Tag: Shelby County Commission

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In Preliminary Vote, County Commission Says No to Nonpartisan Mandate

State Rep. Tom Leatherwood

Back in 1992, the Shelby County Republican Party, under its then new chairman Phil Langsdon, resolved to put a move on the Democrats and petitioned the local Election Commission to have a Republican primary for the offices of Assessor and General Sessions Clerk, the two countywide offices scheduled for that year’s election.

Up to that point, races for all the county offices required by the state constitution or county charter were nonpartisan, and coalitions of candidates’ supporters could and did cross all kinds of party and ideological lines at election time.

Unofficial estimates of party affiliation favored Republicans at the time, and the local GOP wanted to take advantage of the fact while there was still time, before ongoing population shifts created an African-American majority in the county, one inevitably inclined to be heavily Democratic. (An emergent African-American majority in Memphis had just elected Willie Herenton, the city’s first Black mayor.)

The GOP got its primary, and its nominees easily won the two races on the ballot that year, running against incumbents without party labels. In 1994, with a fuller roster of county offices on the ballot, the GOP held another primary, and its nominees swept the general election against independent candidates and candidates “endorsed,” but not officially nominated, by the county’s Democrats.

That was enough to cause the Democrats to resolve thenceforth on partisan primaries of their own for countywide office, and ever since, both parties have conducted primaries for all county offices.

Though many local Republicans began to worry that their party was pressing its luck, the GOP’s momentum was such that it even carried the party’s candidates past the 2010 census, when the long-foreseen ethnic population shift occurred in the county at large. Republicans swept that year’s county offices, too, and continued to do well vis-a-vis Democratic nominees in the next several countywide elections.

Things changed big-time with the “blue wave” election of 2018, won resoundingly by Democrats over their Republican counterparts. And in the 2020 election just concluded, the pattern of Democratic demographic superiority resoundingly repeated itself.

One result was House Bill 1280, introduced in the Tennessee General Assembly this year by District 99 state Representative Tom Leatherwood. The bill would require that “in any county with a population greater than five hundred thousand (500,000), according to the 2010 federal census or any subsequent federal census, regardless of the form of government, elections for all offices that are elected in a countywide election and elections for the legislative body must be nonpartisan.” The bill also mandates nonpartisan elections for judicial offices in counties so populated.

It will be observed that only two Tennessee counties have populations that large and would be affected — Shelby and Davidson (Nashville), the same two counties that, by similar mathematical pre-selection, were singled out in Governor Bill Lee’s 2019 school voucher bill, which was held discriminatory and unconstitutional by the courts, but which is undergoing judicial appeal at the moment.

HB 1280, should it pass, is likely to undergo similar adjudication. But the Shelby County Commission is acting to head off the measure now before it can get to the law books.
By a 7-2 vote in committee on Wednesday, the Commission adopted a resolution opposing the measure, which will come up for a vote before the Commission’s next public meeting on Monday.

“We’ve been here before. This is like the voucher bill,” Commissioner Van Turner reminded his colleagues. The two votes against opposing HB 1280 came from Brandon Morrison and David Bradford, both Republicans.

Incidentally, that part of the proposed measure applying to judicial elections would affect only Davidson County, which currently does have partisan elections for judges, but none for expressly political positions.

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Amid Re-shuffling of Vaccine Policy, Harris Keeps Stiff Upper Lip

Harris on Zoom call with Commission

“I don’t think there’s a lot of time right now to do a lot of navel-gazing. We need to keep on plowing here and moving forward.” That was Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris’ way, at a Friday afternoon press conference, of summing up what had to have been one of the most harrowing weeks that any public figure has endured of late.

During the past week, 1) a 100-year snow caused a water crisis and immobilized his and other local jurisdictions, which found themselves locked down, not by government mandate, but by Mother Nature; 2) a county vaccine-distribution program, already regarded as problematic, was halted by state edict (not without some subtle shaming by state authorities) and turned over to the city of Memphis and other local agencies, public and private; 3) the director of the county Health Department, Alisa Haushalter, resigned amid a widening scandal related to a state investigation revealing the spoiling locally of 2,500 unused vaccine doses.

