Arkansas Times' Week in Review Podcast: Recent Episodes
Arkansas Times
Every Friday, Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the biggest stories of the week in The Natural State. Since 2011, "The Week in Review Podcast" has been the place to go for the straight dirt on politics and culture. With more than 40 years as a journalist in Arkansas, Brantley is unrivalled when it comes to providing the broad context you need to stay in the know.
If you aren’t a Saracen Player’s Club member, you’ll want to join so you don’t miss out on a chance to win your share of prizes—including a Lotus Emira.
Last week, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute published an article that celebrates Arkansas’s private school voucher program. It offers up data from our state’s annual “Education Freedom Accounts” report as reason to believe that Arkansas families are giving up on public education. In particular, the article celebrates that, “Parents are no longer waiting for reforms to arrive or bear fruit.”
There are several problems with the article’s argument, but let’s start with the obvious: Arkansas families are not flocking en masse to public education alternatives.
The voucher program’s enrollment is growing because more already-enrolled private school families are now getting vouchers.
The article points out that enrollment in our state’s private school voucher program did double from Year 1 to Year 2 of the program. That is noteworthy enrollment growth, but it must be clarified: in Year 2 of the program, 83% of the new enrollees did not attend a public school in the previous year.
Based on available data, the private school voucher program’s growth is not generally indicative of public school families making new or different education choices; instead, it’s generally indicative of already-enrolled private school families opting to claim newly available state funds for tuition.
The retention of already-enrolled private school students is neither a surprise, nor does it measure the choices being made by public school families.
The article celebrates the private school voucher program’s 91% retention rate into Year 3 of the program. This is interpreted by the author as a sign of a “durable” transition of public education families toward private education providers. But again, the reasoning here is flawed: 83% of new enrollees in the private school voucher program were not previously public school enrollees, so not only does the data not support “transition durability” – there’s just very little transition to speak of in the first place.
None of us should be surprised that 91% of a population of students, the vast majority of whom were already enrolled in private schools or homeschooled prior to their enrollment in the Education Freedom Accounts program, opted to continue in their private education.
There is a question we should be asking: Who are the 9% of students who were not retained? Had they previously been public school students and switched back to public school enrollment, for one reason or another? (If we try, we can make the data cited by the article support “education choice fragility” just as well as it supports “education choice durability.”)
In Arkansas, Education Freedom Accounts are predominantly subsidies for families whose children were already enrolled in private schools.
The author very briefly entertains this objection, but does not answer it. His words:
“Critics often argue that ESAs mainly subsidize families already in private schools. That may be partly true at the outset, but it misses the larger dynamic. As the Arkansas report suggests, new and durable funding streams invite new entrants: low-cost private schools, microschools, hybrids—much as the charter movement did a generation ago. Said differently, an ESA doesn’t change who is eligible to receive a free public education. It changes who is eligible to provide it.”
Critics rightly argue that Arkansas’s “Education Freedom Accounts” predominantly subsidize families already in private schools – because that’s exactly what EFAs have done in Arkansas, to-date, to the ballooning tune of $300 million a year.
The remainder of the quote fails to recognize an important reality: “New entrants” into the education industry, in response to the genesis of new “durable [public] funding streams,” are not yet correlated with (new) excellent learning environments or (new) improved learning outcomes. Arkansas doesn’t need just more education providers; we need more Arkansas children enrolled in world-class learning environments that (1) improve measurable learning outcomes, (2) are accountable to the strictest standards of evidence-based education best practices, and (3) are transparent and accountable in their expenditure of state dollars.
I’m certain the article’s author would agree that having another education option doesn’t do one any good, if it’s a sub-standard option. We should be measuring the quality of the choices available to parents, not the number of the choices.
The available data simply does not support the claims made by the author. Sure, enrollment in Arkansas’s “Education Freedom Account” private school voucher program has vastly expanded; but that does not mean participation in alternatives to public education has vastly expanded. And it certainly does not mean Arkansas’s families have given up on the project of a quality public education.
It’s a story to tell, but it’s not the story being told by Arkansas’s data.
The view from other statesWe reached out to some of our colleagues in other parts of the country, for their response to the Fordham Institute article. Each of the following organizations works in a state touted as a success story in the article.
Beth Lews, Director of Save Our Schools Arizona:
“Mr. Pondiscio is right that Arizona’s universal voucher program has reached an enrollment of 94,600 students, but he neglects to mention that the vast majority of these students never attended public school, creating a massive new $1 billion cost for the state that is robbing our local public schools and forcing school closures en masse. He admits that vouchers are predominantly subsidizing wealthier families, but dismisses this inequity by celebrating new models of ‘low cost private schools and microschools.’ In Arizona that means fly-by-night schools in strip malls, living rooms, and garages, without certified teachers or any form, without safety, and without academic oversight. The voucher vultures paint a pretty picture, but the stark reality is deeply harmful for kids.”
Zack Sheehan, Executive Director of New Hampshire School Funding Fairness Project:
“New Hampshire’s voucher program wasn’t built to help families in public schools have more choices — it was built to fund those who never attended them. The Legislature’s decision to remove income limits on eligibility shows this was never about providing choice to parents, but about diverting money away from public education altogether. Just last session, they paid for that increase by stripping a proposed $30 million increase in special education funding for our public schools.”
Damaris Allen, Families for Strong Public Schools (Florida):
“Families are tired of state legislatures failing public schools. Universal vouchers don’t provide parents with choice; they provide parents with overpriced, subpar alternatives. The vast majority of our voucher schools in Florida are unaccredited. In fact, the Florida Department of Education advises parents to ‘check with the college, university, or prospective employers to determine whether or not they accept diplomas and transcripts.’”
Nicole Heimarck, Executive Director of Reaching Higher NH:
“In New Hampshire, nearly nine in ten students attend their local public school. Our schools are the foundation of opportunity and community life across the state. They are places where every child — regardless of income or background — deserves access to a high-quality public education. This spring, state lawmakers passed a bill making all families eligible for a school voucher. This expansion directs approximately $50 million in funding to private options while lacking any data on quality, student outcomes, and full transparency of where funds are going and what they are being spent on.
Bobby Howard is the executive director for Arkansas Appleseed Legal Justice Center, a nonprofit organization and member of the Arkansas Coalition for Education (ACE). ACE members advocate for fully funded public schools and improved education outcomes for all Arkansas students. You can learn more about Arkansas Appleseed at *www.ARAppleseed.org.*
Central Arkansas singer-songwriter Adam Faucett, whose new album came out Sept. 19, is fall weather music — like the Zombies or Neko Case or the Sadies or “Led Zeppelin III.” Once the dead leaves start swirling around, it’s an especially good time for his brand of haunted songcraft.
The special election to fill Rep. Carlton Wing’s seat in the state House of Representatives will take place on June 9, 2026.
Calling all pork and whiskey aficionados! The Arkansas Times is once again hosting the ultimate culinary adventure, Pig & Swig. Held from 6-9 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 16, this annual greasy-fingered shindig is a hog heaven for foodies and a whiskey lover’s dream.
Gather your fellow swine-loving friends and prepare your taste buds for a night of culinary bliss at the River Market Pavilion in downtown Little Rock, where you’ll sample high-end whiskey drinks from top-notch brands like Knob Creek, Jim Beam Black and Basil Hayden and indulge in mouthwatering, pork-based delicacies from Wright’s Barbecue, Back Home BBQ, Fassler Hall and more of Arkansas’s finest restaurants. Featured libations include Basil Hayden Dark Rye, Jim Beam Black 7, Knob Creek Bourbon and Knob Creek Rye.
General admission is $40 in advance, or $45 at the door. Proceeds go to the Arkansas Times Investigative Reporter Fund. To support quality journalism in a big way, upgrade to a $100 VIP ticket and experience the event in style. Get in 30 minutes early, hang out in the exclusive VIP area and sample high-end whiskey from a private bartender, snacks included. Special thanks to Edwards Food Giant and Arkansas Style.
So, what are you waiting for? Get your tickets and prepare for a night of food, fun and libation! Remember, this event is strictly for hogs 21 and over, so leave the piglets at home. Get tickets at CentralArkansasTickets.com.
GET TICKETS HERE
EVERYONE ASKED ABOUT YOU
THURSDAY 10/16. Vino’s Brew Pub. $20.
Since reuniting in 2022 for back-to-back gigs at the White Water Tavern, Everyone Asked About You — a late ’90s tweemo group from Little Rock that lay dormant for more than two decades, despite developing something of a cult status — has been busy. The band performed at Numero Group’s 20th anniversary festival; reissued a remastered version of their entire discography on double vinyl via the beloved archival label; and wrote, recorded and released “Never Leave,” an EP of fresh songs that perfectly captured the urgent, bittersweet and slightly clumsy magic that pervaded their early material. They also played more than a dozen shows in hubs across the country, making me wistfully wonder if they’d ever return home. With support from Little Rock post-punk band Or, Everyone Asked About You is making that dream come true. Get tickets here.
Since visiting the latest reincarnation of Little Rock’s storied Town Pump, which first opened in 1969, I’ve been trying to figure out what feels off about it.
Purchased earlier this year, temporarily closed, lightly renovated and reopened in August by the Barnaby Group, a restaurant group led by Mary Olive and John Stephens that also owns Heights Italian restaurant George’s, the new Pump shows a lot of promise and admirably appears to have left more of the old Pump intact than I might have initially thought upon hearing the news of its acquisition.
The bar’s Instagram bio — “We messed it up just enough” — acknowledges both public skepticism around the new owners and their efforts to hew closely to the bar’s divey aesthetic.
The wood paneling and bar configuration remain unchanged, the drink menu is unfussy and beer-centric, and burgers and wings remain central to the menu. The major renovations were mostly nondecorative: deep cleaning, desperately needed plumbing fixes, a kitchen upgrade.
And yet, something feels slightly off. It feels less like the actual Town Pump and more like a restaurant going as the Town Pump for Halloween.
It could be the prices. Five average-sized wings and a 16-ounce PBR will run you $15, tax included. A perfectly fine cheese dip is $11.
But there are daily and happy hour specials galore (plus an “Amaro Hour” special that feels a little off-brand), food prices are up at all restaurants, and it’s unreasonable of me to judge the Pump’s current prices based on the prices drilled into my head from frequent trips there more than a decade ago.
It could be some of the design changes, which tend to lean trendier. It’s hard to imagine someone like famous former regular Charles Portis drinking his whiskey at a bar cast in the glow of a neon sign spelling out the word “Cheese Dip” or overhead lights fashioned to look like solo cups.
GOING THROUGH CHANGES: It’s hard to imagine someone like famous former regular Charles Portis drinking his whiskey at a bar cast in the glow of a neon sign spelling out the word “Cheese Dip.” Credit: Brian ChilsonThe pool tables upon which I’ve lost many a game have been sacrificed in favor of increased seating. This makes the place feel less like a bar with surprisingly good food and more like a traditional restaurant, raising the bar for how good the food needs to be.
And the food could be better, at least right now. Nothing I ate was anywhere close to bad, but everything was closer to fine than great. The burger, perhaps as a tradeoff for a cleaner kitchen, didn’t have the same flavor or crispy edges that I remembered it having. The wings, brined rather than breaded, had good flavor, but many of the flavors ran too close together in taste, and the texture, for someone who prefers breaded wings, verged on slimy. But on a positive note, many of the menu’s new, more creative additions, such as the Chicken Caesar Wrap and the Chili Cheese Crunch Wrap Supreme, received glowing reviews from our table.
Then there’s the GOP elephant in the room: It takes some cognitive dissonance to believe in the authenticity of a restaurant historically described as a dive bar that is now being owned and operated by the uber-wealthy son and daughter-in-law of Little Rock billionaire Warren Stephens, Trump’s ambassador to the United Kingdom.
But in the end, I think my misgivings with the new Town Pump are likely a me problem. I’m unable to fairly evaluate what might be a positive development for Little Rock’s food scene because my memories of the Town Pump are clouded by nostalgia. Was the Town Pump really a beacon of dive bar perfection in 2012, or was I just a grad student drinking a lot of PBR? Is there something ineffable missing from the current version, or do I just miss being 24 and making a fool out of myself on a karaoke stage with my friends?
Like with most new restaurants, the food and service will continue to improve. The new owners’ efforts to thread the difficult needle between new and old will become less pronounced, and the passage of time will lessen the weight of comparison to past iterations.
Ultimately, there’s something to be commended in the Barnaby Group pouring its resources into a local cultural institution that, if we’re being honest with ourselves, has been on a steady decline over the last decade. And ownership fit aside, a successful Town Pump will steadily employ lots of managers, servers, bartenders and cooks who are not millionaires.
I look forward to giving it another chance, and then probably another, and then probably a few dozen more.
The death of a mountain lion is another bizarre animal incident to top off the last six weeks, which have seen two fatal bear attacks in the Arkansas Ozarks.
Even when public employees are ultimately successful in challenging a suspension or termination, those terminations and suspension can have outsized impacts on others’ freedom of speech.
The Pine Bluff Police Department reiterated Thursday morning to the Arkansas Times that the death of 37-year-old Demetrice Moore in the Dollarway neighborhood of Pine Bluff was a result of suicide, not foul play or a racially-motivated lynching.
Jones will host a town hall discussion on ongoing community and federal issues preceded by a block party tonight at Little Rock’s Dreamland Ballroom.
The only way lawmakers can restore funds that have been withheld from 43 municipalities is to expunge a vote they took in July to prevent the state treasurer from releasing the money, the attorney general’s office opined this week.
The Legislative Joint Auditing Committee last month directed Arkansas State Treasurer John Thurston to restore so-called turnback funds that had been withheld because the affected towns and cities had failed to file required audits of their water and sewer systems by July 1, 2024.
That vote had no legal authority, according to the attorney general’s opinion, issued Monday and authored by Assistant Attorney General William R. Olson. Thurston’s office requested the opinion after the Joint Auditing Committee’s vote in September.
According to the opinion, Act 453 of 2023 requires municipalities to submit water and sewer system audits to the auditing committee within 18 months of the end of the audit’s fiscal year. If those audits are not submitted, the committee may — but is not required to — direct the state treasurer to withhold turnback funds until the reports are submitted.
However, once the treasurer is directed to withhold the funds, it is required to do so, and it can only release them if it receives notice from Joint Auditing that “a municipality has submitted all applicable reports concerning water and sewer systems,” according to the opinion.
When the committee voted last month to return the funds, it was with the requirement that each municipality submit the missing audits by Dec. 31 or provide a letter from a certified public accountant that the audit would be submitted by that date.
“An engagement letter from a municipality promising to complete an audit and submit reports in the future does not satisfy the statutory condition for the release of funds,” the AG’s opinion said.
However, Olson said that if the committee expunged the initial vote to withhold the funds, then the “expunged notice would be treated as though it were never sent.”
“It is my opinion that a successful motion to expunge would authorize the Treasurer to release the withheld funds from the date of the July 2025 notices to the date of expungement because it is as if the original notice never existed,” Olson wrote.
Last month, Sen. Dave Wallace (R-Leachville), sponsor of Act 453, proposed restoring the funds with a grace period, arguing that the loss of the funds would harm small towns without the resources to get the audits done. Some lawmakers raised concerns that the vote was not legal.
“If we can’t come down here and make decisions that affect our state, we might as well go ahead and stay home and play dominoes,” Wallace said at the time.
Local governments receive two types of “turnback funds” from the state. General revenue turnback funds support basic local services such as emergency response. Turnback funds from state highway revenue go to municipalities and are required to be spent on maintaining roads that are continuations of state highways or former state highways.
Committee Co-Chair Rep. Robin Lundstrum (R-Elm Springs) said she did not believe lawmakers could expunge the vote this week during Legislative Joint Auditing’s monthly meeting because it wasn’t on the agenda. However, she said she was meeting with the House parliamentarian on Thursday to determine next steps and how an expungement vote might be done.
“This is completely new territory,” Lundstrum said in an interview. “Audit is considered Switzerland — it’s neutral, it’s not political, it’s not anything but numbers. It’s kind of the cold, hard facts type of deal. This is uncharted territory, it’s never been done. So we have to be real careful about what we’re doing.”
Arkansas Advocate is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arkansas Advocate maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sonny Albarado for questions: info@arkansasadvocate.com.
Dubbed “The Beef,” the sandwich will only be available on Fridays starting at noon in limited quantities.
Athena Sinclair, one of the performers at Central Arkansas Pride 2025 Credit: Tios PhotographyCENTRAL ARKANSAS PRIDEFEST AND PARADE
SATURDAY 10/18. 1110 W. Capitol Ave. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Free, $50 for VIP passes.
Whether you think of Central Arkansas Pride as more of a celebration or a protest, you’ll likely be pleased by the 2025 relocation of the festival and parade, which has been transported from Argenta Plaza to Capitol Avenue, just blocks away from the headquarters of the state’s most powerful lawmakers. “By moving this year’s Pride close to the Arkansas Capitol, we are ensuring that our community cannot be ignored. We are here, we are vibrant, and we are united,” Dolores Wilk, the organization’s executive director, said in a press release. Let legislators hear and see what they’re missing by belting and boogieing along to performances by Natural State drag queens Kitty Kouture, Athena Sinclair and Alura O’Shaunacy; singer-songwriter Stephanie Smittle; and trans-fronted metal band Mortalus. Plus, there’ll be vendors, activities for kids and food trucks galore. If you’re feeling extra frisky, consider attending Sunday’s Pride Brunch at the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center, which will include a keynote address from USA Pride co-president Eve Keller. The festival and parade are free and open to the public; brunch tickets are $20 at arpride.org.
The reunion aims to unite anyone who has been involved with the St. Joseph property throughout its many different iterations before the fire-damaged building is torn down.
A spokesman with the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission said Wednesday that two hikers’ encounter with a black bear in the Ozarks over the weekend was much less dramatic than social media posts and some news reports would suggest.
On Monday, the Ozark Highlands Trail Association posted an account of a “non-fatal attack” on two backpackers camping about two miles east of White Rock Mountain. The campers “had to defend themselves the entire night against an aggressive black bear,” the post said. (The Ozark Highlands Trail Association is well-known in Arkansas hiking circles — it’s the decades-old nonprofit behind the creation of the OHT itself, a beloved backpacking trail that winds for more than 200 miles through the heart of the Ozark National Forest from Lake Fort Smith to the Buffalo River.)
The post was widely shared, in part because Arkansas has seen two fatal bear attacks in the Ozarks in just the past six weeks. On Sept. 3, Vernon Patton, 72, was attacked by a yearling bear in northern Franklin County and later died of his injuries. Less than a month later, a 60-year-old Missouri resident camping in Newton County was apparently dragged into the woods and mauled by a bear; Max Thomas’ body was discovered days later.
The animal in the first attack was shot and killed soon afterward, and officials with the Game and Fish Commission said Monday they’ve killed a bear they think was responsible for the Newton County attack.
Black bear attacks are rare, and deadly encounters are extremely rare. In Arkansas specifically, they’re almost unheard of: The last known fatal bear attack in the state was in the 1890s, according to research the Encyclopedia of Arkansas has shared with the Arkansas Times. For two people to be killed by black bears in the same area in such a short span of time is utterly extraordinary, so it’s reasonable to wonder if something could be affecting the bears’ behavior. A third attack so soon afterwards would make it hard to believe there’s not a pattern.
But according to Keith Stephens, a spokesman for the Game and Fish Commission, the description of the bear encounter over the weekend has been misrepresented. Two backpackers did indeed encounter a bear, but the “bear didn’t touch them and didn’t attack them,” he said.
“I don’t think you could even remotely classify it as an attack,” Stephens said.
The incident happened in north Franklin County — only about 10 miles away from Mulberry Mountain, the area where Vernon Patton was attacked on Sept. 3. A father and son from Claremore, Oklahoma, were hiking the Ozark Highlands Trail and made camp east of White Rock, a popular recreation area that intersects the backpacking trail. They were cooking hot dogs at their campsite when a bear appeared, likely lured by the smell of food.
“They did everything exactly like they were supposed to,” said Stephens, who said he spoke to the father last night. They yelled at it and threw rocks to scare the bear away. Once it retreated, the campers put their food and scraps in a bag and hung it from a tree.
“They didn’t see the bear the rest of the night,” Stephens said. “They just heard noises and didn’t sleep very well.”
