Tag: Terry Roland

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Here We Go Again: A Revised Version of the Congressional Map

(from Tennessee State Government)


It turns out that the redistricting map of congressional districts that the General Assembly’s majority Republicans trotted out last week has already undergone significant change — and it ain’t over yet.

It will be recalled that last week’s map pretty much left the boundaries of the 9th District in Shelby County itself as they had been for the last 10 years, extending eastward from the Shelby County riverfront and taking in most, but not all, of Memphis proper. But the 2020 Census demonstrated that Shelby, like the rest of West Tennessee, had lagged behind Middle Tennessee in population growth, and the 9th needed to expand, area-wise, to include the proportionate number of citizens.

Accordingly, the first map proposed to expand the 9th northward, taking in the whole of predominantly rural Tipton County rather than restoring sections of East Memphis that a dominant GOP gave to Republican congressman David Kustoff’s 8th District after the 2010 census.

That solution satisfied the Republican map-makers, who knew that the heavily African-American demographics of Memphis made it impossible to gerrymander the 9th into a Republican-leaning district. And it allowed Kustoff to hold on to the affluent East Memphis areas that the 8th gained after the previous census. The 8th would, in any case, continue to be solidly Republican.

But the GOP mapmakers had not reckoned with the desire of Tipton Countians, quickly made public via their legislative surrogates in the Assembly, to keep as much as possible of their domain aligned with the 8th District, predominantly Republican and rural, like themselves.

So the mapmakers went back to work and have come up with a second provisional version of the 8th/9th split. This one would allow the greater part of Tipton County, that portion east of Highway 51, to remain within the 8th District. To compensate for the population shift, portions of Shelby County would return to the 9th District. 

Kustoff would still have what wags in state government call the “finger of love,” the dagger-shaped salient that, after the 2010 Census, was  carved out westward into Memphis territory and includes a generous  hunk of the affluent Poplar Corridor. Indeed, along its margins, the salient would be marginally enlarged in favor of the 8th District.

For his part, Cohen — though disappointed in his wish to regain East Memphis territories that had long been in the 9th District — was more or less satisfied. He would surrender 30,000 Tipton citizens who were included in the first map but would gain the same number of Shelby Countians. “So that’s good. I picked up some in Southeast Shelby [Ashland] Lake, Forest Hill, as well as Bartlett, Morningstar, and maybe more Cordova. I didn’t lose any of the University of Memphis, maybe a parking lot or dormitory on Poplar,  not much,  and I got the Galloway Golf Course back.”

The Memphis congressman seemed content as well to represent the western portion of Tipton County, including a quaintly named community he identified as “Pecker Point.” A little investigation revealed that the proper name for that tiny hamlet — go ahead and google it — is actually “Peckerwood Point,” a fact confirmed by another political figure, former Shelby County Commissioner Terry Roland.

Roland, who claims ancestral connections with the community and unabashedly embraces the unusual vernacular of its name, is also interested in the final outlines, still to be determined, of the 9th Congressional District. A resident of Millington, Roland is musing about a possible run for the 9th Congressional seat, presumably as a Republican. He also had recently floated a trial balloon about a possible race for Shelby County Mayor as an independent.  

Though he has held office as a Republican and is a professed admirer of former President Trump, Roland maintains, “Really, I’ve been moving away from this idea of having to be a Democrat or a Republican. That partisanship is not what public service is about.”

Roland also expressed dismay at what he saw as the motivations of the map-makers in the legislature, citing the aforementioned “finger of love” in the 8th District as an example. “That’s gerrymandering, pure and simple,” he said.

However the district lines end up at the hands of the Republican supermajority members, who have apparently carved up the Nashville area to eliminate the long-term Democratic congressman there, the label of “gerrymandering” would seem to be irrefutable.

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Politics Politics Feature

Roland versus Kustoff? Conflict Over Who’s the Most Trumpian

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Before the current week is finished, we’ll have an accurate head count of how many members of Congress choose to cast a vote against confirming the election of Joe Biden and, conversely, in favor of the pretense of Donald Trump that he is somehow entitled to remain as president — if not indefinitely, than certainly for the next four years.

Nobody has any doubts that among these loyalists will be David Kustoff, the arch-conservative Congressman from Tennessee’s 8th district and one of the state’s earliest known Trump enthusiasts.

Jackson Baker

Kustoff

Well, almost nobody. As of the middle of the week, with Trump’s minions in Congress prepared to put their votes where their professed outrage is, Terry Roland, the former county commissioner from Millington and an ur-Trumper nonpareil, the sponsor in fact of Trump’s earliest rally in these parts in 2016, has been nursing serious doubts indeed about Kustoff’s willingness to keep the faith.

