Tag: Randa Spears

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Politics Politics Feature

RIP for the Shelby County Democratic Party

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

For what it’s worth — and that is a very open question — the Shelby County Democratic Party has ceased to exist, having been formally decertified last Friday by state Democratic Party chair Mary Mancini of Nashville. 

Mancini’s letter of decertification, dispatched to the latest person to chair the SCDP, Sheriff’s Department Lieutenant Michael Pope, cited as the basis for her action “Article III Section 2(f) and Article VII Section 1(a)(3) of the Tennessee Democratic Party Bylaws,” which, she said, made it “the responsibility of the Tennessee Democratic Party Executive Committee to establish ‘the procedures and rules for organizing and functioning of County Democratic Executive Committees and maintaining close relationships with such committees’ and to develop and monitor a minimum set of requirements that must be observed by a state sanctioned certified County Democratic Party.”

That description left unaddressed two important components of the matter: 1) whether and to what extent the state committee took part in her decision; and 2) specific reasons for her action.

Those are arguably related issues, in that one of the known factors in forcing Mancini’s hand, and likely the precipitating one, has been the Shelby County party’s months-long impasse over what to do about the case of former local party chair Bryan Carson, who resigned last year after an audit turned up evidence of unexplained shortages in the party treasury.

Ever since, through the brief tenure of one successor to Carson as chair, Randa Spears, who also resigned, pleading a need to give full attention to her administrative job at St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, and into the election of Pope as her successor, the local party organization has been riven into two factions. 

One faction was willing to accept a compromise proposal, letting Carson effect partial repayment of the unaccounted-for funds at the level of $6,000, through monthly installment payments of $100. The other, contending that a second audit showed Carson’s liability to be at $25,000 or higher, sought prosecution of some sort and prevailed in a vote of the committee at its June meeting.

Nothing came of that vote, however. Meanwhile Mancini, expressing displeasure that the imbroglio was getting in the way of the party’s ability to focus on electing the party’s candidates this year, prevailed upon Pope to execute an agreement with Carson on behalf of the $6,000 compromise.

That led to a vote at the SCDP committee’s July meeting at which a tie vote failed to ratify the agreement, and to a vote at the committee’s August meeting, two weeks ago, renouncing Carson’s bona fides as a Democrat.

Carson continues to be a member of the state Democratic executive committee, however, a fact that his critics, and Mancini’s as well, find questionable under the circumstances.

In any case, Mancini could with some justice cite as additional reasons for her decertification what she termed (in something of an understatement) the SCDP’s “many years of dysfunction,” typified by nonstop personal feuds, many of them involving self-appointed party gadfly Del Gill, and the fact that, in both Carson’s tenure and Spears’, the SCDP failed to meet deadlines for financial disclosures to the state Election Registry, thereby incurring fines rivaling in size the amounts alleged to have gone missing under Carson.

In the meantime, Alvin Crook, president of the Shelby County Young Democrats, and London Lamar, president of the state YD organization, held a press conference on Monday, at which the YD officers promised, in Lamar’s words, to continue to “represent the views of the Democratic Party,” as the only remaining “chartered Democratic organization in this county.”

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

The Shelby County Democratic Party Is in Crisis Mode Again

CREDIT: JB

JB

Challenges by Del Gill (back to camera) to SCDP chair Randa Spears were a recurrent fact of life during a stormy year for the local party.

Yes, Virginia, there are functional, thriving Democratic Party organizations in Shelby County. There are the Germantown Democrats, whose monthly meetings at Coletta’s on Highway 64 are well-attended events attracting a variety of speakers on political and social issues. There are the Democratic Women of Shelby County, who include a cadre of committed activists. There are the Young Democrats, who are attracting new blood into the party and who are constantly interfacing with local elected officials to disperse useful information about governmental processes.

Nor is this a complete list, notes Dave Cambron, president of the Germantown club. The aforementioned organizations and several others, he notes, continue to conduct useful meetings, assist with political campaigns, and serve as organizational nuclei for interested Democrats, in and out of election years.

So yes, Democratic Party organizations are live and well in Shelby County.

It’s just that the Democratic Party of Shelby County, the official organization which in theory is the party’s flagship, may not be one of them. Cambron, a former SCDP vice chair who served a brief term as acting chairman last year during a difficult moment for the local party, declined to comment on what is shaping up as another period of crisis.