The encounter was surely alarming for the campers, but it’s a far cry from how some other media outlets have described it. The Kansas City Star reported it this way: “After two people were believed to have been killed by bears within a month in Arkansas, two others narrowly survived their own attack, officials say.” (The Star doesn’t appear to have contacted the Game and Fish Commission and seems to rely on the Ozark Highlands Trail Association’s account.)
We haven’t been able to reach the hikers directly, and the Ozark Highlands Trail Association hasn’t responded to our questions. But in its report, Channel 5 News spoke to Chris Adams, a maintenance coordinator with the nonprofit, who said that the hikers “were harassed or stalked for six hours” by the bear. In the morning, they reported the incident to caretakers at White Rock Mountain, who alerted the Ozarks Highland Trail Association about what happened.
According to Stephens, the father told him that the incident “had been blown way out of proportion” on social media.
Stephens also provided an update from the Game and Fish Commission on the fatal Newton County attack last week.
”Based on the biological examination conducted Monday, the bear appeared physically normal with no apparent signs of disease or other obvious abnormalities. However, actual test results for rabies and distemper are still pending,” the agency said in a statement. (The bear in the fatal attack in Franklin County on Sept. 2 tested negative for rabies and distemper.)
DNA testing is ongoing to conclusively determine whether the bear that was recently shot and killed is in fact the bear that mauled Max Thomas.
“Samples from both the harvested animal and the victim’s clothing have been sent to the University of Florida for DNA analysis. While the UF has assured us this is a high-priority case, results are not expected to be finalized this week,” the statement said.
As for a pattern that links the two attacks, Stephens said the Game and Fish Commission had no clear answers as of yet but is investigating the question. “There hasn’t been anything that we can tie both of them together,” he said.
In the first incident, in Franklin County, the bear was underweight — only about 70 pounds. In the Newton County incident, the bear was “much bigger, very healthy,” and weighed 150-170 pounds, Stephens said. Though the attacks occurred in different, non-contiguous counties, they were only about 44 miles apart. The commission is still awaiting testing on the contents of the second bear’s stomach, he said, to see if it had recently eaten human food.
“At this point we are testing everything we can possibly test,” Stephens said.
Arkansas’s higher education institutions and the state’s education department have not been immediately impacted by the government shutdown, but officials said they’re preparing to make adjustments as needed.
Payroll for some employees at the University of Arkansas’ Fayetteville campus may be affected by the shutdown, but any furloughs would pertain to federal employees or positions that are federally funded with no alternative funding source available, Director of Media Relations and Core Communications John Thomas said Monday.
“Our units have been asked to provide alternate university projects and funding options (other than state funding which may not be used for this purpose) for employees in positions tied to active federal research grants ahead of the next payroll deadline, so at this time we do not plan to furlough employees,” Thomas said in an email.
Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders directed state agencies last week to prepare to furlough employees fully or partially funded by federal money ahead of the government shutdown that began Oct. 1. Arkansas state agencies furloughed nearly 250 employees last week as a result of the federal government shutting down, the Arkansas-Democrat Gazette reported Monday.
Arkansas State University has had “no immediate impact from the shutdown,” Chief Marketing and Communications Officer Todd Clark said Tuesday.
“If federal dollars remain available or have already been received, A-State employees will not be placed on furlough,” Clark said. “Our institutions will continue to lawfully access and utilize those funds.”
Regarding student loans and financial aid, Thomas said University of Arkansas Fayetteville officials are expecting some delays to Army and Air Force ROTC students’ living stipends and tuition awards. Meanwhile, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock had not seen any impact on federal aid as of Monday, according to Assistant Vice Chancellor of Enrollment Management Jonathan Coleman.
“Payments for loans and grants will continue, and we can continue paying work study employees,” Coleman said.
Grants at UA Little Rock were under contract so no stop orders had been received as of Monday, Vice Provost of Research Brian Berry said.
At the University of Central Arkansas, there’s been “no discernible impact on any grant funding or student financial aid,” and the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) portal was still functioning as of Monday, according to Director of Media Relations Tiffany Head.
As the shutdown is “a very fluid situation,” Thomas said the University of Arkansas Fayetteville is providing updates on contingency plans from federal agencies and state and UA System guidance for its research community on its website.
At the state level, the Arkansas Department of Education “has sufficient funding for programs and salaries at this time,” Public Information Coordinator Rachel Starks said Tuesday.
“We are monitoring the situation. If the shutdown is prolonged, we will make adjustments,” Starks said.
Education Secretary Jacob Oliva told lawmakers Monday that an extended government shutdown could further exacerbate challenges with the School Readiness Assistance Program. The federally-funded program provides financial assistance for child care to eligible, low-income families while parents work or attend school.
ADE announced updates to the program’s reimbursement rates and copayment structure last month in an effort to reduce the waitlist and make the program more financially sustainable, according to the agency. The announced changes met pushback, and the education department last week delayed cuts to providers’ reimbursement rates until Nov. 1, but moved forward with participant co-payments on Oct. 1 as planned, according to the Arkansas Democrat–Gazette.
Oliva told the House and Senate Education committees Monday that the program’s “current rate system is unsustainable.”
“This program will not exist by Christmas,” he said. “We are using reserves right now making payments that we can’t afford to do. And if the government doesn’t open up when we get a next quarter payment, I’m going to be back here in two to three weeks to tell you there’s no more program.”
Although ADE created a strategy to slow things down to sustain the program, Oliva said “everybody’s complaining about it,” so the agency paused its actions and is working on organizing a meeting with stakeholders next week to discuss ideas for long-term sustainability of the program.
“If the Legislature wants to help support, we’re willing to do that, but what I am telling you is we don’t have $6 to $8 million a month to maintain the status quo,” he said. “That is unsustainable, and every week that goes by is $2 to $3 million that we don’t have additionally coming into that pot of money.”
Arkansas Advocate is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arkansas Advocate maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sonny Albarado for questions: info@arkansasadvocate.com.
Arkansas currently ranks worst in the country for food insecurity. Between 2021 and 2023, an average of 18.9% of Arkansas households were food insecure, nearly 7 percentage points higher than the U.S. average during that period.
One-stop shopping for info on all of the contested U.S. Senate, U.S. House, state constitutional and state legislative races in 2026.
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Stories discussed this week:
UAMS, AR Children’s brace for Trump administration cuts to medical research funding
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2025/02/10/uams-bracing-for-trump-administration-cuts-to-medical-research-funding
Rick Crawford sponsors bill to keep USAID cash flowing to farms amid Musk’s assault on agency
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2025/02/12/rick-crawford-sponsors-bill-to-keep-usaid-cash-flowing-to-farms-amid-musks-assault-on-agency
Senate passes slate of bills to hamstring ballot measure campaigns
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2025/02/12/senate-passes-slate-of-bills-to-hamstring-ballot-measure-campaigns
Bill to stop Arkansas cities from regulating Airbnbs passes House committee
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2025/02/12/bill-to-stop-arkansas-cities-from-regulating-airbnbs-passes-house-committee
Bill targeting disability rights nonprofit narrowly passes House
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2025/02/13/bill-targeting-disability-rights-nonprofit-narrowly-passes-house
We welcome your feedback. Write us at podcasts@arktimes.com
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Stories discussed this week:
‘Tort reform’ bill passes Senate, heads to governor’s desk
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2025/02/06/tort-reform-bill-passes-senate-heads-to-governors-desk
Sanders’ maternal health plan would make it easier to get Medicaid — but not to keep it
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2025/02/06/governors-maternal-health-plan-would-make-it-easier-to-get-medicaid-but-not-to-keep-it
U.S. reading and math scores keep trending downward, with Arkansas towards the bottom
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2025/01/31/u-s-reading-and-math-scores-keep-trending-downward-with-arkansas-towards-the-bottom
We welcome your feedback. Write us at podcasts@arktimes.com
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Stories discussed this week:
Phones would be banned ‘bell to bell’ in Arkansas public schools under new bill
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2025/01/29/phones-would-be-banned-bell-to-bell-in-arkansas-public-schools-under-new-bill
Sanders will seek new Medicaid work requirement for 220K Arkansans
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2025/01/28/sanders-will-seek-new-medicaid-work-requirement-for-220k-poor-arkansans
Senate passes bill to end affirmative action as pleas from Black colleagues fall on deaf ears
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2025/01/30/senate-passes-bill-to-end-affirmative-action-as-pleas-from-black-colleagues-fall-on-deaf-ears
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Stories discussed this week:
State law allowing child sexual abuse victims to retroactively sue gets its day in court https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2025/01/23/state-law-allowing-child-sexual-abuse-victims-to-retroactively-sue-gets-its-day-in-court
Arkansas immigrants brace for Trump’s promised raids as rumors fly on social mediahttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2025/01/24/arkansas-immigrants-brace-for-trumps-promised-raids-as-rumors-fly-on-social-media
Trump pardons Jan. 6 rioters, including those from Arkansashttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2025/01/20/trump-pardons-jan-6-rioters-including-those-from-arkansas
Very dumb resolution filed to rename the Gulf of Mexico in state documentshttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2025/01/22/very-dumb-resolution-filed-to-rename-the-gulf-of-mexico-in-state-documents
Cotton at odds with Trump over extension for TikTok salehttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2025/01/21/cotton-at-odds-with-trump-over-extension-for-tiktok-sale
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Crawford picked as House Intelligence chair after ouster of Republican who dared question Trump**https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2025/01/16/crawford-picked-as-house-intelligence-chair-after-ouster-of-republican-who-dared-question-trump
UPDATE: Sanders’ session agenda includes school phone ban, firing ‘woke’ professors, higher ed fundinghttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2025/01/14/sanders-session-agenda-school-cell-phone-ban-higher-ed-funding-rework-firing-woke-professors
Sanders wants a new Medicaid work requirement — and this time, it could hit more Arkansanshttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2025/01/16/sanders-wants-a-new-medicaid-work-requirement-and-this-time-it-could-hit-more-arkansans
Arkansas Times Film Series screens ‘Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown’ (1988) Tuesdayhttps://arktimes.com/rock-candy/2025/01/15/arkansas-times-film-series-screens-women-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown-1988-tuesday
Angelo Badalamenti explains how he wrote Laura Palmer's Themehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-eqgr_gn4k
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Baker claps back at other Supreme Court justices, declares recent orders null and voidhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2025/01/08/baker-claps-back-at-other-supreme-court-justices-declares-recent-orders-null-and-void
State Supreme Court majority voids chief justice’s appointments to judicial discipline panelhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2025/01/07/state-supreme-court-majority-voids-chief-justices-appointments-to-judicial-discipline-panel
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Despite opposition from local right wing group, Fort Smith City Board approves EPA granthttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/12/18/despite-opposition-from-local-right-wing-group-fort-smith-city-board-approves-epa-grant
Governor’s consultants pitch bad ideas for a FOIA overhaulhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/12/18/governors-consultants-pitch-bad-ideas-for-a-foia-overhaul
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220K Arkansans will lose insurance if Republicans cut federal Medicaid expansion fundshttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/12/12/220k-arkansans-will-lose-insurance-if-republicans-cut-federal-medicaid-expansion-funds
Emails show officials hid purchase of land in Franklin County for prison, mocked residents by sharing South Park video clips (UPDATED)https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/12/10/emails-show-state-officials-intentionally-hid-purchase-of-land-in-franklin-county-for-prison-mock-residents-by-sharing-south-park-video-clips
Corrections board approves lease of proposed Franklin County prison sitehttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/12/10/corrections-board-approves-lease-of-proposed-franklin-county-prison-site
New toolkit aims to help Franklin County prison opponentshttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/12/13/new-toolkit-aims-to-help-franklin-county-prison-opponents
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Stories discussed this week
Can you really use an Arkansas school voucher for horseback riding lessons? Yes.https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/11/27/can-you-really-use-an-arkansas-school-voucher-for-horseback-riding-lessons-yes
Donald Trump taps Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israelhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/11/12/donald-trump-taps-mike-huckabee-as-ambassador-to-israel
Picking Mike Huckabee for ambassador to Israel spells more misery for Palestinianshttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/11/14/picking-mike-huckabee-for-ambassador-to-israel-spells-more-misery-for-palestinians
Trump names GOP mega-donor Warren Stephens as ambassador to UKhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/12/02/trump-names-gop-mega-donor-warren-stephens-as-ambassador-to-uk
State officials promise more air testing near Tontitown landfillhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/12/06/state-officials-promise-more-air-testing-near-tontitown-landfill
Fort Smith restaurateur sues to ‘Stop the Stink’ from a nearby waste storage lagoonhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/12/03/fort-smith-restaurateur-sues-to-stop-the-stink-from-a-waste-storage-lagoon-near-the-city
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Prefiled bills have Republicans pushing discrimination, tooth decay and maternal healthhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/11/20/pre-filed-bills-have-republicans-pushing-discrimination-tooth-decay-and-maternal-health
Arkansas House Dems unveil 2025 agenda, but can any of it pass?https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/11/19/arkansas-house-dems-unveil-2025-agenda-but-can-any-of-it-pass
Raw milk, raffles and retroactive panic: prefiling bills for 2025 continueshttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/11/22/raw-milk-raffles-and-retroactive-panic-prefiling-bills-for-2025-continues
Study finds sharp rise in Arkansas child labor violations in years before state rolled back work permit lawhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/11/18/study-finds-sharp-rise-in-arkansas-child-labor-violations-in-years-before-state-rolled-back-work-permit-law
Chrissy the runaway emu makes her way through Central Arkansashttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/11/20/chrissy-the-runaway-emu-makes-her-way-through-central-arkansas
Emuzing! Chrissy the fugitive emu is back homehttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/11/21/chrissy-the-fugitive-emu-is-back-home
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Franklin County residents question prison location during contentious town hallhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/11/08/franklin-county-residents-question-prison-location-during-contentious-town-hall
Failing up: 10 months after his firing, former prisons chief Profiri still has a $184K job in the governor’s officehttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/11/15/failing-up-10-months-after-his-firing-former-prisons-chief-profiri-still-has-a-184k-job-in-the-governors-office
LRSD board member faces questions over job with program for disadvantaged studentshttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/11/05/lrsd-board-member-faces-questions-over-job-with-program-for-disadvantaged-students
Arkansas Times Film Series screens ‘Still Walking’ (2008) on Tuesdayhttps://arktimes.com/rock-candy/2024/11/14/arkansas-times-film-series-screens-still-walking-on-tuesday
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Little Rock voters say no to new sales tax, yes to incumbent city directorshttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/11/06/little-rock-voters-say-no-to-new-sales-tax-yes-to-incumbent-city-directors
Pope County casino dead after Issue 2 passes, despite local voter support for casinohttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/11/06/pope-county-casino-dead-after-issue-2-passes-despite-local-voter-support-for-casino
Baker, Tucker, Eubanks win judicial raceshttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/11/06/baker-tucker-eubanks-win-judicial-races
The day after: An election postmortem from Max Brantleyhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/11/06/the-day-after-an-election-postmortem-from-max-brantley
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Vote yes: Little Rock’s 1-cent sales tax plan is the city’s chance to think bighttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/10/29/vote-yes-little-rocks-1-cent-sales-tax-plan-is-the-citys-chance-to-think-big
Will it make a difference? Analyzing Little Rock’s proposed 1-cent sales tax increasehttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/10/21/will-it-make-a-difference-analyzing-little-rocks-proposed-1-cent-sales-tax-increase
Arkansas Community Organizations endorses city board candidates, opposes sales taxhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/10/15/arkansas-community-organizations-endorses-city-board-candidates-opposes-sales-tax
Here’s who’s running for the Little Rock Board of Directors this yearhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/08/07/heres-whos-running-for-the-little-rock-board-of-directors-this-year
Candidates talk policy at Coalition of Little Rock Neighborhoods meetinghttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/10/14/candidates-talk-policy-at-coalition-of-little-rock-neighborhoods-meeting
R.I.P., irony: Rhonda Wood accuses two justices of playing politicshttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/11/01/r-i-p-irony-rhonda-wood-accuses-two-justices-of-playing-politics
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UPDATE: Franklin County selected as home of new 3,000-bed state prisonhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/10/31/franklin-county-selected-as-home-of-new-3k-bed-state-prison
New data on Ark. vouchers: More than 80% of new enrollees did not attend public school last yearhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/10/31/new-data-on-ark-vouchers-more-than-80-of-new-enrollees-did-not-attend-public-school-last-year
DHS numbers show Sarah Sanders is wrong: Arkansas needs Medicaid extension for new momshttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/10/30/dhs-numbers-show-sarah-sanders-is-wrong-arkansas-needs-medicaid-extension-for-new-moms
Arkansas DHS officials say they want to find insurance for low-income, Medicaid-ineligible new momshttps://arkansasadvocate.com/2024/10/28/arkansas-dhs-officials-say-they-want-to-find-insurance-for-low-income-medicaid-ineligible-new-moms/
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Utility regulators say AG failed to meet deadlines in case to raise gas rateshttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/10/23/utility-regulators-say-ag-failed-to-meet-deadlines-in-case-to-raise-gas-rates
Advocates of the ‘raw milk revolution’ push legislation allowing retail sales at marketshttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/10/18/advocates-of-the-raw-milk-revolution-push-legislation-allowing-retail-sales-at-markets
Split Supreme Court, stacked with Sanders-appointed justices, rejects marijuana amendment (UPDATED)https://arktimes.com/news/cannabiz/2024/10/21/split-supreme-court-stacked-with-sanders-appointed-justices-rejects-marijuana-amendment
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State Supreme Court requires 2 early voting sites in West Memphis, rejecting Republicans’ argumentshttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/10/17/state-supreme-court-requires-2-early-voting-sites-in-west-memphis-rejecting-republicans-arguments
Supreme Court clears path for Arkansans to vote on anti-casino amendmenthttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/10/17/supreme-court-clears-path-for-arkansans-to-vote-on-anti-casino-amendment
Tyson Foods under investigation again for alleged child labor violationshttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/10/16/tyson-foods-under-investigation-again-for-child-labor-violations
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Judge sentences two former officers videotaped in infamous Mulberry beatinghttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/10/10/judge-sentences-two-former-officers-videotaped-in-infamous-mulberry-beating
Overwhelmed voucher systems in West Virginia, Arkansas leave thousands of homeschoolers hanginghttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/10/09/overwhelmed-voucher-systems-in-west-virginia-arkansas-leave-thousands-of-homeschoolers-hanging
The import business: How Arkansas residential psych facilities make money on out-of-state kidshttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/10/07/the-import-business-how-arkansas-residential-psych-facilities-make-money-on-out-of-state-kids
Arkansas Times Film Series screens ‘Candyman’ (1992) on Tuesdayhttps://arktimes.com/rock-candy/2024/10/09/arkansas-times-film-series-screens-candyman-1992-on-tuesday
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Stories Discussed this week
Billy Jack Lincks named as sole suspect in 1995 Morgan Nick kidnapping (Updated)https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/10/01/billy-jack-lincks-named-as-prime-suspect-in-1995-morgan-nick-kidnapping
There’s an international bird flu summit in Arkansas this week, and this is why it is importanthttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/10/02/theres-an-international-bird-flu-summit-in-arkansas-this-week-and-this-is-why-it-is-important
Medical marijuana expansion a no-go, Secretary of State Thurston sayshttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/09/30/medical-marijuana-expansion-a-no-go-secretary-of-state-thurston-says
Secretary of state rejects marijuana amendment; sponsor plans lawsuithttps://arktimes.com/news/cannabiz/2024/09/30/secretary-of-state-rejects-marijuana-amendment-sponsor-plans-lawsuit
Marijuana group files lawsuit, says Thurston should count remaining signatureshttps://arktimes.com/news/cannabiz/2024/10/01/marijuana-group-files-lawsuit-says-thurston-should-count-remaining-signatures
Two state Supreme Court justices recuse in marijuana amendment case (UPDATED)https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/10/02/two-state-supreme-court-justices-recuse-in-marijuana-amendment-case
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Stories Discussed this week
TIF tiff: Downtown Little Rock Master Plan calls for controversial funding toolhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/09/20/tif-tiff-downtown-little-rock-master-plan-calls-for-controversial-funding-tool
City board to vote on another master plan, mobile grocery stores next weekhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/09/27/city-board-to-vote-on-another-master-plan-mobile-grocery-stores-next-week
Supreme Court refers Justice Courtney Hudson to judicial disciplinary committeehttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/09/24/supreme-court-refers-justice-courtney-hudson-to-judicial-disciplinary-committee
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The attorney for the man who was the subject of a contentious traffic stop in Rogers is asking anyone with information on the state trooper to contact him.
