Tag: Shelby County budget

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Politics Politics Feature

Commission Continues Budget Slog, Feud with Mayor

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

One of the most fervent hopes, post the Shelby County general election of 2018, was that the siege warfare that had existed between outgoing Mayor Mark Luttrell and the Shelby County Commission would cease to be once new Mayor Lee Harris and a practically all-new set of commissioners took over the show in the Vasco Smith County Administrative Building. Justin Fox Burks

Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris

Harris made a point of declaring, early on in his administration, that he would not be at odds with his commissioners but would work with them at every turn. Making allowances for a certain bold innocence the new mayor brought to his task, it was always likely to be roughed up and sanded down by the grit and cross-purposes of others on the commission with differing agendas of their own.

Still, the mayor exuded enough zeal and progressivism in his first months — insisting on pay equities, overdue attention to criminal justice needs, and novel good health initiatives — as to earn himself a lingering honeymoon. It began to wear off when a project or two brought in from the outside, like the Downtown Memphis Commission’s Union Row project, caught him unawares and rendered passive, and when, in the eyes of a majority of commissioners, he overstepped himself by playing hardball with University of Memphis president David Rudd, threatening to veto funding for the university’s planned natatorium, unless Rudd came through on pay raises for the school’s employees.

The standoff with Rudd, though it had support here and there in the community and seemed consistent with Harris’ Captain America image, earned him an override of his veto by the commission and drastically reconfigured his in-house relationships. Henceforth, he would be increasingly — and publicly — regarded by some commissioners as a would-be future congressman biding his time in a lesser office until he could get to Washington. Indeed, at one point, he seemed virtually to concede as much.

Thus it was that Harris came into his second budget season this year with some baggage. And for whatever reason, he had earned a determined adversary on the commission, Edmund Ford Jr., who’d come over from several terms on the Memphis City Council with arguably higher-office ambitions of his own.

Edmund Ford Jr.

Harris threw out his second budget, for fiscal 2020-21, with the same take-it-or-leave-it attitude as had accompanied his first, which the commission had made sure to chew on as a corrective. This year’s Harris budget, delivered in virtual form online amid the first surging of the pandemic, was characterized by the mayor as a “lean and balanced” $1.4 billion.

The Harris budget included a warmed-over version of the wheel-tax increase he’d proposed weeks earlier in another context, and involved some $13.6 million in cuts, along with increases for pre-K and school construction and for the Shelby County Sheriff’s Department, which would be taking over policing responsibility for de-annexed areas of the city of Memphis.

It was promptly disparaged by Commissioner Ford, who compared Harris’ projected plans to some adopted in 2014 by the city council on which both he and Harris served. Those financial arrangements lowered the county’s bond rating and drew the attention of the state comptroller, Ford insisted.

In weeks to come, Ford, the budget committee vice chair, and Eddie Jones, the chairman of that committee (both Democrats, like Harris) would attempt to take over the reins and fashion an alternate budget of their own. Harris was now in a difficult position, analogous to that of his predecessor. Just as Luttrell, a Republican, had been faced off consistently by two active Republican commissioners, Terry Roland and Heidi Shafer, now Harris, a Democrat, was embroiled in continuing controversy with two members of his own party, Ford and Jones.

Republican members like Mick Wright and Brandon Morrison had reordering plans of their own to offer, more or less in the interests of greater austerity, and another Republican, commission Chairman Mark Billingsley, began scheduling marathon special meetings to deal with the budget. Some of these were held online, via webinar, others were arranged at large locations, like the Peabody ballroom or the FedEx Events Center at Shelby Farms.

All these meetings have been lengthy and wearing, and they all have resembled, installment by installment and collectively, a kind of Blair Witch Project, a desperate search for a way out of a lost and forbidding wilderness that ever, inevitably, leaves the participants, anguished hours later, right back at their starting point.

