Tag: Van Turner

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Politics Politics Feature

Jackson Soldiers On

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, whose very presence has an inspirational quality, may have been spread somewhat thin on Sunday, when the great icon of civil and human rights made appearances in Memphis relating to both the city’s forthcoming homage to the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to Operation PUSH, Jackson’s own self-empowerment initiative, and to the celebration of Black History Month.

Jackson also needed to be mindful to the demands of various important local projects and causes, such as the ongoing campaign of CME Church functionaries to renovate the Collins Chapel Health and Recreational Center (aka Correctional Hospital) for African Americans with special needs, one of several community improvement projects whose aims are aligned with the purposes of Jackson’s PUSH organization.

The Reverend has made repeated visits to Memphis on behalf of its renovation, the estimated price tag of which has risen from $3 million a year ago to its current projected level of $5 million. 

Earlier on Sunday, Jackson participated in a press conference upon his arrival at Memphis International Airport, preached the morning service at Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church, and toured the Collins Chapel facility, after which he took part in yet another press availability.

Then came an evening visit to Mt. Pisgah CME Church for what was billed as a “community town hall forum.” At Mt. Pisgah, a palpably tired Jackson (recently he announced that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease) turned out to be essentially a guest observer, sitting at a conference table in the church’s front aisle, along with various church and school and public officials, while other officials and political candidates of various kinds sat in the congregation itself. 

His role during this phase of the program was to be a witness to the proceedings, which would go on to include lengthy speeches from those sharing the conference table with him — on issues ranging from Collins Chapel to school issues, and to matters involving Kroger vacating Orange Mound and rising MLGW rates.

All the while, Jackson sat silent, taking things in. There arose one potentially controversial moment, when City Councilman Ed Ford Jr. rose to expound, first on the grocery-desert problem developing in Orange Mound and then on the issue of a forthcoming November referendum on the November ballot by the council.

The referendum, backed enthusiastically by Ford, calls for the cancellation of a Ranked Choice Voting initiative approved by the city’s voters in a previous 2008 referendum and scheduled for implementation by the Election Commission during the forthcoming 2019 city election. In a nutshell, RCV would allow voters to cast as many as three votes for an office, ranking their preferences. The procedure distributes the voting results in such a way that runoffs in cases where there is no majority winners would prove unnecessary.

“Ranked Choice Voting, in my eyes doesn’t help us,” Ford said, comparing RCV to poll tax procedures of the Jim Crow past. He spoke of having debated the matter against “somebody in from Minneapolis” and against University of Memphis law professor and former County Commissioner Steve Mulroy, an RCV supporter.

“They must have gotten desperate,” he said, noting that his debate opponents had cited both former President Barack Obama and Jesse Jackson himself as RCV proponents. At this, Jackson, clearly determined to stay out of a local controversy, evinced no response whatsoever — though it is a fact not only that he has endorsed RCV as a progressive measure but that his son, U.S. Representative Jesse Jackson Jr., has sponsored legislation supportive of Ranked Choice Voting in Congress.

When Jackson finally got his pulpit moment, he was content to lead the congregation in one of his patented self-empowerment chants. His only intervention into a local issue occurred when he joined County Commissioner Van Turner — head of the Greenspace nonprofit that had removed two Confederate memorials from parks purchased from the city — at the pulpit. The Reverend joined hands with Turner and raised both their arms overhead. Then, having soldiered on for justice one more time in Memphis, Jesse Jackson paid his respects to the congregation and left the building.

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Politics Politics Feature

Democrats Doubling Up in Primary Races

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Tennessee may be a certifiably red (i.e., Republican) state, and, indeed election results in recent years, even in Shelby County, which has a theoretical Democratic majority, have generally been disappointments to the once-dominant Democratic Party.

And the official Party itself has only been reconstituted in the county for a few months after various internal fissures and dissensions caused it to be decertified by the state party in mid-2016.

But none of that has stopped a veritable flood of would-be Democratic office-holders from declaring their candidacies for election year 2018 as the filing season gets going in earnest. Most unusually for a minority party, in fact, many of the races on the ballot this year are being contested by multiple Democratic entries.