The Results for the Rock Committee was formed to support a sales tax increase just a few weeks after several Little Rock conservatives formed a group opposing it.
A side hustle in gay porn would all be well and good, except that DeAngelis made a name for himself by attacking wokeness in public schools generally and targeting queer people specifically.
Gov. Sanders called the man arrested by a state trooper on I-49 “a criminal illegal immigrant” from Guatemala.
Among the most food insecure populations in Arkansas, the Marshallese have been denied access to SNAP benefits for decades.
Gov. Sarah Sanders’ campaign manager, Chris Caldwell, and Sanders appointee Randy Lawson are named in the complaints.
Investigation: Tontitown residents fear health impacts of air pollution they blame on the Eco Vista landfill.
The county election commission chair offered little in the way of explanation or coherent reasoning during the one-hour hearing.
Last year, Metroplan collaborated with the Arkansas Division of Environmental Quality, the Northwest Arkansas Regional Planning Commission and the City of Fort Smith to collect data and input on which energy and environment innovation measures Arkansans would like to see implemented. These findings were compiled to create the Arkansas Energy and Environment Innovation Priority Action Plan.
“If you can imagine [Johnny Cash] … as an 8-year-old boy in the sweltering cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta in what they call sunken lands of Arkansas … and then jump forward 84 years to this day … he might say that he fulfilled the ultimate American dream,” Rosanne Cash said.
The Hogs buckled down against Auburn last week after losing by 38 points to the Tigers in Fayetteville a season ago. If the Razorbacks have a revenge tour planned for 2024, there are plenty of remaining targets. So about this allegedly final Southwest Classic against Texas A&M …
Lavar Moore of Alexander has been charged in the death of Lawrence Nichols whose body was found near Sweet Home on Sept. 9.
This story was originally published by The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence.
When Nakita Lovelady matriculated to the graduate program at the University of Arkansas, her evenings were spent studying by the dim light in her Little Rock apartment, where she scribbled down notes, analyses, and comparisons of public health research and policy. One night during her first year, she came across a term that explained how a person’s environment affects their overall health: the “all-around-me” approach. It was that night, she said, that a neighbor who she knew only in passing was fatally shot.
Lovelady was already familiar with gun violence. She grew up near Helena-West Helena, in Phillips County, which snakes along the Mississippi River through the heart of the Arkansas Delta. The rural community, where crops like soybeans and cotton have sustained the agricultural economy for generations, is vast, and Lovelady’s memories are of its close-knit people and its beauty. But in the past decade, poverty, inaccessibility to social services, and a lack of commerce and public transportation have all contributed to a little-known but alarming spike in gun deaths across the county. From 2018 to 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Phillips had the highest per capita firearm homicide rate of any other county in the United States, rural or urban.
Gun violence was part of life growing up, Lovelady recalled, but it’s worse now. “If I don’t know the person who was shot,” she said, “I went to the school with one of their relatives.”
In 2012, Arkansas was among the top 10 states with the highest firearm mortality rates in the country, where it remains. That was the year Lovelady graduated with her master’s in public health and went to work as a community health specialist, before returning to the university to receive her doctorate. In 2019, Lovelady successfully defended her thesis on the effects of gun violence and graduated the same year that Congress pledged millions of dollars for gun violence research, a pivotal shift for a long-politicized issue.
Still, funding for gun violence research would take time to trickle down, which worried her. “But in my first year as a student, I did a set of qualitative interviews with 10 young Black males,” she said, “and across the board, gun violence was mentioned. I knew I couldn’t turn away from this work.”
Historic Cherry Street in Helena. Credit: Joshua Asante for The TraceWhen 2020 hit with the converging public health crises of COVID-19 and a spike in shootings, Lovelady was analyzing her research on health disparities in Black communities and trying to identify some ways to stem the violence. She was thinking of her upbringing, she said, her weekends spent running through the fields of her parent’s farm with her cousins and neighbors, and marveling at the annual King Biscuit Blues Festival on Cherry Street, where shootings are now wracking the community and threatening a quiet way of life. She knew Arkansas needed a public health program that could provide crucial help not only in Little Rock, but across the state.
“We are Arkansas, and we are in a unique situation… things look different here,” said Lovelady. “A third of our state’s gunshot wounds are coming from rural communities that are low-resourced.”
Soybean cropland in Lexa, where Dr. Lovelady’s family farm was located. Credit: Joshua Asante for The TraceIn 2023, years into her academic research and grappling with the new reality, Lovelady established Arkansas’s first hospital-based violence intervention program, Project Heal, one of the first of its kind in the country to be housed in an urban center but extend its services to rural communities throughout the state. Some of the initial funding for Project Heal came from the American Rescue Plan Act, which was part of a federal stimulus package to help states and localities recover from the pandemic and its economic impacts. Additional funding came from the university and the Arkansas Center for Health Disparities, which is supported by the National Institutes of Health.
Hospital-based violence intervention programs (HVIP) like Project Heal are a form of community violence intervention that provides holistic, rehabilitative treatment to patients suffering from gunshot wounds while mitigating reinjury or potential retaliation. The medical staff connects shooting victims to violence intervention specialists from their communities, who provide emotional support to address trauma and help them navigate available resources as they adjust back to daily life.
Project Heal combines the evidence-based approach from Dr. Nakita Lovelady with the real-life experience of gun violence survivor Caleb Gleason. Credit: Joshua Asante for The Trace“If I had a program like Project Heal, it would’ve made all the difference in my life,” said Caleb Glason, a gun violence survivor who has been with the program since it began and serves as a community health worker. In 2007, when he was 19, Glason was in a street fight with rival gang members and was shot once through the jaw. Now, as a minister and Project Heal peer specialist, his day-to-day activities range from motivational speaking engagements to meeting prospective patients in the emergency room. “I now get to be that person that I needed, and do things like take the victims out to eat, take them to the doctor, just be there for them, you know, just treat them like a human being.”
Arkansas’s statewide population hovers just over three million; 41 percent of its residents live in rural areas, compared to 14 percent of the rest of the country. As in many cities, the homicide rate in Little Rock, its capital, reached record highs in the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, then steadily declined until the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s when the state’s lone Level 1 Trauma Center was overwhelmed by pandemic patients and gun violence victims, and Arkansas’ lack of social services and medical infrastructure became acute.
Historically associated with urban problems, gun violence has recently surged across Southern states and rural communities. Nationally, emergency hospitalizations because of firearm injuries increased by 37 percent between 2019 to 2020; 36 percent the following year; and 20 percent in 2022. For people in communities like the one Lovelady is from, which is about 118 miles away from the capital, getting to urgent medical care can take two hours.
Project Heal is currently providing services to the Greater Little Rock area, with hopes to be servicing eight counties by next summer. Lovelady and her staff of five are holding listening sessions throughout the state and speaking to residents about the community effects of shootings. It’s a drop of relief in the South, where gun violence services have not been focused, despite high rates of firearm injuries over the past decade.
“There has been growth in many areas in what this work looks like, but it has been uneven,” said Dr. Kyle Fischer, an emergency physician in Maryland and the policy director for the Health Alliance for Violence Intervention. He has been doing hospital-based violence intervention work for more than a decade. “A lot of the growth has been related to the funding and who has it. You’ll see states like California, New York, and Pennsylvania that have made really big state investments. In the South, we haven’t seen that; it has been more locally driven.”
For those at the forefront of this work, like Lovelady and Fischer, the 30-year-old HVIP method has proven its need for more investment. The first national hospital-based violence intervention program, Youth ALIVE!, was developed in 1994 in Oakland, California, and similar programs gradually spread throughout the country, largely concentrated in urban areas in the Northeast, Midwest, or West. It wasn’t until 2007 that a program established in Virginia brought the method to the South.
Initially, a lot of the Project Heal staff spent their time learning about the unique needs in Arkansas and planning how best to implement the HVIP in the most equitable way, taking lessons from other programs but applying them to the different circumstances — and history — of their state.
“We have the core pieces of what leads to success with HVIPs as a whole,” said Lovelady, “but how do we do that in different places, and what are the local contexts needed to adopt those interventions?”
The issues facing counties like Phillips, for example, are steeped in a history of segregation. In 1919, it saw one of the nation’s deadliest racist massacres, when Black farmers organizing for better work conditions were attacked by a white mob and nearly 240 Black residents were killed, many by gunshot or lynching. The Elaine Massacre worsened the racial divide for decades to come, contributing to severe challenges in establishing Black-owned agricultural businesses and worsening disparities for generations. Today, 30 percent of Phillips County lives in poverty according to 2022 census data; 60 percent of the deeply rural community is Black, and nearly 40 percent of residents are over the age of 65.
Now, Lovelady and her colleagues are implementing a method to address the needs of communities like Phillips County, which has a population of just 16,500. They hope the approach can serve as an example to other states with large rural populations, particularly in the South, where a handful of emerging HVIPs are rising up, including in Birmingham and Mobile, Alabama; Charleston, South Carolina; Atlanta; and Memphis.
“From a public health perspective, we should know by now that the meat of HVIPs work,” said Lovelady, noting how long such programs have existed. “There is a ton of literature about having a community health worker who connects people with support and helps them navigate the health system. We know that works.”
But she emphasized there is no single solution. Regionally comparative studies that examine how to implement HVIPs differently in different communities are sorely needed. “Our program,” she said, “represents part of a larger movement.
The last time the Arkansas Travelers were Texas League champs, the iPhone 3G was just a couple months old, George W. Bush was still president and Beverly Hills Chihuahua would not hit theaters for another two weeks.
Don’t sleep on Sweet Cheeks Soul Cafe & Dessert Bar — a new soul food restaurant in the former LuLu’s Seafood Kitchen at 5911 R St. in the Heights.
The plaintiffs are almost certainly right about one location that must be opened, but questions remain about other early voting sites.
We highly recommend blocking out your entire schedule and wandering freely from screening room to screening room for days on end, stopping only to go eat garlic knots at SQZBX and drink the Beez Kneez honey basil blonde at Superior Bathhouse Brewing.
The Purple Cow’s 35 year-old original location at 8026 Cantrell Road celebrated its grand reopening on Monday, nearly a year and a half after it stood in the path of the EF-3 tornado that tore through Central Arkansas on March 31, 2023.
Judges may grant residents reduced or waived court fees, reinstate drivers licenses in eligible cases and more this Saturday.
Christian West, 19, was killed last week in the area near 15th Street and Division Street.
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Sarah Sanders used a July traffic stop to demonize immigrants; the dashcam footage tells a different storyhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/09/18/sarah-sanders-used-a-july-traffic-stop-to-demonize-immigrants-the-dashcam-footage-tells-a-different-story
Traffic stop used as anti-immigration rallying cry comes under scrutinyhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/09/20/traffic-stop-used-as-anti-immigration-rallying-cry-comes-under-scrutiny
Solar power is thriving in Arkansas schools — but a new state law may end the growthhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/09/16/solar-power-is-thriving-in-arkansas-schools-but-a-new-state-law-may-end-the-growth
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Stories discussed this week:
- New animal waste rule would keep public in the dark on hog farm permits, environmental groups say
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/09/06/new-animal-waste-rule-would-keep-public-in-the-dark-on-hog-farm-permits-environmental-groups-say
- South Arkansas landowners fire back at lithium companies, call proposed royalty structure ‘unlawful’
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/09/12/south-arkansas-landowners-fire-back-at-lithium-companies-call-proposed-royalty-structure-unlawful
- Special master’s findings in casino case could help medical marijuana amendment
https://arktimes.com/news/cannabiz/2024/09/10/special-master-findings-could-help-medical-marijuana-amendment
- Arkansas Times Film Series screens ‘No’ (2012) on Tuesday
https://arktimes.com/rock-candy/2024/09/11/arkansas-times-film-series-screens-no-2012-on-tuesday
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On this week's podcast, Arkansas author Alice Driver discusses her new book on Tyson Foods and the perils faced by its largely immigrant workforce.
"Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America's Largest Meatpacking Company," by Alice Driverhttps://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Life-and-Death-of-the-American-Worker/Alice-Driver/9781668078822
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The Arkansas Times has been hosting a series of fundraisers in the form of a lecture series featuring Arkansas newsmakers, politicians and writers on current events and policies. The proceeds go to the Arkansas Times Investigative Reporting Fund.
This month, we met at the Copper Grill to hear from Skip Rutherford, Dean Emeritus of the Clinton School of Public Service and founder of the non-partisan Political Animals Club, who spoke about the current race for the presidency between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.
After the event, Skip spoke with Arkansas Times reporter Lara Farrar to give further insight into the state of the race.
Note: You’ll hear in the interview Skip Rutherford refer to an anticipated announcement of Harris first interview as the Democratic nominee. Shortly after the interview it was reported that she and her running mate Tim Walz will sit down with CNNs Dana Bash for a prime time interview Thursday night.
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Stories discussed this week
LRSD Superintendent Jermall Wright resignshttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/08/15/lrsd-superintendent-jermall-wright-resigns
Wronging Wright a huge mistake for LRSDhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/08/18/wronging-wright-a-huge-mistake-for-lrsd
LRSD board hears from the public on Wright’s resignation letter, takes no actionhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/08/19/lrsd-board-hears-from-the-public-on-wrights-resignation-letter-takes-no-action
LRSD superintendent hangs in through another board meetinghttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/08/23/lrsd-superintendent-hangs-in-through-another-board-meeting
Arkansas Supreme Court stretches law to disqualify abortion petition (UPDATES)https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/08/22/calvinball-arkansas-supreme-court-stretches-law-to-disqualify-abortion-petition
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Stories Discussed this week
AG confirms no Chinese or communist ties in land purchased by Walmart supplierhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/08/13/ag-confirms-no-chinese-or-communist-ties-in-land-purchased-by-walmart-supplier
Marijuana and casino petitioner groups agree with abortion petitioners: Key argument from attorney general is wronghttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/08/13/marijuana-and-casino-petitioner-groups-agree-with-abortion-petitioners-key-argument-from-attorney-general-is-wrong
Arkansas Times Film Series screens ‘Lovers Rock’ (2020) Tuesday nighthttps://arktimes.com/rock-candy/2024/08/14/arkansas-times-film-series-screens-lovers-rock-2020-tuesday-night
https://www.riverdale10.com/movie/Lovers%5FRock
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Stories discussed this week:
South Arkansas landowners, lithium extractors clash over royalty rateshttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/08/07/south-arkansas-landowners-lithium-extractors-clash-over-royalty-rates
Walmart supplier under investigation after state officials suggest possible Chinese tieshttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/08/07/walmart-supplier-under-investigation-after-state-officials-suggest-possible-chinese-ties
Both sides file briefs in Arkansas Abortion Amendment lawsuithttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/08/06/little-rock-city-board-extends-sunday-on-premise-alcohol-sales-window
Little Rock city board extends Sunday on-premise alcohol sales windowhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/08/06/little-rock-city-board-extends-sunday-on-premise-alcohol-sales-window
We welcome your feedback. Write us at podcasts@arktimes.com
Stories Discussed this week
LRPD is asking for access to home security cameras to fight crimehttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/07/29/lrpd-is-asking-for-access-to-home-security-cameras-to-fight-crime
Little Rock will again vote on a one-cent sales tax in Novemberhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/07/30/little-rock-will-again-vote-on-a-one-cent-sales-tax-in-november
Little Rock metro is 10th deadliest in the U.S. for pedestrians, study sayshttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/06/10/little-rock-metro-is-10th-deadliest-in-the-u-s-for-pedestrians-study-says
LR Ward 2 Director Ken Richardson recovering from ‘multiple life-threatening surgeries’https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/08/02/lr-ward-2-director-ken-richardson-recovering-from-multiple-life-threatening-surgeries
Casino amendment makes the ballot, marijuana amendment heads to cure period, sec. of state sayshttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/07/31/casino-amendment-makes-the-ballot-marijuana-amendment-heads-to-cure-period-sec-of-state-says
We welcome your feedback, write us at podcasts@arktimes.com
Stories discussed this week:
Ark. Supreme Court orders secretary of state to count some abortion petition signatures
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/07/23/ark-supreme-court-orders-secretary-of-state-to-count-some-abortion-petition-signatures
State Supreme Court won’t dismiss abortion petitioners’ lawsuit, for now
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/07/26/state-supreme-court-wont-dismiss-abortion-petitioners-lawsuit-sets-briefing-schedule
Disgraced cult leader’s name to be removed from Riverfront Park art
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/07/25/disgraced-cult-leaders-name-to-be-removed-from-riverfront-park-art
Arkansas AG investigating another business with possible Chinese ties
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/07/24/arkansas-ag-investigating-another-business-with-possible-chinese-ties
State does about-face on China
https://www.arkansasbusiness.com/article/state-does-about-face-on-china/
Pharmacies running low on Paxlovid as summer COVID spike continues
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/07/26/pharmacies-running-low-on-paxlovid-as-summer-covid-spike-continues
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Stories Discussed this week
Abortion advocates sue secretary of state over rejection of amendmenthttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/07/16/abortion-advocates-sue-secretary-of-state-over-rejection-of-amendment
Little Rock City Board accepts Downtown Master Plan, plans July 30 tax votehttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/07/16/little-rock-city-board-accepts-downtown-master-plan-plans-july-30-tax-vote
Little Rock city board member has missed every meeting since mid-Mayhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/07/04/little-rock-city-board-member-has-missed-every-meeting-since-mid-may
UA System President Donald Bobbit to retire by Januaryhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/07/16/ua-system-president-donald-bobbit-to-retire-by-january
UA System board to begin search for new president to replace Bobbitthttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/07/18/ua-system-board-to-begin-search-for-new-president-to-replace-bobbitt
Conservative GOP women, led by Arkansas Gov. Sarah Sanders, rally at conventionhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/07/17/conservative-gop-women-led-by-arkansas-gov-sarah-sanders-rally-at-convention
We welcome your feedback, write us at podcasts@arktimes.com
Stories Discussed this week
PHOTOS: Repro rights supporters cheer a milestone in push to put abortion on the ballothttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/07/05/photos-repro-rights-supporters-cheer-a-milestone-in-push-to-put-abortion-on-the-ballot
Whiplash: Why the Arkansas Abortion Amendment still might be in playhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/07/12/whiplash-why-the-arkansas-abortion-amendment-still-might-be-in-play?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR3y-MtSj7B5lJtV_zACdgJDrHYMmXRjzbfv_GPonrN38m46g23peX6znQg_aem_GgfStkmP9znc_B0b2hstZw
Endorsements
Arkansas Times Film Series screens ‘Desperately Seeking Susan’ (1985) Tuesday nighthttps://arktimes.com/rock-candy/2024/07/11/arkansas-times-film-series-screens-desperately-seeking-susan-1985-tuesday-night
James by Percival Everetthttps://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/738749/james-by-percival-everett/
Stories Discussed this week
POSTMORTEM: Joe Biden and Donald Trump face off in presidential debatehttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/06/27/liveblog-joe-biden-and-donald-trump-face-off-in-presidential-debate
Why it’s a big deal that the Supreme Court struck down Chevron deferencehttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/06/28/why-its-a-big-deal-that-the-supreme-court-struck-down-chevron-deference
U.S. Supreme Court ruling against homelessness puts advocates on edgehttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/06/28/u-s-supreme-court-ruling-against-homelessness-puts-advocates-on-edge
Will Supreme Court’s Jan. 6 ruling affect ‘Bigo’ Barnett’s prison sentence?https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/06/28/will-supreme-courts-jan-6-ruling-affect-bigo-barnetts-prison-sentence
We welcome your feedback, write us at podcasts@arktimes.com
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Stories Discussed this week:
Dashcam footage from ATF raid that killed LR airport director Malinowski released by prosecutor
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/06/19/dashcam-footage-from-atf-raid-that-killed-lr-airport-director-malinowski-released-by-prosecutor
Bodycam footage of attorney’s arrest at bar association convention supports her version of events
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/06/19/bodycam-footage-of-attorneys-arrest-at-bar-association-convention-supports-her-version-of-events
Attorney arrested at Arkansas Bar Association meeting in Hot Springs for carrying FOIA petitions
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/06/14/attorney-arrested-at-arkansas-bar-association-meeting-in-hot-springs-for-carrying-foia-petitions
Ham-fisted House resolutions attacking direct democracy efforts may have backfired
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/06/21/ham-fisted-house-resolutions-attacking-direct-democracy-efforts-may-have-backfired
Still need to sign petitions? Here’s where to go, June 20-22
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/06/20/still-need-to-sign-petitions-heres-where-to-go-june-20-22
Don’t believe the propaganda: One-time surplus money does not fund Sanders’ tax cuts
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/06/18/dont-believe-the-propaganda-one-time-surplus-money-does-not-fund-sanders-tax-cuts
Endorsement:
Bentonville Film Festival: ‘The In Between’ lingers in liminal spaces at the border
https://arktimes.com/rock-candy/2024/06/12/bentonville-film-festival-the-in-between-lingers-in-liminal-spaces-at-the-border
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Stories discussed this week:
More tax cuts incoming: Governor calls special session next week
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/06/11/more-tax-cuts-incoming-governor-calls-special-session-next-week
We can blame one of the clumsiest politicians in Arkansas history for next week’s special sessionhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/06/13/we-can-blame-one-of-the-clumsiest-politicians-in-arkansas-history-for-next-weeks-special-session
Fight! GOP fissures laid bare as Arkansas Republicans vote to close primarieshttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/06/10/fight-gop-fissures-laid-bare-as-arkansas-republicans-vote-to-close-primaries
Father shot by 11-year-old son in library parking lot has long history of crime, drug abuse and child neglecthttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/06/12/father-shot-by-11-year-old-son-in-library-parking-lot-has-long-history-of-crime-drug-abuse-and-child-neglect
Lawsuit challenges LEARNS voucher program as unconstitutionalhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/06/10/lawsuit-challenges-learns-voucher-program-as-unconstitutional
Endorsements:
Arkansas Times Film Series screens ’35 Shots of Rum’ (2008) Tuesday night
https://arktimes.com/rock-candy/2024/06/13/arkansas-times-film-series-screens-35-shots-of-rum-2008-tuesday-night
The Sympathizer: https://www.hbo.com/the-sympathizer
Kami Renee: https://soundcloud.com/soulsistakami/landr-recharge-m-m-balanced
We welcome your feedback. Write us at podcasts@arktimes.com.
