Minority-led business contracts in Memphis and Shelby County are apparently such a hot commodity, some political figures who double as private consultants are willing to go to great lengths to procure them for their clients.

In the past week, a spate of such dealings have raised all manner of ethical and conflict-of-interest concerns.

When he was a Shelby County Commissioner, for example, Bruce Thompson pushed hard to privatize the Shelby County Jail, insisting it would mean big savings for taxpayers. Meanwhile, shortly before Thompson broached that idea with the commission in summer 2004, Memphis minority contractor Kirby Salton introduced him to the president of a construction company eager to a win a contract to build new Memphis city schools.

Small-town blues

To sift through competitors looking to win construction bids, municipal governments and school boards favor an appropriate level of minority participation in the development team they ultimately choose.

So that year and through 2005, Thompson was paid by Jackson-based H&M Co. to help guide the company in bidding for - and winning - a nearly $50 million contract to build three city schools. Salton's introduction of Thompson, a successful businessman and consultant, to the president of H&M Co. apparently was the key.

Commissioner Deidre Malone also was approached to help H&M as it put together a team of minority contractors with enough local representation that it gave the company the edge.

Federal law, as anyone even remotely familiar with the details of the Tennessee Waltz scandal knows by now, prevents elected officials from accepting money in exchange for their official influence. Both commissioners defended their actions in recent days by insisting they didn't leverage their titles to help a client.

"But all of a sudden, it's like we're having to define ethics," said John Malmo, former chairman of the Memphis Parks Commission. "We didn't have to do that 40 or 50 years ago."

Changing times

And that episode highlights an important yet not widely scrutinized element of local municipal projects - namely, the requirements governing minority participation and what goes into the selection process.

Strike the right balance, and the result can be a lucrative contract. In October 2004 - incidentally, a few months after Salton introduced Thompson to H&M officials - the county commission sent out a request for proposals for Thompson's pet cause, to privatize the jail. One of the companies that answered the bid, Corrections Corp. of America, picked Salton's firm as part of its local minority contractor team.

Two months later, H&M Co. won its city schools contract, also with Salton's firm as part of its venture.

That issue is similarly at the heart of other legal and municipal dealings at the moment. Next month, a case involving former MLGW commissioner Joe Saino - who maintains a public watchdog Web site - and the Mid-South Minority Business Council Inc. likely will go to trial in Shelby County Chancery Court.

Saino filed the suit after he was rebuffed in his request to inspect records of the group he believed should be open to the public. Part of the mission of the nonprofit MMBC is helping minority-owned businesses grow and secure contracts with large corporations.

"I have nothing against the Mid-South Minority Business Council or their stated goals and purposes, but they need to operate in the open," Saino said at the time. Frank Gibson, executive director of the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government, suggested the resolution of that suit will depend on whether the MMBC performs some governmental or quasi-governmental function.

'Procedural twists and turns'

Then there's the still unresolved court dispute over the city's bid award for ambulance billing services over the past several years - an issue in which, again, the minority contracting process plays a part.

In 2002, according to court filings, American Medibanc Inc. was awarded the job of collecting ambulance fees for the city. Yet that company apparently had a month-to-month relationship with the city, as opposed to a negotiated contract, for more than two years, something that seems to have made the relationship more costly than bid packages that were submitted by some of Medibanc's competitors.

That's what a special master has been appointed by the Shelby County Chancery Court to help determine.

Charmiane Claxton, an attorney with the Apperson Crump & Maxwell PLC law firm, has been appointed as special master and tasked with issuing a report that will be used by the court as a kind of compass in navigating the litigation. Claxton was planning to issue her report Friday.

"There are certainly quite a number of procedural twists and turns" in the matter, said Claxton, a former assistant City of Memphis attorney and a former deputy director of the city's Division of Human Resources.

Medibanc, which later was acquired by another company, first was chosen back in 1997 in a search for minority vendors to provide the ambulance billing. In November 2005, Memphis City Council member Scott McCormick wrote in a letter to the city's finance chief, Roland McElrath, and Mayor Willie Herenton that he believed the city was losing millions because of what appeared to be poor performance on Medibanc's part.