Van Turner weighs 2023 bid for mayor
Shelby County Commissioner Van Turner has formed an exploratory committee to run for Memphis Mayor in 2023.
Turner confirmed the likely bid Thursday, Aug. 5, as Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris appears more likely to run for a second term in the 2022 county elections and closer to kicking off that re-election bid.
“I think he’s going to run for re-election. Naturally, if Lee was not running that would be something I would just have to look at,” Turner told The Daily Memphian.
“I do think Lee will likely run again and of course I won’t challenge Lee,” he said. “I would actually ask for his support for Memphis mayor if anything, but certainly wouldn’t run against him for county mayor.”
Turner, an attorney who is president of the Memphis Branch NAACP and former Shelby County Democratic Party chairman and president of the Ben F. Jones chapter of the National Bar Association, is serving his second four-year term in the District 12 seat on the commission and is limited to two consecutive terms.
He will complete his second commission term at the end of August 2022.
Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland is serving his second consecutive term and faces the same term limits that Turner faces in county government at the end of calendar year 2023.
“If they will have me, I’m offering myself for further service in an elected role,” Turner said. “I think my background has uniquely qualified me to hopefully be the right person at this time to take the torch from Mayor Strickland.”
Turner was a key supporter of Strickland’s 2019 re-election effort.
Turner is also president of the nonprofit Memphis Greenspace that was integral to the legal loophole the Strickland administration used to move Confederate monuments out of two city parks.
The nonprofit was formed and the City Council approved the sale of the two parks to Memphis Greenspace, including the monuments in those parks. The nonprofit then had monuments removed within hours of the council vote to sell the parks.
Turner has also emerged as a key strategist and mediator who has attempted to bring together an eight-vote Democratic majority on the commission on critical issues, which at times has proven to be a daunting task.
Turner said his candidacy for mayor would be about more than maintaining or continuing Strickland’s “brilliant at the basics” philosophy of city government.
“First and foremost, how are we going to address the upticks in gun violence and that has to be a key component for what I would hope to resolve and hope to address in 2023,” he said. “You have to look at what is causing the crime.”
Turner talked publicly about the Memphis mayor’s race two days after encountering classmates from his days as a student at Havenview Junior High School in Whitehaven. He talked with them at Hollywood and Chelsea in North Memphis, where a teenager was shot and killed.
“I want to be able to go into the North Memphis community and be with them in their time of need,” he said.
“But I also want to be able to go into the Chamber of Commerce and sit down with the corporate leaders and bring those experiences from Hollywood and Chelsea and South Memphis into those board rooms to say, ‘This is what the people are saying. … We have to get what you all are doing down to the grassroots level if we want to stop the violence.’
“I think whether you are standing at a homicide scene on Hollywood or whether I’m sitting in a board room with the leaders of corporate Memphis, everybody wants the same thing,” Turner said. “I think we’ve just got to work a little harder to achieve it.”
The fields are still forming for county offices on the 2022 ballot, which is the longest ballot in Shelby County politics every eight years when judicial offices with eight-year terms return for voters to decide.
The 2022 ballot also includes races for Shelby County mayor, all 13 seats on the County Commission and every countywide office with a four-year term except General Sessions Court Clerk.
Contenders can’t pull or file their qualifying petitions until Dec. 20.
But with the city election following the county election year, those considering races for county office are frequently balancing what city offices they might be interested in that will be on the ballot a year later.
With six of the 13 county commissioners in their second terms and facing term limits, others among the six are making the same calculations about county or the city ballots.
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2023 Memphis Mayor's race Van Turner Shelby County CommissionBill Dries on demand
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Bill Dries
Bill Dries covers city and county government and politics. He is a native Memphian and has been a reporter for almost 50 years covering a wide variety of stories from the 1977 death of Elvis Presley and the 1978 police and fire strikes to numerous political campaigns, every county mayor and every Memphis Mayor starting with Wyeth Chandler.
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