MEMPHIS, TN (abc24.com) - Greetings to the residents of South Cordova, and welcome to the city of Memphis. Sure, there was no welcome mat, or much of any notice, but you can rest assured that your new mayor was just as uninformed as you about annexation.
“They won’t get any double talk from me about it,” says Memphis Mayor A C Wharton. “All I can do is set about trying to make it right. That’s what we’re going to do.”
The Wharton administration will try to “make it right” after they made it about as wrong as possible.
Nikki Mitchell and family came back from an out of town trip on Sunday to learn from neighbors they were now living in the city of Memphis. “We’re very disappointed,” Mitchell said. “We weren’t for the annexation to begin with, but we felt like at least we should have received some type of notice.”
Mayor Wharton says he received maybe two weeks notice. “The matter was tied up in court for eleven years. Then about two weeks ago, we got notice that the litigation is over. It was about some thing that the lawyer didn’t do or something. There’s nothing we can do while it’s tied up in court. Then they walk in and tell us it’s over.”
You might get the idea that what happened doesn’t give a lot of people in South Cordova faith in their new city. Apparently, nobody in government said anything about the annexation for two weeks because they were busy trying to find out what it meant.
“Well, we were trying to get all the answers because we knew it was coming,” says Memphis City Council member Bill Boyd. “We were hustling around trying to get the right answers. We didn’t want to blow any smoke.”
Mayor Wharton, Councilman Boyd, and city directors will meet with people from South Cordova on Wednesday, July 11th, at Bert Ferguson Community Center.
