Tag: Mayor Mark Luttrell

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Politics Politics Feature

Truce, Sort Of, Between Luttrell and County Commission

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Anyone who attended the regular committee meetings of the Shelby County Commission last Wednesday, May 9th, and followed that up with a visit to the full commission’s regular public meeting on Monday, May 14th, might be mildly confused about the resolution of a long-running power struggle between the commission and the county mayor’s office.

Jackson Baker

Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell

At the Wednesday meeting, Mayor Mark Luttrell, term-limited and experiencing what he called his “long goodbye” to public office, heard himself applauded by commissioners in attendance and extolled by one commissioner after another for his achievements over his eight years in office, in maintaining essential county services while at the same time lowering county debt to a significant degree — by as much as a billion dollars, to a level below $900 million.

Given that May 9th was also the day on which Luttrell chose to present a $1.254 billion budget for the coming year that, if executed, would shave the county’s recalculated  tax rate by a penny, to a target rate of $4.05, which is six full cents off the current rate, the hosannas might seem very much in order — especially since the proposed Luttrell budget also contains more money for schools, law enforcement, and employees at large, the latter to be provided with the $15-an-hour minimum wage which was at such extended issue during the 2016 presidential campaign.

There was none of the truculence from dissenting commissioners that had become a regular chorus during the past two years, although, as commission budget chairman Eddie Jones and others pointed out, there would be ample opportunity during the next couple of months to make such revisions as might be worth debating.

In prior weeks, and again, to some degree, on Monday, notes were sounded that were at variance with the Hakuna Matata of the May 9th meeting.

A regular feature of recent commission meetings has been a series of votes on expenditures in proposed county  contracts greater than $50,000 in value. Several weeks back, the commission voted to impose the $50,000 limit as a way of limiting the mayor’s spending power and curbing his general contractual authority, in line with a charter for county government that, unlike that for the city of Memphis, restricts the chief executive to a “weak mayor” role.

That action was one outcome of the power struggle that began with disagreements during budget deliberations in 2015. In that budget year, several commissioners, dealing with what they were told would be a projected surplus, insisted on using it to fund a tax decrease. Luttrell, pleading a concern for unanticipated infrastructure needs as well as the need to reduce the county debt, resisted and ultimately prevailed. What followed was a commission resentment that would increase as members learned that the surplus was far greater than expected — a discovery that led to ever more demands for a greater share of fiscal oversight.

Other matters of contention included the commission’s desire to hire former Commissioner Julian Bolton as its own attorney. After much fuss and bother and argumentation, Bolton was allowed on as a “policy advisor,” but the official legal representative for all organs of Shelby County government would remain, under the provisions of the county charter, the mayor’s  appointee as county attorney, currently, Kathryn Pascover.

At the moment, Bolton’s status is in limbo, with Luttrell poised to veto an ordinance for his reappointment — something he did once already but will have to repeat because the ordinance he received, due to a clerical error, was not the one ultimately adopted by the commission.

Starting again from scratch, the commission completed work Monday on a correct version of the reappointment ordinance that would extend Bolton’s tenure through September 30th, leaving it to a newly reelected group of commissioners to decide what to do next.

Meanwhile, the most spectacular show of commission independence was evinced just before Monday’s meeting, in a ceremony in the Shelby County Building, in which commission Chair Heidi Shafer — joined by Luttrell, Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland, and representatives of local law enforcement and medical interests — announced an ambitious $2.5 million task force plan for combating the county’s current opioid epidemic. (See Editorial, p. 8) The plan is the outgrowth of a commission initiative that Luttrell, though initially claiming authority over the matter, was induced to become a party to, via a series of court tests.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Another Big Shoe Drops with Lane’s Entry in Sheriff’s Race

CREDIT: JB

JB

The voice on the other end of Dale Lane’s cell phone is his chief endorser, County Mayor Mark Luttrell, tied up in Nashville but eager to speak, via microphone, to Lane’s kickoff crowd.

Close on the heels of Democratic candidate Floyd Bonner’s kickoff of his campaign for Sheriff two weeks ago at the Racquet Club, another big shoe dropped last Thursday when county Homeland Security director Dale Lane, a leading Republican candidate for trhe office, had his own kickoff affair in Millington.