That starts at the top of the ballot, as two name Democrats — former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean and current state House minority leader Craig Fitzhugh of Ripley — are vying for the office of governor. (Even more Republicans are running: six gubernatorial candidates in all, most of them with serious networks and campaign funding at their disposal.)

Jackson Baker

Forrest fan Jenna Bernstein taking her leave

It seemed for a while that there might be a Democratic primary contest for U.S. Senator as well, until the well-backed entry of former two-term Governor Phil Bredesen convinced a promising newcomer, Nashville lawyer James Mackler, to withdraw in favor of Bredesen, whose second gubernatorial win in 2006 was his party’s most recent statewide hurrah. (At least two name Republicans — 7th District U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn and former 8th District congressman Stephen Fincher are vying for the GOP nomination.)

In any case, Democrats are also doubling up — and not just in the marquee races. There are competitive Democratic primary races at virtually every election level.

Take the case of state Senator Brian Kelsey‘s reelection bid in Senate District 31. The long-serving Germantown Republican sent out several S.O.S. emails to supporters this week informing them that he has a Democratic challenger and asking for campaign donations.

The opponent Kelsey had in mind was Democratic activist Gabriela “Gabby” Salinas, who did indeed announce her availability last week as a Democratic candidate in District 31. And she has a backstory that gives Kelsey reason for his concern. Salinas, who survived childhood cancer as a patient at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and went on to do research work herself at St. Jude, was also a survivor later on of an automobile accident that took the lives of family members.

Nor is Salinas the only Democrat seeking to unseat Kelsey. Another declared candidate for the seat is David Weatherspoon, one of several first-time office-seekers on the Democratic side.

On Monday, one of the Democratic Party’s recognized stars in Nashville, state Representative Raumesh Akbari, announced she would seek to fill the state Senate seat left vacant by Lee Harris, who is running for Shelby County mayor. And Akbari has a Democratic opponent in the primary, her House colleague, Joe Towns.

There are numerous other races on the ballot in which Democrats are competing with each other for the honor or capturing an open seat or one currently held by a Republican. One such case is the Shelby County Commission District 13 seat, a swing seat now occupied by Republican Steve Basar.

Both former Election Commissioner George Monger and political newcomer Charles Belenky are competing for that one. Monger, a former boy wonder who became a music manager at 15 and ran for the City Council at 18, declared his candidacy over the weekend, while Belenky turned up as a citizen critic of a purchasing contract at the commission’s regular public meeting.

And where a seat is traditionally considered Democratic, the infighting can be brisk indeed; two Democrats — Eric Dunn and Tami Sawyer — are vying for the Commission District 7 seat; four seek the seat in Commission District 8: David Vinciarelli, Daryl Lewis, J.B. Smiley Jr., and Mickell Lowery; while Commission District 9, vacated this year by the term-limited Justin Ford, is being sought by no fewer than five Democrats — Edmund Ford Jr., Ian Jeffries, Jonathan L. Smith, Jonathan M. Lewis, and Rosalyn R. Nichols.

• Monday’s first county commission meeting of the year was an abbreviated affair, starting at the late hour of 4 p.m. to accommodate attendees at the well-attended funeral at Idlewild Presbyterian church of the late public figure, Lewis Donelson.

On a day when the city was visited by groups of protesters partial to the now-removed statue of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, the commission was the site of one such protest — from one Jenna Bernstein of Tampa, who said she had come all the way from Florida to call for the expulsion from the commission of Van Turner, head of Memphis Greenspace Inc., which purchased two parks from the city prior to removing their Confederate monuments.

Bernstein’s mission received fairly short shrift, resulting only in a brief debate between Commission chair Heidi Shafer (nay) and Commissioner Walter Bailey (yea) as to the right of a non-resident to be heard. Shafer’s view prevailed.

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Politics Politics Feature

The Abortion Divide, Again

During Monday’s regular meeting of the Shelby County Commission, a dispute on continuing Planned Parenthood’s involvement in a local, state-funded HIV-prevention program was resolved — sort of — in a fashion that reveals the political fault lines not only of Shelby County but, to some extent, of the state and nation as well.

Van Turner

After a considerable amount of testimony, both pro and con, from an audience that seemingly filled the first-floor auditorium of the Vasco A. Smith Jr. County Administration Building to capacity, the commission finally approved a grant of $115,000 — the first of five scheduled annual ones — to support the renewal of a condom-distribution  program overseen by Planned Parenthood. Three other local agencies had previously been authorized without incident for equivalent shares of a total grant package of $407,000.