Roland has for some time been bombarding people on his online networks with expressions of doubt that Kustoff will follow through this week on a key action on Trump’s behalf, a vote in Congress objecting to the recording of the votes of Electoral College members from the 50 states, showing Biden with a commanding total of 306 votes — well over the threshold of 272 votes required to elect a president.

The hardcore members of Donald Trump’s loyalist bloc not only don’t accept that arithmetic, they do not believe the repeated reassurances of election commissions and tribunals and various courts that, in fact, their man has lost and Biden is president-elect. They believe instead that the recent presidential election was conducted in an atmosphere of such unrestricted, if as yet unproven, cheating on behalf of the Democrats that the election needs to be rerun, at least in several key battleground states — Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia among them.

In fact, these hardcore Trump true believers regard the presidential contest — now two full months past — as still being in the live, contestable stage and, as Roland does, use such locutions as “if Biden wins,” as though the issue were still in doubt.

Jackson Baker

Roland

And Roland has made it clear, going into this week, that he regards Kustoff’s commitment to a Trump continuance to be in doubt, asking in one posted text: “Is David Kustoff part of the Surrender Caucus wing of the Republican Party?” And suggesting the answer in another, which overlaps Kustoff’s image with that of 9th District Democratic Congressman Steve Cohen.

All of this is in the absence of any declared intent on Kustoff’s part that he will break with the other long-term Trump loyalists and vote this week to accept the evidence of triumph for the Biden-Harris ticket.

So what else, what wonders, might be fueling Roland’s suspicion? Asked point-blank if he might be interested in challenging Kustoff for the 8th District seat, Roland declared, “I’m thinking about it.”

On the surface, this would seem to be a forbidding undertaking. As the incumbent in the 8th, Kustoff has twice won re-election easily since overcoming George Flinn in a stout challenge for the seat in 2016. Kustoff’s strength in that first race was overwhelmingly in the East Memphis part of the district. On the strength of heavy advertising in the 14 mostly rural counties of the sprawling West Tennessee district, Flinn ran him close elsewhere.

Roland, who maintains, “I have a house and farm in Tipton County that’s already in the 8th and I’m kin to everyone,” thinks he can do better than Flinn did in those rural outreaches, and he also thinks there’s a good chance before 2022 that in a post-census reapportionment the legislature might return Millington and north Shelby County to the 8th district, where those precincts were a decade ago.

A Roland-Kustoff race is still in the realm of the hypothetical, and most observers doubt that Kustoff will evince even the smallest sign of falling off the Trump wagon this week, but a contest between the two of them, should it develop, could still reveal fissures in area Republican ranks.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Millington: One of Tennessee’s Five Best Cities to Live In

Franklin, Millington, Germantown, Brentwood, Collierville. What do these five Tennessee cities have in common? And how does Millington, with its unpretentious middle-class roots, come to be in that exalted company of posh bedroom suburbs?

Terry Roland

The list of Tennessee’s “best cities to live in” is hot off the press, and it comes from ChamberofCommerce.org, a national support organization for America’s numerous Chamber entities. Here was their methodology: “We ranked a total of 2,509 qualified cities (those with populations above 25,000 and enough data for analysis) by five factors: employment (number of establishments, median earnings); housing (owner-occupied housing with a mortgage, monthly housing costs); quality of life (work commute, poverty levels); education (percentage with a bachelor’s degree or higher); and health (obesity ratios).”

Franklin, described as “an affluent, fast-growing city of nearly 81,000 in Williamson County,” gets the award as “the best Tennessee city to live in.” And next comes Millington, “a small city in the southwest corner of the state that is best known as home to the Naval Support Activity Mid-South naval base, which provides over 7,000 jobs to residents in the area and is one of the largest employers in Tennessee.”

Trailing behind are Germantown, Brentwood, and Collierville, in that order, and beneath them are the also-rans, with Memphis finishing 24th and the other major regional municipality, Jackson, coming in at 34.

Now you might understand why, in the aftermath of my lost race for Shelby County mayor last year, I described my coming to be the executive vice-president of the Millington Chamber of Commerce as “probably the best thing that ever happened to me in my life.”

Here’s a checklist that resulted from me asking a few fellow Millingtonians to do some modest bragging about our city at a Chamber luncheon earlier this year.

Mayor Terry Jones started things off by talking about a few of the city improvement projects under way: a wastewater treatment plant here, new traffic lights there, road construction on major thoroughfares, street improvements, work started on a soon-to-be five-lane bridge, a new fire station, Waffle House, Arby’s, and numerous other franchises coming in, grading projects, and a new recreational center, including an amphitheater, planned for the southern approaches to the city. 

