Tag: Wharton

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Editorial Opinion

Electrolux Deal: Time to Rethink the Industrial-Development Process

The catastrophic news late last week of the imminent closing of the Electrolux plant at Pidgeon Industrial Park underscored the importance of long-overdue efforts currently underway to examine the incentives policies employed locally to recruit industry and, more generally, to reform the industrial development process.

It was not even a decade ago that the announcement was made, in mid-December 2010 at a gala year-end Chamber of Commerce banquet at the Peabody, that the giant Swedish appliance manufacturer would be building a 700,000-square-foot installation on Presidents Island. Numerous luminaries were present, including Electrolux executives, Mayors A C Wharton and Mark Luttrell of Memphis and Shelby County, respectively, and then-Governor Phil Bredesen.

Bredesen said the enterprise would represent a $190-million investment and would bring some 1,200 jobs, in addition to supplier jobs and other ancillary benefits. The facts, as things turned out, were a little different: The supplier jobs never really developed; the ancillary benefits remained theoretical; the job numbers totaled out at 1,100 and had subsided to roughly half that number at the time of last week’s announcement; and only the $190-million investment turned out to be entirely real.

Except that $190 million was the amount paid out by local and state taxpayers, not a measure of bounty to be received by the local economy. And, most worrisome of all, there was no “clawback” provision in the contract with Electrolux mandating that the company would be liable to refund any of this investment in the case of any default in its commitment to Memphis, Shelby County, and Tennessee, all of whom played the role of marks in this one-sided transaction. All that Electrolux had consented to do by way of recompense is to pay the standard tax rate, deferred to this point, for the remaining year or so the plant will be doing business in Shelby County.

How could such a deal have been made? To be sure, all the governmental principals had reasons. A basic fact of life for an elected official is the need to demonstrate results. The two mayors were facing elections, the exiting Bredesen was understandably eager to crown his gubernatorial legacy, and for the then-incoming Governor-elect Bill Haslam, who gave the project his approval, it no doubt had the looks of a godsend on a platter.

For current Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland, who was a member of the city council that gave the deal its blessing, it must look now like a joke at his expense. The Electrolux deal was not of his making, but it is a setback that may count against him in his reelection campaign. It is not to his advantage that his own explanations for the debacle dovetail with the company’s: a troubled economy, blowback from Trump tariffs, the going belly-up of Electrolux super-customer Sears.

All of that may be so, but none of it explains the embarrassing and costly predicament facing Memphis and Shelby County now. The fact is, our civic guardians undertook an enormous gamble without elementary protection. They bet on the come — and it came and went.

Any valid reform of our industrial recruitment process must include safeguards against any possible recurrence of this disastrous deal.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Running For Election? Show Yourself.

We write this just after having witnessed the four major Memphis mayoral candidates in a debate at a Rotary Club luncheon at the University Club. By general consensus, not excluding partisans of each of the four, all of them

— Mayor A C Wharton, Councilmen Harold Collins and Jim Strickland, and Memphis Police Association president Mike Williams — fielded questions smoothly and well, and, to go way out on a limb here, each of them offered convincing evidence of being able to serve as mayor if elected.

Since we at the Flyer were co-hosts of sorts for the debate, we take an understandable pride in that fact — not in having caused it, mind you, but in having the honor to be there to observe the results.

What was responsible for the remarkably uniform display of knowledge, insight, and improvisatory skill — all attributes which are surely prerequisites for serving as chief executive of the nation’s 22nd largest city — was the experience, day-in and day-out, of having to think about the subject of governing, talk about the subject of governing, and interact with citizens who had their own ideas about being governed — often contrary ones, but just as often complementary to those which this or that candidate has in mind to propose.

The process has a certain resemblance to the premises of a Socratic dialogue — the kind of interchange which, if all goes well, results in a synthesis of views and a leap forward of sorts for the res publica. But to get to the launching pad for such progress requires, above all, being there — making oneself available to the public that, once in power, one will have the duty to represent.

Why are we making such a big deal of a simple truism? Because there is a countervailing theory these days of how democratic government works, and it has bought its way into the catbird seat. It is all well and good to be able to raise prodigious sums of money, as a few local candidates have done in the present election cycle. It is another thing altogether to hide behind one’s moneybags, as it were, deigning never to match wits with an opponent or even to submit to fair-minded, unscripted exchanges with the public at large, but letting slick mail-outs and canned TV ads tell the tale — or make the sale, as it were. A tale which — without the reality-testing that genuine public colloquy provides — could as easily be based on fiction as upon fact.

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News

How Do the Memphis Biz Incentives Compare?

John Branston took Mayor Wharton up on his invitation to “read” about what other cities are doing to lure big business. The numbers tell a story.

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Politics Politics Feature

Who’s On First?

It may take some time to evaluate the enduring effects, but the fact is that the three main contenders in the Memphis mayor’s race all have found something to brag about in the several days since the candidate field became complete:

• Mayor Willie Herenton finished first in a straw poll held by the Shelby County Democrats at the Rendezvous Restaurant last Thursday night. And he did so by typically Herentonian means, without bothering to attend the event.

