As I look forward to the Shelby County elections of 2026 and to the intense competitions that will develop for them, I can’t help wondering if all the would-be members of the Shelby County Commission, say, have even a remote idea of the skills that will be required of them.
Math skills, for example. Rare is the undergraduate who sees his confrontations with the world of numbers in this or that college course, basic or advanced, anything other than a curricular matter that he or she has to safely get through in order to graduate — never again to have to deal with in the real world.
But they will, they will. The men and women who sought membership on the city council or the county commission, hoping to represent the interests of this group or that class or to raise up the prospects of some noble idea for improving society or maybe just to advance themselves in the world, will discover that to do any of those things, they have to crunch numbers.
So hath it been the last few weeks for the 13 members of the current county commission, and progressively so as they neared the July 1st deadline for the 2026 fiscal year.
In an eight-hour session on Monday, climaxing just before midnight, the commissioners added and divided and fractionated numbers many times over, as they tried to arrive at mutually acceptable dividends that would both accomplish their personal and social goals and stay within the parameters of available financial resources.
Partisans of the zoo, for example, would find themselves vying with advocates for mental health, say, or the county’s embryonically developing crime lab, or the multi-tiered desiderata of a “moral budget” proffered by various petitioners to the commission on behalf of underserved local populations.
More so than might have been expected, compromises were arrived at by the commissioners allowing all of the various claimants some share of the limited bounty available.
Then these compromises would be done and redone, shuffled and reshuffled in accordance with the crests and redirections of an ever-shifting debate.
Passions were aroused, as when Commissioner Henri Brooks, fighting over a suddenly available sum of $124,000, urged unsuccessfully that it be used to “feed hungry children” rather than to help establish pay parity for county prosecutors.
Ultimately the commissioners had to confront the bottom line, a property tax rate for the county.
Mick Wright, a member of the commission’s Republican minority, proposed a rate of $2.69, a figure that would align the county with a state-supported rate designed to maintain the county’s current level of expenditures and avoid a tax increase.
Democrat Charlie Caswell Jr., determined to advance the social goals of the moral budget group and others, proposed a rate of $2.74.
And for the next two hours commissioners went back and forth with various rate variations to achieve a variety of different policy outcomes — all of which rate variations failed to achieve simple majorities, much less the two-thirds vote needed to pass.
In the end, the commissioners were assisted somewhat by advice from Mayor Lee Harris, who suggested two possibilities — the originally preferred $2.69 rate or one of $2.73, with the increment dedicated to a fund for universal pre-K. (This last had been an idea put forth by Commission Chair Michael Whaley.)
The $2.69 figure, cycling the rate debate all the way back to Wright’s first proposal, was adopted. The hard circle was squared, and Shelby County had a budget.