From time to time, Harris himself has intervened in the commission’s deliberations in a vain effort to offer guidance, more often so has county CAO Dwan Gilliom, but the administration’s real warrior has been the normally self-contained County Financial Officer Mathilde Crosby, whose duty it has been to spar with Jones/Ford and try to maintain such administrative priorities as she can against the revisionist mathematics of the budget duo.

Meanwhile, Mayor Harris has been releasing periodic broadsides taking the commission to task. The most recent one came on Monday, June 15th, even as commissioners were girding for the latest specially called budget webinar.

“Unfortunately,” wrote Harris, “the commission has taken a buzz saw to the county’s budget, cutting vital programs, and putting jobs at risk.” He predicted looming layoffs and irrevocable damage to “Homeland Security, the Health Department, Juvenile Court, the Office of the Public Defender, Finance, Human Resources, County Attorney, Information Technology Services, and our Low-Income Commodities Food Program, among others.”

Previous broadsides by the mayor asserted such declarations as, “Unfortunately … the Shelby County Commission has voted to approve several budget cuts that will put in jeopardy our ability to meet our community’s need,” and “dozens of Shelby County employees could see their jobs vanish amid the current public health emergency. This is the wrong approach and the wrong time to put jobs in jeopardy.”

Keeping to the theme, CFO Crosby has consistently maintained that most of the reductions proposed by Jones/Ford, who have effectively become the commission’s official scalpel, are taken at the expense of administrative personnel and projects.

Before Monday’s meeting, it had seemed that the commission, by diligent scrutiny and trimming among the weeds of county finance, had come to within $5,7435,00 of balancing the budget. The state Senate, closing out the state government’s budget in Nashville, had meanwhile liberated some $200 million of previously allocated infrastructure aid to localities, eliminating restrictions on the money’s use.

The state’s action potentially freed up Shelby County’s share, $7.7 million — enough to balance the budget. That fact would be duly considered on Monday by the commission, but only after yet another lengthy wrangle between Jones/Ford and Crosby over a new configuration presented by Jones.

Ultimately the commission would once again suspend its work on the budget. Before adjourning on Monday, however, it voted, by the minimum seven votes necessary, to deposit the $7.7 million manna from the state, when and if it is delivered after July 1st, into the county’s fund balance, which is due to be tapped significantly in any possible venture to balance the budget.

Even that engenders controversy, however, in that the commission, led by Democrats Van Turner and Reginald Milton, are determined to find money in the budget for rehabilitating The Med (aka Regional One Health). The commission’s previous allocation of $5.4 million for the purpose was vetoed by Harris, who wishes to use the money for construction of his proposed new Juvenile Justice Center.

Turner indicated Monday that the commission will attempt to recover that funding for The Med via an override vote. And the $7.7 million due from the state, originally earmarked for the Juvenile Justice Center, may well be sliced up, ultimately divided into several parts for several purposes.

The commission will have met in committee on Wednesday, June 17th, before what may well be its climactic meeting on the budget, next Monday, June 22nd.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

State Funding Could Plug County’s Budget Hole

After several marathon budget-review sessions and an interminable and mind-boggling amount of numbers-crunching and wrangling, Shelby

Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson announcing relief of grant restrictions

County’s budget stalemate may finally reach something resembling a satisfactory conclusion at Monday’s scheduled Shelby County Commission meeting.

Going into the weekend, the commission still had something like a $5 million+ looming deficit to make up. In the weeks of fretting over possible cuts and reallocations, a schism of sorts had developed between the county administration of Mayor Lee Harris, whose initial budget was rejected, and Eddie Jones and Edmund Ford Jr., chairman and vice-chair, respectively, of the commission budget committee.

In recent meetings, the impasse had come down, more or less, to non-stop sparring between Jones and Ford, on one hand, and county Chief Financial Officer Mathilde Crosby, on the other. The discussion wandered, as they say, into the weeds, and the weeds grew ever denser and more impenetrable.

