Tag: Sidney Chism

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Politics Politics Feature

Party Purity

The most surprising aspect of last week’s decision by the Shelby County Democratic Executive Committee to censure several party officials for “disloyalty,” i.e., siding with Republicans in electoral situations, was the unanimity of the committee’s vote.

Not a peep of dissent was heard from the membership, as veteran committee member Del Gill read out the bill of particulars against state Senator Reginald Tate, state Representative Joe Towns, Shelby County Commissioner Sidney Chism, and state Executive Committee Member Hazel Moore.

All were accused of violating what the censure resolution called “existing protocols for bona fides, loyalty, and political behavior.”

Chism was cited for efforts to dissuade Democratic sheriff’s candidate Bennie Cobb from running against incumbent Sheriff Bill Oldham, a Republican, so as to allow Oldham “to be the only filed candidate of any party for the position.” Tate, Towns, and Moore were censured for their presence “at a campaign opener and fund-raising event” for Republican Jimmy Moore, the incumbent Circuit Court clerk, a longtime former Democrat before changing his nominal party affiliation in the 1990s.

Gill, a Democratic primary candidate for the Circuit Court clerkship now held by Moore, and a longtime advocate of strict party-loyalty requirements, was the prime mover in seeking the censure resolution.

The censure resolution was in the same spirit of the one voted last year against Shelby County Commission Chair James Harvey — who was cited in September for awarding chairmanship of the commission’s key budget committee to Republican Commissioner Heidi Shafer. An unspoken premise of that censure was that Harvey, who was about to become commission chair, had bargained with GOP members to achieve their support for the chairman position.

It is uncertain what effect the censure resolution will have on the party status of Tate, Towns, and Chism, although the censure resolution, in its final sentence, states, “The Democratic Party reserves the rights under Tennessee Election Codes to control who appears on its ballot.”

Gill informed the Flyer that, in his words, “the party could declare these persons ‘non bona fide’ Democrats if further violations of party conduct are affirmed by the executive committee. They would then not be able to file a future petition for Democratic Party candidacy.”

Short of such a draconian move as that, the real issue is: What practical difference will the censure make?

Harvey, who is not known to have apologized for anything, had filed this year for the office of Shelby County Mayor — as a Democrat — and had been allowed to speak to the same executive committee that voted last week’s censures, along with three other mayoral candidates, at the committee’s February meeting.

He withdrew his filing for county mayor at the deadline for withdrawal, two weeks ago, but not, it seems, out of any concern — his or anybody else’s — about party fidelity.

The issue of ecumenism versus political purity is certain to resurface during this year’s election contests, at least on the Democratic side, with various candidates already vowing to pick over their primary opponents’ voting records with an eye toward finding telltale votes in Republican primaries.

Local Democratic Party Chairman Bryan Carson says the rule of thumb for certifying a candidate on the Democratic ballot is whether he or she has voted in a Republican primary more than once in the last five election cycles.

Apropos that, a visitor at last week’s censure meeting, one Tom Reasons of Dyersburg, who says he is running this year as a Democrat against 8th District GOP Congressman Stephen Fincher, offered an interesting excuse for having voted in the most recent Republican presidential primary. It was in order, he explained, to help pick the “worst” GOP nominee for President Obama to run against.

• The past weekend saw several political events bearing on the forthcoming May 6th primaries for countywide office. One of the key ones, a forum involving all three Democratic candidates for county mayor, took place on Saturday at Caritas Village in Binghamton, at a luncheon of the Democratic Women of Shelby County.

The candidates, who appeared in alphabetical order, were former County Commissioner Deidre Malone, current Commissioner Steve Mulroy, and the Rev. Kenneth Whalum, a former school board member. All had their talking points, and all got them said.

As she has at previous events, Malone reminded the audience of her political credentials, including a prior run for mayor in 2010, and her business credentials (a former ALSAC-St. Jude administrator, she now operates a PR company). And she looked past her current Democratic rivals to assail “the current Republican county mayor,” Mark Luttrell, for what she said was inattention to the needs of the less fortunate and for his refusal even to offer opinions on “things that are important to Democrats.”

