By now, it should be apparent newly-minted Memphis Mayor A C Wharton Jr. has a lot on his plate.

Between cleaning up the city’s animal shelter, unveiling his agenda in a breakfast speech to The Leadership Academy and encouraging executives of a major Memphis employer not to relocate their operations, the past few days alone have been frenetic. And his to-do list keeps getting longer – mostly by choice.

Wharton soon will embark on a communitywide plan to address the level of gun violence in the city, a cause he also championed while seated behind the county mayor’s desk on the other side of Main Street earlier this year.

Sharing what he said is a “preview of things to come” with The Daily News, he spoke from an outline he’d prepared titled “Firearm Injuries: A Philosophical Construct.” With classical music drifting from a speaker near his desk on the other side of the room and portraying the same Zen-like calm he shows outside City Hall, the former trial attorney made his opening argument.

“Here’s the comparison I’d like to make: As horrible as the swine flu is, we have sometimes more deaths from handguns in one week than we’ll have from the whole epidemic of swine flu,” Wharton said. “We somehow have to bring the same level of awareness to our community as a whole with respect to handguns, gun crime and our youngsters being killed, so that it’s not merely a matter of, ‘What’s the police department going to do? What’s the district attorney going to do? What’s the sheriff going to do?’

“It’s much more than a sheriff, district attorney or police department matter. It’s a health care issue.”

It’s also typical of the kinds of political and public challenges Wharton – who’s been in office barely a month – likes to confront. And he’ll do it in his familiar way.

Find and assemble a local team of experts, give them a mission and begin a dialogue with them.

Enforcement issues

To combat the spate of crime and gun violence in the city, Wharton said he plans to tap a steering committee comprised of officials from hospitals, churches and law enforcement. In outlining his plan, he has to be prodded to discuss involvement from the Memphis Police Department – and, specifically, about where Police Director Larry Godwin fits into the plan.

It’s an important question and one with political ramifications. The new mayor has yet to say what his long-term decision will be about Godwin’s employment as the city’s top cop, leading to much speculation about what is one of the most high-profile staffing decisions the mayor will make.

“Of course, we’ll have strong, unrelenting enforcement” as part of his crime and gun violence abatement plan, Wharton said, adding about the department director: “You don’t just walk in and make a change at the top.”

The mayor said his priorities include determining what the department’s mission should be, whether the department is executing that mission and if it has the resources it needs.

“At the right time, we’ll take stock and see how well-equipped (the department) is to see what the solution entails,” Wharton said.

Finding solutions to gun violence is a different kind of problem from many of the ones the mayor has confronted so far, in that his decision to address it has not been thrust upon him the way other conflicts have. The animal shelter flap – in which county sheriff deputies raided the shelter investigating allegations of animal abuse and cruelty – landed in Wharton’s lap on his first full day in office.

Business decisions

A few days ago, Wharton met with executives from San Francisco-based McKesson Corp., a health care services company that employs 813 people in Memphis and is looking at ways to restructure its local operations.

McKesson has several options on the table its executives are mulling over, including moving some of its local operations to North Mississippi or to Fayette County. One drawback to keeping its presence in Memphis is the area’s level of crime, McKesson noted in paperwork supplied with its recent request for a local tax incentive.

That’s why Wharton said he’s taking up a major crime and gun violence prevention strategy early in his tenure, saying it’s a communitywide problem that touches everyone.

“If you are a taxpayer, gun crime is an issue for you,” Wharton said. “Because it’s your tax dollars that’s paying this (cost) per patient when they come in with gunshot wounds. And these are the people – there ain’t no TennCare for some gangbanger who gets shot up in a drug deal gone bad. That comes straight out of Shelby County taxpayer dollars.

“I feel now that I’m on this side of the street, in which I now have responsibility for the city of Memphis where a lot of gun violence occurs, it’s incumbent on me to bring … back an effort to focus communitywide attention on the deadly combination of young folks gone wrong and guns.”