When Jim Strickland enters a public place after hours — say, a restaurant — he does so most often by himself. Though he has, like any major official, an abundance of aides (whose competence he’ll brag on with minimal provocation), he has no Bobby Lanier, that being the name of the genial, knowledgeable, and self-sacrificing aide who, over several decades, made it a practice to accompany several county mayors in a row to whatever evening or weekend events had them out around town.
Mayor Jim Strickland at work in his office in City Hall. Photograph by Brandon Dill.
“People have lives of their own,” says Strickland, explaining his disinclination to deputize anybody for such overtime duty. And the mayor of Memphis, who considers it his duty to be a familiar presence “in every area of town,” does not lack for company. Entering a full-to-the-rafters Pete & Sam’s on Park Avenue on a recent evening, to meet with an interviewer, he is greeted by several patrons and restaurant staffers on the way to a table. And during the hour or two he spends there, several more people will amble over for a bit of conversation.
At one point, a diner at the table behind Strickland and his dinner companion says something that turns the mayor around. He chats for a while, discharges one of his world-class horse laughs, says some more, then turns back around.
Asked what the discussion was about, the mayor relates his conversation with the man. “He wondered, ‘Can I ever just have a private dinner without being interrupted?’ I said, ‘Like you are?’” That had to be when the horse laugh came. Strickland, whose talent for geniality is among his chief political skills, is preternaturally courteous and can make a point like that without being in the least offensive.
In fact, he is pleased at such recognition. He remarks on the fact that, as he was told, the late Elvis Presley had been unable to “go to the cafeteria,” for fear of being mobbed, when the entertainment icon was with his then-wife Priscilla prior to the birth of their daughter Lisa Marie. “I’m not as popular as Elvis,” Strickland says self-effacingly.
The mayor visits friends in Orange Mound during America's Night Out 2018. Photograph by Jackson Baker.
Maybe not, but he seemed popular enough on the night in early August when he and several City Hall staffers made the rounds of neighborhood events for this year’s “America’s Night Out,” an annual observance designed to connect law enforcement officers and heads of local government with their constituents. Piled into two city-owned SUVs, Strickland’s group started out in north Memphis and hit five stops before ending up in Whitehaven at an event well-attended by numerous other local political figures.
At all the stops, the T-shirted mayor became the instant center of attention, and Strickland, who stands 6 foot 5, would often end up towering over a ring of awed children, looking like a good-natured Gulliver from another planet. At one event, held in a basketball gym, he took part in an impromptu game of Three Horses, graciously losing to two young shooters half his size. That the kids, and the admiring adults at all the neighborhood stops were mainly African Americans had to be a reassuring point, given that the 25-percent share of the black vote he won in a multi-candidate race in 2015 was essential to his upset win over then incumbent Mayor A C Wharton, and he believes he can better that “if and when” he runs for reelection.
That “if and when” is somewhat obligatory, part of the ceremony of pol-speak; no one doubts that the mayor, who has launched several initiatives requiring follow-through, will seek reelection in 2019 — to crown a city-government career that began with a loss in a city council race in 2003 and continued with victories for the same East Memphis seat in 2007 and 2011.
Strickland is one of those natural politicians who got started early, in his case as student government president in the 1980s at what is now the University of Memphis, where he also got his law degree. (For many years after, he was the law partner of David Kustoff, another student pol at the U of M, and now the Republican Congressman from the nearby 8th District.)
Strickland’s appeal, then as now, was based more on a disarming Everyman persona than on any dazzling personal charisma. Appropriately, “Brilliant at the Basics” is the slogan used by Strickland to denote both his methodology and his goals. For most of the eight years that he served on the council, Strickland was best known for his dedication to budgetary frugality, even to the point of advocating a reduction in the salaries of city employees.