Amid warnings from both the Tennessee Department of Health and the county administration that failure to do so might endanger the entire package, the commission approved the Planned Parenthood grant, seven to five, with the vote being a clean split along political lines — the commission’s seven Democrats voting in favor, and the body’s six Republicans demurring, five voting no and one, Commissioner Mark Billingsley, recusing himself on grounds of his professional association with Le Bonheur Community Health and Well-Being, one of the three organizations whose HIV grants had already been endorsed by the commission. The ot

Heidi Shafer

her two were Friends for Life Corp. and Partnership to End AIDS Status.

For the record, voting aye were Van Turner (a Planned Parenthood board member who termed support for Planned Parenthood “a matter of life and death”),Walter Bailey, Reginald Milton, Eddie Jones, Willie Brooks, Justin Ford, and chairman Melvin Burgess — all Democrats (and all African Americans, as are, as was pointedly noted during the debate, a majority of the county’s HIV cases). 

Voting no were Republicans Heidi Shafer, Terry Roland, David Reaves, George Chism, and Steve Basar.

The difference between Planned Parenthood’s treatment and that of the other three state-designated grant recipients clearly had to do with Planned Parenthood’s long-term status as an abortion provider, although the agency’s opponents on the commission tended to couch their opposition — for tactical reasons, it would seem — on their stated belief that the county Health Department could better carry out the services required by the grant.

Planned Parenthood has frequently been the subject of controversy in commission votes over the years — notably in 2011, when a commission majority narrowly supported a recommendation by Republican Mayor Mark Luttrell that Christ Community Health Centers supplant Planned Parenthood, which had been the traditional recipient of new federal Title X funds to administer a variety of women’s medical services. 

Abortion had been the elephant in the room for that debate, too, though proponents of the change over stressed such other points as the greater number of physical venues available through Christ Community Health Centers. In the final reckoning, CCHC’s religious orientation may also have attracted enough Democratic votes to join with Republicans in determining the outcome.

It was no secret then, however, and is no secret now that governmental defunding of Planned Parenthood programs at local, state, and federal levels is essentially a Republican goal, with Democrats tending to support the agency, and differing attitudes toward abortion determining the divide. Over the years, that fact of political life has been as crucial as economic factors in determining the two parties’ working coalitions.

Though Luttrell’s administration had matter-of-factly included Planned Parenthood as a recipient back in December, when the grants were first announced publicly and the controversy was ignited, the mayor and county CAO Harvey Kennedy played a middle role of sorts in Monday’s debate.

Both argued stoutly that the county Health Department could perform HIV prevention services as well as, if not better than, Planned Parenthood. But both, significantly, urged caution in view of a letter from the state Department of Health advising that denial of Planned Parenthood for “extraneous,” (i.e., political) reasons might invite judicial intervention that could invalidate the totality of the $407,000 grant — a sum that all parties agreed was needed in view of mounting HIV and STD cases in Shelby County.

Monday’s debate was spirited among audience members, a majority favoring Planned Parenthood for stated reasons of public health, while a minority opposed the grant, some boosting the Health Department, while others spoke to the formally unspoken issue: abortion.

Some of the latter were graphic in the extreme, with one opponent contending that Planned Parenthood was “founded by racists … and killed more than the Nazis and KKK combined.” Another, Don Ware, who frequently testifies at public meetings on behalf of conservative causes, drew jeers and dismissive laughter when he said that “the business of Planned Parenthood is legalized murder.”

There was an ironic moment, pointing up the varying secular and religious motives among disputants, when, after Ware contended that “God is opposed” to Planned Parenthood’s activities, a voice was heard from the audience counterpointing that with a sardonic “Oh, God!”

The Almighty, it would seem, kept His own counsel in the matter.

• Another matter on which local opinions are sharply divided surfaced anew last Thursday with the presentation in the City Hall conference room of a voluntary de-annexation proposal for Memphis by the Strategic Footprint Review Task Force.

The city/county group was appointed last year after a near-miss in the General Assembly of a far-reaching bill that would have authorized relatively easy and extensive ways for communities to detach themselves from the state’s major cities.

