Bamboozled Again

With some 200 supporters at last week's City Council meeting, it was an impressive showing. They were, for a few minutes, confident they could stop out-of-state developers JPI—a.k.a. Jefferson Commons—from razing more than a dozen turn-of-the-century houses, several of them well-preserved, in the Fort Sanders community. They thought they had enough council votes to appeal the consolidation rulings to scuttle the project. But as it turned out, Mayor Victor Ashe and one of their anticipated supporters on council—Ed Shouse—weren't present. Of the remaining eight, four supported the neighborhood; the feelings of the others were unknown. The developers, who have mounted an impressive propaganda campaign with lawmakers and the press, apparently weren't sure they'd done enough lobbying, either, and the two sides cut a deal.

Councilman Gary Underwood didn't bring up the motion, and attorney John King, representing the developer, agreed to table the vote for 90 days, with the agreement that no buildings would be demolished during that period. King agreed to the terms, admitting, "I have one property owner who's not here. I can't speak for him."

That property owner, the Fort Sanders supporters discovered, turned out to be Robert Shagan, who owns most of the property involved in the project. And, as it was later disclosed, Shagan had already obtained demolition permits for 10 of the houses in question. Meanwhile, an unrelated Shagan-owned property on Laurel Avenue went down this week.

And the Winner Is...

...Channels 10, 6, and 8 and ComCast, who cleaned up with the biggest haul of political ads in local history.

The year's biggest, slickest, toughest effort has to be that of Republican DA nominee Jimmy Kyle Davis, who has been on a 30-day media blitzkrieg centered around three nuclear television spots attacking incumbent Randy Nichols. Produced in Dallas, Texas by Scott Howell, the same firm that did U.S. Rep. Van Hilleary's 1994 media, the ads have drawn sharply differing reactions.

Davis campaign manager Cameron Sexton says his camp has gotten an overwhelmingly positive response and has picked up a bunch of volunteers. But Nichols' media man Tom Jester says his strategy was to make "ads that would work under oath," refuting Davis' allegations.

The other marquee race is the County Executive contest between incumbent Democrat Tommy Schumpert and GOP challenger Scott Davis. Schumpert, whose campaign coffers have been stoked by the deepest pockets in town, appears to be confident of re-election—or has gotten the least bang for his buck, depending upon how you look at it. His one TV spot, which repeatedly refers to him as "Coach," was at first centered around a picture of Schumpert and U.S. Rep. Jimmy Duncan, which elicited howls of GOP protest and the eventual exorcism of Duncan's image from the ad and a print endorsement of Davis by Duncan in the Sunday paper.

(Late-Breaking Development: Forty-eight hours before the election, "Coach" has morphed into a negative campaigner as the guts of his warm, fuzzy spot has been transformed into an attack on Davis. The ad is based on anonymous information shopped around and rejected by every major media outlet. Say it ain't so, Coach!)

Davis' ads, produced and directed by GOP campaign manager Ray Hill, feature a "batter-up" spot crammed with inside baseball jokes. The klutzy batter, in a uniform marked "Schump's Wrecker Service," strikes out as a voice-over intones a variety of sins.

Jester, who did not do the 1998 Schumpert spot, says the Republicans are paying homage to the 1994 "Cadillac stuck in the mud" spot he created for Schumpert in 1994 (Schumpert was at the wheel of a wrecker pulling an old Cadillac out of a mud hole). He also suggests a way out of the Duncan flap: "I would have substituted a shot of Schumpert shaking hands with Elvis."