Tag: Mike Williams

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Politics Politics Feature

Herenton and Others Look to Challenge for Mayor

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

It would seem to be a fact that former Mayor Willie Herenton, who headed city government from his election in 1991 as Memphis’ first elected black chief executive until his retirement in 2009, amid a fifth term, will make another try for the office in 2019.

Earlier this month, Herenton, who first announced he was considering another mayoral race in the wake of the MLK commemorations of April 4th, made things semi-official with a formal statement of candidacy on Facebook. The venue was modish for a political figure of Herenton’s vintage, who made a point of saying, in his online announcement, that “age is just a number, and I am physically fit, mentally sharp, and quite healthy.”

Justin Fox Burks

Willie Herenton

Still, circumstances beyond those of age would not seem exactly propitious for the former mayor, who just learned that three of his remaining four charter schools will be forced to close, having landed on the Priority List of schools unable to meet state standards for two years running. Two other Herenton-operated schools were closed earlier, and the net result of it all would seem a crippling omen for the onetime city school superintendent’s desire to rekindle his educationist’s vocation.

The school closures give a sense of irony to the statement, “My record of achievement speaks for itself,” Herenton made in his announcement remarks. Indeed, Herenton had much to boast of from his 17 years of ascendancy in government, although much of the positive aura attaching to his tenure had dissipated toward the end of his mayoralty, and a run for Congress in 2010 against incumbent 9th District U.S. Representative Steve Cohen ended disastrously.

Aside from other factors, that loss, in which Herenton’s share of the vote was only 20 percent, owed much to Herenton’s painfully obvious lack of resources, and it is difficult to see where his money would come from in a challenge to Mayor Jim Strickland, who is sure to be well-funded. (The current mayor has not yet declared for reelection, but no one seriously doubts his intentions to run again.)

The chief effect of a Herenton candidacy — should it come to pass — would be to inhibit the likelihood of another serious opponent to Strickland’s reelection. As of now, the only known challengers are Memphis Police Association president Mike Williams, a 2015 candidate who has indicated he will run again, and a relative unknown named Lemichael Wilson.

Others who have received at least tangential mention as possible mayoral contenders in 2010 include Harold Collins, director of community engagement for the Memphis-Shelby County Crime Commission; City Councilman Martavius Jones; and the Rev. Keith Norman, a prominent clergyman with numerous civic and political connections, including the past chairmanship of the Shelby County Democratic Party.

Collins, however, has just accepted an appointment by county Mayor Lee Harris to become Director of Re-entry for Shelby County government. Jones seems satisfied to explore the potential of his council career, and Norman would presumably have to vacate a well-paid position with Baptist Hospital to make a run.

Two other local figures with acknowledged interest in the mayoralty are, almost by definition, future-tense in their ambitions. They would be Van Turner, chairman of the Shelby County Commission, and uber-activist Tami Sawyer, a newly installed member of the commission.

Turner, who at 43 has the right balance of seasoning and relative youth to make a race, acknowledged to the Flyer that a mayoral run has crossed his mind, but says his candidacy is more likely to occur in 2023, when he will have concluded his permitted two terms on the commission. At the moment, he is still classified as a Strickland supporter and, as head of Memphis Greenspace, which purchased and removed the city’s downtown Confederate monuments, is an effective partner of the mayor.

Sawyer, who, as Turner notes, “has a great following among millenials,” is also apparently looking down the road to 2023, when the mayor’s race will seemingly be wide open.

Meanwhile, for Herenton and whoever else might be thinking about running in 2019, Strickland’s camp is floating a recent poll showing the incumbent mayor’s favorable rating among whites to be 66 percent, and that among African Americans to be 68 percent.

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Politics Politics Feature

Memphis Political Intrigue Arises

Even as the year 2018 advances, with its plethora of county, state, and federal election contests, the city election of 2019 is throwing some hints of things to come. For one thing, Mike Williams, the Memphis Police Association president who drew a substantial cadre of voters in his race for Memphis mayor in 2015, is clearly preparing the way for another mayoral race in 2019.

On Saturday, Williams inaugurated a new Facebook page entitled “Michael R. Williams 2019,” and his initial text was a de facto announcement of another race next year:

“I am starting this page to allow more people to follow and for me to disseminate information. I needed a public figure page that allows more than 5,000. I have almost 1,000 additional friend requests that I can not add. I will start directing people to this page. Are we getting ready for 2019, yes we are. Let’s get started early this time. Thanks, and please direct people to this page as well.”

As of 8:30 a.m. Tuesday morning, the page had attracted 56 likes.

• And, as current Mayor Jim Strickland thereby learned the identity of one reelection opponent for next year, he reluctantly found himself at the center of a brewing controversy involving a candidate for the Shelby County Commission.

That would be Tami Sawyer, whose urgent activism last year as a leader in the “#TakeEmDown901” drive to remove the city’s Confederate statues often seemed to put her at odds with what Strickland regarded as a more moderate and methodical pathway to that end.

Sawyer is a candidate this year for Position 7 on the commission, and, among her opponents in the Democratic primary is former Shelby County Schools board member Stephanie Gatewood. Proponents of Sawyer have charged in online posts, in emails to their networks, and in other modes of an ongoing whispering campaign that Strickland is taking a behind-the-scenes role on behalf of Gatewood and against Sawyer.

When queried about the rumors, Strickland responded with a categorical “No,” and, focusing on the online rumors, expressed amazement that they could be taken seriously. That in this heyday of social media, he himself relies heavily on regular messages from his office circulated through the internet is clearly something he regards as being another matter altogether.

And Gatewood herself took note of the rumors, contending in a Facebook post that they were “inaccurate” and saying specifically, “Mayor Strickland has not donated a dime to my campaign nor have I had a conversation with him regarding him having a fund-raiser on my behalf.”

Addressing the same matter of online credibility that seemed to astound Strickland, she would conclude her post by acknowledging “What’s funny is that perception is reality to most.”

In an effort to rebut such a perception, one supporter of the mayor maintained in an online message that Strickland had gone out of his way during a presentation to the state Heritage Commission in Athens last year to cite the role of “people of grass roots” in the struggle to remove the statues, and, in so doing, had bade Sawyer to rise.

Sawyer herself, when asked about the Gatewood matter, was somewhat guarded. She acknowledged that she was conversant with the rumors but declined to comment further on them except to say, “The mayor has a right to support anybody he chooses for public office.”

