WKNO TRANSCRIPT
CHRISTOPHER BLANK (HOST): Shelby County government is in transition as eight of the 13 commissioners left office this week and a new county mayor prepares to take over. But before they left, there was still some unfinished business to wrap up. With us to talk about that is political analyst Otis Sanford. Welcome back.
OTIS SANFORD: Thank you, Chris. Thank you for having me.
BLANK: So one of the commission's last decisions this week was committing $200,000 to fight the state takeover of Memphis-Shelby County Schools. This was a big deal during this past year. You'll remember, Otis, Republican lawmakers expected a lawsuit to come of this. So they preemptively passed legislation preventing school districts from using taxpayer money to fight the state in court. So regardless of whether the takeover is constitutional, it becomes more about who's going to pay the bill to find out. So who benefits from a lengthy court battle?
SANFORD: Nobody benefits. And it's unfortunate that it has resulted in this. I understand the reasoning behind both the school board and the county commission wanting to fight this because in the end, it undermines and negates the will of the voters here. But this is going to be costly. Nobody wins on this, especially the students. So it's just unfortunate.
BLANK: Another payout was court-ordered this week. Shelby County Clerk Wanda Halbert will get her legal fees covered by the same county that tried to kick her out of office... an office that doesn't normally warrant two attempts to fire an official. But the county failed twice at this, really, on some odd technicalities. As a voter, Otis, did the system work here? Meaning should it be difficult to oust elected officials? Or would you like to see a clearer blueprint for how to do this in the future?
SANFORD: Well, first of all, as a voter, I'm outraged that this was a long protracted fight. One attempt was enough to oust Wanda Halbert. And if that failed, then they should have just left it alone and stopped the second attempt, which is costing us extra money. Having said that, I do believe that there should be some clear guidelines--and it will have to be a state law--that calls for how to oust local elected officials who are deemed to be incompetent in office or commit malfeasance or, you know, whatever. If we don't do that, then we're going to be faced with this again because voters, not only in Memphis and Shelby County but voters everywhere, tend to, on occasion, elect incompetent people.
BLANK: Well, finally, it's been almost a week since the surprise storm hit the city. The seventh worst power outage in MLGW history. Rep. Justin J. Pearson, who's running for Congress, stirred up a little controversy with a post on X comparing Memphis to Gary, Indiana, which is also having a long-term outage that some ascribe to racial neglect by the power company there. Pearson posted about Memphis: "Another majority black working-class city in the dark." What do you think he's saying here? Why is it controversial? And does it apply to MLGW's response to the outages?
SANFORD: This is an unfortunate comment by Justin Pearson. The storm did not pick communities to disrupt based on skin color. And it's apples and oranges, really, to Gary, Indiana. But I just think that Justin picked a wrong issue here to make his point. I think it's going to come back to bite him in the campaign. He should have thought better of having this kind of comparison.
BLANK: The criticism he got, especially from the right, was that Rep. Pearson is a little too heavily focused on race. And if his message in running in this new District 9 is that he can serve this very large community, rural and urban, that it didn't play very well. Would you agree with that?
SANFORD: You can't ignore when there are racial issues. And of course, I've said time and time again that I think the gerrymandering in the first place was race-based. So I'm on board with that. But no, you cannot ascribe everything that's going on in this campaign down to a racial issue, even though he makes some valid points on some issues.
BLANK: And Otis, you've lived through some power outages, some ice storms, some things like that in the past. How would you rate MLGW's response this time?
SANFORD: They did a very commendable job, Chris. They worked around the clock. They communicated with the public. They brought in extra resources from out of town. I gave them a really good A to A minus here on how they responded to this, even though a lot of people, black and white, I might add, were left in the dark for quite a while. And, you know, obviously when you don't have electrical power for that long, your nerves get frayed and you get a little testy. But I think MLGW is to be commended for how they handled this.
