School Vouchers in Shelby County

The failure of the Shelby County Commission to appoint a successor to Mark Lovell, forced in February to resign his seat as state Representative in House District 95 amid allegations of sexual indiscretions, means no one will represent the district, based in Collierville, Germantown, and Eads, as the Tennessee General Assembly winds down its work this month.

Jim McCarter

Candidate Missy Marshall, Tennessee Lt. Gov. Randy McNally (who came from Nashville to host a Marshall funhdraiser), and TNA co-host Connie McCarter. (Marshall’s fundraiser overlapped with the forum; she was able to make an opening statement and field one question.)

But all 10 of the candidates who qualified for a June 15th special election showed up to pitch their credentials for the 2017-18 legislative session at a Tuesday night forum at Collierville High School last week, sponsored by the Tennessee Nurses Association.

Three of them are sure to make it to the general election: trial lawyer Julie Byrd Ashworth, unopposed in the special Democratic primary of April 27th, as well as Robert Schutt and Jim Tomasik, both on the ballot as independents. Schutt, a recent Vanderbilt graduate, is a novice making his first race; Tomasik, a declared Libertarian, is a veteran of several runs for office and numerous activist causes, including the current de-annexation movement.

There are seven Republicans in the race: lawyer Joseph Aaron Crone; Gail W. Horner, also an attorney; sales representative Curtis D. Loynachan; Missy Marshall, a veteran of numerous appointed positions in state government, most of them in connection with health-related issues; Billy Patton, computer executive and Collierville alderman; Frank Uhlhorn, a small business owner and longtime Germantown alderman; and Kevin Vaughan, an engineer, real estate broker, and Collierville School Board member.

The bad news for those seven is that only one of them will survive as the winner of the special Republican primary, also held on April 27th; the good news is that, on the basis of the District’s established GOP voting habits, the winner of that primary will no doubt be favored in the general election.

That well-known Republican tilt figured indirectly in a kerfuffle that resulted in the County Commission’s recent defaulting on the opportunity to appoint an interim District 95 state Representative to serve out the current legislative session.

The commission had voted unanimously to oppose a school-vouchers bill by state Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown) that is moving toward a late-session resolution, but members’ initial intent to appoint an anti-voucher interim state Rep was shelved when Republican commissioners, with an assist from two GOP-leaning Democrats, balked at a campaign by east Shelby County Democrats to get one of their own appointed via the commission’s formal 7-6 Democratic majority.

If the Kelsey bill, authorizing a “pilot program” of 5,000 private-school vouchers for selected students at low-performing public schools in the Shelby County Schools district, doesn’t make it this year, it will almost certainly be back up next year. With the exception of voucher supporters Loynachan and Patton, the candidates at last week’s forum either waffled on the issue or opposed it outright.

The same pattern asserted itself on the issue of a bill enabling urban de-annexations, which a state Senate committee had decided, that very day, to put off for a year. This time the confirmed adherents of the bill were Loynachan and Tomasik, with Ashworth leaning to Yes.

Loynachan and Tomasik were the definite No votes against revisiting some variant of Governor Bill Haslam‘s Insure Tennessee proposal for TennCare (Medicaid) expansion under the still-standing Affordable Care Act. Vaughan was dubious, characterizing Obamacare as “so last week.” Patton, however, had a convincing reason to be on board: “My sister’s a registered nurse, sitting in the second row, and she informs me I need to be pro.”

A majority of the candidates also tended to favor some version of Haslam’s “Improve Act” proposal for a $10 billion rehab of the state’s infrastructure and roadways, financed by an increase in the gasoline tax while being offset to some degree by a series of tax reductions elsewhere. But Vaughan and Tomasik were concerned about the remaining tax burden, Ashworth saw “no compelling reason” for the gas tax, and lawyer Horner said she’d rather keep on paying her professional privilege tax, slated for relief, than “see the gas tax imposed on people who can’t afford it.”

As the current session of the Tennessee General Assembly heads toward its conclusion, either late this month or early in May (see cover story, “Nashville Gets Serious”), two questions of serious concern to the Memphis area are about to be revisited.

Up for reconsideration this week are the voucher bill, co-sponsored by state Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown) and state Representative Harry Brooks (R-Knoxville), and a measure enabling de-annexation, sponsored by state Senator Bo Watson (R-Hixson) and state Representative Mike Carter (R-Ooltewah).

The voucher measure, a variant of which has been brought up unsuccessfully by Kelsey for years, may have its best prospects for passage yet — its odds improved by the fact that it is styled as a “pilot program” restricted to the Shelby County Schools district alone.

Brian Kelsey

That fact removes some of the onus from legislators elsewhere in the state who might be deterred by the prospect of immediate blowback affecting their own districts. In much the same manner, the way was cleared in 2012 for the Norris-Todd bill, which eliminated a freeze on new special school districts in Tennessee and allowed new suburban districts in Shelby County, when Norris-Todd was successfully revised to apply only to Shelby County.

The difference, and it could prove to be major, is that support for Norris-Todd was relatively stout in the major suburbs of Memphis, represented by several key legislators, notably state Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris of Collierville, the bill’s chief author, while a majority of Shelby County legislators, Republican and Democratic and from Memphis and as well as its suburbs, are on record as opposing vouchers.

And the Kelsey bill prompts doubts as to its ultimate constitutionality, inasmuch as it fails to qualify as a “private” bill — i.e., one supported by a county’s chief legislative body. That would be the Shelby County Commission, which voted unanimously in February to oppose the voucher measure.

In any case, the voucher bill, which has been hanging fire on the Senate side for a month awaiting action by the House, was placed on the calendar of the House Government Operations Committee last Thursday. Action was deferred until Wednesday of this week.

The Watson-Carter bill on de-annexation is essentially the same measure that was introduced last year, gaining quick passage in the House and getting immediate traction in the Senate, until an all-out resistance on the part of Memphis city officials, the city’s allies in other Tennessee cities, and the Greater Memphis Area Chamber of Commerce managed to get it postponed in the Senate State and Local Government Committee.

That reprisal was based on the understanding that Memphis deserved the option of proposing its own formula for de-annexation — one presumably kindlier than the Watson-Carter version, which provided a fairly easy means for any area annexed by a city since 1998 to hold a referendum to gain its independence. A hastily appointed city/county task force came up with a formula for “right-sizing” the city and allowing a relatively graceful exit of such hotbeds of de-annexation sentiment as South Cordova and Southwind-Windyke.

But the right-sizing plan envisioned that implementation would be postponed until 2021, a fact unsettling to local de-annexation activists. And, instead of promptly giving the plan an up-or-down vote, the city council has opted for a more deliberated response, allowing for a series of public meetings in the potentially affected areas and envisioning possible referenda in those areas later on.

Both those facts moved Carter and Watson to schedule new action on their bill, which was first reset for last Thursday’s calendar of the Senate State and Local Government Committee and then postponed for action by the committee on Tuesday of this week.