Details of the task force proposal are covered online in “Political Beat” on the Memphis Flyer website.

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Editorial Opinion

Van Turner: The Compromiser

In the course of years, individuals in organized groups start to differentiate into what anthropologists call “archetypes” — specific behavior types that can be discerned to recur periodically over the long span of human history. One of the best-known archetypes is that of the messiah — the would-be savior who emerges to attempt drastic alterations in the pattern or fate of a body politic. The scale for that archetype runs from benevolent saintly figures to charismatic demagogues. There has been no dearth of either sort in political history.

Van Turner

And then there is something we might call the Henry Clay archetype. Known as the “Great Compromiser,” Clay was a towering figure in American politics during the early 19th century, famous for resolving seemingly intractable disputes by finding and advocating middle-ground positions.

The Henry Clay of the Shelby County Commission is Van Turner, a Memphis Democrat who consistently interposes between squabbling factions and finds compromise solutions that resolve the quarrel. Such was the case again Monday when an intervention by Turner made it possible for the commission to approve an MWBE program requiring the county to give African Americans and Caucasian women special consideration to remedy what Equal Opportunity Compliance director Carolyn Watkins had determined to be discrimination in contracts and purchasing.

The measure almost hit a snag when Commissioner Heidi Shafer objected that, by not specifying all women as such, including Asians and Hispanics, the measure was “actually regressive.” Various other members of the commission insisted on an immediate vote on the measure as written, seeing Shafer’s objections as essentially semantic, but enough fellow Republicans sided with her to ensure further discussion. A largely unspoken issue was that, if the ordinance were amended, it would require an additional reading — meaning that the issue would have to be held off until the new year.

It was then that Turner materialized with a resolution that bridged the gap between the two contending factions, leaving the existing classifications of the ordinance intact but adding a provision that gave the EOC director Watkins free rein to apply the terms of the ordinance to such other groups as she deemed appropriate.

More debate ensued, but the key moment came when Shafer said she found the provisions of the resolution satisfactory. That allowed for a final vote approving the ordinance by a decisive 11-2 vote. The commission went on, by a 12-1 vote to approve a companion measure applying similar remedial provisions to locally owned businesses, strengthening their potential future share of county purchases and contracts.

The two ordinances together allowed the commission to end the year on a positive note and, temporarily at least, resolved a long-standing wrangle over the disparity issue. As audience member James Johnson said, appropriating a famous World War II quote from Winston Churchill, “This is not the end. It’s not even the beginning of the end. But it’s the end of the beginning.”

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Opinion Viewpoint

County Commission Moves to Safeguard Independence of County Employees

Two ordinances introduced Monday for a first reading by the Shelby County Commission could be, and have been interpreted as such, measures to curtail the power of Mayor Mark Luttrell and to give the commission a leg up on the mayor.

Regardless of how these measures might affect the principle of checks and balances or the relative balance of power in county government, those are not their primary purposes. What they mean to do, quite simply, is to ensure stability and balance for the county’s workforce.

The first ordinance involves setting guidelines for the interim appointments of senior cabinet-level members in the county administration. It received five yes votes and six abstentions at this week’s commission meeting on Monday. That result, signaling a desire to produce a compromise ordinance before the third and final reading, was in conformity with the commission’s general agreement, during debate, on its merits.

Currently, our rules provide that an interim appointment shall serve in that temporary role for a “reasonable amount” of time.  The intent of the ordinance is to define “reasonable.”  

The probationary period for a new county hire is six months. I believe that the commission and the administration can agree that this is a reasonable time period for an interim tenure, with the possibility of an extension if one is necessary and requested by the administration. That would involve a modest change in the language of the ordinance, which, as originally written, specified a 90-day limit. County CAO Harvey Kennedy indicated on Monday the administration could live with a limit of 180 days.

Van Turner

The proposed ordinance is unrelated, in my mind, to Mayor Mark Luttrell’s recent decision to seat attorney Kathryn Pascover as the interim county attorney.  I will support her ratification as permanent county attorney when a resolution to that effect is presented. Attorney Pascover comes highly recommended from a very reputable firm, and I think she will do well as our county attorney.  