On the eve of Monday’s meeting, two possible solutions were on the brink of being proposed. Jones had a formula which, he said, involved changes to the education portion of the budget, while Commissioner Van Turner was ready to propose substantial borrowing from the county’s fund balance, or “rainy day fund,” temporarily dispensing with county government’s tradition of maintaining the fund at 20 percent of the county budget.
Meanwhile, state government, acting as a deus ex machina, may have resolved the dilemma for the county by removing restrictions on $200 million previously offered by Governor Bill Lee to the state’s local governments for help with infrastructure needs and COVID-related expenses.

In its version of a $39.4 billion state budget completed last Thursday, the state Senate, in order to deal with what Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson (D-Franklin) called the “dire circumstances” of localities, voted to take any restriction off how local governments chose to spend the money. Indications are that the House, which has yet to finish its deliberations, will follow suit in approving removal of the restrictions.

Shelby County’s share of the money, which will become available as of the new fiscal year on July 1, is $7,756,653, enough, if applied to the county general fund, to overcome the remaining amounts of a prospective budget deficit.

The county’s sum had been spoken for some weeks ago in the form of a commission resolution to use it for partial funding of the county’s Juvenile Rehab and Education Center, but Commissioner Turner said he would be willing to pursue a formal rescinding of that proposed allocation — even, if necessary, to seek an override of a mayoral veto — in order to re-access the state money for the purpose of budgetary resolution.

Shelby County government isn’t the only local beneficiary of the state grant funds. Memphis’ share is $14,388,140, while the moneys available to the other county municipalities are as follows: Arlington, $288,135; Bartlett, $1,338,991; Collierville, $1,147,017; Germantown, $892,855; Lakeland, $308,438; and Millington, $265,802.

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Politics Politics Feature

County Commission Continues Budget Battle

There came a moment in Monday’s regular public session of the Shelby County Commission when chairman Van Turner attempted to assure his colleagues that all the forthcoming year’s budget numbers were in order, including maintenance of a fund balance amounting to no less than 20 percent of the total budget — the amount regarded as sufficient to ensure solvency.

After all, Turner remarked, there was the matter of $2.5 million that was “going back in” to the 2020 budget at some point. That would offset the impact of several new expenditures approved by the commission on Monday, including $2.5 million (or $2.4 million; the exact amount remained somewhat hazy) required for the county’s obligations under a joint pre-K program undertaken with Memphis city government.

The commissioners present seemed to know what Turner meant, though there was considerable confusion in the audience at large. In the course of an extended recess, during which much head-scratching occurred among media members and other spectators, things became a little clearer: As members of the commission and Mayor Lee Harris had been informed by county attorneys during executive session, a piece of litigation — its exact nature unspecified publicly — was about to be resolved in favor of the county.

Further prodding revealed that representatives of the city had evidently assured county officials that a settlement, in which the aforementioned $2.5 million would be made over from city to county, was imminent, though the deal was not yet done.

If this informaton seems uncertain to the point of being opaque, that circumstance is due to what amounts to a vow of omerta imposed upon county officials regarding the nature of the aforesaid litigation.

In any case, this “trust-us” premise is at the heart of what would appear to be a somewhat conditional resolution of both the county property-tax rate (at the current figure of $4.05 per $100 of assessed value) and the planned operating and capital budgets for fiscal 2020.

There’s an interesting ambiguity involved in the tax-rate figure, as well. As Shelby County Trustee Regina Morrison Newman revealed at Monday’s meeting, the $4.05 rate was arrived at last year by error, as the result of some faulty arithmetic (including double-counting of expected revenue amounts). Responsibility for the error was not assigned, though it occurred on the watch of former County Mayor Mark Luttrell and former Trustee David Lenoir.

Erroneous or not, the same tax rate is being continued, though, as Commissioner Reginald Milton keeps insisting (and did so again Monday), an “adjustment” is clearly in order. One impediment has been the adamant opposition to a perceived tax increase on the part of the commisson’s five Republicans and Democrat Edmund Ford Jr. — enough opposition to forestall the charter-ordained eight votes needed, especially since Mayor Harris is also reluctant on the score.

