Memphis City Council

- (female announcer) Production funding for Behind the Headlines is made possible in part by the WKNO Production Fund, the WKNO Endowment Fund, and by viewers like you, thank you.

- The Memphis City Council on criminal justice, residency, and much more tonight on Behind the Headlines.

[intense orchestral music] I'm Eric Barnes with The Daily Memphian.

Thanks for joining us.

I am joined tonight by three members of the Memphis City Council, first up, Michalyn Easter-Thomas.

Thanks for being here.

- Thank you for having me.

- JB Smiley from Memphis City Council, thanks for being here again.

- Back again.

- Jeff Warren, also Memphis City Council, thanks for being here.

- Thank you.

- Along with Bill Dries, reporter with The Daily Memphian.

Y'all have a lot going on at the Council right now, and we'll try to get to as much of it as we can.

I wanna start with residency and this question of residency.

It's a question both legal in the court right now, very much driven by Floyd Bonner, current sheriff running for Memphis City Council, or excuse me, Memphis city mayor, as well as Van Turner, former council-, county commissioner, running for City Council, city mayor.

And both have questions about how long they, both will tell you they have not lived in Memphis for the last five years.

There's a fight between the city, City Council, the campaigns, it's in court.

So let me ask the two-part question for, and I'll start with Michalyn, is your understanding of the laws, the ordinances, all, the charter, all that, that to run for mayor, you have to have lived in the city of Memphis for the last five years?

- That's what it was made clear to us per, when we had the charter shown to us, it said five-year residency.

Then it was also said, a competing opinion, that that clause didn't matter and that it was taken out by some resolution done later in the '90s, which I hear that in the '90s, a lot of things were happening in Memphis politics.

- I don't presume that you're a lawyer.

So let me ask you a follow-up question, which is, should, on principle, should the reality be that people should've lived in the city for five years before they are able to run for that?

- I think you will ask us and any other position, we have had to live in the city or in our district before we can run.

So I think just having that as a precedent is a good thing.

- Same question to you, JB.

- Well, I think the plain reading of the law as it stands today is the qualifications of mayor must be the same as the qualifications for City Council.

When we talk about the particular ordinances that were passed, one of the ordinances removed the five-year residency for City Council.

So if you read the document as it is today, you will see no residency for City Council.

You will see the qualifications for the mayor must be the same as the qualifications for the City Council.

It's pretty clear.

It's a plain-language document.

The document should be taken as is, and there's no residency for City Council.

There's also, one of the reasons when City Council passed a referendum ordinance that to establish what the residency will be going forward after the 2023 election, because we understood there was ambiguity in terms of interpretation, not ambiguity in the language, but in terms of interpretation.

So now we have a two-year residency for City Council and the two-year residency for the mayor, which will go on the referendum ballot in 2024.

And I think that's important.

- And so that, forget, separate from the legal issue on principle, right, you as an elected official, you think the two year would be the appropriate period of time.

- Absolutely, so, you know, I can't operate as a member of the City Council, but also wearing my other hat as an attorney.

If you look at some of the case law that talks about duration residency requirements, duration residency requirements, when they extend over three years have been struck down by many courts, many circuits throughout the country.

So if you talk about juggling the competing interests of those folks who live in the community, who want their elected officials to choose this particular community, we say all the time, choose 901, and we want our elected officials to do the same.

The problem we have now, our laws do not allow, do not require those individuals running for mayor to live in here, so our body took the appropriate action, which is to put before the voters to require people to live-- - Okay, yeah, and Jeff Warren, same question to you.

What's your interpretation?

You're a doctor, you're not a lawyer, but you're, if you have an interpretation of this current situation, and then how do you think it should be?

- I agree with JB completely, and I also think that because of this, we have an ordinance that we brought forward that gives the voters a chance to decide whether they want it to be zero time or two years.

But realize the reason they went to this zero time is when I was on the school board, we had a problem with 70% of our student body didn't end up the school year in the same school they started in.

So if you're gonna have people of lower economic means have the opportunity to run for Council, then you, if you require them to be in the same district for two years, that takes people on the lower rungs of economics and keeps them from being able to have a political voice.

So that's where this came from initially.

That's why we had this vote to come up with.

And I think maybe this is a little bit too much, and we'll let the voters decide that when they get the election.