If you like the show, tell your friends and leave a review wherever you get your podcast.
Stories in this week's edition:
Education vendor Solution Tree abandons ship on hefty state contracthttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/06/03/education-vendor-solution-tree-abandons-ship-on-hefty-state-contract
Government sues ExxonMobil 11 years after Mayflower oil spillhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/05/31/government-sues-exxonmobil-11-years-after-mayflower-oil-spill
UPDATE: Proposed $1.8 million settlement filed over Exxon’s 2013 Mayflower oil spillhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/06/03/proposed-1-8-million-settlement-filed-over-exxons-2013-mayflower-oil-spill
Voter registration groups sue over Arkansas’s abrupt rejection of e-signatures on formshttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/06/06/voter-registration-groups-sue-over-arkansass-abrupt-rejection-of-e-signatures-on-forms
Big if true: Pro-lifers claim no abortions in Arkansas in 2023https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/06/04/big-if-true-pro-lifers-claim-no-abortions-in-arkansas-in-2023
One mother’s suffering under the Arkansas abortion banhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/06/05/one-mothers-suffering-under-the-arkansas-abortion-ban
U.S. Supreme Court revives Arkansas gerrymandering case, but plaintiffs face long oddshttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/06/03/u-s-supreme-court-revives-arkansas-gerrymandering-case-but-plaintiffs-face-long-odds
We welcome your feedback, write us at [podcasts@arktimes.com]
If you like the show, tell your friends and leave a review wherever you get your podcast.
Stories discussed in this week's episode:
Little Rock police say governor told them to block canvassers from public property
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/05/30/little-rock-police-say-governor-told-them-to-block-canvassers-from-public-property
Arkansas education secretary withdraws Solution Tree contract after legislative opposition
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/05/31/arkansas-education-secretary-withdraws-solution-tree-contract-after-legislative-opposition
Solution Tree may not be improving Arkansas schools, but it is raking in the cash
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/05/29/solution-tree-may-not-be-improving-arkansas-schools-but-it-is-raking-in-the-cash
Endorsements:
Bens Appliances and Junk
https://www.youtube.com/@bensappliancesandjunk
The ‘Vous
https://www.riverdale10.com/movie/The%5FVous
We welcome your feedback. Write us at podcasts@arktimes.com
If you like the show, tell your friends and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts.
Stories Discussed
Attorney general threatens groups advertising abortion pills in Arkansashttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/05/21/tim-griffin-warns-against-advertising-abortion-pills-in-arkansas
$15K in donations to Supreme Court Justice Barbara Webb come from industry her husband regulateshttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/05/17/15k-in-donations-to-supreme-court-justice-barbara-webb-come-from-industry-her-husband-regulates
Arkansas Educational Rights Amendment organizers say they’re ‘nearing the halfway mark’ on signatures for the 2024 ballothttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/05/21/arkansas-educational-rights-amendment-organizers-say-theyre-nearing-the-halfway-mark-on-signatures-for-the-2024-ballot
Jim Walton gives $500K to defend Arkansas school vouchers from ballot measurehttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/05/16/jim-walton-gives-500k-to-defend-arkansas-school-vouchers-from-ballot-measure
Endorsements
Serial Season 4: Guantánamohttps://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/podcasts/serial-season-four-guantanamo.html
The Rest is Historyhttps://linktr.ee/restishistory
We welcome your feedback, write us at [podcasts@arktimes.com]
If you like the show, tell your friends and leave a review wherever you get your podcast.
Stories discussed this week:
Central High principal’s salary adjustment to close a gender pay gap up for approval Thursday
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/05/15/central-high-principals-salary-adjustment-to-close-a-gender-pay-gap-up-for-approval-thursday
Glitch sends out contract renewals to all LRSD employees, even the ones losing their jobs
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/05/15/glitch-sends-out-contract-renewals-to-all-lrsd-employees-even-the-ones-losing-their-jobs
LRSD outlines $15 million in budget cuts, employee non-renewals
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/05/16/lrsd-outlines-15-million-in-budget-cuts-employee-non-renewals
Public schools must teach pro-adoption, anti-abortion lesson by end of school year, per new state law:
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/05/14/public-schools-must-teach-pro-adoption-anti-abortion-lesson-by-end-of-school-year-per-new-state-law
Judge asks the guns-in-courthouses questions the Arkansas Supreme Court chose to ignore
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/05/08/judge-chip-welch-asks-the-gun-questions-the-ones-the-arkansas-supreme-court-chose-to-ignore
Arkansas Supreme Court goes loco after judge refers to its gun ruling as ‘LOCO’
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/05/14/arkansas-supreme-court-goes-loco-after-judge-refers-to-its-gun-ruling-as-loco
Endorsements:
The Hundred Years' War on Palestine A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781627798556/thehundredyearswaronpalestine
The Beinart Notebook
https://peterbeinart.substack.com/
Arkansas Times Film Series screens ‘Late Spring’ (1949) Tuesday night
https://arktimes.com/rock-candy/2024/05/16/arkansas-times-film-series-screens-late-spring-1949-tuesday-night
We welcome your feedback. Write us at podcasts@arktimes.com
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Stories discussed this week include:
Judge partly sides with plaintiffs suing to stop Arkansas’s ban on ‘critical race theory,’ ‘indoctrination’https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/05/07/judge-partly-sides-with-plaintiffs-suing-to-stop-arkansass-ban-on-critical-race-theory-indoctrination
Judge hears arguments in lawsuit over LEARNS ban on ‘indoctrination,’ ‘critical race theory’https://arktimes.com/news/2024/04/30/judge-hears-arguments-in-lawsuit-over-learns-ban-on-indoctrination-critical-race-theory
Students and dignitaries celebrate in Little Rock as Daisy Bates statue debuts in Washington, D.C.https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/05/08/students-and-dignitaries-celebrate-in-little-rock-as-daisy-bates-statue-debuts-in-washington-d-c
Streaming numbers say Netflix’s controversial ‘Unlocked’ is a hithttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/05/01/streaming-numbers-say-netflixs-controversial-unlocked-is-a-hit
Endorsements
Ye Paul's Soul Bodega & Grillhttps://www.facebook.com/YePauls/
Annikahttps://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/shows/annika/
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Hester reelected as President of Senate as Legislature wraps up fiscal session; Chesterfield honoredhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/05/02/hester-reelected-as-president-of-senate-as-legislature-wraps-up-fiscal-session-chesterfield-honored
Crypto regulation bills advance out of House committeehttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/05/01/crypto-regulation-bills-advance-out-of-house-committee
Crypto bills pass House and head to the governor’s deskhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/05/01/crypto-bills-pass-house-and-head-to-the-governors-desk
Lawmakers adopt emergency rule barring electronic signatures for would-be votershttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/05/02/lawmakers-adopt-emergency-rule-barring-electronic-signatures-for-would-be-voters
Arkansas AG Tim Griffin sues to keep gun show loophole open, with a nod to Bryan Malinowskihttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/05/01/arkansas-ag-tim-griffin-sues-to-keep-gun-show-loophole-open-with-a-nod-to-bryan-malinowski
We welcome your feedback, write us at podcasts@arktimes.com
One of the main selling points behind school vouchers, which use public funds to help pay for private school tuition, has always been that they help families find a better option if their kids are stuck in failing public schools. But in practice, most vouchers in such programs wind up going to kids who never went to public school at all.
Unsurprisingly, that has been the clear trend thus far in Arkansas, which enacted a voucher program under Arkansas LEARNS, the education overhaul signed into law last year by Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Many of the latest voucher programs across the country are universal — any kid can apply regardless of how much money their family makes, whether they are currently enrolled in public school, or any other factor. The Arkansas program is being phased in over three years and will be universal in the 2025-26 school year. Such programs mean that any kids already enrolled in private school are eligible to apply for a voucher to pay for tuition. That doesn’t sound like a program targeted to help low-income families frustrated with their public school; it sounds like a program to boost the bank accounts of existing private school families, many of them wealthy.
Josh Cowen, professor of education policy at Michigan State University and a prominent researcher on vouchers and other education policies, examines this issue in a new article for the National Education Policy Center, in which Cowen reviews a report from the pro-voucher advocacy group EdChoice. LEARNS watchers will recognize that name. The well-heeled group was an outspoken cheerleader for LEARNS and a frequent source of pro-voucher material for advocates across the country, including in Arkansas.
The evidence that voucher programs mostly benefit kids who never went to public school in the first place is overwhelming, but EdChoice tends to twist whatever information it can to paint a rosier picture for vouchers. In March, they published a report, “The Reality of Switchers,” that tried to make the case that vouchers really are helping kids who leave public schools and switch over to private schools.
It was written, by the way, by Martin Lueken, who got his doctorate at the University of Arkansas, where he studied at the Department of Education Reform. This department, with help from Walton funding, has long been known for churning out research that happens to align with pro-voucher politics (and helping to train up the future staff of think tanks like EdReform). It’s the same department that will conduct the evaluation of LEARNS, as mandated by the law.
Here’s the current research lay of the land, according to Cowen:
Drawing on both state agency releases and analysis by independent researchers, reports from across the country estimate that between 65% and 90% of voucher users were either in private school already, homeschool, or, at best, beginning kindergarten. These numbers have been confirmed consistently by journalists in Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Wisconsin. National media outlets, including Education Week, Politico, and the Wall Street Journal, have echoed these conclusions. Taken together, the reporting confirms a pattern identified by experienced researchers and program evaluators since at least 2007: that the vast majority of vouchers amount to subsidies for students who have never been in public school.
And this basic dynamic has been true across a variety of voucher programs with different structures or eligibility pools:
Many of these programs (especially Arizona, Florida, and Ohio) approach near-universal status in their voucher systems. They can differ in economic and demographic diversity, size, and scope. Yet despite these distinctions, the fact that most users were not in public school is a universal feature of voucher systems themselves and not particular to the state in which those vouchers are available.
The EdChoice report acknowledges that there isn’t really any doubt that most voucher users were not in public school at the point at which they got the private school voucher. So no one is disputing that the story of “switching” out of failing public schools via a voucher, which is often a centerpiece of pro-voucher politics, amounts to a very small portion of actual voucher usage.
But, the report, argues that there are some kids who would have eventually become public school students, or would have returned to public school, if not for the vouchers helping to fund their tuition to continue as private school students. It notes that kindergartners are typically counted as never having gone to public school, and some of them may not have gone to private school if not for vouchers. For these and other methodological reasons, the report argues that data on this topic generally overstates the number of “non-switchers,” as the report calls them.
For EdChoice, the point isn’t just the political rhetoric and the stories that both sides tell. It’s also about the budgetary impact of vouchers. Typically, the way these programs are designed, the voucher is worth less than the per-student cost the state incurs when someone attends public school. Therefore, every time a student switches (goes to a private school with a voucher when they otherwise would have gone to public school), the state saves money. But every time a student who would have gone to private school anyway gets a voucher, the state spends more. That’s a big reason EdChoice is worked up about who gets counted as a “switcher” and a “non-switcher.”
The recent history has been that these programs wind up wildly over budget. Arizona’s universal school voucher program had initially been projected to cost $65 million this year. State officials now expect the cost to be $900 million, nearly 14 times higher than the initial estimate, and hundreds of millions of dollars more expensive than the funding initially allocated. If EdChoice is right, this trend should, I guess, start reversing soon? We’ll see.
In Arkansas, the Legislature ultimately controls how much funding the voucher program will get. But what happens when the floodgates open? In the law’s third year, remember, literally every student already attending private school will be eligible to apply. Why wouldn’t all of those families want a massive tuition discount?
If costs explode, will the Arkansas Legislature be willing to hold the line on the original budget forecast, even if that means turning lots of kids away who want vouchers? This could be a major political mess, so the Legislature better hope that EdChoice’s voodoo economics hold and giving away $7,000 tuition coupons to all comers is fiscally sound.
According to Cowen, the EdChoice report “uses almost no credible research literature. Instead, it relies on social media posts, a handful of media reports, and previous reports by its own author.” It also omits key research bolstering the widely accepted findings about the prevalence of “non-switchers,” Cowen writes. And it offered no clear description of its methodology or evidence that any accepted methodology was used at all, he says.
It also uses data from two small voucher programs that made the information available via proprietary agreements — thus making the data potentially inaccessible to other researchers who might want to try to replicate the results. In one case, “this included data given to EdChoice directly by the voucher administrator, the Children’s Scholarship Fund, a voucher advocacy group co-funded by John Walton decades ago,” Cowen writes.
Cowen makes no allegation of anything nefarious in terms of how this data was handled. But speaking for myself, this dynamic makes me nervous. If pro-voucher groups are making arguments based on secret data that’s not available to other researchers, I’m a little more skeptical that their conclusions have a sound basis.
Cowen’s conclusion:
The report does one thing that advocates and critics alike should applaud. It makes a case that even if all voucher users were already in private school before taking a voucher, this would be a result that taxpayers should welcome. If vouchers amount to taxpayer funding of private, religious school tuition—especially for those who can already afford it—it would be an optimal policy result, in the report’s view.
Many disagree with this argument, but it—not some half-baked, back-of-the-envelope assertion that vouchers provide meaningful new choices to kids—is the honest version of the case for vouchers. Namely, that some parents will always choose private, religious schools. And that taxpayers should pick up the tab for those religious choices just as they do a common public school system. Policymakers should have that debate, make their decisions, and be held accountable by the voters.
The claim that taxpayers should fund religious choices will be vigorously challenged and—I believe—rejected by majorities of parents and other voters. But all of us should welcome it as a statement of the true intent behind voucher systems. In the meantime, we can move past hastily assembled talking points meant to discredit extant research, a dozen separate pieces of solid journalism, and many more state agency reports. The stakes are too high to waste time on spin and misdirection.
Cowen cites our report from last October on the early data from Arkansas LEARNS: According to the first annual report on the voucher program, a whopping 95% of the students receiving vouchers this year did not attend public schools last year.
In general, the percentage of total LEARNS voucher students who did not attend public school can be expected to go up over time, because more and more of the voucher students are simply continuing to go to private school with a voucher. LEARNS gives preference to returning voucher students, which is typical of programs in other states as well, so this is more or less guaranteed to happen. (Likewise, a larger share of new voucher users, eventually, should be made up of new kindergartners and transfers from public school, since most of the private school kids who want vouchers will already have them.)
If we look at the history of voucher programs, Cowen told me, they seem to settle in roughly somewhere around 70% for this figure, but he added that it was too early to say how that might change with the new wave of universal programs.
Also, keep in mind: Universal eligibility doesn’t mean that families necessarily get to choose the private school they want. Voucher-accepting private schools can can reject students in ways that public schools, who must take all comers, cannot. Some private schools can and do have discriminatory admissions practices, such as banning LGBT students. Not all parts of the state have a high-quality private school nearby. And many of the private schools that accept vouchers have tuitions that are significantly higher than the vouchers, shutting out parents who can’t afford the difference.
There are a couple of nuances are worth highlighting behind that 95% number in Arkansas. The program is not yet universal, and only a fraction of the state’s students were eligible this year, based on certain categories were, such as students with a disability, first-time kindergartners and kids who attended an exceptionally low-performing public school.
First-time kindergartners made up 31% of the state’s voucher students this year, according to the state’s report last fall. There is no way to know how many of those kids would have gone to private school even if they didn’t have the vouchers or how many would otherwise have gone to public school.
There are reasons we could make an educated guess that many of them are private school families. Outreach was generally not as strong as voucher advocates probably have liked, in part because the program itself was still in legal limbo because of a court challenge until well into the summer. Given that, there’s a good chance that private school families — families with older kids already in private school or just already tuned-in to the private school application process for their kindergartner — were more likely to hear about the voucher program. The legal delays also meant that the application process for vouchers opened up so late that many private school applications may already have been due, which might again skew things toward parents planning to send their kids to private school regardless.
But this is all speculative. We just don’t know. This is a fair point from the EdChoice crowd: When people use that 95% number, it’s important to highlight that new kindergartners complicate the picture.
Another complicating factor is that 13% of the voucher students this year were absorbed into the program from the Succeed Scholarship Program, an earlier, smaller voucher program that mostly went to students with disabilities. And these students had to be previously enrolled in public school before entering private school via Succeed.
Still, there were eligibility categories, such as disability, open to students who had previously been enrolled in public school. And nevertheless, in the program’s first year, those transfers were vanishingly small. Among the nearly 4,795 students who were enrolled in the voucher program as of September, just 55 of them across the entire state were kids who were eligible because they came from the lowest-performing public schools or districts.
So far, as has been the case in voucher programs, very few LEARNS voucher students are moving from public school to private school. Private school families are getting a windfall.
The post Most voucher students are not coming from public schools appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Conway School District Deputy Superintendent Jason Black will make $140,592.20 for the coming school year, which will cover 240 work days during the 12 months starting July 1 under the contract he signed Wednesday.
That’s more than $14,000 higher than what he now makes — $126,270.32. Black also will continue to be paid $600 monthly for in-district travel expenses.
You may remember that Black was recently in the news for his work as a paid adjunct teacher for the Arkansas Criminal Justice Institute.
Black is also listed as a consultant for Superintendent Jeff Collum‘s private business, Triad Consultants, which we wrote about most recently last month.
Neither Black’s new nor his current contract addresses outside employment. But in a March email the school district’s attorney sent to the Arkansas Times last month, Black said, “Any consulting work is done either outside of school time or scheduled at a time that minimally conflicts with any deputy superintendent duties for the district.”
That attorney, Shastady Wagner, said in an email Friday that the school district doesn’t assess whether it can give an across-the-board raise or bonus to all employees until the end of each fiscal year.
The post UPDATE: Conway deputy superintendent gets a nice raise appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Two bills, Senate Bill 78 and Senate Bill 79, aiming to regulate crypto mining and address some of the problems created by a bungled law from 2023, passed easily with no debate in the Arkansas House today.
Crypto “mining” is the process by which bitcoin confirms transactions and creates new bitcoin, using a network of high-powered computers. Unfortunately, this big-money industry is noisy and terrible for the environment. Crypto mines have often proven to be a major problem for the rural communities where they’ve popped up.