Prior to the press conference, Harris had spent a visibly uncomfortable two hours sitting Buddha-like in a special called meeting of the Shelby County Commission, whose members took turns grilling him on the import and details of the vaccine debacle. There was concern among some commissioners about an alleged “power struggle” between city and county. Commissioner Van Turner rejected what he saw as a misleading sub-text here and there questioning the mayor’s performance.

There was little brand-new information adduced in the dialogue with the commission, aside from the revelation of the Haushalter departure, which had leaked out earlier Friday, and references to “suspicious activity” and alleged theft of vaccine from the Pipkin/Fairgrounds vaccine-distribution site that had stirred law enforcement inquiries at the site. Going forward, Pipkin will be operated by the  by the city of Memphis, in tandem with UT Health Sciences.

In the later press conference, Harris revisited some of the content of the commision meeting. In his Zoom talk with reporters, he shouldered the potentially humiliating loss of surrendering responsibility for vaccine storage. He accepted it in the spirit of “it-is-what-it-is” and vowed to seek “a new working relationship and a clean slate” working in harness with the state, the city, and the other agencies charged now with distribution of vaccines and administration of vaccinations.

Harris vowed to “put forth the best practices” and said he was having “departments engaged in remediation planning” and ”moving their focus away from vaccine administration.” He said he was having daily conversations with Lisa Piercey, director of the state Health Department of Health, who on Monday publicly terminated the county Health Department’s responsibility for storage and allocation of vaccine supplies.

Harris was diplomatic about how it came to pass that Haushalter resigned. “We had been in conversation about the path forward and the appropriate path forward at this juncture, based on what had happened and based on what Director Haushalter wants to do. … I agreed with her decision to resign. So I prefer to, you know, try to treat all our employees with respect and dignity, and particularly because all of our employees devoted their careers to service or community helping. So the decision was ultimately made, that she was resigning, and I accepted that resignation.”

Haushalter, who did not attend either the commission meeting or the press conference, will cease her duties as of March 15th, but will evidently remain on the county’s human resources roster until March 31st. Haushalter had been appointed to her directorship by former county Mayor Mark Luttrell and was inherited by Harris when he began his mayoralty in 2018.

Said Harris: “All of us are learning about the wasted dosage, that there were doses expiring in the pharmacy, and so forth. And so we’re gonna have to work hard to rebuild trust. … I’ve talked about making sure that we change out some of those personnel that have responsibility for management.” As for replacing Haushalter, “We’ll go through a process of trying to identify a really incredible candidate for this time. I mean, this is a very unique time that I don’t think any of us have seen in our lifetime. Our public health employees are burning the candle at both ends. … They’ve been working extremely hard. And I think we have an opportunity here to get someone who is poised for this moment.”

Asked about his ability to interface positively with others, Harris said, “I have a good relationship with at least the executive branch of the city. And with respect to … other folks in town, with respect to the commission, a great working relationship with them. I think this is just a challenging period for everyone, particularly, you know, all of us on the Joint Task Force. You know, we’re all exhausted, because of the pandemic. We’re all frustrated. We all want things faster. We all want more quickly, we all want to be better. But I think on the whole, given where we are on such a tough road ahead. I’m pretty blessed.”

Harris’ determination to discover silver linings extended to one of the revelations from the state investigation that resulted in this week’s reordering of responsibilities — the fact of 50,000 unused vaccine doses in Shelby County. This extra inventory, he noted, happened to be the solution to the mounting determination in various quarters to reopen the schools and simultaneously to vaccinate Shelby County’s teachers.

“That was always the plan.” And, Harris said, it began to seem like it was a possibility during the snowstorm, around February, when we started saying, ‘Okay, we’re going to reopen!’”

Harris concluded his press availability with a promise to be forthcoming with the public henceforward. “So please,bear with me, okay?”

