Tag: Shelby County Commission

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Seeing Red

The 2024 presidential election results by precinct (Photo: Courtesy Don Johnson)

The Shelby County Republican Party is scheduled to hold its biennial convention in January, and the party has a bona fide chairmanship race on its hands.

One candidate is Bangladesh-born Naser Fazlullah, manager of a food-and-beverages firm and the local party’s vice chair, who has been highly active in Republican outreach efforts over the years. Most unusually, he professes a desire to “bring both parties together” for the benefit of Shelby County and has numerous friends both inside and outside GOP ranks.

The other candidate is insurance executive Worth Morgan, the former city council member who in 2022 ran unsuccessfully for county mayor and had been rumored as a possible candidate for Memphis mayor the next year before deciding not to make the race.

Both candidates are running as the heads of slates for a variety of other party offices.

Morgan’s campaign in particular, run under the slogan “Revive,” is in the kind of high gear normally associated with expensive major public races and has employed a barrage of elaborate online endorsements from such well-known party figures as state Representative Mark White, state Senator Brent Taylor, and conservative media commentator Todd Starnes. 

The GOP convention is scheduled for January 25th at The Venue at Bartlett Station.

• Morgan’s choice of the campaign motif “Revival” is interesting. Not too long ago, Republicans dominated county government, but demographics now heavily favor Democrats in countywide voting. As one indication of that, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris outdistanced the GOP’s Donald Trump in November by a margin of 201,759 to Trump’s 118,917. 

In a series of post-election analyses, however, veteran Republican analyst Don Johnson, formerly of Memphis and now with the Stone River Group of Nashville, has demonstrated the GOP’s supremacy virtually everywhere else in Tennessee. He has published precinct-specific maps of statewide election results showing areas won by Trump in red. Patches of Democratic blue show up only sporadically in these graphics and are largely confined to Memphis, Nashville, and the inner urban cores of Knoxville and Chattanooga. Even Haywood County in the southwest corner of the state, virtually the last Democratic stronghold in rural Tennessee, shows high purple on Johnson’s cartography.

Post-election analysis shows something else — a shift of the Republican center of gravity eastward, toward the GOP’s ancestral homeland of East Tennessee. For the first time in recent presidential elections, Republican voting in Knox County outdid the party’s totals in Shelby County.

Looking ahead to the 2026 governor’s race, it is meaningful that a recent poll of likely Republican voters by the Tennessee Conservative News shows two Knoxvillians — Congressman Tim Burchett and Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs — leading all other potential candidates.

• The Shelby County Commission ended its year with a full agenda of 89 items, several of which were matters involving schools and school funding. The commissioners navigated that agenda with admirable focus and aplomb, considering that the bombshell news of Tuesday’s scheduled Memphis Shelby-County Schools board meeting regarding the potential voiding of superintendent Marie Feagins’ contract exploded midway through their discussions.

• One of the more inclusive political crowds in recent history showed up weekend before last at Otherlands on Cooper to honor David Upton on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Upton is the proverbial man-behind-the-scenes in Shelby County politics and has had a hand — sometimes openly, sometimes not — in more local elections and civic initiatives than almost anybody else you could name. 

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State and Local

Karen Camper (Photo: capitol.tn.gov)

When Karen Camper, the Democrats’ leader in the state House, ran for Memphis mayor last year, she discovered that, her impressive credentials notwithstanding, she lacked the citywide name recognition of locally based officials.

Consequently, she never developed enough traction to compete effectively for the mayoralty. And her name recognition problem was exacerbated further by the fact that members of the General Assembly are prohibited from active fundraising during the course of a legislative session.

The reality, especially in the case of the minority party statewide, is that state legislators, however much they may shine in the environs of Nashville, simply lack enough day-to-day connection with local voters to become household names on their home front.

A possible exception to that rule may arise in the case of a legislator whose public activities impinge directly on a festering local issue — as in the case of Republican state Senator Brent Taylor, whose nonstop efforts as the sponsor of bills to affect the status of local law enforcement have doubtless earned him a certain local notoriety.

Taylor’s party cohort John Gillespie, equally active on similar issues in the state House of Representatives, is on the fall ballot as a candidate for re-election and has attracted similar attention, for better or for worse.

