Metro Pulse/Cover/County Elections 2002

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Rags to Executive
Unopposed for county executive, Mike Ragsdale sets the agenda that most Commission candidates tend to follow

Trend Toward Lockstep
Commission candidates nearly all stand for economic development plus education

Tim v. Them
Sheriff Hutchison's got a race or two on his hands this time out

A simple court clerkship can stir up quite a political stew

by Barry Henderson

It's challenger Lillian Bean against office-holder Cathy Quist for the Knox County Circuit, Civil Sessions and Juvenile Court clerkship this election season. Four years ago, it was the other way around.

Bean lost the office to Quist the way she held it for 18 years. She bowed to a political force that was similar to the one she once wielded, one that had grown superior to her own "Bean Machine."

It was manipulated by Republicans loyal to Sheriff Tim Hutchison, whose own power in the county was cresting at the time his people were supporting Quist.

By late 2001, Hutchison's clout had waned perceptibly, and Bean's decision was firm to seek the clerkship again. The question is, can Big Lil's bean suppers and recipe notes and her new round of campaigning bring more Republicans to the polls May 7? Or has Quist sufficiently solidified her own position among the county's pols and the lawyers and judges who use the office? It will be decided in the primary. No Democrat filed for the clerk's race.

Quist's clerkship was troublesome and controversial at first, with employees leaving right and left and payments going very slowly on a $756,000 county loan to operate the office. The loan was necessary to run the clerkship, since the Bean books and accounts had been closed in a routine that goes with a change in clerks. But early costs took up much of the court fee-collection balance that usually goes to the county general fund, and the loan looked shaky for a couple of years.

Quist lays those problems largely to "the changeover and the effect it had on employees. We made a lot of changes." Once the changes were in place and "the employees and judges were working together to collect fees," repayment sped up, she says, to the point where the loan was paid off last April. "We paid back $902,000, about $146,000 more than was extended," she says.

In mid-term, the sessions court's criminal division and 40 employees were transferred to Criminal Court Clerk Martha Phillips' office to consolidate criminal proceedings. It was considered a controversial move in itself, but Quist says it was the product of discussions with Phillips and with attorneys, "who had been asking why it hadn't been done before. It has worked out well, because it made sense."

That sort of shift would not have occurred with Bean as clerk, Bean herself acknowledges. She says she is still skeptical of its effects. But Bean's employees were an important part of her power base. To give away 40 of them would have been highly improbable.

Bean says she sees her chances to regain the office as good, based in part on her better ability to campaign this time. "I lost that election, she didn't win it," Bean says. "I didn't campaign hard enough." She had double knee replacement surgery right after the loss and says the lack of mobility and pain she was suffering then is now past. And, she says, the sheriff she supported strongly when he first won office in 1990, and who turned on her ("It may have been my support of Metro government, which he opposed, I don't really know."), should be less of a factor this year. "What goes around comes around," she says, adding that she'll be accused of working for Hutchison's principal GOP opponent, J.J. "Jimmy" Jones, in this election, "but I'm busy working on my own campaign."

Bean had other problems toward the end of her last term, with one deputy clerk, Wayne Potter, convicted of abusing the office by soliciting for prostitution from women who owed court fees, and another, former County Commissioner Rudy Dirl, convicted of cocaine charges. The latter had nothing to do with the office, but it made a negative splash.

In a reflection on Quist's application last year to be considered for the post of Oak Ridge city attorney, Bean says, "I want the job (of clerk) more than she does, obviously." Quist's response is that she sought the Oak Ridge post because her mother, who lives there, had gone through serious injuries in an auto accident and needed her daughter nearby. Quist withdrew her application when, she says, other family arrangements were made. "I wouldn't vote for somebody who wouldn't go take care of her mother," Quist says.

Both Bean, 58, and Quist, who is 42 and a lawyer and former deputy law director for the county, claim that the office's future needs will include technological upgrading, which they each pledge to see performed. Bean says she'd like to institute a merit plan to offer job security to the office's employees. Quist says she sees room for further "streamlining," plus a better employee screening and training process.

Either way, it won't be promises to improve the workings of the clerk's office that decide the election; it will be the rough-and-tumble political campaigning that moves the voters one way or the other. Bean says if she wins she would probably regain some of her lost Republican "influence." That's "not my objective," she says, "but I'm comfortable with that."