Tag: Mike Ritz

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Politics Politics Feature

County Commission Election Next Week

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Even as candidates for city office gird for an October 8th election, which is still weeks away from its stretch drive, another election of some possible consequence is just around the corner.

On Monday, the Shelby County Commission will elect a chairman to serve  for the 2015-16 period, and, while other commissioners are quite likely considering their options in case of deadlock, at least two members of the commission — Steve Basar and Terry Roland — are more or less publicly running.

Both, interestingly enough, on a 13-member body which has a Democratic majority of one, are Republicans. Basar, however, is a de facto Democratic candidate, hoping to gain through an active coalition with members of the other party an office which he believes himself to have been unfairly deprived of by members of his own party.

A year ago, Basar, an East Memphis Republican who was then serving as commission vice chair, confidently expected elevation to the chairmanship as a matter of course.

For the first several years after the commission became subject to partisan elections in the mid-1990s, the tradition was to elect a chairman from one party in a given year, along with a vice chairman from the other. At the end of that year, the vice chair would be formally elected to become chair for the next year, in a routine whereby the succession to chairman was essentially foreordained, and the commission’s chairmanship was, by what was termed a “gentlemen’s agreement,” rotated by party annually.

That was the format which Basar expected to apply to his own case when a newly elected commission met to select a chairman after the conclusion of the August 2014 county election.

But Basar encountered a body which contained five new members, and the once-predictable rites of succession to the chairmanship had been jimmied and could no longer be depended on.

That all began with the election for chairman in 2011, when then Republican vice chair Mike Carpenter, who had angered his GOP colleagues by what they considered too close a collaboration with the commission’s Democrats, failed to get Republican votes, and Democratic chairman Sidney Chism parlayed the resulting deadlock into reelection for a second consecutive term.

From that point on, even as the principle of rotating chairmanships seemed to have reasserted itself to some degree, there was always an element of suspense in the matter of electing a chair, as well as a fair amount of intrigue.

When Republican Mike Ritz succeeded Democrat Chism as chair in 2012, he in effect became chief strategist for the Democratic majority’s opposition to independent suburban school districts and ran afoul of his GOP colleagues, as Carpenter had done previously.

In 2013, as Chism had done before him, Ritz sought a second consecutive term, but once again the Republican minority coalesced around what they considered a sympathetic Democrat, James Harvey, who won with their support. And, in 2014, GOP members continued with what had seemingly become a strategy of supporting a compliant Democrat over a fellow Republican, backing eventual winner Justin Ford over a stunned Basar.

In the wake of his defeat, Basar entered into a coalition with the commission’s Democrats on key vote after key vote, beginning with their efforts to limit Ford’s chairmanship powers last fall, and continuing through this year’s budget negotiations.

Basar still wants to be commission chairman, though he has also offered himself as a possible successor to Paul Morris, who is stepping down as chairman of the Downtown Memphis Commission.

Meanwhile, Roland makes no bones about it: He wants to be Shelby County Mayor, is essentially already running for that office, which is up again in 2018, and clearly believes that becoming commission chairman would give him a leg up on that race.

Roland hails from Millington, was elected to the commission as a GOP firebrand, and can still comport himself that way, depending on the issue. But he has made an obvious effort to mute his partisanship and work across party lines. He led the effort to put the commission on record as supporting Governor Bill Haslam‘s Insure Tennessee proposal, and the successful resolution to rename the Shelby County Courthose for the late civil rights icon D’Army Bailey was proposed by Roland.

• Meanwhile, on the Wednesday agenda of the commission’s general government committee is the still simmering issue of the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue and Forrest graves in what was formerly Forrest Park (Health Sciences Park).

Again before the commission is a resolution sponsored by Commissioner Walter Bailey that would put the commission on record as supporting the Memphis City Council’s ordinance to remove the statue, which was due for a second reading at this week’s council meeting. The commission’s resolution supporting the council’s intent was deferred from the committee’s July 22nd meeting.

Any action by the commission would be purely symbolic, inasmuch as only the council has authority regarding disposition of the statue. But whatever the commission does would definitely have an effect on public opinion during what is expected to be a lengthy course of litigation over the issue.

The city council’s sentiment has so far remained unanimous for removal, but indications are that reservations by suburban members of the county commission could make for controversy.

The commission’s budget committee is likely to get into something of a thicket, too. Budget chair Heidi Shafer wants the commission to take up the issue of establishing a staff or hiring an individual to perform for the commission the same kind of independent vetting service over financial matters that the Congressional Budget Office does for members of Congress.

Shafer and other members of the commission, on both sides of the party line, were plainly vexed by seemingly disparate accountings issued by the administration of Mayor Mark Luttrell and County Trustee David Lenoir, respectively, on the actual amount of an end-of-fiscal-year surplus.

There is a strong and bipartisan sentiment on the commission to assert the body’s independence vis-à-vis the administration, as was also indicated recently by the commission’s open exploration of the prospect of hiring its own attorney, at least for ad hoc matters.

• It was neither the most surprising action nor the most momentous one of the 2015 Memphis election season, but the joint endorsement of Councilman Harold Collins‘ mayoral campaign on Monday by the Memphis Fire Fighters Association and an independent firefighters’ group was another sign of an apparent recent surge of support for Collins.

The councilman from Whitehaven was fairly universally judged to have acquitted himself well in a four-way mayoral forum last week put on by several local women’s groups at First Congregational Church.

And, though Collins’ financial receipts still lag behind those of Mayor A C Wharton and Councilman Jim Strickland, they have been significant enough to suggest the possibility that talk of a two-man mayoral race between Wharton and Strickland may have been overdone — or, at any rate, premature.

The opening by Mayor Wharton on Sunday of a Whitehaven-based headquarters on Elvis Presley Boulevard, to complement another headquarters on Poplar Avenue (to be inaugurated this coming Sunday), is a clear indication that the mayor has a two-front war on his hands.

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Editorial Opinion

Shelby County’s Tax-Rate Impasse

First, the good news. (Long pause). Yeah, right. Now, for the bad news: This is the budget season for Memphis city government and Shelby County government, and, with the clock ticking (the 2014-15 fiscal year begins, in theory, on

July 1st), both local governments are clearly having trouble getting their books in order for what comes next.