The aforementioned Rep. Camper, meanwhile, is attempting to familiarize her constituents in House District 87 with the activities of state government by means of an innovation she calls “State to the Streets,” an event she will unveil on Saturday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at New Direction Christian Church.

She calls it “a unique opportunity” for residents of District 87 to engage with more than 20 state and local government agencies, ask questions, voice concerns, and receive assistance on a wide range of topics, including healthcare, education, employment, and social services.

Among the services that will be spoken on by representatives of the affected state agencies are:

• Job search opportunities from the TN Department of Labor and Workforce Development

• SNAP benefits and Families First assistance from the TN Department of Human Services

• Help processing REAL IDs from The TN Department of Safety & Homeland Security

• Mental health, addiction, and substance abuse counseling from the TN Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services and the TN Sports Wagering Council

• Legal advice from the Memphis Bar Association

• Expungement and Drive While You Pay assistance from the General Sessions Court Clerk’s Office

• Help searching unclaimed property listings from the TN Department of the Treasury

• Voter registration and information from the TN Secretary of State’s office and the Shelby County Voter Registrar

“This is a great chance for me to talk with my constituents and hear their thoughts about the recently concluded legislative session and the direction of the state,” says Camper, and she may have something there.

• With the fiscal-year deadline approaching, Monday’s regular meeting of the Shelby County Commission saw action on many matters — including the county’s proposed tax rate and numerous budgetary items — deferred for further discussion at the commission’s June 12th committee sessions, but one long-standing uncertainty was finally dealt with.

This was the question of $2.7 million in funding from opioid-settlement funds that had been embedded in the sheriff’s department budget, pending the commission’s decision on where to route them — whether to a proposed program for remedial medical treatment of inmates deemed incompetent to stand trial, or elsewhere.

Elsewhere was the answer, with $5 million going to CAAP (Cocaine and Alcohol Awareness Program), and another $18 million to juvenile court, where it will pay for a variety of wraparound services for youthful wards of the court.

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Politics Politics Feature

Across the Lines

David Pryor (right) with the author in 2016

The Shelby County Commission — and county government in general — normally gets less public and media attention than do Memphis city government and the city council. This is largely due to long-held tradition held over from the numerous decades of the preceding century when the bulk of the county’s total population resided in the traditional urban core.

White flight, sprawl, and suburban growth have altered the demographic proportions and residential patterns significantly, of course, but even before the balance of population began to shift so radically eastward and outward, the fact was that, in Shelby as in the state’s other 95 counties, county government has been the chief instrument of self-government — not least because Shelby County is the Venn diagram; it contains not only Memphis but six other incorporated municipalities and much unincorporated turf as well.

The county’s budget is larger than any city’s, and it has primary constitutional charge of health and education matters, as well as significant and growing responsibility over law enforcement.

Monday’s meeting of the county commission reflected the unique aspect of our binary system, actually one of multiplicities.

One significant debate concerned the expanses into which solar energy enterprises — those harbingers of our greener future — can be allowed to spread. Mindful of the outer county’s increasing residential mass, the boundaries for such installations were significantly circumscribed: Going forward, they must be distant from each other by at least a mile and no closer than 600 feet at any point to residential areas. And they must be limited in size to a square mile.

Another prolonged discussion concerned the question of whether a portion of a long-dormant planned commercial development in the Eads area should be allowed to proceed with the development of septic tanks pending an opportunity to connect with the Memphis sewer system. (It will be remembered that such new tie-ins with new developments outside the city were discontinued as of 2017.)

The developers of the area under consideration Monday — one that was de-annexed in 2020 — hope eventually to manage such a connection. But expressed concerns on Monday from Eads residents and defenders of the Memphis sand aquifer about potential pollution resulted in a unanimous turn-down of the septic tank proposal by the commissioners.

After these and various other agenda items were dealt with, several of the commissioners turned their solemn attention to a matter that increasingly roils citizens everywhere in Shelby County — shoot-outs like the one that in the last few days resulted in the deaths of MPD Officer Joseph McKinney and attendees at an Orange Mound block party.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” said Commission chair Miska Clay Bibbs. Indeed so. The bell tolls for city and county alike.

