A group of professionals, businesses, non-profits and community organizations in Memphis has recently banded together to form the Coalition for a Better Memphis, following the pattern of a business coalition called Committee for a Better Atlanta in Alabama. With the goal of informing and educating voters, both groups developed a set of candidate criteria meant to be non-partisan and somewhat objective evaluation guides.

This past week, the Coalition for a Better Memphis released its first set of candidate grades, scoring each of the Shelby County Commission candidates running for contested seats. The CBM voter guide gave an overall score to each candidate on a scale of 1 to 100, with 100 being the highest possible score. The scores are based on written questionnaires given to each candidate (not all candidates participated in the evaluation) and in-person interviews. These overall scores are further broken down into three general qualities (vision, qualifications and experience, ability to implement initiatives) and five specific issues (integrity and ethics, county debt, education finance, economic development and growth policies).

Did the Coalition succeed in offering non-partisan evaluations? It’s difficult to say for sure. With no track record previous to this election and with a small pool of candidates scored, those trends that appear are tentative.

The big winner was Republican Mike Ritz, scoring 89 overall. Ritz also received the highest individual score of 92 in the category of “growth policy.” The lowest overall scores were earned by two Democrats running in District 3 Position 1 — Adrian Killebrew and Georgia Malone — each receiving a grade of 50. Killebrew and opponent Del Gill (D) also shared the lowest individual score of 39, for “Integrity and Ethics in Government” and “Growth Policy,” respectively.

In addition, Republicans received a higher average score of 76, compared to 70 for Democrats. Do these results reveal a conservative bias in the data? Perhaps not. In the one race where both parties are really competing against each other (District 5), a Democrat came out on top — Steve Mulroy, with an overall score of 86. It should also be noted that more Democrats than Republicans were evaluated, allowing for the possibility that its talent pool was diluted with a number of lesser-qualified candidates.

The CBM also received praise from a few Memphis liberals. LeftWingCracker said the Coalition did a “diligent job” in reviewing the candidates, West Tennessee Liberal’s David Holt seemed rather pleased and Smart City Memphis offered the group a mostly-positive welcome:

As for the Coalition for a Better Memphis, it’s encouraging whenever leaders and organizations – grassroots and prominent – are willing to get their hands dirty by getting directly involved in the political process. Dean Deyo, former head of Time Warner here, deserves a lot of credit for putting together this new program.

We admit that we are perplexed by some of the evaluations and the framework used by the Coalition members to reach the grades announced this week, but those are expected first year growing pains. Regardless, the Coalition’s a welcome voice in the political process if it can improve the quality and qualifications of candidates for public office in this community.

It’s quite an achievement for CBM to have pleased members of both parties, though it has adopted a system that seems certain to create more political enemies than friends (those not receiving the top score in each race).

The Coalition deserves plenty of praise for getting involved in the process, for having the vision of a better Memphis, for developing the evaluation system and bringing everyone together, for putting everything online, and for shaking the tree of political power.

On the other hand, it’s unclear how much these efforts bring to the table for the average voter in Memphis.

First of all, there’s the question of whether voters are better informed after coming into contact with this material. If the candidates are already unknown quantities, are voters really aided by the evaluations of a group of nameless, faceless entities? Do voters have a clear reason to hold the evaluations of a disparate group of 50 businesses and organizations in high esteem? Why does the unimformed voter care how executives from Time Warner or Memphis Restaurant Association feel about the candidate?

Second, can the Coalition really reach uninformed voters and make a difference in the way they make their political decisions, and will it have any influence on those groups who are already in the know?

Organizers say the Coalition can “provide momentum for qualified candidates who may not have the name or connections to get off the ground,” or at least “help identify ‘nuisance’ candidates, like Robert ‘Prince Mongo’ Hodges.” However, does that tell voters anything they didn’t already know? Will Mongo voters stop voting for Hodges because he received a bad evaluation from the Memphis Area Association of REALTORS and 100 Black Men of Memphis, Inc.? One would suspect not.

Still, the average voter will benefit from having access to the candidates’ raw questionnaires, and over time, once the CBM has developed a track record, voters will be able to qualify the scores and use them as factors in their own decision-making process, perhaps similar to how moviegoers treat a “thumbs-up” from Ebert and Roeper.

Friends of the Coalition have also posted a comprehensive Shelby County Election Guide (PDF) that voters may find quite helpful. It explains the duties of each elected office and offers various facts about the incumbents, term of service, salary, etc.

All said, the Coalition for a Better Memphis is a welcome newcomer to the local political scene.