Tag: Mike Williams

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Master Debaters, Near and Far

Boring, boring, boring, boring, TRUMP!, boring, boring, boring, TRUMP!, boring, boring, boring, boring, TRUMP!, boring, boring, TRUMP!

That was the most concise analysis of last week’s GOP presidential candidate debate that I read. And that was on Twitter. It was a lot like the final episode of True Detective, except you’d replace “TRUMP!” with “KA-BLAM!”

The candidates spent most of the debate trying to convince viewers that they would be the best man to control American women’s uteruses, and denying any possibly sensible positions they’d held in the past. I fully expected Chris Wallace to end the debate by saying, “Final question: Which of you is the absolute batshit craziest, and why?”

The aftermath of the GOP debate was almost as much fun as the debate itself, as The Donald seemingly shot himself in the foot with misogynist comments about Fox moderator Megyn Kelly, who had the audacity to ask Trump about his many past mysogynist comments. Pundits immediately proclaimed that Trump had jumped the shark and that his campaign was over, unless he apologized.

Trump, as anyone who has observed his career could predict, didn’t apologize, and instead ramped up his rhetoric another notch. Naturally, his lead in the polls grew and Fox groveled, withering under Trump’s verbal assaults on the network.

I fully expect Trump to pull out a bunch of bills at the next debate and “make it rain” on the other candidates. What could it hurt at this point? He’s the Teflon Man.

It was a big week for debates, with Monday night’s Memphis mayoral forum coming just on the heels of the GOP’s extravaganza. Five candidates — Mayor A C Wharton, Jim Strickland, Harold Collins, Mike Williams, and Sharon Webb — vied to impress Memphis voters with their rhetoric and political acumen.

Well, except for Webb, who appeared to have wandered onstage by accident. As one person tweeted: “I’m sure Dr. Sharon is a sweet woman with a great heart, but this is not her element.” That would be correct, if by “her element,” you mean Earth. Prediction: You will not read or hear the term “Webb-mentum” in the next few weeks.

Each of the other four candidates made some points and took some shots at their opponents. Wharton gave as good as he got (and he got fired upon more than Detective Ray Velcoro in that True Detective finale).

I still think the race is going to come down to Wharton and Strickland, based primarily on the fact that they are by far the best-financed, and that beating an incumbent in a field split four ways is tough without serious cash. I don’t think race-based voting will be much of a factor. Memphis voters have shown time and time again that when it comes to city-wide races, crossover voting is the rule rather than the exception, especially when party affiliation is not a factor.

One thing is certain: This fall in Memphis will not be boring.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Spreading Blessings

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Monday’s televised debate involving five Memphis mayoral candidates may have a significant effect on public attitudes toward the contestants. It certainly gave them all greater currency.

As almost all the initial media coverage indicated, the central event of the forum was a one-on-one verbal slugfest between Mayor A C Wharton and Councilman Jim Strickland, whom Wharton and most observers regard as the the major challenger to the mayor’s incumbency.

But each of the other candidates involved — Councilman Harold Collins, Memphis Police Association president Mike Williams, and former Memphis School Board member Sharon Webb — had an opportunity, as well, to define themselves to a general audience that, for the most part, has been unfamiliar with them.

Collins and Williams, both of whom proved to be articulate and knowledgeable about the issues confronting city government, probably enhanced their vote potential.

Webb’s case is harder to evaluate. In her favor is the fact of being the only woman in the race, coupled with a likable presence and a way of making the case that “it’s time for a woman to take over” that is both eloquent and passionate. Detracting from her prospects, though, is her obvious unfamiliarity with city issues, the same weakness that caused her to draw a blank in a TV debate the last time she ran for mayor in the special election of 2009.

The exchange of attacks and insults between Wharton and Strickland clearly provided the most intense moments of the forum, which was televised by WMC-TV, Action News 5, and was co-sponsored by the Memphis Association of Black Journalists and the League of Women Voters.

Oddly, for an incumbent facing a challenge to his reelection, the mayor was the more aggressive in seeking out points of difference, and his assertiveness was nicely complemented with periodic references to the value of experience and a show of wit — as when he dubbed Strickland “Dr. No” for favoring clamps on police funding as budget chairman.

Contrasting that with Strickland’s emphasis on public safety as a campaign theme, the mayor said, “I think candidate Strickland ought to be introduced to Councilman Strickland, because they are two different people.”

Strickland responded by putting the blame for a reduced police presence on budgets prepared by the mayor, and he showed some polemical skill of his own in attacking redundancies in Wharton’s administration, by suggesting that the mayor was trying to be “Noah,” making allowances for two of everything.

Strickland and Wharton also quarreled over their relative support for summer jobs for youth, with each claiming credit for what appeared to be different programs in different eras.

While the bickering between the two may have shed some light on areas of city government, it also drew out both men as able combatants, with the normally easy-going Wharton showing some unaccustomed swagger — as well as the kind of agility that allowed him to co-opt emcee Joe Birch’s introductory description of Memphis as “a city on the move” as a motto for his administration.

Strickland, meanwhile, seemed to flourish under the mayor’s goading, which forced him away from his usual bullet-point recitations — that can turn into rote — into some impressively vigorous improvisations.

The Wharton-Strickland duel also gave Collins and Williams some good moments, allowing Collins, for example, to appear statesman-like in commenting on the “Tom and Jerry Show” aspects of the scrap, while Williams, commenting on the exchange of accusations between Wharton and Strickland on police issues, made the plague-on-both-their-houses observation that the city’s active police force had shrunk from 2,500 to 2,000 on their watch. He was enabled thereby to tilt the police debate away from self-serving arguments about benefits into the realm of public safety.

Collins, too, had a telling retort to the mayor’s experience factor, adding Wharton’s seven years as Shelby County mayor to the six he has served as mayor of Memphis and contending that those 13 years have not netted much for the community.

All things considered, the debate did not occasion any major breakaways in the direction of a particular candidate. If anything, it tended to equalize things, in the direction of all-have-won-all-must-have-prizes.

But there are several more mayoral forums planned, all of them — like the one Monday night — good free-media opportunities for the less well-endowed candidates to catch up to the ones with bankrolls.

• In a bizarre turnaround, the Shelby County Commission elected a new chairman, Steve Basar, as its first order of business Monday, withdrew the honor an hour later in a reconsideration vote, then decided to defer further action on the chairmanship until next month.

Basar, a Republican member who served as vice chair of the commission last year, suffered his second consecutive disappointment. He had expected to be named chairmen last year, only to lose out to Democrat Justin Ford when Basar’s GOP colleagues withheld their support from him.

This one had to feel all the more crushing, since Basar had believed himself to be the chairman-elect and was clearly savoring the triumph, until the reconsideration vote was called for by Democrat Eddie Jones, whose vote for Basar on a final ballot had originally broken a deadlock in Basar’s favor.

Jones offered no explanation for his change of heart, though Basar would note to reporters afterward that “you saw who was sitting next to each other.” Basar sat on one side of Jones; on the other side was fellow Republican Terry Roland, who had also sought the chairmanship and served notice that, given another shot at it, he was prepared to try again.

