Ok. It took a call to Apple and a bounce to engineering, but I think I have an answer. At least it fixed the issues on my computer, although I cannot understand why this would have created the problem I was experiencing. Apparently Disk Utility would not allow me to partition the internal drive while TimeMachine had a local snapshot.
The fix is relatively easy. In Terminal enter
tmutil listlocalsnapshots /
Once you see the list go ahead and delete them
tmutil thinlocalsnapshots /
That should allow you to partition the drive. On mine when I added the new partition it showed as if I had created two partitions, one the intended partition and then a second unmounted partition of essentially the same size that was formatted with APFS partition store. On restart the second ghost partition was gone and the issue resolved.
Good luck if anyone stumbles across this problem.