To be sure, there is a need for more diversity among the administration’s senior cabinet positions, particularly in the case of African Americans. Of the nine specific appointive positions directly named in the ordinance, only two are served by African-American men, and there are no African-American women. However, I am convinced that Mayor Luttrell is committed to the principle of diversity, and I have expressed my willingness to work with him going forward to make sure that his senior cabinet fairly reflects the nature of our whole community. 

The second ordinance introduced on Monday originally proposed classifying all attorneys subordinate to the county attorney as civil service employees. On Monday, however, commission debate turned away from reclassifying these lawyers as civil service employees toward the idea of echoing a referendum that will be on the ballot in November. That referendum, if approved, would establish the right of the commission to ratify or deny a decision by the administration to terminate an attorney on the county payroll.  

Currently, the county attorney is selected by the mayor and ratified by the county commission. All subordinate attorneys to the county attorney are hired, fired, and serve at the will and pleasure of the mayor. The goal of the ordinance is to protect the county attorney’s office from the sometimes unpredictable political fallout that may occur based on the opinion of one of the county attorneys.  

The intent is not to protect attorneys who are performing badly. The ordinance simply seeks to ensure that a county attorney’s considered legal advice does not subject the lawyer to the danger of termination, should either the administration or the commission object to the advice.

The point is to allow attorneys in the county attorney’s office to practice their craft without fear of political retribution. The county attorney’s office should serve the entire county — including the administration and commission — without intimidation, fear, or threat of termination based on legal advice.  

As in the case with the ordinance on appointments, this one will return to committee for further discussion and will achieve its final form between now and its third and final reading.

However it finally reads, the ordinance would ensure that attorneys working in the county attorney’s office can practice law without fear of job loss because of how that attorney decides an issue. We want sound legal advice from the county attorney’s office, and we don’t want the politics of the day to affect that advice adversely.

Van Turner is a Democratic member of the Shelby County Commission and a co-author, with Republican Terry Roland, of the two ordinances described above.

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Editorial Opinion

County Sausage

In a somewhat surprising take on the nature of his job, Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell on Tuesday described his relationship with his legislative body, the Shelby County Commission, as an “adversary relationship.” In

an address to the members of the Rotary Club of Memphis at the University Club, Luttrell said he’d offered that description as an alternative way of looking at things to an observer who’d asked him about his “contentious relationship” with the commission. 

“We do get worked over,” the mayor acknowledged about the relationship between his administration and the commission (which, it must be said, has often nursed a fair number of feuds and internal divisions within itself). “But,” said the mayor, and it was a crucial “but,” that kind of relationship “is in concert with what the founding fathers devised.”

In other words, the system of checks and balances that was built into the Constitution seems to have carried over into the governing practices of our nation’s various subordinate institutions, as well. Everybody is everybody else’s watchdog.

A case in point was Monday’s commission meeting, when the bone of contention was a plan devised by the county administration, faced with forthcoming reductions of $1.9 million annually in state funding for the county’s incarceration here of state prisoners. The administration had presented a plan whereby it would recoup most of that expected deficit by outsourcing Corrections Center food services to the Aramark Corporation, which would endeavor “in good faith” to re-employ as many as possible of the current 31 workers employed in food services, while the administration would seek to relocate those who were not rehired in jobs elsewhere in county government.

The commission’s discussion of this plan was touch-and-go, especially since sincere and vociferous complaints were heard early on from some of the affected employees, and since the issue, by its nature, was the sort that would invite party-line differences on the commission, divided 7-6 between majority Democrats and minority Republicans. There was a tendency among the Republicans to mount stiff upper lips, sigh, and describe the situation as one of making the best of a bad situation. That was balanced by an outcry among several Democrats that the workers were being thrown under the bus. But there was a middle ground, made evident from the start by the fact that one Republican, Terry Roland, and two Democrats, Van Turner and Willie Brooks, headed in opposite rhetorical directions from those of their party-mates.

Not that there wasn’t some invective thrown about, along with charges of duplicity and deceit, along with intermittently serious tension between the two sides and between county CAO Harvey Kennedy and Democratic critic Eddie Jones. But in the end, with some amendments attached to the proposition that cemented the guarantees of continued employment for the food-services employees, the adversarial atmosphere had served to clarify and complete the proposed arrangement in the form of a legitimate compromise.

