by Jackson Baker
ocal Democrat
Yvonne Acey won election to the Shelby County Election Commission
way back in March, but she hasn't yet had an opportunity to take her seat.
Holdover commissioner Greg Duckett is meanwhile continuing to serve, despite having been voted out of office by the Shelby County Democratic caucus, which returned the other two Democratic commissioners -- Myra Styles and Commission chairman O.C. Pleasant. (The two GOP members are David Lillard and Rich Holden.)
The reason is inaction by Duckett's close friend Calvin Anderson, one of five members of the state Election Commission and the member responsible for certifying results of local commission elections for Tennessee's westernmost 30 counties. Anderson has passed up two opportunities to certify Acey, one at the state commission's meeting of April 7th and another at the meeting of April 21st.
His explanation? On April 7th, said Anderson, he had not yet received a letter formally attesting to Acey's election from Kathryn Bowers, chairman of the Shelby County Democratic caucus in the General Assembly. County election commissioners are customarily voted in every two years by the Shelby County members of their party serving in the legislature.
By the time the state commission met on April 21st, Bowers' letter was in hand, but still Anderson held back from certifying Acey -- this time, he said, because "I wanted to be sure that she wasn't the kind of city employee who, by reason of her employment, would be ineligible." Acey is a city school teacher and is thus exempt from regulations prohibiting election commission membership for other types of government employees.
Having now satisfied himself of Yvonne Acey's eligibility, Anderson says he will act to certify her when the state commission next meets, on May 20th. That will enable Acey to take her seat at the county election commission's own next meeting of May 21st.
Various local Democrats -- not excluding chairman Pleasant, who was the target of a purge attempt by Duckett which would seem to have backfired -- find Anderson's explanation for his fastidiousness to be more than a bit disingenuous. They cite a parallel of some years back when Republican state election commissioner Charles Ashford declined to certify GOP legislators' negative vote against former county election commissioner Ann Weldon, an abstention that in effect allowed Weldon to serve the greater part of an extra term that she had not, properly speaking, been elected to.
Anderson denied that he ever intended to do anything suchlike. "I find it odd that people are speculating about things like that who haven't even bothered to ask me what was going on," he said, indicating that the current Flyer inquiry was the first questioning he had undergone about the matter.
Besides being friends, Duckett and Anderson are also considered close to Vice President Al Gore and are regarded by some Shelby County Democrats as having been too proprietary in their husbanding of the Veep's accessibility during Gore's visits to the county. This was privately cited by some Democratic legislators as one reason for their vote to unseat Duckett in March. The main reason, however, was Duckett's expressed intent to become chairman himself while seeing a protege, Deidre Malone, replace Pleasant. In the event, both Duckett and Malone were outvoted by Acey, a longtime party activist who, prior to the voting, had been regarded as a dark horse at best.
Pleasant's reaction to the defeated purge attempt: "I'm too old a cat to get scratched up by a little kitten."
* The four names most prominently mentioned as the Shelby County Commission prepares to name a successor next week to the late General Sessions Judge Jim White: lawyers Bob Talley and Lynn Cobb, Juvenile Court Referee Herb Lane, and assistant county attorney Danny Presley.
* The mellifluous, golden-molasses tones of Dave Black have been a staple of local radio since 1957, when Black began broadcasting on WMC-AM 790, as an announcer for the station's agricultural reporter Ed Jones, who went on to become the longtime congressman for Tennessee's 8th District.
Black went on to succeed Jones as WMC's agri-reporter, and he has hardly missed a beat in the intervening 40 years. Mid-Southerners accustomed to his four-times-daily reports, beginning at 5:52 a.m., were able to keep on feeding their habit during the last six weeks, during which Black stayed regular as sunrise.
During that time, however, the venerable announcer underwent a serious operation for the removal of a kidney, which a checkup had revealed to have a malignancy. (The discoverer? Dr. Jennifer Kinnard, the daughter of the self-same Ed Jones.)
This news will doubtless surprise many listeners who continued to hear Black's cheery "Goooooood Morning!" during the period of his operation and recovery. Black kept on keeping on by virtue of such expedients as pre-taped broadcasts done before he went under the knife, followed by a series of transmissions done from his bed, both at hospital and at home.
Black has now resumed doing business as usual from the Agricenter.
* Black's wife is Kay Pitman Black, the former ace governmental reporter for the old Memphis Press-Scimitar and, for the last several years, the press aide to the late Sheriff Jack Owens and his successor, A.C. Gilless.
Well-known to all local media people as the source of quick and reliable information about breaking news on the law-enforcement front, Kay Black has performed political prodigies, too, surviving both her own heart attack and the indictment of Gilless' top aide Ray Mills on job-selling charges, to supervise her boss' continued viability as a political figure.
Gilless, a member of the large crowd which last week helped Overton Square impresario Karl Schledwitz inaugurate the new comedy emporium The Loony Bin, confirmed that he will run for reelection next year as a Republican. He also acknowledged his continuing association with Mills, who has loomed large in the incumbent sheriff's fund-raising and strategic planning. "I had breakfast with him this morning," Gilless said.