In deference to Jones, who will be absent at the commission meeting of August 24th, the next chairmanship vote will take place on September 14th, with current vice chair Van Turner, a Democrat, presiding. As County Attorney Ross Dyer noted on Monday, current chair Justin Ford’s term will run out at the end of August. The unexpected — and unprecedented — circumstance of Monday had its roots in the shifting alliance structure of the commission, which, ever since last year’s post-election reorganization, had drifted into a quasi-party-line division in which six Democrats, plus Republican Basar, had been one faction, with the other faction consisting of five Republicans plus Ford, who won his chairmanship with GOP support.

Jackson Baker

Former Chattanooga congressman Zach Wamp was in Memphis on Monday, convening a meeting at Owen Brennan’s Restaurant of supporters of the presidential candidacy of Florida Senator Mario Rubio. Here, Wamp consults with Rubio’s West Tennessee chairman, Germantown state Senator Brian Kelsey.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Wharton Has Big Crowd for Opening of Second Headquarters on Poplar

CREDIT: JB

JB

The Mayor was feeling his oats on Saturfday.

What a difference a week makes!

Mayor A C Wharton’s opening of a campaign headquarters in Whitehaven last week was a presentable enough affair, and a necessary one, given that one of his two major opponents, Councilman Harold Collins, has an unmistakable presence there.

Btut the Mayor’s opening on Saturday of another headquarters on Poplar Avenue a week later was both quantitatively and qualitatively more ambitious and was beyond doubt a more resounding affair for the Mayor. For one thing, he was more forceful than he had been a week earlier, exuding a great deal of apparently unfeigned confidence.

Buoyed by crowd

This was important, given that the Mayor’s race might well be decided right there, in the Poplar Corridor, where Wharton’s other major opponent, well-funded Councilman Jim Strickland, has already demonstrated real strength.

Buoyed by a big, responsive crowd containing no few influential members, Wharton eschewed the kind of defensiveness that led him, at Whitehaven, to volunteer an unforced denial that his campaign was “ toxic’ to office-holders (thereby putting the idea in heads that may not have previously harbored it).

Too, the logistics on Saturday were far more favorable. As at Whitehaven, the Mayor’s rally was arranged outside, with rows of seating under a tent-roof for some, while others had to stand. But on Poplar there were more chairs, while spreading trees provided ample shade for those standing, and large fans on either side of the assembly kept a strong but gentle breeze circulating.

The rally area on Poplar, moreover, was reachable by just a step or two out the back door of an interior headquarters space that was multi-roomed and cavernous. So the large crowd had no trouble shifting back and forth, more or less compactly, and without discomfort.

How large was the crowd? In the hundreds, easily. The rally group outside numbered at least 200, pushing higher, and extrapolating from the fact that there had to be significant numbers who remained inside, a claim of between 300 and 400 could at least be entertained.

And Saturday’s crowd could fairly be described as racially diverse, much more so than the predominantly African-American one at Whitehaven had been (though Wharton described them both as if they had been veritable UN assemblies).

Different logistics

An article in this space regarding the Whitehaven rally originally estimated the crowd at that rally in and around the tent
[italics mine] to be between 50 and 75. To put it mildly, that figure was objected to, both immediately thereafter and on Saturday at the Poplar headquarters rally, where this reporter encountered an organized tag-team volley of complainants.

(High-ranking ones, too, including, on Saturday, the city’s First Lady, Ruby Wharton, from whom, however, I was actually able to extract a generous-sized smile. Fair trade, that.)

And, though I had indulged the good folks at Whartonville South by amending my account to include their own (carefully attributed) claim of 150-200, I continue to believe my original estimate was correct. (Look again at those italics overhead.)

There may have been a lot of coming and going at Whitehaven that was hard to encompass visually and difficult to enumerate, but the interior headquarters space there appeared to be about the size of a small studio apartment, and at no point did it contain what could be described as a throng.

And the distance from the front door of that modest office space in Whitehaven to the tented area where the rally itself was held was a bare asphalt area that, on HQ day, with temperatures approaching 100, came off as about as vast and unsheltered as Death Valley, California

It was hot on Saturday on Poplar Avenue, too, but not only were the logistics more inviting, so was the format of the rally. There was no elongated waiting-around period, as there had been at Whitehaven, and instead of the ten or so speakers preceding the Mayor’s advent at last week’s opening, there were only three or four on Saturday, most of them concise and well-spoken. (Among them was the ever-gracious co-chair Lois Stockton, inadvertently overlooked at a previous year’s Wharton opening, but a solid plus on Saturday.)

The number of elected officials lending support for the Mayor on Saturday was somewhat larger than it had been a week earlier, and as easy to list, inasmuch as, at one point or another, they were all acknowledged by emcee Bobby White (or “Roberto Blanco,” as he was re-dubbed for the occasion by Councilman Edmund Ford Jr, one of Saturday’s speakers.)

Hot rhetoric

Things got started on Saturday with something of a stem-winder by Mike Carpenter; County Commissioner Reginald Milton had a passably good speech, too, concluding, “We don’t need a new mayor. We got a mayor!”.

On hand were: Municipal Judge Tarik Sugarmon, Council members Wanda Halbert and Ford, state Representatives Barbara Cooper and G.A. Hardaway; County Commissioners Milton, Van Turner, and Willie Brooks; and Probate Judge Kathleen Gomes.

Especially considering that Mayor Wharton had just been through a somewhat devastating week, the key point of which was having to deal with the shooting death and funeral of MPD officer Sean Bolton, he summoned up a collection of exhortations that were no less spirited for being disjointed.

A sampling:

“I know it’s hot out there…[but]we are going to turn op the A C!,,,,[With] people just melting in the sweltering heat of joblessness and hopelessness, why would you turn off the A C?….I think that’s the time your turn it up, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do on October 8!”

The Mayor distinguished between his opponents as “thermomerter people, who tell you what the temperature is” and himself, a “thermostat” who knew how to calibrate things back into balance. The choice, he said, was between “those who crow about problems and talk about a future of doom” and a Mayor who had brought 10,000 new jobs and could “get off his butt” and go get seed money for the city without raising taxes.

“What’s wrong with going to Bloomberg and getting $5 million? What’s wrong with getting on a plane and bringing the money back here?…What’s wrong with saying, ‘Governor, you’ve got $6 million that you cannot spend’” and talking
Bill Haslam into funneling that much to Memphis?

Wharton boasted of recent pieces in The Huffington Post and the Chicago Tribune that called Memphis a “city of promise,” and he concluded with his patented rainbow note: “We can’t work as black folks, we can’t work as white folks, we can’t work as brown folks, we’ve got to work together” toward “the Destiny of One Memphis!”

To repeat: Disjointed but spirited. Somehow, it came off as a tour de force.

And more important than the words was the image of a man of passion and personality (which is what A C Wharton, at his best, is on the stump), determined to see both his campaign and his mayoralty through and, crowd-wise, able to match, if not beat, opponent Jim Strickland, who had pulled a large but more homogeneous crowd of his own at a headquarters opening on Poplar three weeks ago.