In county government’s case, there are several end-of-cycle issues that didn’t get resolved at the County Commission’s regular Monday meeting and have been slotted for resolution in a special called meeting for June 26th. The most important of these is the matter of a county tax rate, and the holdup there has to do — wouldn’t you know it? — with fallout from the long-running city vs. county showdown on school reorganization.

The chief difference between a tax-rate resolution offered by Republican Commissioner Heidi Shafer and one suggested by Democrat Steve Mulroy is whether an additional 4 cents on suburban residents’ tax obligation — accruing to the building of a new Arlington High School 10 years ago — should be removed, as Shafer and her mainly GOP and suburban allies want, with the tax burden being equalized for city and county residents alike. Or, as Mulroy and his Democratic allies insist, the differential tax rates should be continued.

The Shafer argument is essentially that school reorganization — the complicated segue from merger to unity to post-merger and municipal school independence — has changed the relevant school jurisdictions so as to make the additional 4-cent tax burden unfair and even, as Shafer supporter Terry Roland argued, “illegal.”

County finance officer Mike Swift shares the concern, to the point of recommending that the additional tax be substituted for by using a portion of the local-option sales tax collected in the suburban areas in order to pay off the remaining $11.68 million left on the rural-bond issue that built the Arlington school.

At Monday’s commission meeting, Mulroy and Commissioner Mike Ritz, a Germantown resident and a Republican, but an established dissenter from the GOP position on schools, argued that disallowing the suburban tax differential cheats the original deal reached in 2003, whereby Memphis-based commissioners agreed to waive the Memphis City Schools share of a 3:1 split in the city’s favor on capital construction funding so as to allow county residents alone to build the Arlington school with rural school bonds.

Moreover, said Mulroy and Ritz, the local-option solution would divert funds that could be used for general county purposes.

It is a technical controversy, to be sure, but one with real consequences to taxpayers and one that allows both sides to plead the issue of fairness.

Neither side could get a majority on Monday, and, if there is no agreement on June 26th, there is only one opportunity left, at the Commission’s regular meeting on July 7th, for a tax rate to be established in a timely manner. County attorney Marcy Ingram has warned of fiscal consequences to established county services if that doesn’t happen.

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Politics Politics Feature

More About That Henri Brooks Brouhaha

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Last week’s set-to in a County Commission meeting featuring Commissioner Henri Brooks against various comers, including a couple of colleagues and a young Hispanic man, has local Democrats seriously worried about repercussions in the next election period, ending August 7th.

Jackson Baker

Henri Brooks

It is taken for granted that Brooks’ own prospects, as the Democratic nominee for Juvenile Court clerk against Republican incumbent Joy Touliatos, have taken a hit. Latino voters are not likely to forget her public dressing-down of Pablo Pereya, who had intervened on behalf of the minority status of Hispanic workers in a dispute over a roofing contract.

Brooks, who with fellow (African-American) Commissioner Walter Bailey had been making the case that blacks had been short-shrifted in hiring for the project, hit back hard, telling Pereya, among other things, “Your experience does not compare to mine. … Don’t ever let that come out of your mouth again!”

Brooks’ acidic remarks occurred in a context of her apparent knowledge that Pereya would be a principal witness against the side favored by Brooks in another, as yet unheard, commission case on last week’s docket involving the disposition of a tax-delinquent property. 

But the immediate public impression of a hostile black-versus-Latino outburst overpowered such a distinction, and bad became worse in the subsequent debate over the tax-delinquent property, when Brooks, rattled by a side conversation involving Commissioner Chris Thomas, turned toward Thomas and said, “Excuse me, uh, you over there mouthing something? You with the sheet on!”

But Brooks wasn’t done. She responded angrily to Commissioner Mike Ritz‘s attempt to “call for the order of the day,” so as to conclude the meeting during a confused impasse after the vote on the property item.

“Ain’t nobody asked you what the … ” a conspicuous silence, clearly representing an unvoiced but familiar expletive “… you called for!” Brooks raged.

In subsequent interviews, Brooks stood by what she said. But, whether or not there was a context for Brooks’ utterances to Pereya, Thomas, and Ritz became irrelevant.  

In a few brief exchanges, she may have destroyed the good will and respect (however grudging in some quarters) she had managed to build up in leading the charge against alleged abuses at Juvenile Court, and forcing a series of Department of Justice-mandated reforms.

In a trice, the reelection prospects of Touliatos, as low-profile as Brooks is in-your-face, were improved to the same degree that Brooks’ were dashed. And the public focus on her remarks had other consequences.

Several of Brooks’ commission colleagues, long tired of enduring verbal assaults from the outspoken commissioner, which they deemed ideologically hard-edged, self-serving, and personally insulting — not only to themselves but to county employees against whom Brooks had a grievance, began openly venting the idea of censuring their colleague.

County Commission Chairman James Harvey was up front about it. Brooks’ behavior had been “extreme … embarrassing,” and showed “a disrespect to the body and a disregard to the public.” He acknowledged that a censure resolution would likely be considered at the commission’s next meeting and said he personally was inclined to support it.

Meanwhile, Democratic Party leaders, concerned about the contagious effect on the party’s electoral fortunes by voter animus against Brooks, were huddling about the matter and meditating on actions of their own.

Party Chairman Bryan Carson acknowledged the obvious, that he was being inundated with a variety of suggestions for ways of distancing the party and the rest of its candidates from Brooks, some of them radical, but was not yet prepared to speak on the issue.

There was general agreement on one thing — that Brooks could greatly ameliorate the situation and alleviate the lasting damage to herself and others by the simple expedient of an open and heartfelt apology.

But nobody saw that as a likely option for the proud and headstrong Brooks.      
        

• The race between incumbent 9th District Representative Steve Cohen and lawyer Ricky Wilkins, his latest challenger, has been relatively low-key so far, but finally, in the aftermath of the May 6th county primary election, the congressional race may be heating up.

