Halls Shopper News

RAGSDALE RESPONDS (sort of)

We offered Mayor Mike Ragsdale an opportunity to comment. His spokesperson Dwight Van de Vate said: "This is a sad situation involving a deeply troubled young man; all we can do is wish him the very best as he tries to put his life together."

Mike Ragsdale: Ambitious mayor starts second term

Next Monday, Knox County Commission will vote on two contentious issues: Zoning for a $30 million tax-funded business park at Midway Road and Mike Ragsdale’s plan to trim costs at Hardin Valley High School by building for 1,300 rather than 2,100 students.

Angry residents will pack the City County Building, lack of convenient parking notwithstanding. Once again, commissioners will face politically distasteful choices. Four years ago, Team Ragsdale would have prevailed. Today, that's not certain.

How did the Ragsdale Administration consolidate, then squander, political power? Stay with us for the next three weeks. Staff writer Betty Bean says it started with a young man named Tyler Harber. ...

'Missing me now'
By Betty Bean

The day after the Aug. 3 county general election, an e-mail titled "Ragsdale missing me now" appeared in various local in-boxes and on Web sites. It listed the defeats suffered by candidates supported by county Mayor Mike Ragsdale and contrasted this string of losses with wins rung up when 24-year-old political operative Tyler Harber worked for Ragsdale.

Soon, message boards and courthouse hallways were buzzing with conversation about Harber, who disappeared from the scene 17 months ago under a cloud of scandal that included a police chase, a missing computer and allegations of computer hacking - none of which produced any charges against him.

Nobody knew the real identity of the e-mail's author (it came from something called "tylerharber.com"), but the buzz about the 1999 Farragut High School graduate proved that he is still on the minds of people who think about local politics, probably because his activities were shrouded in mystery and never really explained. The Shopper-News conducted a series of interviews after Harber left Knoxville and will examine some of the issues over the next two weeks.

Harber is a native Knox Countian who grew up in Claiborne County where his parents - whose names he doesn't wish to appear in this story - were involved in the coal mining business.

Why the secrecy?

"I just think it's nobody's business," he said.

Harber went to UT, majored in political science and cut his electioneering teeth by volunteering in the 2000 Bush/Cheney campaign's Knox County office. Like so many other aspiring political operatives, he is a devotee of "The Art of War," a ruthless "how-to" book written by an ancient Chinese general, Sun Tzu.

"I have multiple copies," Harber said. "There are different translations by different professors who''ve studied him." He's not much on Machiavelli, whom he says is "directed more to the leader than the strategist."

Other influences include the late GOP politico Lee Atwater, whom he calls "a defining character in the world of modern-day political operatives - 'do anything you need to do, attack on all fronts, take no prisoners. …' "

He quotes Napoleon, Gen. George Patton, Alexander the Great, Lord Nelson, even Democrat James Carville.

“I've studied military history - if I weren’t so short and fat, I probably would've gone to military school … so I figure I did the next best thing."

He made some valuable connections while volunteering in the Bush campaign and landed a job working on Archie Ellis's 2001 City Council race. Ellis lost in the primary, and Harber's next client, Joe Bailey, lost in the general election. But in the process, Harber met and worked for Joe May, a former state legislator and county commissioner who is now Knox County’s lobbyist in Nashville.

Mayor Mike

Soon thereafter, Harber met another former county commissioner, Mike Ragsdale, who was building toward a run for county executive in 2002.

Ragsdale, a native of Cleveland, had come to Knoxville to attend the University of Tennessee. As a first generation college graduate, he received the university's Torchbearer Award.

Ragsdale obtained a master's degree from Auburn University and then returned to UT to complete his doctorate in education.

He was director of admissions for what is now Pellissippi State Technical Community College for a time, and in 1987, he moved to Barber & McMurry, a well-established Knoxville architecture and planning firm. He worked as a partner and vice president of the firm for 16 years.

Ragsdale served on County Commission from 1990-98. And he wanted the county's top job. Before long, Harber was working in Mike Ragsdale's campaign.

Another Joe May employee, Rebecca Hargroves Smith, managed the day-to-day details of the Ragsdale campaign while Harber picked up checks, put together a Web site, advanced events and did voter targeting. He said his primary responsibility, however, was to get involved with a slate of Ragsdale-approved candidates - specifically "to run everyone else's races. All the candidates they wanted to run to take over Commission and/or the school board - that was my main job. I probably had my hands in 12 to 14 campaigns, most of which were Ragsdale-oriented. …"

After losing the Ellis and Bailey races, Harber said winning the Ragsdale race (and several other races as well) "… gave me two things: first, credibility; second, a power base. I wanted to establish myself as a good electioneer."