Quite properly, Mayor Jones credited our city manager, Ed Haley, our Industrial Development Board (IDB), and the Millington Board of Aldermen for their sterling advance preparation and work on these projects.

Next up was Charles Gulotta of the IDB, a man I call my mentor. He talked at length about our latest pride and joy, the new 53-megawatt solar farm built on city-owned turf in tandem with Silicon Ranch Inc. and TVA. Opened in April, the farm is three-and-a-half times the size of any other such facility in Tennessee and can generate enough power for 7,500 homes.

One of our assets is an abundance of land, enough to have created space for a new, 135,000-square-foot retail development called The Shops of Millington and the impressive new $25 million thoroughfare, Veterans Parkway, where the Chamber office is.   

As Gulotta pointed out, we sold 28 acres to Roadmasters for developing a truck-driving school to produce some of the estimated 50,000 commercial drivers needed in the country. And we have unparalleled access to major state and federal roadways.

Did we lose some momentum when the old Naval Air Station closed down a couple of decades back? We did, but the surviving installation, known as Naval Support Activity Mid-South, remains our largest employer, and its retiring personnel are a prime source of new, skilled workforce for this region.

There are also the airport facilities, which the Navy deeded over to the city, including an 8,000-foot-long runway, the third longest in Tennessee. What is now called Millington-Memphis Airport is an ever-developing facility with an economic impact of $14 million a year.

We’ve got a lot more on our brag list, including a thriving new city-run public school system and such intangibles as the weekly dances held on Saturday nights at Millington’s Strand Theater, featuring professional players and a musical prodigy or two.We’re grateful to ChamberofCommerce.org for telling the world about us. Come take a look for yourself. We’re only 20 minutes from Downtown Memphis.

Terry Roland, a Millington businessman and former Shelby County commissioner, is executive vice-president of the Millington Chamber of Commerce.

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Politics Politics Feature

Rocky Issues at Shelby County Commission

Monday’s meeting of the Shelby County Commission began with the attendees under instruction to take a deep breath. This was both because County Mayor Lee Harris had a breath consultant on hand as part of his current public health campaign, and because a controversial — and potentially aggravating — subject was on the agenda. That subject belongs to a type of issue that can be filed under NIMBY (Not in My Back Yard). At question was whether the commission should approve an application from Memphis Stone and Gravel to construct a mine site for gravel excavation in a remote part of the Rosemark community in upper Shelby County, as well as the approaches to that site. (As part of the latter endeavor, the company volunteered to improve an already existing road and to maintain it at the company’s own expense.)

The Office of Planning and Development had given the project a preliminary approval, but the county Land Use and Development Board had turned it down.

The case for the mine was made by lawyer Michael Fay, who told commissioners that Memphis Stone and Gravel, in business locally since 1910, was an indispensable source of gravel for construction purposes in Memphis and Shelby County, that there were no alternative sites in the county for the high-grade gravel required for future projects, and that, if the application should be denied, Memphis Stone and Gravel only had enough such gravel on hand to last three years, after which it might be forced to move out of the county.

“We are the only supplier that can meet the needs of the airport,” Fay warned, adding that if the company were forced to import gravel from elsewhere that would end up adding as much as $2.2 million to the costs of an ongoing construction project of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Various employees of Memphis Stone and Gravel also testified to the importance of the mine for their personal livelihoods.

The opposition to the application consisted mainly of residents of the Rosemark area, including a woman who suffered serious injuries when her car was met on a narrow road by a truck carrying a load from an earlier, smaller gravel plot near the proposed site. Most of the other residents expressed safety concerns, too, as well as quality-of-life issues and potential drops in the value of their properties.

Two former chairs of the commission, Terry Roland and Heidi Shafer, joined the protesters. Roland at one point branded a “bald-faced lie” a claim made by the applicants that no other fully equipped gravel company operated in Shelby County.

Shafer recalled the dilemma she had back in 2011 when a similar proposal came before the commission. She said she deliberated seriously on arguments pro and con and finally opted for the latter.

Shafer’s position of eight years ago was roughly the same as it was this year, said Commissioner Amber Mills, whose District 1 contains the site of the proposed mine.

In the end, the commission majority seemed to reason similarly. The final vote was one for (Commissioner Reginald Milton), eight opposed, and two abstaining.

At the same commission meeting, Jimmy Rout was elected County Historian to succeed the longtime holder of that unpaid position, Jimmy Ogle. Ogle, who is moving to Knoxville, will be honored for his service by the commission at a subsequent meeting.