Wilkins, who was highly visible shaking hands at an entrance of last weekend’s World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest, was on the street again Monday morning, this time at a press conference in front of the National Civil Rights Museum, where he was joined by a contingent of local ministers, including Memphis NAACP President Keith Norman of First Baptist Church on Broad, who offered him their endorsements.

Just as in his formal announcement for the congressional race in March, Wilkins continued to eschew an attack strategy, per se, against the incumbent, who has dusted off every primary challenger since his first win in 2006 with margins ranging from 4 to 1 to 8 to 1. Wilkins, in fact, tried out an intriguing line: “If you like Steve Cohen, you’re going to love Ricky Wilkins.”

Cohen’s formal response to the news conference was equally restrained. His office issued a brief statement, saying, “I feel confident in my knowledge of the people of District 9, as well as polling data, that a vast, vast majority, including ministers, approve of my record and performance and will vote to keep me working with President Barack Obama for the benefit of Memphis and the country. I proudly stand on my record.”

• When Tennessee Democrats met in Nashville on Saturday for the party’s annual Jackson Day Dinner, there were the usual exhortations to the faithful, the mantras to past glory, the paeans to hope. Tennessee Democratic Party Chairman Roy Herron made essentially the same speech as last year — and from the same stage (or a facsimile thereof) in the same venue, the expansive interior concourse of the Musicians Hall of Fame building, fitted with chairs and tables and made out as a ballroom venue.

As was the case last year, Herron boasted the fund-raiser’s gross receipts — the affair should net a half million dollars, he said — and, as before, he insisted to his audience that the Democratic Party’s current low estate in Tennessee was temporary in the same way that a political downturn in the late ’60s and early ’70s had been. That was a time frame when the Republicans had won the state’s two U.S. Senate seats, had captured the governorship for a term, and had even briefly won a majority in the state House of Representatives.

Yet Tennessee Democrats had managed to take it all back, he said, and, as further historical inspiration, he went through the litany of improbable triumphs by the party’s national icons— the “crippled” FDR (using the antiquated adjective for effect), the failed haberdasher Truman, the Catholic JFK, the Southerners LBJ and Carter, the dalliance-prone Clinton (who would spawn “the eight most prosperous years in American history”), and, finally, a president descended not from African Americans but from bona fide Africans.

This year, Herron offered as prime exhibit someone seeking an office not yet won — a youngish woman with the unprepossessing name of Alison Lundergan Grimes, currently serving as Secretary of State of neighboring Kentucky but attempting to unseat one of the symbols of GOP congressional power, Senate Minority Leader and Filibusterer-in-Chief Mitch McConnell.

Memphians in attendance at the state Democratic event had special reason to be curious about Grimes, inasmuch as she is a graduate of Rhodes College. But all Tennesseans were made aware of the fact that, astonishingly, Grimes has, as she noted in her speech, run neck-in-neck with McConnell in all the polls taken so far and had led in the last one by a point or two.

Her challenge to the Republicans’ main man in the Senate had, indeed, as Grimes also pointed out, become the “number one” Senate race in the country this year. In her speech, she hit McConnell on his obstructionism and his apparent statement that it was “not my job” to make a dent in the Bluegrass State’s ominously high unemployment rate.

Grimes spoke in an eloquent and assured manner, and numerous Jackson Day attendees went fishing afterward for an analogue to her. The name most often mentioned: Clement — as in Frank Clement, who won renown for his oratorical skills when first elected the state’s chief executive in 1952 at the tender age of 32.

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Politics Politics Feature

Mike Ritz: It Ain’t Over Yet

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Shelby County Commission chairman Mike Ritz, the man who has been at the center of the school-merger crisis for the last two years and has been the driving force behind ongoing litigation, assayed the situation in the wake of Monday’s passage of municipal-schools legislation in Nashville and saw some complications remaining.

Jackson Baker

Mike Ritz

At some point, a few of the six suburban municipalities may find the independent school districts they establish vulnerable to legal challenge, Ritz said. The chairman, a resident of Germantown himself, pinpointed Germantown as most likely to encounter problems because of the large number of non-resident students served by the eight schools now operating within the city.

“These students may not be educated by the city for long because they won’t be contributing to the taxes paid by Germantown residents to maintain the schools, and the city’s taxpayers may get their board to react to that,” said Ritz, who noted that a fair number of the outliers would be minority students, and any change in their status would put the district in jeopardy.

The next phase of the commission’s litigation against municipal schools is an equal-opportunity challenge on resegregation grounds, and presiding U.S. district judge Hardy Mays is maintaining the option to hold trial on the point, though Ritz acknowledged that any such process might not occur until after the new municipal districts are established, probably in August 2014.

Another matter noted by Ritz was that of how and at what cost new municipal districts might acquire existing school buildings. This is a question to be negotiated between the municipalities and the Unified School Board, Ritz said. “That makes it all the more urgent that we go ahead and expand the board to 13 members, a number more representative of the entire community.”

Ritz said that enough issues remained unresolved to justify a resumption of the negotiations between the commission and the municipalities that were conducted briefly but suspended at year’s end. “I think they [the municipalities] will see it in their interest to come back to the table,” he said.

• The bill enabling municipal schools in Shelby County (SB 1353/HB 1288) was a retooling of a 2012 version that had been ruled unconstitutional by Mays because its application was limited to Shelby County.

The new version applies statewide and, for whatever reason, did not encounter the controversy that befell an early draft of the 2012 bill that was scaled back to meet objections from legislators outside Shelby County.

With little more than perfunctory debate, this year’s bill passed both chambers of the Republican-dominated Tennessee General Assembly with comfortable margins Monday, thereby allowing the de facto secession from Shelby County’s soon-to-be “unified” school district that six suburban municipalities in the county have been seeking for at least two years.

Mayors and other representatives of those suburbs — Germantown, Collierville, Bartlett, Lakeland, Arlington, and Millington — were on hand for the occasion and were introduced in the state House of Representatives by suburban GOP members before Monday’s vote in that chamber. The House vote was 70-24 in favor. The Senate followed with a 24-5 tally for the bill.

