Tag: Terry Roland

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

The Cycle Starts Anew

A freed Kelsey with well-wisher Naser Fazlullah at celebration party (Photo: Courtesy Naser Fazlullah)

King Arthur was not present. In fact, the ranking attendee at the Roundtable in East Memphis last Saturday night for Brian Kelsey’s out-of-prison celebration was Brent Taylor, the fellow Republican who won a special election to succeed Kelsey in the state Senate.

A crowd of some 50 family members and well-wishers braved street floods and a thunderstorm of generational ferocity to help Kelsey rejoice at his recent pardon by President Trump — a circumstance that a grateful Kelsey  kept referring to as a “miracle” in the course of a 15-minute speech to the gathering.

Kelsey had been convicted of conspiring with others in a scheme to illegally funnel campaign finance money from his state account into his unsuccessful 2016 congressional race. He consented to a plea arrangement of guilty but later tried and failed to get his plea rescinded.

Ultimately, he would surrender and had spent two weeks in a federal prison in Kentucky before getting the surprise pardon from President Trump two weeks ago. After his indictment, he had contended that he was being unjustly targeted by then-President Joe Biden. Though the claim appeared far-fetched to many observers, Trump may have regarded it as credible. In any case, Kelsey had a network of GOP supporters who had kept up his fight for vindication.

On the morning that he learned of his pardon, Kelsey told the crowd, guards were conducting a shakedown of the prison population, looking for illicit drugs.

Kelsey said that he was writing a book about his brush with the law, presumably including information about his trial as well as his incarceration.

• Another Go
Mark Billingsley, the once and possibly future county commissioner, speaking with KWAM on Monday morning, announced his candidacy in 2026 for the District Four commission seat, now held by the term-limited Brandon Morrison, saying, “The last couple of years I’ve been really concerned with our leadership. The way we change things is getting involved. People are voting with their taillights, they are leaving, and I want them to have better opportunities in Shelby County for young and old.”

Republican Billingsley mentioned a dilapidated jail and a defective educational system as things in need of remedy. 

“All Shelby County residents deserve better, and they should demand more common sense and real accountability from their elected officials, no matter their party affiliation,” he said, pledging to work across the aisle with the commission’s majority Democrats.

And Terry Roland, who served as commission chair during his two terms on the body, wants to return to his old District One seat, now held by the also term-limited Amber Mills.

Roland, another Republican, is well known to followers of local politics as a colorful ideologue with pronounced MAGA sympathies. But, like Billingsley, he boasts his record of working across the aisle and was in the forefront of efforts to resolve racial disparities in the county workforce.

A specialist in economic development tools, Roland is the immediate past president of the Millington Area Chamber of Commerce. He recently cofounded a consultancy group with Cary Vaughn and Jon Crisp to focus on development issues. 

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

A GOP Grudge Match

Naser Fazlullah with South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, Trump’s secretary of Homeland Security nominee and last year’s Lincoln Day keynoter. (Photo: Naser Fazlullah | Facebook)

The race for chairman of the Shelby County Republican Party, due to be resolved at the local party convention on Saturday at the Venue at Bartlett Station, has turned into a real donnybrook, with potentially divisive consequences.

As noted previously in this space, the two candidates are former Memphis City Councilman Worth Morgan, the beneficiary of an intra-party “Revive” campaign supported by numerous prominent party members, and longtime activist Naser Fazlullah, whose nose-to-the-grindstone party activities have won him a sizable grassroots constituency. 

Underlying the surface aspects of the race are conflicts and rivalries involving other party figures and a myriad of issues.

Morgan’s most significant supporter is undoubtedly state Senator Brent Taylor, who claims credit for having recruited Morgan, an unsuccessful candidate for Shelby County mayor in 2022, to seek the chairmanship. Taylor won election to the state Senate that same year, claiming the seat vacated by former incumbent Brian Kelsey, who was forced out by legal problems. Since then, he has gone on to generate an amount of attention for himself unusual for a first-term legislator.

That’s partly due to the fact that Taylor, wealthy from the sale of his extensive funeral home network, has personally endowed numerous GOP candidacies and party events, both statewide and locally. And he continues to attract publicity for his aggressive efforts, in and out of the legislature, to impose stronger state control over law enforcement in Shelby County.

The most recent manifestation of what Taylor calls a “Make Memphis Matter” campaign is his ongoing attempt to force the removal of Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy, whom he accuses of lax crime control. The senator has initiated a legislative procedure that would ultimately require a two-thirds vote in both chambers of the legislature to oust Mulroy.

As it happens, Fazlullah opposes that effort, on the grounds that using legislation to remove a legally elected local official is unjustified overkill.

That’s one reason for Taylor’s animus toward Fazlullah and his recruitment of Morgan as a rival candidate. Another is his assertion that, at last fall’s Germantown Festival, Fazlullah strenuously urged GOP state Representative Mark White to oppose Taylor’s reelection in 2026. White acknowledges that Fazlullah made such an approach, which he politely turned aside.