………………………………………………………………………………

David Pryor (right) with the author in 2016

In Memoriam

He was not a Memphian nor even a Tennessean, but Arkansan David Pryor, a near neighbor who died Saturday after a lingering illness, deserves our sympathy and remembrance as well.

Pryor, who represented Arkansas as a congressman, as governor, and as senator, was the genuine article, a selfless public servant. He may turn out to have been the last major Democrat in his state’s history, but as my friend and former Arkansas Gazette colleague Ernie Dumas observes in an almost book-length obituary in the Arkansas Times this week, Pryor was much more — “the most beloved member of the U.S. Senate” in his time, across all partisan lines. That was something that I learned myself when he took me in tow on my first visit to Washington as a cub reporter back in the ’60s. R.I.P.

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Bills Against Reparations Before House, Senate

Sen. Brent Taylor (R-Memphis), left, and state Rep. John Ragan (R-Oak Ridge), right, sponsor the legislation Photo: State of Tennessee)

State lawmakers don’t want Shelby County leaders — or any local government in Tennessee — to study giving reparations “to individuals who are the descendants of persons who were enslaved.” 

Shelby County Commissioners approved a $5 million study of reparations in February 2023. A new committee was established to study the impact of giving local money to local African Americans. The committee would focus on the potential impact on access to housing and homeownership, healthcare, the criminal justice system, career opportunities, financial literacy, and generational wealth.

Bills to stop this were filed by Sen. Brent Taylor (R-Memphis) and state Rep. John Ragan (R-Oak Ridge). Ragan told House members Tuesday that “unfortunately” Shelby County was already at work on this. He said the county does not have legal authority to do it, nor is the move on solid constitutional footing. 

“Despite any good … intentions of such actions, [reparations] have not fostered and can never enhance community healing and unity,” Ragan said. “Rather the real impact divides us and generates more bitterness. Ill-founded accusations of collective guilt and group punishment for wrongs no one in the group could have ever committed creates resentment, always.”

Ragan explained slavery is among the most unconscionable human evils. “This is true where the enslavers were an African monarchy or a Mexican cartel,” he added.

His speech was cut short here as Black House members called out from their desks, seeking to correct Ragan. State Rep. Antonio Parkinson (D-Memphis) called Ragan’s assertion that Africans were partially responsible for American slavery “mean-spirited” and “insulting.”

“There was no shipping across the Atlantic of slaves until the Europeans went to Africa — at the behest, sometimes, of their government entities and privateers — to exploit Africans on the continent of Africa, and cruelly — for 400 years — bring them back to America, only to be mistreated,” Parkinson said.

Kings in what is now the African country of Benin sold slaves to European merchants for more than 200 years, according to a 2018 story in The Washington Post. Those sold were usually members of rival tribes, the story says.   

“The overwhelming majority of slaves sold to Europeans had not been slaves in Africa,” reads a blog post from Digital History on the University of Houston website. “They were free people who were captured in war or were victims of banditry or were enslaved as punishment for certain crimes.”

“While there had been a slave trade within Africa prior to the arrival of Europeans, the massive European demand for slaves and the introduction of firearms radically transformed West and Central African society.”

Debate on the reparations bill did not make it back to the House floor Tuesday as lawmakers moved on to other business to untangle rules on who could speak on the bill and when. 

Before the bill stalled, though, Rep. Larry Miller (D-Memphis) offered a series of amendments to the bill to slow its momentum this year. Those were tabled or voted down. 

However, introducing them allowed Miller to speak his mind about the legislation. He argued for the right of a local government to make its own decision in the matter of spending its own, local tax dollars. He, then, took aim at Ragan’s motives.

“What’s inside of you to make you want to further say, ‘Look, you can’t study our history. You can’t even talk about our history. You can’t even spend your local tax dollars to talk about it, to study it’?” Miller asked. “That is so antiquated. 

“It’s a cruel intent, in my opinion, to say to people in this state, especially African-American people in this state, ‘We don’t want to talk about it anymore.’”

The Senate was set to take up its version of the bill Wednesday afternoon. 