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Politics Politics Feature

Touching the Hot Buttons: County Commission Takes on Trump, PILOTs

The public musings of the Shelby County Commission add up at times to as accurate a bellwether on issues at large as can be found in these parts, and that applies to state and national subjects as well as purely local ones. By definition, the commission represents a larger and more representative hunk of the population than does, say, the Memphis City Council, and, though the body is by no means exclusively partisan in its outlook, the fact that its membership is elected by political party gives it natural polarities on a number of matters.

Four matters taken up by the commission at Monday’s public meeting illustrate the range. The first, sponsored by Commissioner Tami Sawyer, well known as a Democrat from her party’s progressive wing, was a resolution “to prohibit the naming of any Shelby County property after U.S. President Donald John Trump, the 45th President of the United States.”

Tami Sawyer

Clearly occasioned by public outrage and confusion stemming from the catastrophic endgame of Trump’s presidency, the resolution garnered the seven votes necessary for passage, all from Democratic members: Sawyer, Van Turner, Mickell Lowery, Willie Brooks, Edmund Ford, Michael Whaley, and chairman Eddie Jones. Three Republicans — Mick Wright, David Bradford, and Brandon Morrison — and Democrat Reginald Milton abstained. Two Republicans, Amber Mills and Mark Billingsley, cast outright “no” votes.

A companion measure of sorts, coming late in the day, was a resolution “in support of preserving our Republic and condemning the insurrection that took place at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.” That one, sponsored by Wright and Milton, garnered 12 “aye” votes across the board but got a single abstention from Morrison.

In between those two resolutions was a pair of hot-button votes. One was a substitute resolution for one introduced back in the summer by Sawyer designed to curtail the potential acquisition of military-grade materials from federal sources by the Sheriff’s Department. Co-sponsored by Turner and Milton, the revised version acknowledged the fact that current Sheriff Lloyd Bonner desired no such weaponry but gives the Sheriff’s Department and the Office of Emergency Management and Homeland Security the option, via commission approval, to acquire protective equipment such as bulletproof vests, as well as rescue vehicles in case of emergencies.

The original resolution had drawn fire from several members as being what they saw as an unwarranted attack on the character of the sheriff. On Monday, Sawyer addressed those reservations: “You know, why do we need police reform? Sheriff Bonner’s a great guy. … But in 2020, across the country, and right here in Shelby County, we recognize a pandemic of racial injustice that was almost as deadly as COVID-19 that impacts the lives of Black and brown people every day.”

The ultimate vote on that one was 10-3, with Commissioners Billingsley, Mills, and Morrison remaining unmollified.

The other resolution incurring extended debate was also sponsored by Sawyer. It proposed a 180-day moratorium on the issuance of any new PILOT (payment-in-lieu-of-taxes) grants by any of the eight authorities in the county able to issue PILOTs.

These tax-abatement grants, which by definition limit property-tax revenues in the interests of industrial recruitment, have long been controversial, as Sawyer noted, denouncing “the organizations that come and promise 1,000 jobs and never offer more than 300, organizations that pay no taxes, recipients whose workforces are 75 percent temporary workers with no healthcare, and no childcare. And then they close when they’re pushed to do anything else. Why don’t these corporations have to invest in the community?”

Ultimately, the PILOT resolution was recast as a proposal to join with the city of Memphis in a task force to study the implications of PILOTs and to consider possible changes in policy. County Mayor Lee Harris supported that proposition, saying, “I am all for trying to figure out how we might reform the system. … It’s probably a good idea to not try to tee up too many questions. But instead, we try as best we can to narrow our scope to what we might be able to handle. So I would try to narrow the scope to bite-sized amounts.” With that understanding, the proposal was referred back to committee for further shaping.

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County Commission: Do the Ayes Still Have It?

The formal vocabulary of Shelby County Commission meetings is slowly gravitating from the antique and ornamental to current and ordinary forms of speech.

Until recently, as an example, meetings used to be opened by invocations by the sergeant-at-arms of the venerable Anglo-Norman phrase “oyez, oyez,” (except that the uniformed county officer serving in that role would pronounce the phrase “Oh yes, oh yes.”) These days, the officer says instead, “Hear ye, hear ye,” which happens to be what the archaic phrase “oyez, oyez,” still used in the U.S. Supreme Court and by numerous other tribunals, actually means.