The like-mindedness of Ford and Harris on this point was in contrast to some ill feeling that has flared between them of late — and did so again on Monday when Ford publicly castigated the mayor for remarks made on a weekend television show blaming previous disagreements between the two on the fact that Harris had achieved his electoral victories by defeating members of the extended Ford family.

“Don’t use any member of my family as backup when you don’t have answers,” Ford said. “I can’t respect you.” Harris did not respond right away, but at the end of Monday’s meeting, which ended around 10 p.m., he made a point of praising the political Ford family and denying any animosity toward its members.

All of that, however, was but a sideshow to the budget turmoil, which, almost certainly, will require a revisit and perhaps a revision.

• Kudos: To 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen for presiding over an eye-opening panel of the House Judiciary Committee last week on a question that won’t go away — that of potential reparations to African-American citizens for the effects of slavery and Jim Crow laws. Cohen, chairman of the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, was the sponsor, years ago, of a House resolution expressing an overdue apology for slavery.

To Sidney Chism, for another installment last week of his annual summer political picnic, this one attracting numerous political candidates, including mayoral foes Jim Strickland and Willie Herenton.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Commission Averts Crisis in Stormy Back-and-Forth Voting on Budget

CREDIT: JB

JB

Kennedy and Luttrell (r) listen as CFO Swift makes administraton case.

One of the most stressful meetings in the history of Shelby County government took place Monday at a County Commission meeting that saw:

(a) an organized walkout by one side of a divisive argument over the county budget and tax rate, followed by
(b) a response by the other side to reconstitute itself as the full committee — all of this after
(c) a dire warning from the County Finance Officer that a failure to agree could lead to a shutdown of county government and a defaulting on employee paychecks.

In the end, after five hours of this sort of high-stakes poker, the Commission would approve a $1.1 billion budget package that assumed a status quo property tax rate at the current level of $4.37, though resistance from an organized Republican minority prevented an actual vote of approval on second reading;. The Commission would also vote for a generous distribution of surplus tax revenues that nullified the GOP minority’s lingering hopes for a one-cent reduction in the tax rate.

It was a party-line struggle — though each side included one prominent member of the other party — and it further intensified a division which has existed since the formation of a new Commission after the 2014 county election but which had been dormant until disagreements over budget policy flared it up again.

In a strict sense, there had been little doubt as to the outcome of the conflict, since the administration of County Mayor Mark Luttrell, himself a Republican, had used its influence in both public and private ways to put the brakes on sentiment for a tax decrease, which five Republican members had sought ever since Luttrell had made a point of announcing the fact of a $6 million end-of-fiscal-year surplus.

At a marathon budget-committee session last month, Luttrell had stated his opposition to using part of the surplus to reduce a penny on the tax rate, insisting both that county infrastructure needs and blight-eradication efforts should come first and arguing for larger increases to specific county divisions — the Sheriff’s Department being prominent among them — than the Commission as a whole had seemed willing to grant.

Subsequently, claim such proponents of the tax decrease as GOP members Heidi Shafer and Terry Roland, Luttrell bargained privately with Commission members and managed to wean Republican outlier Steve Basar back into line with the Commission’s Democratic majority, recreating the de facto alliance with the Democrats that Basar had pursued last fall in response to a GOP majority’s dashing his hopes of becoming Commission chairman when it tilted instead toward Democrat Justin Ford, the eventual winner.

During the same period, chairman Ford had been allied with the Commission Republicans, and he voted consistently with them again in each of Monday’s showdown votes, which centered on a seemingly nonstop series of procedural issues. Basar was aligned again with the Democrats, and indeed it was he who began Monday’s consideration of the budget with a recipe for distribution of budget increases that the Democrats backed and that administration CAO Harvey Kennedy conferred his imprimatur on.