By 2015, though, the cuts and retrenchments that had been forced upon Wharton by the 2008 economic crash had made Strickland’s proposed austerities moot, freeing him to run on a platform — poll-tested by his chief consultant, Stephen Reid — that emphasized blight control, accountability, and public safety. That triad of issues — the “basics,” as it were — remain as the essence of Strickland’s vision for the future.
There has been some embroidery on those points, however, one of them being the mayor’s stated determination — on behalf of a city government that had long since opted out of spending on public schools — to improve the status of early childhood education. One of his recent accomplishments was the devising of a formula to pay for universal pre-K out of funds as they became available by the retiring of PILOT (payment-in-lieu-of-taxes) incentives previously granted to relocating businesses and industries.
Indeed, it had been Strickland’s advocacy of a public financing referendum in 2014 for pre-K that had softened his image as a budget-cutter. The referendum would fail, but it reminded potential future voters that this one-time chairman of the Shelby County Democratic Party was not averse to priming-the-pump measures in a worthy enough cause. In the event, however, Strickland’s successful pre-K formula was achieved “without raising taxes or infringing on other programs,” a fact he takes pride in.
At Ernest Withers' studio, Strickland poses before a photo of Elvis and B.B. King. Photograph by Jackson Baker.
Strickland is a true believer in pre-K. “Currently 24 percent of our third-graders read at the third-grade level. That’s awful,” he says. He cites statistics demonstrating that quality pre-K “followed by a remarkable K-through-3,” gives a child, even one raised in poverty, a “90 percent chance of graduating.” There’s the advantage of “socialization,” and Strickland suggests that one of pre-K’s long-term effects is the reduction of crime and poverty down the line. In any case, he had made sure to send his own children, Kathleen, now 12, and James, now 16, through the process, at his own expense, and, as he says, “everyone who can afford pre-K sends their kids.”
At a certain level, it seems clear, Jim Strickland is as much a homebody as he is a family man. “My kids are still relatively young,” he says, “and that means I have to give attention to ballgames, recitals, and homework. “The 16-year-old has aged out of my ability to help him out, especially with new math and that sort of thing, but I can still help my daughter.” He touches base with his two children and his wife Melyne, a pharmaceutical assistant, as often and in as many ways as he can.
A onetime tennis fanatic, Strickland has been obliged pretty much to give up the game by the circumstances of his office but still sneaks in a little net time once in while with James, “who is so much better than me.” With daughter Kathleen, the thing is to go to the zoo. “We all still try to have dinner together, and we try to go the movies.”
Strickland’s attachment to family and a concomitant sense of privacy are surely things that keep him in touch with the hopes and fears of his electorate, for better and, as it happens, for worse. They may, for example, also help to explain the troublesome — and still unresolved — saga of the City Hall Blacklist. In February 2017, it was revealed that some 80-odd Memphians were listed in a “security book” of people requiring a police escort to be in City Hall. And 43 of those people had also been named in an “authorization of agency” form signed by Strickland in January forbidding them to set foot on his personal property.
That last action had been prompted by a highly public protest in December 2016, at the mayor’s East Memphis residence (a comfortable but modest bungalow which is an almost literal stone’s throw from his U of M alma mater). The participants in what they chose to call a “die-in” were shown on local television alternately playing dead on the lawn and peeking into Strickland’s house through its windows.
“I’ve really forgotten what they were protesting,” Strickland maintains today. He says nobody was kept from entering City Hall; the people listed were merely subject to surveillance and “escort” by the building’s police security force. Beyond that, he observes a silence on the matter, noting that a lawsuit had been filed against the city by attorney Bruce Kramer on behalf of the protesters and had yet to be heard and attributing both the idea for the list and its execution to the MPD. Beyond the matter of surveillance, that suit, in U.S. District Judge Jon McCalla’s court, revealed undercover ruses and provocations, under the guise of “homeland security,” that resembled those attributed to the Russian hackers of 2016.