“You tell me somebody else who could turn out a crowd like this on a day like this!” Wharton had said in his remarks. And it was no idle boast.

The message on Saturday was clear: Whoever turns this man out will have to go some.

Monday night debate

• Meanwhile, push will come to shove for five mayoral candidates — Wharton, Strickland, Collins, Mike Williams, and Sharon Webb — on Monday night at 7 p,m. at the National Civil Rights Museum for the next in what will be a spate of mayoral debates between now and October 8.

This one is sponsored by WMC-TV, Action News 5; the NCRM; the League of Women Voters; and the Memphis association of Black Journalists..

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Few Surprises in Memphis Election Filings

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

The probable lineups for various races in the forthcoming Memphis city election have been set for so long — most of them long before last week’s filing deadline — that it was interesting indeed to see some surprises develop before the stroke of noon on Thursday.

• There were no real surprises in the mayor’s race. It remains the case that of the 12 candidates who qualified, only four can be considered viable: incumbent Mayor  A C Wharton, Councilmen Jim Strickland and Harold Collins, and Memphis Police Association head Mike Williams. Wharton and Strickland are, at this point, in the first tier all by themselves.

In any case, the four mentioned candidates, by a general consensus, seem to have been settled on as the four contestants in a series of forthcoming forum/debate events, though all mayoral  candidates and candidates in other races, for that matter, have been invited to Thursday night’s Sierra Club environmental forum at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library. 

There was a genuine surprise in the council District 2 race, however: Frank Colvett‘s last-minute entry after the unexpected withdrawal of incumbent Bill Boyd presents voters with a likely showdown between party-affiliated entries. Colvett, president of GreenScape in Memphis, a custom design firm, is a longtime Republican activist who has served as state party treasurer and has been an active member of the Northeast Shelby Republican Club. He has already lined up backing from several GOP heavyweights.

His major opposition will probably come from newcomer Rachel Knox, who made a name for herself as an audience participant in Memphis City Council debates, especially on behalf of employees facing reductions in their benefits. Knox seems to have solid backing from Democrats, both grassroot and establishment, and is riding a wave of recent fund-raisers, but District 2 traditionally favors Republicans.

There are three other candidates in the race: Detric Golden, who switched from the mayor’s race; Jim Tomasik, who has run partisan races as both a Republican and a Libertarian, and this time is running on a de-annexationist ticket; and Marti Miller.

• Despite the up-to-the-brink aspect of it, there was no great surprise in the filing-day withdrawal of Justin Ford from the mayor’s race. Virtually from the moment of his first announcement, the youthful Shelby County Commission chairman had deported himself less like a real candidate and more like someone exploring the best way to maximize his name identification without committing himself to the serious effort of a campaign. In the vernacular of sport, Ford never made a football move.

The question is, does Ford’s switch to the race for city court clerk mean that a real race can be expected of him for that office? That race already features quite a few name players. Besides one Thomas Long, son of the incumbent, there are Shep Wilbun, a former City Council member and Juvenile Court clerk who has kept his name active; Wanda Halbert, who is just coming off a relatively long incumbency on the council; and, in what may be the real surprise in this race, Kay Spalding Robilio, who was a Circuit Court judge for a quarter century before resigning from the bench last year.

The clerk’s race is a winner-take-all, so even someone like the relatively unknown William Chism Jr., whose last name — a familiar one in local politics (Democrat Sidney, Republican George) — got him the Democratic nomination last year for Probate Court clerk, can hope for a lottery-like score.

• Did the district attorney general’s office stonewall a request by veteran political figure and twice-convicted felon Joe Cooper to have his citizenship rights restored in time to file for the Super District 9, Position 2 seat? Cooper alleges that is the case, and both the D.A.’s office and the state of Tennessee seem to have corroborated their opposition officially in responses to recent court hearings.

In any case, the D.A.’s office professed not to be able to have an attorney present for a hearing on Cooper’s case before Judge Robert Childers in Circuit Court early last week, and Cooper was forced into the expedient of seeking an injunction in Chancery Court for a stay on the filing deadline that would apparently have applied to all candidates in all races.

At that Thursday hearing, not two hours before the filing deadline, Chancellor Jim Kyle told Cooper that he could not rule on the case unless Cooper had actually filed a petition that had been denied. Subsequently, Cooper paid his filing fee at the Election Commission and submitted a petition that had two signatures, 23 less than the 25 required. It will be up to the Election Commission to rule on its admissibility.

Cooper has been campaigning, one way or another, for months. He had engaged professional consultants and had begun putting up campaign signs. To the question of why, in all this time, he hadn’t bothered to acquire at least 25 signatures on a qualifying petition, he answers to the effect that the state had advised him he could not legally do so before having his rights restored. And, for whatever reason, his court challenge on that point waited until very late in the game, indeed.

Though Cooper was talking of strategies ranging from a crash campaign to present signatures to the Election Commission to the launching of appeals to the state attorney general’s office or to the U.S. Justice Department, he acknowledges that his chances of getting anywhere, at least for this election season, seem remote. 

Meanwhile, state Representative G.A. Hardaway is working on a long-range solution to problems of this sort. Hardaway, who made it clear he was not endorsing Cooper but had made himself available as a potential witness for Cooper in Circuit Court, said he would file legislation in the 2016 General Assembly that would automatically restore a convicted defendant’s citizenship rights upon completion of his sentence, putting the burden of subsequent challenge on the state. Even without Cooper, the Super District 9, Position 2 race will not lack from drama. IBEW union leader Paul Shaffer will have significant support from Democrats, while the well-funded Philip Spinosa can count on solid backing from Republicans. Two former School Board members, Stephanie Gatewood and Kenneth Whalum both have appealed to existing, somewhat diverse constituencies. And the two remaining candidates, Tim Cook, who has some name recognition from previous races, and Lynn Moss, who is running on the same de-annexationist platform as Tomasik in District 2, can hope that lightning will strike in this winner-take-all race, which as an at-large position, has no runoff.

Other city races will be briefly previewed next week.

Two memorial events highlighted the weekend. On Saturday, former President Bill Clinton delivered a eulogy for Circuit Court Judge D’Army Bailey before a large crowd at Mississippi Boulevard Baptist Church. In his remarks, Clinton paid tribute to Bailey’s chief creation, the National Civil Rights Museum, as an institution whose power would never die.

Clinton concluded with these words: “This man was moving all his life. … He moved. To the very end he moved. And God rest his soul.”

A smaller ceremony was held Saturday at the chapel of Elmwood Cemetery for Pierre Kimsey, producer of several well-watched public affairs programs at WKNO-TV, including Behind the Headlines. One of the features of that event was the showing of several Emmy-winning feature shorts produced and directed by Kimsey.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

On the Cusp

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Let the record show that Harold Collins, the city council member whose mayoral candidacy is one of the key variables of the 2015 election season, was able to sport the first prominent campaign signs around town.