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Memphis Makes a Change

CREDIT: Toby Sells

Toby Sells

So, Memphis has a new mayor-elect. While many people were surprised at last week’s election results, those with access to various local political insiders were not. Polling numbers had been bandied about sotto voce for weeks, numbers that suggested Jim Strickland had a substantial lead over two-term incumbent A C Wharton. But none of the polling numbers I heard suggested a result in which Strickland would basically double Wharton’s percentage of the total vote.

The easy analysis was that Strickland got the white vote while the three African-American candidates split the black vote. And while it’s true that Strickland’s 42 percent represented only a plurality of the electorate, I think when our crack (ahem) Election Commission finally comes up with the precinct and ward breakdowns, we’ll learn that the results were not so black and white.

Fourth-place finisher Mike Williams, for example, had substantial white support among his constituency, which included the Save the Mid-South Coliseum crowd, Memphis Animal Services activists, the Memphis Police Department, and the anti-pension-cut true believers.

Wharton, too, had white support, especially in Midtown progressive circles and among the business community that financed his campaign. And Strickland’s camp is claiming that the numbers will show that their candidate had a decent slice of the black vote. We shall see, sooner or later. Probably later.

There will be at least six new faces on the Memphis City Council, including a couple of young, white newcomers who were heavily funded by family and business interests. Midtown’s District 5, for example, home to the city’s most liberal populace, will be represented (after a runoff election) by one of two Republicans: Worth Morgan, a poor lad from the wrong side of the tracks, or Dan Springer, who was backed by county Mayor Mark Luttrell, who announced last week that he would manage the local campaign for presidential candidate and professional Christianist sleazeball Mike Huckabee. Ugh.

What happened was that the three progressive candidates in District 5 (Chooch Pickard, Mary Wilder, and John Marek) split the liberal vote, opening the door for Morgan and Springer (both of whom are probably decent fellows, truth be told). But to say they represent progressive interests is probably a stretch.

I was saddened by the cheap shots that former Mayor Willie Herenton took at Wharton after the election. Wharton is a consummate gentleman, full of grace and humor. His concession speech, which I witnessed, was big-hearted and generous. He handled defeat like a winner. He represented the city with class, and we were lucky to have him, especially after enduring Herenton’s tumultuous final years in office. Wharton should leave with his head held high. He has a lot to be proud of.

And I credit Strickland with an equally gracious victory speech. A smooth transition benefits all of us. My hat is off to both men for the way the campaign ended.

Change is inevitable in politics, and change has happened in Memphis. I have confidence that the city is still on the upswing, and I’m hoping Mr. Strickland can keep the best initiatives of our outgoing mayor in place and still make the kind of changes that will fulfill his campaign pledge to more effectively fight crime and blight.

I wish him the best.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

What Strickland Will Do

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Jackson Baker

Mayor-elect Jim Strickland

To the surprise of many observers, Councilman Jim Strickland, an acknowledged underdog when he declared as a candidate for mayor last January, won election last week with a 20-point edge on incumbent Mayor A C Wharton. At 42 percent, Strickland’s share of a larger-than-expected dissenting vote was clearly the predominating one when compared to those of Councilman Harold Collins (18 percent) and Memphis Police Association president Mike Williams (16 percent). 

So does the mayor-elect regard himself as having a mandate?

“Yes, to implement my platform” a relaxed Strickland agreed in the course of an interview in his law office on Monday.

Strickland will take office, along with a newly elected city council, on January 1st. In the meantime, his first task, to be completed this week, is the naming of a transition committee. There will be “two or three” co-chairs of that committee, he said, and they will assist him in naming a staff to help run the city.

As for that aforesaid platform, it was made clear during the campaign, within the winner’s incessantly reiterated triad of bullet points. In every speech, public statement, interview, and ad, Strickland essentially limited himself to promises of remedial action on public safety, blight, and accountability of public officials.

Wharton pitched to millennials and talked up bike lanes and futurist blueprints. Collins advocated a crash program on behalf of high-tech jobs. Even Williams evolved rapidly from his original incarnation as a one-issue candidate (restoration of lost employee benefits) and proposed strategies involving solar panels and transportation reform.

With the regularity of a metronome, Strickland stuck to his triad of safety, blight, and accountability. These are all valid problem areas — or would seem to have been so regarded by the voters, but they are all arguably managerial, even housekeeping, matters.

Strickland thinks otherwise. “I disagree with people who say all that’s not a vision,” he said on Monday. “You have to have an effectively run city government. To create a community that’s more inviting to people and businesses is so meat-and-potatoes that some people don’t consider it a vision. I just disagree. I think it is a vision. When you’re one of the most violent cities in America, number one in unemployment, with a poverty rate of 30 percent, doing the basics is important. If city government were a football team, you’d say it doesn’t block and tackle very well.”

And there was one important component of his legislative persona that Strickland left unsaid during his campaign — his longstanding history as a budget-cutter and apostle of fiscal austerity, as the councilman who in 2010 generated this headline: “Strickland Proposes City Employee Pay Cut.” 

These were inconvenient matters to remind voters of at a time of palpable public resentment of benefit cuts and reduced core services. To be fair, Strickland later rethought the pay-cut idea, but — unlike Collins, who seems to have split that part of his core protest vote with Williams — he signed on to most of the other economies that Wharton would ultimately embrace (and pay the political price).

There is a reason why Strickland, who some 20 years ago served a term as Shelby County Democratic chairman, had virtually wall-to-wall support this year from the city’s Republican voters and other conservatives and why GOP rank-and-filers from the county’s suburban municipalities were always to be found at his fund-raisers and rallies.

To those who might wonder, however, Strickland still considers himself a Democrat — “I’ve always voted in Democratic primaries. I never have voted in a Republican primary” — though he says he is unlikely to be running for any future office as a party nominee of any kind. His ambitions, he contends, are limited. “This is it,” he says of the office he has just won.

“Those who thought crime was not an issue lost.”

Apparently, safety-blight-accountability was a sufficiently nonpartisan platform to work with voters across the board, and the first two points of that triad had figured large in polls commissioned by chief Strickland strategist Steven Reid, resonating strongly even — or perhaps even especially — with inner-city blacks, whose encounters with violence and environmental squalor have been long-standing.

(To give David Upton his due, that veteran Democratic operative — neutral in this campaign — has always maintained that concern over the crime rate has been more significant and politically charged in the inner city than elsewhere.)

Though only a handful of African Americans had been among the white throng at Strickland’s Poplar Plaza headquarters opening in July, and an early Commercial Appeal poll had the District 5 councilman in single digits with blacks, Strickland was, in the late stages of the race, doing significant under-the-radar outreach, and he was privately claiming to have as much as 20 percent of the black vote. (It will be interesting to see how closely a demographic accounting of the final vote totals will come to bearing that out.)

