Tag: Shelby County Commission

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Rumblings on the Commission

It is the City Council that grabs most of the headlines and TV attention, but it must be remembered that the Shelby County Commission not only represents more constitutionally ordained authority than does the Council, it is the body that ultimately calls the shots on such important aspects of our collective life as public education and public health.

Eddie Jones

Not that the Commission controls the public schools; it just pays for them on behalf of the taxpayers. It can’t dictate on matters of curriculum — those are entirely to be worked out between the School Board and the superintendent’s office — but the Commissioners can, if they choose, withhold funding for the schools if they don’t like the drift of things.

Once in a while, in the heat of debate on the Commission, action of that sort gets threatened. One of the most persistent critics of the Shelby County Schools system is current County Commissioner Edmund Ford Jr., an educator himself and one who, in particular, is forever suspicious of S.C.S. spending plans and demands to see the fine print and the bottom line regarding virtually everything representatives of the school system bring to the Commission to get funded.

And now the Commission, which already is responsible for monitoring the county Health Department, is — in the crush of the ongoing pandemic — attempting to ground its authority even deeper, with the proposed creation of a Shelby County Health Board. The recent proposal to do so, which seemed at first to be uncontroversial, has become anything but.

Two key members of the Commission, outgoing chairman Mark Billingsley and Edmund Ford Jr., withdrew their sponsorship of the enabling ordinance at Monday’s Commission meeting amid reported pressure from city government and suburban municipalities — both of which entities are said to view the proposed new Board as threatening to their own power concerns. “We don’t like people trying to pre-empt us. We don’t like the state to pre-empt us, and we don’t like anybody else doing it, either,” said a well-placed source in Memphis city government.

The city, of course, is the driving force behind the Memphis-Shelby County COVID-19 Task Force, though virtually everyone of importance in local medicine, not to mention representatives of all the municipalities and first-responder agencies, is a member of that sprawling body which, for all the honorific nature of its cast of characters, does hard work and holds at least two valuable public information sessions during the week.

What the Task Force does not have is the power to compel policy throughout the county, and that is what the proposed Board would have, and that is why city and suburban officials were resistant to it right away. Van Turner, the low-keyed but highly influential inner-city Democratic commissioner and former chairman, is the remaining major sponsor, and he indicates he is amenable to broadening the composition of the Board — certainly not to the dimensions of the Task Force but in ways inclusive of the concerned separate jurisdictions.

After a preliminary 7-3 vote on the Board proposition and a decision to send it back to committee, the process of compromise and overhaul has begun. As it proceeds to the point necessary for passage, the concept of the Board seems likely to become that of an advisory body rather than a prescriptive one, and, in that case, its relevance as an add-on to the Task Force may cease to be obvious.

Besides the initial aversion of Memphis and suburban officialdom to the idea of the Health Board, there was another inherent obstacle to its creation — the ever-widening gap between Mayor Lee Harris and the Commission itself. There has always been a certain tension between the two power centers of mayor and Commission. In a sense the relationship is based on a balance of power, and relations between the two have always swung pendulum-like between common purpose and rivalry.

It was the latter state that dominated things during the last two or three years of the administration of former Mayor Mark Luttrell. A jurisdictional dispute that had begun in 2015 over the amount and disposition of a county fiscal surplus would harden into long-term enmity. A pair of Repubican commissioners — Terry Roland of Millington and Heidi Shafer of East Memphis — would each serve a term as Commission chair during the crucial period and the two of them, working with each other and with a technical Democratic majority, would supervise a rebellion against the GOP mayor that would erode his authority significantly and see him, at the end of his two terms in 2018, unable or unwilling even to oversee the details of transition to the newly elected Democratic mayor, Lee Harris.

Harris came into office with an 8 to 5 Democratic majority and resolved to avoid any schism with the Commission. Yet here he is, two years later, with the Commission having seized the initiative on producing the budget — and not tenderly, either — exactly as the previous Commission had done with Luttrell at the very start of their mutual alienation.

Brandon Morrison

It is this Mayor-Commission dichotomy and not partisan bickering that had seemingly become the major determinant of disagreements in county government. Yet that may be changing, as partisanship certainly reared up as a reality in the course of Monday’s election of chair and vice chair.

The Shelby County Commission has, more than most bodies elected by partisan election, been able to enjoy cooperation across party lines — certainly more so than Congress or the state legislature in Nashville. As already noted, the case can be made that Republicans Roland and Shafer (neither of whom can be described as a moderate) provided the guidelines for group action in the previous version of the Commission, a majority-Democrat one like the present version, which lines up 8 to 5 Democratic.

Which is not to say that Shafer and Roland imposed GOP ideology; except for their efforts on behalf of a tax cut, the main Commission emphasis during that period arguably was on behalf of MWBE (Minority and Women-owned Business Enterprises). That and resistance to Nashville on matters like school vouchers.

Two Democrats — Eddie Jones and Edmund Ford Jr. — have experienced no problem working back and forth across the political aisle, in much the same manner as Jones and Justin Ford did in the previous Commission. The occasional vote on a partisan matter has often seen either or both of them voting with the body’s GOP members. Up until now, there has been no equivalent among Republicans.

That all changed on Monday, when, after a unanimous vote of all Commissioners for Jones as the body’s next chairman, East Memphis Republican Brandon Morrison joined six Democrats in a vote to make herself vice chair and defeat fellow Republican Amber Mills, a north county member who tilts significantly to the right and was the preferred candidate of the other GOP members. The significance of the vote is the bearing it is likely to have a year from now when the vice chair will presumably be in the catbird seat for the next vote for chair.

Mark Billingsley, a Republican from Germantown and the outgoing chairman, has reacted with outrage to what he sees as devious and disloyal action on the part of Morrison (whose conservative voting record, incidentally, has not been radically dissimilar from Mills’), and he declined to consider a motion from Democrat Tami Sawyer to make Morrison’s election unanimous.