• Both local political parties are in the throes of reorganization. The Shelby County Republican Party held its precinct caucuses Sunday at Arlington High School, and the delegates elected there will meet at the same location on Sunday, February 24th, to elect new officers, including a chairman to succeed the retiring Lee Mills. The new chair seems certain to be Chris Tutor, a lawyer at the Butler Snow law firm and, so far, the only person seeking the chairmanship.

The Shelby County Democrats are scheduled to hold party caucuses on March 30th, electing the party executive committee and a larger parliamentary body called the “grass roots” committee.

The members of these two bodies will meet one week later and elect a party chair, who may or may not be the current chairman, Corey Strong. It has long been assumed by local Democrats, mainly on word from Strong himself, that he would not seek reelection, but a recent news report suggested (on what evidence is unknown) that Strong has had a change of mind.

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Politics Politics Feature

Truce, Sort Of, Between Luttrell and County Commission

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Anyone who attended the regular committee meetings of the Shelby County Commission last Wednesday, May 9th, and followed that up with a visit to the full commission’s regular public meeting on Monday, May 14th, might be mildly confused about the resolution of a long-running power struggle between the commission and the county mayor’s office.

Jackson Baker

Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell

At the Wednesday meeting, Mayor Mark Luttrell, term-limited and experiencing what he called his “long goodbye” to public office, heard himself applauded by commissioners in attendance and extolled by one commissioner after another for his achievements over his eight years in office, in maintaining essential county services while at the same time lowering county debt to a significant degree — by as much as a billion dollars, to a level below $900 million.

Given that May 9th was also the day on which Luttrell chose to present a $1.254 billion budget for the coming year that, if executed, would shave the county’s recalculated  tax rate by a penny, to a target rate of $4.05, which is six full cents off the current rate, the hosannas might seem very much in order — especially since the proposed Luttrell budget also contains more money for schools, law enforcement, and employees at large, the latter to be provided with the $15-an-hour minimum wage which was at such extended issue during the 2016 presidential campaign.

There was none of the truculence from dissenting commissioners that had become a regular chorus during the past two years, although, as commission budget chairman Eddie Jones and others pointed out, there would be ample opportunity during the next couple of months to make such revisions as might be worth debating.

In prior weeks, and again, to some degree, on Monday, notes were sounded that were at variance with the Hakuna Matata of the May 9th meeting.

A regular feature of recent commission meetings has been a series of votes on expenditures in proposed county  contracts greater than $50,000 in value. Several weeks back, the commission voted to impose the $50,000 limit as a way of limiting the mayor’s spending power and curbing his general contractual authority, in line with a charter for county government that, unlike that for the city of Memphis, restricts the chief executive to a “weak mayor” role.

That action was one outcome of the power struggle that began with disagreements during budget deliberations in 2015. In that budget year, several commissioners, dealing with what they were told would be a projected surplus, insisted on using it to fund a tax decrease. Luttrell, pleading a concern for unanticipated infrastructure needs as well as the need to reduce the county debt, resisted and ultimately prevailed. What followed was a commission resentment that would increase as members learned that the surplus was far greater than expected — a discovery that led to ever more demands for a greater share of fiscal oversight.

Other matters of contention included the commission’s desire to hire former Commissioner Julian Bolton as its own attorney. After much fuss and bother and argumentation, Bolton was allowed on as a “policy advisor,” but the official legal representative for all organs of Shelby County government would remain, under the provisions of the county charter, the mayor’s  appointee as county attorney, currently, Kathryn Pascover.

At the moment, Bolton’s status is in limbo, with Luttrell poised to veto an ordinance for his reappointment — something he did once already but will have to repeat because the ordinance he received, due to a clerical error, was not the one ultimately adopted by the commission.

Starting again from scratch, the commission completed work Monday on a correct version of the reappointment ordinance that would extend Bolton’s tenure through September 30th, leaving it to a newly reelected group of commissioners to decide what to do next.

Meanwhile, the most spectacular show of commission independence was evinced just before Monday’s meeting, in a ceremony in the Shelby County Building, in which commission Chair Heidi Shafer — joined by Luttrell, Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland, and representatives of local law enforcement and medical interests — announced an ambitious $2.5 million task force plan for combating the county’s current opioid epidemic. (See Editorial, p. 8) The plan is the outgrowth of a commission initiative that Luttrell, though initially claiming authority over the matter, was induced to become a party to, via a series of court tests.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Call Them by Name

The weeds keep multiplying in our garden, which is our mind ruled by fear. Rip them out and call them by name. — Sylvia Browne

It was quite a week in Nashville. The biggest news out of the capital city was the horrific mass shooting that took place in a local Waffle House and resulted in the tragic deaths of four young people: Taurean C. Sanderlin, 29; Joe R. Perez, 20; DeEbony Groves, 21; and Akilah Dasilva, 23. All four were people of color; most of them were in college.