Lane’s was a homier affair, held at the Mid-South Auction Group & Marketplace in Millington, but, like current chief Deputy Bonner, who was endorsed by his boss, outgoing Sheriff Bill Oldham, Lane had some bigtime backing, too. His came from County Mayor Luttrell, who served two terms as Sheriff himself before his election as Mayor in 2010.

An obstacle to Lane’s announcement of the Luttrell endorsement was the fact that the Mayor had been in Nashville and was still en route back to Memphis. That logistical problem was solved via some everyday technology: Lane got Luttrell on his cell phone and had him speak to the assembled crowd by holding the phone to a microphone.
JB

Candidate Lane also gets a boost from wife, Karen, and baby grandson Braxton Allen Lane.

Luttrell noted the candidate’s impressive credentials, which included several important command positions, including that of chief inspector of the Department’s patrol division and supervision of the Department’s swat team and its training division.

And finally, the Mayor said, Lane had served “as our point person in Shelby County,” as director of preparedness and Homeland Security.

In his own remarks, Lane, a devout Christian, made a point of proclaiming, as he always does in his public appearances, the chief importance in his life of his faith and his family. He reminisced about having begun his law enforcement career 30 years ago as a member of the Millington police force.

Lane said one of his chief preoccupations as Sheriff would be that of youth violence, for which he proposed a multi-layered approach involving partnership with the faith-based and business communities, intervention via youth activities, and direct suppression, by means of street-level enforcement.

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Editorial Opinion

Memphis’ De-Annexation Deal

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

Greg Cravens

It is not quite a year after Memphis was able to extricate itself from what had seemed an inescapable fate, the Carter-Watson bill in the Tennessee General Assembly. It seemed to come out of nowhere, passing the House in a jet-propelled jiffy and seemingly destined, on the strength of rural members’ and suburbanites’ resolve, to sail through the state Senate, saddling the city with what looked to many like a death sentence.

The bill’s authors, both from the outskirts of Chattanooga, had already succeeded in passing a measure that abolished the former prerogatives of Tennessee cities to annex new territories at will, giving the residents of the state’s unincorporated areas what amounted to a veto over their possible annexation by adjacent municipalities. In the process, they had rendered virtually null and void a compromise agreement of 1998, which had provided significant brakes on the cities’ ambitions for growth but had acknowledged their right to certain areas as potential annexation reserves.

The measure proposed by the Hamilton County duo last year was designed not just to stall or hamper or regulate the growth pattern of cities. It was clearly and plainly meant to cut the cities down to size — literally — and Memphis had been a fairly blatant offender by the standards of the two sponsors, whose bill would have allowed any area annexed since that pivotal year of 1998 to escape its encompassing municipality with a petition signed by 10 percent of its residents, followed by a majority vote in a referendum.

It was only by the most heroic exertions by Mayor Jim Strickland and other city officials, in emergency collaboration with the local Chamber of Commerce and sympathetic allies in other Tennessee municipalities, that the bill was blocked in a state Senate committee and remanded off to summer study. The “study,” such as it was, is over, and, with the General Assembly back in session, the word is that Carter and Watson could bring their bill up again, as Draconian as ever.

An implicit condition of the bill’s tabling last year was a gentlemen’s agreement of sorts: The city of Memphis, which had from time to time considered the principle of de-annexation as a useful option and a means of conserving its resources, might submit an alternative proposal. Last week, a city/county task force presented a plan that would divest the city of several relatively uninhabited areas that are expensive to service, as well as two recently annexed areas — Southwind/Windyke and South Cordova — that have been champing at the bit to be de-annexed. According to the report’s authors, the bill would shrink the city’s population by only 1.2 percent and its annual operating revenue by a mere 1.1 percent, while allowing a “right-sizing” that would benefit the city now and in its future planning.

Among other things, the task force’s plan is a reminder of reality, a rebuff to escapism, a dose of brass tacks. It may, in fact, be the best option facing Memphis at the moment. It is, in any case, worth careful study by the city council, which can adopt and enact it this spring — perhaps pre-empting the legislature in the process.