A parallel phenomenon has been the attrition undergone by the archaic term “aye” as the traditional signifier of an affirmative vote. At some point in the early days of the Commission that was elected and installed in 2018, new Commissioner David Bradford, who represents Collierville and other suburban areas in east Shelby County, began saying simply “yes” when, in a roll call of Commissioners’ vote, he gave his okay to this or that measure.

The other members voting on his side of the issue would continue saying “aye,” an Anglo-Scottich term dating from the 16th century which has got itself lodged in parliamentary idiom ever since. Slowly, though, Bradford’s usage began catching on with other commissioners — fellow Republicans Mark Billingsley and Mick Wright, especially — who are now apt to say “yes” as often as “aye” when they vote in favor.

Though the dominion of the traditional term is slipping on the Commission, the ayes still have it, for the most part, as the word continues its general prevalence in roll calls. Oddly, the symmetrical equivalent to it, “nay,” goes totally unspoken in normal circumstances, except in the occasional summing up of a negative vote outcome, as in “the nays have it.”

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Politics Politics Feature

DeBerry’s Good Fortune, The Lookout, Commission COVID Controversy

No few local political observers were puzzled in the aftermath of November’s statewide elections by published reports that former state Representative John DeBerry had left his campaign financial account of roughly $200,000 untouched, spending none of it in his losing bid as an independent to newly elected Democratic successor Torrey Harris.

John DeBerry

Certainly that conclusion seemed somewhat sensible in the wake of DeBerry’s four-to-one loss to Harris, but the fact was that DeBerry had not gone unspoken for. Especially in the latter stages of his race, a plethora of signs boosting his re-election had appeared at strategic locations of the sprawling District 90.

It was suggested that DeBerry, whose GOP-like positions had caused him to be banished by the state Democratic Party from its ballot, had been the beneficiary of contributors from a conservative Political Action Committee on his behalf. To some degree he had, but it now develops, according to the Tennessee Lookout, that DeBerry did in fact spend from his own resources, to the tune of some $90,000, and that he would shortly be amending his previous financial disclosure report to the state Election Registry.

Going forward, the former legislator is likely to have few financial worries. As previously reported, he has been hired by Republican Governor Bill Lee as an advisor, at an annual salary of $165,000. How he’ll earn that is a little uncertain. DeBerry had a certain fame in the General Assembly for his oratorical prowess, which he used in recent years on anti-abortion and pro-voucher subjects, among others. How that penchant translates into his new advisory role remains to be seen.

• The aforementioned Lookout, which has a discernible progressive tilt, is renting space these days in the press room of the Cordell Hull building, which also houses legislators’ offices and meeting rooms, and will be covering the forthcoming legislative session from there.

Because of its arguable identity as an advocacy journal, there had been a modicum of controversy among the existing denizens of the press room, all serving established and ostensibly politically neutral periodicals, as to whether the Lookout should have a space there.

One of those considering the point rhetorically was Sam Stockard, a longtime journalist for various periodicals, most recently the Daily Memphian, for whom he rendered formidable service.

Somewhat to the astonishment of Stockard’s peers, the DM recently discontinued his role as their Capitol Hill correspondent. With the consent of his colleagues, Stockard will soldier on in Cordell Hull as the official lookout for the aforementioned Lookout.

• Even amid expectations of the imminent arrival of a COVID vaccine, the current spike of cases has raised anxiety in Shelby County. The auditorium of the Vasco Smith County Administration Building has suggested a ghost town for most of the pandemic in 2020. But it was filled to the maximum and beyond during a recent meeting at which county health department director Alisa Haushalter laid down new directives for dealing with the spike, which is currently setting new records for cases and deaths.

The new guidelines, which tightened mandates on mask-wearing, limited serving capacities, and established 10 p.m. closing times for restaurants, seemed moderate enough, at least by harsher standards applied elsewhere in the nation. But nearly 30 citizens came to the well to protest them, in sentiments ranging from sensible to troubled to outlandish.