While Democrats like Van Turner and Reginald Milton saw the matter as no big deal, except as a good-for-the-goose, good-for-the-gander bit of parallelism, the outgoing chair remained unappeased. Given that Billingsley himself had, during his chairmanship, clearly attempted to position himself as a conciliator of factions, his reaction could signal a sea change in future relations between the parties. All that remains to be seen.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Threat of Reduction in State Funds Averted for Memphis and Shelby County

UPDATE: Reportedly, the House-Senate conference committee has agreed on new amounts for Memphis and Shelby County, as well as for Davidson County (Nashville). Memphis and Nashville are to receive $10 million apiece as a result of negotiations by the conference committee, which included three participants from Davidson County but none from Shelby County.

Locally, this solution represents a partial restoration of the $14.3 million originally allowed to Memphis by the state Senate but reduced to $5 million in the proposed House version of the budget. Shelby County’s amount reverted to the Senate’s original budget version of $7.7 million, a figure which had also been reduced to $5 million in the proposed House budget.

The funding is part of a $200-million package which was authorized by the legislature for statewide distribution in March as a response to the economic emergencies caused via the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. At that time, the money was restricted for specific infrastructure or COVID-related purposes, but the restrictions were lifted by the Senate last Thursday and by the House on Wednesday of this week, but the two chambers disagreed on the amounts to be allotted to the state’s two largest urban areas.

Accordingly, the money, whose sums the two legislative chambers now agree on, is available for the general funds of both Memphis and Shelby County.

Rep. Mark White

PREVIOUSLY REPORTED: What the Senate giveth, the House taketh away. The newly freed state financial resources that the Tennessee Senate voted last week to make available to Memphis and Shelby County have been truncated significantly by the House, and only the work of a joint-chamber conference committee can fully restore them. The issue is that of so far unreconciled differences in the budgets approved by each chamber.

On Thursday of last week, state Senate majority leader Jack Johnson (R-Franklin) announced that the Senate’s version of the fiscal 2020-21 budget would allow the lifting of restrictions from a $200 million infrastructure grant program approved in March. In practical terms, what this meant was that the City of Memphis was enabled by the Senate action to re-allocate some $14.3 million in previously restricted infrastructure-grant funds for any purpose it chose; Shelby County’s share of the newly freed-up funds was $7.7 million.

The problem is that the House version of the state budget, passed on Wednesday, allows the lifting of restrictions on how that previous statewide funding is spent by local governments but caps the amount allowed for the cities of Memphis and Nashville and for Shelby County to a maximum of $5 million each. That’s a cut of $9.3 million for Memphis, and one of $2.2 million for Shelby County. The theory of the reductions on the amounts for the state’s two largest urban centers, as presented by House majority leader William Lamberth (R-Portland), is based on the state’s need for fiscal austerity and the fact that Memphis, Nashville, and Shelby County, uniquely, had all been beneficiaries of the federal CARES Act, covering some of the same potential purposes, including COVID-19 needs, as were intended for the state infrastructure-grant money in March.

This has not gone down well with Shelby County’s legislative delegation in Nashville, nor with the two local governments here. “This does not seem so good a deal for Memphis and Shelby County,” observed state Rep. G.A. Hardaway (D-Memphis) in debate. The state, he said, would be doing a “back-out” and “end-around” of moneys the city and county governments had been led to expect. State Rep. Bob Freeman (D-Nashville) voiced similar sentiments on behalf of the state’s capital city.

Lamberth expressed confidence that Memphis and Nashville were able to “bounce back faster” from current financial predicaments than more rural areas, whose allotments were not cut — the idea seeming to be that the two big-city areas could better shoulder the pain of austerity.

A spokesman for Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland released the following statement: “We had included the original proposed state funding into our FY21 budget. We are hopeful that amount will remain intact as it goes through the conference process.”

In the case of Shelby County, the $7.7 million figure provided for it in the Senate’s version of the budget has already been spoken for in the Shelby County Commission’s ongoing efforts to achieve a budget for fiscal 2020-21. The Commission voted on Monday to incorporate the whole amount into the county’s fund balance or reserve fund, there to be drawn upon to meet such needs as rehabilitation of The Med (Regional One) and funding for construction of the new Juvenile Justice Center.

Before receiving news of the House’s intended reductions of the county’s grant amount, Commissioner Van Turner and County Mayor Lee Harris had been reaching toward agreement on how to split the figure of $7.7 million between the two needs. Should the reduced House figure survive the forthcoming conference committee between the two chambers in Nashville, the county’s budget calculations will be even further complicated than they already are. State Rep. Mark White (R-Memphis) was more sanguine about the consequences if the House’s budget figure should stand. “We’ll always take care of Memphis,” he said. “We’re now getting $5 million that wasn’t on the table to begin with. So we’re $5 million ahead.”

White said he thought the federal government would end up taking the strings off the COVID-related funds it had previously allocated to Memphis and Shelby County, and that it was important meanwhile to take care of the distressed counties of rural Tennessee.

White’s Democratic opponent for his District 83 seat, Jerri Green, responded to White’s support of the House version by saying, “Budgets reflect our values. And the values of anyone who voted for this budget do not lie with this community. If I was asked to voted for it, my answer would be ‘Hell no.'”

UPDATE: In the aftermath of the conference. committee report [see above], White, a member of that ad hoc committee, sent out a press release claiming to have influenced the final outcome and quoting GOP House Speaker Cameron Sexton as saying, “Chairman White was instrumental in the negotiation process between the House and Senate in efforts to obtain this critical funding for Memphis.”

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Politics Politics Feature

Commission Continues Budget Slog, Feud with Mayor

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

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

Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris

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

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

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

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

Edmund Ford Jr.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

State Funding Could Plug County’s Budget Hole

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

Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson announcing relief of grant restrictions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Election Commission: No New Voting Equipment for This Year

Considering all the delays that have occurred in the drawn-out and contentious process of acquiring a new election system for Shelby County, this will not be the most surprising news: There will be no new devices — whether of the ballot-marking sort or of the hand-marked variety — for any county elections this year.

Word from the Election Commission is that, for several reasons, the federal/state primaries and the county general election scheduled for August will be performed on the county’s existing and outmoded machinery, and the same goes for the November election.

One of the reasons for the postponement, according to an EC source familiar with the thinking in the office of Election Administrator Linda Phillips, is uncertainty, at least in her mind, over the availability of funds allocated by the Shelby County Commission. Funding for a new election system was allocated last year by the county commission for the purchase of a new election system in the current fiscal year, but the money has not yet been appropriated.

