More Nashvillians know that opossums are marsupials than know the day of the county's primary election, which happens to be next week—May 7. There is, of course, a good reason for this disconnect. Most of those on the ballot next week are running unopposed. By and large, they are seeking the city’s constitutionally mandated offices—those the state’s founding document says each county must have.

Public defender Ross Alderman, Trustee Charlie Cardwell and other clerks and record keepers—whose positions probably have no business being elected in the first place—are guaranteed their well-paid administrative posts, simply because once they get there, few people come along to knock them off. These are the officials most voters only see at the county’s local-yokel fish fries. (The fish is usually pretty good, which may explain the officeholders’ perpetuity.)

As a consequence of these single-candidate races, there’s going to be some serious nail filing going on at the county’s election commission. To illustrate just how unimpassioned people are, consider this: Twenty-two people voted Saturday. That’s right. And not many more voters before, or since, have cast their early vote in the county primary.

“It’s like four-tenths of a percent have voted,” Michael McDonald, Metro’s administrator of elections, said earlier this week. “Anemic may be the word to use.” He predicts that only 11 to 15 percent of Davidson County’s 324,560 registered voters will turn out, which illustrates just how little people care.

But don’t write off your civic duty so fast. There are two contested races in the county’s primary next week—but, mind you, to say the elections are primaries is a bit of a misnomer, as there are no Republican candidates for these Democrats to face in the August general election. (Republicans don’t have fish fries in Davidson County.) Next week’s election, then, effectively decides the outcomes for the juvenile court clerk and sheriff contests.

Those races may seem like snoozers, but there’s more political intrigue in both than meets the eye. The races have pitted the mayor against the current sheriff, prompted a Titans cheerleader to enter the political fray and inspired a phantom candidate without an answering machine to potentially upset the juvenile court clerk race. More importantly, despite the relative obscurity of these offices, they very much affect the lives of Davidson County residents—whether voters know it or not.

One big filing cabinet

It’s hard to fight the glassy-eyed syndrome that tends to set in when talk of the juvenile court clerk post presents itself. But once the job is explained, the numbness tends to wear off a little.

The clerk’s office has about 30 employees and a budget of approximately $1.2 million. It is responsible for keeping records in all cases involving such issues as child support between couples who have never been married, custody and visitation disputes, child abuse and neglect cases, termination of parental rights, and, not least importantly, cases dealing with violent juvenile offenders who may be transferred to adult court. As well, it is the clerk who is charged with the administrative task of collecting child support.

Lawyers, the juvenile court judge and court referees are dependent on the clerk to keep complete and accurate records of court minutes and pleadings. Families with disputes being handled in the juvenile court are directly affected by the operation of the clerk’s office.

The one thing that the serious candidates running to replace juvenile court clerk Kenny Norman can agree on is that Norman is not the right man for the job. But if voters don’t believe his opponents, they can check out a recent independent audit of Norman’s office, which paints a decidedly grim administrative picture.

The office appears to be the only one in Metro government, for example, that doesn’t have a Web site. It’s technologically stunted, and those who deal with it day in and day out complain that files of ongoing cases are poorly maintained.

Perhaps most damning, Juvenile Court Judge Betty Adams Green says not so subtly that the office “needs someone with general intelligence...and someone who can just get along with people.” The Code of Judicial Conduct prohibits Green from advocating for or against particular political candidates, but she points to the independent audit, which is inarguably a partial indictment of Norman’s administrative abilities.

Green says, for example, that the audit points to the need for a clerk employee to be in each court at all times to take minutes of the proceedings. “One of the duties is to have a clerk in the courtroom from the beginning of court until it’s over,” Green says. “The only time I have a clerk in my courtroom is during a two-hour motion docket on Tuesday mornings.... The consultant report is pretty much on the money.”

As for the candidates opposing Norman, only two of the four are qualified. The other two can be quickly dismissed. The first sham candidate is Aubrey Allen, who has conceded that he’s not actually running a campaign. The man is difficult to reach even when someone wants to find him. The phone number, in fact, that Allen submitted to the election commission is actually registered to Gail A. Hughes, who doesn’t have an answering machine. Meanwhile, conspiracy theories abound about why Allen’s on the ballot—the most interesting being that Norman recruited Allen (who appears at the top of the alphabetized ballot) to further split up the vote among his opponents. Norman didn’t return a phone call from the Scene.

The other unqualified candidate is 21-year-old Titans cheerleader April Pennington, who has offered a not-so-compelling explanation for why she’s running—something about being on her way home on a snowy evening and seeing campaign signs in yards. Pennington is, by all accounts, perfectly well-meaning, but the office’s $1 million-plus budget requires a leader who’s had a checkbook for more than three years.

Which brings us to the qualified candidates, both of whom currently serve on the Metro Council. The first and, quite clearly, the hardest working is Bellevue council member Vic Lineweaver, who was briefly the juvenile court clerk in the late 1980s, when Davidson County created the office to be consistent with other counties in the state. Lineweaver, proprietor of Bellevue Patrol, a security company employing more than 40 workers, says he wants to make the office more accessible by increasing office hours, making technological improvements (like allowing fax filing of pleadings) and training employees.

Lineweaver is the father of two adopted children and a politician of the old-school variety. “I’ve been on both sides of that court,” Lineweaver says. West Nashville snoots might accurately regard him as more redneck than brainiac, but the man is more complicated than that. He says 28 of the 40 council members support him in the race, and he’s regarded as a very hard worker. “I’ve probably outworked the other four candidates combined,” he says.