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Politics Politics Feature

“We Have to Disrupt”

Mayoral candidate Michelle McKissack set up her campaign headquarters on B.B. King Street. )Photos: Courtesy Michelle McKissack)

Even as two rather well-qualified female candidates continue in pathways that they hope will make their current mayoral runs viable, women already in power are busy constructing models of parliamentary behavior that owe very little to tradition and nothing at all to the vintage tactic of go-along-to-get-along.

Britney Thornton, the Shelby County Commission’s first-term representative from Orange Mound, has her mind set on nothing less than overturning her legislative body’s history and practice of awarding county contracts. Last Monday, the commission’s regular session began with some 17-odd items in the “consent agenda,” these being items that have been previously examined in committee and have already been worked over and are now ready for final judgment.

As each of the 17 items was called to the floor, Thornton directed the same question: How many Black women, men, Asian, white, other were invited to bid on the contract? How many followed through and bid on the contract, and who got the contract?

Almost invariably a white bidder, one used to the jargon and handling of commission business, was awarded the contract.

At one point, the item under discussion was an inmate-feeding contract that has so long belonged to Aramark that it would seem to have the status of a legacy. To the tune of a million and half dollars. Needless to say, the management of Aramark is white.

The distinguished lawyer John Farris, who represents Aramark, offered his usual smooth guarantee that the company would continue to provide inmate meals in its usual skillful mode.

To which Commissioner Thornton threw a bomb. With no substitute agency in mind, she moved to cancel the contract.

“We have to disrupt” was her way of explaining how long-standing aspects of white dominance can be eradicated.

In the end, the commission was brought to a compromise. The Aramark contract will continue for two months with what amounts to a temporary lease on the contract, with the understanding that it will be rebid on in October with a full complement of MWBE requirements favoring a non-white bidder.

Thornton is no lone wolf. She gets frequent support from other commissioners, especially those of the women on this body of seven females and six males.

Her sponsored ordinance directed at the sheriff’s department, getting the department to shed special units and multi-unit alliances, failed, although another requiring the department and the commission to take measure of pretextual road stops was mandated.

Photo: Courtesy Michelle McKissack

• There is no reason to believe that mayoral contender Michelle McKissack has anything like the long aim that Thornton has. McKissack’s style is milder and more inclined to consensus, but she is nothing if not forthright, and her adoption of a headquarters on B.B. King Street last Saturday allows her entry into the forthcoming WMC-TV mayoral debate, in which she will have every opportunity to hold her own and then some.

• For those expecting a word here on the late Governor Don Sundquist, it would have been here but for a bad modem. Expect it soon, online.

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County Commission Report

Election Commission head Mark Luttrell asked for permission to ditch old voting machines. (Photo: Mark H. Luttrell | Facebook)

Each of the major legislative bodies operating in Shelby County presents challenges to its members, to the various publics that wish to influence it, and to the matrices of other governmental bodies that it must coexist with.

Take the Shelby County Commission meeting of Monday, May 15th, a six-and-a-half-hour affair. The commission opened up its Monday session with an agenda of 21 “consent agenda” items and an additional nine “regular” items. In theory, the consent agenda items are matters whose import has been sufficiently chewed over in committee as to be generally acceptable already, whereas the regular items must be tackled anew.

It doesn’t work out that way. On Monday, a clear majority of items on the commission’s consent agenda were singled out for additional discussion by one or more — a fact clearly indicating that consent had not been reached. Most of these items involved the approval of public grants to this or that person or body to achieve some public purpose.

Commissioner Britney Thornton and, to a different degree, Commissioner Henri Brooks have chosen on a weekly basis to focus on the demographic distribution of these grants, wanting to know if a sufficient number of minority firms were invited to participate in the bidding for these projects. Thornton’s summing up of Monday’ results — “a flat zero” of ultimate participation by minorities.

This is one leitmotif of a typical commission meeting. Another is the dependable insistence of Commissioner Edmund Ford Jr.that commissioners — the “electeds” of county government — must be vigilant in preventing the “appointeds” of Mayor Lee Harris’ administration from usurping commission prerogatives.

At one point, Ford asked a yes-or-no question of administration budget director Michael Thompson, insisting, “Do not give an essay answer. I will cut you off and bust you out.” Mick Wright, one of four Republican commissioners on the 13-member body, challenged the decorum of that.