And Collins’ reported second-quarter financial receipts of $48,812, giving him a total on hand of $61,405, support the idea that his candidacy is feasible, depending on developments in the roughly two-and-a-half months remaining in the city election period. (That’s when, as conventional wisdom has it, people actually start paying attention.)

As will be seen, Collins’ financial assets don’t begin to compare to those of the two presumed mayoral frontrunners (incumbent Mayor A C Wharton and Collins’ council colleague Jim Strickland) or to a couple of unusually well-endowed council candidates, for that matter. His candidacy, of necessity, will focus more on grass-roots activity, especially on his home ground of Whitehaven, one of the areas with a voter population large enough to be one candidate’s base (or the source of another’s swing vote).

From that standpoint, the early campaign signs are a good omen.

And let it be said that Kenneth Whalum, Jr., the New Olivet pastor and former school board member whose will-he or won’t-he attitude toward a mayoral race has made him the great unknown quantity of 2015, had scheduled to announce his plans for 2015 on Tuesday night at Church Park, well after this column must deadline for the week. We’ll catch with up the news online.

In April, Whalum drew petitions for mayor, for city council District 5 seat, and for the council’s Super District 9, Position 2 seat. The fact that he finished a close second in the 2014 Democratic primary for Shelby County mayor, even while being out of the country during the final weeks, has given his announcement a certain suspense value.

Memphis Police Association’s Mike Williams, who filed last week, has, at the very least, a niche following among aggrieved city employees, and especially among fire and police employees. He has a tight but active support group, but his reported second-quarter receipts of $6,204 make his race an uphill battle.   

County Commission chairman Justin Ford has also filed, as has James Harvey, his predecessor, but it remains to be seen how serious their candidacies are.

There is no doubting that Wharton and Strickland are still the big dogs in the race, certainly financially. Strickland raised $140,521 in the second quarter, while Wharton raised $129,700. Each appears to have $400,000 on hand, and their campaign treasuries are still growing. One possible caveat regarding those figures: The mayor has committed more money to date than has Strickland.

The possible relevance of that fact became obvious on Saturday, as Strickland and an aide braved 100-degree weather to go door-knocking on Walnut Grove, looking in particular for places to locate yard signs on that highly visible thoroughfare. Strickland got reasonably good feedback from the homeowners, but he won’t have the signs ready for delivery until August 1st.

Wharton continued last week with a series of modest-sized fund-raisers, located in upscale areas where he faces competition from Strickland. One of these was at Waterford Plaza, where he spoke to a group of women supporters and delivered one of those point-by-point surveys of city projects at which the mayor is both glib and convincing. He also addressed his concern that opponents portray him as “the Grinch” for having to impose austerity measures in response to intractable budget problems.

Thursday is filing deadline for city positions, with the withdrawal deadline a week later. Then we’ll know for sure what we’re dealing with.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

County Commission Power Surge

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Monday’s public meeting of the Shelby County Commission saw the commission, as a whole, still trying to forge a new, more independent role for itself but experiencing a bit of erosion in its resolve.

The meeting began with Chairman Justin Ford continuing in his new mode of permitting audience statements on the front end of proceedings rather than, as was long customary, at the conclusion of business. Commissioners got an earful of complaints about its budgetary provision of $1.3 million to be divided equally between the 13 members of the commission for purposes of making grants within their districts.

“Charity” grants, the critical audience members were calling them, in a bit of a misnomer, inasmuch as the money — amounting to $100,000 per district — had been defined during the course of several recent commission debates as applicable to a district’s infrastructure needs as well as to this or that community organization with a civic or charitable purpose.   

Indeed, Commissioner Terry Roland, of Millington, who had been among a contingent of Republican commissioners who had lobbied hard but without success for a one-cent reduction in the county’s property-tax rate, was able to use that setback to respond to one of the critics, telling her that his share of the grant money would go, at least partly, to “fix your roads.”

Since there hadn’t been enough votes during the budget process to allocate at least some of county Mayor Mark Luttrell‘s $6 million budget surplus to a property-tax cut, the commission could at least use the back-door route of district grants to take care of district needs, Roland said. It was an agile argument and one not without irony, inasmuch as part of Luttrell’s argument against the proposed one-cent tax reduction had been that funding needed to be reserved for infrastructure repairs.

Even so, the audience complaints — apparently the tip of an iceberg that had included numerous phone calls, emails, texts, and personal intercessions from citizens — induced a change of mind in two previous supporters of the grants: budget chair Heidi Shafer and David Reaves, both Republicans. They joined fellow GOP member Mark Billingsley of Germantown — formerly the lone holdout against the grants, as he reminded the audience — in casting a nay vote.

The process was too “subjective,” Billingsley argued. Reaves and Shafer acknowledged that, and while they still thought the district-grant formula was a good idea, they were bowing to the will of their constituents.

Democrat Reginald Milton, author of the grant idea, held firm, insisting that government had “a role and responsibility to serve all its citizens.” Fellow Democrat Melvin Burgess told the two defecting Republicans, “We don’t represent the same districts. I represent District 7. Mine is a poor district.”

The ultimate vote, 10-3 in favor of the grants, indicated that there was still a fair degree of solidarity among the commissioners regarding the issue of self-assertion.

There had been an expected party-line division on the issue of third and final approval of the $4.37 county tax rate, same as the current one, with five Republicans — Shafer, Roland, Billingsley, Reaves, and George Chism — voting no in an 8-5 outcome, but most other issues saw the same degree of unity as was demonstrated on committee day last Wednesday, when the commission took on the Luttrell administration on two issues — an administration switch from Nationwide Insurance to Prudential as administrator of a county deferred-compensation plan for employees and an insistence that the commission had a right to its own attorney.

On Wednesday, commissioners went back and forth with spokespersons for the administration on the attorney matter. After a prolonged executive session, closed to the media, it was agreed that, while the county charter forbade the commission’s having a full-time attorney of its own, it permitted the commission to engage separate counsel for specific ad-hoc purposes, as, for example, during the late school-merger controversy, when the commission hired an outside law firm to litigate for its position.

Otherwise, the charter empowered the county attorney’s staff, headed by Ross Dyer, to represent county government in general, the commission, as well as the administration.

As a final add-on item to Monday’s agenda, Democratic Commissioner Van Turner introduced what was, in effect, a reprise of last Wednesday’s two controversies by proposing that the commission engage an attorney to look into the Nationwide-Prudential matter. The fat was back in the fire.

“It’s hard to serve two masters. It says that in the Bible” was how Roland posed the issue.

As might have been expected, the Turner proposal generated yet another extended back-and-forth, with Dyer and assistant county attorney Kim Koratsky insisting that they needed time to research the matter, which included the side issue of who would pay for an additional attorney. On that latter point, a consensus seemed to develop that the commission’s contingency fund would be the appropriate source.

Any possible solution to the controversy may have been sidetracked when Turner’s resolution, already a two-in-one, became a de-facto three-in-one, with his suggestion that former Commissioner Julian Bolton could serve as the ad-hoc attorney on the Nationwide-Prudential matter.