And, to be sure, Strickland did espouse some new wrinkles, mostly incremental in nature. He suggested using private funds to help reformed felons pay for expunging their records, liaising with Boys Clubs and Girls Clubs, and offering financial incentives — residential PILOTs, he called them — in the form of tax breaks for people to buy a home in the inner city, rehab it, and live in it.

“Another thing is that it can take a city or county three or four years to foreclose on a piece of property with a tax debt. That’s too long,” Strickland contended. “We need a shorter time than that.” The legislature has to be talked into making both of those ideas possible.

“Then I’d like to expand a program I created enabling citizens to serve as reserve code-enforcement officers. That’s not being implemented very enthusiastically at present. I’d also like to talk with county government about better cooperation on simplifying code enforcement. We’ve got a city fire code, a city residential code, and a county commercial code. Maybe we could consolidate them.”

Strickland sees law enforcement as his most pressing matter, as well as the key part of what he sees as his vision.

“Last November, we did a poll to see if Mayor Wharton could be beaten. And we polled the issues that were near and dear to my heart, including crime. We found that being tough on crime was a popular stand, to both races. Harold Collins was as tough on crime as I was. He used the term ‘terrorism.’ There’s a small minority in Memphis who don’t think crime is an issue, and they lost.

“We lost a little less than 400 people. In 2014, the Wharton administration told me we lost 158 police officers. We normally lose 100 a year in natural attrition. We lost 58 more than normal, which is concerning, but it’s not 400.

“But, aside from quibbling about numbers, we do have a serious problem hiring and retaining police officers. I propose a series of steps. Number one, we’re going to be honest and open with the unions. We’ll open up the books and let them look at them. The Wharton team has told us for a year and a half that we could not afford the lifetime health insurance. The employees have a suspicion that money is there for lifetime health insurance and has been used elsewhere. The only way to counter that argument is to open up the books and let everyone see what we can afford and what we can’t afford. I want to learn the answer myself.

“Two, we need to do a better job of recruiting new police officers. When I got on the council eight years ago, one of the first things we did was try to hire more police officers. We went then from 2,100 to 2,400 police officers by changing the area in which they could live — Memphis to Shelby County — and we went through a big recruiting period, with TV ads.

“We’ve got to come up with funds in the city budget to increase the pay of police officers.”

Strickland reserves the right to impose rigid curfews on youth in cases of flash-mob flare-ups like the violent outbreaks that plagued the city in late 2014. “[Former Councilman] Rickey Peete passed a curfew law 10 or 15 years ago, but it’s not enforced. It’s a stair-step program, pegged to age. If you’re 14 years old, you need to be home at 10 o’clock.”

Reinstituting a full-fledged program of civilian reserve (PST) officers to handle traffic investigations and other nonviolent matters is another step Strickland intends to take. “That’s an additional expense, but it gives you more police officers on the street. And I want to bring the animal control officers from the city shelter into the police department, for two reasons: One, I think you get better oversight from the police department than the shelter; and two, I think you’d get more efficiency, because, right now, a wild dog call can go to either the police department or the shelter. Put them under one roof, and there’s more efficiency, and you can send out animal control officers, which frankly are less expensive, and the police officers can patrol the streets.

“We need a new director of Animal Services, by the way. I want to hire one of these national, certified animal-advocate groups to come in and do an evaluation of the shelter and also help us hire a director.”

There is the matter, too, of who will serve as police director. During the campaign, the three other major mayoral candidates — Wharton, Collins, and Williams — all indicated they would continue the employment of Toney Armstrong, who has a year to go before exiting the department via the early-retirement (or “drop”) program. Strickland was the only candidate who avoided committing himself.

“I think Toney’s a good man,” Strickland said. “It’s too early to say what I’ll do. That’s one of the things I want to talk to him about. If I wanted to go outside the city and recruit a police director, would that person want a full four years to institute their program? Or would three years be acceptable? And I think Director Armstrong would know that.”

“We will restructure government.”

As he sets about naming a staff (which he promises will be “impressive and diverse”), Strickland says he will employ the same “less is more” philosophy that he employed in picking a campaign staff. “We had lots of volunteers, but we had just two paid staffers, Kim Perry and Melissa Wray,” he said. He also had the services of campaign consultant Reid, to whom he gives significant credit in planning a strategy that led to victory. 

As noted above, the one major fact of his council experience that came in for minimal expression during that campaign was Strickland’s reputation as a budget-cutter and advocate of economic austerity. “I think people already knew that about me,” Strickland says by way of explaining his downplaying of the issue. “As a whole, people cared about the other issues more. I think you’ll see more serious cuts, by the way. We’ll have fewer employees, especially in upper management.” Having often decried what he described as over-billeting and cronyism in Wharton’s administration, Strickland will do some judicious pruning and consolidation of the city roles.

“We will restructure government,” he promises.  

Holdovers? There could be some, he acknowledged. Gone from his conversation on Monday was the sharp polemics of his mayoral campaign. He paid tribute to outgoing Mayor Wharton and the incumbent’s CAO,  Jack Sammons. “They’ve both been very gracious and forthcoming in the conversations I’ve had with them.”

Strickland made clear he intends to take seriously the third point in his triad of campaign issues — that of employee accountability. Were there already check-points to measure performance in office? Strickland was asked.

“I would argue they are spotty,” he said. “I’ll be meeting with Doug McGowen, who runs the Mayor’s Innovation Delivery Team, to go over what work he’s already created. We ought to have measurements on how long it takes to process 911 calls, for example, and we should hold people accountable to a definite set of standards.”

There are more details to be worked through but, consistent with the bare bones of Strickland’s campaign appeal, the syllabary of the new mayor’s agenda will be a lean one, limited by the relative scarcity of available resources and focused on a few carefully chosen target areas.

The real change is the fact of Strickland himself, a bluff, hearty, good-natured but competent and calculating man whose mayoral ambitions had been of long standing but whose pathway to power and margin of victory both remain something of an astonishment — with the latter fact allowing him whatever mandate he can make of the means at hand.

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Cover Feature News

Memphis Decision 2015

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Change is in the air. That is a given. That’s the message of the slight but obvious up-tick in early voting statistics over the equivalent period four years ago. That is what the pollsters and pundits are telling us as they assess the chances of prevailing for this or that candidate for mayor in the 2015 Memphis city election, which is just two weeks away, on October 8th. 

So will the race for City Court Clerk, unique on the ballot for its lack of any real bellwether content, and so will those for the six of the 13 City Council seats selected by voters at large, the results of which races may well turn out to have long-term significance indeed.

