Harris wants pay raise for temps
Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris is calling for an increase in pay for temporary employees with the Shelby County government to $15 per hour.
Harris said over the last few days, his office has been circulating a Memorandum of Understanding for a pay increase — following up from pay increase of full-time Shelby County employees to $15 per hour.
Harris noted that this was a combined effort with Mark Luttrell’s administration. “I believe that the same reasons used to lift the pay for full-time employees can be applied to our temporary employees. If implemented, this initiative would increase the pay of roughly 340 active (employees) to $15 per hour,” said Harris.
“Temporary employees include, among others, election commission workers, custodial workers, secretarial staff and law clerks. If implemented, the pay increase will use current budget re-
cials pushed Shelby County to, among other things, fix the broken toilets and heaters at the juvenile facility and to stop meting out disproportionate punishments to African-American youths.
Ending the oversight may mean that Shelby County, while commended by monitor Michael Leiber in 2017 for taking steps to divert black youths in particular from adult court and harsher treatments, could backtrack on those efforts if it’s no longer being watched.
And sometimes, when federal oversight is removed, discrimination — or attempts at discrimination — return.
One example of this comes courtesy of the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 2013 decided that states and jurisdictions with a history of discrimination no longer had to have new election plans cleared by the federal government.
That has led states such as Georgia to hold up voter registration forms if the names don’t directly match, to purge hundreds of thousands of voters and to attempt to close polling places in a mostly black rural county.
So, fears that Shelby County could return to its old ways without federal oversight is grounded in both history and reality. And County Commissioner Tami Sawyer, who supported a resolution that would have asked the DOJ to continue oversight, said its decision to end the monitoring is troubling on a number of levels.
“Let’s say that the DOJ called tomorrow, and said that we were in compliance with all the areas of concern, and that everything was clean,” she said. “Even after that, they still would have continued the monitoring for a year, to ensure that we stayed in compliance.
“Also, while the county has made great strides, the last areas of concern were equal protection items ... AfricanAmerican youths are not being treated equally in the system. Those items are real serious ... this is not a game.” Sawyer has a point. The DOJ has, for the most part, left Shelby County on its own to correct what was perhaps the main issue that led to its monitoring — African-American juveniles receiving harsher punishments and having disproportionate contact with the criminal justice system.
New county Mayor Lee Harris, however, is committed to fixing that.
Among other things, he’s hired a new disproportionate minority contact coordinator for Juvenile Court oversight, Jessica Indingaro, to continue to examine racial disparities.
On top of that, commissioners such as Sawyer and chairman Van Turner are passionate about the issue of juvenile justice and have prioritized it, while activists like the Rev. Earle Fisher, pastor of Abyssinian Missionary Baptist, plan to support them in that fight.
“We expect for our progressive officials to act with as much fervor on this issue as our regressive officials have acted with fervor in the past,” Fisher said.
And it’s their fervor that the future depends on.