A few score Democrats showed up at the event to pay $50 a head for the privilege of voting in a mayoral straw poll while raising money for the party. The only mayoral candidate who was there from start to finish was Herman Morris. Carol Chumney came late and addressed the crowd, as had Morris earlier. John Willingham had a spokesperson on hand who talked him up before the attendees.

Only the mayor was absent and went unspoken for. But his was the name called out by party chairman Keith Norman when it came time to announce the winner. Norman declined to give out any numbers or declare who finished second or third.

What was proved by the event and by its outcome? That Herenton has a hard core of supporters and a network that serves him well, for all the fact that he’s not campaigning this year in the conventional sense: no fund-raisers, no polls, no inclination to participate in forums.

A scientific poll? Of course not. What it did prove, however, was that the mayor — who presided over a couple of weekend headquarters openings — is not lacking where G.O.T.V. (get-out-the-vote) is the game. And that’s what the game will be during early voting and on October 4th.

• For her part, Councilwoman Chumney turned up the leader in a fresh trial heat by pollster Berje Yacoubian showing her to be leading a second-place Herenton and a third-place Herman Morris. The numbers were 33 percent for Chumney to Herenton’s 29 percent to 14 percent for Morris.

Underlining the surprising showing for Chumney, whom many observers had thought to have declined from her peak as a leader in early spring polls, was the fact that Yacoubian had made public statements only a week earlier, telling Fox 13 News, which also broke the news of his poll, that Herenton was a “good bet” to be leading the field.

Au contraire, when Yacoubian got around to toting things up. His sampling of some 300 presumably representative voters showed Chumney to be considered a better bet than Herenton on issues like crime and education, with Herenton having a lead only on the matter of economic development.

Among other things, what that meant was that Chumney’s standing had apparently survived her widely publicized refusal to vote, back in April, for a council resolution asking for the resignation of Joseph Lee, then still at the helm of MLGW. The fact that the resolution, offered by colleague Jack Sammons, then failed by a single vote was thought to have been an embarrassment for Chumney. So was the fact that her own previously offered resolution, directing Herenton to accept a much earlier resignation offer from Lee, had failed to draw a second.

Both circumstances underscored Chumney’s reputation as a go-it-alone maverick with few if any allies in city government. Yacoubian’s poll results suggest that voters may find Chumney’s non-observance of the maxim “go along to get along” more attractive than not.

• Though Morris had reason to be discouraged by all of this, his demeanor, on a stepped-up round of activity, didn’t show it. He seemed unfeignedly confident as recently as Monday night, when the former head of both MLGW and the local NAACP (an alphabet spread that, in theory, encompassed a good deal of potentially centrist turf) addressed a meeting of the Germantown Democrats.

Parenthesis: One of the peculiarities of the current political season — as noticed both by ourselves and by Mediaverse blogger Richard Thompson — is the number of forums, fund-raisers, speaking appearances, and other events involving candidates in the Memphis city election that have taken place in the bordering municipality of Germantown.

That has to do both with the fact of overlapping populations (many members of the Germantown Democratic Club are residents of Cordova and Memphis voters) and with the circumstance that, with governmental consolidations of various kinds in the air, people in the near suburbs are taking an unusual interest in how things go in Memphis voting.

Consolidation was, in fact, one of the matters that Morris dealt with forthrightly during Monday night’s meeting. He endorsed it, categorically, and went so far as to express impatience with half-measures like the current intergovernmental talks involving an enhanced liaison of Memphis police with the county sheriff’s department.

“Consolidate everything!” Morris pronounced, and to that end, he recommended following the example of Louisville, where city and county voters voted consolidation in after an extensive period of public discussions. Similarly, he said, Memphis and Shelby County voters should be paid the “respect” of having the issue “put in front of us.”

When a club member said she was “tired” of questions about impropriety surrounding various officials now in office, Morris barely hesitated before responding, “I am, too. And I’m tired of people reelecting them.”

In general, Morris cast himself as Mr. Candor, attributing the financial problems of Memphis Networx, which he championed while leading MLGW, to the short-sightedness of the profit-focused private investors involved in the public/private initiative. He freely acknowledged hatching thoughts of a mayoral run in December 2003, immediately after being forced out of his utility perch by Herenton. And he flatly declared, “I don’t trust those numbers,” concerning Herenton’s current economic forecasts.

He suggested that his major opponents drew their strength from white or black enclaves, respectively, “while I’m 50-50, right in the middle.”

One note being struck resoundingly in private by Morris’ campaign people is the prospect, in fact, that he will shortly inherit some of the racially balanced support that was evidenced in the short-lived “Draft A C” campaign to induce a mayoral candidacy by Shelby County mayor A C Wharton.

With only two months to go, Morris needs a boost — more than he’ll get from the drug test which he successfully passed last week after challenging all the contenders to take one as well.