Because two Republican members, Mark Billingsley and David Reaves, were away on vacation, the GOP resistance on Monday was reduced to the scale of a guerilla insurrection led by Roland and Shafer, but one that, when joined on a given vote by Republican George Chism and Ford, could prevent the absolute majority of 7 that was needed for certain key measures to succeed

Thus was the second reading of the administration-preferred $4.37 tax rate held one vote short of success, though it will be back up for a third and decisive reading on July 1, which coincidentally is the first day of the new fiscal 2015-16 year.

And the magic number was thereby denied on a series of other votes on budget-related items, since the Democratic coalition was also hampered early in the meeting by the absence of member Eddie Jones.

Jones’ arrival late in the meeting created the conditions for a decisive majority of 7 and prompted Democrat Van Turner to reintroduce a somewhat modified version of the budget proposal Basar had made, and that version would be approved — but only after a grueling procedural struggle that required two prolonged recesses, innumerable rulings by County Attorney Ross Dyer and staff, and a moment of genuine crisis.

That moment had come, just before Jones had made the scene, when the two sides were deadlocked over the Democratic coalition’s effort to secure a budget vote and the GOP minority’s wish to opt instead for a continuing resolution that would allow current funding levels to continue. Another prospect for both sides was for a special called meeting sometime next week, but agreement on that, too, proved elusive.

It was then that CFO Mike Swift warned, on the basis of a Dyer ruling, that if the two sides could not agree, county government might well have to be shut down in early July and employee paychecks delayed or frozen.

Terry Roland argued for the Republican side that Dyer’s ruling was mistaken, that a continuing resolution could be achieved well after the beginning of the next fiscal year and that such late resolutions had occurred frequently in recent years.

Subsequently four members, Ford and Republicans Shafer Roland, and Chism, would absent themselves from their Commission seats, withdrawing to a back lounge area and thereby creating a temporary loss of quorum that could have aborted the meeting and put Swift’s warning to the test.

That was when Jones arrived, creating a new quorum, and the remaining members were in the process of re-forming the Commission, with Democrat Walter Bailey as the new chairman, when the four absentees returned. Not long thereafter, agreement would be reached on a budget, with the only holdouts being Shafer and Roland.

Seeming anarchy had been just around the bend, though, and it remains to be seen what will happen when the Commission meets on July 1 to consider a third and final vote on both tax rate and budget.

In other action, the Commission named Yolanda Kight from a field of several applicants to a vacancy on the county Judicial Commission. Kight prevailed after multiple ballots and see-saw voting by the Commission.

JB

One of the innumerable recess colloquies that took place on Monday. (L to r: Commissioner Steve Basar, adiministration CAO Harvey Kennedy, and Commissioners Van Turner, Terry Roland, and George Chism

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Editorial Opinion

Hard Numbers, Good Sense

If the leaders of the suburban municipal-school movement, who have now cleared the referendum hurdle for the second — and presumably last — time, had listened to Shelby County Commission chairman Mike Ritz’s address to the Memphis

Rotary Club on Tuesday, they would either have heard more of what, to them, is Ritz’s red-flag rhetoric or they would have listened to his facts and learned something.

That goes for Memphians, too, who would have learned, for example, that, if they had consented last year (as they did not) to a de facto referendum of their own, one for a half-cent increase in the sales tax, some $30 million would have been raised to go toward school funding, obviating the necessity for the extra 6-cent property tax — earmarked for the schools — that county mayor Mark Luttrell needed to fund the 2013-14 county budget, at a tax rate of $4.38, up from last year’s $4.02, based on that period’s higher prevailing property appraisals.

(Technically a county referendum, last year’s sales-tax vote was confined to Memphis residents and residents of unincorporated Shelby County, inasmuch as residents of six outer-county municipalities had already approved a half-cent sales tax add-on for themselves, maxing out to pay for their intended independent schools.)