Jackson Baker

Election Commissioner Linda Phillips

Phillips is said to believe that the funding process for new machines has been shifted to the coming fiscal year, 2020-21, but county commissioners involved in the ongoing process of determining the new budget said that was not the case. The administrator has told election commission members that no voting on any new system will occur until 2022 but that the state has committed to providing new scanners to accommodate the demands of increased mail-in voting this year.

There is still an element of suspense regarding the nature of the new election system, whenever it comes to be. The election commission recently accepted Phillips’ recommendation for the purchase of new ballot-marking devices from the ESS company, but considerable support still exists for hand-marked ballots, both in the community at large and on the majority-Democratic Shelby County Commission, which has the prerogative to appropriate the funding — and, arguably, to designate the type of machinery.

In any case, County Mayor Lee Harris has signed the necessary “intent-to-award” letter to allow the purchasing process to proceed. It remains to be seen when the county commission can cut through the current snags regarding budget calculations to address the matter.

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Politics Politics Feature

Numbed by the Numbers: County Commission Struggles to Agree on Budget

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Separate attempts to produce a budget for Shelby County failed to produce anything resembling a consensus on a marathon meeting day of the County Commission on Monday. Commission Chairman Mark Billingsley said he intends to call a special meeting for next week to see if the process can be expedited.
Jackson Baker

Commission Chairman Mark Billingsley

Billingsley told his fellow commissioners the called meeting would likely be necessary in the interests of reaching agreement on a budget, with the new fiscal year just around the corner on July 1st.

The Memorial Day holiday next week forces an adjustment of the normal schedule, which would mandate a day of committee meetings during the week, preparatory to the next regular commission meeting the week after. The holiday forces the entire sequence to occur a week later, with committee meetings scheduled for June 3rd and the next regular public meeting to be on June 8th.

Hence the need for a called meeting, especially since Monday’s meetings — a special called budget meeting, starting at 11 a.m., followed by the regular Commission meeting at 3 p.m — became embroiled in complications that were still unsnarled when the commission adjourned at nearly midnight.

“We’re getting into another day,” said budget chair Eddie Jones wearily, with the clock moving toward the witching hour and one of the Webinar meeting’s participants, an administration staffer participating from home and having to alternate her contributions with soothing words for a restless two-year-old. “That sounds wonderful,” was the wistful comment of Commissioner Mick Wright on this audible reminder of a domestic life beyond numbers-crunching.

Various formulas have been adduced for dealing with a looming budget deficit that had looked to be as large as $10 million even before the effects of the coronavirus crisis pushed things even further into fiscal crisis.

In mid-April, County Mayor Lee Harris had proposed a $1.4 billion “lean and balanced” budget, with $13.6 million in specified cuts offset by a $16.50 raise in the county’s motor vehicle registration tax, a.k.a. the wheel tax. A majority of commissioners could not be found to agree, and alternative budget proposals, all with different versions of austerity, have since been floated, one by Commissioner Brandon Morrison, another by budget chair Jones, working more or less in tandem with vice chair Edmund Ford.

Among the issues raised by Monday’s day-long discussion was that of whether, as county Chief Financial Officer Mathilde Crosby contended, the proposals offered by Jones and Ford focused overmuch on cuts in administrative departments, thereby paralleling what has been something of a running feud between Harris and Ford based, as more than a few observers see it, as a potential long-term political rivalry between the two.

Crosby also offered criticism that the Jones-Ford proposals for budget-cutting ignored distinctions between the county’s general fund and various dedicated funds for mandated functions.

Another potential issue is that of the county tax rate, currently pegged at $4.05 per $100 of assessed value. Commissioner Reginald Milton, for one, believes that the rate is set artificially low because of simple mathematical error and that this factor is bound to doom the county to endless future variations of the current budget scramble until the rate is recalculated. The current rate has so far been reaffirmed in two of the three readings required for passage.

The budget issue is predominating over other matters, though the commission did reach an agreement Monday on what had been a controversial proposal by Commissioner Tami Sawyer for an ordinance requiring, on penalty of $50 fine, that residents and visitors wear protective face masks in public areas. Sawyer recast her proposal in the form of a resolution requesting such a requirement by the Health Department but providing for no fine. The resolution passed 8-5 on a party-line vote, with the Commission’s Democrats voting for and the Republicans voting against.

Another matter of consequence that awaits the commission is the matter of new voting machines for Shelby County. The commission has twice voted a preference that the county invest in a system of hand-marked paper ballots in time for the August county general election and federal-state primaries, but the Shelby County Election Commission has approved the recommendation of Election Administrator Linda Phillips that new ballot-marking machines from the ES&S Company be purchased instead.

With the elections approaching, the need for a decision soon increases. The process requires that Harris sign an order authorizing the purchase of a new system, after which the commission must vote for its funding. At issue is whether the commission will approve the Phillips/SCEC request or act according to its own preference for the hand-marked system.

A sizable and well-organized group of local activists is pushing for the latter option, on grounds, among others, that a system of hand-marked ballots would be cheaper, more transparent, and less vulnerable to hacking.

Other, related aspects of the controversy include allegations from the activist ranks of potential conflicts of interest involving Phillips and family members and a concern that purchase of the ES&S machines would involve an implicit need to purchase a new voter-registration system from the same company.

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News News Blog

County’s $2.5M Allocation for MATA to Fund Three New Projects

CREDIT: Facebook/MATA

Facebook/MATA

The Memphis Area Transit Authority (MATA) will receive a $2.5 million investment

from the county that will go toward implementing parts of the Transit Vision plan, including a transit on-demand model for two areas. 

The Shelby County Commission voted 9-4 Monday in favor of a resolution sponsored by Commissioner Tami Sawyer to allocate the funds.

MATA CEO Gary Rosenfeld presented a spending plan for $2.5 million in capital improvement funds last week, which he says will be used to implement parts of the Transit Vision plan — a piece of the comprehensive Memphis 3.0 plan, the guiding document for how the city moves forward over the next several years.