The change of direction may not be obvious then. There are seven other City Council races decided by geographic district. These are discussed on page 12, and several of these may persist in uncertainty for six more weeks — until the runoff date of November 19th.

But meanwhile, we’ll likely have a good sense of the shape of our future from the election of our next mayor. The next mayor could be the same mayor we already have, of course — A C Wharton, who signaled change when he came into City Hall via the special election of 2009. Back then, his supporters were chanting his slogan of “One Memphis,” to define the shift from the mayor he succeeded —  Willie Herenton — a great change-maker himself when he narrowly won election in 1991 as Memphis’ first elected black mayor, and an ambitious reformer until four complete terms and a portion of another finally wore him down into resignation (both figurative and literal).

Has the time come, after only six years in office, for Wharton to pass from the scene as well? Manifestly, he doesn’t think so, but the voters might. A dozen private polls, formal and informal, suggested that possibility, including a public one, done by Mason-Dixon for The Commercial Appeal that was taken very seriously in its prognosis of a tight race, that being almost a toss-up between the mayor and his closest challenger, Councilman Jim Strickland.

Strickland, a two-time budget chairman who made his reputation as a champion of austerity, has been running for mayor in his mind ever since his election to the council on his second try in 2007. His thinking was sped up by a snarled and straitened city fiscal situation that drew a pointed rebuke from State Comptroller Justin Wilson in 2013 and in the last year forced service reductions and severe cuts in employee benefits and pensions. 

The remedy Strickland has proposed is less a new vision than a prescription for tightening up and cracking down. Mindful of the violent flash mobs of 2014, he calls for tougher containment action against teen perpetrators. He wants Blue CRUSH writ large and would lobby, too, for elevating repeat domestic abuse to the status of felony. He would rid the city of blight, and he talks of stricter and more transparent accountability standards for public employees.

In the election-year environment, Strickland has downplayed his erstwhile fiscal concerns, perhaps in view of public uneasiness regarding cuts in employee benefits and many resignations in the ranks of the city’s first responders.

This latter concern is very much on the minds of the two other serious challengers for mayor — Councilman Harold Collins and Mike Williams, the president of the Memphis Police Association, on sabbatical for the duration of this election campaign. Both have made restoration of the lost benefits, in whole or in part, a centerpiece of their campaigns.

Collins and Williams also say they would pursue strategies on behalf of citizens trapped on the lower economic rungs, building prosperity from the ground up. Collins questions the value of what he calls the “$9 and $10” jobs resulting from the city’s current industrial recruitment policy and insists on a crash program to provide well-paid high-tech jobs to keep the city’s youth from seeking greener pastures.

Williams has talked of slowing the quest for big industry — and the tax abatements that go with it — long enough to upgrade city government’s core services, and to focus on helping smaller businesses survive. He has evolved his campaign from what many assumed would be a concentration on the lost-benefits issue alone into a wider-ranging consideration of matters like solar energy and a revamping of the city’s MATA bus service.

The challengers offer competing versions of change, and the mayor himself has focused on a revised urban future for Memphis — pitching to millennials and touting new parks and greenways and up-by-the-bootstraps programs and boasting of his ability to latch on to funding from outside the city, meanwhile promising more new and shiny treasures like the Bass Pro Pyramid.

In the course of their campaigns, these candidates have set forth four distinct and divergent pathways to the future.

Jackson Baker

ßL to R: Harold Collins, Jim Strickland, Sharon Webb, A C Wharton, and Mike Williams

There have been several mayoral debates this campaign year, most of them involving the core four — Wharton, Strickland, Collins, and Williams. Here, as one example of their approaches, are excerpts from their statements at a Sierra Club/League of Women Voters forum held on Monday night, one that focused entirely on environmental concerns. 

(The quoted remarks are from their summations except that of Strickland, who had to leave early. His opening remarks are excerpted from instead.)

Strickland: “I’m running for Mayor because, in general, I want to clean up Memphis. … I have sponsored the volunteer code enforcement officer position [for individuals] to work with code officials and clean up their neighborhoods and other neighborhoods in the city. I have led the effort to create a grant program [to rehab] tax-dead properties. I want to work on a residential PILOT program, a tax incentive to help repopulate the inner city. We need to bring people into this city. We’re not growing in population; we’re not growing in jobs. I ask for your support.”

Collins: “The choice is really, really clear: [Will we be] a cleaner city, a better city? Is our transportation system antiquated or up-to-date? Blight has caused a decline in our population and increased apathy among our citizens and crime hotspots in our city. We should not continue down this road any longer. [We need] real choices, real change, a sense of urgency to deal with these problems. These are not election year problems. We have heard these now for six years, or maybe even 13 years.”

Williams: “We need a master development plan, and then we need to do smart development. … We need to tear down or repurpose certain properties in our city. … Since we are the 22nd largest city in the United States, we need a transportation system that is commensurate with that. To say that we’re going to stop developing or bringing in businesses to property that is available is nonsense. It’s time for new, innovative ideas.”

Wharton: “I’ve had the courage to stand up and lead in the face of tremendous opposition. I revived Shelby Farms Park. [There are] the bike lanes; everybody loves them now. … There are those who had questions about the conservancies, who now embrace conservancies. And I will do even more. We have to dream big, of bike lanes across the Mississippi River, along the levee, of bike lanes throughout our city, and programs to get the bikes for the children there, taking children all over the state to see our parks. They’ll come back here. That’s the vision I have for the city. Let me continue that.”

There they are in one brief snapshot: Strickland as technocrat; Collins as alarm-sounder; Williams as evolving planner; Wharton as self-styled futurist. All of them are rounder characters than that, of course, and one of them will guide us into the next age of Memphis. There are two more weeks to check them out, and we’ll doubtless have some more to say about them between now and October 8th.

Jackson Baker

Council races attracted more than the usual amount of attention this year. Here a crowd at Trinity United Methodist Church followed a debate involving seven candidates running for an open 5t6h District seat.

Meanwhile, here are summaries of the at-large City Council positions that will be resolved for sure on Election Day.

Super District 8, Position 1: This, like all the Super District contests, is winner-take-all, as a result of the 1991 ruling by the late federal Judge Jerry Turner that banned runoffs in at-large races — a category that, besides the mayor’s race and that for City Court Clerk, includes the two super-districts, each of which encompasses roughly half the city’s population.

Super District 8, predominantly African-American, encompasses the city’s western half, including the city’s inner-city core.

“In so many words or less,” as Position 1 incumbent Joe Brown would say, he should have easy going against unsung opponents George Thompson and Victoria E. Young, Super District 8, Position 2: Janis Fullilove, notable for her firebrand advocacy of inner-city concerns, notorious for her penchant for getting into embarrassing scrapes, and somewhat beloved by (most of) her council mates for all that, is equally well-situated to prevail against opponents J. Eason and Isaac Wright.

