Running for the Memphis Charter Commission, as I did, was
like running for jury duty. If you wanted it too much you probably shouldn’t
have it.

Expectations should be low for the unpaid charter
commission, and that would be so no matter who won last week’s election of seven
members running by City Council district but chosen at large. George Brown, a
former judge and school board member, figures to provide leadership and a steady
hand. Based on his public comments and questionnaires, Brown takes a narrow view
of the commission’s powers. Another leader figures to be City Councilman Myron
Lowery, the leading overall vote-getter.

The other five members have little or no political
experience or working knowledge of city government or the charter. They tend to
have activist agendas. Janis Fullilove favors more collaboration between city
and county school boards and law enforcement. Sylvia Cox favors elimination of
city council super districts, requiring council members to hold at least four
community forums annually, and says “any and all questionable expenditures
and/or funds allocations should be evaluated and/or mitigated in an expedient
manner.” Sharon Webb is for combining the school boards and mayors and says “the
City Council should never come before the people divided. They should vote by
consensus and not by majority rule.”

Recommendations must be approved by voters in another
election, probably some time in 2007. They can be presented as separate items.
Rhodes College Political Science Professor Steve Wirls says that more than two
proposals on a ballot tends to overwhelm voters. City Councilman Tom Marshall
says he will suggest a budget of $100,000.

The push for term limits, such as it was, may have lost a
little of its steam. Six of the seven charter commissioners are black, and the
1994 Shelby County adoption of term limits was driven by white Republicans.
Mayor Willie Herenton and most of the black members of the City Council oppose
them, although if Herenton follows through on his promise to run for a fifth
term, that could reignite the issue. In their questionnaires, Lowery, Willie
Brooks, and Webb indicated some level of interest in term limits.

The way the charter commission and its membership came to
be is probably more instructive and historically significant than anything it
proposes. The idea was hatched by John Malmo and John Lunt in 2004. They got at
least 10,600 signatures of Memphis voters – a very low threshold because of the
low turnout in the 2003 mayoral election – and hoped to wrap up the whole
process by the end of that year. Had they been able to ramrod through the
election of members in a 2004 school board runoff election, they might have
elected some or all of the members of the Concerned Citizens group that wound up
getting blanked instead, Malmo included.

“We knew we would live or die as a ticket,” Malmo said last
week.

They died, big time. So did Memphis Tomorrow and its
political offspring, Coalition for a Better Memphis. Their voter guide at least
gave voters some indication of where candidates were coming from, but only about
350 people visited the website and it’s doubtful that many of them read all the
questionnaires. The candidate with the highest rating, Dean Deyo, got less than
6,000 votes, finishing dead last in Position Two.

But in an election in which voters knew little if anything
about most candidates, the best strategy was to be endorsed by one or more of
the groups claiming to represent the Republican or Democratic Party in some
incarnation and passing out ballots at the polls which showed the chosen
candidates’ names and faces.