One complainant advised the assembled commissioners and other county officials, “Listen to the mandate of the people in the referendum  provided to you daily on social media.” Another inveighed against the restrictions as specimens of “communism.” And there were numerous spurious statistics spouted, such as a claim that there had been only some 13,000 COVID deaths nationally, and only 37 in Shelby County, with the rest actually being misreported cases of diabetes, cancer, and gunshot wounds.

Most of the commentary from the audience, however, concerned the legitimate anguish, economic and otherwise, of gym proprietors and restaurant owners who felt their livelihoods to be in serious jeopardy. Commission chairman Eddie Jones patiently and sympathetically moderated the public-discussion period.

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Dispute Over Election Machines Remains Unsettled

CREDIT: JB

The tug-of-war between Shelby County Election Administrator Linda Phillips and the adherents of paper-ballot voting over the purchase of new election machines continues apace.

The most recent development, detailed in a November 18th Flyer article, involved the administrator’s purchase of three new ballot-marking devices for the ongoing runoff elections in Collierville.

The machines are manufactured by the ES&S Company and are of a type previously preferred by a 4-1 vote of the Shelby County Election Commission but rejected for funding by the Shelby County Commision, which, in the interests of transparency, had established its own preference for handmarked paper-ballot devices in several prior votes.

The funding source for the three machines had been — publicly, at least — something of a mystery. According to SCEC sources, the machines were paid for by the office of the Secretary of State in Nashville

The purchase of the machines had been revealed last week in a formal SCEC press release, which contended that there had been no alternative to acquiring them, inasmuch as the old machines used by Collierville in the city’s first round of elections earlier this month were tied up, pending certification this week of the November 3rd results.

JB

Election Commissioner Bennie Smith

Early voting for Collierville’s mandatory runoff period had meanwhile been scheduled to begin on Wednesday of last week.

Controversies remain: One of the reasons for the  county commission’s rejection of the SCEC’s preference for the ES&S machines (which had been selected over two other bidders) had to do with the commission’s aforementioned preference for devices enabling the use of paper ballots.
But another reason had been the county commission’s objection to additional costs for accessories added by the administrator’s office to the bids received from ES&S and two rival bidders.

At its meeting of October 23rd, the SCEC board voted to re-submit its request for county commission funding of the ES&S machines, minus the objected-to accessories. That expenditure would be something like $3.9 million, as against the sum of $5,815,405 requested beforehand.

But, said Brent Taylor and Frank Uhlhorn, two members of the three-member SCEC Republican majority, this “skinny” version of the prior request would not include money for accessories needed to facilitate the option of paper-ballot voting for those who wanted it. As part of its selection process, the SCEC board had previously voted to provide the option, and its deletion now further imperils the prospects of county commission approval.

In the meantime, Election Commission Democratic member Bennie Smith has cried foul about the commission’s promised provision for paper-ballot voting during the Collierville runoffs.

Smith and members of his family are residents of Collierville and recently went to vote in one of the three available voting locations, trusting, said Smith, to this statement in the SCEC press release: “There will be a ballot-on-demand printer capable of printing ballots on-demand for those who want to use hand marked paper ballots. If a voter would prefer to vote on paper, that ballot will be printed on the spot.”

Instead of being offered that option, though, Smith said he and his family members were not informed of its availability and were able to vote by paper ballot only upon having to insist on it.

Complaining about this to Phillips, Smith received an email containing the following statement: “We aren’t offering the paper ballot option because at this moment it isn’t an option going forward. This was discussed in the October 23rd SCEC meeting; when the decision was made to go forward with the skinny resolution, it also eliminated the paper ballot option since the accessories included the BOD printers necessary to offer that option in Early Voting.”

The circumstances behind this standoff are either complicated or simple, depending one one’s perspective, but the bottom line is that the twain are nowhere close to meeting just yet.

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No Rubber Stamp: County Commission Flexes Against Election Commission, Harris

One bottom-line message emerged from Monday’s public meeting of the Shelby County Commission: The commission does not intend to function as a rubber stamp — not for the Election Commission and not for County Mayor Lee Harris.

