Tag: Shelby County Commission

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News News Blog

Recently Passed UDC Amendments Bring Hope to Tattoo Artist

On Tuesday, July 17th, the Memphis City Council voted unanimously in favor of amending the city’s Unified Development Code (UDC). The new amendments will bring forth various changes to the code’s stance on development and zoning in the city. But the changes must be approved by the Shelby County Commission before the revised development code can take effect.

One such change affects aspiring tattoo shop owners, palm readers, psychics, fortune tellers, and massage parlors who desire to open businesses in the Commercial Mixed Use (CMU-1) zoning areas. While those businesses are currently forbidden from opening in CMU-1 zoning areas, the amended code will allow them to apply for a conditional use permit to do so.

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Tattoo artist Babak Tabatabai is breathing a large sigh of relief after the council’s decision. In November, Tabatabai signed a lease to open a tattoo shop and art gallery on Broad Avenue. After investing nearly $30,000 in the building and its remodeling, he received a rude awakening from the Historic Broad Business Association that the district was not zoned to allow tattoo shops.

He applied for a zoning variance to open the shop, but it was denied during a public hearing held at City Hall in March. Since then, his business has been at a standstill, but the new UDC amendments passed Tuesday could help change that.

“It’s hard to describe my reaction when I heard the results,” Tabatabai said, who attended the council meeting. “I wasn’t expecting it to go through. I was mostly relieved that I didn’t have to move all my stuff somewhere else. No matter what would have happened at this location, I think [the $30,000] would have never been lost anyway. They say it’s no lesson lost. It would have been a really expensive lesson, but it still would have been one that I could have learned something from. Now it has become even better.”

The next step is a second reading and public hearing on the changes at the Shelby County Commission on July 30th. The commission’s third reading is scheduled for August 13th.

If everything goes well, Tabatabai plans to apply for the Conditional Use Permit in August. He hopes to have his shop open by September. Named Ronin Design & Manufacturing, it will be a tattoo shop, art gallery, and design firm.

“Everybody on the street has a different opinion about tattoo shops, but the official position from the Broad Avenue Business Association is that we support what the process says,” said Pat Brown, vice president of the Historic Broad Business Association in regard to the recent UDC changes. “We never stated that we were against tattoos. That was never the case. Now that the entire UDC has been changed, we’ll support whatever that process is.”

Chooch Pickard, executive director for the Memphis Regional Design Center, was a part of the UDC stakeholders. The group worked with Josh Whitehead, planning director for the Memphis & Shelby County Office of Planning and Development, to come up with compromises on the amendments.

Pickard said he’s “90 percent happy with how things turned out,” regarding the code’s amendments.

“We weren’t wholesale against [the amendments] by any means,” Pickard said. “We actually were in favor of the majority of them, but we had a number of items that we took issue with. I think the Conditional Use Permit is a better option than just allowing tattoo shops outright, because that gives the neighborhood an opportunity to give their voice and perhaps put some limitations on hours of operation and things like that.”

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Opinion

Schools: Is It 1973 Again?

CREDIT: Steve Davis

Samuel H. Mays Jr.

  • Samuel H. Mays Jr.

The short answer is “no” but there sure are some interesting parallels.

In 1973 and 1974, some 30,000 students left the Memphis public school system in white flight in reaction to court-ordered busing for integration. In 2013, some 30,000 students could leave the “unified” Shelby County schools to attend new municipal school systems, if the voters approve and the courts allow the establishment of such systems.

White flight cut the enrollment of MCS from 148,000 students to about 120,000 students. Five or six municipal school systems would cut the enrollment of the unified system from about 148,000 students to about 120,000 students.

A federal judge in Memphis is once again at the center of the story that is getting national as well as local attention. In 1973 it was Robert McRae — a Central High School graduate and Lyndon Johnson appointee who wore a red judicial robe and was capable of flashes of temper and impatience from the bench. In retirement, he joked that he was Central’s most famous graduate since Machine Gun Kelly. Now the judge of the hour is Samuel H. Mays, a White Station High School graduate and George H. W. Bush appointee whose low-key courtroom mannerisms are often as folksy and wry as they are wise.

Mays wrote last year’s order and consent decree on the schools merger and now faces a Shelby County Commission challenge to the scheduled August 2nd referendum on municipal schools. His ruling on “ripeness” last year invited such a challenge at a later date, and that time has come.