There was some opposition. In the House, Representative Bill Dunn (R-Knoxville) rose to express forebodings about the measure and declared his opposition to it, as he had to last year’s original model. Dunn worried that, since this year’s bill, unlike the final product last year, was cast so as to apply statewide, not just to Shelby County, “we’re going to see some problems down the road.”

The Knoxville legislator pointed out that he had ultimately supported the Shelby County-only version of last year’s bill, but “unfortunately, a judge shut it down.” He reminded his colleagues that he had “asked that the current bill be rolled” until a version with dependable safeguards for school districts statewide could be perfected, but,” unfortunately it was not rolled.” Consequently, “I will be voting no tonight. I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think I’m gonna be.”

Objections came also from representatives from the city of Memphis, who, unlike their suburban Shelby County colleagues, were opposed to the bill. Representatives G.A. Hardaway, Antonio Parkinson, and Johnnie Turner all took shots at the measure, articulating their concerns about the effect of the bill on the county’s unified school district, still in the process of formation, and extracting assurances from primary House sponsor Curry Todd (R-Collierville) that the bill had no immediate impact upon the future disposition of school buildings currently owned by Shelby County.

Both Hardaway and Parkinson gave voice to a rumor that has circulated widely of late, namely, that an unspoken arrangement exists between the bill’s sponsors — Todd and Senate majority leader Mark Norris being the principal ones — and Republican colleagues in districts elsewhere to the effect that a one-year window would be held open for Shelby County and would be closed for everybody else by follow-up legislation next year.

Todd, who had begun his remarks by expressing thanks for the “61 signatures” of House co-sponsors he had received, blithely gave assurances that no such revocation next year was planned and that if it was proposed, “I would vote against it.”

Representative Craig Fitzhugh (D-Ripley), leader of the 27 House Democrats, made one last stand against the measure. “I hadn’t planned to speak on this bill,” Fitzhugh said. “I thought I didn’t have a dog in the hunt. … But, as so goes Memphis, so goes my little town and my district.” And he expressed concern about the “long-term effect” of the bill upon Memphis.

In the Senate, Democratic leader Jim Kyle (D-Memphis) warned his Senate colleagues of potential negative effects of the bill on other counties and other districts.  

“A special school district could withdraw and become a municipal district,” he said. “This is a mistake — a mistake you’ll see in your community one day.” And senators would ask themselves, said Kyle, “‘Why did I get involved in a boundary dispute in Shelby County?’ … bringing to your front door what essentially is a local dispute.”

The bill now requires only the signature of Governor Bill Haslam and perhaps an ultimate vetting by Mays.

• Another long-running issue dealt with as the General Assembly neared the end of the 2013 session was legislation (SB 0132) proposed by state senator Stacey Campfield (R-Knoxville) that would have required the state department of human services to reduce state aid to families of failing school children.

Dubbed “Starve-the-Children,” the bill would be shunted off to “summer study” by the state Senate, earning a fate that had previously befallen Campfield’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill that would have outlawed discussions of homosexuality in the state’s elementary schools. That bill, after being relegated to summer study in 2011, finally expired in a House committee this year.

The first hint of serious trouble for Campfield on SB 0132 came during floor debate, when GOP majority leader Norris pronounced himself “queasy” about the bill, which would reduce state aid to dependent families whose children were experiencing grade trouble. The bill had already engendered a mid-week statement of opposition from Haslam and had been actively opposed by any number of agencies and institutions concerned with student welfare.

Norris told Campfield, “You’re fooling yourself,” regarding the Knoxville senator’s claim that only parents and not children would be penalized by the withholding from the affected family an average of $20 a month in state support payments. The majority leader also referred to the bill as “the sort of legislation that gets challenged in a court of law as vague and ambiguous, arbitrary and capricious.”

Concurring with a statement by state senator Lowe Finney (D-Jackson) that the bill would “make the child responsible for the parents’ actions,” Senator Todd Gardenhire (R-Chattanooga) said, “You can’t legislate parental responsibility. I don’t care what you do.” He foresaw “unintended consequences” for the student. “The parent will beat the dog doo out of him for taking that $20 away from them, that’s what’s going to happen.”

In the end, with Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey (R-Blountville), the Senate speaker, explicitly encouraging him to do so, Campfield offered to have the bill referred again to the Senate health committee and to have it relegated to the aforesaid summer-study status, which he hoped would allow it to be ultimately retooled in coordination with K-12 education subcommittees of the Senate and House.

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Politics Politics Feature

Wars and Rumors of War

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

“Just like World War Two, I’m going to Nashville to get my allies, and I’m coming back to bomb your Hiroshima!” That was how Millington’s Terry Roland, an opponent of city/county school merger and a backer of municipal school systems in the suburbs, put it last week, when he was out-voted on a school-related issue on the Shelby County Commission.

That was one Republican’s point of view as the GOP-dominated General Assembly headed into a week in which consideration of enabling legislation for municipal schools as well as school vouchers was due to be on the front burner.

Another Republican, meanwhile, was feeling some heat himself, though he professed not to mind it. This was commission chairman Mike Ritz, suddenly the subject of efforts by a group of discontented local Republicans to have him recalled as chairman and declared “persona non grata” by the state Republican executive committee.

Jackson Baker

Commissioner Mike Ritz

Ritz, up to this point a Republican in good standing, told the F lyer, “I certainly won’t volunteer to leave the party,” and basically shrugged off the threat. He thinks the whole development could be “quite frankly, helpful” to him in a plan he’s actively considering to run for county mayor in 2014 as an independent.

About the recall effort, announced at Sunday’s county Republican convention by a group associated with the Tea Party movement, Ritz contended that most of his critics live outside the area he represents, District 1, which takes in much of the city of Memphis from Midtown to its eastern periphery as well as scattered precincts in its adjoining suburbs.       

Ritz says he doubts that 21,000 signatures could be found inside his district for a recall petition. That’s the number — 15 percent of the district’s registered voters — estimated as necessary according to state law by Mick Wright, a vice chair of the county GOP organization supporting the recall effort and a parallel one to have Ritz formally excommunicated from the Republican Party.

