Tag: Michael Whaley

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A Momentous Day for the Commission

Mick Wright: "I hope "God will forgive me if I vote wrong." Photo courtesy Shelby County Government


There are various ways of dividing the efforts of humankind into separate but oddly complementary spheres: sacred vs. profane is one way, ad hoc vs. eternal is another. And who is to say that one sphere exceeds the other in importance?

Maybe not the Shelby County Commission, whose current Democratic-dominated version seems bent on taking direct action wherever it can.

On Wednesday, the Commission spent roughly the same amount of time and energy on two radically differing pending matters — one being how next to try to get the office of the Shelby County Clerk up to snuff (in this case via a “special adviser”), the other being how best to remedy centuries of racial injustice through a system of reparations for the African-American component of local society.
Left pending until the Commission’s next meeting were a series of proposed correctives aimed at preventing another Tyre Nichols situation. 

The matter of County Clerk Wanda Halbert came first on the agenda. Various commissioners made it plain they were fed up with Halbert’s inabilities to deal expeditiously with the duties of her office, which include the processing of auto license tag applications and the distribution of them. Through much of the past  year, during which Halbert twice closed her office so as to do catch-up, long lines of frustrated Shelby Countians turned up daily at the various clerk’s offices in a vain effort to get their plates.

During one of those shut-downs, Halbert conspicuously took time off in Jamaica. She periodically has described herself as a “whistle-blower” and has blamed her office imbroglios on vague insinuations of conspiratorial action on the Commission’s part or on that of County Mayor Lee Harris.

The Commission has tried numerous incentives to help the clerk out, but, as commissioners noted on Wednesday, none of these bore much fruit. Simultaneously, state Representative Mark White has introduced a bill in the General Assembly in Nashville that would facilitate local efforts to recall the clerk.

On Wednesday, Halbert, along with aides, was present in the Commission chamber, behaving more or less meekly as the Commission tossed around a proposal to appropriate $150,000 to hire a special adviser to her. The clerk welcomed the initiative, claiming she had wanted something like that all along.

Much of a lengthy debate on what was clearly being put forth as a “last chance” solution concerned the issue of where the money to hire the adviser should come from. Various commissioners objected to the proposal’s original formulation that the $150,000 should come from the Commission’s own contingency fund, and it was ultimately decided that the clerk herself possessed enough uncommitted funds to foot the bill for the adviser.

In the end, that’s how things were decided. Halbert’s helper, who will be hired by the Commission, will be paid by available funds from the clerk’s office but will answer to the Commission, not to her. The vote was 12 to 1, with Republican Commissioner Brandon Morrison expressing disapproval of the need to spend more taxpayer money to accomplish duties that are part of the express charge of the elected clerk’s office.

Later in Wednesday’s public meeting, which was specially called by chairman Mickell Lowery, the Commission took up the momentous matter of a proposed $5 million outlay to fund a feasibility study on reparations for the African-American population. The “reparations” were not necessarily financial, although at least one successful amendment to the resolution proposed by Commissioner Henri Brooks seemed to call for make-up pay differentials for African-Americans.

Most of several amendments by Brooks addressed directly, as did the resolution itself, the undeniable fact of overall racial disparities in accessing of advantages of American citizenship.

Sponsoring the reparations measure were eight of the Commission’s Democrats, including all of the body’s Black members, most of whom spoke for the measure with various degrees of passionate intensity. 


Reservations were heard from the body’s four Republicans, who tended to see the resolution as “divisive”  or in conflict somehow with the American system of equality. Aligning with them in harboring doubts about the reparations issue was Democrat Michael Whaley, whose mother is Asian-born and who self-identified Wednesday as a “person of col0r.”

Voting for the resolution were chairman Lowery and fellow Commissioners Shante Avant, Brooks, Charlie Caswell, Miska Clay-Bibbs, Ed Ford, Erika Sugarmon, and Britney Thornton, all Democrats.

“No”  votes came from Republicans Amber Mills, Brandon Morrison, and Mick Wright, and abstaining were Democrat Whaley and Republican Bradford.

In one form or another, the objecting Commissioners wondered where the $5 million to pay for the feasibility study would come from (Ford made the case that such funds were available in the county’s residual share of funds from ARPA, the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021).

The objectors conceded during debate that disparities existed between the races that needed addressing but expressed disagreement with reparations as such as the remedy. Bradford had originally moved that the matter be postponed until the next public Commission meeting but ultimately withdrew his motion (that clearly would have failed) and expressed hopes that the larger effort to alter disparities succeeded.

His fellow Republican, Mick Wright, expressed similar sentiments, concluding with a blessing for his colleagues and the seemingly heartfelt statement, “I hope God will forgive me if I vote wrong.”

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Politics Politics Feature

Michael Whaley: Mt. Everest Bound

Michael Whaley (Photo: Jackson Baker)

Anyone attending a meeting of the Shelby County Commission is bound to notice Michael Whaley, the Democrat who represents the newly reconfigured District 13, which slices through several sections of central and northeast Memphis.

Whaley is chairman of the commission’s budget and audit committees and has the vaguely clerkish look you might associate with such concerns. He does his homework on pretty much everything that comes before the commission, however, and can always be counted on to take part in discussions, whatever the subject, and often in great detail.

By profession, Whaley is an organizer of educational programs and institutions, and is principal of Memphis College Prep, a fact which gives him a solid continuing interest in all school matters.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, which would provide an observer a hint as to Whaley’s chief motivations as a private individual. He happens to be an adventurer par excellence, with ambitions and accomplishments far in advance of your average weekend outdoorsman.