That brought on an explosion from Reaves, who pronounced himself “sick and tired” of the whole controversy. “I’ll support the school lawsuit, not this,” he said, referencing a possible action in support of Shelby County Schools’ ongoing effort to challenge alleged underfunding by the state.

And Reaves was especially scornful that Turner’s resolution included the offer of a job to Bolton.

“I can help the commission resolve this impasse. I’m not looking for a job. I just want to help,” responded Bolton.

“Will you serve for free?” shouted Reaves. “You’re asking for money.”

Eventually, that flare-up ended, with other commissioners endorsing Bolton’s ability and integrity. Bolton and Reaves shared a relatively polite tête-à-tête after the meeting.

Meanwhile, though, Turner’s resolution was sidetracked, referred back to the general government committee, which Turner chairs and which had been the starting point of last week’s twin controversy. Dyer and company had gained the leave they sought to research the relevant issues, and the whole thing had bogged down into a truce of sorts.

• Next Thursday, July 16th, is filing deadline for the 2015 Memphis city election — which means that some long-unanswered questions will finally be resolved.

How complete is the field for city mayor? That’s one general question that needs answering. And, in particular, will Kenneth Whalum Jr. run for mayor? And, if not, will he seek one of the other offices — Council District 5 and Council Super District 9, Position 2 — for which he drew petitions last April?

One question involving former school board member and New Olivet pastor Whalum was long ago resolved, with the fraying away of any semblance of an arrangement with Memphis Police Association head Mike Williams, whereby only one of them would be a mayoral candidate. Both Williams, directly, and Whalum, indirectly, have since debunked that idea.

Meanwhile, spiffy new electronic roadside signs have begun to appear advertising the candidacy for the Super District 9, Position 2, seat of Joe Cooper — remember him? — who has also said he will offer free bus transportation to the polls for anyone needing it.

Cooper’s signs pledge his vote to restore the lost benefits of police and fire employees, and he credits Williams with being his authority on the matter.

Another Cooper idea for dealing with fiscal scarcities in city government is to sell naming rights to City Hall, and he cites as precedents the corporate titles adorning football stadiums in Nashville and elsewhere. Er, any potential bidders out there?

By next week, we should also have a fairly complete reckoning of what various candidates’ financial disclosures for the second quarter were. Stay tuned.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Chism Backs Strickland for Mayor

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Adherents of City Councilman Jim Strickland‘s campaign for mayor are certainly pleased with their guy’s ability to go fund-raising dollar-for-dollar against incumbent Mayor A C Wharton (both candidates having reported $300,000-plus in their first-quarter disclosures). And they’re counting on a good showing for Strickland in both the Poplar Corridor and Cordova, where his message of public safety and budgetary austerity resonate.

But those predominantly white areas of Memphis (to call them by their right name) are probably not enough, all by themselves, to get Strickland over, especially since Wharton has his own residual strength in the corridor and with the city’s business community, where the mayor can hope to at least break even.

There is also the mayor’s advantage in being able to command free media on a plethora of governmental and ceremonial occasions.

Yes, it’s probably true that A C’s support in predominantly African-American precincts ain’t what it used to be, and it never was what you would call dominating, not this year with all the well-publicized cuts in city services. And not with Mike Williams working the African-American community, along with Whitehaven Councilman Harold Collins and Justin Ford, and with the Rev. Kenneth Whalum ready to grab off a huge chunk of that vote, should he make what is at this point an expected entry into the mayoral field.

Still, Strickland needs to grab a share of the black vote to have a chance to get elected. Where does he get it? Well, he’s attending African-American churches on Sunday, one of the well-worn pathways in local politics. So that will help. But probably not as much as the endorsement he got last Saturday at the annual Sidney Chism Community Picnic on Horn Lake Road from the impresario of that event. Longtime political broker Chism early on announced his support of Strickland from the stage of the sprawling picnic grounds.

Time may have tarnished Chism’s reputation a bit, as it did his longtime ally, former Mayor Willie Herenton (an attendee at the picnic), but the former Teamster leader, Democratic Party chairman, state senator, and county commissioner still has enough influence to have basically put Randa Spears over as Shelby County Democratic chair earlier this year. And he may have enough to give Strickland that extra boost he needs to be fully competitive. We’ll see.

Chism, as it happens, is mired in a couple of controversies at the moment. His employment as a “media specialist” by Sheriff Bill Oldham is regarded with suspicion as a political quid pro quo and pension-inflater by several Republican members of the Shelby County Commission, who at budget-crunch time are making an issue of it, along with an Oldham-provided job for former Shelby County Preparedness director Bob Nations.

And Chism may have reignited another long-smoldering situation when he used the bully pulpit of his picnic to attack an intramural Democratic Party foe, Del Gill, who was runner-up to Spears in the party chairmanship contest. Chism did so at first indirectly, on the front end of the event, while he was acknowledging from the stage the presence in the crowd of party chair Spears.

“She’s been catching a whole lot of flak from one crazy person, but I hope y’all put him out of this city, and he’ll be all right.” Chism chose to be more explicit when he returned to the stage after a series of candidates in the city election had made their public remarks.

“I said something earlier,” Chism said. “I said there was somebody who needed running out of town, and that person, I didn’t call his name, but that person is Del Gill. … He ain’t worth two cents. … He’s been lyin’ on me for 10 years He won’t show up and do it to my face, but he lies all the time.”

In a widely circulated email response, Gill returned fire, reminding his readers that he had taken the lead in having Chism censured by the local Democratic Party executive committee in 2014 for allegedly attempting to subvert the sheriff’s campaign of Democratic nominee Bennie Cobb in favor of Republican Oldham.

Chism used his attack on Gill as a platform from which to launch his recipe for Democratic success at the polls: “We’re not going to win any elections in Shelby County until we get into the mindset that we’ve got to get in the middle. If we get in the middle, we can elect Democrats, qualified Democrats.

“I didn’t say you’ve got to be a super-intelligent magna cum laude educated person. I’m saying you ought to be smart enough to know that the people in this country are in the middle.” He urged his listeners to “vote for the right person, and he ain’t got to look like me; just act like me.”

Actually, the two Chism battlefronts — his employment battle with GOP county commissioners and the Democratic Party fireworks — are connected. Such commission critics of Chism as Heidi Shafer and David Reaves, both Republicans, have made pointed remarks in private about what they claim was Chism’s disservice to fellow Commissioner Reginald Milton, a Democrat, in intervening against Milton’s own bid for party chairmanship. And Milton, perhaps unsurprisingly, has expressed his own skepticism about the sheriff’s budget requests.

Shafer and Reaves, along with GOP Commissioner Terry Roland, are also suspicious that Oldham’s wish to have Chism (and other Chism associates) aboard is related to a potential 2018 campaign by Oldham for county mayor, an office for which Roland, for one, has essentially already announced.

Oldham has been mum on the subject of his future political intentions, if any, but it is a fact that the progression from sheriff to county mayor has been made already by several predecessors — Roy “Skip” Nixon, Bill Morris, and current County Mayor Mark Luttrell.