The shooter, whose name will not be mentioned here, was a fan of white supremacist “philosophy” and right-wing politics and did the killing with — what else? — an AR-15 assault rifle.

Same story, new town. God bless America. God shed his grace on thee.

The most compelling part of this terrible incident was the bravery displayed by James Shaw Jr., the young man who jumped the assailant while he was reloading and wrestled his weapon away from him. In this case, a good man who was unarmed stopped a bad man with a gun.

President Trump and the NRA quickly issued statements praising Shaw and his courageous actions.

No, they didn’t. Trump didn’t mention the incident, probably because it involved black victims, a black hero, and didn’t fit a narrative that appeals to his base. Or maybe he was distracted by his legal troubles or maybe because it wasn’t on Fox and Friends. Hard to tell.

The NRA’s response was the usual: If others in the Waffle House had had guns, they could have stopped the shooter, because the more guns we have, the safer we all are. They failed to acknowledge the fact that if the shooter had had a larger magazine, which the NRA favors, he wouldn’t have had to reload and could have kept killing until he felt like stopping.

Meanwhile, the Tennessee legislature was wrapping up its annual session this week. It was the usual GOP ideological shenanigans, leavened with a couple of sensible moves. They passed a motion to build a monument to “unborn children” on the state capitol grounds. This, of course, in the wake of last week’s measure to strip $250,000 from funds that were to be allocated to Memphis for its bicentennial celebration. It was a vindictive move, meant to punish the city for removing two Confederate statues from city parks, because small government means the state controls everything. Especially statues.

On the plus side, the legislature voted to honor Shaw for his brave actions at the Waffle House with a resolution filled with the usual “whereas” clauses. It was a nice gesture, even if it was boiler-plate. The legislators avoided actually doing anything meaningful by refusing to allow out of committee a proposed bill to close the loophole exploited by the Waffle House murderer’s father in giving his son weapons back that had been confiscated from him in another state.

The legislators also passed a motion that will allow Tennesseeans to vote in 2022 to remove slavery as a possible punishment for criminal activity. Yes, you read that right: Using slavery as a punishment is still legal in Tennessee. Not likely, admittedly, but legal.

Speaking of slavery and the Confederacy, I hope everyone read Jackson Baker’s report on the Flyer website about the debate last weekend between the GOP candidates for the office of Shelby County mayor. All three candidates expressed support for the state legislature’s move to strip $250,000 from the city of Memphis for taking down its confederate statues. That’s right. They liked the idea of the state controlling statues in Memphis-owned parks. And they all want to be your county mayor, so you should remember their names: Terry Roland, Joy Touliatos, and David Lenoir.

And you should remember whose side they’re really on when you enter the voting booth. I mean, as long we’re naming names.

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Politics Politics Feature

Forums Forth

A definitive public exposure of candidates for office in 2018 still remains to be accomplished. But several preliminary efforts in that direction took place during the past week or so — a Thursday morning showcase of Democratic women candidates at the City & State coffee house on Broad; a Thursday night forum that attracted a decent-sized crowd and two Republican mayoral opponents at Mt. Moriah East Baptist Church; and a massive turnout on Saturday at the University of Memphis for candidates for virtually every position on the ballot.

At the Thursday night forum, WMC-TV anchor Kontji Anthony moderated a guarded discussion of issues by the two candidates for Shelby County Mayor — Terry Roland and Joy Touliatos — who answered an invitation to debate from Diversity Memphis. And on Saturday those two candidates and scores of others — most of those running for election this year — joined a throng of campaign supporters and attendees at large in the ballroom auditorium of the University of Memphis for a meet-and-greet affair co-sponsored by the Tennessee Nurses Association and the League of Women Voters.

Touliatos and Roland at forum

The latter affair was basically a schmooze-fest that culminated in a parade of candidates across the UM stage as their names were called by moderator Greg Hurst of WREG-TV. Nobody got to speak to the entire assembly, but there was ample conversational opportunity out on the jam-packed floor. And the mere fact of showing up and being seen surely paid dividends — pointedly so for GOP gubernatorial candidate Diane Black, who arrived somewhat late but, to all appearances, unflustered, after her car was involved in a collision caused by an errant vehicle operated by the Tennessee Department of Transportation at mile marker 24 of I-40.