Act 851 of 2023, reportedly written in large part by the Satoshi Group — a dark money crypto advocacy group — sharply curtailed the ability of Arkansas cities and counties to regulate the industry, giving crypto companies a legal leg up on communities impacted by the nuisances they cause. This led to an outrage, stirring up local and national media reports and bringing a deluge of constituent complaints to legislators in impacted areas — typically rural.
The co-sponsors of Act 851, Sen. Joshua Bryant (R-Rogers) and Rep. Rick McClure (R-Malvern), are also co-sponsors of these new bills, which has some observers concerned.
“I don’t let the same man take me snipe hunting twice,” Rep. Josh Miller (R-Heber Springs) recently commented during a committee hearing.
Miller co-sponsored a more aggressive slate of proposals to regulate crypto mines along with Sen. Bryan King (R-Green Forest). Those proposals were blocked from even being considered a couple weeks ago when they failed to get the needed approval in the House. Most Democrats declined to vote for it, which turned out to be a deciding block on a few of King’s measures, despite the fact that they took a stronger hand in regulating the industry.
My take: The two bills aren’t perfect, but they at least establish mechanisms for regulation of the crypto mine industry and address many of the concerns created by Act 851. There are still troublesome open questions, limitations, worries about loopholes, too much leeway for industry and vague language that could weaken their impact. Much will come down to how the rules are promulgated and enforced by state agencies. That’s yet another worry: Can we trust Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her administration to be aggressive and really tackle the problem, or will they prove cozy to industry?
Good questions have also been raised by Rep. Andrew Collins (L-Little Rock) and others about whether the provisions blocking foreign ownership or governments from certain nations may be both overly broad, unfairly snaring innocent people, and ultimately ineffective given that bad actors are likely to hide their involvement via shell companies and other schemes.
But crucially, they will allow local governments to make their own regulations on crypto mine businesses after they were hamstrung by Act 851. They still are denied local control when it comes to regulating “home crypto mining” — which lots of lawmakers are worried might be abused — but in practice is much less likely to cause the same kind of nuisance.
I would have much preferred to have some of King’s tougher provisions included, or at least part of the discussion — but I view the two bills as more or less positive overall and certainly better than nothing.
Whenever Bryant opens his mouth, I start worrying again. He certainly still sounds like someone still carrying water for the crypto mine industry. But here’s my best guess about what’s going on: Bryant and others are indeed foot soldiers for the industry and its high-dollar lobbyists. My take is that Act 851 was such a terrible overreach that the crypto mining businesses realized they had to agree to some real reforms or there was a good chance they would get shut out of the state altogether. They were terrified of the King proposals; they probably would prefer to keep Act 851 as it was, but they’re willing to bite the bullet on SB78 and SB79.
Here’s the gist on the two bills:
- SB78 restores local control to municipal and county governments to regulate crypto mine businesses (though not home mining operations); requires noise mitigation techniques, with specific examples noted but not mandated — and has no decibel limit; requires that if they do not use such mitigation techniques, the crypto mining facilities must be at least 2,000 feet from the nearest residential or commercial use structure (or located in an area zoned for industrial use); and prohibits the crypto mines from being owned by people or governments from certain countries, including China.
- SB79 creates a state-level regulatory system to work in tandem with SB78, including a process for the attorney general to investigate potential violations of rules against foreign ownership by prohibited nations such as China, and a state licensing system that requires a permit from the Oil and Gas Commission, including compliance with all aspects of SB78 and SB79.
SB78 passed 93-4 and SB79 passed 93-5. Now they’re on to the governor, and barring a wild surprise, she’ll sign them into law.The post Crypto bills pass House and head to the governor’s desk appeared first on Arkansas Times.
With the Milwaukee Bucks’ two top scorers Giannis Antetokounmpo and Damian Lillard out of the lineup with injuries, former Razorbacks Patrick Beverley and Bobby Portis Jr. each recorded double-doubles to help save the Bucks from elimination in Game 5 of the team’s first round playoff series with the Indiana Pacers Tuesday night.
Portis, 29, who began the day apologizing to teammates for his first quarter Game 4 ejection, scored a playoff career high 29 points and 10 rebounds.
We stick together. pic.twitter.com/33fnZFSPMJ
— Milwaukee Bucks (@Bucks) May 1, 2024
Beverley, 35, scored 13 points with a playoff career high 12 assists, and brought his celebratory A game.
Heard the timeline wanted this. pic.twitter.com/iNSSOUzyJV
— Milwaukee Bucks (@Bucks) May 1, 2024
Check out these highlights.
Late night Pat Bev highlights
13 points
12 assists
71% TSOutplayed Tyrese Haliburton
( @Digits3App )
pic.twitter.com/B7T1yLGseA
— NBACentral (@TheDunkCentral) May 1, 2024
The Bucks face elimination again on Thursday night. The Pacers lead the series 3-2.
The post Two former Razorbacks lift Bucks in NBA Playoffs elimination game appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A new documentary short by Iranian-American filmmaker and Russellville native Andy Sarjahani is now available for viewing as part of the New Yorker’s documentary series.
“The Smallest Power,” which premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival in January, gets its title from the testimony of an anonymous medical resident in Iran who — on top of mostly black and white animation — recounts a modest but inspiring act of courage during the country’s Woman, Life, Freedom protests that erupted after the death of Mahsi Amina. Amina was “arrested and reportedly beaten for revealing some of her hair, a violation of Iran’s mandatory-hijab law,” according to the New Yorker.
“This is the only thing I could do. I don’t have the power to do anything about a child being killed in another city. But I have yet the smallest power,” the woman says in voiceover. You can watch the short below:
The New Yorker’s write-up about the film includes some interesting reflections from Sarjahani about what it was like to grow up in Arkansas as the child of parents with clashing backgrounds — one a Baptist from the South, the other a Shiite Muslim from Iran.
An ordinary homelife was “complicated by geopolitics,” he reflected. Members of his mother’s church regularly visited to try to convert his father. As a kid, Sarjahani was embarrassed. “What’s wrong with my dad?” he wondered. He distanced himself from his heritage, playing high-school football and hunting deer to fit in. He had a shotgun and has appeared in his videos in overalls. “My features are Iranian,” he once wrote about himself. He has an elegant Persian nose and dark eyes. “But my twang is all Arkansas.”
Sarjahani began to experience an internal pivot after the 9/11 attacks, in 2001. “The way people felt about Iranians or Middle Easterners, just speaking very transparently in front of me, I was like, Wow, this is the community that I grew up with, and this is how people feel about the other half of me,” he said. His friends and even his extended family were cheering to bomb Iran.
Sarjahani was a cinematographer for “The Barber of Little Rock,” a recent Oscar-nominated documentary about Little Rock resident Arlo Washington that was also showcased by the New Yorker. His other most recent documentary, “Wild Hogs and Saffron,” logs a contemplative hunting trip in the Ozarks between he and his childhood friend.
More about Sarjahani’s work can be found on his website.
The post The New Yorker shares documentary short by Russellville native Andy Sarjahani appeared first on Arkansas Times.
When word leaked in March about Netflix’s “Unlocked: A Jail Experiment,” much of the reporting about the show centered on the controversial agreement between Pulaski County Sheriff Eric Higgins and Lucky 8 TV to allow the production company to film in the county jail. Everyone from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette to The Daily Wire mentioned it. Even the Arkansas Times had two stories touching on the controversy.
Based on the early numbers, however, it appears the eight-part docuseries has proven the old adage true yet again: there really is no such thing as bad publicity.
The show was released to Netflix’s U.S. customers on April 10. Despite only being available for a portion of the week of April 8-14, Variety reported “Unlocked” was the “an immediate hit” and “Netflix’s second-most-watched English-language series” for that week, with nearly four million views and over 21 million cumulative hours of streaming in less than a week.
Initial interest in the show has remained strong in subsequent weeks as well. It remained in second place among TV shows for the week of April 12-18, with 2.4 million views and a little over 13 million hours of streaming, and it added another 2.5 million views and 13.6 million streaming hours from April 22-28 as the third-most-watched among Netflix’s English-language TV shows for that time period.
Shot in the Pulaski County Regional Detention Facility over six weeks in 2023, “Unlocked” chronicles Higgins’ efforts to implement a radical new approach to incarceration in a single living unit within the jail.
As the show begins, the inmates in H Unit are on a “23/1” schedule, where they are locked in their cells (usually with a cellmate) for 23 hours per day and receive only one hour for activity outside the cells, and one or more Pulaski County Sheriff’s Office deputies remains in the unit at all times. Early in the first episode, Higgins and deputies tell H Unit inmates the plan (and the reason for the documentary): Higgins has decided to try something different, with the cell doors inside the unit remaining open and jail guards staying outside the unit except in emergencies or to dispense inmates’ medications.
Or, as an ominous voiceover explains it early in the episode: “Treat the inmates like responsible adults, and they’ll behave like responsible adults. That’s the theory, at least.”
Initially, the results are predictable. The younger inmates — some still minors, though charged as adults — almost immediately test the limits of the new arrangement by (among other things) attempting to make “hooch” (fruit and other sugary liquid fermented in a plastic bag), making contraband tattooing equipment, and stealing a battery from the unit wall clock so they can use it to heat a wire and make a lighter. Older inmates, on the other hand, generally try to organize the unit in an effort to keep everyone on the straight-and-narrow so their newfound privileges aren’t taken away. The groups predictably butt heads over myriad issues, big and small.
One of the more fascinating aspects of “Unlocked” is how the inmates facing life sentences frequently seem to be the most protective of the freedoms offered in Unit H. Guys who are simply serving a jail sentence and will be released relatively soon are indifferent by comparison, especially in the beginning.
Over the course of the series, however, a number of broader themes emerge. The difference in perspective, regardless of age, between inmates who have been to prison before and those who are in jail awaiting (potentially) their first prison sentence is palpable. The inmates’ distrust for other inmates — and especially the PSCO staff — slowly gives way to a reluctant peace in the unit as inmates come to understand the opportunity they’ve been given. Higgins and the PSCO deputies work to find a balance of carrot-and-stick that will encourage the men in Unit H to put the inmates’ collective needs ahead of their own. Inmates whose visitations and phone calls with family were contentious and heated in early episodes slowly begin to grasp the concept of empathy. As the docuseries progresses, those interactions grow less heated, and good behavior yields expanded phone call privileges.
“Unlocked” first made headlines in late March when it was announced, then again a short time later when questions arose about the agreement between Higgins and Lucky 8. Pulaski County made additional news late last week when it returned the $60,000 check Lucky 8 sent to cover any costs associated with filming in the jail. Initial reviews of the show largely focused on how some inmates violated jail rules through fighting or possession of contraband.
Such framing overlooks a far more interesting story: by most objective measures, Higgins’ experiment seems to have worked.
Inmates who previously were locked away for 23 hours per day were given a chance to learn socialization skills many previously lacked, and — other than a few minor hiccups — demonstrated growth and change in their behavior and outlook on life in just six weeks. For some, the experiment literally gave them a sense of hope for the future that was previously missing.
The inmates weren’t the only ones who seemed to grow through the experiment. Deputies who were initially hesitant (or outright opposed) to the idea softened their positions as the show progressed and the first positive signs the experiment was working became visible.
Even Higgins, who came up with the plan in the first place, seemed to learn from it. In the final episode, Higgins returns to Unit H to discuss the experiment, and he asks the group why it took some of the inmates so long to start taking their new opportunities seriously and come together as a community.
“You gave us enough time, but we new to this,” inmate Willie Lovelace explains. “We true to this, but we new to this. So it took us a while because we slow, look how long it’s taken us to get along in life.”
A smile spreads across Higgins’ face, as if he hadn’t considered that before and was just then realizing the depth of what Lovelace was saying: many of these men would likely not be in jail if they already possessed good interpersonal, social, and conflict-resolution skills.
Six weeks is an awful short time to break a lifetime of bad habits and poor decision-making. That Higgins was able to see any change in that timeframe is almost as impressive as his willingness to even try this experiment in a state as carceral as Arkansas.
With the success of “Unlocked” over its first three weeks on Netflix, maybe we are seeing the first cracks in the “lock up more people, longer” ethos that drives so many states’ criminal-justice policies.
The post Streaming numbers say Netflix’s controversial ‘Unlocked’ is a hit appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Brian ChilsonGov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (file photo)Budgets, as the cliché goes, are about priorities.
The top priority for Arkansas Republicans, beginning during former Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s administration and now exploding under Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, has been tax cuts, heavily tilted toward the rich.
That leaves less money for all the various services provided by state government, from UAMS to pre-K.
Sanders proposed a budget plan in March that would move the state toward severe austerity, and the budget bill now being finalized by the Legislature follows her lead. Unlike her father, former Gov. Mike Huckabee, who signed the ARKids insurance program into law as one of his signature achievements, Sanders is proving to be a doctrinaire right-winger — willing to aggressively slash spending for those most in need.
Conservatives will take issue with that statement, because the governor’s fiscal year 2025 budget (which starts on July 1 and ends June 30, 2025) increases spending over last year by around $109 million, or 1.76%. Most of that is made up of an increase in funding for school vouchers under Arkansas LEARNS, the government’s education bill that passed last year.
But budget watchers typically focus on the rate of growth, and the Sanders budget has a much smaller increase than we’ve seen in recent years. Fiscal year 2024, by comparison, was around 3% higher than fiscal year 2023. Critics argue that adopting the austerity approach is a particular problem now, given high inflation in recent years.
If funding doesn’t keep up with inflation, you wind up with a de facto cut. An agency might have to cut staff positions, for example, if competitive salaries are rising but the funding pool used to pay those salaries is flat.
The LEARNS voucher system, which allows families to use public funds to send their children to private schools, will get a major bump in the new budget, roughly tripling from $31.7 million in fiscal year 2024 to $97.5 million in fiscal year 2025.
That $65.8 million increase for vouchers accounts for around 60% of the total increase for the entire budget.
That clarifies just how stingy the governor’s budget is: Outside of the LEARNS funding, the proposed budget is only increasing by roughly 0.7% compared to last year. It also hints at the extent to which pouring money into the pockets of private school families is already crowding out other priorities.
And it means that lots of other agencies and services that Arkansans rely on will now be facing a crunch.
Here are some examples of agencies and services getting squeezed with year-over-year funding increases close to zero: child care and early education (0.5%), the School for the Blind (0.1%), the School for the Deaf (0.4%), educational television (0.04%), the State Library via the General Education Fund (0.03 percent), Youth Services (0.01%), Developmental Disabilities Services (0.16%) and Behavioral Health Services (0.06%).
This is just a sampling; have a look for yourself.
Even these teensy percentages can almost mask the fact that the increases are essentially nothing — a rounding error. For example, services for people with developmental disabilities, housed under the Department of Human Services, is a $65 million program. It is being bumped up by only around $100,000. The School for the Deaf’s $11.8 million budget went up $4,444. The State Library funding via the General Education Fund, nearly $4 million last year, went up by $1,230. Those growth rates all round to zero.
Higher education was likewise slammed. Total funding for four-year colleges was worse than flat: It went down by 0.29%, a $1,849,365 cut without even factoring in inflation. The schools with budgets on the chopping block include Arkansas State University (down by $390,716 compared to the last fiscal year), the University of Central Arkansas (-$892,398), UA-Little Rock (-$539,714) and more.
Arkansas Tech (-$741,960), Henderson State University (-$382,676) and UA-Fort Smith (-$429,507) will take the hardest hits in relative terms, each getting slammed with 2% cuts.
Total funding for two-year colleges was slashed by $848,319, a 0.72% cut compared to last year. Seven two-year colleges were hit with cuts of 2% or more.
Some of the cuts are difficult to track just by looking at top-line figures on the Legislature’s budget. “Miscellaneous agencies” are getting cut by $3,323,272, or 4.09% — which likely amounts to significant cuts in many smaller programs.
These numbers can feel cold, but they have real impacts when we see a decline in the services that so many Arkansans rely on.
Instead of fully funding these programs, Sanders and her allies in the Legislature are shoveling tens of millions of dollars toward vouchers, which in practice amount to a hefty bump for the bank accounts of private school families, many of them wealthy. That’s on top of the multiple rounds of tax cuts over the last few years, likewise a windfall mostly for the rich. Most believe yet another cut is coming via a special session to slash the top rate even more.
The governor’s priorities are clear.
The post Sanders and Republican legislators pour money into vouchers and tax cuts while crucial programs suffer appeared first on Arkansas Times.
KPOT Korean BBQ & Hot Pot, a restaurant franchise that blends “traditional Asian hot pot with Korean barbecue flavors” is close to opening its new location in North Little Rock at 4317 Warden Road. The building is situated near McCain Mall in between IHOP and Whole Hog North Little Rock.
KPOT opened its first Arkansas branch in Jonesboro last year. According to its website, a Rogers store at 5204 Village Parkway is also in the works. Almost every post on the company’s Facebook page is followed by a slew of comments from users asking when certain pending locations around the U.S. are opening. Four days ago, someone asked when the North Little Rock store would open, and KPOT responded that the restaurant “is set to open in the next few weeks.”
The excitement the restaurant generates, in part, is that it offers patrons an opportunity to participate in traditional hot pot, an interactive dining experience where diners can cook thinly sliced meats or vegetables in a pot of simmering stock at their table (Mr. Chen’s Authentic Chinese Cooking on South University has offered hot pot for years if you want to try it for dinner tonight). KPOT also features table grills for customers to prepare Korean barbecue.
The North Little Rock location has several hiring positions listed on indeed.com.
The post KPOT Korean BBQ & Hot Pot opening soon in North Little Rock appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Big concert announcements often come coupled with long lead times. Lucky for us, that’s not the case for yesterday’s reveal that rap goddess and Little Rock native Kari Faux will be headlining this year’s 501 Fest, a free celebration of all things Central Arkansas with live music, vendors, food trucks and an inflatable laser tag course (!) that runs from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday in the SoMa neighborhood.
If you don’t yet know Faux — who last performed in Arkansas at Bentonville’s FORMAT Festival in September — she’s got a casual yet totally confident way of delivering lines that both invites and intimidates. In other words: If you’re on her team, hell yeah. If not, then watch out. Upon the release of her 2023 album, “Real B*tches Don’t Die!,” PopSugar put it like this: “Kari Faux raps and sings with the self-possession of the best friend who’s required to proofread any text message to a partner you know you need to break up with. She’ll ensure you’re not giving any extra energy to someone who isn’t worth it. Or will happily tell you to delete the messages altogether.”
The full lineup includes DJ Xavier Riley, P for Parker, SinClare, Bri Ailene, Emily Fenton, Piecemeal Pact, Jett Jano, and Q.G. The BlackKnight.
Another 501 Fest-adjacent activity to be on the lookout for: At noon, 8 artists will simultaneously paint the alley behind The Bagel Shop, and the public is encouraged to show up and watch for what’s being called MuralFest. According to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the alley is currently “covered with graffiti, some of it vulgar” and the event organizers hope that “putting art there will signal to others that the spot is taken.”
Reserve your ticket for 501 Fest here.
The post Kari Faux to headline 501 Fest on Saturday appeared first on Arkansas Times.
NICKEL CREEK
THURSDAY 5/2. The Hall. 8 p.m. $40-$90.
Despite being bluegrass aficionados, Nickel Creek — founded in 1989 by Chris Thile (mandolin) and siblings Sara (fiddle) and Sean Watkins (guitar) when all three were merely preteens — has always kept the genre at an arm’s length. The trio certainly boasts the chops to traffic exclusively in traditional music (no list of the best mandolin players in the world is complete without Thile), but they’ve always had a soft spot for poppiness, too, meaning that their respectful renditions of hand-me-down folk ditties and rhythmically sophisticated original instrumentals are sandwiched in between songs that highlight their gifts as sugary stringers of melody. No matter how technical the group can sometimes get, what keeps them from losing orbit is their vocal chemistry, with Sara Watkins’ often plaintive delivery offering a counterpoint to Thile’s piercingly precise tenor. Their last two albums — 2014’s “A Dotted Line” and 2023’s “Celebrants” — were both released after several years of hiatus, so don’t miss out on what might be another short-lived reunion. Guatemalan singer-songwriter Gaby Moreno is set to open. Get tickets here.
The post Bluegrass aficionados Nickel Creek at The Hall on Thursday appeared first on Arkansas Times.