- Before I go to Bill, is 2024 for the referendum the soonest you can do that?

Or is that a choice to wait till then?

- It's as soon as you can do it legally.

- Okay, let me go to Bill.

- So in court this past week, as we record this, there was much discussion about Allan Wade's legal opinion on this, which says that there is no residency requirement until you, or unless you win the election.

That's actually what his opinion was.

The city charter clearly says that it is five years, in the city charter dating back to 1905, but court cases and legal rulings do change the interpretation, as the attorney on the panel said.

- So it's the 1996 ordinance that he's referring to right now.

What does that ordinance say, Bill?

- The 1996 ordinance was all about converting at-large Council seats to super districts.

The wording in the referendum on the ballot never said you are doing away with the term limits that have been in the charter since 1905.

- Can I jump in here?

- Sure.

- When we take that into consideration, we also have to take in consideration the language of the, I think it's the 1852 ordinance specifically that says, that deletes certain provisions.

What the Council did not do with their particular ordinance, they did not remove the language.

When those folks who were sitting in those bodies, they did not remove the language that said qualifications for the mayor must be the same as the qualifications for City Council.

If you look at the document in totality right now, if you print off all of the applicable chapters right now, you will see no residency requirement for City Council.

You will see the other provision that says qualifications for the mayor must be the same as the qualifications for City Council.

A plain reading of the document will suggest to anyone that one of the qualifications for City Council must be the same as the qualifications.

You can't take, you cannot take extraneous information that's outside the plain reading of the ordinances into consideration.

You have to read it as is.

- All right, my question is, the City Council did not take a vote asking Allan Wade to issue a legal opinion on this matter.

Should the Council have voted on that, and do you consider your attorney's, your attorney as the Council to be a valid reading of this, that should be what the court goes with, Jeff?

- Allan Wade, I think, was involved in the writing of the ordinance, and his initial interpretation to us was as he's speaking in court now.

So I think that he thinks that's what it meant when he put it out there.

And in my mind, we wanted him to make sure that what he was doing is protecting the Council's right to be the legislative body of our government.

We're not the administrative body.

We write the rules and regulations, and now what you've got is the administrative body trying to tell us what the rules and regulations that we wrote were.

And I think that having Allan there to defend the Council's authority makes perfect sense.

- Michalyn, does Allan Wade's opinion speak for you?

- I think this goes to show that all Council members, past, future, and present, need to really do a better job at reading the charter on our own.

We have to make sure that as elected officials representing some 98-plus-thousand that is in my district and beyond that we are really doing our due diligence to not depend on one person, whomever they may be, to tell us what laws and what charters and rules are.

We need to do a better job all around of making sure that we know so that when things come up such as this, we aren't all looking towards one person to make a decision or the one attorney we do have on Council to say, "Hey, what do you think?"

We've also looked at things for ourself.

- JB, your read on this, does Allan call the shots on this?

- I think the Council calls the shots.

Can't get into particular because a lot of the things that we discussed was done during attorney-client.

But you know, when we have an important decision concerning whatever legal issue it may be, there's usually a consensus from our body instructing our attorney how to act.

But when we talk about Allan's interpretation, to be honest with you, I don't necessarily know if Allan's interpretation matters.

I don't know if Robert Meyers' interpretation matters because the ultimate person who's gonna decide this before everyone is Chancellor Jenkins.

He ultimately has to make a decision.

And he was very clear in his ruling this past Wednesday that you know, at this point, 20 pages, no longer than 20 pages with your briefs because this is a purely legal question.

What does the plain language of the ordinance say?

And that is probably what Chancellor Jenkins will go with.

- But for each of you, you're comfortable with Allan Wade having filed a suit against the city of Memphis without a vote by the Council.

- No.

- Well, I will say this.

- Michalyn, you said no, just so people heard.

You are not comfortable with- - Yes, I thought everything we had to do had to come to a vote before Council or at least a consultation, because if it ends up in us making expenditures, we're gonna have to approve that, unless that is something that goes directly to the chair, in which we still need to know, which goes back to us all knowing what's going on in the charter.

- Well, that's not necessarily how our Council works.

In terms of instructing our attorney to move, it can be done by the Council, but the chair also within his discretion can instruct our attorney to move.