As for the aforesaid suburbanites, they would surely have been displeased to hear Ritz (a Germantown resident) prophesy out-of-control and unforeseen expenses for the forthcoming municipal school systems. He pointed out that Germantown — financially one of the better-endowed suburbs, to say the least — might see a “taxpayer revolt” once the city’s residents realize that, however the forthcoming debate over transfer of existing infrastructure goes, A) they will have to build new schools to accommodate the 8,000 students they need to finance their system (and that’s if they win a contest with the Unified System over who gets those students); and B) Germantown taxpayers by themselves will have to foot the bill for fully half of those 8,000 students — the half, including many from low-income communities, who live outside the city limits.

And there is the matter of the infrastructure. Ritz foresees difficult negotiations between the suburbs and the Unified Shelby County School board over the transfer of school properties when the time comes for the new suburban systems to start up. If they do start up, that is. Ritz professed a concern that “the three smaller suburbs” (that would be Arlington, Lakeland, and Millington) will see that, fiscally speaking, they may have gotten in over their heads.

The outgoing commission chairman addressed other realities as well — one example being that of a much-coveted new convention center that might enable Memphis to stay within hailing distance of Nashville, which recently had a grand opening for its own giant new megalopolitan state-of-the-art convention complex. As part of an accelerated program of speakers on topical issues, the Rotarians in Ritz’s audience had heard much discussion of late about that subject. Ritz may have doused their hopes a bit when he noted that revenues which Nashville and other cities have used to finance such enormous projects — hotel-motel taxes and diversion of sales-tax revenues — are already dedicated to payment of FedExForum bonds and to a downtown Tourist Destination Zone project, respectively.

Much of what Ritz had to say was not good news, but there was something refreshing to hear a politician doling out hard numbers and common sense.

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Politics Politics Feature

County Tax-Rate Battle Ends

CREDIT: JB

So finally it’s over! Shelby County commissioner Sidney Chism, who had been abstaining on all prior votes on the county’s 2013-14 tax rate, out of consideration for a possible conflict-of-interest situation, made the dramatic announcement at the beginning of Monday’s meeting that he would be voting on a repeat third reading of the once-rejected tax rate and explained why.

Previously, said Chism, he had been legally advised that, as proprietor of a South Memphis day-care center which received some of its funding from Shelby County government, it might be a conflict of interest for him to vote on a budget that authorized such funding. The center, which the commissioner said was under the control of family members, not himself, was in any case no longer receiving such funding, and Chism continued, “I’ve been advised that with full disclosure I will be able to vote.”

On another contentious issue, Chism acknowledged that he would be a board member of a charter school which his granddaughter has applied to operate but that such a circumstance would not arise until he had left the commission, even if her application got approval. So he regarded himself as unhampered on that count as well.

The bottom line was that Chism would be recorded in favor, and this fact, along with another major conversion, that of Commissioner Justin Ford, would make the final tally 7-5-1 in favor of Shelby County mayor Mark Luttrell‘s $4.38 tax rate ($4.42 for non-Memphis residents, due to a 2004 rural school bond obligation), with the lone absentee being Commissioner Heidi Shafer, a tax-rate opponent.

Ford’s conversion was actually a return to form. The commissioner had voted aye on the first two readings of the Luttrell tax rate, but he switched to no, along with new chairman-elect James Harvey two weeks ago. On Monday, Ford said he had spoken with members of the administration about their considering the idea of money for summer jobs programs and was satisfied that they were open to discussion.

The absence of Shafer from Monday’s meeting, along with the (relatively) perfunctory resistance put up by tax-rate opponents, was an indication that commissioners of all persuasions saw the handwriting on the wall and that there would be no more stalemates on the tax-rate question like those which have stalled implementation of the budget in recent weeks.

Various grants and new hires that were put on deep freeze until a tax rate could be approved are now free to be implemented. That includes programs for the homeless that had received vocal support from audience members at the last several meetings.

So foregone was the conclusion as the relatively brief meeting got under way that the only tension was an angry exchange between Commissioner Terry Roland and Chairman Mike Ritz over a verbal attack by Roland on Commissioner Walter Bailey, a tax-rate supporter.