Eyes on the prize

Harber said he got his marching orders the day Ragsdale was sworn in:

"He took me to his office and told me, 'The first day I was elected to Commission, I started working on being elected county executive. Now, the first day I am county executive, I'm going to work on being governor. I want you to help me be governor.' "

Harber said he was a little overwhelmed.

"Now that’s a tall order," Harber said. "I was 19 years old. I didn't know exactly how, but I knew I could help him."

Harber went on the county payroll as an employee of Information Technology Services, headed by Dick Moran.

"But, most of my time, I spent with Mike," he said. "I would pick the man up from his house. I would be with him all day long, and I would drop him off at the end of the day. I was his body man. We would talk politics, policy and everything else in between. It sort of ‘married’ me to him."

Harber was still in school at this point and said he "was spending a whole lot of nights and days awake.

"So at this time, I have a desk in IT, and I’m working on things like the 'Read with Me' program and board appointments. During the first few months, I was also doing campaign work for (GOP U.S. Senate candidate) Lamar Alexander."

Life was good.

"We controlled County Commission. We controlled the school board - although we could never get rid of (Superintendent Dr. Charles) Lindsey. We were getting along with everybody because we were extremely victorious. We could throw some business to people who helped us, and we did, because the mayor's budget was enormous, full of money we could spend in 'PR' ways."

After awhile, Harber changed jobs - "I needed to be somewhere there weren't quite so many eyes," he said. "So I moved over to Probation and Pretrial when we hired Todd Cook to head it. It was like this - 'I'm sending Tyler over there.'

"Actually, I only had one boss; I guess two - (Mike) Arms and Ragsdale. I really didn’t work for Dick Moran, or Todd Cook, although I respect them both very much. …

"After I moved over to probation, the cover story was that I'm there to make sure the electronic monitoring (ankle bracelets) were working. That was my cover story. I had zero caseload and never saw a single probationer. I had no obligation or task relative to IT or Pretrial Release and Probation, although I did help Todd and Dick with some things, when they asked.

"I even learned how to put on and operate an electronic tracking device in case a journalist ever asked me to do so (they never did). When there'd be a TV story about electronic tracking, I made sure I was there. … Eventually, I was moved to an office on the 6th floor of the Andrew Johnson with Community TV, where there were not so many eyes."

Taxing wheels

It was good to be Mike Ragsdale in the spring of 2004. Midway through his first term as county mayor, things were going his way. He had pretty much brought County Commission to heel and was getting most of what he wanted, including a $6 license tag renewal fee that had passed unanimously the previous year.

Perhaps emboldened by the docile reaction to the $6 fee hike, Ragsdale proposed an additional $30 wheel tax. Once again, the commissioners gave him what he wanted, but this time with a little opposition - it passed 16-3. Rumors swirled that Ragsdale swore to take revenge on Mark Cawood, Paul Pinkston and Mike McMillan, the three commissioners who voted against the tax.

"The wheel tax? I just could not support it," said Cawood. "I had the 113-4 rule - 113 calls against it and four for it; and the four who called in favor of the wheel tax were basically just feeding at the trough. I was elected to represent the people of my district, not the Ragsdale administration - that’s my job. I'd heard rumors that he would have someone against me, and I didn't know if the rumors were true or not, but you have to assume they are because they came from a couple of good sources."

One of Cawood's constituents, Greg "Lumpy" Lambert, showed up the day of the final wheel tax vote wearing a giant screw through his body.

Come Sept. 1, the Powell used car dealer will be known as commissioner Lumpy Lambert and will join Cawood in representing District 6. Considering that Cawood fended off a general election challenge from county employee Chuck James, a Ragsdale-backed candidate who had supported the wheel tax, and Lambert beat Ragsdale-blessed opponents in both the primary and the general elections, these two seatmates probably won't be harboring any warm fuzzy feelings toward Mayor Mike.

But that's getting ahead of the story.

Fighting the referendum

Also present the day of the wheel tax vote was east Knox Countian Gary Sellers, a slow-talking, deliberate man who urged the commissioners not to approve the tax and threatened to mount a petition drive to force a referendum if they did. Afterward, Sellers proved to be good as his word. He and his wife, Sheila, spent a long, hot summer sitting in shopping center parking lots collecting signatures. Lambert signed on to the effort, and so did a few others. A bona-fide grassroots citizen movement was born.