Wright and Ford bumped heads again on Wright’s proposal to route $3.5 million into needed upgrades for Regional One. Ford successfully insisted the money be spread around among the 13 commission districts for members’ preferred projects.

Ford was also instrumental in deferring action on Mayor Harris’ proposal to raise the county wheel tax to finance work on Regional One as well as two new schools.

The bottom line is that work on an ambitious 2024 budget has been remanded into the future with a target date in mind of June 30th, the end of the current fiscal year.

With surprising unanimity, the commission approved a $3.39 tax rate, as well as a desire to establish a county civilian law-enforcement review board like those now operating in Memphis and Nashville city governments. The commission also gave conditional approval to the Election Commission’s wish to dispose of “useless” old voting machines, so long as significant information from them was retained. Commissioners also approved a $2.7 million budget item providing medical backup resources for the county specialty courts dealing with veterans, mental health, and drug issues. And it readies for future voting a matching proposal to provide psychiatric rehabilitation for prisoners deemed incompetent for trial.

Overall, the import of Monday’s commission meeting was that a lot of cans got kicked down the road. More of this anon.

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Turmoil at Capitol

Democrats in jeopardy: (from left) Justin Pearson, Gloria Johnson, Justin Jones (Photo: John Partipilo | Tennessee Lookout)

Not since the income tax riots of 2001 has the Tennessee state capitol building in Nashville seen such intensity. Monday’s session of the General Assembly, which included the introduction of resolutions in the House threatening the expulsion of three Democratic state representatives, concluded with the crowded galleries shouting epithets — including “fascists” — at members of the Republican supermajority.

Outside the capitol, worse things were being chanted by massive crowds at the expense of GOP Governor Bill Lee, who, like the Republican lawmakers, was faulted for inaction on gun safety following last week’s gun massacre at a Nashville Christian school.

“Eff Bill Lee!” the demonstrators chanted.

The three Democrats in jeopardy — representatives Gloria Johnson of Knoxville and Justin Jones of Nashville, along with Memphis first-termer Justin Pearson — had gone to the well of the House last Thursday, and, with the aid of bullhorns, encouraged protesters in the galleries to keep demanding action on guns.

A vote on expulsion of the three will probably take place Thursday, along with, equally probably, energetic new protests on their behalf and for gun-safety legislation.

• On Thursday this week, Chancellor JoeDae Jenkins will hold a status conference on suits by mayoral candidates Floyd Bonner and Van Turner against an apparent edict by the Shelby County Election Commission (SCEC) requiring five years of prior residence in Memphis for candidates.

Neither candidate could clear a strict interpretation of the SCEC’s edict, which is included on the Commission’s website via a link to an opinion from former Commission chair Robert Meyers.

Jenkins gave a preliminary ruling last Friday against the SCEC’s effort to include the city of Memphis as a co-respondent against the suits.

• There was some unprecedented attention given to the matter of county contracts at Monday’s public meeting of the Shelby County Commission, and it all started while the body was considering the meeting’s “consent agenda,” ordinarily regarded as routine and largely consisting of pre-screened items.

With Democratic member Britney Thornton in the lead and with fellow Democrats Erika Sugarmon and Henri Brooks, among others, taking part, members kept county financial officers and economic opportunity administrator Shep Wilbun in the well for more than an hour answering detailed questions about each and every contract up for a vote, including many that appeared to be essentially maintenance matters.

The two basic questions were: How many bids were there for the contract? And how many bidders were minority? In most cases there was an obvious and even enormous disparity in the two numbers, which was, of course, the point of the questioners.

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Michael Whaley: Mt. Everest Bound

Michael Whaley (Photo: Jackson Baker)

Anyone attending a meeting of the Shelby County Commission is bound to notice Michael Whaley, the Democrat who represents the newly reconfigured District 13, which slices through several sections of central and northeast Memphis.

Whaley is chairman of the commission’s budget and audit committees and has the vaguely clerkish look you might associate with such concerns. He does his homework on pretty much everything that comes before the commission, however, and can always be counted on to take part in discussions, whatever the subject, and often in great detail.