In a much-anticipated vote on a request for a $5,815,405 purchase of voting machinery from the ES&S Company, the momentum of a tense, drama-filled debate tilted against the buy when county commission Chairman Eddie Jones pointedly reminded Election Commissioner Brent Taylor, who was making the pitch, that the county commission had put itself on record, not for ballot-marking machines of the sort marketed by ES&S but for hand-marked voting devices.

Jones was immediately backed up by Commissioner Tami Sawyer, and the commission’s vote, in short order, was 6 ayes, 5 nays, and 2 abstentions — leaving the measure one vote short of the necessary seven. During the debate, Commissioner Willie Brooks had reminded Taylor of his intriguing statement he had made to the Flyer last March: “The process is backwards,” Taylor said then. “The Election Commission should not have initiated the RFP and passed the decision about funding on to the county commission. What we [the Election Commission members] should have done is come to some broad general decision about the kind of machines we wanted and then let the county commission issue an RFP [request for proposal], make the choice, and then vote on the funding.”

Soon came another demonstration point, led by Edmund Ford, who wanted to establish commission authority over what he deemed a mayoral overreach: a $1 million expenditure to two local PR agencies to produce an ad promoting face masks as a prophylactic against COVID-19. The ad was commissioned by Harris in August under statutory emergency powers assumed to be his under the federal Cares Act. But Ford insisted that the statute did not give the county mayor authority without commission consent to contract for a sum larger than $50,000. Commissioner Van Turner, who had wanted to withdraw the resolution, said unhappily after a vote of 7 nays and 3 abstentions against it, that the matter had been a “political show,” a case of “wanting to stick it to the mayor.”

Early voting for the November 3rd election begins October 14th and runs through October 29th at the following 26 locations; 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., Monday through Friday; 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., Saturday.

• Abundant Grace Fellowship Church, 1574 E. Shelby Dr., Memphis, 38116

• Agricenter International, 7777 Walnut Grove Rd., Memphis, 38120

• Mississippi Blvd. Church Family Life Center, 70 N. Bellevue Blvd., Memphis, 38104

• New Bethel Missionary Baptist Church, 7786 Poplar Pike, Germantown, 38138 

• Arlington Safe Room, 11842 Otto Ln.,  Arlington, 38002

• Anointed Temple of Praise, 3939 Riverdale Rd., Memphis, 38115

• Baker Community Center, 7942 Church Rd., Millington, 38053

• Berclair Church of Christ, 4536 Summer Ave., Memphis, 38122

• Briarwood Church, 1900 N. Germantown Pkwy., Memphis, 38016

• Collierville Church of Christ, 575 Shelton Dr., Collierville, 38017

• Compassion Church, 3505 S. Houston Levee Rd., Germantown, 38139

• Dave Wells Community Center, 915 Chelsea Ave., Memphis, 38107

• Glenview Community Center, 1141 S. Barksdale St., Memphis, 38114

• Greater Lewis Street Baptist Church, SE Corner of Poplar and E. Parkway N., Memphis, 38104

• Greater Middle Baptist Church, 4982 Knight Arnold Rd., Memphis, 38118

• Harmony Church, 6740 St. Elmo Rd.,  Bartlett, 38135

• Mt. Pisgah Missionary Baptist Church, 1234 Pisgah Rd., Cordova, 38016

• Mt. Zion Baptist Church, 60 S. Parkway E., Memphis, 38106

• Raleigh United Methodist Church, 3295 Powers Rd., Memphis, 38128

• Riverside Missionary Baptist Church, 3560 S. Third St., Memphis, 38109

• Shelby County Election Commission, James Meredith Bldg., 157 Poplar Ave., Memphis, 38103

• Second Baptist Church, 4680 Walnut Grove Blvd., Memphis, 38117

• Solomon Temple MB Church, 1460 Winchester Rd., Memphis, 38116

• The Pursuit of God Church (Bellevue Frayser,) 3759 N. Watkins, Memphis, 38127

• White Station Church of Christ, 1106 Colonial Road, Memphis, 38117

• The Refuge Church, 9817 Huff N Puff Rd., Lakeland, 38002

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County Commission to Look At Voting-Machine Costs

UPDATED. Anybody who has followed county government processes knows how easy it is to get lost in the weeds of complex numeral series. Such was the case with the Shelby County Commission’s budget negotiations earlier this year, and such is the case with a key matter before the commission today, Monday, September 28th.