Once exposed, the names added of participants in the “die-in” at Strickland’s house had been removed from the security book virtually as soon as it had been made public. Critics of the mayor point out that Kramer is one of two members of the watchdog group CLERB (Civilian Law Enforcement Review Board) that Strickland recently declined to reappoint. The other is attorney John Marek, a sometime mayoral critic and a longtime activist for striking or moderating penalties for marijuana possession.
Does all this add up to undue sensitivity on the mayor’s part to criticism, or merely an awareness of the need in our time for strict security for a highly visible public person? Proponents of the former view might cite Strickland’s less than enthusiastic regard for media coverage.
During the course of an interview at the Shelby County Republican Party’s 2017 Lincoln Day banquet (Strickland makes a point of attending the ceremonial functions of both major political parties), the mayor allowed as how he avoids reading newspapers or watching TV news reports. “Never. I find out what I need by going to the source of things, the people I represent,” he insisted, acknowledging, though, that he is kept informed by his highly capable communications assistants.
More recently, Strickland admits to sampling various Twitter feeds and maybe “two stories a day” from the local media. He vaunts his own procedure for routing news to the people via his regular emails to an extensive list of constituents, including the media. “Mayor Strickland’s Weekly Update,” it is called. It is issued every Friday, and its contents have an uncanny resemblance to the mayor’s verbal talking points.
A recent issue, for example, has been the uneven garbage pickup service given some 20 percent of Memphis residents on the eastern edge of the city. Strickland’s newsletter for Friday, August 3rd, outlines his response to the matter. But, first, he outlines, via a self-report card of sorts, on how he has dealt with his campaign promises of 2015:
Friends,
When I was sworn in as mayor two and a half years ago, I promised you that I would apply fresh eyes to the old problems of City government.
That’s exactly what we’ve done.
When we took office, it took us an average of 60 seconds to answer a 911 call. We dug in, figured out the issues, and we fixed it — we’re now consistently at 8 seconds.
When we took office, the live release rate at Memphis Animal Services was around 50 percent. We made it a priority, hired the right people to be in charge, and we fixed it — we’re now consistently at 90 percent.
When we took office, we had an antiquated system to handle people who wanted to apply to become a Memphis police officer — which contributed to our staffing problems and public safety challenges. We cut the red tape, and now we’re much more efficient in working to rebuild our force — with the first net annual gain of police officers in seven years coming last year.
When we took office, the City had no plan or strategy to contribute funding to a need long identified for the health of our community: Pre-Kindergarten. In March, we fixed that by finding a creative way to do that without raising taxes.
Strickland’s campaign themes of blight, accountability, and public safety all get their due in that list. After those initial points, Strickland explains that he has changed contractors for the offended eastern sectors of Memphis, arranged to ramp up the city’s own trash-collection facilities, and avoided raising taxes to pay for the upgrades by tapping general revenues. He acknowledges that, after the first year of the upgrade procedures, the matter of raising rates to pay for it will have to be re-evaluated.
Just as both he and the council strained to ensure that the city’s forthcoming 2018-19 budget will require no new taxes, it is difficult to imagine — the politics of governing in a democracy being what they are — that a rate increase for garbage collection will be announced at any point during the runup to voting in the October 2019 city election.
But, to give Strickland his due, he does seem determined to attend to his city’s basic issues — whether brilliantly or not is in the eye of the beholder.
He makes every effort to document his successes by metrics: e.g., “we pick up dead animals within 24 hours of being called;” the city’s stepped-up MWBE program of extending contracts to business enterprises owned by women and minorities has increased the percentage of such contracts from 12 to 24.7 percent; the MPD’s January graduating class of about 80 new officers (augmented by a kitty of some $6 million from private donors) had brought the Department to the first period in seven years that more officers were hired than had left; the “right-sizing” de-annexation plan he has begun pursuing voluntarily, in order to thwart more Draconian plans imposed from Nashville, will result in a loss of only 1 percent of the city’s population rather than the 20 percent that would leave under the originally proposed legislative formula.