In his spare time, Lineweaver works with juveniles who have trouble with truancy, and he has coached and sponsored Little League teams as well.

East Nashville Council member Eileen Beehan, who’s been much less visible than Lineweaver so far, is the preferred candidate among the coffee shop, Volvo set.

Beehan has spent her entire adult life as a social worker helping people in the societal margins, many of whom have come through the juvenile court clerk’s office. She currently works as director of social services for Catholic Charities of Tennessee, administering a budget roughly the same size as the clerk’s office and overseeing about the same number of employees.

She’s less specific than Lineweaver about what she would do if elected, characterizing herself as an “introvert,” who probably would be more inclined than Lineweaver to get a feel for the office before making changes.

To Lineweaver’s chagrin, Mayor Bill Purcell has endorsed Beehan in what appears to be the first time in Metro’s 39-year history that a mayor has openly taken political sides. That didn’t stop Lineweaver, though, in one of his characteristically endearing moments, from giving the mayor a yard sign, telling him, “Mayor, what you do in that voting booth is just between you and the Good Lord.”

Nashville’s Andy Griffith

Two-term Sheriff Gayle Ray is stepping down, leaving an open seat. And voters couldn’t ask for a more qualified field to replace her, as each of the three Democratic candidates running for the job has the experience to be the caretaker of the city’s approximately 3,000 jail inmates and rehabilitation programs, as well as manage the office’s more than 600 employees and $46 million budget.

It is this race that has inspired the most hand-wringing among the city’s hyperinvolved political observers, because, for starters, Ray has endorsed her chief deputy Daron Hall, while Purcell has endorsed at-large Metro Council member Leo Waters. Friends and political organizers who regard Ray and Purcell as politicos of a similar stripe are somewhat confused about who to support.

To complicate matters, both Hall and Waters have been labeled unfairly throughout the campaign. Hall, a career corrections professional, has been painted by some as a shill for the private-prison company, Corrections Corp. of America, his former employer. In fact, given the shakeup within the company, Hall says he doesn’t know any of the company’s current leadership, and says there are only about three people once associated with the company who have contributed to his campaign.

As well, he defends the knee-jerk reaction labor leaders have had to his private prison experience. “I believe that the CCAs of the world are healthy for government,” he says. He adds that the company is a prison manager, and that he would never advocate CCA overseeing Metro’s jail inmates, which is a different task altogether. “[CCA] is not the answer, but it’s not the devil,” Hall says. “I don’t agree with people who are against privatization in concept.”

For his part, Waters inexplicably hasn’t made the inroads he probably deserves in more affluent West Nashville areas—and concedes as such—though his popularity countywide is undisputed. His gravelly voice and public housing upbringing tends to hide the fact—on first meeting, anyway—that he’s a well-educated, nuanced and hard-working public official. “There are some vestiges of the old political campaigns that people like to tag me with that are antithetical to who I am,” Waters says.

First elected in 1995, Waters is perhaps the most involved and responsive of the Metro Council’s five at-large members. He’s been both for and against initiatives by former Mayor Phil Bredesen and current Mayor Bill Purcell, and his independence has served him well.

Purcell has, in fact, endorsed Waters in the sheriff’s race, partly because he believes the council member makes a good candidate and partly because the mayor clearly has reservations about continuing the Ray tradition in the sheriff’s office. It was only this year that Metro was released from court supervision stemming from years of jail overcrowding in Davidson County. Just about 10 days after becoming mayor in 1999, Purcell was notified by the federal judge in the case that the city had to cough up its plan to end the court supervision. Since then, the mayor and Ray have met monthly to work on a resolution. But it’s not a secret that Purcell resents that the long-standing issue was dropped in his lap.

Hall contends, however, that he and Ray had been working on a plan, and that it was almost complete when the new mayor came in, but that the transition from Bredesen to Purcell upset the progress. The Purcell administration, meanwhile, claims that it has been the catalyst for the progress in the sheriff’s office, and U.S. District Judge Thomas Higgins did in fact strongly credit Purcell in lifting the supervision.

A self-described recovering alcoholic, Waters’ candidacy is due, he says, in no small part to the fact that he wants to broaden rehabilitation efforts for criminals, most of whom statistics show are addicts of one kind of another. As well, Waters is no stranger to the jail, as he was recruited to work there by former Sheriff Fate Thomas, for whom Hall also worked.

The interest in rehabilitation isn’t unique to Waters. Hall says it is a priority for him, as it is for the third qualified candidate in the race, Charles Bass. Bass is a career Tennessee Department of Correction prison administrator who spent his time “behind the walls,” as he puts it, for decades before retiring several years ago. The reality, however, is that Bass has raised very little money for his campaign, which directly correlates with his limited support.

While Hall and Waters are each qualified—both have even studied criminology—there is a distinction to be made between the two. Hall sees the role of sheriff more narrowly, saying he would be disinclined to be out in the community as Waters might be, and instead would be more focused on running the jail. “I think the job that’s on the table is much more in line with what I’m doing than what he’s been doing,” Hall says.

Waters couldn’t disagree more. “I think that the office can be more than it is,” he says of the sheriff’s office. “If it’s just about managing jails, I don’t want to be sheriff. If it’s about providing leadership to deal with the homeless, addictions.... that is why I’m running for sheriff.”

On another note, there is also a contrast between the two concerning their dealings with employees. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which represents some of the sheriff’s office workers, has endorsed Waters. Hall, on the other hand, tends to have a more arm’s-length approach to labor. “I think it would be better for SEIU if Leo won,” Hall says.