Ritz gaveled Roland down as “out of order” for making “personal” remarks, and Roland responded, “You’re out of order!” Reminded by Ritz that he had the duty to maintain order as chairman, Roland retorted, “Well, you won’t be much longer.”

At the commission’s last meeting, Commissioner James Harvey became chairman-elect, helped along by votes from tax-rate opponents. Harvey continued in that mode on Monday, voting no to the $4.38 tax rate, the only Democrat to do so, along with Republicans Roland, Wyatt Bunker, Chris Thomas, and Steve Basar.

Before the votes were taken, Basar made an extended and somewhat impassioned statement about the roughly $57 million still owed by Memphis city government to the county’s new unified school system as successor to Memphis City Schools. The debt, found to be legally binding by the courts as a “maintenance of effort” obligation, dates from a fateful decision in 2008 by the Memphis City Council, budget-beleaguered then as now, to cut its annual allotment to Memphis City Schools by that amount.

Had the debt been paid, Basar said, “we wouldn’t be talking about raising taxes here. We wouldn’t be trying to fill the gap.”

Until recently, Basar had been a potential seventh vote, if needed, for the $4.38 tax rate. But in the course of the stalemate that developed on the commission during the last few weeks, he had resolved to stand fast in favor of a $4.32 rate, which is identical to the state-established certified tax rate, an arbitrary figure representing the rate at which the county could count on revenue at the same level as the previous year.

The $4.32 rate had figured large in an extended session of the commission’s budget and finance committee last week (a de facto commission meeting per se, since 12 of the 13 commissioners were in attendance and voting, all but Steve Mulroy, who was out of town).

Previous to that meeting, a consensus in favor of the $4.32 rate seemed to have been building as a compromise between Luttrell’s request and a resistance to any tax-rate increase at all on the part of the commission’s hard-line conservatives.

Normally, Roland is a member of that latter coalition (though, as some of its members have made clear privately, they are not always comfortable with his often abrasive and confrontational approach). But last Wednesday, to the surprise of most, the Millington commissioner offered a version of the $4.32 tax rate as his own, putting it forth as an “olive branch” gesture of solidarity.

But in the course of extended debate that day (far more strenuous than anything that happened on Monday), Roland could find few takers. Even Shafer, who had seconded his motion for $4.32, did not end up voting with him, being out of the room when the issue was called. Only Roland and Basar voted aye, a result that owed a great deal, as commissioners on both sides of the issue would confide later, to their view of the messenger as much as to their attitude toward the message.

But more than personality issues were involved. Luttrell and two chief aides, CAO Harvey Kennedy and county finance officer Mike Swift, made the point that no less than $9.6 million would have to be pared from the county’s $1.2 billion budget, already passed and, to some extent, already being acted upon.

Since nobody wanted the schools, already acknowledged by most observers to be operating at a bare-bones level, to suffer, all of that $9.6 million would have to come from the county’s general fund, and that would mean layoffs and program cuts. In the end, that prospect proved too much to deal with for commissioners, like Ford, who were on the fence.

• It is to be hoped that 9th District congressman Steve Cohen enjoyed the weather in Washington last week. There was not much else for him to take comfort from.

First, for those few who might have missed what became a national story and viral on a large scale, CNN announced the results of a DNA test it had administered to Cohen, Victoria Brink, the Houston model whom he introduced to the world back in February as his daughter, and John Brink, the Houston oil man who had raised her as his own daughter.

The results were as astonishing as the Memphis Democrat’s original announcement of proud paternity — but, for obvious reasons, devastating.

The tests showed that Brink was the actual father and not Cohen, who had been involved with Victoria Brink’s mother at a time consistent with his possible fatherhood and had apparently been informed, almost four years ago, that he was indeed the father.

A “stunned and dismayed” Cohen said, “I still love Victoria, hold dear the time I have shared with her, and hope to continue to be a part of her life.”