At the Thursday night forum, Roland, currently a Shelby County commissioner, and Touliatos, who serves as Juvenile Court clerk, are both candidates for the Republican nomination for county mayor, and while neither of them broke any new ground or made any waves in their remarks, they had the opportunity to present coherent profiles of themselves as they fielded questions put by Anthony and audience members.

Touliatos stressed what she said would be her ability to “build relationships” within county government and with other governmental entities, while Roland emphasized his experience as a “full-time commissioner with part-time pay” for the last eight years.

Both boasted of their roots with ordinary citizens, and both expressed a determination to buttress education and industrial expansion. Touliatos stressed a need to lay a strong foundation in pre-K education. Roland made his usual case for tax increment financing (TIFs) as an alternative to payments-in-lieu-of taxes (PILOTs). He got the most animated response from the crowd when he attacked what he called “a culture of corruption” in Shelby County, in which “the same 10 people have been getting all the sweet milk.”

Anthony asked, “Why do Black Lives Matter?” And both candidates responded with variations on the statement that “all lives matter” — a generalized response that drew a buzz of disapproval from the predominantly African-American crowd and a precursor to a possible issue in the general election, when either Lee Harris or Sidney Chism, both African Americans, will be the Democratic opposition to the Republican nominee.

Further forums and debates are to be expected in the next few weeks, especially for countywide candidates, whose moment of reckoning with the voters will culminate in the May 1st party primaries, less than two months away.

(See also memphisflyer.com for slideshow of TNA-LWV forum.)

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Two Approaches to Political Advertising

Anybody who’s been raised since the advent of television (which is everybody now alive) knows the importance of TV ads in political races. The advertising phase of several campaigns is just now coming into prominence. In the case of Shelby County political races, there are but two months to go before the May 1st election day in the Republican and Democratic primaries. Statewide races, which culminate in August, have a bit more lead time.  

Two new ads that are just now getting to be seen by the public indicate wholly different strategies. One is on behalf of Shelby County Trustee and GOP county mayor candidate David Lenoir. The other is for gubernatorial candidate Randy Boyd of Knoxville, the former state Commissioner of Economic Development.

Though Lenoir is well known in local government circles, he is not exactly a household name. Accordingly, his new 30-second TV spot attempts to fill a name-ID gap between himself and primary opponent Shelby County Commissioner Terry Roland, a firebrand who is adept at gathering free media coverage for himself.

Lenoir’s spot begins with an image of a football helmet, which fades into a shot of the candidate as a young man, wearing the crimson uniform of the University of Alabama, and clearly game-ready. A voice-over then explains, “When an injury ended his dreams to play in the NFL, David Lenoir refused to stand on the sidelines.”

In fact, Lenoir, whose athletic career ended prematurely due to injury, was once a highly touted defensive end for the fearsome Crimson Tide. The duration of the ad shows images of Lenoir at work and on the campaign stump, looking both accessible and able, while the voice-over speaks of his “reduc[ing] county debt and saving taxpayers millions.” The ad promises that Lanier will “fight to protect our neighborhoods and strengthen our schools” and contends that Shelby Countians “need a mayor with drive and determination.” 

Lenoir has ample funding and will be able to play that ad, and subsequent ones, abundantly in the face of Roland’s newsmaking skills and hot-button pushing, and his other GOP opponent, Joy Touliatos, whose pleasant countenance is displayed on several well-placed billboards on county roadways. No doubt each of them has a TV campaign in mind as well.

Meanwhile, Boyd, a pleasant, mild-mannered man who was a highly successful businessman (Invisible Fences) before his service in state government, where he was known as a moderate, is up against a primary opponent in U.S. Rep. Diane Black who is as well-funded as he is and has a strong hold on her party’s ultra-right constituency.

So Boyd, who has run a couple of TV ads already, stressing his business success, his grit as a distance runner, and his ambitions on behalf of economic development and education, has belatedly decided to contest Black (one of whose ads boasts her readiness to “stand up to the weak-kneed people in my own party”) on her own ground.

Accordingly, while the images in Boyd’s new ad are similar to those in his previous ones, a voice-over intones that the candidate “believes that the right to life comes from God, not the government,” and that people “who can work should work and not permanently live on welfare,” while a subscript on the screen blasts the notion of sanctuary cities. The ad concludes, “What really matters is faith, families, and a good-paying job. A conservative businessman, not a politician.”

Asked about the ad over the weekend in Memphis, where he attended the GOP’s Lincoln Day banquet, Boyd said, “If I’m asking Republicans for their votes, I need to assure them that I share their values.”

