Ellington

"I, Harvey Johnson, Jr, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully ... discharge the duties of the office upon which I am about to enter, so help me God."

When Mississippi Supreme Court Justice James Graves swears Harvey Johnson Jr. into the office on Friday, July 3, before about 1,000 onlookers at the Jackson Convention Complex, it is Johnson's second time that week to take the oath.

In the final scene of the Greek tragedy that was the Frank Melton administration, Johnson had to step in prematurely as acting mayor to serve out the last three days of Melton's tenure because the acting mayor, former Council President Leslie McLemore, had announced that he was retiring as a councilman before the Democratic primary, setting his retirement date as June 30.

Melton collapsed on the night of the May 5 Democratic primary, which he lost handily, and died on May 7, hours after the Jackson City Council had appointed McLemore acting mayor. McLemore had not foreseen being acting mayor in the days leading up to June 1. Long criticized for wanting to be mayor while head of the city council, McLemore had to abdicate his newfound mayorship the same day he relinquished his council seat.

The curious turn of events meant Johnson got to serve out the term of the mayor who had ousted him four years ago while promising to solve crime within 90 days.

It was a theatrical denouement, a last laugh of sorts, that should not have been possible without the help of a witch-doctor, or at least a contract-killer.

You don't see Johnson wallowing in the sheer poetry of the situation, however. If he is capable of nasty cynicism, I don't hear it from him, even as some of his supporters aren't beyond remarking on the irony. There's a smart-ass in every crowd, after all.

Johnson held numerous public meetings with his transition team in the days leading up to his Wednesday and Friday oaths of office. I followed and watched him every chance I could, searching for some hint of a defining characteristic. Melton, the guy who had temporarily interrupted Johnson's mayoral career, was chock full of defining characteristics: the cussing, the snide sense of humor, the snorting laughter, the smell of booze. That mayor was a cartoonist's dream come true, and a journalist's heaven. He was many things, but never dull.

Johnson provides a stark contrast to the jumpy, off-the-cuff antics of Melton. They say you get the face you deserve at the age of 50. Johnson passed that point more than 10 years ago, and the personality behind the face is as obvious as ever. And as steady.

Hearing Voices
At his June 18 meeting with transition team committee chairs, Johnson sits at the edge of a desk inside a conference room of Jackson State University's College of Business building on Lynch Street—the same portion of the campus he occupied as an adjunct professor of during his brief return to civilian life.

Johnson shows interest in every question asked. His transition team only has a limited amount of time to receive departmental reports, analyze them, question every stinking detail in them—because department heads have a habit of putting their work in the best light. The committee has to come up with top issues and priorities, and write a final report.

The heat is definitely on the transition members, all 30 of them. Johnson assures them that, while they only have a window of a few weeks, it is likely the process can be completed in either August or September.

"The citizens of the city would appreciate these reports as soon as we can get them," Johnson tells the team. "They deserve that."

Some members are dubious of this goal, but Johnson's lack of panic manages to calm most doubts. His cool, quiet persona can leave a lot open to interpretation, however. Some of his critics believe he may be making a show of listening while packing away only the bits he feels are useful—bits they believe are well short of what really needs to be retained.

Former Jackson Police Chief Robert Johnson worked under Harvey Johnson for only a few days after his 1997 win before going his own way. The chief came to Jackson under former Mayor Kane Ditto, who was quite possibly the last white mayor the city of Jackson will see for a long time. When Harvey Johnson upset Ditto's candidacy in 1997, however, it was clear within days that the potentially promising mayor/chief team of Johnson & Johnson wouldn't be happening.

"I spoke to him after I won the election, but Johnson wasn't interested in working with the team," Harvey Johnson told the Jackson Free Press in April, prior to the election, about the former chief. "I was willing to consider keeping him on, but he didn't feel like coming on board, I guess. I can't speak for him."

Robert Johnson, business owner in Jackson who ran against Harvey Johnson in the Democratic primary, has a different view, saying his temporary boss wasn't looking for a strong-willed police chief. He says one of Johnson's critical flaws regarding battling the city's crime issue is his inability to adapt his game plan based upon the sometimes more knowledgeable opinions of others.