Whaley has climbed to the top of a still-active volcano in the Congo to smell the sulfur in the world’s largest lava lake and has made his way into the interior of that country’s vast jungle in order to find and “get up close and personal” with the last remaining mountain gorillas there.

Like Tom Cochrane, he believes that “life is a highway” and intends to experience it “from Mozambique” — where he has scuba dived — to “Memphis nights” to wherever else he can find the out-of-the-way and unusual, the “unique destinations and alternative cultures of the earth.” He has explored the remotest places he can find, from Madagascar to New Zealand to the outbacks of South Africa.

It all began for Whaley when, 10 years ago, he went with his mother, a teacher, and father, a college administrator, to Burma (Myanmar) where his mother had been born. “It opened my eyes,” he recalls. The experience not only nourished his curiosity; it was a leading reason for his own choice of education as a career.

Whaley’s first serious climbing challenge came in 2006 when he and his then roommate went to Montana and climbed Mt. Helena. His most recent experience was hiking and fly-fishing in Colorado, which he concluded just before the convening of the new commission session.

Whaley makes it a point to travel to a different place every year. Newly married, he intends to take a Caribbean jaunt with his wife Lauren next. After that, he has in mind solo trips to such places as Tasmania and Antarctica. Those places will have to wait, though. First, Whaley will go to Tibet to take a shot at Mt. Everest, the tallest mountain in the world.

That is scheduled for the spring, when he will take a leave to join the Highland Expedition, the next organized assault on the summit of that famous edifice, all of 18,000 feet up. That’s well more than three miles high.

Whaley is sensible enough to realize that the summit itself may represent an insuperable challenge for him at this point, but he plans to go as high as he can. His climb will start with a trek in the company of Sherpas (Tibetan natives who assist climbers) to the mountain’s base camp, which is a high destination in itself.

From there? “The toughest part is in getting through the glacier,” says Whaley, who has researched the matter in some depth. One of the ordeals to come will involve tipping a ladder horizontally across an abyss, a mile or two up, and walking across it to safety wearing spiked shoes.

Merely consider that for a moment or two. And consider what it must be like to be Michael Whaley and routinely take on such challenges in his spare time. Not for him the easy chair and a soft season of watching the NFL on TV.

It’s enough to make the commission work, with all of its demanding obligations, seemingly endless six-hour sessions, spirited and sometimes baleful exchanges, and not inconsiderable arcana, pale into relative insignificance by comparison.

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Politics Politics Feature

The County Commission’s New Map

Source: Shelby County Government

Although various rules of parliamentary order caused Monday’s special called meeting of the Shelby County Commission to open by fits and starts, the needed result, a final vote on commission redistricting, was achieved with relative dispatch. But that was after — in order — a commission meeting, an adjournment, a meeting of the general government committee, another adjournment, and a final commission meeting.

Still and all, it got done, and on the November 9th deadline set by the Election Commission. Accommodations were made via amendment to oblige commissioners from Germantown and Collierville. Some precincts were shifted around in the area of East Memphis and western Germantown so as to keep incumbents Brandon Morrison, a Republican, and Michael Whaley, a Democrat, from having to run in the same district.

Morrison has a district to herself, though it is fundamentally changed from the old District 13 she has represented — a conglomerate of largely East Memphis precincts. She objected last week that too many precincts from her original district were being shifted to District 4, essentially the Germantown district.

In the amended version, those precincts are still moved east. But at least her own home precinct, the one she lives in, has moved along with them. District 4, containing a reliably Republican voting base, is now her district to run in, for better or for worse.

District 5, Whaley’s designation in the old configuration, has become a brand-new district consisting essentially of Cordova (the creation of a Cordova district being one of the stated aims of Commissioner Van Turner and other members of the Commission majority).

The district Whaley inhabits, meanwhile, renumbered as District 13, is still situated at the junction, more or less, of East Memphis, Midtown, and Binghampton, and its population is presumed to be majority-Democratic, as his old district was.

If the interested parties did not get all of what they wanted, they may have gotten the best of what was possible.

Among the several parliamentary maneuvers pursued during this important but relatively brief commission meeting was a last-ditch effort by Morrison to get a previously discarded map (known for its original sponsor, District 2 Republican David Bradford of Collierville, as “the Bradford map”) up for a vote.

In the amended map, Bradford had gotten the return of the Collierville High School precinct from its earlier proposed relocation in District 12. But he and Morrison evidently felt obliged, for the record, to get a more idealized version of their hopes up for a vote.

They did, but “Map 4,” as it was entitled, unsupported by any precinct data, went down to defeat predictably, with only 5 votes, only those of the commission’s Republicans, supporting it. (In the debate over Map 4, Democrat Tami Sawyer charged that the map had been shaped by Brian Stephens of Caissa Public Strategy, a conservative-oriented consulting firm.)

The final vote for the amended redistricting map, a version of the CC4A3 map voted on last week, was 8-5, with Democrat Edmund Ford Jr. joining four Republicans as naysayers. The approved map will probably yield nine Democrats and four Republicans in the next elected commission.

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Politics Politics Feature

Shelby County Commission Prepares for New Fiscal Year

WIllie Brooks (Photo: shelbycountytn.gov)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Politics Politics Feature

Commission Gets $1.4 Billion “Lean” Budget from Harris

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Billingsley

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

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