Seven apply to fill open District 4 city council seat
Jamita Swearengen attends the council’s first in-person session in over a year on Tuesday, May 18, 2021. (Mark Weber/The Daily Memphian file)
Memphis City Council members will bring the body back up to a full 13 members Thursday, Sept. 1, with a special meeting to fill the vacant District 4 seat.
The 12 council members have seven applicants for the seat, vacant since the Aug. 9 resignation of Jamita Swearengen. She begins a four-year term Thursday as the Shelby County Circuit Court Clerk.
Watch a livestream of the 10:30 a.m. meeting and follow @bdriesdm on Twitter for live coverage of the meeting.
The applicants, who had to gather the signatures of at least 25 voters in the district on a qualifying petition, include three of the four contenders on the Nov. 8 ballot to serve the remaining year or so on Swearengen’s council term.
The applicants are:
- La Tonia Blankenship, family engagement specialist at Memphis-Shelby County Schools.
- Barry Ford, business systems analyst for Shelby County government.
- Jana Swearengen-Washington, first lady of Prospect CME Church and sister for former council member Jamita Swearengen.
- Lucille Catron, executive director of Beale Street Development Corp. who has battled in court unsuccessfully across several different mayoral administrations to restore BSDC as manager of the city-owned entertainment district.
- Teri Dockery, founder of Awakening Minds Neighborhood Development and a business consultant. Dockery ran unsuccessfully earlier this year in the May Democratic primary for County Commission District 10.
- Ronnie Johnson, no information available.
- Mark Jones, activist best known for pushing for a reopening and reuse of the Mid-South Coliseum.
If no one gets seven votes in the first round of council balloting Thursday, the council vote advances to a second and third round.
The council would then decide whether to delay a vote to a later date or to continue with three more rounds of balloting and from there another set of three rounds until someone gets seven votes or the council delays the decision.
Blankenship, Ford and Swearengen-Washington are among the four candidates in the special election race on the November ballot. The fourth contender, Dewayne Jackson, did not apply for the council appointment.
Council members will make nominations and could nominate outside of those who applied.
Not everyone who applied will necessarily be nominated. In past appointments to vacant council seats, the larger the field the less likely it is that more than three or four at the most will be nominated.
Whoever gets seven votes claims the council seat for the Orange Mound, South Memphis, Cooper-Young and Hickory Hill area until the results of the special election are certified.
That could be two months or three months, depending on whether any of the four contenders get a majority of the votes on the Nov. 8 ballot. If no one does, the top two contenders advance to a December runoff.
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Memphis City Council District 4 city council vacancyBill 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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