* Also keeping her hand in is the Blacks' daughter Maura Black Bulick, a Democratic activist and, like her mother before her, a member of the local party's executive committee, who has taken a new job as an aide to U.S. Representative Harold Ford Jr.
BY ANYBODY'S RECKONING, ONE of the more outspoken members of the City Council is architect Tom Marshall. Taking a break Sunday between running three miles in this year's 20th Anniversary Oak Hall/St. Jude race and getting in nine holes of golf, Marshall advanced some reactions to recent and current political/governmental events.
On the recent flap between Mayor W.W. Herenton and U.S. Rep. Harold Ford Jr. over a summer jobs program for city youth: "Lookit, I'm just a city councilman, and, if I want an appointment to see the mayor, I can get one within two hours. I would think if the congressman from my district wanted to see me, I could find room on my calendar for him. That looked like a case of disrespect to me."
The jobs controversy -- dormant of late -- became public last month when Rep. Ford held a press conference to criticize Herenton and Shelby County Mayor Jim Rout for declining to meet with him on short notice to coordinate plans for summer jobs funding.
On Dean Jernigan's offer, on behalf of Blues City Baseball, Inc., to guarantee the financing of $28 million on the proposed Triple-A baseball stadium, to which the city and county have jointly agreed to contribute another $8.5 million: "I'm still not convinced we've got all the problems solved. First of all, the recent history of stadium construction indicates they're very likely to have a cost overrun. I think the existing cost estimates are unrealistic."
Marshall's comparisons of the current project to early financing of The Pyramid by the city and county in conjunction with long-gone entrepreneur Sidney Shlenker are credited by some observers with having prompted Jernigan's guarantee offer of last week.
On the Nehemiah Project, a low-income housing program of Shelby County Interfaith, involving three houses built so far -- but unsold -- on property provided to SCI for the purpose by the council:
"Building a revolution is one thing, but building a house with a bedroom you can actually fit a bed into is another." Marshall contended that SCI's houses were unfunctional and predicted that the council would be forced to reconsider its support for Nehemiah.
On Marilyn Loeffel of Cordova, Governor Don Sundquist's recently defeated nominee for the State Board of Education: "I heard that she had charmed some people in Nashville [where Loeffel had passed her early hurdles, in the Senate, before being turned down in the state House]. Well, she never charmed me."
Marshall remembered a telephone conversation in which, he said, he was severely chastised by Loeffel, then president of the conservative activist group FLARE, for declining to answer questions about abortion in one of the group's election-year questionnaires.
Marshall, who seriously considering running for Congress in the 8th District as a Democrat some years back, said he still hoped to be able to make such a race some day. "I'm in a waiting stage right now. I do have ambitions to go on in politics," said the representative from District 9, a council super-district.
* As the General Assembly heads into its last month of activity, with still no solution to the state's pending budget imbalance, Lt. Gov. John Wilder may have tipped his hand on how he thinks the deficit ought to be managed.
Greeting a Memphis visitor who was urging him to protect the $88 million in reserve funds of the Tennessee Housing Development Agency, which Governor Don Sundquist has designs on, Wilder said, "What else are you going to do? You've got to either raise taxes, go to the Rainy Day [state reserve] Fund, or get it from T.H.D.A.'s surplus."
In the House, which is under stricter Democratic control than the Senate, where Wilder presides over a Democratic/Republican coalition, momentum continues to mount in favor of forcing Sundquist to forgo the T.H.D.A. funds and look instead to the Rainy Day fund.
* The clock will probably run out on efforts, being pushed by House Finance Chairman Matt Kisber, to pass a measure privatizing state prisons during the current legislative session. But some observers think Speaker Jimmy Naifeh, whose wife Betty Anderson is a lobbyist for the corporation which desires the move, will intervene decisively on its behalf later this month. Naifeh's public posture has been one of neutrality.
* State Rep. Joe Towns of Whitehaven, secretary of the House Education Committee and one of five members of the K-through-12 subcommittee which rejected gubernatorial nominee Marilyn Loeffel's bid to become a member of the State Board of Education, says that the lobbying he experienced was all one-way.
"You hear it said that the TEA [the Tennessee Education Association, which opposed Loeffel's confirmation] put on all the pressure. I never even heard from them, but the governor called me no less than three times," said Towns, whose financial records, like those of other subcommittee members voting against Loeffel, were subsequently inspected by conservative activists in Nashville.
* House passage appeared likely this week for a bill licensing companies that extend short-term loans while holding borrowers' post-dated checks.
* Lobbyists for both Memphis and Shelby County are coordinating their efforts to defeat a measure, being lobbied hard by tax appeals representative Jerry Caruthers of Memphis, to expand the Shelby county Board of Equalization to mandate two new members from Collierville and Millington.