And the way that our chair currently works, he says it is the will of the body.

If the body collectively believes in terms of the majority believes that this is the right thing to do, he has the authority to give our attorney to move.

- Was it appropriate for Allan Wade to file suit without a vote of the Council?

- Based on the consensus that JB is talking about and the meeting that we had, the consensus was present in that meeting instructing the attorney to file this lawsuit.

- But not a vote.

- It wasn't a vote, but the comment could've possibly been everybody but the chairman.

I think that could've been, I think I heard someone say something similar to that, but I can't recall.

- Back to Bill.

- I don't recall either.

- Okay.

[group laughs] - We're just taking that in.

- All right.

- Well, but to just- - But Martavius, to be fair, I mean, you correct me wrong, if I'm wrong, Bill, Martavius, the chair of the Council was not happy, was not particularly pleased that- - And that may go with I heard- - That Wade filed this lawsuit.

- If I may, so if you look further into the article in which we're referencing where the chair says he wasn't necessarily happy, if you read it further, he says ultimately it's the will of the body, and he always goes back to the will of the body, which means he looks to his colleagues.

If his colleagues believes that this is the appropriate action, even though he may not agree, that's how he will move.

- But if you've got, all of the Council members are usually there for an attorney-client meeting.

Some members are not there, but usually you have at least a majority.

So if there's a question about the consensus, why not put it to a vote, which you wouldn't be able to do in a private attorney-client meeting?

You would have to do that publicly.

I mean, if it's a question about consensus- - Well, there really wasn't a question of the consensus in the meeting.

The only question was perhaps the chair wasn't in consensus, as I recall.

- Absolutely no question about the consensus.

Although we do not talk directly to each Council member, it was clear, it was clear.

- You can give your questions to the attorney.

- Michalyn, you were in that room?

- I'll go with the will of the body here.

- Okay, all right.

[laughs] - All right, well played, well played.

- Back to Bill.

- So tell me what the residency requirements are for the Council then.

- There isn't any, essentially, in terms of residency other than living in your district for the amount of time that a regular voter would have to be in a district, but there's no real residency requirement.

- Which is how long?

- Thirty days.

- Thirty days.

- Thirty days.

- That's your understanding now of you as, all right.

- Let's talk about something else that you all disagree on, and that's redistricting.

First of all, is the Council going to make a, going to pass a different set of lines before folks start filing for the Council races?

Michalyn, do you think so?

- I'm not sure how any of my colleagues will vote.

- You favor a plan that would, among other things, create a Cordova district on the Council and would put all of Downtown into one district.

Downtown's now split between two of them.

And District 1, which includes Raleigh and Cordova, would become mostly a Raleigh-centric district.

These are some big changes.

- Well, I'm gonna clarify what I favor.

- Okay.

- I favor transparency, I favor communication, and I favor community involvement and true due diligence of what we're being called to do.

So that being the pure essence of this redistricting committee acts due that second resolution and especially the acts that was in the first redistricting resolution from 2021, which was pushed and withheld.

So it came back in a different manner.

That's what I favor.

All colleagues voted yes to have this redistricting committee.

Everyone had the opportunity to appoint one person as a community member.

So we had 12 community members appointed to go through the process.

I know that as you've seen with budget, it's a lot to be at Council for meetings, whether virtual or physical, outside of our Tuesdays along with our regular day jobs.

But we had some colleagues come in and out and be present on virtual and physical for the best that we as a Council could do, but I think the community did also do a good, a great due diligence with that mapping subcommittee led by Dr. Dee Harris, which also did redistricting on the county side, so.

- And you were also chairman of the ad hoc group as a whole.

- And I was chairman of that ad hoc, no, I was not chairman of the ad.

Yes, I was chairman of the ad hoc full redistricting meeting but not the mapping subcommittee.

I didn't attend those meetings at all actually.

- All right, Jeff, you think this is too close to the election and will cause confusion.

And you have talked, I believe, in favor of a plan that Allan Wade, the City Council's attorney, has put forth to move a single precinct from District 5 into District 2, right?

- Yes.

- Why not go for the big changes here?

- Well, one, I don't think most voters want big changes.

Most voters are pretty content at where they are, and we haven't really heard from most of the voters.