"One of (Harvey) Johnson's biggest flaws is failing to actualize what he's hearing. Instead, he hears what you're saying, maybe even buying it to some extent, but then not doing anything about it. I'm not sure if he has overcome that flaw, from my observation," says former Chief Johnson, who admits that he "hasn't had a lot of interaction with (Johnson) other than during the campaign."

"I continue to have that sense that he has in his head what he thinks ought to happen, while he is camouflaging what I consider to be a major flaw in his leadership."

Robert Johnson has served as police chief in Jackson, Mich., as well as Jackson, Miss. He also served—successfully, many argue—as head of the Mississippi Department of Corrections, dropping statewide operating costs and accrediting many of the state's prisons, despite legislative opposition. He says his expertise remains in crime fighting, and he claims to be a hot advocate of community policing.

In interviews leading up to the Democratic primary, Robert Johnson outlined examples of community policing as a preventative to crime, rather than using the overworked and understaffed police department to mop up crime scenes after a nefarious deed is done.

Harvey Johnson and his former police Chief Robert Moore, who resigned after Melton was elected, both spoke of the benefits of community policing. Crime followed a nationwide trend and actually fell under Johnson and Moore, with both attributing some headway to a community-policing policy. Robert Johnson claims neither of the two whole-heartedly embraced the tactic, however.

"The basic philosophy," says Robert Johnson, "is that you'll have people in the community working together with police, and taking their fair share of the responsibility for what happens."

Robert Johnson says many other cities implementing community policing have set up "team policing," where every beat officer has a cell phone to take calls directly from concerned or victimized city residents, as opposed to people phoning the dispatch center for routine calls. The method, for starters, gives callers a realistic estimated time of arrival for police officers, and allows the responding officer to know whether he's heading off to dust up a two-day-old burglary scene or stop a screaming maniac from chasing his girlfriend around the house with a weed-whacker.

The former chief says that a true commitment to community policing involves a dedicated effort to blanket whole neighborhoods with training, educating people on how to watch for suspicious activity and how to form relationships with neighbors. Neighborhood residents should know whether the guy moving furniture and electronics out of their neighbor's house is actually their neighbor trying to dodge his back rent, or is a daylight burglar taking advantage of an empty house.

The mayor plans to bring back the city's Crime Prevention Unit, formerly a team of about 10 city employees who made the rounds in neighborhoods, educating people on crime-prevention measures and anti-burglary equipment. Melton abruptly killed the unit during his first year as mayor, reportedly due to long-held vendettas against family members of some of the employees.

Community policing can't stop at the Crime Prevention Unit, however, and Robert Johnson fears the returning mayor may sell community policing short on follow-up.

"If you're looking for an example of his lack of follow-through, I would have to point to his failure to fully appreciate what it takes to ... move the department where it needs to go. I don't think he has that depth of knowledge or that he's willing to get somebody who does, because I think he's afraid of strong, knowledgeable leadership in that area. I don't know if that would ever get corrected," Johnson says. "I wish him the best and I'm hopeful for him. I'm more than willing to lend whatever assistance I can to make him successful in every area, but I still remain skeptical."

Johnson said in an earlier interview that he would be looking for a chief with considerable career and management skills, who can treat the officers with respect.

New Mayor, Same Problems
In early June, soon after winning the Democratic run-off, the mayor-elect is in the University Club at the top of the Regions building to meet with his transition chiefs: Glenda Glover, dean of JSU's College of Business, and Jackson attorney John Maxey

With a Jackson Free Press reporter and photographer in the room, the three discuss what they are likely in for as the transition team came together. The sit-in comes on the heels of a political "unity" gathering and fundraiser to pay off Johnson's campaign debt at the University Club. The Jackson Free Press criticized the event's organizers for inviting media , but then banning cameras from the event—for which Johnson later apologized.

The mayor-elect chooses the intimate transition meeting to make the point that he is determined to be transparent, and that this is the way things are done in an open government that's "accountable to the people."

The three are sitting at a table overlooking a nosebleed view of the city, with reporters behind them at the next table. None of them show any outward anxiety, but continue to speak frankly about city business and those who run it. At one point Johnson admits to the transition chairs that reaching some current department heads would not be easy.

Former Jackson Chief Administrative Officer Robert Walker, for example, "is in touch with Robert Walker," Johnson says.

