake the city council committed six years ago. If council-members decide to reject this settlement because of bruised egos or personal agendas, then they should be made to pay the price at the ballot box in 2015. It will be a fitting answer for those we elect who once in office suffer from the “addiction” of power. If we as voters don’t respond? Maybe we’re on crack.