She said her business experience would allow her to repair what was an “inefficient” county operation under Luttrell.

Asked about the county’s shift of Title X funding for women’s health issues from Planned Parenthood, the traditional recipient of the funding, to Christ Community Health Services (CCHS), Malone pronounced it a “mistake” and vowed “to do something about it” as county mayor.

She may have felt that Mulroy was vulnerable on that score, in that he had voted in 2011 with the majority to award the Title X contract to CCHS. Mulroy, though, was able to address the issue from what he felt was a position of strength. Earlier in the week, he had held a press conference announcing his dissatisfaction with CCHS for, among other things, allowing its service level to drop precipitately for two years in a row from the level previously maintained by Planned Parenthood.

He said at the press conference and repeated on Saturday that he had voted in 2011 to switch from Planned Parenthood to CCHS only after realizing that there were already nine votes on the commission to approve CCHS (two more than needed) and that he used his position on the prevailing side to insist on strict monitoring to assure that CCHS a) engaged in no religious proselytizing and b) didn’t attempt to steer patients away from abortion.

Because of CCHS’s sub-par service levels, said Mulroy, he was insisting that the county re-bid the contract, using independent medical experts to score the bidding agencies for expertise.

Thus did the commissioner attempt to solidify his position with pro-choice Democrats who felt that Planned Parenthood, identified by the political right with the abortion issue, had been targeted by state and federal sources for separation from its historic Title X role. Mulroy described himself as the commission’s chief progressive activist on a variety of hot-button issues.

Whalum continued, as in the past, to burnish his maverick credentials, proclaiming,” I am the underdog candidate for Shelby County mayor. All of the pundits, all of the professionals are saying, ‘Whalum doesn’t have a chance. He doesn’t have any money. He can’t get the support of the political professionals.’ I don’t need it and I don’t want it.”

Whether the eloquent minister is protesting too much can be debated, in that his personal abilities and grass-roots appeal have been amply noted in most public commentary, as has his leadership in the successful recent effort to turn back a proposed sales-tax increase to fund city pre-K programs.

“The city of Memphis is the county seat of Shelby County, not the toilet seat,” said Whalum, who described the imminent closing of several Memphis schools as symptomatic of serious community crisis, and promised to address that problem, “if we have to move all the county departments into the buildings they want to close.”

He promised to raise the pay for women in the county administration to a level commensurate with men and to bring in young people with fresh governmental ideas. Asked if he was pro-choice, Whalum answered as follows: “I am pro-choice. I represent the ultimate pro-choice person. ‘Choose ye this day.'”

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Politics Politics Feature

Decisions, Decisions …

The word “trust” — as in “lack of” — dominated post-mortem comments by principals on both sides of a vote taken in Monday’s meeting of the Shelby County Commission.

That vote, on whether or not to recommend the establishment of a new utility district for fire and ambulance service in the unincorporated areas of Shelby County and in the municipalities of Arlington, Millington, and Lakeland, ended up with six aye votes and seven abstentions, and consequently failed.

It was one of those relatively rare occasions when the voting split entirely along partisan lines, with the aye voters being Republicans and the abstainers being Democrats. But the real distinction seemed to be that of city dwellers versus suburbanites, as first noted in the wake of the vote by Republican Chris Thomas, a District 4 representative whose constituency is outside the boundaries of Memphis.

Sponsor Wyatt Bunker, who also represents District 4, expressed unhappiness with the outcome afterward and declared that an innocent proposition, one designed merely to clarify what have been ill-defined service lines and to establish “stability” for first responders, had been turned down because of an absence of trust.

In a conversation with Bunker, District 5 representative Steve Mulroy, a Memphian, agreed. As he told the Flyer: “The Memphis people just weren’t in on the preparation of the resolution and weren’t sure what was involved.” He said he thought the proposition would be better received at the commission’s next meeting, if Bunker chose to reintroduce it.

Ironically, or perhaps appropriately, the ambivalent outcome of the suburban utility district vote preceded a closed executive session of the commission, along with legal counsel, regarding prospects for reaching agreement on still-active school-related litigation, posed essentially along city vs. suburban lines.