“As we move to the next step in the evolution of this pandemic, we will be using the Transit Vision plan to re-tool the network as we come out of this,” Rosenfeld said. “This is kind of a positive outcome of the pandemic, if you will. We are able to move in the direction of starting to put the transit vision in place.”

Rosenfeld said the county’s $2.5 million will be invested in three projects. The first is a demand-response system for two areas, Boxtown/Westwood and the Downtown entertainment district.

Rosenfeld said in the Boxtown/Westwood area, the ridership count doesn’t suggest that there should be a complete fixed-route service. But the demand-response model will improve residents’ opportunity to get to public transportation and provide service in an efficient manner, Rosenfeld said.

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The model will work similar to Uber, allowing people to call in and get picked up at their house, transporting them anywhere within a certain zone or connecting them with the transit network.

In the entertainment district, MATA plans to provide a similar service. Rosenfeld said employees in this district often cannot catch a bus home because their shifts end long after the buses stop running. With the new service, employees in the district will be able to call in and be picked up and driven home.

Rosenfeld said the endeavor for both areas will require seven vehicles, which will cost a total of $500,000.

MATA also plans to put $1 million of the county’s investment into a mini transit center near Third and Brooks. Rosenfeld said the center will house four to five bays and will meet the need of new routes in the Transit Vision Plan.

Lastly, Rosenfeld said MATA will provide the local match portion for the $75 million Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) project, which is mostly funded by federal grants. The BRT would be a high-frequency route from Downtown to the University of Memphis.

Rosenfeld said all three areas of investment are “highly visible” and would “greatly enhance everyone’s access to public transit in the future.”

The Memphis Interfaith Coalition for Action and Hope (MICAH), which has long been advocating for more funding for MATA, commended the county commission’s decision to allocate the $2.5 million.

“Both now and as our regional economy begins to heal, our public transit system is critical,” said Ayana Watkins, executive director of MICAH. “It matters now for essential workers and residents who depend on public transit for food, supplies, and health care. And it will matter as we all begin returning to work and school en masse.”

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Samantha Bradshaw, co-chair of MICAH’s economic equity task force said the county’s investment is a “hopeful recognition that the county intends to keep transit a top priority to encourage a restored and more equitable local economy.”

“Memphis Transit 3.0 needs to keep on track to ensure the many Memphians who don’t have access to better paying jobs have an equal shot at a job that supports their families at a dignified level,” Bradshaw said.

MICAH also urges the city to reconsider its “drastic reduction” to MATA funding of $10 million, noting that public transportation has been underfunded for decades, “unable to maintain service levels from year to year, much less afford the needed upgrades to make it a truly viable system.”

Bradshaw encourages the city to prioritize funding for MATA so that “the planned improvements of Memphis Transit 3.0 can enable all residents to have equitable access to jobs, education, necessities, and the full scope of all this city and county has to offer.”

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Cover Feature News

Welcome to the Machine: Fight Over Voting System Raises Issues of Integrity and Nepotism

Are the citizens of Memphis and Shelby County — troubled with decades of problematic and even botched election results — really about to acquire a new, improved means of expressing their will in the forthcoming August and November election rounds?

That question may be answered this week, as the Shelby County Commission decides whether to accept or overrule the judgment last week of Election Administrator Linda Phillips and the Shelby County Election Commission (SCEC) — apparently in favor of ballot-marking devices marketed by the ES&S Company, a monolith of the election-machine industry. The name of the chosen manufacturer was not explicitly revealed last week — “Company 1,” was how it was called in discussion — but several references by Phillips to the “thermal paper” uniquely employed by ES&S for production of machine receipts, were something of a giveaway.

Jackson Baker

Election Administrator Linda Phillips

The Shelby County Commission, which has the responsibility of paying for the machines (or not), had voted twice previously in favor of hand-marked ballots instead, on several grounds, including cost, transparency, and invulnerability to ballot-hacking. And an aroused contingent of local activists, abetted by a network of nationally known election adepts, is prepared to insist on that choice.

Theoretically, the SCEC voted last Thursday to accept something of a compromise resolution from Election Commision member Brent Taylor, one of the three Republicans on the five-member body. Taylor accepted Phillips’ recommendation on behalf of ballot-marking devices but proposed that voters in each precinct be offered, much in the manner of the grocer’s “paper or plastic” choice, the alternative of a hand-marked ballot. That was seemingly enough to win over Democrat Anthony Tate. But not Bennie Smith, the other Democrat and an election-security professional who is one of the sparkplugs of the case for hand-marked paper ballots.

The bottom line is that, despite last week’s 4-1 vote by the Shelby County Election Commission in approval of ballot-marking devices — again, presumably those manufactured by ES&S — the battle isn’t over yet. Hardcore proponents of hand-marked paper ballots, who have been highly motivated and organized from the beginning, are looking ahead to the prospect that the Shelby County Commission, whose duty it is to pay for and transact any purchase of voting-machine equipment, might override the stated choice of the Election Administrator and SCEC.

The county commission has put itself on record twice as wishing to purchase a system employing hand-marked paper ballots as the most cost-effective, transparent, and unhackable way to carry out an election. As the specter of COVID-19 began to make itself felt, the paper ballot adherents have also emphasized the lesser likelihood of viral infection via a paper ballot used singly than for metal used over and over by a sequence of individuals.

Jackson Baker

Commissioner Van Turner

One of the more dedicated believers in the paper ballot concept is Democratic County Commissioner Van Turner, who some weeks ago at a commission meeting was involved in a verbal exchange with Election Administrator Phillips, who was adamantly insisting on her preference for ballot-marking devices.

“We can vote down the funding,” Turner pointed out.

“We can sue you,” Phillips retorted.

Legal Aspects

Though conflict-of-interest and disclosure issues are involved in the dispute, the heart of the matter may well be fundamentally different ideas about the right to vote. Though both sides in the current controversy make claims that the system they advocate will save money and achieve accurate results, the question is deeper and more essential than that.

There may, in fact, be something more than an incidental correlation between the method we choose to cast our ballots and the degree to which the franchise is made available to the maximum number of people. As one instance of that, the partisans of hand-marked paper ballots tend to favor the maximum use of voting by mail for anticipated absenteeism and other reasons, especially in a time of enduring fears regarding the COVID-19 virus. One such advocate is Steve Mulroy, law professor at the University of Memphis and a former member of the Shelby County Commission and one of the leaders of the local activists seeking hand-marked paper ballots.