• The fourth name candidate in the Memphis mayor’s race, John Willingham, meanwhile, resolved to soldier on, despite the fact that few observers (and no polls to date) have given him much chance. “Look what happened in 2002,” he said, a reminder of his runaway upset win that year over the late Morris Fair, then an incumbent Shelby County commissioner. Last week’s cover story, by the way, erred in suggesting that Willingham had plans to convert Shelby Farms, now administered by the nonprofit Shelby Farms Conservancy, into an Olympic Village. It is the Fairgrounds that Willingham has in mind for his proposal. More of that anon.

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Cover Feature News

Game On!

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

In the course of his rounds on Monday, Memphis mayor Willie Herenton was preparing to leave City Hall for an engagement across town when it was discovered that the Toyota van in which he is normally transported from place to place had a flat tire. So His Honor had to cancel out. Figures.

It hasn’t been a good week for the mayor, nor a good month, nor, for that matter, a good year. Herenton began 2007 at the Convention Center with one of those traditional fustian ventures with which the city’s four-term mayor, for better or for worse, honors attendees at his annual New Year’s Day prayer breakfast.

The mayor, an alpha male if there ever was one, annually contrives to bestow upon the gathered media and masses something dramatic, the latest installment of the Big Picture — be it a declaration of war against his City Council or an affirmation of his chosenness by God or merely another vow to pursue the elusive goal of city/county consolidation.

This year was different. This year, Herenton unveiled a proposal that merely mystified his audience. He proposed to raze the Mid-South Coliseum, the Liberty Bowl, and what remained of the Libertyland grounds to pursue an extensive redevelopment of the Fairgrounds and its environs around a brand-new “state of the art” football stadium. Estimated price tag? $200 million, to be financed by a bond issue.

Skeptics immediately pointed out the “been there/done that” aspect of building a stadium at the Fairgrounds and the fact that the NFL, for which such a thing might serve as bait, had bypassed Memphis for Nashville years ago. One of the chief boosters of the University of Memphis, banker Harold Byrd, argued convincingly that the university, the chief acknowledged beneficiary, would gain more from an on-campus stadium.

Even the disbelievers assumed that there was method to the madness, however, and that behind the mayor’s proposal had to be some group of far-sighted social engineers or maybe just a cabal of self-interested developers looking to profit from what would be a socially useful scheme. In the fullness of time, it was thought, the “invisible hand” of these sponsors and the nature of their plans might be made clear.

But no plans have emerged, nor has any group of identifiable prime movers. Truth be told, once the mayor’s proposal was up the flagpole, nobody saluted it.

Quite as much as the city’s on-again/off-again credit rating and its sputtering economy, its ever-frightening crime statistics (to give the mayor his due, he has also proposed buffing up the police force), and the aura of corruption and favoritis that hover over city government, the unsatisfying vagueness of Herenton’s stadium proposal may have galvanized what would seem unmistakably to be a concerted reaction against him.

Two weeks ago, the Flyer published the general findings of two independent polls which showed that the incumbent’s approval rating had slipped badly among both blacks and whites and that Herenton was running behind maverick City Council member Carol Chumney.

Perhaps that was on the strength of Chumney’s consistent opposition to the governmental status quo and perhaps it was merely because her name recognition and public profile are (so far) greater than those of ex-MLGW CEO Herman Morris and former Shelby County commissioner John Willingham, two other opponents of record.

In the aftermath of the general public shock, The Commercial Appeal commissioned and published its own poll, which corroborates the earlier findings.

Beyond doubt, Mayor Willie Herenton, once regarded as “mayor for life,” now faces real challenges to his reign.

“I honestly think the mayor is a great leader, as able now as he ever was and totally deserving of reelection” was the almost wistful appraisal this week of Jon Thompson, an entrepreneur who served in Herenton’s first term as head of the now-dormant Wonders series. “But in the course of time there’s a fatigue that settles in, and that’s what happening to him, I think.”

That bottom line is encountered frequently among members of the city’s financial elite, not all of whom are as loyal or appreciative in their views as is Thompson.

It is no secret, in fact, that there is an ongoing effort among a number of established movers and shakers, many of them contributors to the mayor’s hefty campaign war chest (estimated to be as high as $600,000) to draft as a successor to Herenton his longtime friend and former campaign chairman, Shelby County mayor A C Wharton.

In those same early polls that demonstrated Herenton’s vulnerability, the easygoing Wharton fared demonstrably better than his Memphis counterpart. A survey commissioned by well-connected businessman Karl Schledwitz and performed by established pollster/strategist John Bakke reportedly showed Wharton’s “negatives” to be only 8 percent, as compared to Herenton’s whopping 51 percent.

Wharton has publicly acknowledged that he is the object of continued pursuit from well-placed advocates for his candidacy (telling the Flyer, however, that he wouldn’t “kiss and tell”) and has said pointedly that he would not run against Herenton. At the same time, he has made clear his interest in running if the Memphis mayor should, for any reason, not be a candidate.

One member of the local political establishment who has actively proselytized for a Wharton candidacy, whether or not Herenton remains in the field, says that the county mayor promised him a definitive answer “in 30 days.” Asked this week when that conversation took place, the would-be Wharton supporter reflected and realized to his surprise that the 30-day time period was ripe for expiration.

