by Jackson Baker
ext Monday,
July 7th, looks to be a double day of reckoning for citizens of Memphis
and Shelby County. Two county boards will meet that day, and both will apparently
be immersed in big-time controversy.
With state Attorney General Knox Walkup's favorable decision late last week on a recent General Assembly measure allowing judicial primaries in Shelby County to be aborted, followed by Governor Don Sundquist's announcement that he would not veto the bill, the buck has been passed to the Shelby County board of Commissioners on the question of whether judges on next year's general election ballot will be permitted to run by party.
It's
no secret, of course, that most county jurists don't want to take part in
a primary next year, whether of the Republican or the Democratic variety.
And pressure from sitting judges -- including several nominally Republican
ones -- was undoubtedly one of the influences on Sundquist, who said for
the record that he wouldn't interfere because local matters should be settled
locally.
With the question due to come up at Monday's regular meeting of the board, some of the same pressure will be brought to bear on members of the commission, and it's anybody's guess as to the outcome. The anti-primary bill, sponsored by State Rep. Kathryn Bowers and passed late in the legislative session, provides that two-thirds of the county commission can vote to nullify a judiciary primary called by either political party.
In theory, eight votes, of the nine needed on the 13-member body, will be available to vote down the judicial primaries that both local parties -- the Republicans aggressively, the Democrats defensively -- have announced they intend to hold next year. The commission's six Democrats are on record as being willing to vote against primaries, and two Republican members -- Buck Wellford and Linda Rendtorff -- have also indicated an opposition to primaries for judges.
But Wellford and Rendtorff have left themselves lots of wiggle room, and, in any case, commissioner Morris Fair, an acknowledged swing vote, has yet to decide which side of the issue he'll come down on.
Commission chairman Mark Norris said the issue just now was "too close to call" but predicted a repeal vote would fail. "In fact, the Attorney General's opinion has been misreported. It was by no means a ringing endorsement of the bill's constitutionality. The most Walkup said was that it was merely `defensible.'"
And that fact would influence any commission members now straddling the fence to vote no, Norris said.
* But the commission's dilemma may be child's play compared to the conundra confronting the county Board of Equalization, the eight-member body whose function it is to mediate between the taxpayers and the county assessor's office on questions of property evaluation.
For at least four years -- from some point in the first year of former Assessor Harold Sterling's term -- there has been covert warfare between the board and the assessor. Although current assessor Rita Clark defended the board in her successful campaign against Sterling, she and former board director Pamela Rains quickly became antagonists, and her office's war with the board became overt and declared.
Several developments have brought that war to an almost nuclear pitch. First, Clark formed a compact with Mayor Jim Rout and the members of the county commission, who had become annoyed with both Rains and what they saw as the Board of Equalization's delays in processing taxpayer appeals.
Rains was adjudged by the county attorney's office to be ineligible to serve as director on the grounds that she and husband Ed Rains (her predecessor as board director) had taken up residence in Olive Branch, Mississippi, and had therefore violated county regulations requiring residence in Shelby County. She resigned.
Meanwhile, the commission in February had voted to oust three members of the old board and replaced them with new members more amenable to its views. More recently the commission voted unanimously to restrict the time frame of 1997 appeals, cutting back an October deadline to a more abbreviated 90-day period, which some judge, technically, to have already ended.
And the legislature passed a bill that would have the effect of restoring one of the previously purged members, John Bennett of Collierville, as well as creating a new position to be filled by a Memphis resident.
All these issues came to a head Monday when board member Sam Pearson called a meeting to deal with them, only to find assistant county attorney Leonard Hackel ruling that the meeting was illegally called because of improper advance notice, because the board was technically "in recess," because Pearson lacked the authority to call a meeting, and for various other reasons.
On hand to protest that decision were tax-appeal representatives David Scruggs, Andy Raines, Jerry Caruthers, and Taylor Caruthers, and the argument back and forth between them and Hackel and county attorney Donnie Wilson, on the one hand, between them and new board chairman Greta Thompson, on another hand, and between what has become new board factions, on yet another, grew strenuous indeed.
"Disrespectful" is how Thompson referred to a highly vocal Scruggs. Jerry Caruthers got off light, being characterized merely as a "baby."
The bottom line was that the highly charged meeting ended without ever being formally acknowledged to be a meeting. Matters will resume Monday morning with the convening of what will apparently be a bona fide meeting, although several carry-over board members said they would refuse to heed a newly imposed 8:30 starting time; so even that issue is in doubt.
Stay tuned; underneath all the fireworks, vital questions relating to the property tax and its assessment will end up being disposed of.