Memphian of the Year: Willie Herenton The city mayor found victory – and his finest hour – in the war against Chapter 98. by Jackson Baker Last things first: Okay, by the time Mayor Willie Herenton appeared in late December before the Memphis City Council with a consultant named Rotan Lee, whom he had hired (for $150,000) to study the sale of city-owned Memphis Light, Gas and Water, the issue looked to be about as dead as a proposal can be. (That was thanks largely to Herenton’s habit of tossing Big Ideas from out of nowhere and waiting to see who salutes them.) PHOTO BY JOHN LANDRIGAN And okay, Lee turned out to have one of those over-cozy relationships with Herenton that have periodically raised eyebrows and alarms in the media. And okay, the mayor’s unforgiving attitude toward political disagreements turned petty when he refused this year to allow Shelby Mayor Jim Rout to help light the city’s official Christmas tree, as is the custom. And okay, Herenton’s sometimes peremptory manner toward the media was evinced once again when, just after the state Supreme Court decided in his favor on suburban incorporation in November, the mayor used profane language to question the intelligence, the manners, and (it almost seemed) the pedigree of a radio talk-show host who had the temerity to ask him pointed questions. And okay, none of these occasions was exactly outside the character mold of the complicated man who has headed city government since the former Memphis City Schools superintendent became the city’s first elected black mayor in 1991. Well, who’s perfect? We still think the 1997 Memphian of the Year has to be Willie Herenton – a.k.a. W.W. Herenton, the more elevated name the mayor used until mid-summer, when he started gearing up a reelection campaign with a $400,000 fund-raiser at The Peabody attended by the city’s social and economic elite – the same elite who unanimously opposed Herenton’s first election and who now see him as a hedge against the possible mayoral candidacy of former congressman Harold Ford. In fact, we think Willie Herenton is a hands-down winner of this year’s Memphian of the Year title, the first of those which we intend to award annually to a star newsmaker. The award does not necessarily connote our approval, by the way. The criteria are merely that the recipient should be the person who has done the most in the past year, for good or ill, to impact the news and the community. It is indisputable that Willie Herenton did that during 1997 – as administrator, as politician, as person. The fact is, though, that, while we have reservations, on the whole we do (somewhat emphatically, even) approve of what Willie Herenton did in 1997. Here’s a brief rundown: n Herenton got considerable headlines early on when he announced in February that he would force the city police hierarchy to shape up or ship out as part of his focus on the city’s crime problem. (At the end of the year, he was still plainly unconvinced that city police director Walter Winfrey and other police officials were doing their best to control a rate of burglaries, rapes, and other serious crimes that kept rising while felonies of that type were declining in the nation at large.) Of course, the mayor got his own hands spanked during the year when U.S. District Judge Jon McCalla found for plaintiff Lt. Mike Wagner in a suit against Herenton and the city for damages in the aftermath of a racially tinged 1994 pepper-gas incident. (Never mind that Herenton eventually wiggled out from under his part of the liability; McCalla’s judgment was clear that the mayor had denied Wagner due process by demanding he be fired.) n Although Governor Don Sundquist’s perhaps necessarily penurious state government denied the mayor everything he wanted for development of downtown and the riverfront, Herenton nevertheless made some modest beginnings on those fronts – making piecemeal bargains with the feds, the state, and with his county counterpart Rout. n Herenton also made news during the year on the housing front, talking up privatization of the troubled Memphis Housing Authority and inaugurating a move away from old-fashioned public housing to an extensive new program of detached dwellings for low- to moderate-income residents. Of course, the mayor had taken some lumps at one point from U.S. Rep. Harold Ford Jr., who charged negligence in the solicitation of funds for MHA from a federal government that kept threatening to take over the agency. Herenton’s cold war with the Ford family heated up at several points on the calendar – particularly when the young first-term congressman loosed some steamy pre-summer accusations that the mayor was dogging it (like Rout, for that matter) on providing summer jobs for disadvantaged youth. n Did we mention that the mayor has a less than perfect equanimity when it comes to media criticism? We should know. “Go to hell!” he told us in May. “It’s nobody’s business how I make my money or who I appoint to do things for Memphis.” That came after we had been raising questions for some time about possible conflicts of interest in Herenton’s business dealings. Some of these were – in the truest sense of the word – questionable. And so we questioned them. We wondered whether the mayor should, as he had indicated late in the previous year that he would, be getting into the billboard business – one which involved city regulation on zoning and other matters. (This issue became moot when Herenton never got his ducks in the water and therefore didn’t take the plunge after all.) We wondered if Herenton’s real estate interests – notably the Banneker Estates development down on the Mississippi state line – didn’t push the envelope, too. But, most often and vigorously, we wondered out loud and in print about Herenton’s involvement with Sungold Gaming International, the casino operation which put him on its board of directors and gave him potentially lucrative stock options. It wasn’t just the arrangement itself that looked suspicious, it was also the fact that an ex-academic named Dr. Robert L. Green had been the man who got Herenton on the board, and, coincidentally or not, the same Dr. Green was the beneficiary of contracts – potentially worth as much as $123,000 – awarded him unilaterally by Herenton to study a wide variety of subjects running from education to crime control. Eventually, after repeated efforts and the filing of a Freedom of Information suit, we got a mass of documents from Green in lieu of the long-overdue “report” on his activities and findings which he owed the city. Whatever Green’s reputation as an old lion of the civil-rights movement in days gone by, he did not seem to us to have done much to earn his money. Had the year ended then, with no intervening events, Herenton’s reputation