Random notes: The newly elected president of the Shelby County Young Democrats is Alvin Crook, who made something of a stir last year when, in the course of a public debate, he formally endorsed Van Turner, his Democratic primary opponent for a county commission seat.

Crook, who is employed as a courtroom bailiff, says his group will be making endorsements in the city election this year.

Other new Young Democrat officers: Regina Beale, first vice president; Jim Kyle Jr., 2nd vice president; Matt Pitts, treasurer; Rebekah Hart, secretary; and Justin Askew, parliamentarian.

• Two Shelby Countians, state Senator Mark Norris and attorney Al Harvey, were among three Tennesseans who were invited guests of British royalty at Monday’s ceremony in Runnymede, England, commemorating the 800th anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta there.

Norris was invited in his capacity as immediate past chairman of the Council of State Governments; Harvey, along with General Sessions Judge Lee Bussart Bowles of Marshall County, represented the American Bar Association.

A sure sign that the city election season is heating up: On Thursday, June 18th, from 5 to 7 p.m., Patrice Robinson, a candidate for city council, District 3, and Mary Wilder, candidate for the council’s District 5, will be holding simultaneous fund-raisers in different parts of town.

Overlapping events of this sort, still uncommon, will at a certain point in the election cycle, become routine.

• In its latest issue, the Tennessee Journal of Nashville takes note of the Tennessee Republican Party’s concerted “Red to the Roots” campaign directed at capturing as many of the state’s county assessor positions as possible next year.

The newsletter also notes that Shelby County Assessor Cheyenne Johnson, a Democrat, will be exempt from the purge attempt, having already won reelection to a four-year term in 2014. Johnson’s being on a different cycle from other state assessors is a consequence of the county commission’s consolidating all county offices into a common election cycle via 2008 revisions to the county charter.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Commission Plays 52-Pickup

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Early on in Monday’s regular business session of the Shelby County Commission, Commissioner  Melvin Burgess, a Democrat, moved to defer for two weeks a vote on appointing someone to fill a Judicial Commission vacancy, on the grounds that a discussion on the matter would crowd out some necessary and potentially lengthy deliberations on the county budget and tax rate for fiscal 2015-16.

That was either a face-value statement, as Burgess insisted, or a political maneuver, as the Republican members of the commission — or most of them — suspected, and very shortly the provisional consensus on a budget/tax rate combination that had apparently been reached in a lengthy commission session on May 20th began to come asunder.

Several of the GOP members — conspicuously excluding Steve Basar, who supported Burgess’ motion — objected that most of the 15 applicants for Judicial Commissioner were sitting in the commission audience and had cleared their personal slates in order to be present for the scheduled vote.

; Privately, they began to sense that some deal had been made that involved trade-offs of various kinds, and Basar’s support of the Burgess motion convinced some of them, at least, of something that Commissioner David Reaves, a GOP member from Bartlett, was willing to voice later on:

“It all goes back to the chairmanship vote,” Reaves said, referring to a reorganizational vote of the newly elected commission last fall. Basar, who had been vice chair of the previous commission, had expected to be elected chairman but was stunned to find that most of his fellow Republicans were committed to other candidates. In the end, a majority of Republicans united behind Democrat Justin Ford, who had often voted with the GOP contingent during his first term.

Whatever the reason for that reversal — and they were probably as much personal as political — it made for a commission divided along clearly partisan lines, with the body’s Democrats, plus Basar, on one side, and the Republicans, plus Ford, on the other.

For weeks last fall, the two factions waged procedural warfare, with the Democratic/Basar coalition seeking either to unseat Ford as chairman or to drastically limit his authority. In the end, Ford survived, though with modestly curtailed prerogatives, and the showdown eased up. It, indeed, had been largely forgotten, until Monday, when Burgess made his motion. 

Ford, as chairman, attempted to disallow any deferral, but in the resultant vote, Burgess’ fellow Democrats, plus Basar, prevailed.

“Basar tipped his hand,” Reaves said. “He’s looking toward September, for the next chairman’s vote and trying to gain some leverage. Why else would he vote that way? It allowed us to figure out quickly that he had flopped.”

Basar denied any such motive, but he agreed that the Republicans began to shift, more or less in unison, to a common strategy, “once they saw me voting again with the Democrats.”

One consequence was a defeat for a long-pending ordinance proposed by Basar to apply pedestrian safety laws to unincorporated areas of Shelby County. Basar needed nine votes, but Republicans Reaves and Terry Roland, who had agreed to help him meet his quota, withdrew their support.

Subsequently, the old arithmetic of Democrats-plus-Basar versus Republicans-plus-Ford reasserted itself on vote after vote, preventing agreement on matters that, as of the marathon commission meeting of May 20th, had seemed either settled or within easy reach. 

The commissioners had then seemed to agree on a formula dividing some $1.8 million equally between each of the 13 commissioners for them to distribute to non-profit organizations in their districts. That matter, now involving a lesser sum of $1.3 million and altered to include other services and recipients beyond non-profits, was referred back to committee on Monday.

More importantly, a sense of distrust had arisen among the commission Republicans regarding what they thought had been a common commitment to use part of a $6 million surplus claimed by the administration of Mayor Mark Luttrell to lower the county tax rate one cent, from $4.37 to $4.36. 

The GOP members now began to suspect behind-the-scenes collusion between the administration, which had never been sold on the tax decrease, preferring to use any left-over differential on infrastructure, and Democratic members, who, now supported by Basar, were proposing to raise several sums apparently agreed upon on May 20th — notably for the Sheriff’s Department and Juvenile Court, each of which were seeking significant increases.

Consequently, Roland proposed a 4-cent reduction in the tax rate (“as a way of getting one cent,” he would later acknowledge).That went down, by the same quasi-party line vote as before, as did a follow-up vote for the 1-cent reduction.

In the end, a “flat” or stable tax rate at the current level of $4.37 received the same 7-6 vote distribution for the first of three required votes, and all budget items were deferred or referred back to committee.

In a true sense, nothing got resolved on Monday, though several commission meetings, both scheduled and ad hoc, are sure to revisit the budget/tax rate matters between now and the July 1st fiscal-year deadline. And several members, seeing the prospect of consensus slipping further way, are foreseeing that an official arbitration process will need to be invoked.

“Irresponsible,” was Chairman Ford’s verdict on Monday’s meeting.

• On the mayoral-race front, most observers are now betting that the Rev. Kenneth Whalum Jr., the New Olivet Baptist Church pastor and former school board member, will run for mayor, despite his insistence that he will defer to Memphis Police Association President Mike Williams, a declared candidate.

“He’s making noise like he is,” said Williams last week at Broadway Pizza, after one in a series of what will be several organizational meetings, noting that “I have never asked Whalum about not running. …  I’m just moving at my pace. Even if he runs, we’re still going to be friends. … My destiny has nothing to do with his destiny.”


•Oh, and make room for Robert “Prince Mongo” Hodges on your tout sheet. The Zambodian prince, a frequent mayoral candidate in the past, says he’ll pull a petition for mayor next week.