Super District 8, Position 3: Now here’s a race — or at least a contest with the potential to be one. Mickell Lowery, son of the seat’s longtime possessor, the venerable Myron Lowery, has had abundant fund-raisers and significant shows of support resulting from them, and appears to be in good shape against opponents Jacqueline Camper and Martavius Jones.

Neither is a pushover, especially not Jones, who cut quite a figure as a pivotal member of the old Memphis School Board and was as responsible as anybody for the MCS charter surrender that led to the oh-so-temporary city/county school merger. But, once again, as with his near-loss last year to Reginald Milton in a County Commission race, Jones is running more or less on his own, without much money or a support network, as such.

Super District 9 basically encompasses the eastern part of the city and has a larger preponderance of white voters.

Jackson Baker

Super District 9, Position 3 seat, make their pitches to picnicking Democrats Steve Steffens (left) and Joe Weinberg.

Super District 9, Position 1: You can’t fault Robin Spielberger, who has been ubiquitous in her cost-conscious campaign for a council seat and has picked up any number of across-the-spectrum endorsements in the process. And you can say about as much for Charley Burch, the perpetually youthful federal air traffic officer who is also, like Spielberger, challenging the seemingly entrenched incumbent, Kemp Conrad.

Spielberger and Burch are so into it that their intensity has boiled over into an ongoing quarrel over the placement of their signs, with Burch claiming that Spielberger has uprooted a key sign of his and replaced it with hers. (She denies it, blaming an errant supporter.)

Conrad is seen by both of his challengers (and by supporters of CLERB, for his sponsorship of a delay in council consideration of the police-review agency) as a symbol of the establishment. Conrad, who has generous support from business interests, probably wouldn’t quarrel with that idea. His incumbency and a visibility sure to be enforced by sufficient advertising (which he can afford) in the campaign’s latter days give him a major edge.

Super District 9, Position 2: Who is Philip Spinosa? Between now and October 8th, you will have seen him — or images of him — on your TV set in well-produced commercials and, if you reside in the sprawling District 9 area, in your mailbox in equally well-produced mailers. Now that early voting has started, you have a fair chance of seeing him greeting arrivals at this or that polling place. (That’s if Spinosa follows the example of Reid Hedgepeth, who won election to the council in 2007 by following that formula.)

Where you probably won’t see the youthful FedEx sales executive, who — thanks to the generosity of the city’s business elite — has a massive campaign treasury, is in a public forum in a give-and-take situation alongside four rival candidates.

Each of those others has a story to tell. Pastor and former school board member Kenneth Whalum, a self-styled “gadfly,” is a declared foe of the status quo and an apostle for a newly configured municipal school district. He heads an informal “education slate” composed of council candidates in other races. Paul Shaffer, an official of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, has a working-class outlook and good name recognition in union circles and among democrats at large. 

Stephanie Gatewood is another former school board member with a record of involvement in numerous causes. And Lynn Moss, a Cordovan, belongs to that stable of disaffected Memphians who are running hard for rank-and-file causes like restored employee benefits, saving the Mid-South Coliseum, and, in her case, for the right of de-annexation.

Spinosa’s financial edge, blue-ribbon sponsorship, and ongoing advertising blitz all give him an edge in a winner-take-all format. Although Moss gave him at least nominal opposition for the official Shelby County Republican endorsement, Spinosa also ended up claiming that credential.

Super District 9, Position 3: The aforementioned Hedgepeth has served on the council quietly and, in the judgment of many, effectively — faithfully representing the point of view of the business community, but suggesting development projects of his own and backing those of his colleagues, including those dear to the hearts of inner-city residents, like the Raleigh Springs Mall renovation.

Hedgepeth’s proudest moment came in 2012, when he broke his customary silence to make a powerful and probably decisive statement in favor of adding “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to the language of the city’s workplace-protection ordinance. That action won him the endorsement this year of the Tennessee Equality Project, even though one of his two opponents, Zachary Ferguson, the director of Youth and Young Adult Ministries at St. John’s United Methodist Church, is openly gay.

The other candidate, Stephen Christian, a Nike employee, is, like Ferguson, a political newcomer whose horizons may be somewhat down the line.

The well-financed Hedgepeth, whose campaign signs rival those of Spinosa and Morgan in omnipresence, should finish well ahead.

City Court Clerk: This is another non-runoff race, and it would be strange indeed if Kay Spalding Robilio, who logged 30-odd years as a judge, first in City Court, then in Circuit Court, did not end up with a comfortable plurality.

Not that her opponents are slouches. What they amount to en masse is an unusually concentrated collection of African-American candidates with governmental experience or name recognition or, in most cases, both. And that’s the problem. There are so many of them that they will inevitably slice up and splinter each other’s vote totals (such is the demographic fact of life, like it or not), leaving Robilio, a white female still well-regarded and liked in the community at large, well in the lead.

Robilio was basically pressured to resign her Circuit Court judgeship in 2013 at a time when she was charged with misconduct by a state ethics board for personally investigating facts pertaining to a child custody case in her court. The reality is that, while such a breach of the canon might — and did — appear serious within the legal community, it is not the sort of offense likely to seem especially scandalous to a lay public.

Meanwhile, several of Robilio’s opponents have had their own bumps in the road. But, again, their main drawback as aspirants for the clerkship is that they will seriously reduce each other’s vote totals. For the record, they include: County Commissioner Justin Ford; current councilwoman and former school board member Wanda Halbert; and former councilman and Juvenile Court Clerk, Shep Wilbun.

In addition, Thomas Long II bears a name so close to that of his father, the outgoing clerk, as to be seriously confusing, and William Chism Jr.‘s last name will remind voters of former county commisioner and interim state Senator Sidney Chism, who still remains a political broker of note. Antonio Harris, a longtime employee of the clerk’s office, can tout his experience there, unique in the field.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Wharton, Strickland Remain Close in Mayoral Race

With three weeks to go, the race for Memphis mayor is still a coin-toss affair. By most reckonings, incumbent Mayor A C Wharton and City Councilman Jim Strickland are running virtually neck and neck.

That circumstance was confirmed by a recent Mason-Dixon poll, published in The Commercial Appeal, which had Wharton at 30 percent and Strickland at 25 percent, with City Councilman Harold Collins and Memphis Police Association President Mike Williams at 12 percent each. Arguments promptly raged as to the nature of the sampling, but the general picture seemed clear enough. And so were candidates’ responses.