On this week’s podcast, in lieu of our regular weekly news roundup, we’re sharing something special — a speech by Arkansas Times editor emeritus Max Brantley on the sorry state of politics and journalism in our state.
Beginning in November 2023, the Arkansas Times started a luncheon speaker series that covers current events in Arkansas and serves as a fundraiser for our reporting efforts. Speakers have included former LRSD superintendent Baker Kurrus; Lauren Cowles, a drafter of the Arkansas Abortion Amendment and coalition member with Arkansans for Limited Government; and former state representative Nate Bell. This week, guests heard from Max, who retired from the helm of the Arkansas Times’ daily news blog in 2023 after 50 years in journalism in Little Rock.
If you liked this episode, please subscribe to our weekly show on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. We welcome your feedback. Write us at podcasts@arktimes.com
The post Max Brantley on “The Lost Cause: The Demise of Politics and Journalism,” April 26th, 2024 appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Mary Jane Doe is a local stoner-socialite here to provide you with hot gossip on fresh bud, best strains and how to make the most of your high.
Mary Jane DoeWana Gummies in Mango (Sativa)Wana | Gummies | Mango | Sativa
10mg per gummy
I popped half of one of these bad boys before the all-femme-fronted show at Vino’s on International Womxn’s Day. First half is always to get in the mood. Snuck the second half between sips of my lukewarm Busch Light during the middle of the show. Second half is to enhance the Vino’s experience of my boots sticking to the floor as I watch the mosh pit with a mixture of awe and envy. Am I too high (or not high enough) to enter this swarm of people — big and small, short and tall, happy and sad, gleefully pushing each other as a baddie from NYC with a sparkly rainbow grill shreds on the guitar, summoning us all like we’re at a seance? Maybe I was just right. I didn’t need to be in the pit. I was vibing in my fanny pack, and I didn’t want to take my hoops off.
Pairs well with: live music, $5.90 Tuesdays at the Riverdale movie theater, walking around downtown, a cold draft pilsner, an after-dinner-treat.
Mary Jane DoeGood Day Farm’s Watermelon Wonder (Hybrid)GDF | Flower
Watermelon Wonder| Hybrid
The first time I smoked this strain was after I took an outdoor yoga class on Petit Jean Mountain. Posted up on the side of the mountain, I sat in one of those zero-gravity chairs all afternoon, breathing deeply and puffing on my watermelon joint. My favorite flavor. I didn’t do a damn thing. I just sat. Watched the grass grow, heard the birds chirp and rested my eyes a bit. Boy, that was nice. I liked the weed so much I decided to roll it up for a bonfire celebrating a friend’s new house. This weed was on sale so I was more willing to share with a big group. How they bought a house in this economy, I have no idea, but a couple of puffs of the W.W. and I didn’t give a single you-know-what about the cost of living and an unlivable minimum wage. I was too busy a hootin’-and a-hollerin’, talkin’ ‘bout who knows what and laughin’ at Dicky lookin’ more stoned than we’ve ever seen him. There was no hidin’ behind those silly little glasses, Dick.
Pairs well with: hanging out on a mountain, picnics, bonfires, being social, being antisocial, staring at your dogs, staring off into space, a double cappuccino from Fidel & Co, yacht rock.
Mary Jane DoeCookies Cartridge,
Ooh La La (Wedding Cake x Lemon Pound Cake)Cookies | Tank (Cartridge)
Ooh La La (Wedding Cake x Lemon Pound Cake)
The vape is a godsend for us working girlies. I can easily sneak a puff in during a bathroom break, and it makes dealing with people much more tolerable, even pleasant. It also helps me feel more relaxed in my body so I’m not so caught up in my aches and pains. When I decided to paint my kitchen Lime Rickey green, I was glued to this cart. The high had the shade of green looking particularly lime, like I could smell the citrus in the wet paint. Between the Ooh La La and the ’90s hip-hop blasting, I was rockin-and-rolling, climbing on my countertops as carefree as Meg Ryan in a Nora Ephron movie. No matter what I’m doing or where, when I don’t feel like rolling one up or packing one in, the vape comes in super handy. And this cake flavor is delish. IYKYK.
Pairs well with: bathroom breaks, intense labor, buffet lunch at Al Seraj, parking lots, kombucha with a splash of La Croix and lime.
The post Mary Jane Says: Cannabis reviews from Mary Jane Doe appeared first on Arkansas Times.
This week: We say a bittersweet farewell to Arkansas Times city reporter extraordinaire Mary Hennigan, but not before one last update on Little Rock news. And, Matt Campbell answers everything you want to know about the #lecterngate audit and the governor's response.
Stories discussed in this edition:
Little Rock city manager hopefuls include Sen. Fred Love, acting manager Emily Cox
https://arktimes.com/news/2024/04/12/little-rock-city-manager-job-attracts-out-of-state-prospects
U.S. senators say ATF agents weren’t wearing body cameras in fatal Malinowski raid
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/04/19/u-s-senators-say-atf-agents-werent-wearing-body-cameras-in-fatal-malinowski-raid
Activists call on Little Rock officials to support ceasefire in the Middle East
https://arktimes.com/news/2024/04/16/activists-call-on-little-rock-officials-to-support-ceasefire-in-the-middle-east
City officials OK financial plan for Little Rock solar array
https://arktimes.com/news/2024/04/17/city-officials-ok-financial-plan-for-little-rock-solar-array
Arkansas lawmakers call on ATF to release footage of Malinowski raid
https://arktimes.com/news/2024/04/19/arkansas-lawmakers-call-on-atf-to-release-footage-of-malinowski-raid
Lawmakers question governor’s staff over lectern audit
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/04/16/lawmakers-question-governors-staff-over-lectern-audit
State auditors refer lecterngate findings to prosecutor’s office
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/04/15/state-auditors-refer-lecterngate-findings-to-prosecutors-office
Arkansas Times listeners, we need your feedback! What do you like about the podcast? What do you hate? What can we improve? Email us with your thoughts, please, at podcasts@arktimes.com.
This week, Dave Ramsey and Benji preview the fiscal session, the governor's meager budget and the legislative fight over crypto mining; and, Omaya talks with Rhett Brinkley about John Calipari's arrival at the University of Arkansas and what it means for Razorback basketball.
Stories discussed this week:
Austerity Sarah: Governor’s budget is generous to private school families, stingy for everyone else
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/04/11/austerity-sarah-governors-budget-is-generous-to-private-school-families-stingy-for-everyone-else
State budget leaves only crumbs for rural schools and the poor, advocates say
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/04/11/state-budget-leaves-only-crumbs-for-rural-schools-and-the-poor-advocates-say
Thousands pack Bud Walton Arena to welcome new Razorbacks coach John Calipari
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/04/11/thousands-pack-into-bud-walton-arena-to-welcome-new-razorbacks-coach-john-calipari
Crypto at the Capitol: Legislature revisiting Bitcoin mining after complaints from local residents
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/04/11/crypto-at-the-capitol-legislature-revisiting-bitcoin-mining-after-complaints-from-local-residents
“It’s bad for everything”: Citizens group from Arkansas County ready to fight back against crypto mines
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/04/11/its-bad-for-everything-citizens-group-from-arkansas-county-ready-to-fight-back-against-crypto-mines
This week, Benji and Mary Hennigan discuss the latest in the case of Bryan Malinowski, who was posthumously awarded a $24,000 bonus by the Little Rock airport commission, as well as several actions taken by the city board of directors at a Tuesday meeting. Then, Benji and Austin Gelder talk about the latest in a new lawsuit over a provision in Arkansas LEARNS. Finally, Benji talks to Rhett Brinkley, Daniel Grear, and Stephanie Smittle about Monday's endlessly anticipated solar eclipse.
Little Rock officials approve new recycling contract, glass is backhttps://arktimes.com/news/2024/04/03/little-rock-officials-approve-new-recycling-contract-glass-is-back
$4.3 million Little Rock port expansion up for a vote tonighthttps://arktimes.com/news/2024/04/02/4-3-million-little-rock-port-expansion-up-for-a-vote-tonight
Airport commission gives $24K bonus to director Malinowski after deathhttps://arktimes.com/news/2024/04/02/airport-commission-gives-24k-bonus-to-director-malinowski-after-death
Central High plaintiffs sue Sanders, Oliva over targeting of AP African American Studieshttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/03/25/central-high-plaintiffs-sue-sanders-oliva-over-targeting-of-ap-african-american-studies
Federal judge in LEARNS lawsuit plans to apply for LEARNS vouchers, won’t recusehttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/04/01/federal-judge-in-learns-lawsuit-plans-to-apply-for-learns-vouchers-wont-recuse
LEARNS lawsuit over ‘indoctrination’ reassigned to Judge Rudofskyhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/03/28/learns-lawsuit-over-indoctrination-reassigned-to-judge-rudofsky
Partly cloudy skies expected in Arkansas for Monday’s eclipsehttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/04/03/partly-cloudy-skies-expected-in-arkansas-for-mondays-eclipse
Mulberry Mountain welcomes eclipse watchers with one-day music festivalhttps://arktimes.com/entertainment/2024/04/02/mulberry-mountain-welcomes-eclipse-watchers-with-one-day-music-festival
Mass eclipse wedding ceremony to bring hundreds of couples to Russellvillehttps://arktimes.com/rock-candy/2024/03/22/mass-eclipse-wedding-ceremony-to-bring-hundreds-of-couples-to-russellville
9 stellar ways to celebrate the solar eclipse in Central Arkansashttps://arktimes.com/rock-candy/2024/03/04/9-stellar-ways-to-celebrate-the-solar-eclipse-in-central-arkansas All our eclipse-related coverage:https://arktimes.com/tag/2024-solar-ecli
This week, Benji and Matt Campbell discuss Pulaski County Sheriff Eric Higgins' reality show TV (coming soon to Netflix!), the latest on the long-awaited #lecterngate audit and why you shouldn't accept Arkansas's projections for April 8 eclipse tourism at face value. Plus, Austin fills us in on a GOP primary runoff in Hope that's turning some southwest Arkansas Republican legislators against the governor's office.
Show Notes:
Pulaski County weighing options for handling sheriff’s seemingly illegal contract with TV producers
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/03/27/pulaski-county-weighing-options-for-handling-sheriffs-seemingly-illegal-contract-with-tv-producers
Republican infighting over south Arkansas legislative runoff continues, pitting Sanders against old-guard GOP
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/03/27/republican-infighting-over-south-arkansas-legislative-runoff-continues-pitting-sanders-against-old-guard-gop
‘Lecterngate’ audit is ready, but the public release date is still unknown
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/03/27/lecterngate-audit-is-ready-but-a-public-release-date-still-unknown
State’s estimates of 1.5 million eclipse tourists next month are shady at best
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/03/05/despite-states-claims-1-5-million-eclipse-tourists-unlikely-to-come-to-arkansas-next-month
This week, Benji and Mary review the big news of the week — the shooting of Little Rock airport director Bryan Malinowski on Tuesday by federal agents as they attempted to execute a search warrant related to illegal gun sales. Then, reporter Debra Hale-Shelton discusses two stories she's reported this week: an ominous new effort to intimidate public libraries and Asa Hutchinson's interest in a job atop the University of Arkansas System.
Show Notes:
Illegal guns sales led to fatal ATF raid on airport director Malinowski’s home, affidavit says:
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/03/21/judge-unseals-documents-in-malinowski-case
Policing libraries, aka book banning, moves a step further in Arkansas:
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/03/19/policing-libraries-aka-book-banning-moves-a-step-further-in-arkansas
Is Asa Hutchinson interested in becoming the next UA System president? Apparently.
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/03/21/is-asa-hutchinson-interested-in-becoming-the-next-ua-system-president-apparently
Show Notes:
The queen’s gambit: Gov. Sanders and Co play political games with overcrowded prisonshttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/02/28/the-queens-gambit-gov-sanders-and-co-play-political-games-with-overcrowded-prisons?fbclid=IwAR2FFU6Gw9ldB0JxOij_e81FprTrW3fL2QwkzkHeI_i8aFYkRFzBh-LFB9c
Legislature OKs ’emergency’ rule limiting gender options on state IDs, dodges public commenthttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/03/15/legislature-oks-emergency-rule-restricting-gender-options-on-state-ids-dodging-public-comment
Bill Whitworth, legendary editor at The New Yorker and The Atlantic, dies at 87https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/03/08/bill-whitworth-legendary-editor-at-the-new-yorker-and-the-atlantic-dies-at-87
I remember his sweetness: Bill Whitworth and Dizzy Gillespiehttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/03/12/i-remember-his-sweetness-bill-whitworth-and-dizzy-gillespie
The Women by Kristin Hannahhttps://kristinhannah.com/books/the-women/
The Arkansas Times Film Series Presents Kundun (1997)https://www.riverdale10.com/movie/Kundun
Show Notes:
Little Rock Zoo welcomes new baby orangutan
https://arktimes.com/news/2024/02/26/little-rock-zoo-welcomes-new-baby-orangutan
We dig it! Construction slated for Little Rock’s Southeast Trail
https://arktimes.com/news/2024/03/06/we-dig-it-construction-slated-for-little-rocks-southeast-trail
Little Rock’s city boardroom still under construction, April return hopeful
https://arktimes.com/news/2024/03/06/little-rocks-city-boardroom-still-under-construction-april-return-hopeful
$53 million in federal funds set to improve Arkansas water systems
https://arktimes.com/news/2024/02/27/53-million-in-federal-funds-set-to-improve-arkansas-water-systems
Top Little Rock housing authority exec resigns
https://arktimes.com/news/2024/03/08/top-little-rock-housing-authority-exec-resigns
Two appointments to Little Rock housing authority cleared by city board
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/03/07/two-appointments-to-little-rock-housing-authority-cleared-by-city-board
Secretary of state warns against voter registration e-signatures; Pulaski clerk says she’ll keep taking them
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/03/07/mixed-messages-from-the-arkansas-secretary-of-state-sow-confusion-over-online-voter-applications
If Arkansas claims to protect life, it needs to do more for mothers and infants
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/01/30/if-arkansas-claims-to-protect-life-it-needs-to-do-more-for-mothers-and-infants
Sanders rejects 12-month Medicaid extension for moms, says Arkansas already has enough coverage
https://arktimes.com/news/2024/02/22/sanders-rejects-12-month-medicaid-extension-for-moms-says-arkansas-already-has-enough-coverage
In this week's podcast, we focus on the March 5 primary and nonpartisan judicial elections coming up on Tuesday.
Group pushes Womack to support Ukraine aid despite GOP blockade of bill
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/02/21/group-pushes-womack-to-support-ukraine-aid-despite-gop-blockade-of-bill
U.S. speaker fight influences Arkansas congressional race (via Arkansas Advocate)
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/02/26/u-s-speaker-fight-influences-arkansas-congressional-race
March 5 election may hand Gov. Sanders new state Supreme Court appointments
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/02/07/march-5-election-may-hand-gov-sanders-two-new-state-supreme-court-appointments
The Central Arkansas legislative primaries to watch on March 5
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/02/29/the-central-arkansas-legislative-primaries-to-watch-on-march-5
Stepping away, not down: Vivian Flowers leaves the Capitol to run for Pine Bluff mayor
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/02/29/stepping-away-not-down-vivian-flowers-leaves-the-capitol-to-run-for-pine-bluff-mayor
Up and down the ballot, judicial races could create openings for the governor to fill
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/02/21/up-and-down-the-ballot-in-central-arkansas-multiple-judicial-races-could-create-openings-for-the-governor-to-fill
Max Brantley and the Blue Hog weigh in on judicial races
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/02/20/max-brantley-and-the-blue-hog-weigh-in-on-judicial-races
Allegations against Ark. corrections board member raise questions for Gov. Sanders’ father — and Trumphttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/02/22/allegations-against-ark-corrections-board-member-raise-questions-for-gov-sanders-father-and-trump
National funders skip Arkansas’s abortion fight, locals soldier onhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/02/20/national-funders-skip-arkansass-abortion-fight-locals-soldier-on
‘No one’s coming to save us’: Abortion campaigns scramble for limited cashhttps://www.politico.com/news/2024/02/19/abortion-access-map-funding-00141436
A deeper look at Arkansas’s state-funded safety grants to religious institutionshttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/02/19/a-deeper-look-at-arkansass-state-funded-safety-grants-to-religious-institutions
News Round Up
Group pushes Womack to support Ukraine aid despite GOP blockade of billhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/02/21/group-pushes-womack-to-support-ukraine-aid-despite-gop-blockade-of-bill
Attorney general signs off on ballot measure to expand medical marijuanahttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/02/21/attorney-general-signs-off-on-ballot-measure-to-expand-medical-marijuana
Sanders rejects 12-month Medicaid extension for moms, says Arkansas already has enough coveragehttps://arktimes.com/news/2024/02/22/sanders-rejects-12-month-medicaid-extension-for-moms-says-arkansas-already-has-enough-coverage
Endorsements
Smashed N’ Stacked’s burger whiz is hungry to helphttps://arktimes.com/eat-arkansas/2024/02/22/smashed-n-stackeds-burger-whiz-is-hungry-to-help
https://www.facebook.com/smashednstacked/
The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkaihttps://rebeccamakkai.com/work/the-great-believers/
Tropical Depression by Dave Ramseyhttps://davidbramsey.substack.com/
Show Notes:
University of Memphis hires Little Rock’s ex-police chief
https://arktimes.com/news/2024/02/13/university-of-memphis-hires-little-rocks-ex-police-chief
Little Rock mayor’s annual address teases new programs, renewed sales tax push
https://arktimes.com/news/2024/02/09/little-rock-mayors-annual-address-teases-new-programs-renewed-sales-tax-push
Little Rock officials approve step toward city-owned solar array
https://arktimes.com/news/2024/02/07/little-rock-officials-approve-step-toward-city-owned-solar-array
A swing and a hit: CALS Main Library renovation starts with a bang
https://arktimes.com/news/2024/02/06/a-swing-and-a-hit-cals-main-library-renovation-starts-with-a-bang
Recycling ‘Green Station’ opens at new location in Little Rock
https://arktimes.com/news/2024/02/05/recycling-green-station-opens-at-new-location-in-little-rock Jason Rapert tries and fails to defund libraries suing the state
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/02/09/jason-rapert-tries-and-fails-to-defund-libraries-suing-the-state
Federal judge blocks Arkansas’s library censorship law from taking effect
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2023/07/29/federal-judge-blocks-arkansass-library-censorship-law-from-taking-effect
Dozens more allege sexual abuse at youth facility owned by Arkansas businessman freed by Trump
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/02/02/dozens-more-allege-sexual-abuse-at-youth-facility-owned-by-arkansas-businessman-freed-by-trump
Survivors of child sexual abuse now have another two years to file Ark. lawsuits, senator says
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/02/06/survivors-of-child-sexual-abuse-now-have-another-two-years-to-file-ark-lawsuits-senator-says
That roller dance at the Super Bowl halftime show? A Little Rock native choreographed it
https://arktimes.com/rock-candy/2024/02/14/that-roller-dance-at-the-super-bowl-halftime-show-a-little-rock-native-choreographed-it
Watermelon Man
https://www.riverdale10.com/movie/Watermelon%5FMan%5F1970
This week, Benji recaps two races for the state Supreme Court in which the likely winners are already sitting justices, education reporter Jeannie Roberts fills us in on ClassWallet and the state's weird, secretive bidding process, and publisher Alan Leveritt has the dirt on the best tomato and pepper varieties for an Arkansas climate.
**Show Notes:
March 5 election may hand Gov. Sanders new state Supreme Court appointments**
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/02/07/march-5-election-may-hand-gov-sanders-two-new-state-supreme-court-appointments
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2023/09/05/supreme-court-justice-courtney-hudson-joins-race-to-fill-robin-wynnes-seat
State abandons bids for LEARNS voucher vendorshttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/02/07/state-abandons-bids-for-learns-voucher-vendors
From the Farm: Tall tales in the mailboxhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/02/08/from-the-farm-tall-tales-in-the-mailbox
Stories in this Episode
Helena - West Helena Water Crisis
-https://arktimes.com/news/2024/01/29/shower-truck-other-resources-available-in-helena-west-helena-as-water-crisis-drags-on
-https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/01/26/legislators-weigh-in-on-broken-water-system-in-helena-west-helena
-https://arktimes.com/news/2024/01/31/possible-end-in-sight-for-water-outage-in-helena-west-helena-ways-to-help-from-afar
State Police
https://arktimes.com/news/2024/02/01/state-police-trumpet-245-arrests-but-only-36-people-were-actually-booked
Jamol Jones
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/01/29/governor-appoints-jamol-jones-as-parole-board-chair-giving-him-seat-on-corrections-board
Endorsements
-https://open.spotify.com/track/1Efz5q54qAztkgsdMxeFnN?si=04a12facc7084807
-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=La8N60CYwdM
This week: The abortion amendment clears a key hurdle at the state attorney general's office, while the FOIA amendment makes progress. Plus, we continue talking with Dave Ramsey about how Arkansas LEARNS affects teachers, specifically job protections post-Teacher Fair Dismissal Act.