Jackson Baker

U of M law professor Steve Mulroy

Mulroy first came to public attention more than a decade ago when he was an early advocate locally of a paper trail for the purpose of double-checking, if need be, the votes cast in an election. The concept is now accepted virtually everywhere, and the idea of scanners to provide such a paper record of ballots cast is now built into both of the rival systems being considered for Shelby County’s new voting process.

Even as Mulroy is joining with others to urge the county commission to expand its fiduciary intent and resources for the purchase of a hand-marked ballot system, he has filed suit in Chancery Court in Nashville against relevant public officials of the state of Tennessee — Governor Bill Lee, Secretary of State Tre Hargett, state Coordinator of Elections Mark Goins, and state Attorney General Herb Slatery — seeking relief for several named individuals and organizations from state regulations impeding or prohibiting their wish to vote absentee by mail in the face of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

Court is where the voting machine case could end up, too. The partisans of hand-marked paper ballots are hopeful that the seven Democratic members of the county commission who have voted twice to endorse the purchase of such a system will stick to their guns and vote to overrule the Election Commission’s official recommendation. Such a vote could happen at the county commission’s next regular public meeting, on May 18th. Or it could come earlier via a special called meeting.

In the event such a vote does occur, it is probable that the issue would be contested legally. A first step would be Chancery Court locally, where, as County Commissioner Turner, a proponent of hand-marked ballots, sees it, the odds would favor his side. “After that, who knows?” said Turner, who foresees a round — maybe several — of appellate testing, as well as a possible action supporting ballot-marking devices by a reconvened state legislature with its Republican super-majority. “However it goes, I’m with it to the end,” vowed Turner, who said he thought the other six Democratic commissioners favoring hand-marked ballots would persevere as well. (It should be noted that the party-line aspect of the current controversy owes much to a public letter from GOP state Senator Brian Kelsey addressed to the three Republican SCEC members insisting on their support for ballot-marking devices.)

Administrator Phillips is very much a true believer for her side. She has made numerous public statements disparaging paper ballots and extolling ballot-marking devices, and, even as her original RFP (request for proposal) went out to potential vendors, she had an op-ed published on behalf of such machines. And she has made frequent public statements alleging that voter error is a rampant feature of paper ballots and, even more sensationally, told a county commission meeting recently that voter fraud occurred “100 percent” in the realm of paper ballots.

Mulroy, who has authored numerous serious papers and a book on the kaleidoscope of issues relating to voting, promptly debunked Phillips’ assertions, producing evidence that such paper-ballot fraud is hard to authenticate anywhere and has been non-existent in Tennessee. Further, Mulroy cited studies demonstrating that the rate of voter error was no higher in paper voting or in absentee ballot counts than in touch-screen voting. Significantly, he used research performed by the conservative Heritage Foundation to buttress his conclusions in both cases.

A Matter of Bona Fides

Adherents of paper ballots have been at pains of late to question the bona fides of Phillips’ professed positions, citing her own relationship — and that of her family members — to companies with whom she has arranged contractual relationships. Inasmuch as her preferred vendor for the new ballot-marking devices she wants for Shelby County is apparently ES&S, it may or may not be relevant that, as her PR assistant Suzanne Thompson acknowledged in a recent communication, one of Phillips’ two sons, presumably Andrew, “worked for ES&S,” adding, “He’s no longer employed there.”

Documentary evidence does establish that Andrew Phillips, along with another Phillips son, Chris, did work at the voting-software company Everyone Counts in 2017, when Shelby County, during Phillips’ first year as election administrator , concluded a $1 million-plus contract with that company, for the purchase and maintenance of voter-registration software. Controversy surrounds the history of that contract, first of all, since not only the two Phillips sons but Phillips herself had been an employee of Everyone Counts. Everyone Counts was, in fact, her immediate past employer at the time she took the job of Shelby County election administrator.

At the time, Everyone Counts seems not to have been regarded as a leader in its field. During the first year of the Shelby County contract, in fact, Everyone Counts suffered financial difficulties and was purchased by a company called Votem, which took over administration of the voter-registration contract. In short order, Votem would divest itself of the Shelby County contract, passing it on to a third company, KnowInk.

Coincidentally or not, Chris Phillips, one of Linda Phillips’ sons, would end up in the service of each of those companies in turn — first Everyone Counts, then Votem, and finally KnowInk, where he remains today. Meanwhile, Shelby County has continued to pay an annual maintenance fee to whoever held the contract, and has purchased KnowInk e-poll books for $175,000 on a sole-source contract.

The issue of family connections is not the only one that has arisen regarding that voter-registration contract, which was Linda Phillips’ first major action in the service of Shelby County. There is some indication that she may have waived the duty of keeping her commission members sufficiently informed about the vendor or the other relevant facts regarding the contract.

Prior to concluding that 2017 contract, Phillips, who had been hired by Shelby County in 2016, went through the motions of asking Marcy Ingram, then the ethics officer in the Shelby County Attorney’s office, a series of questions, including those of whether her own past relationship with Everyone Counts needed to be disclosed and whether her son’s employment at the company should be disclosed as well.

Attorney Ingram’s answers were succinct: “As you are involved in the evaluation of the proposals,” she said, Phillips needed to make disclosure in both cases “to the other evaluators” to avoid “an appearance of impropriety.”

In her query of Ingram, Phillips had offered this assurance: “I’m not going to be making the final decision on what to purchase; that will be the Election Commission decision to recommend the vendor.” [Our italics]

There is no record in the minutes of Shelby County Election Commission meetings or elsewhere to suggest that the commission was in fact invited to pass judgment on the vendor. Norma Lester, an election commissioner at the time, is adamant about that and affirms, too, that there were no disclosures to the election commission of the sort mandated by Ingram. Phillips’ own PR consultant, Suzanne Thompson, explains the letting of the contract thusly:

“For the purchase of the VR equipment, a scoring machine [sic] made up from county IT reps and the election commission each ranked the equipment. Each member rated the system independently. She [Phillips] didn’t make a recommendation for the Voter’s Registration System because it was all up to the folks in purchasing.”