Strickland’s support among white voters and along the Poplar Corridor in general was obvious and unlikely to diminish much, if at all, by election day. If anything, came the word from his camp, his standing in the poll was low-balled. Strickland, who has certainly not forsworn the black vote but was lagging there, accelerated his appearances at African-American churches and other predominantly black venues to augment his prospects.

Wharton was maintaining a plurality among black voters, who constitute almost two-thirds of the eligible electorate, and was in the low double-digits among whites. The mayor kept pitching to his strength and was emphasizing support from fellow office-holders and established sources, including The Commercial Appeal, which gave him its endorsement.

Collins and Williams, meanwhile, maintained they were within striking distance and were working hard to present themselves as the change agents of choice in an environment in which voter discontent was obvious, both anecdotally and as measured in the polls.

The four principal mayoral candidates will participate next Tuesday at noon at the University Club in what could be the climactic mayoral forum in what has been a series of them this year. The forum is sponsored under the joint auspices of the Rotary Club of Memphis and the Flyer.

• Politics is politics, and education is education, but all too often, especially in Memphis and Shelby County in recent times, the two have merged. 

Everybody in Shelby County surely got their fill of education politics per se during the the city/county school merger controversy that raged from December 2010 to August 2014, when the six suburban municipalities of Shelby County got their independent school districts up and running, more or less.

But what’s this? Here, in its entirety, is an item reported in the current issue of the Nashville-based Tennessee Journal:

“The Memphis-Shelby County Education Association claimed through its attorney Wednesday to have seceded from the Tennessee Education Association and the National Education Association. Relations had been tense since Keith Williams, a former M-SCEA president whose term ended in July, was hired last month as the new executive director. 

“Ken Foster, the director for 15 years, was ousted. TEA has notified teachers it has set up a new ‘TEA West’ office to serve them, and that despite actions of M-SCEA leaders, they are still members of TEA and NEA. According to a TEA email, TEA West was established ‘after M-SCEA leadership refused to allow NEA officials to conduct an audit, broke the agreement of the Memphis-Shelby County [schools] merger, forced out the long-serving executive director, and now has claimed to disaffiliate from TEA-NEA.'” 

For the record, the Keith Williams mentioned here is the same Keith Williams who is considered one of the main contenders in the race for the District 3 City Council seat being vacated by Harold Collins, now a candidate for mayor.

Williams’ pugnacity as an opponent of the charter surrender that was voted on by a majority of the old Memphis City Schools board on December 20, 2010, was rivaled only by that of then board member Kenneth Whalum Jr., now a candidate for the Super District 9, Position 2 seat.

As previously indicated in this space, Whalum is running as the unofficial head of a like-minded “education slate,” and, unsurprisingly perhaps, Williams is one of the six members of that slate he has endorsed.

By all accounts, the other major candidate for the District 3 seat is Patrice Robinson, who served alongside Whalum on the old MCS board and was a member of the majority which cast the fateful vote to surrender the MCS charter.

Robinson — who has been running hard in the current District 3 race, holding one meet-and-greet affair per week — previously tangled in the race for the District 9 Shelby County Commission seat now held by Justin Ford, who was able to eke out a win in that winner-take-all race.

Unlike that race, this one for city council is subject to a run-off if no one candidate is able to win a majority, and, inasmuch as the field includes five other candidates — some with name recognition from previous races of their own — it is not impossible that this latest showdown between Williams and Robinson will have another chapter beyond October 8th.

The other active contenders for the District 3 seat are Tanya Cooper, also an educator and the daughter of state Representative Barbara Cooper; Kevin Mott; Sherman Kilimanjaro; and Coleman Thompson. Rhonda Banks is listed on the ballot as a candidate, but she has suspended her race and is now supporting Robinson. • Runoffs, if they should be called for in the District 3 race or in any of the other six district races, will not be held on November 8th, as originally scheduled and announced as a runoff date, but on November 19th. This is according to a new clarification by the Shelby County Election Commission of state election law, which calls for runoffs to occur no sooner than 30 days from the posted election day and no longer than 45 days.

The clarification happens incidentally to avoid the awkwardness of holding an election on a date, November 8, which falls on a Sunday.

 

• Meanwhile, one de facto “runoff” election has already been held — that for the chairmanship of the Shelby County Commission. The commission’s original vote for chairman was held a month ago — on August 10th, when East Memphis Republican member Steve Basar won the election by a single vote.

Then, in a bizarre turnabout, one hour after the election, Memphis Democrat Eddie Jones, who had abstained for most of the ballot rounds that day before casting what had turned out to be the decisive vote for Basar, unexpectedly asked for a reconsideration ­— i.e., a revote on the matter.

Parliamentary protocol allows for such a reconsideration if the person seeking it was a member of the prevailing side on the original vote, and Jones, who had in the meantime had several sotto voce conversations with another chairmanship contender, Millington Republican Terry Roland, qualified.

After a vote which narrowly approved reconsideration, another vote was held, in which — thanks largely to a spoiler candidacy by Collierville Republican George Chism — neither the now un-elected Basar nor Roland could prevail, and a new election was called for this week, to accommodate Jones, who said he would be unable to attend the intervening commission meeting on August 14th.

Come Monday, and the new election was the first order of business after the commission’s approval of a consent agenda. With interim chair Van Turner presiding (outgoing chair Ford’s term having formally terminated), new nominations for chairman were called for, and the same three candidates as before — Basar, Roland, and Chism — were put in nomination.

Tellingly, Roland was nominated this time by Jones. In the end, after two ballots, Roland won election on the basis of five Republican votes, including his own, and those of two Democrats, Jones and Ford.

As a preamble to Monday’s rescheduled chairmanship election, several citizens, representing Democratic, Republican, and perhaps independent constituencies, had appeared before the commission, challenging its members to cast their votes on some basis other than deal-making.

Whatever degree of public cynicism that may have represented, victor Roland, whose election was a springboard of sorts for the county mayor’s race he intends to run in 2018, sought to be reassuring. Before the vote, he promised “from my heart” that, if elected, he would “break my neck” on behalf of his colleagues of all persuasions. After the vote, he professed to be humbled.

Basar — who, besides his two recent setbacks, had suffered an unanticipated loss to Ford in last year’s chairmanship vote ­— was sounding philosophical even before Monday’s vote was taken. “Déjà vu all over again,” he said.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Election 2015: The Mike Williams Factor

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

All right. The shape of the mayoral race — and perhaps of the City Council races — has changed, and it’s time to take note of it.

It is still true that there are four principal mayoral candidates, though WREG-TV News Channel 3, for purposes of its forthcoming televised debate on September 15th, seems to regard the proper number as three.