Sometimes victory can be gained — and loss forestalled — through a judicious compromise.

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Politics Politics Feature

Unfinished Shelby County Business: Aquifer, EDGE, and Weed.

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

The issue of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s drilling wells into the Memphis Sand aquifer may not be a done deal, after all. Though TVA’s application to complete four wells into the aquifer to acquire water to use as coolant for its forthcoming natural-gas plant was seemingly given the go-ahead in November by the Shelby County Board of Water Quality Control, concerns remain in important political places — on the Memphis City Council and the Shelby County Commission — and in the Tennessee General Assembly.

A bipartisan duo of state senators from Shelby County — Democrat Lee Harris of Memphis and Republican Brian Kelsey of Germantown — last year made a point of expressing solidarity with local environmentalists on their fears of possible contamination of the aquifer and the need to resist the TVA drilling. On Tuesday, in tandem with a media contingent, they began a “fact-finding trip,” which began at the Center for Applied Earth Science and Engineering Research at the University of Memphis and included stops at MLGW’s Sheahan Pumping Station,and the current coal-burning TVA plant on President’s Island and TVA’s soon-to-be natural-gas plant there.

Jackson Baker

Ward Archer and state Senators Lee Harris and Brian Kelsey at site of new TVA plant

 • The final form of the Shelby County Commission’s legislative agenda, to be presented to the General Assembly by the county’s lobbyists, was achieved on Monday, with the unanimous approval of a brief addendum, apropos the city-county EDGE board, which is responsible for making industrial-development decisions. The resolution called for “a member of the governing body of the municipality where the Industrial Development Board (IDB) was created to serve as a voting board member of the IDB.” Currently, the city council and county commission each have a non-voting member on the EDGE board.

Conspicuously absent from the final legislative agenda, due to unresolved discord, was a previously floated item calling for approval of medical marijuana and a “second chance” policy for persons arrested for possession of minor amounts of pot. The General Assembly is expected to take up the issue of legalizing medical marijuana.

Put off again were two resolutions having to do with the Shelby County Board of Education’s efforts to balance its books. One resolution was to receive and file the board’s first quarter report for the year ending June 30th. Another would ratify and approve amendments to the board’s budget for fiscal year 2017, adding on expenditures of $217,389. Neither had achieved any consensus from the commission’s education committee last Wednesday.

• Citing what he said was a “critical need” for infrastructure improvements in the county and its municipalities, Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell endorsed Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam‘s  proposed seven percent increase in the state’s gasoline tax in an appearance at the commission’s Monday meeting. The proposed tax hike would enable work to begin on a backlog of $10 billion worth of infrastructure projects that Haslam and Commissioner John Schroer of the Tennessee Department of Transportation deem long overdue but undone for lack of funding. 

Along with new fees on electric vehicles and rental cars, the proposed tax increase would pay for an overhaul plan, which the governor has given the name “The IMPROVE Act” (“Improving Manufacturing, Public Roads, and Opportunities for a Vibrant Economy”). 

The governor’s proposal calls for the gasoline-tax increase to be accompanied by a half-cent reduction in the state sales tax on groceries, by $113 million in cuts to the state’s business taxes, and by cuts to the Hall Income Tax.

Luttrell said that Haslam’s proposal called for more than $9 million to be spent in Shelby County and in the county’s several municipalities. “There will be some opposition to it in the General Assembly,” Luttrell cautioned, adding that he would be coming back to the commission seeking “a more formal resolution for support” once the proposed measure was in its final form.

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News News Blog

Lamar to Get $300M Upgrade

CREDIT: Google Maps

Google Maps

Lamar close to Holmes Road.

Lamar Avenue is set for projects totaling $300 million from the Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT) to help ease traffic on the congested road.

State and local officials are slated to announce the details of the projects in a news conference Tuesday afternoon.

But TDOT said Monday that Lamar will be widened from four lanes to six from the border of Tennessee and Mississippi to the six-lane section at Getwell. Also, three interchanges will be will be upgraded to interchanges.

The following are set to speak at tomorrow’s news conference: TDOT Commissioner John Schroer, Sen. Mark Norris, Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland, Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell, Greater Memphis Chamber president Phil Ternary.