Critics of American government often make the comparison to law-making to the unpleasant process of sausage-making. But ideally that very process is what makes the end result digestible and, with any luck, easy on the system.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

County Commission, Chairman Ford Cut a Deal on Power-Sharing (Finally)

CREDIT: JB

JB

Attorney Krelstein and Justin Ford confer just prior to chairman Ford’s agreeing to deal with plaintiffs

It took a while, both in the long run (two and a half months since the standoff began, in the immediate wake of the August 7 election) and in the short term (two hours of mind-bending intricacy at Monday’s climactic public meeting), but the Shelby County Commission’s power struggle finally ended — or seemed to — with a win-win solution.

Both of the warring party-line-plus-one factions were claiming victory, in any case — the one composed of six Democrats and one Republican (Steve Basar), and the one containing five Republicans and one Democrat (Justin Ford).

The solution involved a willingness by the D-Plus-Ones to give up their ongoing Chancery Court lawsuit against chairman Ford (for his seemingly high-handed control of what could be placed on the Commission agenda) in return for the R-Plus-Ones’ agreement to drop their appeal of an adverse decision by Chancellor Jim Kyle, coupled with Ford’s acceptance of majority rule in determining agenda items.

Ford and his Republican allies claimed victory because they had fended off what Republicans Heidi Shafer and Terry Roland saw as an effort by the D-Plus-Ones to “overthrow” Ford’s chairmanship. The Democratic coalition — whose ad hoc leaders were newbie Van Turner and the veteran Walter Bailey — claimed victory because they had forced Ford to yield on his arbitrary control of the agenda.

Virtually lost sight of in the two-sided celebration (which followed an exhausting and repetitious squabble settled evidently in an off-to-the-side chat by competing lawyers Turner and Ron Krelstein) was the origin of the dispute, in the chairmanship election held on September 8 by a freshly elected Commission with six new members.

The GOP’s Basar, who had been vice-chair in 2013-14, had expected to be elected chairman and was shocked when the majority of Republicans opted instead for the candidacy of Roland, switching to Democrat Ford when the Millington Republican seemed obviously about to fall short.

Ford was ultimately elected on the basis of his own vote and that of the Commission’s six Republicans (including the stunned Basar, who would shortly have a change of mind). Bailey, the Commission’s senior Democrat, was meanwhile outraged by his second-place finish to Ford, whose long-term chumminess with Republicans and openness to their agenda were no secret.

At the Commission’s next meeting, on September 22, Bailey and five other Democrats, along with Basar, voted together to block the committee appointments made by Ford. Eventually, weeks later, Ford would get his way on the committee matter, but in the meantime the battle had shifted to the matter of an agenda item which Basar kept proposing and Ford kept rejecting.

That agenda item, which proposed a rules change allowing agenda items to be added on the basis of simple majority votes and not by a 2/3 super-majority, became the basis of a Democratic coalition lawsuit against Ford’s alleged violations of Commission rules via his persistent rejections.

Two weeks ago Chancellor Kyle declined to rule outright on the suit, finding instead that the Commission had no rules because it had adopted none for the new body and directing Commissioners to adopt new rules or to re-adopt the body’s former rules.

Hence a motion for an amended rules package presented as an add-on by Basar on Monday, igniting another round of the ongoing factional dispute — partly tedious, partly fascinating — and going over all of the same old issues dividing the body.

As indicated in a prior post on this site, the amended rules package contained new clauses calling for the majority-rule principle and essentially removing the chairman from any control over agenda items. Deleted from the package, on a finding by County Attorney Marcy Ingram that it conflicted with the county charter, was a clause declaring that the chairman served “at the will and pleasure of the Commission.”

[pdf-1]

When the deal finally came sometime after 6:00 p.m. on Monday, the two sides had agreed (on a motion by Ford!) to refer the rules matter to the next meeting of the general government committee, resolved to drop their respective legal actions, and to do the trade-off indicated in Paragraph Three above: Ford can feel secure in his chairmanship, though he has had to sacrifice the power over the agenda which he had previously claimed and employed.

Either both sides won, or both sides lost. The question now becomes: Do the two party-line-plus-one coalitions continue to cohere, or do they break apart, a major part of their raison-d’etre having dissolved?