Mays, I believe, is the perfect person for the job. He graduated from White Station in 1966, smack in the middle of the one-grade-a-year desegregation plan that was scrapped in favor of busing. He is a graduate of Yale Law School in 1973, and had to have been aware of what was happening in his hometown and his high school alma mater. Most important, he has experience in the rough-and-tumble world of state politics as chief of staff for former Tennessee Gov. Don Sundquist.

Robert McRae

  • Steve Davis
  • Robert McRae

McRae kept a box of hate mail that he drew upon when completing his nine-part oral history for the Mississippi Valley Collection at the University of Memphis. I don’t know this for a fact, but I doubt that Mays gets much if any hate mail; he is rarely criticized in the thousands of online comments on schools stories I have seen.

I spent several hours interviewing McRae in his retirement. He was not a man to shirk a task, but he was a somewhat reluctant history maker and fully aware of the consequences of busing.

“I tried to stop with Plan A but the appeals court wouldn’t allow that,” he said in 1995. “I was disappointed in the reaction to Plan Z. But I had to keep a stiff upper lip because this [reaction] was an act of defiance. Still I was disappointed that we hadn’t come up with something that worked.

“No, I wouldn’t do it any other way. I am convinced there was nobody who could have settled this the way the parties were opposed. Somewhere along the line I became convinced that it was morally right to desegregate the schools.”

Plan Z, of course, was the “terminal” school desegregation plan, so named because McRae (who ate his own cooking by sending his children to Memphis public schools) didn’t want a succession of plans “A” through “Y.” But it was forever associated with one of its authors, MCS employee O.Z Stephens, who told me years later that “my identification with Plan Z killed me professionally in the school system.” His son David works for Shelby County Schools and has attended all of the meetings of the transition team and school board.

The senior Stephens thought busing was a disaster and has predicted that MCS charter surrender could also have dire consequences, but he is anything but a suburban firebrand or hater. He gave his working life to MCS and greatly respected both McRae and Willie Herenton, the superintendent during much of his tenure. McRae, he said, was “as easy on the school system and the city as he could possibly have been” and a less courageous judge could have passed the whole mess on to the appeals court.

For these and other reasons I am still somewhat hopeful about the schools merger. Pure conjecture on my part, but I suspect Mays is exercising as much judicial restraint as possible and well knows the limitations of a court-ordered “solution” to school desegregation and school system unification. He will let the political process play out as long as he can.

My attention span is not long, and I would rather walk on hot coals than sit through a five-hour meeting. But there is something positive and substantial in the Transition Planning Commission and, especially, the unified 23-member school board, even though it is not long for this world. Old white folks from the ‘burbs sit next to young black folks from Memphis, old black folks from the city sit next to young white folks from the suburbs; they look and listen, and speak their minds publicly. It’s hard to hate someone you’re sitting next to that long. John Aitken sits next to Kriner Cash and they occasionally share a private joke. Martavius Jones and David Pickler have probably spent more time together over the last two years than some spouses.

For this to transcend symbolism, both sides will have to compromise. The procedural shenanigans must end. We’re on the clock. MCS gave up its charter. Actions have consequences. I’m an Aitken fan, but that may be too much to ask, as even he knows, and he says he would willingly serve as an assistant superintendent. If Cash gets the job and really wants it, then I’m a Cash fan because I live in Memphis and want the city to prosper and personal differences don’t mean crap and I don’t believe in miracle-worker superintendents or 11th-hour national searches and Cash has the benefit of experience and knows the lay of the land.

Segregation is not the right word for what the muni’s are seeking. Legal segregation was the law in Robert McRae’s youth. Integration was the driving national force in Hardy Mays’ youth. Resegregation or de-facto segregation (and voluntary integration) is the driving force in Memphis (and many other big cities) in our time. But the suburban schools are not segregated in either a numerical way or a legal way, as the county commission’s filing this week states. There are certainly all-black schools. Southwind High School, which is almost all black, is the one I keep coming back to in my columns because it was such a calculated move when it was approved by the city and county school boards as a joint project. Federal Judge Bernice Donald almost forced the issue five years ago but she was overruled on appeal.

The next thunderbolt from federal court will have to account for the underlying factors that gave us a Southwind High School as well as, potentially, municipal schools. I think it has to come sooner rather than later. Ripe.

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Opinion

Schools Merger Up to Judge Mays Now

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No guns, no sex, no stolen cash, no cops. Just a stack of holiday homework for U.S. District Judge Samuel H. Mays that may be the most important federal court case in Memphis in decades.