Even as pressure is mounting on Wharton to declare his availability, so too is Herenton being given broad hints to consider withdrawing. The progression of unflattering polls, together with an increasingly rampant public speculation about his vulnerability, makes for increased pressure — but also for increased resistance.

Echoing the general feeling among those who know the mayor well, Thompson said, “I can’t imagine his giving in to public pressure.” Says another friend: “He’s too stiff-necked. The more people insist, the more he’ll resist.”

Then there’s Sidney Chism, former Teamster leader, former Democratic Party chairman, a power broker in his own right, and historically the mayor’s chief ally out in the rough and tumble of practical politics. Said Chism this week: “Wait ’til I get through. Everybody’s got a plan until they get hit.”

What Chism’s threat means in practice might vary from opponent to opponent. But there’s no question that Herenton, the towering former Golden Gloves boxing champion who once boasted, “I never got beat, once I got my growth,” has not once gone down for the count since he entered public life.

Not as a rising school administrator in the late 1970s who forced a reluctant school board to name him the first black superintendent of Memphis City Schools and, hit by both a sexual and an administrative scandal, survived more than one purge attempt before leaving the job on his own terms; not as the contender who outlasted several other African-American worthies (including one A C Wharton, then the Shelby County public defender) to become a consensus candidate for mayor in 1991; not as the underdog who, as down in the polls then as he is now, overtook highly favored incumbent mayor Dick Hackett to become — by the slim margin of 142 votes — the first elected black mayor in Memphis history.

And there was 1999, when Herenton, running for a third term, was challenged by a well-credentialed multi-candidate field that included then city councilman Joe Ford. Now chairman of the Shelby County Commission, Ford was a well-liked representative of Memphis’ proudest and most politically powerful clan — one which then numbered in its ranks a congressman, a state senator, a county commissioner, and — most importantly — former U.S. representative Harold Ford Sr., whose command of inner-city loyalties was considered incontestable and whose political organization and patented election-day sample ballots were the means by which candidate after candidate got elected.

It had become axiomatic, an urban legend of sorts, that Herenton himself would have been beaten by Hackett on his first mayoral try in 1991 but for the last-minute all-out intercession on his behalf by the senior Ford, who, so went the story, put aside his natural feelings of rivalry to make political and social history.

As the inevitable tension between himself and the Fords asserted itself over the years, Herenton was determined to disprove that piece of conventional wisdom. He wanted it known that he could win altogether by himself, indeed had won the prize on his own. Having Joe Ford as an opponent gave him an opportunity. The mayor would turn the young councilman into a straw man.

And so it came to pass. In the very first forum involving the two of them, Herenton waited until Joe Ford started floundering on an answer to someone’s question and then called out to the candidate’s older brother in the audience: “Harold, you got to do a better job of getting this boy ready!”

“Boy”? Herenton had already used that unnerving signifier, especially insulting in the macho-conscious black community, to dismiss another opponent, then county commissioner Shep Wilbun. Candidate Ford seemed flustered at the insult and never quite recovered his aplomb in that race. Both he and Wilbun went down hard, along with the rest of a fairly star-studded field whom the mayor, in his election post-mortem with the Flyer, would dismiss as “clowns.”

Just as during his pugilistic youth, the mayor seems to relish the opportunity for mano-a-mano combat.

A case in point was Herenton’s statement last month in an interview on the historic black radio station WDIA. Asked about opponent Herman Morris, who had just announced his candidacy for mayor, Herenton responded thusly: “I want the world to know, there’s a man up in here in City Hall. If they’re looking for a boy, they identified one in Herman Morris, but he ain’t going to enter this gate.”

Once again, “boy”, the telltale epithet. And “gate”? The archaic, quasi-epic sound of that word was counterpointed ironically by its frequent use these days as a suffix to scandal.

The mayor has been equally blunt in dealing with the challenge from Chumney, whose first-place finish in this month’s raft of polls has energized her campaign and buoyed her hopes.

Back in February 2005, the first-term councilwoman was busy building a profile as an outspoken people’s champion, unafraid of tangling with the mayor or her council mates or anybody else in government. That her adversaries considered her an opportunist did not detract from the fact that she was amassing a following and seemed bent on running for city mayor this year.

At the close of a well-attended affair at The Pyramid that month, in which Herenton had presented his latest plan for city/county school consolidation, Chumney began a long discourse of her own, the point of which seemed to be that the mayor’s plan resembled consolidation proposals she had made during her earlier unsuccessful race for county mayor in 2002.

She had reached the point of reprising her decision not to solicit campaign money from developers when Herenton cut in: “Miss Chumney, I don’t think we need this shit,” muting the last word only a little, and continued on, “I don’t feel comfortable going through and hearing all this political dialogue and stuff.”

After Herenton’s remark prompted a walk-out in protest from councilman Brent Taylor, normally a Chumney antagonist, the mayor continued: “I don’t need to hear about her political campaign where she lost,” and, looking straight at Chumney, added, “You’re gonna lose the next one too.”

