Council still deadlocked on District 1 appointment
It remains unclear who the Memphis City Council’s newest member will be, more than a week after a heated marathon voting session where the council deadlocked on two candidates for the vacant District 1 seat.
Memphis City Council Chairman Berlin Boyd issued a statement Thursday, calling on council members “to allow their wisdom to supersede their emotions so that we can facilitate a smooth election process to fill these seats.”
The Memphis City Council stalemated Nov. 20 on two of the candidates vying to succeed former councilman Bill Morrison in the District 1 seat, with Rhonda Logan and Lonnie Treadaway emerging as the top choices for their would-be colleagues on the council. The council votes split largely along racial lines — Boyd was the only African American council member who didn’t vote for Logan.
Since then, the council has seen two more departures and now has three seats to fill on the 13-member body.
Candidates surprised at deadlock
Both Logan and Treadaway voiced surprise about the at-times testy meeting with more than 100 rounds of voting and no consensus among at least seven of the 12 members.
“I was very surprised, I must say,” Logan said. “I was not expecting to be there until 12:45 a.m., I was not expecting to receive six votes and need just one more in 100 rounds of voting. It was surprising, it was somewhat disheartening. But I do understand the process.”
Logan consistently received six votes, falling one shy of the minimum she needed to be installed in the council seat. Treadaway often garnered four votes in the repeated rounds. Boyd often passed on voting, and other council members passed in some of the rounds of voting.
Treadaway said he believed the short time frame between when council members learned which candidates were certified by the Shelby County Election Commission as eligible, and when they needed to make a decision on who to appoint to the seat, made the decision challenging.
“I could feel the criticism coming from up there. It shocked me,” Treadaway said. “I just want to serve my community. I don’t know whether they’re going to be able to make a decision. I just want them to look at our qualities and take everything else off the table.”
Treadaway was questioned last week by some of the council members who backed Logan about his recent move to Memphis.
Treadaway, the national manager for Flinn Broadcasting Corp., moved to Memphis in July after spending roughly 15 years living in Senatobia, Mississippi, where he unsuccessfully ran for alderman last year. He lived in Memphis previously, and initially moved to Senatobia because it put him within a twohour drive of several Flinn Broadcasting television and radio stations, he said.
“I’m not a carpetbagger. I saw the opportunity to serve a city that’s been very good to me, and all of a sudden there’s a firestorm. I don’t understand why,” Treadaway said.
Logan, who is the executive director of the Raleigh Community Development Corporation, moved to Raleigh earlier this year, but she has lived in the city’s District 1 on-and-off her whole life, she said.
Attracting and retaining businesses is among Logan’s top priorities for District 1, she said.
“I want to be a consensus builder,” Logan said. “That’s important — that we focus on collaborating.”
Fighting blight
Both Logan and Treadaway said tackling blight would be among their major focuses for the district.
“Blight and all of the things that come with it — there are natural, physical and psychological impacts of blight,” Logan said. “It breeds a lot of crime. Crime prevention and safety are very important.”
Treadaway said he would advocate for more city budget dollars to go toward beefing up the Memphis Police Department’s ranks.
“On blight, we’ve got to get people taking pride in what they have,” Treadaway said. “We need to track down some of these absentee landlords. That’s the biggest problem.”
Seat vacant since November
Former Shelby County Probate Court Clerk Paul Boyd, Latino Memphis Executive Director Mauricio Calvo, Tierra Holloway and Danielle Schonbaum rounded out the pool of six candidates the council had to choose from to represent District 1. The council consistently narrowed the pool to Logan and Treadaway on Nov. 20, but didn’t make progress beyond that.
District 1 has been without a representative on the council since Nov. 1, when Morrison resigned his seat. Whoever the council appoints will serve out the remainder of Morrison’s term and would be an incumbent in next year’s city elections, if they run. The three Memphis City Council members elected to Shelby County positions in August did not resign in time for their successors to be determined by voters on Nov. 6.
“There is definitely a concern about not having representation,” Logan said. Logan plans to run in 2019, she said. Treadaway hasn’t decided whether he would seek the District 1 seat in next year’s city election, he said.
Boyd, the council chairman, issued a statement on Thursday about his decision not to vote in the continuous rounds at the Nov. 20 meeting.
“I decided early on that it was not prudent or appropriate for the chair to assert any influence on the process of vote on a matter that had the obvious potential to fall upon partisan lines,” Boyd said. “The process quickly became partisan in a non-partisan body. Therefore, I decided I would not vote in the process.”
When the meeting got “further out of hand” and “there was no way we would get seven votes for either candidate, I made every effort to adjourn the meeting so that emotions could settle down and cooler heads could prevail at another meeting,” Boyd said.
He was unable to get enough votes to adjourn last week’s meeting. The session finally wrapped up in the early hours of Nov. 21, after nine hours. The council will again take up the District 1 appointment on Tuesday.
Since then, council members Janis Fullilove and Edmund Ford Jr. resigned their seats. Both were required to do so by Nov. 30 because they were elected to Shelby County posts in August. Both Ford and Fullilove were part of the faction that consistently voted for Logan last week. The council is slated to vote for appointments to replace Ford in District 6 and Fullilove in Super District 8-2 at its Dec. 18 meeting.
Boyd hasn’t decided whether he will vote in the next round to fill the District 1 seat, but he plans on “making a decision in the next few days,” he said.
Councilmember Jamita Swearengen, who backed Logan for the District 1 appointment, said she didn’t know how the council’s second attempt to fill the seat would play out. “I have no idea,” Swearengen said. Jamie Munks covers Memphis city government and politics for The Commercial Appeal. She can be reached at jamie.munks@commercialappeal.com or 901-529-2536. Follow her on Twitter @journo_jamie_.