Glover says she expects the city budget to have suffered from the attention of the last administration, telling the other two that when the transition team eventually got the enormous document that "it won't be pretty."

It is a safe guess. Budget problems have been emblematic of the city for decades. Jackson has steadily lost population since the 1970s, as white residents continue to flee the increasingly integrated neighborhoods around them. Blacks discovered low-end housing to be more available in the city as new rental property opened up and home prices dropped. Also fueling the flight was the rise of affluent blacks following the 1960s and, some blacks say, the willingness of lenders and real estate agents to accommodate minorities.

As a result, a considerable percentage of the city's tax base has high-tailed it to bedroom communities. Property and sales tax combine with fines and permit fees to form the brunt of the city's revenue, but the white flight (indicative in Jackson Public Schools' 97 percent black student population) puts an increasing strain on the budget with each budget year.

Johnson, during his last mayoral tenure, was forced to close unfilled city vacancies a number of times to counter shortfalls in the budget, and he had to draw down money from the city's reserve fund prior to signing a commitment with the city council to build the fund back up to a target goal of $7 million.

Things got worse under Melton. Department of Administration Director Rick Hill told the Jackson City Council that the city was facing a $4.3 million shortfall in its 2008 budget due to lost revenue and cost overruns, such as overtime from the police and fire departments in 2007. But even while it was debating how to fill holes in the 2008 budget, the council was also fighting to cover a $3 million shortfall leftover from the 2007 budget.

A 3-to-2 vote from the council allowed the administration to raid $3 million from the city's $7 million budget reserve fund to fix the lingering hole in the budget. Council members like Ward 1 Councilman Jeff Weill argued that raiding the reserve would hurt the city's interest rates on future bond projects and negatively affect the city's standing with financing agencies.

Later, in 2008, Hinds County Sheriff Malcolm McMillin, who replaced police Chief Shirlene Anderson and did double-duty as county sheriff and city police chief, told the shocked council that Anderson had allowed police to ravage their overtime budget, blowing more than half of it within three months.

Money problems have been an issue in the city, and Johnson will have to deal with them. He'll have a balancing act to manage while he does it, working between cutting city positions it cover budget holes while keeping city services working efficiently enough to keep residents happy.

'JackStat' to the Rescue?
North Jackson resident Daniel Carter has a For Sale sign in front of his home on Atkins Boulevard, in north Jackson, but admits that the sign has been there since before the housing market collapse of 2008. He knows he will likely have a hard time selling the property to finance a purchase in one of the suburbs, but he is determined to move.

"We need more police. That's all there is to it," Carter says, adding that he would have a cop sitting at that street corner in front of his house around the clock if he could get it. "One of the reasons I'm leaving the city is because a very important city service is not being met."

The most likely option for Carter is to rent his home out while he lives elsewhere. His neighbors aren't happy with the idea of another rental property opening up on their street, but Carter says he can tolerate the creeping problem of crime no longer.

Johnson used federal money to fund new police officers during his first two terms as mayor, and boasts that he had authorized more police training academy classes than any mayor before him. The federal money, provided through a COPS grant, dried up under President Bush, but President Barack Obama re-opened the spigot on the program, according to Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, and the incoming mayor will again get to apply for program funding.

That funding may help the city return to where it was under Johnson's last administration, when crime was falling steadily despite hype that claimed otherwise, but the money only funds the first few years of a new officer's salary and must eventually fall to the city.

But Johnson knows more police officers won't solve the problem.

Some of the issues driving flight out of the city arise from systemic problems. A neighborhood obviously falling into decay gives criminals the feeling that neither the residents nor its police force have committed to the area, making it an easy target for predation. Abandoned property and broken windows require a solution more complicated than a call to 911— or an errant sledgehammer—can fix.

It's a problem between the city and its residents, not to mention absentee landlords.

One of Johnson's self-described problems as mayor was accountability. Complaints about a broken streetlight on High Street had a way of getting lost somewhere between the call reporting it and the guy with the yellow helmet who changes the bulb.

To address this issue, the new mayor is looking to duplicate a call-in system similar to one already used in New York, Chicago and Baltimore. People know about the 911 call system, but the idea of a 311 call system, first implemented in Baltimore in 1999, still hasn't quite caught on. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg swears by it, calling it "the most powerful management tool ever developed for New York City's government."