By profession, Whaley is an organizer of educational programs and institutions, and is principal of Memphis College Prep, a fact which gives him a solid continuing interest in all school matters.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, which would provide an observer a hint as to Whaley’s chief motivations as a private individual. He happens to be an adventurer par excellence, with ambitions and accomplishments far in advance of your average weekend outdoorsman.

Whaley has climbed to the top of a still-active volcano in the Congo to smell the sulfur in the world’s largest lava lake and has made his way into the interior of that country’s vast jungle in order to find and “get up close and personal” with the last remaining mountain gorillas there.

Like Tom Cochrane, he believes that “life is a highway” and intends to experience it “from Mozambique” — where he has scuba dived — to “Memphis nights” to wherever else he can find the out-of-the-way and unusual, the “unique destinations and alternative cultures of the earth.” He has explored the remotest places he can find, from Madagascar to New Zealand to the outbacks of South Africa.

It all began for Whaley when, 10 years ago, he went with his mother, a teacher, and father, a college administrator, to Burma (Myanmar) where his mother had been born. “It opened my eyes,” he recalls. The experience not only nourished his curiosity; it was a leading reason for his own choice of education as a career.

Whaley’s first serious climbing challenge came in 2006 when he and his then roommate went to Montana and climbed Mt. Helena. His most recent experience was hiking and fly-fishing in Colorado, which he concluded just before the convening of the new commission session.

Whaley makes it a point to travel to a different place every year. Newly married, he intends to take a Caribbean jaunt with his wife Lauren next. After that, he has in mind solo trips to such places as Tasmania and Antarctica. Those places will have to wait, though. First, Whaley will go to Tibet to take a shot at Mt. Everest, the tallest mountain in the world.

That is scheduled for the spring, when he will take a leave to join the Highland Expedition, the next organized assault on the summit of that famous edifice, all of 18,000 feet up. That’s well more than three miles high.

Whaley is sensible enough to realize that the summit itself may represent an insuperable challenge for him at this point, but he plans to go as high as he can. His climb will start with a trek in the company of Sherpas (Tibetan natives who assist climbers) to the mountain’s base camp, which is a high destination in itself.

From there? “The toughest part is in getting through the glacier,” says Whaley, who has researched the matter in some depth. One of the ordeals to come will involve tipping a ladder horizontally across an abyss, a mile or two up, and walking across it to safety wearing spiked shoes.

Merely consider that for a moment or two. And consider what it must be like to be Michael Whaley and routinely take on such challenges in his spare time. Not for him the easy chair and a soft season of watching the NFL on TV.

It’s enough to make the commission work, with all of its demanding obligations, seemingly endless six-hour sessions, spirited and sometimes baleful exchanges, and not inconsiderable arcana, pale into relative insignificance by comparison.

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Still Party Time?

Worth Morgan (Photo: Jackson Baker)

Not too long ago, Republicans held a one-vote majority on the Shelby County Commission. Then, for a spell beginning in the mid-aughts, it was on the slim end of a 7-6 ratio — still a force. As of 2018, the ratio became eight Democrats to five Republicans, and the “gentlemen’s agreement,” whereby the parties would swap chairmanships year by year, was allowed to lapse. If the Democrats win all of the contested races remaining to be settled in August, as they are favored to do, the ratio will be 9 to 4.

Though pendulum shifts of a sort will possibly continue, the general trend is clear. Assuming the continuation of partisan elections for county offices — begun under GOP auspices in 2002 — Election Year 2022 is almost a last-stand occasion for the Shelby County GOP as an electoral force, countywide.

By general consent, the big race on the ballot is that for District Attorney General, where Republican incumbent Amy Weirich, running as “Our D.A.,” hopes to continue for another eight years.

The thrust of Weirich’s strategy is made plain by that self-description. In what is a throwback of sorts to the days of Democratic dominance in the state, she chose, in a signal event last week, to downplay her party identification. This was at a Republican Party unity rally at the Grove in Cordova, in which Todd Payne, the party’s nominee for the Commission’s District 5, played something of a host’s role.

Following remarks by Worth Morgan, the Republican nominee for county mayor, who himself struck a basically bipartisan note, Weirich began, “I’m going to say something that may offend you. I don’t want your vote just because I have ‘Republican’ by my name.” Voters, like elected officials, should think in bipartisan terms.