“Now, they might have an easy time of it out in the county,” Ritz said, meaning, essentially, District 4, which takes in unincorporated areas of Shelby County, as well as six suburban municipalities, which are seeking to form independent school districts and are resisting long-term involvement in the unified city-county school district, which Ritz supports. “The mayors out there might even circulate the petition themselves,” Ritz said, only half joking.

Rather famously, Republican Ritz and seven county commission Democrats have formed a solid bloc of eight in favor of completing the unification of city and county schools and litigating against efforts by the suburban municipalities to secede from the school consolidation forced by the December 2010 surrender of the Memphis City Schools charter.  

Concerning the likelihood of legislation favorable to suburban school independence, Ritz and the commission majority have consistently expressed the view that whatever is decided by Hardy Mays, the presiding judge over school-merger litigation, will trump any actions by the General Assembly.

Term-limited and unable to run again for his commission seat, Ritz foresees no negative consequences from either the recall effort or an attempt to expel him from the GOP. He doubts things will come to that, but, given his mayoral-race plans, “If they kick me out, it could be the best thing possible for my candidacy.”

Running as an independent candidate for Shelby County mayor against GOP incumbent Mark Luttrell and any of several possible Democrats, he could at the very least be something of a “spoiler,” Ritz believes. And if Luttrell should accept an appointive office from Governor Bill Haslam — something Ritz thinks is possible — “my vote potential looks better and better.”

Whatever happens, Ritz says, he’s perfectly at ease with the political positions he’s taken, attributing them all to a sense of fiscal responsibility: “I think most people see that I’m a moderate, and that’s basically what I am.”

• The city council-appointed Committee on Renaming Parks held its inaugural meeting on Friday in City Hall and made plans for a second meeting on April 1st, where the public can express its views in a town-hall format.

If that meeting should feature as many disparate points of view as the one on Friday, the public meeting could turn into a wild and woolly affair.

Such was not the case on Friday, inasmuch as the committee’s council co-chairs, Bill Boyd and Harold Collins, did their best to ensure that decorum prevailed and the committee members managed to disagree — and occasionally agree — in polite fashion.

But the variance in points of view was wide enough on what happened in the past — the Civil War portion of it, anyhow — that the chances of agreement on how to commemorate that past seemed remote.  

The Rev. Keith Norman, current president of the Memphis NAACP, made it clear early in the meeting that he regarded the idea of paying homage to Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, a “slave trader,” as unacceptable and that the Southern Confederacy, whose reason for being was to further slavery, was a case of treason against the United States and therefore deserving of no honor.

That was one flank of the debate. The other was provided fairly quickly by Becky Muska, a late appointment by council parks committee chairman Boyd, who appointed the naming committee. Muska was chosen, Boyd said, because her ancestors had settled in Memphis early in the river community’s history.

Her explanation for the Confederacy and the Civil War was as distant from that of Norman as could be imagined. The 13 Southern states that seceded had done so not because of slavery, she said, but in defense of “states’ rights,” and their grievance was against high tariffs on Southern agricultural exports imposed by Northern manufacturing interests.

As for Forrest Park, Muska said it was an outgrowth of Progressive Era politics and had the support of Robert Church, a Memphis African-American eminence, she said. For all the volatility generated by disputes over Forrest and the Confederacy and the meaning of that aspect of history, “I don’t feel ashamed, and I don’t feel embarrassed.”

The other members of the committee, also present and taking part, were: Jimmy Ogle, president of the Shelby County Historical Commission; Larry Smith, deputy director of Parks & Neighborhoods; Michael Robinson, chairman of African & African American Studies at LeMoyne-Owen College; Douglas Cupples, former instructor of history at the University of Memphis; and Beverly Bond, associate professor of history at the U of M.

Ogle and Smith attempted to route the discussion away from forming conclusions about history. Ogle noted that the saga of Memphis was abundant with examples of every kind of historical development, telling “the story of America better than any other city,” and that ample potential parkland existed to pay tribute to any and all points of view.

Smith took the point of view that the committee’s purpose was to formulate guidelines for future development of park properties. “I don’t think we’re here to name a park,” he said bluntly (and somewhat surprisingly, given the publicly stated purpose of the committee).

Councilman Collins got in the last word at Friday’s meeting, commenting that “our mission is bigger than our own opinions.” The committee’s task was to do what “benefits the city.” Whatever that is is yet to be decided, of course, and the naming committee’s role is an advisory one. The council will make any final decisions.

• A vote by the Shelby County Democratic caucus in the legislature to replace IT specialist George Monger with businessman/activist Anthony Tate on the Shelby County Election Commission has some local Democrats in an uproar.

The loss of Monger, who had impressed many as an assertive advocate for needed election reforms and as an expert in election-software issues, was lamented by several local bloggers and activists, as well as by Norma Lester, the other Democrat on the five-member SCEC board. There evidently is a move afoot to get Monger named to a pending vacancy on the five-member state election commission. Another Democrat interested in that slot is Van Turner, outgoing chairman of the Shelby County Democratic Party.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Obstructing From Within

The conversations between county commissioners and school board commissioners at the Shelby County Commission’s budget retreat a couple weeks ago, Judge Hardy Mays’ comments about his frustration over school board decision-making processes, and my recent conversations with a suburban mayor and a school board commissioner have confirmed in my mind that it will be difficult for the school board to open the 2013-14 school year with the best chance for success. The need for a special master is quite apparent.

(Editor’s note: This week federal judge Hardy Mays appointed former City of Memphis CAO Rick Masson special master for city/county school merger.)

Mike Ritz

The Unified School Board (USB) has 23 members until August 31st. Six of those members (Snowden Carruthers, Mike Wissman, Joe Clayton, Ernest Chism, David Reaves, and David Pickler) appear to be supporting the suburban mayors who criticize the USB and its goals. It plays well for the suburban mayors’ municipal, special, and charter school legislation in Nashville for the USB to publicly struggle. Wissman, as the elected head of Arlington, is, in fact, one of those mayors.