As of earlier this month, the party lacks a chairperson, former chair Randa Spears having resigned for reasons that may have something to do with her desire to focus more on the duties of her job at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital but may also have to do with what various Democrats describe as a kind of chaos that has descended upon the Party’s affairs.

These Democrats say that Spears, who was elected chair of the party in March of 2015 in the wake of a financial scandal involving previous chair Bryan Carson, has had to contend with persistent tension at party meetings involving Del Gill, her runner-up in the chairmanship election who, at meeting after meeting, has employed an unrelenting variety of parliamentary maneuvers to challenge the chair’s control.

Gill, of course, does not see himself as the problem. Rather, he appears to regard himself as a long-term, committed party member who has so far been unfairly frustrated from realizing his own leadership ambitions. He sees himself as a Democratic purist who has mastered both Roberts’ Rules of Order and the party’s own regulations, while his foes see him as pedantic to a fault, disruptive by nature, and egregiously self-absorbed.

In any case, he has to be regarded as a leading candidate for the local party’s chairmanship, which will be up for grabs again in June at a meeting presided over by Sheriff’s Department Lt. Michael Pope, a former party vice chair now serving as acting chairman. Several members of the party’s executive committee say privately they intend to resign if Gill is elected.

The leadership vacuum is just one of the party’s problems, of course. Another is that, for the second year in a row, the local party has failed to meet deadlines for filing financial reports with the state Registry of Election Finance and faces the prospect of stiff financial penalties as a result.

Then chairman Carson, Spears’ predecessor, was forced to resign in early 2015 when it was found that the party had not only missed the state Registry’s deadlines but that, as was revealed in an audit conducted by party member Diane Cambron, Carson could not account for some $6,000 in party fund expenditures.

It was then that David Cambron, Diane Cambron’s husband, became acting chair. He served in that role until the election of Spears in March, 2015.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Get It Together

Four aspirants to succeed local Democratic Party Chairman Bryan Carson, who resigned under pressure recently (though his term was about to expire anyhow), made their cases Saturday in a forum at the IBEW Union Hall. They were

Reginald Milton, Jackie Jackson, Randa Spears, and Del Gill.

Party caucuses will be held on March 14th, a party convention to name a new executive committee and a new chairman on March 28th.

Meanwhile, the Shelby County Republicans caucused at Bartlett Municipal Center on Monday night of this week, selecting delegates for their own convention at the Bartlett location on March 29th. There are two declared candidates for chair to succeed the outgoing Justin Joy: Arnold Weiner and Mary Wagner.

All the names mentioned here, be they sinners or saints, are committed activists, with personal histories that indicate that they possess the energy to acquit themselves well in the positions they are seeking. “Zeal” might even be a better descriptor in some cases. There’s the rub. Particularly if partisanship per se commands the electoral environment, the nature of our political debates is often nothing less than poisonous.

Strong feelings have always been a feature of political life in Shelby County, but only since the mid-1990s, when first the Republicans and later the Democrats adopted partisan primaries as a means of selecting preferred candidates for local office, have local political contests become as divisive as they are today, at least at the level of countywide elections. Until the advent of local partisan primaries, it was the rule, not the exception, for various components of the body politic to form coalitions behind this or that candidate. Blacks, whites, Democrats, Republicans, atheists, Christians, and Jews, plus whatever other categories come to mind — the more different sectors of the community were accounted for in a political campaign, the greater the likelihood for that campaign to succeed.

These days, that situation is reversed. One of the questions asked of the Democratic chairmanship aspirants at Saturday’s forum was how each of them would deal with the flight of white former-Democrats into the Republican Party. One of the candidates rejected the question as irrelevant. He was in error, as would have been demonstrated by a look at Monday night’s GOP caucus crowd — almost entirely white, though there is presumably some variance in their political complexion. That configuration was an inverse mirror image to Saturday’s predominantly African-American Democrat crowd.

This is not a suggestion that either of the county’s parties avows or practices racism, as such. The increasing racial polarization of the local parties is largely a result of the primary process — which has magnified ethnic and social differences that have always existed and assigned them to opposite ends of the spectrum.

Contrast this troublesome phenomenon with the city elections — including the one to be held this fall — where the absence of party affiliation will, as it always has, encourage some serious coalition-building across party and ethnic lines.

In the long run, we’d like to see local partisan primaries done away with as detriments to the political process. In the short run, we would merely express a wish that whichever of the chairmanship candidates mentioned above actually ends up at the controls of our two major parties understand that we all are — or should be — a single community.