Says Taylor: “Naser should never be party chairman after trying to recruit a candidate to run against a sitting state senator in a primary who happens to have been the largest contributor to the Republican Party while he was vice chairman. Two can play at this game!”

Meanwhile, Fazlullah has allies who hold grudges against Worth Morgan. One is Terry Roland of Millington, a notable GOP conservative who regards Morgan as a lukewarm Republican, a “Never-Trumper,” and a potential advocate of city-county consolidation.

Roland sees Morgan as a tool of party “elitists” and reproaches the chairmanship candidate for allegedly “boycotting” the local GOP’s 2022 Lincoln Day banquet, which was keynoted that year by Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows.

The showdown over the chairmanship reflects a complicated pattern of conflicting loyalties, with GOP moderates and conservatives to be found on both sides.

• You saw it here first, in our year-end forecast of future political events: U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn is seriously considering a race for governor in 2026 and has so informed an increasing number of her fellow Republicans statewide. 

Glenn Jacobs, the Knox County mayor who was previously regarded as perhaps the leading Republican gubernatorial hopeful, has energized Blackburn’s likely candidacy with a formal endorsement. 

The Republican nomination, though, will apparently still be contested by U.S. Representative John Rose of Cookeville, a multi-millionaire with the capacity to self-fund. 

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Early Heat

Terry Roland (Photo: shelbycountytn.gov)

As no one needs to be reminded, the year 2025 is starting off with near-arctic temperatures, but enough political action is ongoing or forthcoming in the near future to generate a bit of heat.

• The executive committee of the Tennessee Democratic Party will convene in Nashville on Saturday, January 25th, to pick a new chairperson, and no fewer than seven candidates have been nominated for the honor. They are:

— Rachel Campbell of Chattanooga, currently serving both as party chair of Hamilton County and vice chair of the state party. She is one of two co-favorites in the race.

— Gloria Johnson of Knoxville, a state representative and, most recently, the Democrats’ unsuccessful candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2024. The other co-favorite, she has good name recognition and a residual network within the party, but there is some question as to whether her legislative service would disqualify her from the fundraising duties required of a chair.

— Brian Cordova of Nashville, the state party’s current executive director, and a veteran of numerous Democratic electoral campaigns. In the event of a deadlock between Campbell and Johnson, he is seen as a possible fallback choice.

— Vincent Dixie of Nashville, another state representative and a former chair of the party’s legislative caucus. Like Johnson, he, too, might be conflicted on the issue of fundraising.

— Alec Kucharski, a veteran of Tennessee political campaigns and currently a resident of Chicago, where he serves as a liaison with the Democratic delegation of the Illinois legislature.

— Todd Frommeyer of Pulaski, an activist, lawyer, and Navy vet.

— Edward Roland of Chattanooga, said to be a salesperson. 

All these candidates will participate in a forum at 1 p.m. on Saturday, to be streamed on Facebook via the Tennessee Democratic County Chairs Association.

• It will be noticed, by the way, that this fairly sizeable field of Democratic candidates contains no aspirants from Memphis.

One longtime member of the Democratic state committee from Shelby County, David Cambron, takes note of this, saying in a text, “We are not Big Shelby any more.”

Cambron maintains that the Memphis area’s “last chance of relevancy” was lost in the 2006 U.S. Senate election, which saw Democrat Harold Ford Jr. lose to Republican Bob Corker.

And, in Cambron’s view, the problem has bipartisan dimensions. “It’s the same reason every statewide discussion of possible Republican gubernatorial candidates doesn’t mention Brent Taylor.” 

The reference is clearly to state Senator Taylor’s seemingly nonstop campaigning for more assertive state authority over law enforcement in Memphis and Shelby County. Often, such intentional omnipresence in media attention bespeaks an intention to seek higher office.

Yet, as Cambron points out, Taylor’s name is rarely to be found in public speculation about the 2026 governor’s race.

(In fairness, it should be pointed out that when the Flyer queried Taylor about a possible ambition to run for governor, the senator replied, “The short answer is no. The long answer is hell, no.”)

• As it happens Saturday, January 25th, is also the date for a GOP chairmanship decision, this one for the leadership of the Shelby County Republican Party, the issue to be decided at the Venue at Bartlett Station.

The two declared candidates are former Memphis City Councilman Worth Morgan and longtime GOP activist Naser Fazlullah. As noted previously in this space, Morgan has been the beneficiary of a hyped-up PR campaign involving numerous public endorsements from influential local GOP figures.

All of that has gotten the goat of one prominent Republican, however. Former County Commission Chairman Terry Roland of Millington, who praises Fazlullah’s “selfless” service to the local party, denounces the pro-Morgan faction’s “Revive” campaign as nothing more than an “elitist” plot to suppress grassroots Republicans.

And Roland, who has headed up local campaign efforts for Donald Trump from 2016 on, levies what may be the worst charge in his vocabulary against Morgan, whom he calls a — wait for it — “Never-Trumper.”

Categories
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.

Categories
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.

Categories
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.

Categories
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.

Categories
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.

Categories
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.

Categories
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.)