A briskly-debated referendum seeking voter approval of consolidation of the city of Memphis and neighboring Shelby County as a way to streamline regional government and increase competition is, according to polls, doomed to failure in the Nov. 2 election.

The measure, supported by business leaders but opposed by citizens, has been seen by Memphis residents as a dilution of the city’s influence, since Memphis city government would be absorbed into the county government under the proposal.

Proponents of consolidation cite the increased efficiencies of government, and blame consolidation opponents as mossbacks doing all they can to keep the region from growing.

Shelby County was the object of two previous consolidation efforts, in 1962 and 1971, years after the state’s “dual majorities” rule required two votes — a polling of Memphis residents and a vote of country residents outside Memphis — to achieve a metro consolidation.

For some of the city’s 415,000 African-American residents, 62 percent of all Memphians, consolidation efforts have a racial undertone. But the issue doesn’t conveniently break down along racial and ethnic lines of pro and con. Black business groups are some of the more ardent supporters of consolidation envisioning bottom-line benefits to the region, despite the just-as-strong opposition of the Memphis chapter of the NAACP.

It may be a sign of the times: A stagnant national economy and concerns about diminished American competitiveness have made government efficiency a watchword of the midterm campaign season. Talking points of candidates have focused on bloat and waste in governments from the statehouse to Washington. The consolidation measure plays strongly to businesses’ drive toward achieving that bottom-line efficiency.

“The fundamental problem in Memphis and Shelby County is we are simply not competitive in terms of the cost of our government structure, and we are losing population, and we are not growing as fast as our peer competitors,” said Fred Smith, the founder and CEO of FedEx, the global overnight-shipping giant that employs more than 30,000 people in the Memphis area.

“Unfortunately, in a market-based economy, not to grow means that your standard of living is going to decline. It’s just that simple. We are not competitive.” Smith said in an interview in the Memphis Flyer alternative newsweekly.

The consolidation drive has the support of the Black Business Association of Memphis, Elvis Presley Enterprises and the backing of J.R. (Pitt) Hyde, the founder of AutoZone and whose Hyde Foundation is a major donor to the National Civil Rights Museum.

“It’s just plain crazy, especially in these economic times, that we’re paying for two governments to do the work of one,” said Hyde at a September announcement of support by 75 area business leaders.

But for the Memphis NAACP, it wasn’t economics but education that factored in its October decision to urge a no vote on the proposed charter to consolidate.

“After careful review and deliberation the Committee resolved that the new Charter does not provide for the consolidation of the two school systems and it requires the City of Memphis to surrender its own Charter but it does not require any of the municipal governments in Shelby County to do likewise,” said a release from the Memphis NAACP’s Executive Committee.

The debate over consolidation in the metro Memphis area has national precedent. Portland, Ore., consolidated three cities into one in July 1891. Indianapolis consolidated many functions of city and county government in 1970. The biggest such consolidation occurred with the union of Manhattan with the city of Brooklyn and parts of three counties to form, in 1898, the civic and municipal infrastructure of modern New York City.
The reasons for that consolidation and the one proposed in the Memphis area are strikingly similar: “The general movement in the Old World for consolidating minor municipalities with the greater can scarcely have escaped observation,” wrote a consolidation commissioner in 1898. “London is at it. Berlin is at it. In this country, Chicago and Philadelphia have accomplished it…. No opportunity so full of promise for establishing improved methods in municipal government …has occurred.”

The support New York’s consolidation enjoyed a century ago isn’t present in the counties around modern-day Memphis.

Some of the objection, no doubt, stems from stubborn regional affinities and a preference for not having to contend with being wedded to Memphis’ singular urban challenges as the 19th-largest city in the United States. Its crime rate has decreased in recent years, but lingering perceptions of the city’s troubled past, combined with Memphis police’s use of the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System, a metric that includes all infractions, even the most minor, have combined to give what some Memphians think is a bad rap, and what others think is the truth.

“No thanks. Memphis has a lingering gloom that hangs over it. It’s a depressing violent city being ran by thugs. We don’t want anything to do with it and would be content building a wall that separates us from the city,” wrote one reader at the Smart City Memphis blog.

And then there’s the woeful disparity in black and white incomes. The black unemployment rate in Memphis is at 16.9 percent, while the city’s white unemployment rate is at 5.3 percent, according to The New York Times. Hardly attractive to those who oppose consolidation on the grounds of not wanting to take on Memphis’ baggage.

Some backers of consolidation call their opponents captive to their political aspirations. “There are a number of elected officials and power brokers around town that see this as dissolving their political base,” said Jack Sammons, a Memphis businessman. earlier this month.

Objection to consolidation apparently doesn’t just hinge on matters racial. A pending lawsuit brought by eight Shelby County residents who claim the dual majorities law violates the “one-person, one vote” run enshrined in the Constitution isn’t given much weight. “We don’t have the very, very tough history of voter discrimination that you find in other parts of the South,” said retired Circuit Court Judge D’Army Bailey, to the Memphis Daily News.

By all outward appearances, the dismal forecast for the consolidation bid may be evidence of how economics can trump everything as an issue, even the impact of race. A September poll showed that 72 percent of Shelby County voters oppose consolidation.

One thing animating the opposition’s feelings might be Shelby County’s deficit of $1.3 billion (according to the Shelby County Government Department of Finance). “The average county voter doesn’t care if Fred Smith or Pitt Hyde are for it,” said pollster Berje Yacoubian. “They are going to oppose it if they think it hurts them in the pocketbook.”