The commission is scheduled to take up the matter of new voting devices for Shelby County. This is an in issue that has been simmering for well over a year, and, amid a bidding process that engendered no meager amount of controversy, county election administrator Linda Phillips ultimately has recommended, and the Shelby County Election Commission has confirmed, the selection of new ballot-marking machinery from the ES&S Company, which dominates the election-machinery field.

The actual scheduled vote on Monday was for $5,815,405.00 for equipment including scanning equipment for prospective immediate use in regard absentee votes, with $2,410,000.00 of that offset from expected reimbursement funds from the State of Tennessee.(After some debate, the Commission voted 7-6 to defer the item until its next regular meeting).

A variety of other numbers figure into the respective bids, as well, and the expertise of the County Commission, the ultimate paymaster, in working with conflicting columns of numbers could be called on again at the Monday meeting. There are ample weeds to be dealt with.

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Kustoff Defends Postal Changes

The U.S. Postal Service cannot “continue to act like Blockbusters in a Netflix world.” So said 8th District U.S. Representative David Kustoff in a Zoom address to the Rotary Club of Memphis. The matter came up in relation to concerns about the effect of reductions of postal services on mail-in ballots.

Speaking from his local office in Ridgeway Loop, Kustoff said those reductions reflected ongoing social changes — mainly the drastic reduction in first-class mail caused by the cyber-revolution — and had begun under President Obama. “The Postal Service will have to adapt,” he said.

On another matter, Kustoff took note of the fact that there has been no congressional follow-up to the original COVID-related stimulus payments and said that the window for passing another stimulus bill had, for practical purposes, shrunk to the dimensions of the next three weeks.

Congressman David Kustoff

Members of Congress stand ready to return to Washington to vote for a solution as soon as one is agreed to by the two parties, he said, but, “once we hit October, everybody will be in their districts and involved with campaigns.”

• COVID-19 has clearly affected the way running for office has proceeded, locally. Certain races that usually involve a significant amount of public appearances or door-to-door contacts are more than usually dependent on social media, mailouts, phone banks, and — not least — polls.

Much polling is, of course, carried out by disinterested parties and seeks genuine opinion sampling. But increasingly candidates invest in polling, including “push polls” that are phrased so as to insinuate various points of views, for or against. And there are “benchmark” polls, designed to elicit public attitudes on various issues so as to guide the campaign strategy of a given candidate.

Two polls that were dropped last week indicate the range. One, arriving in people’s message boxes, is entitled “The Voter Survey,” and, despite its generalized name, is not so anodyne as all that, including as it does several leading questions that “push” in the direction of some candidates as against others.

The other poll, on Facebook, asks a wide variety of questions about various candidates and offices, and, to the degree that it deals with positions, phrases those positions more or less fairly. It, like the other poll, seems to focus ultimately on the state House District 83 race between incumbent Republican Mark White and Democratic challenger Jerri Green — indicating that the District 83 race is considered up for grabs. More on these two polls anon.

• The Shelby County Commission is scheduled to meet next in committee on September 9th, and, if all goes as County Mayor Lee Harris has indicated, they’ll finally have a budget book from the administration to pore over. Uncertainty over the final shape of the 2020-21 budget has vexed the last several meetings of the commission, and the budget book, which has been firmly promised for delivery on September 8th by Deputy Mayor Dwan Gillom, could go far toward resolving several issues or opening up new questions. Or both.

In recent meetings, the commission has been asked to lift a freeze on new hiring for several departments, both in the purview of elected officials and elsewhere. Those departments seeking relief from the freeze have pointed out that the proposed new positions would remain within fiscal limits voted on earlier. The commission has agreed to lift the freeze in one or two instances but in other cases has held judgment, pending receipt of the budget book.