Topics discussed in this episode:
Ballot initiatives:https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/01/23/arkansas-abortion-amendment-can-proceed-attorney-general-says
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/01/27/arkansans-ready-for-reproductive-rights-amendment
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/01/25/foia-ballot-measure-can-move-forward-attorney-general-says
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/01/23/group-sues-attorney-general-over-blocked-government-transparency-measures
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/01/18/public-education-advocates-for-ar-kids-submit-revised-ballot-measure-to-attorney-general
Arkansas Learns:https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/01/04/how-does-arkansas-learns-impact-teachers-we-have-answers-part-1
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/01/08/how-does-arkansas-learns-impact-teachers-we-have-answers-part-2
Endorsements:https://www.arkansascinemasociety.org/
https://www.nature.org/en-us/get-involved/how-to-help/places-we-protect/bluffton-preserve/
It's a relatively slow news week thanks to the winter weather, so we're talking to reporter David Ramsey at length about how the Arkansas LEARNS Act impacts teachers. Also, Mary Hennigan updates us on the situation in Stone County, where residents have been going without water amid sub-freezing temperatures.
Articles discussed in this episode:
- How does Arkansas LEARNS impact teachers? We have answers. https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/01/04/how-does-arkansas-learns-impact-teachers-we-have-answers-part-1
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/01/08/how-does-arkansas-learns-impact-teachers-we-have-answers-part-2 * Stone County residents go days without water during winter storm https://arktimes.com/news/2024/01/18/stone-county-residents-go-days-without-water-during-winter-storm
Endorsements:
https://www.tenement.org/
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/power-broker-01-robert-caro/
https://www.riverdale10.com/movie/Barry%5FLyndon%5F1975
In this week’s podcast, Benji and EIC Austin Bailey update us on the status of the various ballot initiatives seeking Attorney General Tim Griffin's approval, Asa Hutchinson's chances in the Iowa caucuses, and developments in the state Board of Corrections' dispute with the governor.
Among the stories referenced in this episode:
Amendment to expand medical marijuana program filed with AGhttps://arktimes.com/news/cannabiz/2024/01/12/amendment-to-expand-medical-marijuana-program-filed-with-ag
Arkansas AG’s ‘so sue me’ attitude worked: FOIA defenders plan to suehttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/01/12/arkansas-ags-so-sue-me-attitude-worked-foia-defenders-plan-to-sue
With Iowa caucus approaching, Asa Hutchinson barely registers with votershttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/01/11/with-iowa-caucus-approaching-asa-hutchinson-barely-registers-with-voters
Board of Corrections holds the line, preserves separation of powershttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/01/11/board-of-corrections-holds-the-line-preserves-separation-of-powers
Update: Board of Corrections fires Sarah Sanders’ hand-picked prison chiefhttps://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/01/10/board-of-corrections-fires-sarah-sanders-hand-picked-prison-chief
In this week’s podcast, Benji and investigative reporter Matt Campbell take a deep dive (probably too deep) into the tangled dispute between the state Board of Corrections and the governor, attorney general and secretary of corrections. Debra Hale-Shelton updates us on the case of Deitric Williams Jr., a 26-year-old Black man who died while being arrested by Conway police in July. And, Mary Hennigan catches us up again on the Little Rock city beat with a review of 2023’s homicide numbers and the latest from the Metropolitan Housing Alliance court case.
Among the stories referenced in this episode:
Corrections secretary to remain under control of board, not governor, at least for now
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/01/04/corrections-secretary-to-remain-under-control-of-board-not-governor-at-least-for-now
Attorney general doubles down in obstructing Board of Corrections from hiring attorney in FOIA case
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/01/03/attorney-general-doubles-down-in-obstructing-board-of-corrections-from-hiring-attorney-in-foia-case
Shenanigans! Governor, prison board face off over staff shortages, and it’s quite a show
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2023/12/22/shenanigans-governor-prison-board-face-off-over-staff-shortages-and-its-quite-a-show
Court sides with Board of Corrections over governor, blocks new laws over prisons authority
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2023/12/15/court-sides-with-board-of-corrections-over-governor-blocks-new-state-laws-over-prisons-authority
Body-cam videos released in arrest of man who died after apprehension by Conway police
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/01/05/body-cam-videos-released-in-arrest-of-man-who-died-after-apprehension-by-conway-police
Death of Conway man in police custody in July is ruled an accident by prosecutor
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/01/04/death-of-conway-man-in-police-custody-in-july-is-ruled-an-accident-by-prosecutor
Breaking down the 2023 Little Rock crime data
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/01/04/breaking-down-the-2023-little-rock-crime-data
Court ruling opens door for Little Rock officials to fill housing commission seats
https://arktimes.com/news/2024/01/04/court-ruling-opens-door-for-little-rock-officials-to-fill-housing-commission-seats
Little Rock’s Women & Children First shelter announces $12 million in grants
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/01/04/little-rocks-women-children-first-shelter-announces-12-million-in-grants
On this week's podcast, Austin and Benji dig into the state Board of Corrections' suspension of the governor's corrections secretary, Joe Profiri. (Note: We recorded this episode midday on Friday, Dec. 15; a few hours later, a Pulaski County circuit judge granted a temporary restraining order requested by the Board of Corrections. Catch up on the latest on the Arkansas Blog.)
Austin and Benji also discuss the Little Rock School District's approval of a (hugely) increased construction budget for the new West high school. Austin Bailey catches up on the city beat with reporter Mary Hennigan. And, endorsements from Benji and Omaya.
Among the stories referenced in this episode:
- Board suspends corrections secretary, says governor’s power grab violates constitution https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2023/12/14/board-of-corrections-suspends-profiri-with-pay?fbclid=IwAR16UgCyslUsacY0Vm83QQXKq3AFMsUTMRe_U8dABoLSBSKvfSj0f_X70Tg
- Court sides with Board of Corrections over governor, blocks new laws over prisons authority https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2023/12/15/court-sides-with-board-of-corrections-over-governor-blocks-new-state-laws-over-prisons-authority?fbclid=IwAR2jEOOeb5ZwF12yhPXo2xibDPFjmiC1GN9EMPA5ByPwV0cWvrTaLk2PgSo
- The LR school board approves plans for West high school after huge price jump https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2023/12/14/lr-school-board-approves-plans-for-west-high-school-after-huge-price-jump?fbclid=IwAR3WC2pUv51EK5P2GimpyYIII54bKH9TGrr1O-Z_XKnoOYgtCtcWWaj-Gug
- Arkansas Times Film Series screens ‘Imitation of Life’ (1959) Tuesday night https://arktimes.com/rock-candy/2023/12/13/arkansas-times-film-series-screens-imitation-of-life-1959-tuesday-night
In this episode, Arkansas Times' editor-in-chief Austin Bailey and city reporter Mary Hennigan run down local news of the week:
https://arktimes.com/news/2023/12/08/fore-better-or-worse-little-rocks-topgolf-opens-dec-22
Austin and managing editor Benjamin Hardy discuss a recent ruling from the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals on a voting rights case out of Arkansas with a national repercussions: https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2023/11/20/appeals-court-sides-with-arkansas-federal-judge-on-restricting-voting-rights-act-lawsuits
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2023/11/21/national-media-voting-advocates-react-to-catastrophic-ruling-in-arkansas-redistricting-case
Then, Benji and Austin cover the latest from the Little Rock School District. A proposal to move Parkview high school to a new West Little Rock campus appears to be dead, but other big changes are inevitable.
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2023/12/08/little-rock-school-board-weighs-plans-to-address-districts-budget-crunch
And, the return of endorsements!
On this week's episode, we discuss the University of Arkansas' hiring of Bobby Petrino to be the Razorbacks' new offensive coordinator.
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2023/11/29/read-petrinos-permission-slip-to-come-back-to-work
A new ballot initiative to restore some abortion rights in Arkansas.
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2023/11/27/group-aims-to-restore-limited-abortion-rights-in-arkansas
And, a ballot initiative to enshrine the Arkansas FOIA into the state constitution.
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2023/11/27/transparency-group-plans-to-submit-foia-amendment-to-attorney-general-monday
*Correction: This podcast mistakenly identifies a private school promoted by the Arkansas Department of Education as “Covenant Christian Academy.” In fact, the name of the school is “Cornerstone Christian Academy.”
Omaya Jones and Arkansas Times Managing Editor Benjamin Hardy talk about the news that ExxonMobil is going to begin drilling for lithium in south Arkansas.
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2023/11/13/exxon-to-begin-producing-lithium-in-south-arkansas-by-2027-and-scale-up-rapidly
Benjamin Hardy and Editor-in-Chief Austin Bailey discuss more bad news for the Little Rock School District as well as the state education department's promotion of a private Christian school.
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2023/11/17/lrsd-board-presses-pause-on-budget-busting-price-tag-for-new-wlr-campus
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2023/11/16/voucher-mad-arkansas-department-of-education-uses-public-funds-to-promote-private-christian-school
Benji and city reporter Mary Henningan talk about the ongoing rebuilding after the devastation of the March 31st tornado that hit Central Arkansas.
https://arktimes.com/news/2023/11/03/seven-months-later-little-rocks-long-road-to-recovery-from-a-devastating-tornado
Music used in todays episode was composed and performed by Steinbruchel
It's the return of the Arkansas Times' Week in Review Podcast!
This week, Omaya Jones talks to managing editor Benjamin Hardy about a new lawsuit against businessman Ted Suhl. Editor-in-chief Austin Bailey discusses the Little Rock school board's decision to combine Hall High School and the West School of Innovation into a single campus. And, Benjamin talks to new Arkansas Times reporter Matt Campbell about the origins of "Lecterngate," nee "Podiumgate".
Articles discussed:
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2023/11/07/suhl-family-attorney-denies-allegations-of-abuse-at-lords-ranch
https://arktimes.com/news/2022/10/21/trump-seeks-to-protect-clemency-papers-these-include-the-case-of-arkansan-ted-suhl
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2023/11/06/lawsuit-alleges-decades-of-sexual-abuse-at-former-youth-facility-run-by-huckabee-associate-ted-suhl
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2023/11/10/little-rock-school-board-votes-to-combine-two-high-schools-next-school-year
The retreat and redirect comes after a rancorous five-hour committee hearing that saw Republican legislators squabbling with both progressive and conservative activists over the FOIA rollback.
The post Sanders retreats on FOIA rollback, endorses more limited ‘security’ exemption appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The mayor and board members said they want housing commissioners to resign after HUD reports revealed spotty record-keeping and questionable expenses.
The post LR officials want housing authority commissioners gone appeared first on Arkansas Times.
After dozens testified on a government secrecy bill that would pull the shades on decades of sunshine, the Senate State Agencies committee adjourned today without a vote.
The post Senate committee takes no vote on FOIA bill after tense all-day hearing appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Julie Mayberry's House Bill 1011 would only exempt security-related records from the FOIA. Might it give Republicans an alternative if the governor's bill continues to flounder?
The post Republican lawmakers file competing FOIA-exemption bill focused only on security appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Among this year's seven recipients are prestigious publications like n+1, Los Angeles Review of Books and The Paris Review, proving once again that the Conway-based magazine's reach and prowess is beyond regional.
The post Oxford American awarded Whiting Literary Magazine Prize appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Lawmakers have taken their next step toward prohibiting state entities from mandating COVID-19 vaccines and requiring the Arkansas Department of Health to spread information on potential adverse effects of the immunization.
The post Citing ‘individual autonomy,’ House committee passes bill against COVID-19 vaccine mandates appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Though their songs are catchy and almost danceable, the foundation of synths on which they’re constructed is modular and stuttering, as if to temper the vocal sweetness of singer Amelia Meath.
The post Electronic pop duo Sylvan Esso arrives at The Hall next week appeared first on Arkansas Times.
"The fact that the Arkansas General Assembly is choosing to use the same unconstitutional process now is an intentional act of defiance against the Arkansas judiciary and the Constitution," Attorney Ali Noland said.
The post Senate still bundling bill and emergency clause into one vote, despite recent court ruling appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The passenger names on Sanders' plane flight logs have been revealed, no thanks to the governor or the state police.
The post UPDATE: Who was on those plane flights that led the governor to enter panic mode? Matt Campbell has answers. appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The COVID-19 vaccine mandate ban would extend from state employees to the county and city level and down to schools, according to the proposed bill.
The post Bill to ban COVID-19 vaccine mandates heads to the House appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Good news — to the tune of $1 million — for advocates of harm reduction in the battle to fight opioid overdoses.
The post $1 million federal grant to fund statewide naloxone training program from UAMS appeared first on Arkansas Times.
On Monday, the former Regions Bank building on the northeast corner of the JFK and McCain intersection was demolished to make room for a new 7 Brew Coffee stand.
The post Regions Bank building on JFK Boulevard destroyed to make way for 7 Brew Coffee appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Since the pandemic began, the state has been accumulating massive budget surpluses each year began because it is severely underestimating tax collections. That's a problem.
The post Tax cuts vs. toddlers: State lawmakers need to prioritize Arkansas families in special session appeared first on Arkansas Times.
An advocacy group on Monday submitted language for a 2024 ballot initiative to abolish Arkansas’ “tampon tax.”
The post Ballot title submitted to exempt feminine hygiene products from state sales tax appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The new bill removes the proposed "deliberative process" exemption and substitutes a narrower one. But it's still a major rollback of transparency.
The post Republicans rework anti-FOIA bill in face of opposition appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The vaccine mandates would extend from state employees to the county and city level and down to schools, Sen. Joshua Bryant said.
The post Senate committee approves bill to ban COVID vaccine mandates at state and local entities appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The governor's attack on the Freedom of Information Act bogs down in the House while senators bumble ahead in an uncertain direction.
The post House won’t budge on suspending rules; votes on FOIA attack bill will have to wait appeared first on Arkansas Times.
It's basically a tour through Alexander's rich history of local collaboration over the past three decades, encompassing nearly every project he's ever been involved with.
The post Isaac Alexander benefit show features Big Silver, The Easys, The Screaming Mimes and more appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Your right to know what your government is doing is under attack. State lawmakers must protect the FOIA and vote against bills that create more state secrets.
The post The effort to roll back state government transparency is an attack on your rights appeared first on Arkansas Times.
North Little Rock police reported at least one gunshot was fired at Premier High School, a charter school in North Little Rock. A separate threat also led to the evacuation of Mills University Studies High School in Little Rock.
The post Shooting, threat force evacuations at two high schools appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Special legislative sessions are usually quick affairs, but this one may drag out.
The post Governor’s rush-job special session on government secrecy hits a snag appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Saturday’s death was the 42nd homicide reported in 2023, according to LRPD data.
The post LRPD investigates weekend homicide near UA Little Rock housing complex appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A deceased female victim with visible trauma was found in an apartment, but the nature of the trauma has not been disclosed.
The post North Little Rock police investigating homicide at Overbrook Apartments appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Earlier this week, I attempted a meager preseason dissection of the position groups manning the Arkansas Razorback offense in 2023. And despite my woeful performance historically in evaluations, I soldier onward, as obstinate as ever.
The Hog defense has been uninspiring for, well, about 15 years if you want the real dirt. There have been periodic moments of achievement, and there have been numerous individual players making waves professionally on that side of the ball. Therefore, please do not misinterpret this as a total condemnation of what Arkansas has done in that respect.
Let’s take a look, however, at the list of coordinators who arrived after Houston Nutt and Reggie Herring both left at the end of 2007. Bobby Petrino hired—and far too late, fired—erstwhile pro position coach Willy Robinson, who had a lot of tools to work with but couldn’t produce meaningful results in big games. Paul Haynes got the opportunity for a bowl game and a miserable 2012 season where nothing went right anyway, then new guy Bret Bielema hired Chris Ash and then Robb Smith. At least the latter built a decent unit for the 2014-15 seasons, but the shine wore off fast when the likes of Trey Flowers, Deatrich Wise and Darius Philon left town. A brief Paul Rhoads experiment with a 3-4 defense tanked spectacularly, and Bret was gone.
So then there was this Morris guy, who hired this Chavis burnout, and…I’ve said too much already.
Barry Odom did a competent enough job with Sam Pittman, definitely being more of an asset than liability. Part of the resurgence was a critical buy-in from holdovers like Grant Morgan, Bumper Pool and Jonathan Marshall. But in 2022, the secondary struggled with injuries while the defensive line didn’t do much to hem in the opposing running game.
That led to Pittman bringing in Travis Williams, a onetime Auburn star linebacker whose work in two seasons at Central Florida created a buzz. The Knights won 15 of their last 20 games over 2021-22, and did so in large part because Williams’ attacking unit took charge of a few games. Most encouraging of all? Williams’ blitzing style, and his pledge to a 4-2-5 base defense, means that pass defense should improve greatly.
DEFENSIVE LINE: This is, again, a place where depth is not a problem. While the Hogs lost Jordan Dominek and Austin Nichols to the transfer portal, there’s no shortage of experience, with Zach Williams and Eric Gregory (17.5 career tackles for loss, including 10 sacks, combined) among a host of experienced interior players. Taurean Carter, Jashaud Stewart and Cameron Ball also return with an ample amount of game experience and size.
The eyes of the state have largely been on Landon Jackson, though. A gift from the transfer portal a year ago, the LSU expat had a nice sophomore year. But his addition of added muscle and speed has a lot of people thinking he’s going to explode, and why not? An apt comparison might be Jamaal Anderson, who maybe didn’t have the best NFL experience, but was such a pass rushing threat in 2006 that he went in the top 10 months later.
There’s also big transfer energy again, with Trajan Jeffcoat coming over the border from Mizzou. John Morgan III is a versatile addition from Pittsburgh. If they can fill the void that Dominek and Nichols created, that’s a wash, and the rest of the DL is considerably better and deeper. POSITION GRADE: B
LINEBACKERS: Hog fans, frankly we were spoiled these past few years. After a long period of deficiency in the linebacking corps, Grant Morgan, Drew Sanders, Bumper Pool and others helped make the position impactful again.
Now the only returnee with significant play time is Pooh Paul, who was genuinely great as a freshman. His four sacks and 62 tackles are evidence alone of his impact, but now the Hogs need him to emerge as a leader, rather suddenly.
The transfer portal, thankfully, is an asset here too. Antonio Grier and Jaheim Thomas arrived from South Florida and Cincinnati, respectively, with good metrics across the board. Fayetteville product Mani Powell figures to play a lot more, and a few freshmen (Alex Sanford, Brad Spence and Carson Dean) are also going to see time. The issue here is not a dearth of talent, but of experience. POSITION GRADE: C
DEFENSIVE BACKS: This is always where Arkansas boasts individual talent, but inconsistent team performance. The pass defense in 2022 was atrocious much of the time but would then puzzlingly have great efforts against the likes of LSU’s Jayden Daniels and Ole Miss’ Jaxson Dart.
Dwight “Nudie” McGlothern came along with Landon Jackson last year and after Hog fans bemoaned losing Greg Brooks Jr. and Joe Foucha, let’s face it, we won that trade rather decisively. McGlothern had four picks and was simply terrific in coverage most of the season.
Then there’s the unknown: How healthy is Quincey McAdoo, the Clarendon product who electrified as a true freshman convert from wideout? He was in a serious car accident months ago, and the reports from coaches regarding his health have been cryptic enough to make most fans assume he won’t be playing this fall. His absence would hurt greatly, but there is some help to speak of.
Georgia transfer Jaheim Singleton is a potential steal, and Jaylon Braxton could have a similar effect on the defensive backfield as McAdoo did last fall. Malik Chavis, Jayden Johnson and LaDarrius Bishop all have significant game experience—not all of it exceptional, to be clear—and Hudson Clark secretly had a nice 2022 after moving to his natural safety spot.
