Not that it is, or should be, the most significant fact to emerge from last week’s COVID-19 debacle in Shelby County, but, all the same, it’s a fact: The 2022 county election has begun, with the sides being chosen and the weapons weighed.
Much of that became obvious at a special called meeting of the Shelby County Commission on Friday, February 26th, when the 13 commissioners were given a chance to interrogate County Mayor Lee Harris regarding the Tennessee Department of Health’s charges of mismanagement of COVID-19 vaccination by the Shelby County Health Department, resulting in TDH’s yanking responsibility for allocating vaccines locally and reassigning that function to the city of Memphis.
In the course of two hours of tense and sometimes volatile questioning of Harris, who remained in his upstairs office and appeared virtually via webinar, the commissioners, most of whom were seated in their regular chamber seats in the auditorium of the Vasco Smith County Building, cleaved unmistakably along partisan lines.
Jackson Baker
Four of the body’s five Republicans — Mick Wright, David Bradford, Amber Mills, and Mark Billingsley — directly challenged the county administration, with Bradford, Mills, and Billingsley questioning the leadership of Harris, a Democrat, and Wright demanding an accounting from Shelby County Health Department Director Alisa Haushalter, who was absent from the session and, in fact, had, as Harris announced at the meeting, tendered her resignation that very day.
Harris — who declined, as he said, to engage in “navel-gazing”— kept a solemn mien as he stressed the need to “remediate” the situation, going forward, and fielded inquiries about the imbroglio and its details, including spoilage and subsequent wastage of an alleged 2,500 doses of Pfizer vaccine, the purported stockpiling of some 30,000 doses, unauthorized vaccination of children, possible theft of vaccine from the Pipkin vaccination site, and much more.
There were references in state documents to a “power struggle” between the county and Memphis city government over vaccine administration. Harris denied knowledge of any such development, but Billingsley reinforced that meme by lengthily extolling what he portrayed as Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland‘s filling a void with a display of “leadership.”
Bllingsley, a former commission chairman, is widely regarded as being a likely GOP candidate in 2022 to oppose Harris’ re-election. Another Republican known to be considering a race for county mayor next year is the well-connected Frank Colvett Jr., the current chairman of the Memphis City Council.
In normal circumstances, partisan differences on the county commission are not hard and fast, and allegiances are formed across party lines. (So are antagonisms: One of Harris’ persistent critics is Democratic member Edmund Ford Jr., who chimed in his discontent Friday along with the aforementioned Republicans.) But there was a drawing together on the Democratic side as well; Democratic Commissioners Van Turner and Reginald Milton rose to Harris’ defense on Friday with expressions of praise for his conduct of the mayoral office.
Turner even seemed to imply that the state’s action reflected a bias of Republican state government against Shelby County as a “step-child,” and noted that equivalent vaccine mishaps in Knox County had largely escaped censure by the TDH.
The current crisis will eventually be resolved or it won’t, but in the meantime it has offered a preview of a partisan divide, which may partially heal over but is bound to become more pronounced the closer we come to election year 2022.