It should be said, by the way, that forced de-annexation by legislative fiat was avoided by a massive diplomatic effort on Strickland’s part — one of several achieved on his watch. The severely punitive bill alluded to above had already virtually passed in 2016, at the behest of an influential state Representative from the environs of Chattanooga. It had come to rest for one final step in a Senate committee on a Monday. But when that Monday came, Strickland, in tandem with the Chamber of Commerce, had organized a resistance in depth, consisting of testifiers from Memphis’ business elite and governmental representatives from other threatened urban areas in Tennessee.
That original bill was tabled and eventually replaced, a year later, by one that allowed municipalities to suggest their own de-annexations. Hence, the Strickland Right-Sizing Plan — designed to satisfy mutinous recent annexees on the city’s periphery and to diminish the cost of city services, with minimal real loss to the city.
Another such triumph had come early in Strickland’s tenure when he learned, from a chance remark by Governor Bill Haslam, that ServiceMaster intended to leave Memphis for greener pastures. The new mayor had responded quickly and without let-up to that emergency as well, organizing the rest of the business community to lobby the departing corporation on its way out the door and doing his own share of jawboning with the ServiceMaster management. Result: The corporation stayed and was ushered into the roomy downtown —and conveniently empty — Peabody Place complex.
One of Strickland’s most difficult tasks was getting the management and proponents of the Memphis Zoo to unbend long enough to agree on a formula with “Save the Greensward” activists and the Overton Park Conservancy that basically split the difference, Solomon-style, between them, cost-wise and space-wise, on how much green space could be used for zoo parking.
But Strickland’s supreme accomplishment on the crisis front was his patient search for an agreement on how to dispose of downtown statues of Confederate leaders in time for MLK50 Day on April 4th of this year.
Taking care not to be goaded by activists into breaking state law with an arbitrary act or bowing down in defeat to unyielding state authorities, Strickland, working with city attorney Bruce McMullen, came up with the perfectly legal expedient of selling the parking properties containing those statuaries — Jefferson Davis and Nathan Bedford Forrest — to an ad hoc non-profit, which in turn removed them.
The removal of public monuments to Confederate leaders has been one of the most controversial accomplishments of Strickland's tenure to date. Photograph by Brandon Dill.
All that is arguably some pretty fair urban statecraft from a mayor who promised only to take care of “the basics.”
Says Strickland: “I think we’ve done a good job and communicated successes but also challenges. The public wants somebody who improves things but will acknowledge and be honest about challenges like crime, poverty, and the lack of educational achievement, set out what to do, and give people hope that you’ve got a plan.”
As far as urban planning goes, the next thing up is Memphis 3.0, the forthcoming blueprint Strickland has promised as the culmination of numerous fact-finding meetings all over town. Some Memphians expect nothing but boilerplate to come from all the build-up; others have confidence that Strickland will indeed emerge with a plan, maybe a visionary one.
He already has his slogan: “Brilliant at the basics.” And he adds, “My vision is that we reverse the trend of losing population, that we do that by growing up and not out, avoid costly sewer extensions, de-annex, invest in poor neighborhoods, pave the streets, hire police, and clean up blight — all of it making Memphis a greater place to live in.”
And he also knows a re-election campaign is just a year away: “No mayor has ever run unopposed, so I’ll have at least one opponent. I can’t control it.”
For all the matters alluded to above, Jim Strickland knows there is one keyword that, mantra-like, he must focus on between now and the election of October 2019.
That word, mundane as can be: “Potholes!”
Strickland says his administration’s alacrity in patching over these literal bumps in the road, as soon as they are spotted and known about, is the single thing he gets most compliments about. And he sees them as not only problems in themselves but as metaphors for the other misadventures, large and small, that, out of nowhere, come to plague his city and its citizens.
You can’t get much more basic than that.