So far the third well-known candidate in the mayor’s race, Willingham, has escaped such direct fire from Herenton. But this is due as much to the former commissioner’s relatively dim prospects as measured by the polls as it is to any gallantry or forbearance on the mayor’s part.

But has Herenton, whose political style, like his pugilistic one, has been equal parts brawler and artful dancer, finally begun to wear down in the late rounds? Have the blows finally begun to take their toll? The evidence of the polls reinforces what so many had anecdotally sensed beforehand.

Aside from where they stand right now, what are the prospects of this year’s crop of aspirants?

Greg Cravens

Carol Chumney: Can she really own a double-digit lead over the mayor, as suggested by the CA‘s survey? If so, her standing is testament to the value of single-mindedness. Somewhat to the scorn of her detractors and to the admiration of her mainly grass-roots backers, lawyer Chumney seems at times to have no life other than her public one.

Upon taking office in 2004, Chumney began a steady round of “town meetings” and “coffees with Carol.” Modestly attended in the beginning, these have attracted larger crowds in tandem with her rise in public consciousness as a steady critic of the governmental buddy system, of budgetary excess, and of a variety of boondoggles. (She was instrumental, for example, in publicizing the notorious — and now repealed — city pension plan that allowed full retirement benefits after only 12 years of service.)

Her decision to take on both the mayor and the council, coupled with her go-it-alone style, led directly to an ostracism akin to that which she endured through most of her 13-year service as a member of the Tennessee House of Representatives from Midtown. But her determination did earn her a brief stint in the Democratic leadership in Nashville, and she would ultimately carve out a reputation there as a child-care reformer, heading up a special children’s services committee.

The mere prospect of Chumney being elected mayor has ensured that the usual suspects among zoning lobbyists have attended her fund-raisers. Still, she is cash-poor compared to Herenton and has less visible support among likely big-ticket donors than does rival Morris. Add on the fact that her very independence scares defenders of the status quo, who see her as reckless. Her strengths are also her weaknesses.

Herman Morris: Well-spoken and armed with professional accomplishments as a lawyer and as head of MLGW (where he was forced out by Herenton in 2003), Morris was something of a draftee candidate in his own right. He has been taken up by such exemplars of the Republican Party establishment as political veteran John Ryder, but his chorus of admirers extends also to the ranks of Democratic activists and to the likes of Russell Sugarmon, the venerable, respected civil rights pioneer who retired last year as a General Sessions judge and now heads Morris’ campaign.

Despite his stewardship at MLGW and an earlier prominence as lawyer for and chairman of the local NAACP, Morris’ public profile has been remarkably low. Insofar as the general public has noted him at all, it was for his MLGW service — a tenure which came back to haunt Morris when, just as Joseph Lee, a Herenton appointee, began taking heat for over-indulging the utility bills of Councilman Edmund Ford and other highly placed deadbeats, the mayor’s backers leaked evidence that Morris had kept a courtesy list of his own.

Still, Morris seems to be running within a hair’s breadth of Herenton, and his seemingly apolitical style can be misleading. As he noted recently, he is a veteran of most of the early political campaigns of the city’s African-American pathfinders — those of Sugarmon, A.W. Willis, Otis Higgs, and others.

John Willingham: No one gives the former commissioner much of a chance, and the polls, which show him trailing well behind the others, seem to agree.

However, he is now acquiring some overdue recognition for some genuine muckraking accomplishments: More than any other public figure, for example, Willingham did his best to call attention to what are generally recognized now as the weaknesses, and worse, of the city/county deal with the Memphis Grizzlies.

Long before the scandal erupted concerning misallocation of federal and state funds to build a for-profit parking garage for the Grizzlies’ management at FedExForum, Willingham was noting discrepancies between what public contracts called for and what was being built. His past career as an engineer was a help in that regard. Willingham, who has also been a barbecue maven and once served as an official in the Nixon administration, is something of a Renaissance man, in fact.

“Crimes have been committed,” Willingham avers, and he intends to prove the fact during his mayoral campaign. Even if his own campaign efforts should come to naught, he is in a position to do the incumbent mayor some harm. And, before his chances are discounted absolutely, it needs to be remembered that until the very end of his victorious 2002 commission race against Morris Fair, a generally esteemed incumbent, Willingham was largely disregarded there, too.

A C Wharton et al.: There is a general feeling, settling into a consensus, that the mayoral field is still incomplete. The same consensus holds that Wharton, the choice of most of those yearning for an alternative to Herenton, would be a slam-dunk winner if he chose to enter the race.

Meanwhile, there are reports of others advertising their credentials — unknown quantities as well as known ones. Only next week will it even be possible for candidates, those already in the field and those yet to be identified, to pull qualifying petitions from the Election Commission.

But there is no doubt about one thing. Willie Herenton, the erstwhile “mayor for life,” will be fighting for his political life — if indeed he remains in the mayor’s race at all.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Reaching a Balance

Thanks to a spot that runs regularly on the local Air America radio affiliate, we learn that some or another major media source — we forget which, but we were impressed — declared Memphis “the greatest American place” back in 1998. If we are, it is because the conditions of our existence have historically compelled a mingling of cultures, resulting most noticeably in a series of glorious musical heritages. We use the plural on purpose, having heard music
historiographer David Evans of the University of Memphis discourse convincingly on the separate musical streams — ragtime, blues, jazz, R&B, rockabilly, rock-and-roll, and more — that have issued into the world from Memphis.