But that was not the end. In what he probably saw as no more than a gallant evasion, Cohen told a reporter seeking further reaction that, while she was “very attractive,” he had resolved to say no more about the issue. That got him some more hits from media types, who must have scented blood, and he got even more after a tweet in which he quoted an African-American tow-truck driver (yes, Cohen’s vintage Cadillac chose this week to quit on him) as saying, sympathetically, in a clearly ich-bin-ein-Berliner way, “You’re black!”

The piling on was especially curious in that, with an Obama news conference, major bills, and foreign discords to deal with, it wasn’t a slow news week in D.C.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Balancing Accounts

Perhaps the most important job of the Shelby County Commission is setting the property tax rate. The first vote of three required readings will have taken place this week. The third and final one will occur on July 8th.

Steve Basar

I am fairly certain there are sufficient votes among my peers to increase the tax rate, but is that the right decision? We all want to support funding for the schools, and we need to ensure that public safety is not put at risk. At the same time, we need to find ways to reduce the tax burden and make Shelby County more competitive. This leaves me with the most important decision of my short political career: Should I vote to increase taxes? 

I am reluctant to vote for a tax increase. While I can easily make a case to increase taxes, I also believe we have a duty to reduce spending. We need to find a balanced approach of spending reductions combined with any tax-rate increase.

The current tax rate is $4.02, and Mayor Luttrell has proposed a rate of $4.38. To put that in perspective, on a $100,000 property, the additional tax would be $90 per year. While that doesn’t sound like a lot, the total tax would increase from $1,005 to $1,095 — and that is just the county portion of the tax bill. If you live in Memphis, you will also pay a city tax of at least $3.11, or $777.51 on a $100,000 property. We have high property taxes relative to other cities in Tennessee and surrounding communities. We cannot blindly increase taxes and expect to remain economically competitive.

We should have built a base expectation that each department and local official would present a budget asking for 2 to 5 percent less than last year. Instead, we gave everyone a “hall pass” if they were not asking for additional funding. I think this sent the wrong message. We need to start managing expectations for the next budget cycle now.

I have been fortunate to work for great companies my entire business career. One thing every manager dreads is trimming the budget and finding ways to do more with less. In my brief tenure on the county commission, it appears that the majority of my peers prefer raising taxes over reducing spending. In my opinion, it isn’t enough to just raise taxes. The more rational approach would be to work both sides of the equation.

We have multiple budget deficits. The county revenues are currently less than projected expenses, and the Unified Schools board has approved a budget that would require the county to increase funding by $30 million. I am very pleased that the school board put together a budget that is $75 million lower than the combined budgets of the MCS and SCS last year, but part of that decrease would have happened regardless of the merger. Overall, I support keeping teachers in the classrooms and minimizing change during this first year of a combined system, especially since this may end up being a one-year experiment. If a $30 million increase will keep more teachers in the classrooms and minimize disruptions, it will be money well spent.

The proposed tax rate of $4.38 could be increased an additional 4 cents with a simple majority vote of the county commission. This rate would yield an additional $6.4 million that could close most of the $10 million gap between the mayor’s proposed budget and the Unified Schools system’s requested funding. On a $100,000 house, that would amount to $10 per year.

As stated earlier, I am no fan of increasing taxes. The incremental $64 million generated by a 40 cents increase would allow the county government to avoid making painful cuts this budget cycle while also minimizing cuts in the school classrooms. If the city of Memphis were to fulfill its $57 million obligation to the schools, we could avoid a tax increase this year. If the municipalities were to share a portion of their sales tax revenues (which were approved to fund education), we could reduce the tax rate. I think it is important that everyone in the county realize the city of Memphis owes the new Unified Schools system $57 million, and the city’s failure to pay is what is driving a majority of the proposed tax increase.

The county budget is lean, but we need to streamline and improve efficiencies so we can avoid raising tax rates in the future. We cannot sit by while the cost base increases and revenues decline. Less talking and more doing — that is the challenge for the county commission, the city council, and our school board.

Steve Basar is a Shelby County commissioner and chairman of the economic development committee.