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Politics Politics Feature

Election Commission Zigs; County Commission Zags

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Jackson Baker

Rich Holden

The announcement Monday by Rich Holden of his decision to retire as Shelby County Election Commission administrator at the end of the year belongs to the category of events that are both surprising and instantly seen as inevitable, once they occur.

For years Holden has borne the brunt of virtually nonstop criticism for a seemingly endless series of glitches and issues that have bedeviled the county’s electoral process. These have run the gamut from the issuance of ballots improperly matched up with the appropriate districts to snarls in vote-counting to what critics charged was a disregarding of quirks in the county’s voting machines.

At various times, Holden was the recipient of sanctions from the Election Commission itself, votes of no confidence by the Memphis City Council and the Shelby County Commission, and demands by local elected officials for federal investigations of his office.

Holden’s problems began as far back as the time of his appointment in 2009 by a commission that had become newly majority-Republican in the previous election cycle, when the state House of Representatives tipped over to GOP control.

Since the Senate had already come under a Republican majority, that made the GOP the state’s official majority party, and Tennessee law provides that not only the state Election Commission but each of the 95 county election commissions shall consist of a 3-2 majority in favor of the party which controls the legislature.

For decades, that fact resulted in anomalies like the presence of pretend-Democrats in control of election commissions in several ancestrally Republican East Tennessee counties where there were as many actual Democrats as there were aardvarks.

In Shelby County, however, the two parties had for some time coexisted in a condition of rough equivalence, and the change-over from Democratic to Republican control in the administration of elections had the potential of controversy under the best of circumstances.

And that fact was accentuated in 2009 by a fast-track post-election effort of the new GOP majority on the county Election Commission to transition Holden, who had been a Republican member of the commission, into the administrator’s job, which had long been held by Democratic CAO James Johnson.

The move was initially staved off by a statement of caution from former state Attorney General Robert Cooper, but would eventually come to pass, with Holden acceding to the position of administrator and Johnson becoming a Democratic commission member.

The newly configured commission hit a bump with the 2010 county election, the first major partisan election under the new management, when an apparent electronic glitch erroneously recorded thousands of potential election-day voters as already having cast ballots in the early-voting period, with hundreds of them being turned away before the problem was discovered and corrected.

Given that the slate of Republican candidates swept that election over their Democratic opponents, the losing Democrats thought they smelled a fish and sued to have the results overturned. They were supported by a series of itemized charges— some of them alleging chicaneries that seemed fanciful enough for a James Bond saga — from Black Box Voting, an out-of-state watchdog organization.

The list of allegations was pruned down to a series of possible technical irregularities before trial, and then-Chancellor Arnold Goldin dismissed the plaintiffs’ suit as not meeting the standards for declaring the election result “incurably uncertain,” as required for the trial to be pursued. The numerical gaps between winner and loser had, in any case, seemed far larger than could have been affected by the election-day glitch.

But the seeds of suspicion had sprouted, and the almost dependable eruption of new glitches in election after election ever since has done little to restore trust between the two parties vis-à-vis the election process.

The basis of contention shifted in the course of time from suspicion of fraud to simple negligence or mismanagement, and the spotlight shifted away from members of the commission itself to Holden. Following the mismatching of thousands of races to precincts in ballots issued in the August 2012 county election, the commission members, Democrats and Republicans alike, agreed to put Holden on six-month probation.

He emerged with his job intact, but allegations and complaints continued, from Democratic members of the commission and self-appointed watchdogs like Steve Ross and Joe Weinberg. Most recently, Weinberg made a point of publicizing a new case of apparent wrong ballots being issued to specific voters, this one based on a challenge originally raised by John Marek, one of the losing candidates in the recent election for the Memphis City Council’s District 5.

And state Representative G.A. Hardaway had of late gone so far as to call for a criminal investigation of Holden.

There often seemed to be a good deal of overreach by Holden’s critics, and no doubt partisan motives played a role in his tribulations, as did a general need to find a scapegoat for problems and circumstances beyond the province of a single individual. And, though generally good-natured and uncomplaining, the husky ex-Marine sometimes evinced a stubbornness in the face of complaints that others found frustrating.