But our greatness in the future will depend on how well we achieve a synthesis of our populations in other ways, especially politically and socially. Like the rest of America, Memphis and Shelby County are now past that era in which the words “black” and “white” adequately describe ethnic variety. We are home now to Asians and Hispanics in truly significant numbers.

It is this last fact, along with the rough balance of Caucasians and African Americans in our mix, that made the honor conferred on us this past weekend by Major League Baseball so appropriate. In becoming the site of the first annual Civil Rights Game and, according to baseball commissioner Bud Selig, the likely permanent home of the game, Memphis achieved both a signal distinction and the opportunity to become an annual example to mankind.

That opportunity is a burden, too, of course. We may be currently notorious in the eyes of the state and nation for instances of public corruption, but few other American jurisdictions, we venture, have achieved an effective symmetry in government to the extent that we have.

Consider: The current congressman in Memphis’ 9th congressional district, Steve Cohen, is a white who won a hefty majority last year against a black opponent with a famous last name. The current mayor of Shelby County, where Caucasians still dominate on Election Day, is A C Wharton, an African American who won a lopsided majority in 2004 over a well-known white member of the County Commission.

A white candidate, City Council member Carol Chumney, has gained enough currency in Memphis’ black precincts to have finished ahead of Memphis’ incumbent black mayor, Willie Herenton, in the first major poll of city voters. Meanwhile, a significant number of influential whites are involved in the mayoral effort of another candidate, former MLGW head Herman Morris, who is African American.

Racial issues still flare up in local government. The current controversy over a proposed second Juvenile Court judge is a case in point, though even that issue has as much to do with reaching an effective balance between the county’s municipal and governmental jurisdictions as anything else.

We still argue at the table over who gets the best seat or the first cut of meat. But we sit down together, and we’re used to it. If we can take the next major step and stabilize population flow in an environment that is economically secure for all, we will, in fact, deserve to be called a great American place.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Showdown Time

CREDIT: Gallagher Photo: Jackson Baker

As the Shelby County Commission voted Monday to hold interviews with potential candidates for interim state representative in House District 89 on Monday, April 2, with a vote on the interim member scheduled on April 9, contests were developing on the Democratic side of the aisle — both for the interim position and for the right to serve as permanent member via a subsequent special election.

Two Democrats were being talked up, as of Monday, to serve as interim state representative — activists David Holt and Mary Wilder. Holt was the subject of something of a draft movement among local progressive bloggers, while Wilder was being pushed by longtime activist/broker David Upton.

The real surprise is that, in the looming special election primary, Democrat Kevin Gallagher is losing ground among erstwhile supporters. Gallagher had been considered a tacit consensus choice and a virtual shoo-in after yielding to former District 89 representative Beverly Marrero in the District 30 state Senate special election, which she won.

Since that understanding was reached, however, Gallagher, who served most recently as campaign manager for 9th District congressman Steve Cohen, has alienated many of his former backers — both through acts of omission (some considered him too remote a presence during Marrero’s special election race with Republican Larry Parrish) and acts of commission (he has had a series of awkward personal encounters with members of his support base).

Rapidly gaining support for the permanent seat among Democrats is another longtime activist, Jeannie Richardson — who has picked up backing (some of it silent for now) with both Upton, her original sponsor, and with members of the blogging community who don’t normally see eye to eye with Upton.

All of this was occurring on the eve of another important vote among Democrats — that for local Democratic chairman, to take place next Saturday during a party convention. The two leading candidates are lawyer Jay Bailey and minister Keith Norman.

What amounted to the first one-on-one encounter between Bailey and Norman took place Monday night at the Pickering Center in Germantown through the auspices of the Germantown Democratic Club.

Gallagher Photo: Jackson Baker

Both candidates acquitted themselves well overall, and each made a point of bestowing praise — or at least friendship and respect — on the other. But each wielded a rhetorical two-edged sword in the process.

Norman, for example, was able tacitly to benefit from discussion of an anti-Bailey campaign mailer, even while deploring it. The mailer — a hefty collection of photocopied court records concerning disciplinary actions taken (or initiated) against lawyer Bailey — had, as everybody present knew, been sent at considerable expense to each voting delegate at Saturday’s forthcoming party convention.

In his opening remarks, Bailey had left no mystery as to who the sender of the packets had been.

“I’m proud of being a professional. I’m proud of being one of the people in this community who went through some things but was able to stand up and see my way through it … . I will not allow my character to be assassinated by innuendo by someone sending out an anonymous packet who was too afraid to put their name to it. I’ll tell you who it was. It was Richard Fields.”