We've had three small community meetings, okay?

And most people are just now getting their mind around what this possibly could mean, and nothing we do now can be effective or work with maybe the exception of Allan's particular recommendation.

And the reason we know that we need to do that is what we learned from Dee Harris and our subcommittee that looked at redistricting.

We realized that the data that Mr. Wade had when he did his initial change for District 4 last time somehow had not taken out people who had left from being de-annexed.

So we're looking at this merely as a way to make sure we get the numbers in more or in the equal way that our previous district resolutions called us to do.

So that's an easy way to do it.

I think the Election Commission could get that done.

There's no way that right now the Election Commission could go with these wholesale changes.

And there are a lot of people who are out there that are looking at them, that we're getting calls saying, "I don't wanna move to that district.

I wanna stay in the district I'm in."

So I think we haven't had enough public input to allow us as Council members to make a big change.

- JB, which map?

- Well, I think I'm gonna wait and see some of the language from some of my colleagues.

You know, I'm a fan of big arguments and good arguments, so wait to hear some of the language from my colleagues.

One of the reasons I didn't wholly participate in the redistricting process, for me, I did not want it to be said that I was essentially choosing my voters.

Ultimately, in my opinion, the voters should choose elected officials.

So I wanna wait and see to figure out and determine what I believe to be in the best interest of the city in its totality.

- With about 10 minutes left here, I wanna switch to, crime has been a big topic of conversation in recent years.

I mean, we've, and especially probably in the last year.

For each of you, and I'll go to you first, Jeff, just go around the table here.

What is, how do you characterize the state of crime, criminal justice in Memphis?

Both you, and what you hear from your constituents?

- Well, I've been on the record, and I'll say it again on your show, is I think we need to initiate a crime task force just like we had a COVID task force.

I think part of the issues that we have now is we have an exponential growth of violent crime, and it's going to grow in a similar fashion.

And it's not just here, it's across the country.

Unless we get a handle on it, it's gonna grow in a fashion as the pandemic.

You know, if one shooting begets four shootings, you just don't have to, you do the math, and you can see it's gonna be just like the spread of COVID-19.

And I think we need as a community to have everybody at the table an hour a day talking about what's going on and what we can do to fix it.

So in my mind, I don't think we're where we need to be in fighting this situation.

- And is that what you hear from your constituents?

- When I tell people this, I get a lot of head shakes.

- And you're, I should've done this earlier.

Your district concludes what areas?

- I'm District 9, so District 9 goes from Cleveland to Shelby County, to Fayette County.

- Okay, okay, Michalyn, same, how do you characterize the state of crime, criminal justice in Memphis?

- I think the better question is how do we characterize the state of poverty and opportunity in our city?

And if we can't speak great of that, then we already know the answer for crime.

- And your district includes?

- My district, I like to say it's from the river to Raleigh.

So I have a multitude of areas from Mud Island to North Memphis to Frayser, Victorian Village, Crosstown all the way up to Nutbush.

So I have some of the most affluent economic status folks in the city and some of the most disadvantaged.

- Do you hear different things from different people?

- Oh, definitely.

- I mean, is there affluent people want X, and people who are more in poverty want Y, or is there a commonality?

- It's all dependent upon context for the particulars.

But in essence, everyone wants to be safe.

Everyone wants to be able to live and rear their family and have all the opportunities and exposure that they need to live out their means of progress.

But we don't see those opportunities coming to fruition for all or most of Memphians.

- And that, then, is the root cause.

- And that, then, is the root problem of a lot of the crime that we're seeing.

- In terms of public safety and the police, we've had you, during COVID, we had you on a Zoom show, we talked and, but where are you in terms of, I mean, more or less policing as a result of violent crime, and auto thefts are up dramatically, carjackings, I mean, those kinds of things.

- Yep, police don't prevent crime, and I think Chief Davis has said this in so many ways.

They're responsive.

We are hiring them and asking them to serve, to respond to the needs of our communities, to keep us safe.

However, it's up to us, especially as elected officials, to ensure that on a proactive sense, we're making sure that we are doing things to thwart our citizens and our constituents from experiencing any of those factors of crime, whether they're being the ones committing it or whether they're being the ones that are impacted by it.

- Yeah, same question to you, JB.