All of the parties in the schools merger case filed their final briefs on Thursday, setting the stage for Mays to decide when and how the Memphis City Schools and Shelby County Schools will be consolidated. The question of “if” seems moot since everyone agrees it’s going to happen sooner or later.

There are seven players in the game. Their briefs total 180 pages, plus a few hundred pages of supporting exhibits. Not exactly a full-employment act for lawyers, but a pretty good lick. Judge Mays says he will make a ruling with dispatch.

Here is a summary of the final positions. At stake: the future of two school systems with roughly 150,000 students, one (Memphis City Schools) overwhelmingly poor and black, average ACT score 16.6, and one (Shelby County Schools) majority middle-class and affluent and racially mixed, average ACT score 21.

The legalistic blah-blah about special school districts is not mere semantics. The underlying issue is who gets the bill for paying for MCS, which has a 2011 budget of $1,196,364,127. Presently, 6% comes from the city of Memphis, 30% from Shelby County, 38% from the state, 21% from federal government, and 5% from other local sources. The city council wants to get out from under the financial obligation but has booked a 18-cent property tax hike just in case. When the systems are consolidated it is possible that there will be one countywide tax for schools, not a separate tax in Memphis in addition to the county tax.

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News The Fly-By

Keep It Simple

Temperatures are soaring in the mid-90s on Friday afternoon, and there’s nary a soul near Patriot Lake in Shelby Farms — unless you count a gaggle of geese.

I’m riding shotgun in a biodiesel-powered Volkswagen Bug driven by Laura Adams, deputy director of Shelby Farms Park Conservancy. Adams is giving me a tour and telling me what the park will look like once the changes outlined in design firm Field Operations’ plan are implemented.

At a meeting earlier this week, the Shelby County Commission approved the plan, which will create 12 park landscapes (like an “art mound” and a wildlife refuge) and plant a million trees.

Our first stop is Patriot Lake. It’s void of people now, but in the cooler evening hours, walkers and rollerbladers will fill the lake’s sidewalks while kayakers play boat ball on the large man-made lake.

“Patriot Lake will continue to be the heart of the park,” Adams says. “The plan calls for expanding recreational opportunities at Patriot Lake. The lake itself will be extended further west into the buffalo pasture. The buffalo will just move further over.”

Adams says an expanded Patriot Lake will allow for more competitive watersports, such as regattas. The plan also calls for a beach.

County commissioner Steve Mulroy suggested the park allow swimming near the beach area in order to attract park users from across the city.

Adjacent to Patriot Lake is Plough Park, a picnic area. Adams says Field Operations’ plan would only make modest improvements to Plough Park’s existing facilities, such as new playground equipment and shelters.

On the northern edge of Plough Park, Adams parks her car and we walk toward the amphitheatre. The octagonal wooden stage and surrounding wooden benches were built in the mid-’70s and suffer from natural wear-and-tear.

“It’s not used all that often now, but the plan calls for sprucing it up and making it more user-friendly,” Adams says.

Back in Adams’ car, we pass several man-made lakes, all of which are much smaller than Patriot Lake.

“The plan will improve hydrology in the park. When the lakes were built, they were designed with sloughs that carried water to the upland lakes. Some of that network is no longer working,” Adams says.

When we reach Mullins Station Road on the far eastern edge of the park, Adams points out the new Shelby Park subdivision across the street. It’s located along the planned greenway trail.

“The plan has provisions for more picnic and playground areas on this side of the park to service these neighborhoods,” Adams says.

As we pass the Agricenter, Adams says the future Shelby Farms Park will utilize as much alternative energy, such as solar and wind, as possible.

The preliminary Field Operations plan called for a Shelby Farms School where other government buildings are located. But Adams says the master plan does not include a school. Instead, it calls for the park to expand opportunities for workshops on environmental and health education.

Perhaps most important, the plan will make getting into and out of the park easier for bikers and pedestrians.

“Getting into the park has been a barrier for some people,” Adams says. “There’s been no way to get a bike into the park without a car, and there’s no public transportation into the park. The plan addresses that by utilizing the existing greenways surrounding the park.”

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Politics Politics Feature

Bank Shots

At some point during Monday’s regular public meeting of the Shelby County Commission, one of several petitioners for this or that largesse suggested that what the commission could do for the greater community would be to serve as a bridge over the existing gap between haves and have-nots.