Fields, a frequent adversary, had failed to explain that most of the actions against him had been dismissed, said Bailey. He acknowledged having had a drug problem a decade ago that was at the heart of a suspension imposed on him at the time, but denounced Fields’ packet as the kind of “mudslinging” that had cost other Democrats elections in the past — “eight judicial races and four clerk’s races.”

The reference was to Fields’ practice, begun last year, of distributing open letters making the case against various candidates for office.

During his own remarks, Norman expressed solidarity with Bailey on the point, wondering “where the money came from” for Fields’ mailer. “If you haven’t won lawsuits, you don’t have that kind of money.”

Jackson Baker

Norman and Bailey made nice (sort of) Monday night.

In an apparent reference to Fields’ first campaign letter, sent out last year concerning the backgrounds of several judicial candidates, Norman said he knew “the party was in trouble” when he saw it, and he cited the fact as one of the inspirations for his ultimate decision to seek the chairmanship.

“I knew nothing about this stuff,” Norman said about the current mailer. “I don’t care what Jay Bailey did 10 years ago.” Without mentioning Fields by name, he criticized “someone who had the audacity and nerve” to put it out, “maybe trying to make me look bad.”

In the course of disclaiming any intention of being judgmental about opponent Bailey, Norman, pastor of First Baptist Church on Broad, went so far as to lament the recent firing of an assistant minister at Bellevue Baptist Church for an act of child molestation — “something that was done 34 years ago.”

Of Fields’ mailer, Norman said, “I won’t stand for it” and noted that he and Bailey had discussed preparing a formal joint response, but he added pointedly, “Because it was against Jay, I wanted him to address the issues. That hasn’t happened yet.”

The two candidates agreed that unity across factional lines was a high priority for the party and that the high incidence of corruption among elected officials, many of them Democrats, was a major problem, but they seemed to differ about the degree of loyalty owed by the party chairman or the party as a whole to candidates running as Democrats.

“There are times that we have to make difficult decisions about whether to support particular Democrats,” Norman said, speaking of those with ethics issues. “We can’t go around co-signing everybody’s loan. We’re tearing our credibility down.”

While agreeing that candidates with conflicted personal situations ought to be counseled “either to work their way through it or to work themselves out of the race,” Bailey laid greater stress on unconditional loyalty to a formal Democratic ticket, once selected by the electorate in a primary. He also urged strong support of issues important to organized labor, a traditional Democratic constituency.

As evidence of his ability to cross factional lines and improve the fortunes of the Democratic Party, Norman cited both his pastoral history and his former career in the business world doing “turnarounds” of sagging commercial properties.

He noted the examples of East St. Louis, Illinois, and Gary, Indiana — two municipalities blighted by economic distress and civic corruption. “Memphis is about 25 light years away from that,” Norman warned somberly.

Democrats will choose between the two candidates on Saturday at Airways Junior High, site of the preliminary party caucus four weeks ago.

It remains to be seen whether the field of candidates is complete for the Memphis mayoral election. Various names are still being talked up, and one of them, despite his conditional disclaimer of last week, is Shelby County mayor A C Wharton, who backhandedly acknowledged this week that he is still being hot-boxed to run for city mayor by members of the business community, according to reports.

“I won’t kiss and tell” was Wharton’s somewhat cryptic response. The county mayor has said he won’t run against incumbent mayor Willie Herenton. The implication was that if Herenton ceased being a candidate for any reason, Wharton himself might very well take the plunge.

Roll Call, a Washington, D.C., insiders’ publication, published an article last week about Representative Steve Cohen’s relatively high-profile tenure in office so far and speculated on the kind of opposition he might face in a 2008 reelection bid.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, the article mentioned as likely opponents several of the leading candidates against Cohen in last year’s election — Jake Ford, Julian Bolton, Ron Redwing, Ed Stanton, and others.

Perhaps the most frequently mentioned of likely adversaries, also cited in the Roll Call piece, is Nikki Tinker, the Pinnacle Airlines lawyer who was runner-up to Cohen in last year’s Democratic primary. Tinker is making the political rounds and was one of the attendees at Monday night’s forum for Democratic chairmanship candidates.

Tinker declined to comment “right now” on her intentions.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Mayoral Mumblety-peg

Not long ago, Shelby County mayor A C Wharton sat down at the newspaper offices of The Marion Salute just across the river in Arkansas and delivered himself of some explicit remarks in favor of that community’s prospects for becoming the site of a new Toyota plant. Good. One way or another we’ve made clear our own hopes for that outcome — a highly salutary one for the economy of the greater Memphis area.

But — and there is a “but” clause: Why was it that Wharton, speaking last week to the downtown Rotary Club of Memphis, could not bring himself to be equally forthright about the desirability of the nearby Arkansas location? For the record, here are portions of what the mayor said to our Rotarians about Marion: “So anything that goes there would be good. Obviously, if we could get it into the Tennessee tax base, it would be even better.”

Huh? Did he mean that if Chattanooga, a major rival to Marion for the plant, got the nod from Toyota instead, the indirect benefits to Memphis from the sales tax and other state revenues would be “even better” for us than the direct provision of jobs and dollars in our very midst?