In short, while various IT technocrats may have had a shot at “evaluating” the contract, the Shelby County Election Commission itself seemingly did not. This may or may not be a problem of substance. It is certainly one of optics.

Also in the optics category is another odd circumstance: John Ryder, the veteran Shelby County Election Commission attorney who doubles as a vintage Republican Party eminence, was revealed recently to be sharing office space with the Nashville firm of MNA Government Operations. The head of that firm is Wendell Moore, a longtime Ryder friend, who lobbies for the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce and for ES&S, that major player in the election-machinery field, and the ultimate choice of Linda Phillips and a 4-1 majority of the Election Commission as the contractor of Shelby County’s new voting system.

Once the matter of his office-sharing became public, Ryder argued that his presence in the Nashville office of MNA was due to the fact that his law firm, Harris-Shelton, rented space there and that he had no working relationship with either MNA or its client ES&S. He said further that he had no knowledge of the then-active RFP for Shelby County voting machines nor any of the vendors seeking the county’s business, and therefore he had seen no need to make any disclosures.

Left hanging over the affair in the aftermath, and never quite explained, was photographic evidence that, in two different versions of the glass register in the lobby of the Bank of America building in Nashville, Ryder was listed as an associate of MNA.

Jackson Baker

Election Commission in session

“Slimy Tricks?”

One thing is incontestable: As already indicated, ES&S, which absorbed its main rival, Diebold, some years ago, is a major player in the election-machinery business, a veritable titan. Critics of the company see it as an industry giant squelching would-be competitors and running rampant over contractual and constitutional processes in the jurisdictions where it operates.

Voting rights activist Susan Pynchon, a Floridian who, with local activist Erika Sugarmon, has organized several recent Zoom sessions on the voting-machine issue, has compiled a lengthy list of articles pertaining to the company’s activities nationwide. They run from charges of bribery to criminal negligence to playing fast and loose with contractual obligations to error-prone hardware and undependable software.

As a sort of distillation of all that, U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), in a recent Zoom seminar on election security, said that ES&S “uses every slimy trick in the book” to get states to buy “overpriced, insecure voting machines.”

That, of course, is one side of the issue. ES&S has its partisans, too, who see the company as the industry standard, inveighed against as much for its success as for any actual misdeeds. For the record, ES&S markets a hand-marked paper ballot system as well as its line of ballot-marking devices, though it more aggressively pushes the latter. The SCEC’s recent RFP saw three companies competing for Shelby County’s business: ES&S, Dominion Voting Systems, and Hart Voting System.

The Next Step

The next step in the purchase process will see Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris formally acknowledging the receipt of SCEC’s recommendation and signing an order for the Shelby County Commission to arrange a purchase for new machines to be used in August and thereafter. Word is that he will leave it to the county commission to accept the SCEC recommendation or make its own choice. If it does the latter, presumably it would opt to accept the low bid from among the various bids received in response to Linda Phillips’ RFP. And, as indicated, such an action might well be subject to legal action.

In any case, at some point in the near future, Shelby County stands to be outfitted with new voting devices, hopefully in time for the August election round. Even if human disputation is off the table by then, there might still remain the issue of whether the COVID-19 virus will remain persistent to the point that a truly serious urgency will attach to Mulroy’s aforementioned suit to allow the unimpeded use of “no-excuse-needed” mail-in ballots. For the record, those would be hand-marked.

…

Widely Differing Estimates

Election Administrator Linda Phillips and local activists for hand-marked paper ballots have difficulty agreeing on many things — notably the respective costs to Shelby County of the kind of new voting machines each prefers.

Phillips reckons the immediate purchase costs of new ES&S ballot-marking devices, which she favors, to be $7,160,000, as against $8,150,000 for a hand-marked ballot system. She sees the 14-year extrapolated cost of maintaining the hand-marked system to be $24,785,000, compared to $9,415,000 for ballot-marking devices.

The local advocates of hand-marked ballots, on the other hand, see their system as costing only $3,039,314 up front, with annual maintenance expenses of only $612,564, while they see the ballot-marking machines favored by Phillips to have an initial cost of $8,268,314, with annual expenses thereafter to be $885,203.

Not only different systems, but different vocabularies for figuring costs. No wonder this particular twain can’t meet.

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Cover Feature News

What’s Next as Tennessee Restarts Its Economy?

As the song made famous by the late Doris Day has it, “Que sera, sera/Whatever will be, will be/ the future’s not ours to see/Que sera, sera … ”

Indeed, but the residents of Memphis and Shelby County, like those elsewhere in the inhabited world, can’t be blamed for wondering: Just what does come next?

So far, there have been no armed protests locally, like those that took place in the Michigan state capitol last week. And no reason to, inasmuch as the officialdom of Memphis, Shelby County, and the county’s other six municipalities have all concurred on a business-reopening plan to begin this week.

But there remains a distinct possibility that medical circumstances could impose a hitch on those plans. After all, it is known that the reopening plan was originally scheduled to be announced by the powers-that-be on Monday of last week but was delayed until Wednesday by a reported spike in the number of coronavirus cases.

Still, here we are, with a timetable for reopening, after tiresome weeks of isolation and social distancing and shuttered establishments of virtually all kinds, public and private. Local officials made every effort to accentuate the positive, but there was inevitably a tight-lipped ring to their statements, a left-handedness to their public optimism. The opening paragraph of the reopening announcement, undersigned by mayors and health officials, for example, went this way:

“After careful study of the data, and on the advice of our medical experts including the Shelby County Health Department, the mayors of Memphis, Shelby County, and the six surrounding municipalities have determined that May 4, 2020, is the date that we can begin phase one of our Back to Business framework.”
Brandon Dill

Mayor Jim Strickland

That first salvo of official broadsides had Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland proclaiming this: “Along with our doctors, we believe it’s time to slowly start opening our economy back up and get Memphians working again.”  

Not exactly bursting with confidence. And Strickland sounded even less certain when asked to elaborate in interviews. Here he was, speaking to WMC-TV, Action News 5 last Thursday: “We feel comfortable that over the last month, for the most part, the new cases and hospitalizations have remained fairly static.” [Italics ours.] With all due respect, the effect of those two qualifying phrases — “for the most part” and “fairly static” — is daunting.

