Next mayor must lead a countywide alliance
The person who holds the office of mayor of Shelby County can seem like a ruler without a kingdom.
The county’s chief executive presides over a county with more than 900,000 people — and yet more than 800,000 of them live in municipalities (in particular, Memphis) with their own governments.
The county mayor not only shares political power with seven other mayors, but also with six other countywide elected officials — the sheriff, district attorney, trustee, property assessor, register of deeds, and county clerk.
Most county employees either work in the county’s vast criminal justice system (overseen by the sheriff, elected judges and court clerks), or for Shelby County Schools (overseen by an elected board and its superintendent).
“When county government was restructured (in the mid-1970s) and the mayor’s office created,” said Tom Jones, who leads Smart City Consulting and who worked for three county mayors, “county government was established in the image of city government in the hope that voters would see the wisdom of merging the two governments.”
Unlike voters in booming NashvilleDavidson County, voters here have yet to see the wisdom of consolidation, despite overwhelming evidence of the need for it.
The challenges we face as a community — improving public safety, education, health, economic development and infrastructure — don’t end at the Memphis city limits.
As Memphis goes, so goes Millington and Bartlett, Germantown and Collierville, Arlington and Lakeland, and the county’s unincorporated areas from Cuba to Rosemark. And vice versa.
The Shelby County mayor is in a unique position to see and act on the bigger picture, to marshal the countywide support, resource and — most of all — collaboration needed to solve or resolve challenges we all face collectively.
A burgeoning and increasingly costly Shelby County Jail, and a federally monitored Shelby County Juvenile Court.
A shrinking countywide population and sluggish tax base.
A growing need for universal, needsbased pre-K, vocational education and job training.
A host of public health problems from obesity to opioids.
Jurisdictional and financial challenges in addressing sewage treatment, code enforcement and blight abatement.
Competing needs of urban reinvestment and suburban growth.
The next county mayor — Republican or Democrat — will need the knowledge, vision and temperament to collaborate with a wide range of power brokers — a new sheriff and county commission, the superintendent and school board, city and suburban mayors and councils, state and federal officials, and corporate and nonprofit leaders.
That’s why we are endorsing the mayoral candidacies of Democrat Lee Harris and Republican David Lenoir in Tuesday’s county primary.
Harris, 39, an attorney, is a University of Memphis law professor, a state senator and a former city council member. Lenoir, 49, an accountant who worked in the private financial services industry here for 20 years, has been county trustee since 2010.
Both have demonstrated high levels of energy, initiative, integrity and imagination in their respective elected positions.
Both have gained a breath of experience and acquired a depth of knowledge to accurately diagnose, prioritize and address this county’s discouraging disparities and unrealized prosperities.
We believe all five candidates for mayor — including Democrat Sidney Chism and Republicans Terry Roland and Joy Touliatos — have their strengths, care deeply about this county and would serve it well.
But we believe Harris and Lenoir — in particular — have the qualities and skills needed to lead an alliance of all of Shelby County’s disparate urban, suburban and rural residents.