In any case, Holden is at last off the hot seat. The five-member Election Commission, so often at odds with itself, will now have to agree on a successor.

• The Shelby County Commission, another local body accustomed to a fair amount of contentiousness, eased into its annual holiday break with a Monday meeting that lacked any of the clashes between members that have become routine, and, for the time being, avoided as well any resumption of the commission’s ongoing conflict with the administration of county Mayor Mark Luttrell.

And, as a result of the defeat at Wednesday’s committee sessions of a resolution from Commissioner Steve Basar requiring approval by the county commission and city council of any potential merger of the city/county Economic Development and Growth Engine Board (EDGE) with the Community Redevelopment Agency, Basar had withdrawn his resolution from Monday’s agenda.

The main order of business for the commission on Monday was to approve further incremental grants to community organizations, projects, and charities deemed to be deserving by members of the commission acting under their recently adopted license to dispense such lagniappes on a district-by-district basis.

One indication of Monday’s laid-back pre-holiday mood came in the form of a quip from commission chairman Terry Roland to Luttrell’s CAO, Harvey Kennedy, who had previously complained that the microphone at his desk in the well of the commission auditorium was malfunctioning.

“Well, Cap, you see we got your button fixed, and you don’t even need to use it,” cracked Roland, during a lull in proceedings. (The breeziness of addressing Kennedy, a former Navy captain, as “Cap” was an interesting indicator of the commission’s relations with the administration, as well.)

The lack of action Monday on either the EDGE issue or the conflict between the commission and the administration does not mean that either is a closed matter, of course. There will doubtless be further actions on the commission (and on the city council, as well) to revise the terms of the relationship with EDGE so as to give members of the legislative bodies more active say on industrial recruitment matters than their presence on the EDGE board as ex officio members currently allows.

And there are ongoing discussions behind the scenes to break the stalemate over the commission’s wish to complete the installation of former Commissioner Julian Bolton to act as an independent attorney on behalf of the commission. Basically, the commission insists on the basis of the County Charter that it has that right; Luttrell and County Attorney Ross Dyer insist on the basis of the self-same charter that they do not.

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Editorial Opinion

Shelby County Commission: A Matter of Law

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Not unexpectedly, a bid by the Shelby County Commission to hire Julian Bolton, a former commissioner, as the commission’s independent attorney has been turned back by the existing county attorney, Ross Dyer.

Jackson Baker

Terry Roland

Dyer cited the county charter in ruling basically that the new attorney — any new attorney — would have to be agreeable to him and would have to be a member of his staff. It is as if King George III determined that the 13 American colonies could function “independently,” so long as their actions were subject to approval by the House of Lords.

Those members of the commission who arrived at Monday’s meeting in a giddy state of expectation were understandably dismayed and predictably backed away from the substitute resolution that Dyer’s s staff had prepared.

Not to be foiled, the irrepressible commission chair, Terry Roland, immediately hired Bolton as a special attorney to figure out how to get around Dyer’s ruling. An odd quirk in the charter apparently allows for such ad hoc — and temporary — outsourcings.

At press time, Dyer had not responded, though he could conceivably claim to have the option of hiring Bolton himself to counter whatever move Bolton makes on behalf of the commission.

And we halfway expect to hear from somebody involved in this curious caper some variation of the ubiquitous Donald Trump punchline: “Julian, you’re fired.”

But let’s be serious. The background of this seemingly outlandish matter is a conviction on the part of a commission majority (transcending matters of race or party) that the administration of County Mayor Mark Luttrell has not played fair and square with commissioners on matters of county spending, and on the contrary has usurped the commission’s authority to approve a budget by issuing incomplete and/or misleading reports on the county’s fiscal situation, and by attempting to play commissioners off against each other by dangling now-you-seem-them-now-you-don’t “surplus” funds.

What the commission majority wants is the same wherewithal possessed by the Memphis City Council, which back in the 1990s was able successfully to engage its own permanent full-time attorney, Allan Wade, who continues in that role and is responsible to the council and only to the council. It is this capability that County Attorney Dyer, who insists he represents all county officials, administrative and legislative, maintains is denied the commission by the County Charter.