That set off Commissioner Wyatt Bunker, who several weeks back warned of creeping “Marxism” and this time saw yet another leveling mechanism at work. “That’s not what we do,” he said.

Whether Bunker liked it or not, that’s what the commission did on Monday. Indeed, the body functioned like nothing so much as the board of directors of a taxpayer-funded bank, ruling thumbs up here (as in funding the bond issue for a University of Memphis-area commercial development) and thumbs down there (in declining to reconsider a black-owned firm’s proposal for a school-construction contract), while hedging its judgments on two other contested matters involving public money.

On those latter two matters: The commission forgave a $1 million loan to the Memphis Rock ‘N Soul Museum after forcing its director to make concessions on limited free admissions for students and Shelby Countians at large; it also tentatively released the first component of a community development grant in the LeMoyne-Owen College area, hinging the deal on what looked to be a pro forma follow-up by the office of county mayor A C Wharton.

(The commission’s decision to defer to Wharton to ensure that the LeMoyne-Owen project’s finances turned out to be in order made an interesting contrast to the cityside situation, where an ambitious new council is unlikely to cede any additional authority to an already impressively powered Mayor Willie Herenton. (See this week’s Viewpoint)

Undeniably, political considerations crept into the essentially financial decisions made by the commission on Monday. As an example: Pressure for the Highland Street TIF (tax-increment financing) proposal from the University of Memphis and its boosters has been formidable indeed, and Commissioner Mike Ritz, who for weeks has been the major holdout on that particular TIF, pleaded in vain that, in the strict sense of the term, no “blight” (obligatory under the terms of the grant) really existed on the strip.

Later, when Jeffrey Higgs, executive director of the LeMoyne-Owen College Community Development Corporation, was making the case for his own project, he made a point of looking Ritz’s way and insisting that “real blight” was to be seen in his territory. A smiling Ritz pointed back, signaling his agreement.

Ultimately, the only holdout on the LeMoyne-Owen project was Bunker, who, apropos several of the commission’s judgments — past, present, and, presumably, future — lamented that the body seemed to have become a charitable institution: “We save colleges, we save museums, we save roller coasters … ”

In protest, Bunker attempted to halt deliberations on the LeMoyne-Owen project by invoking the dread Rule 33, whereby any member can ask for an automatic two-week deferral on an agenda item. For a variety of reasons having to do with federal deadlines, that would probably kill the project, responded county financial officer Jim Huntzicker. Presumably in order to keep peace with his commission mates (Deidre Malone had been heard to remark, concerning the future of Rule 33, “I’m going to get rid of that!”), Bunker ultimately relented.

A purely political judgment of sorts is finally what thwarted the hopes of the black-owned Salton-Fox Construction Company for restoration of its contracting role in a $50 million school-construction project. Henri Brooks, usual champion of African-American causes, withheld what would have been her decisive “yes” vote on grounds that to give it would be to provide cover for the company’s role as a mere “front” for a white-owned enterprise. “I’m going to call it out,” she said.

(Salton-Fox, apparently now exonerated of complicity, had first found itself in the crosshairs when it was identified as the donor of campaign contributions to public officials in connection with the case of former commissioner Bruce Thompson, now under federal indictment for extortion and scheduled to be tried in March.)

The commission’s last act on Monday was both political and financial. By an 8-3 vote (dissenters were Herenton allies Malone, Brooks, and Sidney Chism), the commission approved Commissioner Steve Mulroy‘s resolution insisting on January 31st as an absolute deadline for Bass Pro Shop to put up or shut up on its bid for The Pyramid. (See “In the Bluff,” p. 10.)

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Editorial Opinion

Undoing the Lockbox

When a state legislative committee, spearheaded by Memphis legislator Ulysses Jones, first proposed amending Tennessee’s Open Meetings Act some weeks ago to permit some unattended private discussions among public officials, there was a hue and cry from points

across the political spectrum. With prosecutions and other publicized misdeeds of officeholders still fresh memories and with polls and other indicators showing the prestige of legislators — local, state, and national — to be at an all-time low, how could Tennesseans be expected to stand for shutting the doors on public scrutiny?

Yet when not-much-push came to not-much-shove, the members of the Shelby County Commission backed the proposed liberalization to the hilt. In an 11-0 vote Monday, commissioners endorsed the idea of amending the state law to permit private discussions among members of city councils, county commissions, school boards, and other public bodies, so long as the number of officials participating fell short of an official quorum.