Unsurprisingly, reports leaking from the session that were embargoed from the press indicated that little if any progress was made.

• Two other matters of importance were pending at hard-copy press time. Go here for an update.

One involved a decision by the Memphis City Council on whether to ratify a compromise agreement reached between the city administration and AFSCME union representatives regarding changes in the city’s waste-collection procedures.

Modifications in the agreement — spelled out in greater detail by participant Jake Brown in this week’s Viewpoint (p. 15) — seemed possible at press time, but in essence the agreement is a trade-off.

Sanitation workers represented by the union, previously lacking any pension benefits, will get a modest retirement benefit, amounting to a maximum of $12,000 a year, based on seniority of service.

The city will be able to reduce its annual expenditures by as much as $5 million through consolidating what have been separate garbage and recycling/brush collection processes, upping the number of collections performed by individual crews, and reducing waste-management personnel through attrition.

City residents would be assessed an additional $2.25, restoring the monthly fee to its former level of $25.05.

The other process on its way to a resolution Tuesday involved an ethics complaint filed by Shelby County commissioner Terry Roland against commission colleague Sidney Chism, regarding an alleged conflict of interest in violation of a 2009 ethics code adopted by the commission.

Roland alleges that, in voting for county appropriations, Chism improperly failed to disclose the receipt of county “wraparound” services (involving medical and dental checkups and other Head Start funding) by a South Memphis day-care center he owns.

An ethics commission appointed by the county at the time the ethics code was adopted has met twice on the matter and was scheduled to convene Tuesday afternoon, presumably to deliver its verdict on the matter.

The mere fact of the complaint played a significant role in the commission’s budget and tax rate deliberations this year, in that Roland, an opponent of proposed increases in both, challenged the propriety of Chism’s taking part in votes on the two issues. For his part, a cautious Chism, a proponent of county mayor Mark Luttrell‘s proposals for increasing the budget and county tax rate, did, in fact, avoid voting on the latter until the recent announcement by the administration of the Unified School District that the wraparound funds would not be disbursed in the coming fiscal year.

A late contribution to the case was an amicus curiae brief filed with the ethics commission Monday by former commissioners Joe Ford, Joyce Avery, and Deidre Malone, and current commissioner Steve Mulroy.

The brief, prepared by Mulroy, argues against a contention by special counsel Brian Faughnan that state law, which has provisions regarding both direct and indirect benefits, should supercede the county code, which, as the brief indicates, specifically excludes indirect benefits as an infraction of the code.

Chism has maintained that any benefits received by his day-care center were, in fact, just that — indirect ones.

Included in the brief are generous excerpts from dialogue between commissioners at the time the ethics code was being promulgated in 2009. Typical was a comment at the time from Commissioner Wyatt Bunker warning against “politically motivated charges” that could result from the inclusion of indirect benefits as an actionable condition.

• A recent ruling by U.S. district judge Hardy Mays neatly sliced through a Gordian knot regarding the Unified School Board’s future composition. Now another ruling, this one by Chancellor Kenny Armstrong, has snarled the issue again.

In the first instance, Mays postponed by a year the planned expansion of the Unified Board from seven to 13 members, thus extricating the county commission from the puzzle of how — and when — to reconfigure the District 6 seat vacated by Reginald Porter, who resigned it to become the school system’s new chief of staff.

In the latest case, however, Armstrong ruled that a new election had to be held for the District 4 seat occupied by Kevin Woods since the August 2012 elections for the seven-member board. Woods was the apparent winner — by a 106-vote margin that was later adjudged to be 290 votes — over Kenneth Whalum Jr. But Whalum sued, contending that wrong ballots issued by the election commission had skewed the results, and Armstrong agreed.

In his opinion, issued Monday, the chancellor declared: “The Election Commission here made no concerted effort to avoid the problems that occurred in this election for school board positions … .

“These mistakes in assigning so many voters to incorrect school board districts cannot be simply ignored in an effort by the court to not take the step of declaring an election invalid. Without a new election conducted properly, there will always be legitimate questions about the actual winner in the District 4 county school board race … .