Stressing the issues of public safety and economic development, Morgan also minimized partisanship: “You have to be able to bring all those different divisions of county government together, including the state, including the Memphis Police Department, which has a major role to play, and sit down at the table and work through those issues.”

In short, the Republican Party needed a “reach-out” strategy to become again what, in theory, it had been for much of the previous two decades — the governing party of Shelby County.

In an interview after his remarks at the rally, Morgan pledged to pursue a policy of “transparency” and to hold regular press conferences — something he said the Democratic incumbent, Lee Harris, had been “negligent” about. And he promised to process “without resistance or delay” any press or public requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

To regain something resembling its former footing, the Republicans need strong showings in other remaining contested positions on the August ballot besides the high-profile ones. Besides Payne in Cordova, who opposes Democrat Shante Avant, another determined GOP candidate for the commission is businessman Ed Apple, who opposes incumbent Democrat Michael Whaley in District 13.

At the opening last week of the Midtown headquarters he shares with trustee candidate Steve Basar, Apple mused, “One thing that struck me early on when I was going through the hoops to kickstart this race, was that it was binary: ‘You Republican or Democrat?’ Yeah. Can’t run as an Independent. It really bothered me that people I spoke with didn’t understand what stirred my soul and what made me decide yes. And the main reason was: This is about Memphis. This has nothing to do with Democrat or Republican.”

That’s the rhetoric, anyhow, but the reality is that county elections, for the time being, are still partisan ones, and, like it or not, the two parties are on the line, not just the candidates. And the GOP is up against it.

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The County Commission’s New Map

Source: Shelby County Government

Although various rules of parliamentary order caused Monday’s special called meeting of the Shelby County Commission to open by fits and starts, the needed result, a final vote on commission redistricting, was achieved with relative dispatch. But that was after — in order — a commission meeting, an adjournment, a meeting of the general government committee, another adjournment, and a final commission meeting.

Still and all, it got done, and on the November 9th deadline set by the Election Commission. Accommodations were made via amendment to oblige commissioners from Germantown and Collierville. Some precincts were shifted around in the area of East Memphis and western Germantown so as to keep incumbents Brandon Morrison, a Republican, and Michael Whaley, a Democrat, from having to run in the same district.

Morrison has a district to herself, though it is fundamentally changed from the old District 13 she has represented — a conglomerate of largely East Memphis precincts. She objected last week that too many precincts from her original district were being shifted to District 4, essentially the Germantown district.

In the amended version, those precincts are still moved east. But at least her own home precinct, the one she lives in, has moved along with them. District 4, containing a reliably Republican voting base, is now her district to run in, for better or for worse.

District 5, Whaley’s designation in the old configuration, has become a brand-new district consisting essentially of Cordova (the creation of a Cordova district being one of the stated aims of Commissioner Van Turner and other members of the Commission majority).

The district Whaley inhabits, meanwhile, renumbered as District 13, is still situated at the junction, more or less, of East Memphis, Midtown, and Binghampton, and its population is presumed to be majority-Democratic, as his old district was.

If the interested parties did not get all of what they wanted, they may have gotten the best of what was possible.

Among the several parliamentary maneuvers pursued during this important but relatively brief commission meeting was a last-ditch effort by Morrison to get a previously discarded map (known for its original sponsor, District 2 Republican David Bradford of Collierville, as “the Bradford map”) up for a vote.

In the amended map, Bradford had gotten the return of the Collierville High School precinct from its earlier proposed relocation in District 12. But he and Morrison evidently felt obliged, for the record, to get a more idealized version of their hopes up for a vote.

They did, but “Map 4,” as it was entitled, unsupported by any precinct data, went down to defeat predictably, with only 5 votes, only those of the commission’s Republicans, supporting it. (In the debate over Map 4, Democrat Tami Sawyer charged that the map had been shaped by Brian Stephens of Caissa Public Strategy, a conservative-oriented consulting firm.)

The final vote for the amended redistricting map, a version of the CC4A3 map voted on last week, was 8-5, with Democrat Edmund Ford Jr. joining four Republicans as naysayers. The approved map will probably yield nine Democrats and four Republicans in the next elected commission.