No commissioner — not one — would carry a brief for the current law, which, as unamended, prohibits private discussions among groups of two or more. (As an illustration of the absurdity of so complete and literal a prohibition, one commissioner was prepared to offer another a ride back to his office after Monday’s meeting was over but then thought to suggest, only half-facetiously, that the two would need to ask a reporter to come along for the ride.) Of the two commissioners who did not vote aye for the amendment proposal, one, Mike Ritz, was absent but had previously voted for it in committee, while the other, James Harvey, merely abstained on the ground that he owed it to his constituents to survey their opinions more completely.

Commissioner Steve Mulroy, who usually finds himself walking a tightrope between the views of his fellow Democrats (for whom he has often served as the decisive vote in 7-6 party-line situations) and those of his mixed district’s constituency at large, spoke convincingly for the amendment, and he was joined on this occasion by two voices which, in wholly disparate mode and manner, normally speak for the commission’s Republicans. After noting that he was “not at all in favor of secret government,” Chairman David Lillard said the current law was an obstacle to the needs of constituents because, among other things, it prevented one commissioner from filling in another on pending issues which the latter may have missed on first hearing. More importantly, said Lillard, the law can actually “sideline … the most effective advocates” for constituents who have petitioned their own representatives for specific forms of relief.

Wyatt Bunker, who sees himself as a conservative’s conservative, agreed. The current law “hinders the process,” he said.

So far, so good. But, as Lillard also noted after Monday’s meeting was over, the law, as amended, might require honing by way of further amendment. “I think there are situations, such as the election of officials to fill vacancies, on which it might be desirable to limit contact,” he said.

Hopefully, that doesn’t mean that the lockbox, once loosened, doesn’t turn into a Pandora’s box of unforeseen consequences.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Politics and Rule 33

The election in 2006 of a new and, thanks to term limits, almost completely overhauled, Shelby County Commission led to a plethora of ad hoc committees, new regulations, what-have-you. Two of the new rules deserve special mention.

One is the so-called “Mulroy Rule” named after first-term commissioner Steve Mulroy, a lawyer, who proposed it by way of streamlining the parliamentary aspects of commission business. The old protocol had it that members seeking recognition from the chair would be called on in the order of their requests, regardless of the subject matter. The Mulroy Rule gives the chairman discretion to vary that order in the interests of a commissioner who seeks recognition for a point previously covered in the discussion but still pending.

Another new one is Rule 33, so called for its place in the revised bylaw sequence. This one is even more innovative, in that it allows for a commissioner to ask for and get a two-week deferral on any item, so long as the commissioner seeking the deferral has not been granted one on that item previously. Given the well-known complications of Roberts’ Rules, the new rule has often proved to be a convenient piece of streamlining.

It has also served once or twice as a means, for better or for worse, of circumventing an action about to be taken by the commission as a whole. So it was on Monday, when Rule 33 was invoked by Commissioner Mike Ritz to defer a resolution to appropriate $1 million to the Memphis Chamber Foundation. The money would be used to fund a plethora of local organizations and other beneficiaries in the interests of “facilitation of economic development in Memphis and Shelby County.”

And that was a no-no in the eyes of a couple of commissioners, notably Henri Brooks and Sidney Chism, the latter a well-known political broker during election seasons. In the last few weeks, Brooks has carried the brunt of a battle against the resolution, noting that one of the proposed beneficiaries was the local group Mpact, which over the years has involved itself in political issues, though not especially in advocacy of this or that candidate. New Path, another organization not included in the grant, does play politics in the direct sense, however, and normally endorses slates of candidates at election time.

There happens to be a modest overlap of membership between the governing boards of the two organizations, and that was enough to prove antagonistic to Brooks and her commission ally Chism, who prefers to push candidates of his own choosing, sans benefit of county funds. In committee hearings, therefore, Brooks managed to attach conditions utterly forbidding the use of county-appropriated money for overtly political purposes.

There ensued objections to the objections, however, and efforts to parse the issue a bit more proved fruitless. The matter got so tangled that a frustrated and/or confused Ritz moved for a deferral. When that motion was defeated, he shrugged and invoked Rule 33, which meant that the resolution got deferred anyway.