Applying a yardstick that limited eligibility for its debate to candidates who had raised at least $50,000 as of August 1st and who maintained a public headquarters, Channel 3 will feature only incumbent Mayor A C Wharton and Councilmen Jim Strickland and Harold Collins.

Left out by that arithmetic was Mike Williams, the Memphis Police Association president-on-sabbatical, who will shortly open a headquarters on Poplar, across the street from East High School, but who had raised well below $50,000 by the designated target date.

Williams still hasn’t raised big-time money, though he’s had a couple of fund-raisers since August 1st. More important to his prospects is the presence he’s developed on social media, on websites of his own, as well as those he seems to share informally with various other rebels against the established system.

Williams’ critics maintain that he’s a one-issue candidate, and while making the case against benefits cuts on behalf of city employees, and of first responders in particular, does seem to have been his motivation in making the race, Williams is increasingly working other issues.

Among them are reform of the city’s oft-challenged animal rescue operation and defense of the Mid-South Coliseum against an existent city blueprint for its demise, and Williams, who insists his first act as mayor would be to institute a rigorous “forensic audit,” calls for a slowdown in what he sees as high-risk economic development schemes.

His campaign has brought him abreast of several council candidates pursuing similar themes, including the potential hot-button issue of de-annexation, and there are several websites — the Facebook “Just the Facts” page prominent among them — where he and they post so regularly as to seem a ticket unto themselves.

Among his de facto fellow travelers are council candidates Jim Tomasik (District 2), Robin Spielberger (Super-District 9, Position 1), and Lynn Moss (Super District 9, Position 2), though other candidates in other races are known to post in the same matrix from time to time.

While everybody recognizes the growing importance of social media in political campaigning — nobody more so than Williams — everybody also recognizes that money and organized support, both of which maximize a candidate’s public exposure, are of paramount importance.

There are ways to offset others’ possession of such advantages, and the kind of free media that comes with public debates, especially televised ones, is one such. Williams has been included in several recent mayoral debates, including two high-visibility ones — a televised debate on WMC Action News 5, and a well-attended one co-sponsored by The Commercial Appeal and the University of Memphis.

The observers’ consensus was that Williams did well on both occasions, raising his profile significantly. Hence, the perils of being excluded from the Channel 3 debate, which is sure to have a large audience.

Outraged, Williams’ supporters first thought to organize a boycott of Channel 3, but cooler heads, including the candidate himself, prevailed, and the Williams entourage will spend the night of September 15th at a “Thank You WREG” debate-watch party-cum-“twitter-thon.”

That show of equanimity might be more useful to Williams than an outright reaction of anger would have been, but more exposure to the candidate’s ever-evolving populist message continues to be what he needs most.

And, even if his support base is kept small, it still might be large enough to influence the fortunes of others. The question is: Whose?

At this point, the naked eye, on the basis of frequent Williams-sightings, will tell you that Williams’ support base, comprising both police and fire employees and populist reformers at large, is almost totally white, though he himself is an African American.

A modest extrapolation from that would indicate that Strickland, who has a few grievances against the Wharton administration in common with Williams, could be a logical second choice for a Williams supporter — though many Williams backers, seeing the well-funded District 5 councilman as yet another establishmentarian, might demur at that prospect.

A more apt corollary is that a certain kind of Voter X— a recently annexed Cordova suburbanite, say — might find himself/herself pondering between candidates Strickland and Williams. In that sense, Williams could function as a voter hedge against Strickland’s ultimate vote total.

Should Strickland be secretly gratified, then, by Channel 3’s decision to exclude Williams from its debate, or by any other action that effectively limits the voter alternatives to incumbent Wharton?

Not necessarily, because Strickland, who is bound to draw a significant share of the city’s white vote (the packed crowd that lined the walls of his Poplar Plaza headquarters opening in July was a revelation in that respect) has an obvious need. His chances of dethroning Wharton would seem to require further inroads on the mayor’s (allegedly) declining black vote — on Strickland’s own or on the part of Collins or Williams.

That the mayor is worried about Collins goes without saying. Financially, the Whitehaven councilman lags well behind Strickland and Wharton (who refreshed his already significant coffers with a Fred Smith-sponsored fund-raiser last week) but is well-to-do enough to have a radio spot and to do some modest paid TV.

Collins has been effective in slamming the mayor’s vaunted economic development agenda for producing only a modest number of low-paid jobs while — or so contends the councilman— ignoring strategies for upgrading the kind of job opportunities in high-tech and financial fields that would keep Memphis’ aspiring youth population from emigrating elsewhere.

Williams not only advocates a slowdown of showy economic development projects per se, he claims that the ongoing shutdown of schools and community centers in African-American neighborhoods is part of an effort by developers, in cahoots with city officials, consciously or unconsciously to gut the inner city in the interests of gentrification.

That kind of pitch could, if given enough exposure, net a substantial upsurge for Williams in the black community. It plays large in his new campaign video circulating via Facebook.

Jackson Baker

“The opponent of my opponent is my friend,” an extrapolation of an old Arab proverb, would seem to apply to the District 2 City Council race, where Rachel Knox (left) and Jim Tomasik, who bumped into each other at the Flying Saucer on Germantown Parkway, face a common foe, the favored Frank Colvett Jr.

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
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Four-Handed Race, Four-Handed Debate

CREDIT: JB

JB

Before Wednesday night’s debate l to r): Mayor A C Wharton, Mike Williams, Harold Collins, Jim Strickland

JB

Debate moderator Kyle Veazey

Memphis is not about to rival Nashville in the number of mayoral debates, forums, and other ensemble events — 40-odd and counting — held in the state’s capital city this year, but we’re getting there. Several such events have been held by now in our town’s mayoral race, and they seem to be drawing lose attention.

One more is in the can after Wednesday night, a debate co-sponsored by The Commercial Appeal and the University of Memphis at the University’s Rose theatre, and another one is scheduled on Thursday night at Central High School under the auspices of the Evergreen Historic Association.

And people, even in these dog days of summer, seem to be paying attention.

So who’s winning?

One way of answering that is to fall back on the tried and true all-have-won-and-all-must-have-prizes approach. That’s usually an evasion, but so far this year it seems to describe what’s happening in these mayoral-candidate get-togethers.

By common consent, it would seem, the field has settled on four candidates regarded as “viable” — incumbent Mayor A C Wharton, City Councilman Jim Strickland and Harold Collins, and Memphis Police Association Mike Williams.

Former School Board member Sharon Webb was involved in a couple of the early ones, including a widely watched one televised last week on WMC-TV, Action News 5. But there is general agreement that her performance in those encounters was not up to the standard of the others, and she is unlikely to figure in many more debates as such.