would have been in an ambivalent state, at best. But events did intervene. In early June, the city and its suburbs were both jolted by the revelation – which only a few people had realized at the time – of potentially epochal stealth legislation that had been passed in the waning days of the 1997 General Assembly in Nashville. What came to be known as Chapter 98 had been shepherded through a virtually unwitting legislature by Fayette County’s John Wilder, the wily and powerful lieutenant governor who, as presiding officer of the senate, crafted a mystery measure that in effect suspended the big cities’ annexation powers for a calendar year and allowed communities numbering 225 residents or larger to incorporate by petitioning for a quick referendum. The lieutenant governor’s ostensible reason for getting the bill passed was that he feared a tiny Fayette County area called Hickory Withe, where Wilder’s family had commercial interests (and numerous Shelby Countians had estates), might be swallowed up by the nearby town of Oakland. But Wilder would eventually own up to a prevailing concern that Memphis would sooner or later be determined to annex across county lines. There was logic – and emotion – on both sides of the annexation/incorporation issue. But the fact remained, as a dozen or so Memphis suburbs rushed to petition for elections under the new law, that Chapter 98 had been sneaked into being with a misleading caption, and when defenders of the bill like Charlie Perkins, a county lobbyist-turned-incorporation attorney, chuckled that that was how bills got passed in Nashville and when a Nashville chancellor seemed to agree it was no big deal, most defenders of Memphis interests either despaired or prepared to surrender to the inevitable. Not Willie Herenton. Suddenly it was the man who could say “Go to hell” versus those (like suburban State Senator Tom Leatherwood) who could think – and say – “Let them die!” about Tennessee’s major cities, among which Memphis was clearly going to be the chief casualty of Chapter 98. Herenton pointed out that massive suburban incorporation would cause the loss of future sales-tax revenues to Shelby County government as well as to Memphis and noted further the sudden one-sidedness of a year-old “balanced growth” agreement trading city sewer extensions for eventual suburban acquiescence in annexation. When Rout and, for that matter, Governor Sundquist – both of whom had a large voter base in the outlying suburbs – failed to rally to his reasoning or to a defense of the city’s prerogatives, Herenton let his contempt hang out. But also his resolve. Not quite single-handedly, but certainly as the Horatio of the resistance, Herenton began organizing a last-ditch defense. He hired blue-chip law firms to fight the legislation. He testified before a special legislative panel in Nashville. He proposed a “Formula for Fairness” to alter the financial relationships between city and county. He twisted the arms of influential developers and imposed a moratorium on sewer connections to the would-be New Towns. As always when he felt challenged, Herenton invoked his boxing background. “I don’t fear anybody when I’m prepared,” said the former high-school Golden Glover, and there were no fits and starts to his fight plan once he got it started. We all know the outcome. A Fayette County chancellor declared Chapter 98 unconstitutional, as did the state Supreme Court. And though the victory was won in the courts, it was clear that Willie Herenton had done more than any non-jurist to make it possible, as much by his dogged and often eloquent raising of consciousness as by the mechanics of an imaginative, unrelenting resistance. In the process, Herenton had not only won what he himself had called a “life-and-death” struggle on behalf of Memphis, he had begun the necessary and historically overdue process of rethinking the fiscal and political relations between city and county. (Rout, too, had appointed a commission to study the matter.) And in the process, Herenton had stood the conventional and cynical wisdom of the state capital on its head, forcing the powers-that-be to be more careful henceforth in how they draft legislation and putting them on notice that he – along with his city council and an augmented city lobbying apparatus – will be on hand in January to make sure they get started right. (As if to confirm his newly enhanced status in Nashville, Herenton and the mayors of the state’s other big cities sat down with Sundquist at year’s end to urge an urban agenda on the governor.) The Chapter 98 fight was Willie Herenton’s finest hour. Not bad for a year’s work. Not bad for a career, in fact. Which doesn’t mean that we won’t continue to train our scrutiny – and occasionally our skepticism – on the mayor. Like we said, nobody’s perfect. And there are still questions that need answering. But several big ones, having to do with Willie Herenton’s mettle and his enormous – nay, epochal – meaning to local history got answered during the course of the year. Though he was the runaway choice of our in-house panel for Memphian of the Year, Herenton was not the only newsmaker of consequence, of course. Others who got votes were: • Dean Jernigan, that purposeful and seemingly selfless local entrepreneur who made Memphis safe for professional baseball – a Triple-A version, in fact, to begin next year – and who, along with the Center City Commission, is underwriting a brand-new stadium downtown; • Ed Armentrout, the Center City Commission director who has become a kind of de facto mayor of the New Memphis that is materializing downtown; • Jack Belz, another pioneer of downtown resurgence and perhaps its guiding hand; • John Wilder, for reasons stated above (the award is for better or for worse, remember); • Dr. Peter Doherty, the Memphian who won a 1996 Nobel Prize for Medicine. (If we’d had the award last year, he’d probably have been our winner); • Rufus Thomas, who adorned our last week’s cover and is a musical living legend in our midst. We toyed with a category called “Unperson of the Year,” with nominees the likes of Reginald French (a controversial and now-departed Herenton aide); Arnold Weiner (the indefatigable writer of letters-to-the-editor who got the heave-ho from his beloved local Republicans for indiscreet solicitations of probation business in their name); and Bob Kelley, whose Mid-South Concerts was dropped as a MusicFest partner for next year by Memphis in May. Kelley, an accomplished booker of talent, is already planning his own, possibly competitive music festival for next year, however – an indication that what goes down sometimes pops right back up. The vagaries of destiny are something, all right. We’ll let you know a year from now who’s on top. Of our list, anyhow. n