Budget issues have been complicated by disagreements between the commission and the administration over an abundance of matters — ranging from the actual status and amount of funds on hand to the matter of authority over revising specific allocations. The original budget proposal submitted by Harris for the new fiscal year was rejected by the commission, which, after a lengthy series of meetings, proposed and voted on a different sort of budget altogether. In several areas, implementation of the budget has awaited the final details in the aforesaid administration budget book.

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Politics Politics Feature

“I’m No Newcomer”

Who is Marquita Bradshaw? That question got asked a lot last Thursday night, when the Memphis woman took the lead in the Democratic primary’s field of five for United States Senate and kept it all the way until the last votes were counted.

Marquita Bradshaw

That race was supposed by most political observers to be in the bag for Nashville lawyer and Iraq war vet James Mackler, who had been campaigning for two years and raised some $2 million.

Bradshaw, whose receipts were in the low thousands, is surprised that anybody was surprised and seems offended at those who attributed her win to her name being atop the ballot.

“I’ve been an organizer within my community for over 25 years, working on environmental justice issues. And that wasn’t just within Memphis, but that was across the nation and internationally,” she said this week in a telephone interview. “I went through the AFL-CIO Organizing Institute, and I became a union organizer. But before then I was working with an environmental justice network with people across the United States on issues of environmental racism.”

She added: “I’ve been around. I’ve just been an organizer. It’s not a surprise to anybody in the social justice community, or anybody that’s in labor, that we’re here right now.”

She also can claim a long history as an environmentalist: “I’m on the Sierra Club executive committee, and I also serve on the Chickasaw Group.” She also went through the Leaders of Color education initiative.

And, as far as political campaigns go, this was not her first rodeo. Bradshaw has experience working in political races. She is the daughter of Doris DeBerry-Bradshaw, who has been a political candidate, and she is the niece of John DeBerry, the longtime incumbent State Representative from House District 90.

So it is clear that, unlike so many people’s assumptions, she is not a complete novice, and Democrats, who haven’t had much success with statewide elections in recent years, can only hope that her name recognition — along with sources of support — continues to expand as she faces the GOP’s well-heeled Senatorial nominee, the Trump-supported Bill Hagerty.

• At a point well into the 2020-21 fiscal year, the Shelby County budget situation is still in confusion, with members of the county commission still uncertain as to whether funds are on hand for a variety of county programs.

One persistent issue during the commission’s regular public meeting on Monday was the matter of a finished budget book, which could spell out in some specificity the county’s assets, liabilities, and available funds. But, just as during what seemed an interminable struggle to produce a budget in early summer, the commission and the administration of Mayor Lee Harris are having difficulty agreeing on means and ends and on what the facts are.

An early resolution on the commission’s Monday agenda attempted to open the way toward terminating a current hiring freeze and to establish August 19th as the date for receipt of a budget book from the administration. Dwan Gilliom, the administration CAO, could promise no date for the book other than “early September,” while county financial officer Mathilde Crosby indicated that no additional funds could be freed up and no exchange could be worked out whereby federal funding for COVID purposes could be “swapped out” to enable equivalent funding opportunities in the county’s general fund.

Commissioner Edmund Ford Jr. noted that the Memphis City Council had done something similar with its federal COVID funds and wondered why the commission couldn’t do the same. Commissioner Van Turner followed up by prodding the administration to “show some cooperation.”

• Ninth District Congressman Steve Cohen, in the first Zoom press availability since his renomination in last week’s election, told reporters Tuesday that President Trump and Republicans in Congress continue to be unserious in negotiations for a renewed coronavirus aid package, and stressed that, in addition to such matters as unemployment insurance and another stimulus round, funding for the U.S. Postal Service, election security, and public nutrition is at stake.

“I think they lie about everything,” Cohen said, including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in the sweep of his remarks. The Congressman also continued in his criticism of the Tennessee Valley Authority, saying, “TVA is not what it used to be. It isn’t what Franklin D. Roosevelt created. Their electric rates are among the highest in the country.”