Baltimore's 311 system was invented to steer callers from putting complaints about busted sidewalks, bashed streetlights, accumulating garbage and spouting water mains to the city's overwhelmed emergency 911 call system. Got a particularly rancorous litany of graffiti on your public building? Put a call in to the city's 311 system and the city promises it will respond with an acid bath in half the time it did in 1999, thanks to 311.

In New York, all 311 calls go to an operator who electronically transfers the report to the appropriate agency for service; broken lights go to Public Works. Accumulating garbage goes to Waste Removal. An abandoned, deteriorating home goes to Code Enforcement, and so on. The 311 system in Chicago and New York are both capable of updating themselves in real time.

The call center is only the first step, though. In Chicago, the following step after the 311 call is CitiStat. Just as crime reports are consolidated into a weekly crime summary that makes possible the gauging of law enforcement's response to crime, so Chicago's CitiStat allows the mayor to see what kind of reaction time his various departments have to 311 reports. Department heads must be accountable to the mayor, and explain why they couldn't replace a downed Stop sign until four days later, or explain how a home-owner reacted to code enforcement showing up to tell them about their un-mowed grass.

Johnson envisions Jackson using a similar system, called JackStat. A staff member confirmed on the day of his official inauguration last Friday that the mayor had already selected a staff member to head up the program.

The CitiStat system in Chicago uses relatively inexpensive data management software and a 24-hour call center. There's no guarantee that Jackson's system will be a 24-hour service, but the system will cost money.

Johnson says he intends to reinforce the city's grants-writing department, which faltered under Melton's administration.

In fact, city administration seemed to bleed funding as grant writers working under Johnson fled to nearby Tougaloo College and Jackson Public Schools. Not only did the city lose access to new grant money, but it lost control of the management of the grant money it had already secured under Johnson. The council had to vote last year to pay back the federal government more than $50,000 in mismanaged grant money. Assistant Chief Administrative Officer and internal auditor Valerie Nevels sent the council into a fit in March 2008 after telling them that the city might have to pay back $278,000 in mismanaged federal grant money.

Johnson's talent for hiring grant writers will need to go above and beyond the call of duty soon, however, especially with the threat of a looming collapse in some city services.

Missing the Bus
Johnson may rarely show emotion, but you can hear the cold sorrow in his voice at the University Club when Glover and Maxey ask him about grant requests the city had made regarding the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the $787 billion stimulus package signed by President Obama this year in response to the nation's faltering economy.

Congress passed the stimulus bill in February. The money is sitting there, but municipalities must ask for a piece of that pie before it's gone. Johnson, who is at his core a man who lives to tap the federal government of whatever funds he can get for Jackson, has to admit to the other three that the city, as far as he can tell, had made no real call for any of that money by early June.

"They (city administration) have no comprehensive document on what we're going after," a pained Johnson tells them.

Glover points out that her university has been putting together grant requests for a deadline date of June 3. This meeting is happening more than 10 days after that.

Johnson's new grant-writers will need to pull down federal money fast if he is to preserve a flurry of city services facing the chopping block—like the public-financed transportation system.

The Jackson City Council voted last month to approve a $1.2 budget transfer to the city's bus service, saving JATRAN from financially running dry in July. The council plans to fund the transfer with insurance savings and closed city employee positions. The city had to borrow $800,000 from its health insurance budget—which managed to have an excess last year thanks to a drop in claims.

JATRAN is an enormous drain on the budget, however, and it's about to get a lot more expensive if a federal lawsuit now pending in U.S. District Court continues to go in the directions it's been moving.

The U.S. Department of Justice recently intervened in the lawsuit Scott Crawford et al v. the City of Jackson, making it Scott Crawford et al and The United States of America v. the City of Jackson. The new designation naturally swings the argument in favor of plaintiffs suing the city for its bus system's unfair treatment of impaired customers.

Eleven Jackson residents with disabilities and two non-profit organizations filed the lawsuit late last year, accusing the city of violating the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. The city already had a hard fight on that one, especially with the absence of Handilift services on the vast majority of JATRAN buses. Now the U.S. government is agreeing that the city has failed to maintain wheelchair lifts on buses, and that it has not adequately trained personnel to assist passengers with disabilities. It also failed to accommodate pick-ups for the physically impaired, in violation of federal law.