Ragsdale had used a proposed new downtown library as the "carrot" to pass the wheel tax. He later dropped the library in favor of a new high school in deep west Knox County. But as it became clear that opposition to the wheel tax was growing, Team Ragsdale came up with a "stick" that was soon dubbed the "blackmail tax." This proposal required a Commission vote to impose a "contingency" property tax increase if the wheel tax was voted down in November - made it 'either/or" instead of a straight-up vote on a wheel tax.

Tyler Harber calls the wheel tax episode "a fiasco" and says forcing the "contingency" tax vote was a huge mistake.

"When we started pushing our allies to vote for the property tax, we put them in jeopardy, and that is something you never want to do. Everything was going good up until then, but we got a whole lot more paranoid and a whole lot more power hungry, and got involved in a whole lot of things we shouldn't have gotten involved in," Harber said. "We raised a lot of money under the table and behind closed doors for our anti-wheel tax referendum campaigns.

"No one is pro-tax. That's where this anti-Ragsdale sentiment came from. It's the way we forced the issue that caused the opposition.

"I prepared an opposition report and the idea was floated that we put some 'plants' into the referendum organization to get information as to how many signatures they were getting. Our information was dead-on."

This assessment was validated by none other than Ragsdale's chief of staff, Mike Arms. In a March 20, 2005, News Sentinel story by Scott Barker, Arms said, "Lo and behold, when it was all said and done, (Tyler) was pretty close. He knew how many had signed it at the Halls Wal-Mart.”

Harber says his 'plants' (whom he would not identify) were able to make at least 2,000 signatures go away.

"We decided to subvert, steal and destroy as many petitions as we could get our hands on. We were trading real petitions for fake petitions so they would think they had more names than they actually had."

Marsha, Marsha, Marsha

Meanwhile, Harber said, the Ragsdale administration "kept thinking that there had to be somebody behind this. They kept asking 'Why is (Sellers) doing this? There's got to be somebody behind this.'"

At some point, Harber said, Team Ragsdale decided that "somebody" was probably Marsha Blackburn, a popular member of Congress from Williamson County whom they considered a potential rival for the GOP gubernatorial nomination in 2010.

As a state senator, Blackburn had been closely allied with the anti-income tax forces in Nashville.

Harber said: "It got back to us that this anti-tax organization that was helping Sellers and Lumpy was backed heavily by Marsha. We perceived it as an outside attack. I prepared an opposition report on the anti-wheel tax organization and its media implications. We pulled voters' records and compiled a full report on their ages, marital status, voting records. We investigated Lumpy, Sellers and several other people including (radio talk show hosts) Lloyd Daugherty and Kelvin Moxley.

"Ultimately, the reason we weren't more successful was that this was a guerilla movement and there wasn't a real organization to it. I took a lot of flack from Ragsdale, but there was no way short of breaking into the man's house that I could have gotten inside it."

Just the screw, ma'am

Ben Cunningham, head of Tennessee Tax Revolt, says his group had only minimal involvement in the Knox County wheel tax fight.

"The (body) screw was ours, and Lumpy was the perfect one to wear it. We had used it at the Capitol and it's an absolute magnet for photographers. I had it in the truck and asked Lumpy if he wanted to wear it. I think that was the only day I came to Knoxville.

"I'd seen in the paper that Gary (Sellers) was thinking about doing (the referendum), so I called him and asked what we could do to help. We are a knowledge base and resource for these citizen groups. I helped him with the statutory wording on the petition, and that's about the extent of our involvement.

"And Marsha Blackburn has never been involved in our group, either directly or indirectly. She's never been to a meeting."

Cunningham said the Ragsdale administration is fortunate that the voters chose the wheel tax over the property tax increase.

"There’s one other thing I remember about this - the property tax increase they passed was clearly illegal. Dickson County went to the state attorney general, who issued an opinion that you cannot set a tax rate after October. ... If it had come to that, it's very clear to me it would have been ruled illegal and unconstitutional."

Sellers and Lambert both believe some skullduggery went on with their petition drive. Lambert said petitions left at retail establishments disappeared. Sellers said the Election Commission’s count was "about 3,000 signatures short of what we thought it should be."

Harbe's assessment is tinged with regret.

"Ragsdale wanted to build something the whole community could get behind - the downtown library. He wanted to leave a physical legacy, and he used (Gov. Phil) Bredesen as a model. As mayor of Nashville, Bredesen built a beautiful library. A crown jewel. Ragsdale wanted to do the same.

"But we overextended ourselves, and when it was evident that the wheel tax was going to get onto the ballot, we were left with only two choices - beat it or let it beat us, in which case we're damaged, to the extent that we couldn't run for governor. It turns out this was just as bad."

Next week, Bean explores the Web site caswalker.com and talks with candidates who felt the fundraising muscle of Team Ragsdale.