Perhaps the two weeks’ respite will allow the commissioners to unravel the controversy and arrive at a satisfactory compromise. If so, the odd but promising Rule 33 might become a precedent for other local bodies.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

A Clean-Up, Not a Burial

In an 11-0 vote, the Shelby County Commission recently passed an ordinance regulating “sexually oriented businesses” (the aptly named S.O.B.s). While most will say it’s about time, civil libertarians might worry about a New Puritanism. Fear not: This is not some Moral Majority crusade to Disney-fy Memphis but a relatively moderate regulation to weed the industry of a few bad apples.

Secondary effects: Throughout the County Commission’s discussion of this ordinance, I stressed that it is not our place to shut down all adult businesses based on our moral disapproval. Instead, we must regulate such businesses to narrowly target what the courts call their “secondary effects” — increasing crime and decreasing property values in surrounding areas.

We know such secondary effects are here in Memphis, as evidenced by the studies prepared and compiled by the national experts we hired.

Background checks: The new ordinance is provided under state law as a model for counties to adopt. It says adult-business owners and employees must get an operating license. The license will involve a background check to ensure that within recent years they haven’t committed certain crimes associated with S.O.B.s — prostitution, public indecency, rape, exploitation of minors, etc. If an owner or employee commits such a crime, their license is revoked for five years.

County consultant Eric Kelly, an Austin, Texas-based national expert on these issues, has worked on similar ordinances throughout the country. He’s told us that in cities with such laws, most S.O.B.s continue to operate but in compliance with the law. Businesses that base their profits on prostitution and other illegal activities fall by the wayside. The intent here is not to ban all S.O.B.s but to make them behave themselves.

That’s not to say the ordinance is perfect. A few doubts nag.

Alcohol: First, the model ordinance bans alcohol at S.O.B.s. Not even “brown bagging” is allowed. Reasonable people can disagree about the wisdom of this provision, but my vote was influenced by some practical and legal realities.

All S.O.B.s in Shelby County are in the city of Memphis. Once the county adopted the state-supplied model S.O.B. ordinance, it applies, by default, inside Memphis, unless the city adopts its own new law. If the county removed the liquor ban or changed any other part of the model law, it could not apply inside Memphis, making our action almost meaningless.

At the same time, my consultations with City Council members made me think it likely the city would adopt its own ordinance, likely one without the liquor ban. In such a case, the county’s ordinance could serve as a useful “backstop” to the city’s. That is, S.O.B. operators mulling a court challenge to the city ordinance might think twice before doing so, since invalidating the city law would only result in the tougher county ordinance automatically becoming effective inside Memphis.

Kelly tells us the alcohol ban needn’t kill all adult businesses in Memphis. Instead, it will force S.O.B.s to change their business model so they don’t rely on liquor sales for their profits, as S.O.B.s in other cities have done. But if the City Council wishes, it can enact its own ordinance allowing alcohol.

Bookstores: The ordinance regulates all adult bookstores the same as strip clubs, even bookstores without private booths for viewing porn and engaging in sex acts. Since adult bookstores without the infamous booths have less of a connection to secondary effects and more of a First Amendment argument that they promote “speech” rather than “conduct,” I am sponsoring a resolution encouraging the sheriff to enforce this law only on those bookstores with “on-site viewing.”

Zoning: Finally, the ordinance fails to address the problem of long-established S.O.B.s operating in residential areas (rather than the industrial-zoned areas where they belong), simply because they were grandfathered in under our zoning laws. To address this problem, I am sponsoring land-use code changes which would remove such grandfather protections for businesses that violate the S.O.B. ordinance. Over the long term, we want adult businesses in industrial zones, not residential ones.

Our new ordinance comes not to bury adult businesses but to clean them up. It’s one that neither Jerry Falwell nor Larry Flynt would like, which is fine by me.

Shelby County commissioner Steve Mulroy is a professor of law at the University of Memphis, where he teaches constitutional law, including First Amendment issues.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Courting Collegiality

Having previously editorialized in favor of a second Juvenile Court judgeship, we have no objection to the outcome of Monday’s 8-5 vote by the Shelby County Commission — a party-line vote except for Republican commissioner Mike Carpenter’s persuasive presence on the prevailing side — to move in that direction.

But we are not unsympathetic to the complaint of several GOP members that party politics played too large a role in the proceedings — especially in the way the judgeship issue was rushed up by the commission’s new Democratic majority in the immediate wake of last year’s election. The hastiness of their action was clearly a reaction to the victory of current Judge Curtis Person, a longtime Republican eminence in the legislature. (It is everybody’s expectation that the appointed second judge, if it comes to it, will be former U.S. attorney Veronica Coleman, whose background is Democratic and who ran second to Person in a multi-candidate race.)