The fact is, the way forward is strewn, not with palms or garlands, but with thorns and pitfalls. April was, if not the “cruelest month” of poetic legend, unkind enough. At the beginning of the month, some two weeks into his March 23rd stay-at-home order, Strickland took stock of the city’s financial outlook and found, as he put it, anything but a “pretty picture.” With the budget yet to be calculated, the mayor foresaw revenue losses of some $80 million in the coming fiscal year. As the month wore on, his estimate rose to at least $100 million — fully a seventh of what would be a maintenance budget of $700 million.

Strickland said sales taxes, which represent about 23 percent of the operating revenues for the city’s general fund, were estimated to decline by 25 percent, with a worsening of a situation that had already seen “significant reduction in the services we provide to thousands of citizens and layoffs of hundreds of city employees.”

In the course of the month, the city received assurances of $113 million from the federal government, but it could not be used as bailout money. The strings were that every penny would have to go for COVID-related expenses. Ditto with the $50 million of CARES Act money expected by Shelby County government. The city holds a reserve fund of some $78 million but needs to hold on to most of that as a last resource in case the disaster takes even more unpredictable turns.

Conflict in County Government
Shelby County’s budget situation is uncertain as well, and like much else in county government, is subject to a kind of internally raging civil conflict. The discords of the moment, under Mayor Lee Harris, are hardly as pronounced as were those of the administration of previous Mayor Mark Luttrell, who, during his second term (2014-2018) found himself almost totally estranged from the Shelby County Commission. 
Justin Fox Burks

Mayor Lee Harris

Although Luttrell was a Republican and the commission had a Democratic majority, their differences were not partisan. Indeed, Luttrell faced his severest tests under two Republican chairs, Terry Roland and Heidi Shafer. Democrats still dominate the commission, but party loyalties, now as then, provide no cushion for Harris, himself a Democrat. His difficulties, like those of Luttrell, stem from disagreements over budgetary matters.

Luttrell’s alienation from his legislative body began when he evinced a determination to play fiduciary matters close to the vest, withholding information in 2015 about a looming budget surplus that commission members, once they tumbled onto its existence, decided they had plans of their own for. From that point to the end of Luttrell’s tenure, a power struggle persisted. When Harris took office in 2018, he took pains to express solidarity with the commission that had been elected that year, but discovered that maintaining an effective liaison with commissioners required a more systematic and continual effort than he had realized.

When he proposed his first budget in early 2019, he told commission members he wanted passage that very evening. He didn’t get it, of course. The budget didn’t get finalized until weeks later, after the usual give-and-take of negotiations. But in essence, he hazarded something similar this year, announcing last month, in the first blush of the coronavirus crisis, that he’d worked out a series of emergency reductions, across the board of county agencies, totaling $10 million, that would allow the county, by the nearest of near things, to escape bankruptcy.

Several department directors disputed his cuts, and the commission members couldn’t agree on them, and the bottom line was that nothing got done, not even a $2.5 million appropriation that was to have been the county’s contribution toward the costs of PPEs and other local COVID expenses.

Second thoughts on the commission’s part got that latter omission rectified two weeks later, and by then Harris had retooled his own plans, announcing a “lean and balanced” austerity budget of $1.4 billion that now required $13.6 million in cuts as well as a loan of $6 million  from the county’s fund balance, leaving that reserve fund at the “go-no-lower” level of $85 million. There were a few fillips, too, in the way of pre-K expenditures, money for the sheriff’s deputies who’ll have to be hired to police newly de-annexed areas of Memphis, and a few million dollars extra for the schools.

The gremlin in the mix was the ever-unpopular idea of upping the county’s wheel tax, to the tune of an additional $16.50 to be added to the base automobile license fee of $50. No other place to go, said Harris, inasmuch as local property and sales taxes had already topped out.

Between that meeting and this Monday’s, the commission held committee meetings last Wednesday in which disagreement over budget possibilities flared into open name-calling between Commissioner Edmund Ford Jr. and Harris.

Serving as vice chair to budget chair Eddie Jones, the two of them opened up a tear in Harris’ plans, which Ford called “garbage,” floating a plan to ignore the mayor’s “lean”model budget and replace it with a thinly reconditioned version of the old 2020 budget, coming in at $1.3 billion.

“I used to think I was halfway decent at math, but it’s obvious that I can’t add,” CFO Mathilde Crosby said. Harris accused Ford of having been a “bloodletter” when they both served on the Memphis City Council, and Ford reciprocated that Harris was “presumptuous and arrogant and ignorant.”

Perhaps wisely, Harris kept his distance from Monday’s commission meeting, at which the Ford-Jones idea of rehabbing last year’s budget was happily forgotten and the mayor’s own “lean” budget was equally ignored. With all hopes of agreement dissolving, Commission Chair Mark Billingsley seized upon the expedient of a budget retreat to be held on Friday in FedEx quarters at Shelby Farms, with only the commissioners, the mayor, CAO Dwan Gillom, and CFO Crosby there to reason together at six-foot distances and find both the humane initiatives favored by Commissioner Tami Sawyer and the “shorter shoestring” demanded by conservative Republican Commissioner Brandon Morrison.

Jackson Baker

Matters of State
Governor Bill Lee’s own “shelter-in-place” resolve was hardly long-lasting, and it was none too stout to begin with, although an online survey of Tennesseans, conducted by a condominium of northeastern universities found that Lee’s now-you-see-them, now-you-don’t actions have been welcomed by some 64 percent of Tennesseans, while only 13 percent disapproved.

In Nashville, this year’s session of the General Assembly was abandoned when the dimensions of the pandemic and its reach into Tennessee became clear. It was at a time, for better or for worse, of much unfinished business. Left pending were such matters as the funding (and timing) of private-school vouchers, the designation of the Bible as the state book, a carry-over anti-abortion bill, and open-carry gun legislation.

As reported by Erik Schelzig, the diligent and ever-accurate editor of the Tennessee Journal newsletter, “Senate leadership has made it clear its preference is to focus only on downward adjustments to the budget required by the economic impact of the coronavirus. But a vocal faction in the House wants to instead throw open the doors to the legislation left hanging when lawmakers left town in March.”