After another rhetorical nod or two toward Marion, Wharton followed that up with his own “but” clause: “But I will not be in the position of saying it ought to be there [Marion], as opposed to Alamo, Tennessee, which I heard yesterday is also still in the running, or Chattanooga.” If some in his audience thought they had misheard, the county mayor repeated himself: “[A]nything that brings jobs and development to this area, I support it, but I will not get into a position … and make this clear: I will not say it ought to be in Marion [or] Chattanooga.”

With all due respect to the mayor’s open-mindedness, what gives here? What’s the source of all this noble neutrality, when — as Wharton, his County Commission, and all who keep up at all with current events know — one of the most agonizing reappraisals going on in these parts concerns the serious and growing doubts as to the wisdom of PILOT (payment-in-lieu-of taxes) programs extended as bait for new industry by local government. The term in vogue for such programs these days is “giveaways” — measured as a correlate to the widening gap between governmental revenues and needed government services.

So are we to turn up our nose at the idea of new industry coming to our area free of charge? Is that beneath our dignity? Counter to some secret vow of masochism?

Are Mayor Wharton and his fellow chief executive, Memphis mayor Willie Herenton (who has kept a strict silence on the matter), beholden in some hitherto unrevealed way to Tennessee governor Phil Bredesen — who for obvious reasons would prefer that Toyota locate in Chattanooga or Alamo?

Has some deal been made that we don’t know about which would enrich us here in Shelby County by some governmental happenstance? In which case, we would merely request that our local chief executives stop being so inscrutable and Buddha-like and start talking turkey. Otherwise, it would appear that they’re playing a game of mumblety-peg — at our expense.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Double Stuff

CREDIT: Photo Illustration

When one of my friend’s parents moved to the area, they bought a nice house in Collierville. Their daughter, a tried-and-true Midtown girl, asked them why they would want to live so far from the center of town.

Their answer was simple: For the same amount of money that they would pay for property and
taxes in the city, they got a much larger house in the suburbs.

It’s hard to argue with economics like that. For most Americans, their home is both their greatest asset and largest investment. And when faced with a decision that gives you more house for your money (and probably a better rate of return) or spending that same budget on taxes, it’s a wonder anyone is still living within the city limits.

Of course, the city has a way of keeping its population stable and propping up a slumping tax base: annexation. Because of a state-mandated growth plan, the unincorporated areas of Shelby County have already been divvied up between the municipalities. It’s not a question of if they’ll be annexed, it’s a question of when.

And for some of the Memphis reserve areas, when might be as early as the end of this year.

In mid-October, the City Council began the process of annexing two areas of the Memphis reserve: the Bridgewater area near East Memphis and a piece of southeastern Shelby County. If approved, the areas will become part of Memphis December 31st. A public hearing and the final council vote on the matter are scheduled November 21st.

The annexation proposal came at the request of the Needs Assessment Committee, an all-volunteer body created to review facility needs in both the city and the county school systems. Because of earlier annexations in the Countrywood and Berryhill areas, Memphis City Schools (MCS) officials were looking at an additional 2,500 students next year but not enough schools to handle them.

The proposed Bridgewater annexation would help solve this problem, giving MCS “the Dexters,” an elementary and middle school crucial for serving students in that area. But though the annexation is necessary to solve some of the problems, it doesn’t solve the main one: sprawl.

Shelby County and the city of Memphis are like a pair of conjoined twins, intricately connected and utterly dependent on one another, but the division of resources is not always equal. In part it’s that inequality that pushes people to the east and eventually pushes Memphis east, as well.

Are two heads really better than one?

Some services, such as the health department, are funded equally between the city and the county governments. That means that city residents pay for their share once in their city taxes and once in their county taxes.

And that’s not the only spot where citizens see double: look at the Memphis Police Department and the Shelby County Sheriff’s Department, schools, mayors. The county and city governments are in discussions to combine fire services, but it looks like it will be a tough sell.

It would be one thing if the city and the county were two land masses, sitting side-by-side instead of overlapping. As it is: Why pay for the same — or similar — services twice?

In the past decade, the population of Shelby County Schools (SCS) has remained fairly stable. In 1995, it had 43,800 students. In 2005, it had 45,000. But the equation should look more like a complex algebraic formula: As citizens migrate to the reserve areas, bumping up the population of the county schools, the city schools lose students. Then Memphis annexes an area and the numbers reverse: SCS loses students while MCS gains them. And because both systems are “growing,” they build new schools.

If you have the same number of students, why would you need to build more schools, you ask? Whether it’s within the Memphis city limits or not, the local population is amassing in the southeast area of the county. SCS may have room for additional students in Millington, but busing them from the crowded southeast schools would cause skyrocketing transportation costs. The same could be said of the city schools. While they have space in their schools near downtown, they have an over-capacity problem in the southeast area, as well.

Wouldn’t it be more efficient to provide services based on geography rather than jurisdiction? We don’t want to get to a point where the only people who live in the city are the rich (because they can afford to) and the poor (because they can’t afford to move).

Someone needs to draw a line on sprawl … as long as it’s not right down the center.