Three USB members (Jeff Warren, Freda Williams, and Kenneth Whalum) did not support the December 2010 vote to give up the Memphis City Schools charter. Sara Lewis, who joined the board after that vote, was also known to be opposed. Those four seem to support postponing the merger, in the hopes that municipal and/or charter schools will appear in some or all of the suburbs and the unified system will just be a slightly larger MCS system, allowing them to continue as if MCS still exists.

The two leaders of MCS who voted to give up the charter (Martavius Jones and Tomeka Hart) recently led the efforts on the board to postpone the merger for a year. Their rationale may be similar to the other four MCS resisters, and they may be having some seller’s remorse over leading an effort opposed by so much suburban political clout in Nashville.

These 12 board members represent a majority of the current 23-member board. They don’t vote on every matter together. However, their actions or inactions allowed MCS superintendent Kriner Cash, who publicly opposed the Transition Planning Commission (TPC) recommendations, to stay in place long after the board voted not to make him the permanent superintendent. Many of these 12 members, if not all, recently voted for a budget with a $145 million shortfall. These actions and many more similar actions or inactions add fuel to the fire of suburban mayors and other critics of a unified system.

As chairman of the county commission, I have been working with Superintendent John Aitken, interim superintendent Dorsey Hopson, and school board chairman Billy Orgel to share with them the county’s fiscal situation and try to position their budget needs for their best chance of receiving county funding over and above the $362 million a year we have to continue.

With their budget chairman, Chris Caldwell, working with them, they proposed a budget close to the recommended $60 million shortfall recommended by the TPC. Recent calculations indicate that there may be votes on the county commission for no more than about $5 million in new funding for the school budget that begins July 1st. Any more than that figure would require raising the tax rate by more than 10 percent and would need a nine-vote super majority — impossible on this divided commission.

The actions of the Unified School Board over the next 90 days will decide the success of its first year, whether it has support of the community, and whether that community support can help secure more than $5 million in new funds for the school system in 2014. I hope a combination of media attention, public pressure, and the fact of a special master can prompt the board to make some critical decisions.

The suburban mayors’ response to this financial dilemma confuses many county commissioners. No matter whether the unified school system stays in place for many years or municipal school systems or charter school systems appear in every suburb, the mayors should support the county commission in providing more school funding.

The mayors surely know they will need much more fiscal support for their local schools than a half-cent sales tax can provide. And funding from the county commission on a per-student basis would relieve them of making property tax increases. Most of the current complaints of school board budget decisions are coming from suburban parents who seem to get the fiscal picture, even if their mayors do not.

Does the suburban mayors’ disgust with the unified school system trump their fiscal concerns? I believe their support of the unified system this year could greatly change the voting dynamics on the school board and the potential for commission vote for a greater than 10-percent property tax increase.

Mike Ritz is chairman of the Shelby County Commission.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

No More Proscrastination

CREDIT: Danziger

Across the page from this editorial in the hard copy and via this link online is this week’s Viewpoint, written by Mike Ritz, chairman of the Shelby County Commission and an activist sort who is clearly not content to preside over meetings or to be a neutral arbiter over disagreements.

Even before his ascension to the chairmanship, Ritz was anything but bashful in advancing his several agendas — most of which had to do with issues of fiscal solvency, a fact which made him a typical Republican of a certain sort and, more often than not, cast him as a member of a voting minority (not infrequently, in fact, as a minority of one).

For the last two years, however, the current chairman has been out of kilter with the other five GOP members of the commission on what is arguably the most significant issue confronted by the county’s legislative body, and certainly the most divisive and volatile one. This is the matter of city/county school merger, in which Ritz, not only a Republican but a resident of Germantown, has consistently advocated and orchestrated a coalition of eight members (the other seven are Democrats and urban dwellers) behind the goal of a unified public-school system.

Whatever his motives, they cannot be attributed to regional or political parochialism. It would appear that they might indeed owe something to the aforesaid idea of fiscal solvency and to a belief in unity for its own sake. Ritz was pursuing a route to single-source funding of the county’s schools long before the merger issue came up via the December 2010 decision by a majority of the Memphis City Schools board to surrender the MCS charter, thereby forcing a merger with Shelby County Schools.

To be candid, it is possible that the commission chairman’s insistence on keeping school merger on track may be driven somewhat by the fact that the commission is fiscally, politically, and to some limited degree legally the de facto wielder of power in such a process. Indeed, much of what Ritz has put on his plate, on school issues or whatever, has served to remind observers that state law puts county government at the top of the political pyramid.

In any case, the argument that Ritz puts forward in this week’s Viewpoint is a challenge to the bona fides of the provisional school board, which all too often does indeed, as he suggests, seem to be pulling against its ostensible goal of forming a workable and unified educational system. It is worth pointing out that Ritz is not alone in posing such a challenge. We see a counterpart in presiding federal judge Hardy Mays’ recent actions, including his move toward appointing a special master to oversee unity and his no-nonsense declaration to all parties that, like it or not, a unified system will come into being for the 2013-14 school year.

In the course of time — and that could be as short as a single year — constructive alternatives could emerge to what the Shelby County suburbs’ legislative champion, state senator Mark Norris, derisively calls “mere merger,” maybe along lines of autonomy already suggested by the Transition Planning Commission.

But it’s surely time for an end to the delaying game, as Ritz suggests and Mays demands.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Issues Needing Answers

CREDIT: Danziger

A fair degree of public attention has been fixed of late on the factors that might incline businesses and industries to locate in Memphis and Shelby County. The idea being to assure mutual prosperity, theirs and ours. Recent circumstances presented a variety of different vantage points from which to see the problem.

There was the latest flare-up of controversy over Forrest Park, site of the grave of Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest and an equestrian statue dedicated to his memory. There are distinguished and reasonable people on both sides of the argument. One side, characterized by the late novelist and Civil War chronicler Shelby Foote, argues that Forrest was a military commander of unusual valor, talent, and scope whose exploits entitle him to historical recognition, whatever his personal shortcomings. To Forrest’s detractors, who include several political and civic figures, those “shortcomings,” which included slave-trading, the co-founding of the Ku Klux Klan, and possible implication in a massacre, are antithetical to the aspirations of a 21st-century community. Paul Morris, head of the Downtown Memphis Commission, offered his opinion this week that the Forrest issue itself is a drag on corporate recruitment.