• And, almost unnoticed, Joe Cooper (yes, that Joe Cooper) has put together a potentially effective campaign team in his latest quest for a political comeback as a candidate for the City Council Super District 9, Position 2 seat.

Cooper says he expects to spend $100,000 on his race and has engaged the professional consulting team of Matt Kuhn and Mike Lipe to help him do it. Gene Buehler and Karla Willingham Templeton are Cooper’s campaign co-chairs.

Cooper, who serves wrestling legend Jerry Lawler as an agent and manager, says that Thursday of this week will be officially recognized as “Jerry Lawler Day” in both Memphis and Jackson, Tennessee, with Mayor A C Wharton said to be ready to issue a proclamation in his City Hall office on Thursday and Jackson Mayor Jerry Gist honoring Lawler similarly on Thursday night.


• So, guess who else is being touted for Mayor. Yep, Harold Ford Jr.

But not of Memphis, Ford’s erstwhile home base. No, the transplanted former 9th District congressman and 2006 U.S. Senate candidate, is apparently being talked up for mayor of New York, his current abode — the most recent hints of such a prospect coming from Bloomberg Business, which reported last week on a Lincoln Center “American Songbook” gala that, according to the periodical, honored Ford for his fund-raising efforts on behalf of the center.

Said the article: “‘Mayor’ was on the lips of some guests, though not Ford’s. Asked about his interest in leading the city, Ford, who once considered a run for a U.S. Senate seat from New York and has endorsed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race, said ‘I’m a new father for the second time, that’s what I’m focused on.'” 

The next mayoral race in New York will occur in 2017. Current Mayor Bill de Blasio, an avowed liberal, is in some quarters considered vulnerable to a challenge from the center or right.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

As the Memphis election process moves ahead slowly, dramatic events may be brewing on the County Commission.

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

It is a strange and frustrating time for followers of local politics.

Strange, in that the rosters seem fairly complete for all the races to be run this year in the Memphis city election and seemed so even before it became possible for candidates to draw petitions from the Shelby County Election Commission on April 17.

And frustrating because, while there are surely surprises yet to come between now and July 17, the filing deadline for city races (the question of former School Board member’s Kenneth Whalum’s mayoral plans, for instance, or the status of his either-me-or-you agreement with declared mayoral candidate Mike Williams), the pace of change is agonizingly slow, almost glacial.

Oh, there are hot rumors to melt some of that ice (reports that Randy Wade, former Sheriff’s candidate and ex-aide to Congressman Steve Cohen, resume active politics as a candidate for City Council, for example), but for the most part, the sides seem to have been drawn, and we’ll just have to wait out the results, which won’t be final until all the votes are counted on October 8.

That’s anachronistically called “election day,” although active walk-in votes, probably amounting to at least half the total number, will be occurring in the early voting period, stretching from September 18 to September 29).

And, in the case of several of the Council’s seriously contested district races, there’s a whole new election to be had, involving runoffs likely to be completed on November 3.

•This-Just-In Department: An intriguing new development is the likelihood that Scott McCormick, currently executive director of Memphis Botanic Garden, a member of the Shelby County Schools Board, and a former Council member, will seek the Super District 9, Position 2 seat vacated by former member Shea Flinn, who resigned two weeks ago to become a Chamber of Commerce executive.

McCormick confided on Monday, after he and other proposed members of the Shelby County Health Care Corporation’s board of directors were approved by the County Commission, that he intended to draw a petition this week to run for the vacant Position 2 seat. If elected, McCormick would be required to resign from the School Board as of Next January 1, creating a vacancy there.

•And, hark! If the city election as a whole suffers just now from a case of the slows, there is one significant winner-take-all City Council “election” that will be resolved next week. This is the choice to be made on Tuesday, May 19, by the 12 remaining Council members of an interim Council member to replace Flinn.

Deadline for aspirants to that interim position to submit applications to the Council office is noon of Thursday, May 14, this week. And, though several of the candidates who intend also to be on the October 8 regular ballot will be seeking the interim position as well, it is beginning to seem likely that one of several candidates who profess themselves interested in the interim positon only have a better shot at being chosen.<
Among the more prominent of the interim-only candidates to have declared their interest so far are lawyer Alan Crone, a well-connected former chairman of the Shelby County Republican Party, and Fran Triplett, who won recognition over the past year as a citizen advocate for the retention of city employees’ benefits guarantees. Also said to be contemplating a try for the seat is businessman Lester Litt, who previously sought a Council seat in the election of 2007.

•Although the agenda for Monday’s regular meeting of the Shelby County Commission seemed almost harmlessly bland, several matters of fairly serious import developed during discussion.

One such concerned, in the language of Monday’s agenda package, an “Amendment to the existing Planned Development to allow for one payday loan establishment in Parcel 1.” What that turned out to involve was a proposal for continuing to allow “Cash Now,” an existing payday loan company operated by a company called Financial One in Cordova at the intersection of Macon and Houston Levee Rds.

The “Cash Now” site has become the focus of controversy, in that several residents of the area, as well as the Land Use Control Board, contend that its very existence is in violation of previously adopted code applying to Gray’s Creek Area Plan. Specifically, the code would seem to prohibit such an enterprise “within 1,320 feet of a residential property.

What critics of the “Cash Now” establishment maintain is that Financial One’s original application, approved by the Office of Planning and Development and the Commission in 2013, misrepresented the nature of the establishment’s business as one related to financial planning or to investments rather than to payday loans.

Some Commission members allege that the issue goes deeper. Heidi Shafer, the Commission’s budget chair, said the process that resulted in the current location of “Cash Now” (which has announced plans to expand its premises) may not be the result of a mere misrepresentation or a bureaucratic oversight but instead “has an unpleasant odor of commissions past.”

She suggested that the Commission was in danger of being “gamed” and invoked the phrase “Tennessee Waltz,” seemingly implying that some sort of backroom arrangement had been responsible for the original approval of “Cash Now” at the location.

The property lies within the Commission district of George Chism, who also objected to the process that led to “Cash Now” being where it is, and is the proverbial stone’s throw from Shafer’s district.

In the end, the Commission voted to defer a vote on the matter until its next regular business meeting of June 1.
There has also been a bit of a blowback from last week’s budget session, in which Commission members seemed so supportive of Shelby County Schools’ request for a $14.9 budget increase that some observers were calling the meeting a love-fest.

Jackson Baker

Bev Shelley makes her appeal

Budget chair Shafer is taking the lead in walking back that enthusiasm. She has announced that she will be scheduling an additional “education-only” budget session “as soon as we can before we vote on the 20th” to discuss the ramifications for local school funding of the state’s Basic Education Plan, as well as future maintenance-of-effort and OPEB (Other Post-Employment Benefits) obligations.

•After Monday’s meeting, members of the Commission had a dinner meeting with staffers of the non-profit organization JIFF (Juvenile Intervention and Faith-Based Follow-Up), which attempts to rehabilitate hard-core offenders in the Juvenile Court System, those with seemingly intractable records involving five or more offenses.