“The District 4 race is, under the facts here, incurably uncertain when all voters are considered and leaves the Court no alternative except to order a new election in this race.”

Hence, it is up to the election commission — with a new black eye, or with its former black eye newly exposed — to schedule a new election for District 6. Both Woods and Whalum have indicated they would vie again in such an election. But that election could be delayed indefinitely by an appeal from Woods. Meanwhile, the county commission has set a date of August 23rd for applicants to seek the vacated District 6 seat, will interview those applicants on August 29th, and make an appointment on September 9th.

That part seems simple enough.

• The Tennessee Democrats who hope to see Sara Kyle become a candidate for the Democratic nomination for governor in 2014 have now coalesced into to a “Run Sara Run PAC” with co-chairs from three of the state’s major population centers.

Cited in a press release from the newly formed PAC on Monday were Deidre Malone of Memphis, a former Shelby County commissioner who is an announced candidate for Shelby County mayor; Elisa Parker of Nashville, vice chair of the Tennessee Democratic Party; and Chris Anderson of Chattanooga, a member of the Chattanooga City Council.

The release noted the establishment of a website called DraftSaraKyle.com and a physical address in Memphis to which “contributions” might be sent and called for college students to turn out in support of Kyle at the Tennessee Democratic Party’s annual Jackson Day celebration on September 7th.

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Politics Politics Feature

County Tax-Rate Battle Ends

CREDIT: JB

So finally it’s over! Shelby County commissioner Sidney Chism, who had been abstaining on all prior votes on the county’s 2013-14 tax rate, out of consideration for a possible conflict-of-interest situation, made the dramatic announcement at the beginning of Monday’s meeting that he would be voting on a repeat third reading of the once-rejected tax rate and explained why.

Previously, said Chism, he had been legally advised that, as proprietor of a South Memphis day-care center which received some of its funding from Shelby County government, it might be a conflict of interest for him to vote on a budget that authorized such funding. The center, which the commissioner said was under the control of family members, not himself, was in any case no longer receiving such funding, and Chism continued, “I’ve been advised that with full disclosure I will be able to vote.”

On another contentious issue, Chism acknowledged that he would be a board member of a charter school which his granddaughter has applied to operate but that such a circumstance would not arise until he had left the commission, even if her application got approval. So he regarded himself as unhampered on that count as well.

The bottom line was that Chism would be recorded in favor, and this fact, along with another major conversion, that of Commissioner Justin Ford, would make the final tally 7-5-1 in favor of Shelby County mayor Mark Luttrell‘s $4.38 tax rate ($4.42 for non-Memphis residents, due to a 2004 rural school bond obligation), with the lone absentee being Commissioner Heidi Shafer, a tax-rate opponent.

Ford’s conversion was actually a return to form. The commissioner had voted aye on the first two readings of the Luttrell tax rate, but he switched to no, along with new chairman-elect James Harvey two weeks ago. On Monday, Ford said he had spoken with members of the administration about their considering the idea of money for summer jobs programs and was satisfied that they were open to discussion.

The absence of Shafer from Monday’s meeting, along with the (relatively) perfunctory resistance put up by tax-rate opponents, was an indication that commissioners of all persuasions saw the handwriting on the wall and that there would be no more stalemates on the tax-rate question like those which have stalled implementation of the budget in recent weeks.

Various grants and new hires that were put on deep freeze until a tax rate could be approved are now free to be implemented. That includes programs for the homeless that had received vocal support from audience members at the last several meetings.

So foregone was the conclusion as the relatively brief meeting got under way that the only tension was an angry exchange between Commissioner Terry Roland and Chairman Mike Ritz over a verbal attack by Roland on Commissioner Walter Bailey, a tax-rate supporter.

Ritz gaveled Roland down as “out of order” for making “personal” remarks, and Roland responded, “You’re out of order!” Reminded by Ritz that he had the duty to maintain order as chairman, Roland retorted, “Well, you won’t be much longer.”

At the commission’s last meeting, Commissioner James Harvey became chairman-elect, helped along by votes from tax-rate opponents. Harvey continued in that mode on Monday, voting no to the $4.38 tax rate, the only Democrat to do so, along with Republicans Roland, Wyatt Bunker, Chris Thomas, and Steve Basar.