- I don't necessarily think it's either/or.

I think the question is, and what else?

I think when you talk about, you know, crime in its totality, I think you could say, "Hey, the city administration has an issue here."

I think you can say, you know, "City Council has an issue here.

The community should do more here."

But we also, we cannot allow the state officials to continue to be derelict in their duties when we talk about proliferation of guns, refusing to ban assault rifles.

I think that's one of the reasons Dr. Warren has proposed a particular ordinance so that we can have this, a real conversation and go to court and talk about how the state has let down the city of Memphis and Shelby County when it comes to keeping our citizens safe.

We, at this point, I believe the City Council has done all that it can do.

We've allocated more resources for affordable housing, allocated more resources to police.

We're talking about, we've made police reform a real priority to the City Council.

We have done everything we can do.

We can try to put more pressure on the mayor, but the truth of the matter is, what about the guns on the street?

We talked about the increase of violent crime.

We also have to talk about the significant increase in property crime, and people are stealing vehicles looking for guns.

If we look in our community, there's videos where people running around in the community with assault rifles, rocket launchers.

And the reason that is possible because our state officials have not shown an interest in protecting the citizens of Memphis.

- We've got just a couple minutes left.

I wanna clean up one thing.

I'll go to the attorney at the table.

When we said right now the qualification for running for City Council's 30 days.

Thirty days from?

- So 30 days, so in order for you can be considered a valid voter, you have to be in the district for 30 days in order to vote in this particular election.

- Before election.

- Before election.

- Right, same, so that's the same as I understand it.

- The same as voting.

- Starting of early voting, or is that starting of election time?

- Early voting.

- Early voting, and again, there's a little bit of cleanup.

One question for you, Michalyn, and I apologize if I get this wrong.

You've had a, is it a job offer from Memphis River Parks Partnership?

- We're not talking about that.

- Well, but people are talking, they're asking questions, if you're gonna be leaving Council or not.

- Nope, not talking about that.

- So, okay, but do you have a job offer from it?

- Neither one of us, neither three of us are talking about that.

- Okay, then I'll leave it there.

Bill has written about it in Daily Memphian.

We got just two minutes left for any cleanup stuff, Bill.

- Jeff, the gun ordinance that you have coming up, to essentially have an assault rifle ban or an assault weapons ban here, is that with the idea that this is gonna go to court pretty quickly?

- Well, we think it's gonna go to court, but we think we've got precedent that we'll be able to take this to the citizens for a vote.

And we're gonna bring this out so the citizens can vote on what type of gun control they want here in our city.

This would be for a ban of future sale of assault weapons.

We're gonna be adding things to it, including like safe storage of any guns in cars, no open carry without permits, you know, no concealed carry without permits.

We're gonna put things that most people think are good, common-sense gun control laws there.

We're not gonna try to take people's guns away, but one of the things I'd like to see is if you got an assault weapon, you can keep it in your house to protect yourself, and you wanna take it to the firing range to go shoot, great, but you don't need to be carrying it out on the street.

- Absolutely.

- We don't need those on the street.

So we need to write a law that citizens will decide in a vote whether they want to do it or not.

And then once we have that particular ordinance, we'll have to see what the actual laws are at the time the citizens get to vote on it to see if we can initiate it.

- So it's a referendum ordinance.

- It'll be a referendum ordinance.

- So I'm proud to be a cosponsor of this particular piece of legislation, but in addition to that, we have to talk about what does a red flag law look like for our community?

We should be able to report individuals we know that will potentially commit a crime or talking about committing a crime and have their weapons suspended or taken away from them, especially when we know they're gonna go out in the community to do something wrong.

- So we're wanting to really make sure that the citizens have a chance to do this, and we're hoping we can model for the state legislature things that cities need, because cities needs things different than people out in the countryside do, and they need to help us with that.

- All right, we are out of time.

Thank you all.

Thank you all for being here.

If you missed any of the show this week, you can go to wkno.org and get the full show online, or you can go to YouTube and get the show there.

You can also download a podcast to the show from the The Daily Memphian site, iTunes, Spotify, wherever we get your podcasts.

Next week, the Airport Authority talking about all the changes going on there.

Thanks very much, and we'll see you next week.

[intense orchestral music] [acoustic guitar chords]