The Commission members were clearly affected by evidence of JIFF’s successes presented by executive director Richard Graham and the organization’s board chair, Lauren Young, and most of all by hearty recommendations of the organization by Juvenile Court Judge Dan Michael and by JIFF board member Bev Shelley, whose husband John in 2013was robbed and then shot and killed by youthful gang members while he was appraising a house in the Parkway Village area for potential renovation.

Bev Shelley has since become a crusader for rehabilitation efforts like those provided by JIFF and made a moving appeal on behalf of “intervening these children’s lives” and giving them “the help that they need” to move away from criminality and into the social mainstream.

The upshot Monday was an apparent consensus among the attending Commissioners to include JIFF’s request for a $150,000 annual funding contract to supplement its limited resources within the budget for Judge Michael’s office.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Memphis Mayor’s Race is On

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Janis Fullilove may be feeling lonely, but she’s not going to complain. As of the end of Monday, the Super District 8, Position 2 councilwoman was the only incumbent running for reelection in this year’s city election who did not have a declared opponent. All other city races are contested at this point (which is to say that multiple petitions have been drawn for each of them, actual filing having occurred so far in only a minority of cases). 

The other council seats would seem to be assured of contests, with District 5 and Super District 9, Position 2 — the seats vacated, respectively, by mayoral candidate Jim Strickland and Shea Flinn — attracting the most action. There are eight entries so far for District 5, most of them with enough backing to appear serious, and something of the same situation exists for the Super District 9 vacancy, where six petitions have been drawn up to this point.

By contrast, Position 3 in Super District 8, which, as was recently announced, will be vacated by council Chairman Myron Lowery, has so far seen only three petitions drawn. One of those was by the incumbent’s son Mickell Lowery, and the legacy name may be enough to dissuade most comers. District 4 incumbent Wanda Halbert‘s announcement of non-candidacy (she’s a candidate instead for City Court clerk) is too recent to have occasioned a rush of would-be candidates. Four petitions have so far been drawn for that seat.

Another mayoral candidate, Harold Collins, will be vacating his District 3 seat, and that one has generated a fair amount of action, with five petitions drawn so far.

The race for mayor has seen 13 petitions drawn; and it is a safe bet that more are coming. Meanwhile, the first mayoral debate — or forum, as emcee Kyle Veazey of the sponsoring Commercial Appeal, preferred to call it — of the 2015 city election season took place before a good crowd at the old Tennessee Brewery Monday night, and, while there were no winners as such among the five hopefuls invited, it was possible to make out some distinctions. 

To start with, Justin Ford, the youthful county commission chairman, demonstrated likeability but nothing much to anchor it except a recap of his résumé and prerogatives (“I make appointments.”), a recommended slogan (“Listen, Assist, and Invest.”), and enough platitudes and expressions of good will to start a smarm farm.

This is not to doubt Ford’s capability, merely to suggest that he was short on specifics, no doubt on purpose, and did nothing to counter a widespread impression that he is in the race not so much with expectations of winning it as to extend his name recognition for some future electoral purpose.

By contrast, Memphis Police Association President Mike Williams, generally considered a long shot, was all agenda. Pledged to represent the interests of city employees and ordinary citizens, Williams talked up small business and deplored the strategy of enticing big industries here by means of PILOT (payment-in-lieu-of- taxes) arrangements. Indeed, he went so far as to suggest that Electrolux, a relatively recent acquisition on the city landscape, is already looking to go “out the door” because “they didn’t get the profits they thought.”

Williams suggested that Memphis’ problem was not limited revenue but over-spending. He said the city should stick to basics and hire more fire and police. He also weighed in on behalf of those citizens who want to save the Mid-South Coliseum. More than the other candidates, he had audible boosting from a claque of supporters on hand.

Councilman Collins, whose task is to expand on his sprawling Whitehaven base and to convince voters that he and no one else is the legitimate alternative to incumbent Mayor A C Wharton, sounded notes akin to those of Williams, advocating a focus on education to create the basis for “professional” jobs at a “living wage” and against the “$9- or $10-an-hour jobs” available at “Bass Pro and Mitsubishi.”

Collins also joined with Williams in taking a dim view of bike lanes, an issue that separated the five hopefuls into two camps. Collins and Williams made the point that Memphis has an automobile culture and that bike lanes in what Collins called “major neighborhoods” (meaning Frayser, Raleigh, and Whitehaven) were impediments to necessary transportation.

Ford disagreed, pointing out that the bike lanes were paid for by federal “pass-through” money, a point made also by Councilman Strickland, who took Mayor Wharton to task for having “zero bike lanes in the budget” until prodded by the council, after which the mayor allegedly “relented.” Wharton, who had touted the bike lanes early in his remarks as part of his vision of planning for the “city on the move” and the citizens of the future rather than “through the eyes of today,” seemed irate at Strickland’s allegation and insisted that his “plans underway” for the bike lanes were retarded by one city engineer but had been re-established, at the mayor’s insistence, by a “new engineer.”

That bit of sniping seemed more in line with the “debate” that Veazey suggested the CA would be sponsoring down the line than with the informational forum he had in mind for Monday evening. But in fact, everybody but Ford, who was careful to praise his fellow participants, did a little mud-balling. 

The most obvious confrontation was between Strickland, the former two-time budget chairman and self-proclaimed “fiscal conservative” who has been aiming at the mayoralty for years now, and the increasingly beleaguered Wharton, still too spry to be a sitting duck but, clearly, Target Number One for the others in this year’s mayoral race.

Although circumstances could turn out to belie the premise, most observers (and virtually the entire media) see the rest of the mayoral field as being made up of supporting players, while the real drama is the one-on-one between Strickland and Wharton, both well-endowed financially, essentially by donations from the same business interests, and waging an intense battle for the hearts and minds of the Poplar Corridor.

Strickland’s tough-love pitch is to arrest what he sees as the city’s dangerously dwindling population base by practicing fiscal efficiency and focusing on “basic services” and eliminating frills (the city’s “Music Commission” was one he named) and a superfluity of “deputy directors and P.R. people,” while simultaneously attacking blight and crime.

Wharton counters this image of “gloom and doom” with a concept of “revitalizing the entire city in growth mode” and concentrating on “quality of life” issues. This week’s grand opening of the Bass Pro Shop monolith in the Pyramid did not go unspoken for as an exhibit of the mayor’s vision (although the project, brainchild of city housing and community development director Robert Lipscomb, was actually hatched during the mayoralty of Wharton’s predecessor Willie Herenton). 

What gives the notion of a Wharton-Strickland race some validity is the fact that the councilman’s presumed lower profile in African-American communities is balanced by potential inroads there, at Wharton’s expense, by “neighborhood” advocates like Collins and Williams.

There are other candidates, to be sure, including many who were not included in Monday night’s event (several were seated or standing in the audience, however, and Collins gallantly gave shout-outs to several of them), but the distribution of voices Monday night gave some preliminary sense of how this election will play out. If firebrand pastor/former school board member Kenneth Whalum ends up in the race instead of Williams (as per their agreement that one of them, and one only, will run for mayor), the kaleidoscope could shift and radically so.