It is not quite accurate for Commissioner Deidre Malone, a Democrat and the prime mover behind the winning resolution, to respond to Republican complaints, as she did Monday, by protesting that she herself had served four years on the short end of a 7-6 partisan split the other way. She had no closer ally on that prior body than former Commissioner Bruce Thompson, a Republican whose ideology was conspicuously right-of-center. Indeed, the shabby cloth-covered red chair she now uniquely occupies is a vestige of Malone’s having followed Thompson’s lead in resisting, on cost-conscious grounds, the new leather chairs accepted without complaint by other commissioners.

That openness to collaboration on Malone’s part extended to substantive matters, not just cosmetic ones. Just as she and Thompson waged a common struggle against pell-mell development, she and former Commissioner John Willingham, a maverick Republican, often found themselves on the same side of taxation issues. Race and party and the other famous political divides rarely seemed to be primary motivations — either for Malone or for the rest of her colleagues back then.

They are now — as typified by Commissioner Sidney Chism’s passionate and no doubt sincere declaration that, for him as an African American, the court change voted on Monday was in the interests of “people who look like me, walk like me, and talk like me.” And by the insistence of Commissioner Henri Brooks on hauling newly installed Judge Person before the commission like some juvenile offender himself, as well as her demand, prior to any definitive demonstration of wrongdoing, that the court be the subject of a Justice Department investigation.

Much more like it was the commission’s 12-1 vote Monday to go ahead with a previously proposed $50,000 study of court procedures. Maybe, as GOP commissioner Joyce Avery, the lone holdout, protested, it was “cart before the horse,” but, as everyone knows, a court challenge to the court change is in order, and it surely won’t hurt to do some serious and collegial thinking about the future structure of Juvenile Court, whether or not the horse goes back into the stable in the meantime.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Person States His Case

Much attention has been paid of late to a move on the Shelby County Commission to establish a second Juvenile Court judge who would operate alongside the newly elected and installed judge, Curtis Person, in some way that has not yet been fully specified.

A majority of eight members of the commission — the seven majority Democrats, plus Republican commissioner Mike Carpenter — voted to create the new judgeship, but, when Person began legal efforts to block its implementation, Commissioner Deidre Malone, who had made the proposal, withdrew it temporarily in order to give it a legal and technical vetting. It is sure to return to the agenda, however, and indications are that the proposal will receive at least the same number of votes as last time.

Meanwhile, a new issue has been raised by three Democratic commissioners who support the new judgeship: Malone, Sidney Chism, and Henri Brooks have called for a federal investigation of Juvenile Court for allegedly allowing authorities in Germantown and Bartlett to route youthful offenders into diversion programs not available to inner-city youth.

“The court has been operating separate programs for suburban juveniles at taxpayer expense and in violation of Federal and State anti-discrimination laws,” the three commissioner charged, going on to say: “We are appalled at the disparate treatment of African-American children and families. It begs the question, ‘Who is making policy at Juvenile Court and are there any attorneys or others there with even a fundamental knowledge of anti-discrimination laws and the illegality of separate and unequal practices?'”

The three commissioners then asked for a shutdown on federal funds to Juvenile Court, pending the results of their proposed investigation.

In a speech to the downtown Rotary Club on Tuesday, Person took advantage of the opportunity to rebut the commissioners’ basic charge. While he had no objection to youth-services bureaus operated by the two suburban municipalities, he agreed with the objecting commissioners that Juvenile Court has been bypassed as the central authority and should not have been. He said he had so informed municipal authorities in Germantown and Bartlett: “The issue is the law. They must follow the law.”

Person also did his best also to counter the case for a second judge. It is true, he acknowledged, that Shelby County’s Juvenile Court system — consisting of both an administrative and a judicial division and obliged to handle child-support matters as well — is overburdened. But creating a second judge would not solve and might even worsen the problem by confusing lines of authority, Person argued. The remedy, he said, was not in altering the current judicial structure, whereby one elected judge assigns cases to referees for trial. “We’re all functioning at 75 percent of capacity,” he told the Rotarians. The problem, he said, was lack of sufficient funding to arrange for more caseworkers and contract lawyers to get backlogged cases to trial.

Person’s bottom-line case: The issue is not one of black-and-white — in any sense of the term. It was good, in any case, to hear the current judge’s views.