Statecraft and the City

On the eve of the 1998 General Assembly, Memphis officials huddle in Nashville.

by Jackson Baker

fter the experiences of the last year, the City of Memphis has its ducks in a row as the 1998 session of the Tennessee General Assembly gets ready to convene next week. Right?
Well – not exactly. To be sure, city council chairman Myron Lowery will be leading council members and staff on an official “retreat” this weekend in Nashville, where all concerned hope to get their act together – as regards both a local agenda for Memphis and the council’s wish list for this year’s legislative session.
But there’s nothing engraved in stone yet, either on the council’s part or, for that matter, on the part of Mayor Willie Herenton’s administration. “We’ve been pretty much waiting on them [the council] to finish their deliberations before preparing our own recommendations,” said city CAO Rick Masson, who said that he – and possibly the mayor – would be on hand for all or part of the council’s weekend sessions in the state capital.
The incomplete state of preparations may strike some observers as odd, given several circumstances of recent history – notably the convulsions caused in local government and politics by last year’s Chapter 98 stealth measure, a bill that seemed destined to close off Memphis’ future growth until it was struck down late in the year by the state Supreme Court.
Nobody saw Chapter 98 coming – not the mayor, not the council, and not city lobbyist Robin Merritt. Supposedly to remedy that problem, Mayor Herenton revamped the city’s lobbying contingent, cutting back Merritt to half-time and, after several members complained about a poor communications pipeline last year, assigning her what essentially are liaison duties with the council this year.
Herenton has also added on former interim U.S. Senator Harlan Matthews, the veteran Nashville politico who was former Governor Ned Ray McWherter’s Man-to-See and who – to say the least – knows his way around Legislative Plaza. “I’m in daily contact with Harlan,” claims Masson.
But even before last year’s Chapter 98 imbroglio, the city had been faulted for what had become a pattern of late preparation of its legislative packages. The first-come-first-serve legislative hopper fills up early with various cities’ and special interests’ completed packages, some of them bills carefully crafted with all i’s dotted and t’s crossed. One year during Herenton’s first term and the tenure of then-city lobbyist Carl Johnson, the city actually missed the deadline for introducing its preferred bills, even in caption or summary form.
Not to worry, says Masson, who promised on Monday that the administration would be in touch with council members during and after the planned weekend seminars and would have a package ready “by next week.” High up on the city’s wish list, Masson said, would be legislation having to do with: the annexation/incorporation issue; urban enterprise and redevelopment zones; crime; and still-pending construction projects like that under way for Second Street.
Both Masson and mayoral administrative assistant Carey Hoffman indicate that Herenton, who made two high-profile visits to Nashville during the summer and late fall, plans to be on hand in the state capital more often than has been his wont in the past.
Apparently, no city representatives will actually be in Nashville when the legislature convenes on Tuesday, however.
“We thought about holding a reception for legislative members up there then, but were advised that we might be playing into too full a calendar,” Lowery said. What he arranged instead was informal sessions with members of the Shelby County and Davidson County legislative delegations and with representatives of the Nashville city government and council.
Lowery had previously named city/county consolidation as a subject to be taken up by the council during its weekend seminars and meetings. Others he mentioned Monday included the annexation/incorporation question and possible legislation to circumvent the current judicial ban on Memphis city voters’ taking part in future county school-board elections.
One intriguing recommendation – consistent with a current interest on the part of several Tennessee cities in decentralizing state government – is that of Councilman John Vergos, who proposed legislation requiring state championship events for prep-school sports to be rotated around the state rather than held exclusively in Nashville.
Anticipating criticism of the sort that greeted a previous council retreat in Atlanta in 1993, Lowery contended that the weekend retreat in Nashville – estimated to cost some $5,000 – would be cost-effective. Lowery said the problem with holding annual council retreats in Memphis, which has been the case since Atlanta, is that “beepers and phone calls and every kind of possible distraction” are hazards of staying home. “Being in Nashville – especially now that everybody understands the importance to us of what happens there – will ensure 100 percent attention to the business at hand,” he says.
The council chairman noted that he and outgoing chairman Jerome Rubin had at one time planned to convene a legislative planning session in early December but that “events” (possibly including a since-resolved controversy over Rubin’s attempt to add a relative to the city payroll) had gotten in the way.

n Lowery’s annual New Year’s Day Prayer Breakfast, held as always in the Continental Ballroom of The Peabody, and Champagne Brunch, held this year at the River Terrace Yacht Club on Mud Island, netted him “something under $10,000” in proceeds, the council chairman indicated this week.
The breakfast by itself filled 38 tables, at up to 10 people at a table, and the ticket cost was $30-a-head, but Lowery contended that overhead , costs of providing meals, entertainment, “comp” tickets, and other factors limited the post-expenses take, all of which becomes available to him henceforth for campaign purposes. “But what I’m mainly interested in is providing useful occasions for people to come together.”
Both the breakfast and the brunch have indeed become entrenched on the local social/political calendar, and Mayor Herenton normally delivers remarks at the breakfast that function as an early, informal version of his annual state-of-the-city address.

n Herenton pulled no punches this year at the Lowery breakfast, at which he summed up 1997 as “a year of trials and tribulations” but one also of “jubilation.”
The mayor had harsh words for one sometime political adversary, Shelby County Mayor Jim Rout, and soft ones for another, U.S. Rep. Harold Ford Jr.
Seemingly alluding to angry words exchanged with Rout during the course of the city’s resistance to Chapter 98, Herenton promised to “fight anybody who gets in the way of realizing this city’s great potential.” Referring to suggestions that he make greater efforts to cooperate with Rout, the Memphis mayor said pointedly, “Don’t expect me to cooperate with people when they’re not doing right. … If he [Rout] does anything adverse to the interests of the City of Memphis, I’m going to fight him.”
And, to further underscore his message, Herenton said, “Memphis has one mayor, not two, and right now that’s Willie Herenton.”
By contrast, Herenton’s one reference to a past disagreement with Rep. Ford – this one over the congressman’s charges last year that the mayor was lax in providing summer jobs for disadvantaged youth – was soft and conciliatory. “It gets political. It’s all right. … It’s all right to fight about jobs for kids.”
Among the issues reviewed by Herenton were: the proposed sale of MLGW (“Don’t shoot me. All we’re doing is just looking at it”); crime (the mayor promised to protect a forthcoming local march by members of the Ku Klux Klan and suggested a raise in the pay of Memphis police officers disproportionate to that for other city employees) and housing (Herenton promised an accelerated program in helping provide free-standing homes for low-income residents). n

Wilder’s Post Mortem on Chapter 98

Speaking at Memphis Rotary Club Tuesday, Lt. Gov. John Wilder of Somerville, a key supporter of Chapter 98, delivered himself of several afterthoughts about the controversy:
• On new towns – “I don’ think we need any more cities. I know we don’t need any more counties.”
• On criticism of himself in the media – “I don’t even know who I am any more. A sneak? A cheat? A thief? I don’t know who I am.”
• On Chapter 98, found unconstitutional by the state supreme court – “It was unconstitutional. We passed a lot of other bills that were unconstitutional.”
• On coping with the court’s ruling that Chapter 98’s caption was too narrow – “We’re going to broaden the captions. We’re going to put everything in them. We’re not going to leave anything out of the captions.” n