The dust hasn’t completely settled on the differences Shelby County Commissioners are having with each other across party lines and on a number of other fronts.

BROOKS

“We’ve outed a civility gap on this commission,” commissioner Steve Mulroy said. “It’s existed for a while.”

Commissioner Melvin Burgess at one point said to all involved, “Just stop talking.”

Meanwhile, the Memphis branch of the NAACP and leaders of the local Democratic Party played a major role in the dramatic collapse this week of the redistricting plan that would keep the commission’s five-district structure and tweak the district lines.

The commission’s bipartisan alliance led by Democratic commissioner Justin Ford had seven votes to keep the plan at five districts and they were working on two more commissioners for the nine-vote, two-thirds majority necessary to pass the plan on third and final reading.

When that seven-vote block came apart Monday, Jan. 23, on second reading, efforts to move toward an ouster of commission chairman Sidney Chism also came apart.

And the effort to one Republican commissioner favoring five districts to censure two other Republican commissioners opposed to the five-district plan fizzled.

The NAACP leaders and local Democratic Party leaders had been working toward a set of 13 single-member districts since the commission voted two weeks ago to start the redistricting process over.

“Overall, it’s just a fair plan,” said former Shelby County Election Commission chairman O.C. Pleasant who spoke for the voter action committee of the Memphis branch NAACP. “It provides for the opportunity for having closer contact by constituents to their elected members.”

HARVEY

Shelby County Democratic Party chairman Van Turner puts the voter division in 13 single-member districts at 71,000 voters per district.

“It allows more access to the commissioner by his or her constituents,” he said before acknowledging that critics of single-member districts have said voters have three choices for the commission with larger multi-member districts. He also called the multi-member districts “incumbency protection.”

“We don’t understand all the dynamics. We don’t understand all of the politics. We can only look from the outside in,” Turner added. “It’s not really quantity, it’s quality.”

Two critical votes in the collapse of the multi-member district plan were commissioners Henri Brooks and James Harvey, both Democrats.

They will be key players in the committee to come that represents a third start-over on redistricting.

“I’ve always been for 13 members,” Harvey said, breaking a silence in which he has missed most of the recent meetings – special and otherwise – on redistricting.

He and Brooks indicated that if they can be convinced a set of single-member districts can create seven majority African-American voting age population districts, they might be able to support it.

Brooks had supported a tweaking of the five districts previously but acknowledged she had heard from constituents over the weekend with different opinions.

“They differ from me. … The African-American population in this community needs to be represented on a proportional basis,” she said. “They don’t like anything that they’ve seen here.”

The NAACP leaders are willing to say they don’t mind if the plan can also increase suburban representation outside Memphis to four commissioners – although it’s not specifically required by federal one person-one vote requirements or Civil Rights Act legislation. The suburbs are not a “protected class” under the federal case law.

The balance might prove difficult once the committee gets out the maps and looks at overall population and voting age population by race and where it is in the county.

The commission now has three white Republican commissioners who represent the suburban areas including cities and towns outside Memphis. It has six black Democratic commissioners representing most of Memphis.

Three other white Republican commissioners represent the district that is a mixture of Memphis and the suburbs, including part of Germantown. The swing seat on the body is the single-member district covering East Memphis and Hickory Hill now held by white Democrat Steve Mulroy. The seat has been held by both Democrats and Republicans – always white.

Taking apart the mixed Memphis-suburban district is likely to be what makes or breaks a single-member district plan.