As for the other four? Well, yes, they all have “won,” in the sense of staking a legitimate claim to leadership in the city.

THE CASE FOR MIKE WILLIAMS:

Gotta have one winner? Okay, it’s Mike Williams, who, ironically, is not considered to have much of a chance to actually win the Mayor’s race and was not included in one or two early get-togethers. Williams’ fund-raising is miniscule compared to the other three and his support network, while enthusiastic, is — how to say it? — compact.

Moreover, he was long regarded as being a one-trick pony, in the race solely to dramatize the case for restoring lost benefits to city employees — especially first responders and even more especially the dwindling ranks of the city’s police force.

But Williams proved himself a strong, articulate performer in last week’s debate and on the stage of the Rose Theater Wednesday night. And he did so without forsaking his main cause or artificially broadening it but by relating the case for public employees to the core issues of public safety and the economic health of the community and by relating it, too, to other grass-roots concerns, like the ongoing movement to save the Coliseum.

Regarding this or that intractable crisis or malaise that afflicts the city, Williams points out that Mayor Wharton has been in office for six years, and Strickland and Collins for eight years and have been unable to deal with the problem. He suggests with an air of reasonability that maybe he could.

In two short weeks, Williams has transcended a lot of people’s low expectations for his candidacy and demonstrated that he belongs on the debate stage. That’s a win.

THE CASE FOR HAROLD COLLINS:

Similarly, Councilman Collins has been able to enunciate a vision for the city by extrapolating from his achievements within his own Whitehaven-based district — including a massive ongoing redevelopment project on Elvis Presley Boulevard, which, as he demonstrated Wednesday night, began from the level of repairing sewers on up to some wholesale renovation.

Collins has also looked into the nether parts of some of the bright and shiny projects now on display as civic successes for the current regime and seen and described some overlooked tarnish — like the $9 -and $10-an-hour jobs and the filling of positions with temps at Electrolux instead of the high-paying positions the public had been led to expect.

Decrying conditions that lead the city’s youth to seek post-graduate employment elsewhere, Collins, something of an Horatio Alger up-from-nothing case himself, is an apostle for “engineering, finance, and technology” jobs. He has eloquently called the Wharton administration to account for what he calls breaches of faith with city employees and for other alleged inconsistencies affecting the public at large.

nd, like his Council colleague Strickland, Collins emphasizes public safety, calling for swift and punitive reaction to outbreaks of violence.

All in all, the gentleman from Whitehaven has made a good case that his record on the Council merits a promotion.

THE CASE FOR JIM STRICKLAND:


At times, the District 5 Councilman and budget maven, whose district encompasses Midtown, power sectors of  the Poplar Corridor, and relatively humble middle- and working-class residents as well, seems to get snagged on rote repetitions of his bullet-point issues, which can be summed up by the words Safety, Blight, and Accountability.

But Strickland can expand on these basic positions (which, let it be said, are all perfectly sound present-tense concerns) with some interesting improvisations — like his call for a “residential pilot program” of tax abatements for urban residents who would improve their homesteads and his sponsorship of a grant program for those who recover tax-dead properties.

As impediments to crime, Strickland couples his emphasis on stepped-up “Blue Crush” police activity with proposals for reviving community centers and using Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs as outreach to troubled youth. A mite idealistic-sounding, perhaps, but worth a try.

Strickland should be thankful to Mayor Wharton, who, mindful of the general sense that he is the Mayor’s chief rival, has launched head-on attacks on him in the last two debates. These have allowed Strickland to respond in ways that demonstrate he is something other than the “generic white man” that one wag has called him and can Do the Dozens with the best of them.

A rock star might have envied the audience squeals Strickland got from his animated thrust at Wharton during a back-and-forth Wednesday night on civic economy. “He increased the debt to 47 million dollars, He did it! Do not believe the slick maneuvers and the corny stories!”

In sum, a worthy challenger.

 

THE CASE FOR A C WHARTON:

Perhaps the most admirable thing about the current Mayor, who knows from polls and other sources that he’s got a real race on his hands, is that he is unabashed about putting forth policy rationales that may have questionable payoff value with the electorate at large but seem to him worth stating.

One case in point is his running against the tide on the issue of public safety. Wharton defends his record on the issue, contending that, high-profile incidents to the contrary notwithstanding, the rate of violent crime is down. But, even conceding there is a problem, the Mayor insists that “locking ‘em up” is not the solution. As he said Wednesday night, he’s for “keeping the children out” rather than “taking more and more of them in.”

And, to calls from opponents Collins and Strickland to strengthen the hand of Juvenile Court, Wharton assumes an air of injured patience and suggests they are not aware of Department of Justice mandates that would decree otherwise.

Similarly, the Mayor’s attitude toward the city’s straitened budget is that, as he repeated Wednesday night, “we can’t cut our way out of this, nor tax our way out.” He maintains that “growth, growth, growth” is the only solution and touts his success in bringing in money from outside granting sources and his administration’s zealous recruitment of new industry via PILOTs (payment-in-lieu-of-taxes) and other inducements.

The policy, scoffed at by some of his opponents, of catering to the needs of “millennials” via bike lanes and other innovations is justifiable because it will attract young trained professionals to the city, says Wharton, who insists that statistics show the policy is working.

Wharton can be brazenly realistic in defending his administration’s cuts in employee benefits (“There are substitutes for health care, but there’s no substitute for the pension plan”), and he responds to charges from Collins and Strickland regarding everything from the slow restoration of money owed the school system to the winnowing down of police ranks to the holding back of tax levies already authorized by turning the argument around and blaming the Council.

At bottom, the Mayor’s case for reelection is that he’s succeeding more than people realize on jobs and other issues and certainly more that his critics acknowledge.

Beyond the cases made in public exchanges and elsewhere by the various contenders for the office of Mayor (and expect further details here and in subsequent articles), there are demographic and pre-existing political facts of life that will go toward determining an ultimate winner. But be assured: This race is truly competitive, and all members of the current Front Four are credible candidates. Stay tuned.

 

Meanwhile, to get a sense of some of the sass and vinegar of the Wednesday night debate, look at these two video examples. In the first, Mayor Wharton takes off rhetorically against opponent Jim Strickland. In the second, Councilman Collins returns the favor to the Mayor: (Mike Williams bides his rime as a spectator in both frames.)



Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Memphis Mayor’s Race: Light in August

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

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

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

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

Jackson Baker

The Mayor does DIY with yard signs in Whitehaven

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jackson Baker

Collins with daughters at Southbrook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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