The ad, an effort to co-opt an opponent’s issues, is clearly a gamble, and it remains to be seen whether it serves the candidate’s purposes or, alternatively, could backfire with GOP voters looking for a moderate candidate.

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Politics Politics Feature

Crossing Party Lines

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

The election lists are still forming, but already the number of unusual developments in the 2018 election season are way beyond the norm. Several of them cast a bit of light on the question of partisan identity. Where to start? 

SHELBY COUNTY CLERK: Well, there was the fact that Danny Kail and his wife Sohelia Kail, both veterans of county government and both political activists, had each drawn petitions to run for Shelby County clerk as Republicans.

Note the verb form, “was.” Danny Kail is well known in political circles as an active Democrat, who over the years has run unsuccessfully for both Probate Court clerk and Probate Court judge, losing the Democratic primary for clerk in 2010 in the first instance and gaining the Democratic Party endorsement for judge in 2014, though his opponent, incumbent Judge Karen Webster, somehow ended up being listed as the party choice on a semi-official local Democratic newspaper.

The two experiences combined to sour Kail, the county’s former liaison officer on labor issues, on his future potential as a Democrat and led him to declare last fall, when he was serving as CAO for the Criminal Court clerk’s office, as a GOP candidate for the county clerk’s job. 

To the surprise of many, Sohelia Kail also drew a petition for the Republican primary for the same position.

The bottom line, explained Danny Kail this week, was that he decided to yield to his wife, whom he said he deems to be a superior candidate as a longtime budget analyst with the Sheriff’s Department. So he is dropping out, and she was, at mid-week, scheduled to formally file for county clerk.

Others drawing petitions for the position are Republicans Arnold Weiner and Donna Creson and Democrats Shelandra Ford, Jamal Whitlow, and Mondell B. Williams. Weiner, Whitlow, and Williams have completed their filing.

SHELBY COUNTY COMMISSION, DISTRICT 10: This is another case of blurred political lines. Incumbent Commissioner Reginald Milton, a Democrat, seems destined to face an opponent in the party primary, one Vontyna Durham White, who has not only drawn a petition but has filed for the commission seat.

The surprise is that White has also identified herself as an adherent of the campaign of County Commissioner Terry Roland, a Republican, for Shelby County mayor. She turned up in Roland’s company last week when the commissioner formally filed for mayor at the Election Commission, and she posed with Roland, along with other supporters, for a widely distributed photo of the event.

This sparked an immediate and impassioned thread on Facebook, initiated by a Democratic activist. Other Democrats joined in with their own negative reactions, to which White eventually responded defiantly, telling one critic: “I’m not colluding. I chose and have a voice to make my own decision to vote like I want to. … I don’t care who you vote for. Your voice is your voice.” 

However unprecedented, White’s public endorsement of Roland would not seem to violate any stricture of the election code. But the local Democratic Party has a primary board, appointed just last Saturday, which apparently has the authority to declare her an invalid contender in the party primary. That board has not yet met to consider the issue but almost certainly will at some early point.

STATE SENATE, DISTRICT 33: The question of party fidelity is also an issue in the reelection race of Democratic Senator Reginald Tate, who has drawn the ire of his party colleagues over the years for what some of them see as his collaboration with Republicans in the General Assembly.

Tate for some years held an office with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservative think tank which mass-produces sample legislation for its members in the legislatures of various states. Responding to criticism from fellow Democrats, Tate resigned his affiliation with ALEC. But he had acquired a primary opponent, health-care executive Katrina Robinson, who would seem to have hearty support of those Democrats alienated by Tate’s political coziness with the GOP.

On the matter of association, Robinson has a potential problem of her own, though it has nothing to do with any choice on her part or actions of hers. Her sister Sherra Robinson Wright, was recently arrested in California in connection with the 2010 murder of her then husband, ex-University of Memphis basketball star Lorenzen Wright.

Robinson herself has not been implicated in any part of the legal proceedings, and says she has had very limited contact with her sister. She vows to run a viable campaign, steering clear of any publicity or distractions resulting from the Wright case. 

SHELBY COUNTY COMMISSION, DISTRICT 5: This East Memphis enclave — currently represented by Commission chair Heidi Shafer, a Republican — may be on its way to becoming a swing district on the 13-member commission (currently consisting of seven Democrats and six Republicans), and one sign of that is the fact that the four persons who have so far drawn petitions to run for it divide equally between the parties.

The two Republicans are Geoffrey Diaz and Richard Morton, both with activist backgrounds. The Democrats are Michael Whaley and the aforementioned Shelandra Ford, who is considering more than one race.