The issue of an independent attorney is by no means the only matter dividing the commission from the Luttrell administration, but it has become the lynchpin of a generalized rebellion in which the commission intends to assert itself not merely as the administration’s equal but also as its superior in matters of governmental oversight.

What has become a full-blown power struggle has come to rest on a legalistic point involving attorneys and may well end up being contested by adversary sets of attorneys and finally decided in a court of law. We know that we should be comforted by this fact, but for reasons we can’t fully explain, it is making us uneasy.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Politics or Government in Shelby County?

CREDIT: JB

Even as most political attention locally is trained on an ongoing city election season, Shelby County government has a political crisis on its hands in the form of an ongoing power struggle between branches of government.

When the Shelby County Commission concluded its last public meeting of the 2014-15 cycle on Monday, it was still in a state of uncertainty and division as to the nature of its own leadership in the year to come, having elected Steve Basar as its chairman two weeks ago, only to un-elect him in a reconsideration vote an hour later.

But the commissioners seemed to have less difficulty on Monday in unifying against a common foe: the administration of Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell, which has gotten involved in a power struggle with the commission — one that consistently has put the two entities at loggerheads as to just who is the boss in the county system.

The contest was joined in two ways on Monday. First, when Luttrell requested and was given the opportunity to address the commission to open the meeting, in his remarks, the mayor made an effort to review some of the differences between his administration and the commission on budgetary and spending priorities and proposed a forthcoming “summit” with the county’s legislative body to review priorities and to try to get them in sync.

One item mentioned in the mayor’s remarks — a workforce development grant of $175,000 to Seedco, a national nonprofit organization, to train local residents for retail positions — would become the focus of a debate and test-case vote, one that the mayor, who opposed the grant, would lose by a 10-2 vote.

Luttrell’s opposition to the Seedco grant, much of which would be in conjunction with the opening of a Just-A-Buck dollar store, was that routing economically at-risk citizens into relatively low-paying retail-sales positions was not the proper focus for the county’s workforce-development efforts.

In the commission’s later debate on the Seedco grant, the mayor’s position was supported by Commissioners Basar and David Reaves, two Republicans who often find themselves on opposite sides of the commission’s internal politics, but who concurred in opposition to the grant.

Basar, as Luttrell had, challenged the emphasis on retail sales vs. higher-paying kinds of employment, and pointed out that Seedco had in 2012 been charged by the federal government with fraud in its New York City job-placement operation.

Reaves made the point that the commission, once having made a grant to Seedco, would have no further oversight over its disposition, contrasting that with workforce development programs conducted under two existing entities, the Greater Memphis Alliance for a Competitive Workforce (GMACW), operated under the auspices of the city/county EDGE board, and the federally sponsored Workforce Investment Network (WIN).

The commission would have significant input in either of those workforce development programs without having to “spend a nickel,” said Reaves, who called the proposed Seedco grant an exercise in “pork.” He offered a motion, seconded by Basar, to refer the matter of the Seedco grant back to committee while the commission looked into doing something with GMACW or WIN.

The motion went down, however, and it became apparent that something more than pure cost-accounting or workforce-development policy was involved in the debate when influential GOP Commissioner Heidi Shafer, the body’s budget chair and normally an opponent of grants in principle, came down hard for the Seedco grant.

Shafer has made no secret of her view that the Luttrell administration had arrogated too much authority to itself, particularly in its dealings with the commission during recent budget negotiations, when the administration declared a $6 million surplus but opposed efforts by Republican members to offset enough of that amount to allow for a one-cent decrease in the county tax rate.

Other members, Democrats and Republicans, have nursed other grievances, and there developed an apparent post-budget consensus on the commission for the body to look into having its own legal recourse and independent vetting sources.

The commission has meanwhile pressed for more candor from the administration on the county fiscal situation and secured an administration pledge in last week’s committee sessions for a “truing-up” this fall of the county’s fluid revenue status.

