By Billy Davis
and John Howell Sr.

Como Mayor Judy Sumner, fighting cancer and a busted town budget, said this week she has qualified to seek re-election.

“You may laugh at me, but I have to have help from above to do this,” she said, describing prayers asking for widsom to help a town mired in debt, and strength for a body battling its own cells.

Sumner is receiving treatment for breast cancer at The West Clinic, a Memphis-based oncology clinic known for advanced treatments. Her cancer is rare, she said, so rare that she is “number 13,” one of only 13 people in the country known to have it.

Sumner said her physician, Dr. Benton Wheeler, told her last week that the cancer is “contained.” With that news, she turned in her qualifying papers to town hall on Friday. 

The qualifying deadline is March 6. Sumner has drawn one opponent, Andrew Cook.

Since qualifying began in January, some observers, believing Sumner has been an asset to town government, watched with concern as weeks passed and Sumner had not turned in her paperwork.

“It was very much a concern,” said a Como resident who attends the city board meetings. 

Como’s current mayor, a novice at politics, took office in June 2008 after a circuit court fight gobbled up three years of a four-year term.

After hearing the case, a judge ruled that Sumner was the rightful winner of the 2005 mayor’s race. The election results had been flipped when Como’s Democratic Election Committee counted absentee ballots that had been rejected by poll workers.

Every vote went to incumbent mayor Azria “Bobby” Lewers. 

A year earlier, in July 2007, the Internal Revenue Service had seized Como’s bank accounts for almost two years of non-payment of employee withholdings into trust fund accounts.

The freeze awakened Como citizens to a long-simmering financial crisis that boiled over with additional revelations from month to month through 2007 and 2008 that fiscal mismanagement had brought the town into indebtedness amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars, with limited means to repay.

“When I took office, our maintenance department didn’t have a shovel,” Sumner said this week.

But much has been improved, said the incumbent mayor.

Thirty-four natural gas leaks, which were the cause of runaway gas bills, have since been repaired.

At a board meeting last summer, Sumner held up two pieces of PVC pipe, explaining that they had been allowed for natural gas lines. PVC pipe is used for water lines, steel for gas lines.

But Sumner this week credited town employees for working hard on behalf of the town. She praised water operator Andre Ellis for giving Como “good water,” and she credited gas operator Tommy Rayburn, who discovered the PVC pipe, for helping fix the broken lines. 

She also praised Paul Holloway, who operates under contract to oversee Como’s sewage treatment plant.

Ellis, Rayburn and Holloway all have proper certification to perform their duties.

“Judy wants to be known as a person who treats everyone fairly,” said Jody Johnson, who pastors Sumner at Como Baptist Church.

Johnson said he goes to Como Town Hall each Tuesday to pray with Sumner. In recent weeks, the preacher and the mayor have been praying for direction about Sumner seeking a second term.

“She asked how do you go about making the right decision, and I said I don’t know because I haven’t always made the right decisions either,” recalled Johnson.

“I told him I didn’t have any peace about it,” Sumner recalled.

As a decision loomed, Johnson shared a couple of Bible verses. Then he advised Sumner to seek an answer, then follow it.

“The next time I saw Judy she said she had decided,” Johnson said. “Evidently something happened and she got her answer.”

Sumner said she decided to seek a second term because she has unfinished plans, which she described as “big things.” She likened those plans to being on Como’s doorstep and knocking at the door.

One of those plans is the pursuit of a Rural Development grant worth $750,000 that would upgrade the cash-strapped town’s sewer and water lines. 

“I’m steady working about things for the future. I’m pressing ahead,” Sumner said.