Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect two changes to District 5’s boundaries over the last two years by the City Council.

The race for Memphis City Council District 5 on the October ballot is one of at least five council contests that will put a new face on the 13-member body.

And based on campaign finance statements submitted in early July — the most current reports won’t be available until Sept. 28 — it is the most expensive of the ballot’s 13 council races.

Current council member Worth Morgan is in the last year of his second term; term limits prevent him from seeking a third.

Jerri Green, Luke Hatler and Benji Smith among new faces in council races

District 5 covers Midtown, parts of East Memphis, Berclair and Binghampton.

Earlier this year, the council moved a single precinct from District 5 into District 2.

Precinct 13-1, which votes on election day at Berclair Church of Christ, 4536 Summer Ave., moved from District 5 to District 2.

The council made other changes to the district in 2022.

Here are the District 5 candidates:

Luke Hatler is a senior at White Station High School running a campaign for an office that will have to compete with his schedule of classes if he wins. Hatler is on the youth advisory board of Bridges, a nonprofit community leadership group for young people.

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He has said the city is being run for developers and the wealthy and he wants to open access to those “left behind by government.”

He proposes changing the Memphis Housing Authority’s focus from public housing to affordable housing.

Meggan Wurzburg Kiel is community engagement director with the University of Memphis School of Public Health, a former elementary school teacher and co-founder and community organizer of the social justice group Memphis Interfaith Coalition for Action and Hope (MICAH).

Kiel, a native Memphian, also worked in the national office of Facing History and Ourselves and was in the first cohort of the Boston Teacher Residency before teaching elementary school and working as a guidance counselor at Reach Memphis and Soulsville Charter School.

“What I hear is people are tired of the same leaders with the same ideas, the same relationships, and they want new leaders,” she told The Daily Memphian. “They want new leaders who have relationships across the community and have the pulse of the issues. They want leaders who are going to do the work and do the homework.”

Philip Spinosa is a former Councilman elected in 2015 to one of the three positions in Super District 9. Spinosa resigned from the council in August 2018 to take a leadership position with the Greater Memphis Chamber. He worked as senior vice president of the Chairman’s Circle beginning during the tenure of Phil Trenary, the chamber’s former president who was fatally shot in Downtown Memphis in 2018.

Spinosa currently is owner of Prestigious Logistics, a boutique logistics and freight brokerage firm.

On the council, Spinosa was a supporter of Mayor Jim Strickland’s “brilliant at the basics” strategy. That included Spinosa’s proposal of a “neighborhood sentinel” program to place SkyCop cameras in high-crime neighborhoods.

“I feel like things were more honest then,” Spinosa told The Daily Memphian. “Today, everything is about public safety. It was back then as well.”

Spinosa and Kiel have each raised six figures, according to their July campaign finance reports.

Kiel reported $143,940 in her campaign account at the start of July; Spinosa reported $139,884; and Hatler reported $0.

Some candidates got into the various council races late enough that their first financial reports of the campaign aren’t due until later this month. But of those reports filed in early July, Super District 9 incumbent Jeff Warren had the next-closest dollar amount to Kiel and Spinosa, with $119,000 on hand. Warren is running unopposed.

Spinosa says the council he served on seven years ago had a handle on crime.

“I think the body needs less activism and more people that are willing to work together,” he said of the current council. “I can’t wait to work with everyone and get to know everyone and build those relationships.”

Kiel says crime remains a problem but that voters in the district want a change from past methods.

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“Our challenges are too deep and widespread to solve with tough talk,” she said in a separate interview.

“The first thing we have to do is we have to build our strength and we have to fully staff MPD so that we can leverage tactics that are critical with community-based policing to help with prevention and help with building trust within the community,” Kiel said. “The second thing we have to do is attack the root of the problem, and that’s deepening our commitment to focused deterrence to violence prevention and intervention.”

Spinosa accuses Kiel of wanting to defund police, a claim Kiel denies. 

She says her position echoes what Memphis Police Department Chief Cerelyn “C.J.” Davis has been saying: more arrests won’t solve the problem.

Spinosa also disagrees with police reform measures the council has approved in the last three years.

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“I would like to believe in my heart that council members are voting their conscience and trying to do the right thing,” he said. “But the unintended consequence of that is the criminals have taken advantage of every single one of those.”

“We have to be strong, and we have to be smart,” Kiel countered. “We have to focus resources on those who are going to be most at risk.”

If no candidate in the race gets a majority of the votes in the October election, the top two vote-getters advance to a Nov. 16 runoff election.

The runoff provision applies only to the seven single-member district council seats, not the six total Super District seats.