At one point in Monday’s discussion of the Seedco grant, after Luttrell had left the auditorium, GOP Commissioner Terry Roland confronted administration CAO Harvey Kennedy with an accusation that “it was kind of disrespectful for the mayor to come up here and talk about a summit when he has run roughshod over us for five years. … When you look at that charter, what it says is that this body has the power. … At the end of the day, we are the governing body.”

Later in the debate, Kennedy called Roland’s characterization of relations between the commission and administration “extremely inaccurate” and insisted that the county charter provided “shared responsibility” for the branches of government and that “we don’t work for the commission.”

Whatever the case, relations between the two branches could hardly be more strained, and it would seem that Luttrell’s desired “summit” with the commission, if and when it ends up taking place, could be the last best chance of patching things up.

Meanwhile, the commission will attempt once again to resolve its chairmanship question at its September 14th public meeting, with Commissioner Van Turner, a first-term Democrat, presiding as acting chair.


DOGGING THE VOTE:

JB




Three candidates in the Memphis city election who are running along similar and somewhat unorthodox lines are including an emphasis on shoring up animal rights in their platforms and
collaborated in a meet-and-greet at the Overton Bark dog park at
Overton Park on Saturday.



It didn’t take long for this little terrier, belonging to an attendee, to commit himself and come looking for a constituent service — to wit, a dog biscuit — from (l to r) mayoral candidate Mike Williams; Lynn Moss, candidate for City Council, District 9, Position 2; and Robin Spielberger, candidate for Super district 9, Position 1.



Two other issues held in common by the three are support for
retaining the Mid-South Coliseum and restoration of lost benefits for
city employees.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

The County Commission’s Squandered Consensus

The line between politics and government is sometimes indistinct, blurred and all but nonexistent. All things considered, that’s a good thing. And it’s possible to make the case that, in a marathon 10-hour budget/committee session held on Wednesday, May 20th, the Shelby County Commission merged the two functions seamlessly.

Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell

In that session, the 13 members of the commission appeared to be as much on the same page as it’s possible to be for a body that represents often conflicting inner-city and outer-suburb interests and the ideologically divergent attitudes of the two major political parties. That meeting had begun with testimony before the commission by two representatives of the Greater Memphis Area Chamber of Commerce, who laid out in unvarnished terms the county’s catch-22 predicament: one of dwindling revenue streams and increasing demand for services, coupled with population shifts and an awareness of the stiffening economic competition from adjacent political jurisdictions.

Maybe it was that cold-shower, smell-the-coffee start that did it, but, whatever the reason, the commissioners went on to function in as fully synchronized a manner as they, or any other group of disparate individuals could hope to achieve — proceeding efficiently and harmoniously through a normal committee load, through a systematic and patient interview session with a dozen applicants to fill a Judicial Commission vacancy, and finally into the demanding process of weighing the ramifications of a $1.1 billion budget and parsing through the competing demands of various county divisions for a share of what the administration of County Mayor Mark Luttrell presented as a likely $6 million surplus.

By the end of the day, the commission had seemed to reach a consensus on the important issues, literally splitting the difference on disputed sums and even agreeing on an innovative way of handling the vexing matter of grants to non-profits by placing careful limits on the fiscal size of that pie and assigning all the commissioners equal pieces of it to distribute within their districts. As one member observed, the outcome seemed to be one of the “unintended consequences” of the single-member redistricting formula adopted after the census of 2010. Unintended, but welcome.

By the end of that session, the members of the commission seemed to have bonded into a bona fide unit, exchanging compliments and achieving a state which they — and we, observing it — saw as a veritable kumbaya of unified purpose.

That was then. But the 12-day break effected by the Memorial Day weekend between that meeting and the public session on Monday seems to have undermined all that unity. The full commission meeting of this week, partially chronicled in “Politics,” p. 12, was one nasty squabble, virtually from beginning to end — from a surprise decision, early on, to forgo picking a Judicial Commissioner (though most of the applicants had cleared away time to be in the audience) to overt back-biting and ideological name-calling that exploded the coherence of the May 20th session and resurrected all the partisan divisions and personal rivalries that had seemingly been put aside.

The commission has only until July 1st, the beginning of a new fiscal year, to regain its squandered consensus. We’re crossing our fingers.

Categories
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.