Then there was the up-or-down vote on the Shelby County Commission regarding a proposed wage-theft ordinance. As formulated and amended, the proposal would have established oversight and penalties, at least in the unincorporated areas of the county, for the problem of employers who deprive their employees of earned and/or promised wages, who decline to pay overtime, or who otherwise renege on obligations to members of their workforce. Local business organizations, including the Chamber of Commerce, campaigned against the ordinance, and were able to defeat it, offering the premise that such an ordinance would be an undue “burden” on business and private enterprise and thus a disincentive to development. Members of the clergy, labor representatives, and workers themselves maintained just as insistently that the absence of such workplace protection is not only unjust but a lingering cloud over the economy and its prospects.

There was also, at the instigation of Shelby County Commission chairman Mike Ritz, a public information session this week in the county building about the nature of PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes) arrangements to induce businesses and industries to locate or expand here. Ritz was a prime mover in the creation of the EDGE board (Economic Development Growth Engine), which united all such corporate and industrial matters, city and county, under one head. But the commission chairman has also been forthright about his lack of confidence in the way that PILOTs and other incentives are calculated and applied, so as to balance the revenue interests of local government with the needs of the commercial beneficiaries.

None of these issues are clear-cut in the assignment of pluses and minuses to this or that side of the argument. All of them have to do with evolving points of view which, increasingly, are in contrast to the precepts and conventional wisdom of past practices. And they all require fair-mindedness and a willingness to compromise on the part of those who presume to shape our larger community for the future.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Ritz vs. the IP Deal

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Mike Ritz, the chairman of the Shelby County Commission, is once again asserting himself, this time against broad new potential concessions to International Paper company in the way of PILOTs (Payments in Lieu of Taxes) — i.e., what lay people call tax breaks.

IP says it needs them from both city and county governments in order to expand and hints that it may leave for greener pastures in DeSoto County or elsewhere if it doesn’t get them. Ritz, who apparently regards IP’s demands as close to extortionate, is either a courageous man or one afflicted by hubris. He has chosen to draw this latest line in the sand in the immediate aftermath of a serious defeat.

The chairman’s call for a half-cent increase in the county tax rate to buttress the soon-to-be Unified School System went down with a thud on November 6th. His natural allies — city of Memphis officials like Mayor A C Wharton and city councilman Shea Flinn who supported it, even after it chased their own half-cent hike off the November ballot — took the hit, along with Ritz.

Meanwhile, the most obvious winners were the commission chairman’s de facto adversaries, the municipal-school advocates in the suburbs whose previously passed half-cent tax hikes escaped the prospect of being superseded by Ritz’s county tax.

The passage of those suburban tax initiatives on the August ballot goes far, incidentally, toward debunking the notion that tax-increase referenda are automatic losers. When people know what they will be accomplishing by taking on an extra tax burden — as the voters of Germantown, Collierville, Bartlett, Lakeland, Arlington, and Millington clearly did — they will cast their ballots for it.

So none of what had seemed the multifaceted objectives of the Ritz tax proposal were achieved: The $30 million the commission chairman intended to raise for the Unified School System (by statutory mandate, half of the $60 million projected total) will not be forthcoming; the suburbs were not taught a lesson or brought to heel; in fact, they triumphed; and the referendum’s defeat even blunted the impact of a civics lesson taught by Ritz, a long-overdue one — that county government is constitutionally preeminent over all other local governmental units.

Even so, the county commission chairman deserves respect — and maybe even support — for what would seem to be a principled stand in the IP matter.

One of the more bemusing aspects of the Wharton mayoralty has been that a vital service he proposed to bring to local government, both as county and as city mayor, has arguably been stood on its head. What started out as a commitment to reevaluate PILOTs from the standpoint of a shrinking local revenue base seems to have ended up with the mayor’s espousing ever more and bigger giveaways to attract corporate and industrial tenants, or, if already established, to keep them here.

Hence the result of recent negotiations with IP engaged in by Wharton and Shelby County mayor Mark Luttrell — unilaterally, says the commission chairman, and without the sanction of the much ballyhooed joint city/county EDGE Board (for Economic Development Growth Engine). Ritz maintains that the two mayors on their own tack offered the surprised corporate heads more tax relief than they had asked for: a somewhat reconfigured 30-year write-off of all real estate currently owned or contemplated for the future instead of a 15-year extension of the company’s current PILOT and its application to both real property and transport vehicles, including airplanes, owned by the company.

The two mayors have since denied Ritz’s assertion that they made any such firm offer. And both they and IP representatives have been close to the vest about whatever offers and counteroffers were made.

At the time Wharton and Luttrell issued this joint statement: “International Paper is more than just a successful Fortune 500 company; this company is a valued and contributing corporate citizen for Memphis and Shelby County. The significant step International Paper made some years ago to move its global headquarters to our community was a tremendous milestone in our local economic development efforts. We take the position that we must do whatever we can reasonably do to retain this company in Memphis and Shelby County as a strong local partner in our business landscape. We will vigorously work to maintain the current relationship between this industry leader and a community that deeply values its presence.”

Surely no one needs to be reminded that tax revenues to support elementary public services in Memphis and Shelby County — schools, libraries, fire and police, sanitation, etc., etc. — are regarded as seriously deficient and are projected to become even more so.

Supporters of the county sales tax hike had seen something discordant in the logic of Mayor Luttrell’s earlier insistence, in opposing the county tax hike, that the Unified School Board should be made to perform serious budget cuts (more serious than the already draconian ones suggested by the Transition Planning Commission?) before new revenues were authorized.

The county mayor most certainly does not oppose governmental revenue in principle (or at least he didn’t seem to during his eight years as sheriff, when he, eloquently and fervently, fought against the threat of cuts in his own budget).