Before the votes were taken, Basar made an extended and somewhat impassioned statement about the roughly $57 million still owed by Memphis city government to the county’s new unified school system as successor to Memphis City Schools. The debt, found to be legally binding by the courts as a “maintenance of effort” obligation, dates from a fateful decision in 2008 by the Memphis City Council, budget-beleaguered then as now, to cut its annual allotment to Memphis City Schools by that amount.

Had the debt been paid, Basar said, “we wouldn’t be talking about raising taxes here. We wouldn’t be trying to fill the gap.”

Until recently, Basar had been a potential seventh vote, if needed, for the $4.38 tax rate. But in the course of the stalemate that developed on the commission during the last few weeks, he had resolved to stand fast in favor of a $4.32 rate, which is identical to the state-established certified tax rate, an arbitrary figure representing the rate at which the county could count on revenue at the same level as the previous year.

The $4.32 rate had figured large in an extended session of the commission’s budget and finance committee last week (a de facto commission meeting per se, since 12 of the 13 commissioners were in attendance and voting, all but Steve Mulroy, who was out of town).

Previous to that meeting, a consensus in favor of the $4.32 rate seemed to have been building as a compromise between Luttrell’s request and a resistance to any tax-rate increase at all on the part of the commission’s hard-line conservatives.

Normally, Roland is a member of that latter coalition (though, as some of its members have made clear privately, they are not always comfortable with his often abrasive and confrontational approach). But last Wednesday, to the surprise of most, the Millington commissioner offered a version of the $4.32 tax rate as his own, putting it forth as an “olive branch” gesture of solidarity.

But in the course of extended debate that day (far more strenuous than anything that happened on Monday), Roland could find few takers. Even Shafer, who had seconded his motion for $4.32, did not end up voting with him, being out of the room when the issue was called. Only Roland and Basar voted aye, a result that owed a great deal, as commissioners on both sides of the issue would confide later, to their view of the messenger as much as to their attitude toward the message.

But more than personality issues were involved. Luttrell and two chief aides, CAO Harvey Kennedy and county finance officer Mike Swift, made the point that no less than $9.6 million would have to be pared from the county’s $1.2 billion budget, already passed and, to some extent, already being acted upon.

Since nobody wanted the schools, already acknowledged by most observers to be operating at a bare-bones level, to suffer, all of that $9.6 million would have to come from the county’s general fund, and that would mean layoffs and program cuts. In the end, that prospect proved too much to deal with for commissioners, like Ford, who were on the fence.

• It is to be hoped that 9th District congressman Steve Cohen enjoyed the weather in Washington last week. There was not much else for him to take comfort from.

First, for those few who might have missed what became a national story and viral on a large scale, CNN announced the results of a DNA test it had administered to Cohen, Victoria Brink, the Houston model whom he introduced to the world back in February as his daughter, and John Brink, the Houston oil man who had raised her as his own daughter.

The results were as astonishing as the Memphis Democrat’s original announcement of proud paternity — but, for obvious reasons, devastating.

The tests showed that Brink was the actual father and not Cohen, who had been involved with Victoria Brink’s mother at a time consistent with his possible fatherhood and had apparently been informed, almost four years ago, that he was indeed the father.

A “stunned and dismayed” Cohen said, “I still love Victoria, hold dear the time I have shared with her, and hope to continue to be a part of her life.”

But that was not the end. In what he probably saw as no more than a gallant evasion, Cohen told a reporter seeking further reaction that, while she was “very attractive,” he had resolved to say no more about the issue. That got him some more hits from media types, who must have scented blood, and he got even more after a tweet in which he quoted an African-American tow-truck driver (yes, Cohen’s vintage Cadillac chose this week to quit on him) as saying, sympathetically, in a clearly ich-bin-ein-Berliner way, “You’re black!”

The piling on was especially curious in that, with an Obama news conference, major bills, and foreign discords to deal with, it wasn’t a slow news week in D.C.

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Editorial Opinion

Politics and Rule 33

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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