A not unimportant matter is the question of whether state legislators, if indeed they resume deliberations by the planned date of June 1st, would authorize “no-excuse” absentee voting. Early voting for the August 6th election round is scheduled for July 17th, mere weeks later. As of now, a firm cut-off date of May 8th still applies to absentee applications. As Schelzig notes, “There’s been little sign so far state Republicans are becoming more receptive to liberalizing rules on voting by mail. And they have ample political cover from President Donald Trump, who has been a vocal critic of allowing more absentee voting. If it remains just Democrats advocating for sweeping changes to Tennessee’s current vote-by- mail laws, the issue will likely be dead on arrival.”

Locally the ballot will contain a mini-Shelby County general election and, as elsewhere in Tennessee, a primary for state and federal offices. The much-beleaguered county commission, on which Democrats have an 8-to-5 partisan edge, has formally resolved both to seek an extension of the absentee ballot and to urge the county’s Election Commission to purchase new equipment enabling hand-marked paper ballots. Indeed, the commission has conflated the two matters into a single resolution, which has passed twice now with the minimum seven votes required.

Under the more limited approach, a small number of committees would meet the last week of May before gaveling into session June 1st for as little as a week. Under the situation-normal approach, the session could last as long as three weeks — or even butt up against the end of the budget year on June 30th.

Jackson Baker

The Pending August 6th Election
Leaving aside the seemingly remote chance that a re-summoned legislature would facilitate an expansion of absentee voting, the chance that Governor Lee would support such an undertaking is equally unlikely. As indicated, the issue has no place in the playbook of the state’s Republican super-majority.

What is more to the point of reality is the issue of new voting machines for Shelby County, which county election administrator Linda Phillips has expressed hopes of putting to use in time for the forthcoming August election.

As indicated, early voting for that election is scheduled to begin on July 17th, a fact that presents a drastically foreshortened timetable for resolving a matter that has been seriously contested, in one way or another, for years, and confounded local elections for a decade or more.

No one needs to be reminded of the numerous electronic glitches that have led activists to join forces to campaign for a particular kind of machinery, which, perhaps ironically, constitutes a throwback to a less technological time. Among these activists are Shelby County Election Commissioner Bennie Smith, an acknowledged expert in the field of voting machinery; law professor and former Shelby County Commissioner Steve Mulroy; White Station High School government teacher Erika Sugarmon; and Mike Kernell and Carol Chumney, both former state representatives and veterans, respectively, of the Shelby County School Board and the Memphis City Council.

All of the foregoing are advocates of hand-marked paper ballots and argue that given Shelby County’s own checkered and error-prone voting history, and in acknowledgement also of the hacks and rumors of hacks that have plagued national elections, a resort to hand-marked ballots verified by scanning machines would be both safer and less costly. And, in a time of potential viral infections of metal surfaces, they would also be safer than the kind of ballot-marking devices that Phillips and the GOP members of the Election Commission have expressed a preference for.

So far the battle over voting devices has been a back-and-forth affair, and the forced reversion to electronic webinar meetings of the Election Commission occasioned by the coronavirus outbreak has complicated things further. A definitive choice of machine vendors by Phillips and a subsequent vote on her recommendation by the Election Commission members were both aborted by an electronic snag that kept member Brent Taylor, a Republican but a potential swing voter, from participating in a virtual executive session of the EC last week.

The Election Commission is slated to have another go this week, and so, for that matter, is the Shelby County Commission, which, unlike the EC, is dominated by Democrats and has repeatedly voted its preference — twice recently — for hand-marked ballots. Given the fact that the county commission controls the purse strings, the stage is set for a possible showdown between the two bodies over the voting-machine matter.

Meanwhile, the major pressure on all public bodies is the determination on so many people’s part and in so many jurisdictions everywhere to resume public activities — in advance of the reasonably arrived-at phases announced by President Trump requiring 14 straight days of declining coronavirus cases, advances in testing and contact tracing, and much else — parameters that have been roundly ignored everywhere — and not least in the White House itself.

In a recent discussion on CNN with Wolf Blitzer, various experts were heard to theorize that a second, more virulent phase of the pandemic would be coming in the fall and that, sans some unforeseen good fortune to concocting a vaccine, the plague would be with us for at least two more years.

That, said one of the authorities on tap, explained the sudden mania to hit the beaches, the supermarkets, and the national shrines. It was a matter of get-it-while-you-can, the scientist — not a fantasist — theorized. And it is undeniably a goad to our public bodies. Somewhere out there our future beckons — into some rosy and becalmed sunset in which to find our dreams or, if things should take a dystopian turn, there’s Edgar Allan Poe and “The Masque of the Red Death.”

And there is surely something in between.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Harris Teases Austerity Budget He’ll Present to Commissioners

In advance of Monday’s regular meeting of the Shelby County Commission, County Mayor Lee Harris released a brief summary of the budget proposal that he intends to lay before the Commission.

Headed “Shelby County’s Come-back,” Harris’ summary advised that “serious cuts” are coming, but said that “the proposed budget meets our obligation to our retirees by fully funding our pension” and “includes strategic investments in education, public safety, public health, emergency preparedness, and in strengthening the social safety net.”

County Mayor Lee Harris

The proposed $1.4 billion budget, said Harris, would make it possible to “hire more social workers, more personnel to assist our veterans’ population, and create a new COVID-assistance fund to provide direct assistance to families hard-hit by this worldwide public health emergency.” It would also “fully fund … our commitment to Public Health.”

Additions in this budget would include approximately $4 million to fund 30 new additional patrolman positions in the Sheriff’s Department, needed “to patrol the soon-to-be de-annexed areas” of Memphis.

On the education front, the budget would allocate $8.5 million to Pre-K and early Pre-K, as well as “$427 million for schools, in addition to $33 million in school construction needs this year.”

“[T]his budget requires us tighten our belts,” Harris said. “This budget proposes serious cuts. This budget will require us all to make some tough decisions, like everyone else in America right now.”

A fuller presentation of budget specifics (and the Commission’s reaction) will be noted in the wake of Monday’s Commission meeting.