Ritz argues that, however worthy and needful the retention of International Paper might be in the scheme of things, the concessions being offered IP might generate a snowball effect, leading to equivalent demands from Shelby County’s other corporate flagships. Or, as the chairman put it in a recent letter to Luttrell, “What do we tell FedEx? What do we tell AutoZone?”

In his letter, Ritz employed the term “public relations disaster” to describe the deal he says the mayors have offered IP. And he repeated this week his astonishment at the fact that the two chief executives have taken the lead in negotiations with the company.

“In the history of Shelby County, no major PILOT agreement was ever put together that way, at the instigation of the mayors,” said Ritz, who professed confidence that a majority of the Shelby County Commission would concur with him in resisting any PILOT arrangement with International Paper that would extend as long as 30 years.

Anything over 20 years requires the consent of the commission and the city council and would require further approval from the state commissioner of economic and community development and the state comptroller of the treasury. Ritz said he thought a 15-year extension on real property might be amenable to the commission and the EDGE board, and probably also to the city council, “although I don’t have any soundings as such from the council.”

Council member Flinn, for one, said he was open to persuasion on a new PILOT arrangement with IP and expressed little concern about the role of Mayors Wharton and Luttrell in beginning negotiations. “They may have a different relationship with their mayor over on the county side,” Flinn said, “but we have a strong-mayor system, and in our system it is the duty of the mayor to negotiate contracts. Once he does so, the deal comes back to us for a vote.”

Ritz is not mollified by such sentiments and continues to maintain the mayoral intervention is out of kilter with local tradition in arriving at tax abatements. “That’s not the way it has been, and it’s not the way it ought to be,” he said. “I’m the one who took the initiative in creating EDGE, and if we had wanted the mayors to work out these deals, we wouldn’t have appointed Reid.” That would be Reid Dulberger, the president/CEO of EDGE since January 2012.

In any case, there is no deal as of now, and the forthcoming holiday break may provide some brake on the momentum of the issue. But the pressure to do a deal will undoubtedly mount — local fears of being jilted by a major corporate resident being intensified, no doubt, by residual uncertainties concerning the slow-motion progress of the Bass Pro project and maybe even by the absence — during the holiday season, no less — of Twinkies and other goodies that will — at least, temporarily — no longer be produced by any of the now defunct Hostess Bakeries plants, including the one that just shut its doors here.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

A Tiff Over TIFs

Shelby County commissioner Mike Ritz is a first-termer who, on issues ranging from outsourcing Head Start programs to combating sexually oriented businesses, has indicated a willingness to stick his neck out. He is about to do so again.

This week, Ritz threw down the gauntlet against funding a developmental proposal which the University of Memphis is pushing hard and which Ritz sees as an out-and-out rip-off of the taxpayers.

The projec, approved by a 7-2 vote in committee Wednesday and up before the full commission next week, t would require TIF (tax increment financing) outlays for a portion of the adjacent Highland Street strip as a “gateway” to the university. The premise of TIF projects is that they generate significant increases in the tax base over the long haul.

“These TIFs are supposed to be used for public projects,” Ritz says. These include such things, as he has pointed out in notes sent to the media, as housing developments, street and sewer improvements, lighting, and parks.

But the Poag McEwen Lifestyle Center project on Highland, as Ritz sees it, is little more than a “gift” to the developers, who propose building a retail center/apartment complex on the west side of Highland from Fox Channel 13 north to the site now occupied by Highland Church of Christ.

“The University of Memphis is running interference for something that shouldn’t get done,” says Ritz, who maintains that the developers would be using a total of $12 million from the city and county and would be under no obligation to pay any of it back.

“There has been no analysis done on this project, and it contains no performance requirements,” says Ritz, who argues in his distributed notes about the project that “retail centers move sales and jobs around, they do not grow local economy; [there is] no growth of jobs or tax base.” In a conversation this week, he added, “It’s like moving checkers around on checkerboards. There’s no lasting benefit.”

Ritz’s statement of concern comes on the heels of two new reports.

One report from county trustee Bob Patterson notes that 120 local companies have tax freezes under PILOT (payment-in-lieu-of-taxes) programs and that some $44 million worth of county property taxes and 372 parcels of land are involved in the programs.

Another report, from the Memphis and Shelby County Industrial Development Board’s performance and assessment committee, indicates the likelihood of default by several corporations on obligations relating to their tax breaks under PILOT programs. Under the circumstances, Ritz says, the Highland project amounts to an additional “giveaway” which the county simply can’t afford.

University of Memphis officials have been aggressively promoting the project as a way of shoring up the university’s “front door.” One who concurs is veteran U of M booster Harold Byrd, who has had his differences with university president Shirley Raines concerning her lack of enthusiasm for an on-campus football stadium, of which Byrd has been a strong proponent.

But Byrd says he’s on “the same page” with Raines about the Highland Street project. “It would shore up an area that, particularly south and west of campus, has begun to deteriorate.” Citing what he says is a prevalence of “cash-for-title businesses, pawnshops, and fortune tellers,” Byrd says, “It’s definitely a distressed commercial and retail area.” Moreover, he says, “the residential area south of the university is in strong decline.”

Both circumstances would respond positively to the proposed Poag McEwen Lifestyle Center, he said, and the “gateway” aspect of the project would benefit the entire community, not just the university area itself. (For more on this perspective, see In the Bluff, p. 10.)

On the first round on Wednesday, the Highland TIF project, which has the imprimatur of the Memphis and Shelby County Redevelopment Agency, got preliminary support on the County Commission, too. The 7-2 vote in favor (Wyatt Bunker joined Ritz in opposition) came despite a recusal from Commissioner Steve Mulroy, a University of Memphis law professor.

The commission is scheduled to take up — and approve — the measure on a formal vote next week.

• This coming week sees the formal completion of the 2007 Memphis election cycle, with four City Council runoffs being decided on Thursday, November 8. The contests are between Stephanie Gatewood and Bill Morrison in District 1; Bill Boyd and Brian Stephens in District 2; Harold Collins and Ike Griffith in District 3; and Edmund Ford Jr. and James O. Catchings in District 6. Pre-election updates,as well as full coverage of the results, will be posted on the Flyer Web site and in next week’s print issue.