Weill says he had no idea how the city would finance the bus upgrades if the Mississippi Coalition for Citizens and other plaintiffs stomped the city in court.

Some incoming city staff members, like returning Johnson spokesman Chris Mims, say the problem could be addressed by increasing JATRAN revenue. Expanding the bus system to make it more palatable to car drivers, or steer some advertising dollars to the bus system. But another obvious means to deal with it means Johnson could be the only mayor in the city's history to preside over the city's dissolution of its public-transit system.

"The city's federal violation is not about the city simply depriving physically impaired customers of transit services, it's about the city failing to provide these services while providing service to other customers," says former city defense attorney Pieter Teeuwissen, who is currently serving as an interim city attorney after City Attorney Sarah O'Reilly-Evans stepped down last Tuesday.

"This here is a discrimination lawsuit."

Teeuwissen won't say it, but you'd have to be thicker than a brick sandwich not to know what he and many council members are already thinking: The easiest way to avoid the alleged discrimination of providing bus service to most people at the exclusion of some people is to cease service to all people.

Johnson himself is unwilling to commit to an opinion, yet. His transition team is only now reviewing documents provided by the city's current department heads. The number crunching, he says, had yet to begin, and all hard decisions right now are premature.

Weill, a Ward 1 Republican who is the council's most vociferous critic of the bus system—and of government-funded services in general—is chomping at the bit at the possibility of mothballing the bus system, which Weill considers way past its effectiveness date.

"There may be an option for a personal transportation system for city residents who still need it," Weill suggests. "We could use smaller vans to do the same thing that these over-sized empty buses are doing. The truth is, we could provide everybody who rides buses with cab fare, and it would still be cheaper than JATRAN."

For Whom the Bills Toll
On the Wednesday before his (real) inauguration, Johnson is in City Hall, bantering with associates and hopping the elevator up to the mayor's office on the third floor.

As soon as Johnson steps out of the elevator, however, he will get hit by a metaphorical mountain of problems. Like a character out of a Vincent Price movie, one of those problems has been patiently waiting for his return since he left four years ago, like a wailing, flesh-eating cousin that the family tossed into the mansion cellar and tried to forget.

The Jackson wastewater treatment plant, near Savanna Street, has been churning away at the city's toilet water for years, carefully filtering out all manner of God knows what and creating three different products: organically infused wastewater, organically super-saturated sludge, and a host of happy Hinds and Rankin County customers.

The sludge heads off to private farmland to get sprayed onto a wide variety of plants that—oddly—never seem to have natural predators. The waste-water goes back into the helpless waters of the Pearl River. The host of happy customers, for their part, take comfort in the fact that they can (at least for one more day) continue flushing their toilets into the same source of water from which they drink.

The Environmental protection Agency has a problem with the wastewater treatment plant, however—a $100 million problem.

The plant is no longer up to modern EPA standards, not so much because the plant is aging, but because the EPA is tightening it regulations. The water pouring from the facility is too heavy with organic liquids for the federal agency to allow more than a few thousand gallons to be dumped into the river each day. Bacteria feeding on the organic material also use the water's store of oxygen, increasing the threat of fish-kills further down the river.

Then-Councilman Ben Allen said in March 2007 that the plant had reached its capacity limit, though the strain to process more waste was growing with the populations of Madison and Rankin counties.

At the time, Allen described the impending problem as "the most important issue the City Council will face as far as the economic future of Jackson," especially considering that the surrounding suburbs are considering cutting their waste-treatment payments to the city in lieu of funding their own plants. The renovations will have to happen, but if the suburbs pull out, the city will have to handle the $100 million bill all by its lonesome.

Trudy Allen, who represents the West Rankin Regional Authority, told the city council in 2007 that Madison and Flowood were considering building their own waste-treatment plants and cutting funding to the Jackson plant on Savanna Street, and confirmed to the Jackson Free Press last week that the situation hasn't changed since 2007.

Madison Public Works Director Denson Robinson says the Madison County Wastewater Authority was considering a new wastewater-treatment plant that would dump into the Big Black River, while Flowood Public Works Director Gary Miller said in 2007 that the city of Flowood was also considering building its own plan. Flowood is under contract with Jackson to treat and transport wastewater, but can opt out of that contract in 2015 so long as they notify the city by 2012.

