At a time when legitimate issues of state vs. local authority are proliferating — notably in proposed legislation regarding law enforcement and educational vouchers — the long, sad saga of Wanda Halbert is an embarrassing and parallel spectacle.
It is a case study, however, of the need for good-faith cooperation between state and local governments.
This week may see the beginnings of a resolution, through unavoidable state intervention, of the hot mess that is the Shelby County Clerk’s office.
On Monday, Jim Arnette, lead auditor in the state comptroller’s office and his chief deputy, Nathan Abbott, brought a contingent of six auditors to Memphis at the urgent request of Shelby County Trustee Regina Newman. Their task: to help straighten out the clerk’s fearfully tangled records so that the county can square its own accounts and prepare the way for its annual budget.
The problem, as Newman made clear in public alarms she raised last week, is that Clerk Halbert has failed in several belated tries to submit accurate figures regarding her office’s wheel tax receipts over the last several months — specifically failing to indicate the amount corresponding to a surcharge designated by the county commission last year to help pay for new schools and a multi-purpose center.
Once in town, Arnette, Abbott, and their six-person auditing team made a beeline for the county clerk’s office where they wasted little time combing through Halbert’s scrambled figures. At the end of the day, Arnette and Abbott departed, leaving behind the six other auditors to spend the week. Newman said she had every reason to hope that the team will generate an accurate compilation of the needed wheel tax figures.
If so, a ray of light will at last have penetrated Halbert’s murky corner of local government, one which has badly needed sunshine.
Also this week, Halbert has been summoned for a come-to-Jesus meeting on Wednesday with the county commission — the latest in many such encounters with that body during her tenure, now in a second term. Both the commission and the office of Mayor Lee Harris have been persistently thwarted in good-faith efforts to get the clerk’s office on the right track.
Halbert, a former member of the city council, where financial compensation is minimal, was first elected to her much more lucrative clerkship in 2018 and was re-elected in 2022, a “blue wave” year in which having a “D” (for “Democratic”) by her name on the ballot was helpful.
She was already floundering, however, as was indicated by long lines of desperate people seeking auto-tag renewal at the several county clerk offices. Worse, the number of those offices was shrinking, as Halbert, it developed, had failed either to renew the leases at several of them or had defaulted on the rent, incurring eviction.
Her slipshod auditing procedures had meanwhile attracted negative attention both elsewhere in local government, where concerns arose over the county’s credit rating, and from state Comptroller Jason Mumpower, who has pronounced on Halbert’s “incompetence and willful neglect.” Auto dealers complained that they could not get services, business licenses proved impossible to procure, and so forth and so on.
The list of Halbert’s failings is too numerous to detail in this space but is exhaustively contained in a lengthy document submitted by County Commissioner Mick Wright to Hamilton County DA Coty Wamp, who has been charged with the duty of investigating Halbert’s performance preparatory to possible ouster proceedings.
Whatever the ultimate result of those proceedings, and if Trustee Newman’s optimism over the potential outcome of this week’s state intervention proves to be justified, a degree of trust between local and state governments may have been achieved.
Perhaps, we are entitled to hope that will help to allay the current atmosphere of mutual suspicion prevailing elsewhere between the two spheres. That’s what you call a silver lining.