What makes this district somewhat striking is that two of the candidates — Republican Diaz and Democrat Whaley — are staking out centrist positions. Realtor Diaz, who has an Hispanic background, maintains a core group of Latino residents of the district, with whom he meets to discuss issues of diversity and programs for economic opportunity. Diaz is willing to declare himself a “moderate,” something virtually unheard of these days among Republicans, who tend to prefer the self-description of “conservative.” And Whaley, Tennessee director of an education-related non-profit agency, has engaged consultant Steven Reid, a prominent force in the past campaigns of Mayor Jim Strickland and GOP 8th District Congressman David Kustoff; Reid stresses his own candidate’s intent to reach across party lines.

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Roland, Harris Celebrate Veterans Day Together in Millington

CREDIT: JB

JB

County Commissioner Terry Roland (seated, left) and state Senator Lee Harris (seated, right, behind flag on table), candidates for County Mayor and co-sponsors of an annual Veterans Town Hall and Luncheon in Millington, listen as Millington Mayor Terry Jones, dressed in his Naval reservist’s uniform, speaks to the occasion.

One of the several Veterans Day events going on Saturday was the third annual edition of the Veterans Day Town Hall and Luncheon, held at the Hampton Inn in Millington. As always, the event featured a color guard, patriotic recitations and songs (some of the latter enacted by some energetic high school students from Rosemark), fried chicken and fixings, and tributes to the armed services, as well as to specific military veterans from the area.

Perhaps uniquely this year, it also featured two serious candidates for Shelby County mayor. Shelby County Commissioner Terry Roland and state Senator Lee Harris, both of whom represent the Millington area, are the normal sponsors of the Town Hall and Luncheon. The fact that they both happen now to be announced candidates for mayor (and, in some reckonings, possible opponents in the 2018 general election) was either a coincidence or a serendipity, or both.

In any case, Republican Roland and Democrat Harris — along with Millington alderman Frankie Dakin, a Harris campaign aide — were sponsors once again and were all intent upon describing Saturday’s event as “beyond politics.”

As Harris put it, formally convening the program, “We all believe that this is a special day and, although we are not all the same political party, we think honoring our veterans is one issue where party doesn’t matter.”

The senator also paid tribute to the event’s regular partner organization, Alpha Omega Veterans Services, and to several dignitaries on hand: Matt Van Epps, the Assistant Commissioner at Tennessee Department of Veterans Services; Lt. Commander David Mowbray, chaplain at Naval Support Activity, Mid-South; and NSA Mid-South Commander Captain Michael Wathen.

For the most part, the Town Hall and Luncheon did, as all the principals promised, steer clear of politics, with one, probably inadvertent, exception. That was when Millington Mayor Terry Jones, dressed in Navy dress blues to commemorate his 24 years of active plus reserve service, was conveying his gratitude to Harris, Roland, and Dakin for putting on the event.

The first two acknowledgments went this way, verbatim: “Senator, I appreciate you putting this on every year. It’s our third year in public. Commissioner Roland, thank you, can we call you mayor yet?”

That last statement, which drew a nervous chuckle or two from the attendees, was surely unintentional, a case of what the textbooks call a Freudian slip

In any case, Roland did not seem displeased. It was his duty to close out the affair, and he did that with his patented mix of humility, good humor, and roughneck directness.

After telling a few tales about his own involvement with the military tradition, including one reminiscence of his father’s “pushing an ice cream wagon” at the old Naval training base at Millington and another of taking a pilgrimage with his Dad to the ancestral home of Sergeant Alvin York, a famed World War I hero from Tennessee, Roland made a point of professing himself “so grateful to Senator Lee Harris and alderman Frankie Dakin,” his event co-sponsors.

He unabashedly added, “Senator, I love you; Frankie, I love you.”

But, given the patriotic nature of the occasion, Roland could not resist (in any case, did not resist) recalling out loud his passionate resentment of a an official statement from Shelby County Schools, made in the wake of the controversy surrounding NFL athletes kneeling rather than standing for the national anthem.

The SCS statement evidently expressed a willingness to permit that form of expression from students. Roland recapped for the attendees his angry reaction, a threat to “take away every bit of funding” from the school system, easing up to say with a wink, “knowing I couldn’t do it.”

The commissioner said that people had “a right to protest but not during that national anthem and not on that flag.” and ended by saying that the anthem and the flag were “two things that we must stand for and stand behind.”

That might or might not be regarded as a case of allowing politics into the event, depending on one’s point of view. In any case, the muffled shout or two of assent from the audience during the heated part of Roland’s statement indicated that nobody who was there on Saturday had much complaint about it.