Both communities acknowledge that it's cheaper to upgrade the plant than build a new one, but before committing to it, the surrounding communities want ownership of the plant to fall to a regional authority comprised of all the municipalities using the treatment plant, rather than the city of Jackson.

Johnson has earned a harsh reputation for his protective attitude toward Jackson in the face of bedroom communities. Nobody I've ever interviewed has ever called him Madison's BFF, and everybody seems to know it. Many voters outside Jackson, including Madison and Rankin counties supported Melton over Johnson four years ago.

The mayor claims there are no brick walls between himself and the other counties. He was the mayor who ultimately produced a 30-year agreement with the suburbs on sewage management that sends Rankin and Madison toilet water to south Jackson. Still, he remains leery of letting ownership of the plant slide into the hands of a regional authority.

"The other cities are free to pursue their plans, but I don't think it would be cost effective," Johnson says, adding that he believed the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality would take a dim view of other sewage outlets draining into other, smaller rivers like the Big Black River.

No More Puppets?
Whichever way Johnson's decisions will go, he may have a majority of the reconfigured Jackson City Council behind him.

The council has always been a governing body rife with loyalties. Three members of the council—Ward 3's Kenneth Stokes, Ward 4's Frank Bluntson and Ward 5's Charles Tillman—had been staunch allies of Melton, to the exclusion of any sane argument from the other council members. Melton said "jump," and they'd start pole-vaulting.

The Stokes-Tillman-Bluntson faction made itself known in every contentious vote, including those approving potentially illegal payments to city contractors, or Melton's illogical crusades to approve pay raises without making room for them in the city budget.

The three also voted religiously in line with Melton whenever he attempted to nominate his friends as department heads, despite the fact that many of his nominations included utterly unqualified candidates. Melton's argument for replacing 10-year Parks and Recreation veteran Ramie Ford with former police officer Charles Melvin in 2007, for example, was that he was "a good swimming coach" and "great with kids."

The council, naturally, lined up to complain on the matter—all except Melton's yes-men trio, who, as Stokes put it, approved "giving this young man a chance."

All three also opposed the council's decision to withhold approval of the city's payment to contractors after some contractors—Melton's young friends, in fact—were shown to have recent felony arrests.

The unbending Melton faction broke the checks-and-balances role of the municipal system of government. The council requires a super-majority to override any veto coming down from the administrative branch. But, thanks to Melton's unwavering triumvirate, almost every decision by the council that crossed the mayor had to be a vote that was not subject to a mayoral veto, such as a confirmation vote. Everyone on the council (and Melton) knew a veto override would be impossible as long as his trio was in line.

Harvey Johnson is walking into a city government without obvious puppets or enemies, however. Though McLemore and Ward 7 Councilwoman Margaret Barrett-Simon clearly showed relief after Johnson took the Democratic run-off, McLemore is on his way out. Barrett-Simon, though, is capable of biting the leg off just about anybody if she believes it is good for Jackson.

Johnson does have the advantage of being able to debate the issues—a talent that eluded the usually prepared Melton.

McLemore seems to think that Johnson will have an impressive number of council members behind him on a variety of issues.

"I think the discordant voice will be Bluntson, though even he could be changing his tune," says McLemore, who was willing to make a gamble as recently as last week.

The council got to decide who would be the interim mayor two days before Johnson officially took the job July 3.

Rumors circulated prior to the vote that some vestige of the Melton triumvirate could align behind Bluntson as interim mayor, but no hint of the rumor manifested at the Wednesday vote.

McLemore called the vote a "good sign of things to come."

"I think that after four years of Frank Melton, the people coming onto the council want to see some progress made and this city move forward. In spite of some differences, they will be very supportive," McLemore predicted.

"The contention will be over the budget. There will be come argument between producing a meaner, leaner budget and reviving the work force. You'll get different priorities from different people but, by and by, the mayor's going to have a real working majority on a consistent basis."

Previous Comments

ID

149560

Comment

The headline works two ways, as the cover photo accompanying it is, in fact, of Johnson's back!

Author

Tom Head

Date

2009-07-11T16:33:36-06:00