This won’t be the best unit in the SEC. It also will be far from the worst, and has high potential to improve rapidly as the season progresses. POSITION GRADE: B
SPECIAL TEAMS: I will cover this group as part of the defense, and pray that they’ll actually help that beleaguered group out.
Last year, Max Fletcher simply did not have an auspicious debut as the Hogs’ punter. It was also increasingly frustrating to watch him struggle while Reid Bauer, who had his fair share of highlights, sat idly.
It was ultimately just not fair to Fletcher but here he is, still young and clearly resilient. He can’t go anywhere but up, and he will. Since he has retained the job, the presumption is that he’s made strides.
Cam Little’s sophomore campaign wasn’t quite as electric as his first year as placekicker. The so-close miss against Texas A&M really didn’t shake him much, as he had another great year overall with 13 of 16 field goals converted and all 50 PATs. He’s an obvious asset to a team that figures to find itself in close games.
The return game is so neutered by rule changes lately that it barely merits much review, but Bryce Stephens is a nice punt returner with slippery moves and a TD return against Missouri State last year on his ledger. This group isn’t bad at all, but needs to be less mistake prone. POSITION/GROUP GRADE: B.
The post Pearls before swine: Hogs defense could make the grade appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A federal judge on Thursday blocked Arkansas’ new social media age verification law aimed at protecting children online hours before it was set to take effect.
The law — a priority of Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders — would’ve been the first of its kind implemented in the U.S., requiring new users on large social networks — like Facebook, Twitter and TikTok — to release personal information proving their age.
Similar restrictions have been enacted in Utah, Texas and Louisiana, but they won’t take effect until next year.
U.S. District Judge Timothy Brooks acknowledged the importance of protecting minors online, but he granted the preliminary injunction requested by NetChoice, the nonprofit trade association for large tech companies that brought the lawsuit.
In the order, Brooks said the drafters of the law did a poor job, writing legislation that was too vague, overbroad and violated Arkansans’ First Amendment rights.
The preliminary injunction blocks the law from taking effect on Friday, as intended. It will remain on hold until the case’s final adjudication. He wrote in the ruling that NetChoice had demonstrated a strong likelihood of succeeding on its argument the law should be permanently struck down as unconstitutional.
“Act 689 is not targeted to address the harms it has identified, and further research is necessary before the State may begin to construct a regulation that is narrowly tailored to address the harms that minors face due to prolonged use of certain social media,” Brooks wrote in the 50-page ruling.
“Age-gating social media platforms for adults and minors does not appear to be an effective approach when, in reality, it is the content on particular platforms that is driving the State’s true concerns. The many exemptions in Act 689 all but nullify the State’s purposes in passing the Act and ignore the State’s expert’s view that parental oversight is what is really needed to insulate children from potential harms that lurk on the internet.”
brooks-injunction-smsa
Act 689 of 2023, enacted in April, requires large social media companies to use a vendor for “reasonable age verification” before allowing access to their sites. Those under 18 may only access sites with parental permission.
Proof of age could include a digital copy of a driver’s license, government ID or other “commercially reasonable” method.
Brooks’ ruling is likely to be appealed, and Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin expressed disappointment in the decision.
Arkansas Legislature passes social media age verification bill over privacy, speech concerns
“I am disappointed in the ruling, but I will continue to vigorously defend the law and protect our children, an important interest recognized in the federal judge’s order today,” Griffin said in a statement.
Chris Marchese, director of the NetChoice Litigation Center, said the law was a power grab that would’ve required Arkansans to hand over private information.
“We’re pleased the court sided with the First Amendment and stopped Arkansas’ unconstitutional law from censoring free speech online and undermining the privacy of Arkansans, their families and their businesses as our case proceeds,” said Chris Marchese, Director of the NetChoice Litigation Center. “We look forward to seeing the law struck down permanently.”
The new regulation applies to the largest social media companies, like Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram; TikTok; Twitter; Snapchat; and others.
It does not apply to platforms that generate less than $100 million in gross annual revenue and is written in a way that exempts some platforms, like YouTube, LinkedIn, online video games, email and messenger services, streaming sites and e-commerce.
Whether a network is affected by the new law hinges on what its predominant function is. However, Brooks — an appointee of former President Barack Obama — said the term wasn’t adequately defined.
“Act 689 does not explain how platforms are to determine which function is ‘predominant,’ leaving those services to guess whether they are regulated,” Brooks wrote.
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SUBSCRIBEIf someone is under 18, Act 689 requires sites to confirm that the minor has a parent’s permission, and online companies could be civilly and criminally liable if they knowingly fail to perform reasonable age verification.
Violation could also require platforms to pay penalties to an individual, including a $2,500 fine for each infraction and damages resulting from a minor accessing social media without permission.
Social media companies and the third-party vendors must not keep any identifying information gathered during the age verification process once access to the platform has been granted.
The state has argued that the law is necessary to protect children from the ills of social media, including sexual predators, content related to self-harm and cyberbullying. It likened the law to prohibitions on minors in bars and casinos.
“But this analogy is weak,” Brooks wrote. “After all, minors have no constitutional right to consume alcohol, and the primary purpose of a bar is to serve alcohol.
“By contrast, the primary purpose of a social media platform is to engage in speech, and the State stipulated that social media platforms contain vast amounts of constitutionally protected speech for both adults and minors.”
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DONATEArkansas Advocate is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arkansas Advocate maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sonny Albarado for questions: info@arkansasadvocate.com. Follow Arkansas Advocate on Facebook and Twitter.
The post Federal court strikes down Arkansas’s new social media age verification law appeared first on Arkansas Times.
When death strikes, it always leaves marks of pain. Sometimes for individuals. Sometimes for families. Sometimes for whole communities.
This time, death left its mark of pain in the River Valley. A kid with a big heart and a ready smile fought an addiction that was overwhelming and that is all too commonplace in this valley, in this state, in this country.
Zach fought his addiction. His family prayed with and supported him as he fought to break the addiction. Death’s strike was too much, Zach lost, and an Arkansas community was left with the marks of pain.
I had the opportunity to learn about Zach’s life and pay my respects at his funeral. I wanted to share his story on International Overdose Awareness Day in hopes that it would be a balm to the pain the far too many feel.
Zach was close to his grandma. She had passed away in the last month and Zach took it hard. Still, he’d been clean for a month. He had a promising job interview set for that next morning, and tickets for the Jellyroll concert in the next few weeks. But staying clean, trying to turn his life around, was a battle that plagued his every moment.
That night, he ran errands, saw friends, and withdrew cash in Ozark. His family says he likely also met his dealer. When Zach returned home that night and was alone in the bathroom, his addiction made its move and Zach lit a glass pipe. He had used meth before, but this meth was laced with fentanyl. It was Daniel, Zach’s best friend, who found him alone, in the dark, dead on the bathroom floor.
The Arkansas Department of Health keeps track of fatal and non-fatal overdoses. For the public, if you go to those websites, you’ll find that there is not a full accounting of fatal and non-fatal overdoses. Nearly half the counties in the state are not sharing those numbers. Understanding the full extent of the problem is critical if we want to solve the problem. What we do not know, we cannot fight.
Fortunately, the state is making Narcan more widely available. Doing this at low or no cost saves lives. But there is so much more to do. We can stop stigmatizing and minimizing the lives of drug users. We can re-humanize those who struggle with addiction. We can offer treatments options in our jails and prisons. And we can make addiction treatment widely available for those seeking help.
People use drugs. We cannot easily change that reality. If you are someone who uses drugs, please try not to do it alone. Fentanyl is lethal and is being found in other drugs.
Narcan can save you, but Narcan won’t save you if there is no one there to administer it. There is also a support hotline, Never Use Alone, that you can call. The number is 1-800-484-3731. We do not have to be alone. Be a survivor and live.
Zachari Thomas Edward Mullen of Ozark was recently laid to rest. I was blessed to be there to pay my respects and give hugs to his family. The marks of pain from death’s strike were evident on their faces and in their tears. Zach was a drug user, an addict. It’s easy to write his life off because of this fact alone. But on International Overdose Awareness Day, there’s one more story about this 22-year-old boy and his best friend Daniel that you should know.
This story is from Nikolle Ard, his mom in love. “There are times in their friendship [Zach and Daniel] that I would have done anything to separate them. The two of them during their teenage years were difficult, to say the least. Then, on April Fool’s Day 2014, they had a four-wheeler accident that changed everything. The accident left two little boys laying on the ground, one little body torn open, with muscle, tendons and blood everywhere. The other little body broken and going into shock. I’m laying between these two boys, as first responders and med flight are assessing. Then I hear Zach say, ‘Please don’t worry about me, save Danny.’ In that moment, I saw the absolute love he had for my little boy. And in that moment, he became mine.”
Zach fought a personal battle and lost. Zach had an overdose in Arkansas. But Zach is not only a statistic. He was a good and very loved young man. That much is evident from the large community who showed up for his services.
The battle Zach lost was death’s strike leaving marks of pain in the River Valley. Let’s act now before death’s strike leaves its marks of pain on yet another community and yet another family.
Chris Jones is a minister, physicist and former candidate for Arkansas governor.
The post Putting a face to International Overdose Awareness Day appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Brian ChilsonNathan TuckerWhen Iriana’s new owner Nathan Tucker began working at the downtown pizzeria a few months ago, he started out as a regular employee, shadowing founder John Iriana to learn everything he could about the business so he could continue the tradition Iriana started 36 years ago.
“It’s gonna be the same,” Tucker said. “Obviously, I haven’t been making Iriana’s pizza for 36 years like John, but he stood by my side and showed me every trick of the trade to replicate exactly what he does,” Tucker said.
During Tucker’s time as a rep with Golden Eagle Budweiser, where he worked for 17 years, he began to frequent the pizzeria. Tucker said he, John Iriana and his wife Shirley Iriana got along exceptionally well. One thing that stood out to him about the Irianas, he said, was their work ethic.
“John Iriana is one of the hardest working men I’ve ever met in my life,” Tucker said. “He stood behind that oven for 36 years, took pride in everything he did. I don’t know if people really realize how much heart and soul was put into this business,” Tucker said.
Iriana started making pizzas when he was 14 years old in Rhode Island and New Hampshire. He opened Iriana’s Pizza in the spring of 1987 after graduating from UALR.
“I have two daughters and a wife and we just all kick in, and it’s a thriving family business. We do it the old fashioned way,” he told Arkansas Business in 2012.
Tucker also started making pizzas at a young age. His first job was at CiCi’s. He also worked at Domino’s and Little Caesar’s and managed a Pizza Hut.
“I’ve always had a little part in my heart for it,” he said.
About three years ago, Tucker was talking to Shirley and told her that he’d be interested in taking over the business one day if they ever planned on retiring. Tucker said Shirley told him that she wanted to retire at 60, but John wanted to work for the rest of his life, Tucker said.
Tucker said it was around nine months ago when Shirley contacted him and asked if he was still interested.
“She said, ‘This year in May will be our 36th year, and I’ll be turning 60, and we’re ready to take the next step,'” Tucker said.
Tucker said it wasn’t easy leaving a job of 17 years to own his own restaurant, but family factored heavily into his decision.
The same day Shirley messaged about possibly taking over the business, Tucker got a text from his mother, who sent him a picture of his late father, David Tucker. The elder Tucker was a general manager for the Red Lobster division of Darden Restaurants. (Darden sold Red Lobster to Golden Gate Capital in 2014.)
“He was the first general manager at the youngest age for any Darden Restaurant,” Tucker said. “Basically, what he did is he went to Red Lobsters and built them up for a year and two, and then we’d move to the next one. And finally when we got to Arkansas, he fell in love and had the same 86 to 90 employees for almost 10 years.”
Tucker said his kids also factored into the decision.
“This is an asset for my children, something for them to look up to. They can actually come up and see me and interact with the customers and know this is a true family-friendly atmosphere, which is very hard to come by these days.
“My kids’ friends as they get in high school will get to work with us. That’s what my dad did. He hired all my friends and taught them the respectful, disciplined way to be an employee. So with John and Shirley and their dedication, my dad’s dedication and discipline, I just kind of wanted to continue the same legacy.”
The post New owner of Iriana’s Pizza plans to continue the restaurant’s 36-year tradition appeared first on Arkansas Times.
X, Sarah SandersDESPITE THE DATA: One of the first things Gov. Sarah Sanders did when she took office was sign an executive order to “move beyond COVID.”August came and went and left more than 5,300 Arkansans sick with COVID-19. The cases reported to the Arkansas Department of Health in August represent the third highest monthly case count in 2023, behind January and February.
The ADH tracks the disease in a much different way than when the pandemic was in full swing. Now only updating COVID-19 data on a weekly basis, the numbers are hard to compare to previous data. Add in at-home tests and people who don’t visit the doctor when they’re sick, and the numbers likely only represent a portion of the people actually ill.
On Aug. 22, the ADH reported 2,185 COVID-19 cases and 44 hospitalizations had been recorded in the previous seven days. Most Arkansas schools brought kids back on Aug. 14.
One of the first things Gov. Sarah Sanders did when she took office was sign an executive order to “move beyond COVID.” Despite the recent increase in reported illnesses, Sanderstook to X, formerly known as Twitter, Thursday to remind Arkansans that as long as she’s in charge, she won’t take precautionary measures like lockdowns and mandatory masking.
“Let me be clear,” she said. “As long as I’m governor, Arkansas will never lock down. We will never close our schools, churches or businesses. We will never make you or your children wear a mask. And we will never, ever have a COVID-19 vaccine mandate.”
Sanders continued to say the government shouldn’t loom over individual liberties and if the feds make moves to call for shutdowns, she will fight to keep Arkansas “free.”
As long as I’m Governor, Arkansas will not lock down.
We will not close schools, churches, or businesses.
And we will not have mask or COVID vaccine mandates. pic.twitter.com/nj4ONer122
— Sarah Huckabee Sanders (@SarahHuckabee) August 31, 2023
This is business as usual for Sanders. During her campaign for governor, she ran commercials and social media posts critical of school shutdowns. Arkansas schools were shut down for only a couple of months during the pandemic and opened back up in August of 2020, despite ongoing objections from some medical experts. Regardless, Sanders latched on to the divisive issues of school closings and mask requirements that favored her conservative base.
The post As Arkansas COVID-19 cases increase, Sanders vows she won’t require masks, vaccinations appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Myers faces two counts of possession of fraudulent or altered identification, a class B misdemeanor and three counts of purchase or possession by a minor, an unclassified misdemeanor.
The post Garland County JP, age 20, used fake IDs from Miss. and Texas to enter Oaklawn casino appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Here's a healthy ozone checklist from Metroplan.
The post Go green, breathe clean appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Asa Hutchinson has met the RNC's 40K donor threshold to participate in the first debate of the GOP presidential primary this week.
The post Asa Hutchinson meets criteria to participate in first GOP debate appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Rhoda Adams, owner of the famed Chicot County institution Rhoda's Famous Hot Tamales and Pies and a legend in the Arkansas food scene, has died.
The post Lake Village tamale legend Rhoda Adams has died appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Everything you need to know about Arkansas’s new, soon-to-be-universal voucher program, from state budget impacts to "microschools."
The post How does the Arkansas LEARNS voucher program work? We have answers. appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The Arkansas LEARNS Act will soon usher in a new era of segregation, sorting students into the haves and the have-nots and leaving those have-nots further behind. There is too much of this already, and LEARNS will only make it worse.
The post Sorting out the bluebirds: How school vouchers will hurt the kids in greatest need appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Once cleared, 700 W. Markham St. will become the site of the new Little Rock District Court building.
The post Old LRPD headquarters to be destroyed appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Davis left the race after only two days.
The post Donnally Davis drops bid for LRSD board seat; Anna Strong will run unopposed appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Tonight, they'll perform at Vino's, with support from Morbid Visionz, Zashed, Second Life, Stressor and The Chores. Tomorrow, they'll hop over to White Water Tavern, where they'll be joined by Colour Design, Peach Blush, Pett and Zilla.
The post Two chances to catch the return of Little Rock’s I Was Afraid this weekend appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Two federal lawsuits alleging library censorship trudge along while the Saline County Quorum Court moves to weaken its library board's power.
The post Saline County Quorum Court aims to take power from library board with vote on Monday appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Kimchi ramen for the win.
The post It’s the summer of ramen at Gold Bowl appeared first on Arkansas Times.
County officials provided an update to the community this week on plans for the village, including a visual presentation.
The post Pulaski County homeless village expects first residents summer 2024 appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The July figure for U.S. unemployment was 3.5%, according to the national Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The post State unemployment held steady at historic 2.6% low in July; national rate also low appeared first on Arkansas Times.
So many songs have been written about the hardships and complications of a life spent on the road that one forgets that being a nomad can actually be unadulterated fun. Montgomery's new song reminds us of that fact.
The post Bonnie Montgomery is back with new single, album to come in November appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A pair of proposed ballot initiatives have been submitted to the Arkansas secretary of state to enshrine the right to abortion in the state constitution. But it's unclear who submitted them, or why.
The post Will abortion be on the ballot in Arkansas? Mystery documents raise possibility appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts announced this week that its restaurant, Park Grill, will begin offering dinner service starting Wednesday, Aug. 23.
The post AMFA’s restaurant Park Grill to offer dinner service appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The city's housing authority scored 40 points out of a possible 100 on a recent assessment, according to HUD.
The post Little Rock Metropolitan Housing Alliance in hot water, receives ‘troubled’ assessment appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Garland County's District 7 Justice of the Peace Dayton Myers, 20, was arrested by the Hot Springs Police Department Monday on charges of purchase and possession of intoxicating liquor by a minor and fraudulent or altered identification.
The post Garland County Quorum Court member Dayton Myers, 20, arrested for liquor possession and fraudulent ID appeared first on Arkansas Times.
City Silo Table + Pantry, a self-described "creative, clean eating establishment" with two locations in Memphis, announced that its third outlet will be opening by the end of the month in Little Rock. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner will be served, plus smoothies, "wellness lattes" and "juice cocktails," coffee, a full bar, Prosecco cocktails, craft beer and wine.
The post City Silo Table + Pantry opening this month on Chenal Parkway appeared first on Arkansas Times.
One major change from Bobbitt's current agreement is that the board of trustees can sever ties without a big price tag.
The post UA System President Bobbitt’s final contract draft gets board approval appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Arkansas school districts weren't cowed by the state's bungled last-minute attack on a new course focused on African American history and experiences.
The post School districts call state ed department’s bluff, keep AP African American Studies on the books appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Raising Cane's announced that it is donating $125,000 in addition to 15% of today's profits across all of its 750-plus restaurants to Ka Hale A Ke Ola Homeless Resource Centers Inc., a Maui-based emergency shelter in Lahaina, Hawaii, destroyed by last week's devastating wildfire.
The post Raising Cane’s donating 15% of today’s profits to Maui-based shelter in Lahaina appeared first on Arkansas Times.
No potential suspects have been identified at this time, according to the LRPD.
The post Weekend shooting leaves one teen dead, another injured appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Though many of writer and director Céline Sciamma’s films interrogate the complicated act of looking, “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” takes direct aim at the notion of the artistic muse, a tension that’s heightened by a backdrop of forbidden queer romance and the female gaze.
The post Arkansas Times Film Series screens ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ (2019) Tuesday night appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Anna Strong and Donnally Davis both filed for the Zone 5 seat today. Incumbent Vicki Hatter will run unchallenged.
The post One incumbent, two newcomers run for Little Rock School Board appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Comedian Hannibal Buress will be at the Rev Room on Tuesday, Aug. 15 — just six days from now — and we're not asking questions.
The post Comedian Hannibal Buress announces last-minute Rev Room show on Tuesday appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Look to the Independence County seat for democracy in action. Batesville voters approved boosts for parks and infrastructure Tuesday by healthy margins.
The post Big election night (in Batesville) appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Folk rockstar Beck may technically be the biggest name on this almost festival-worthy slew of performers, but I’ve a feeling that the openers — Phoenix and Weyes Blood — will end up outshining him.
The post Beck, Phoenix and Weyes Blood are all coming to Rogers appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Breaking news: Voters don’t like proposals to take away power from voters. Legislators keep on trying anyway.
The post Ohio, like Arkansas and other states, says ‘no’ to effort to curtail direct democracy appeared first on Arkansas Times.
In the latest episode of "Hip Hop Hello," a weekly radio show on 103.3 KOBV, host Clint Schaff interviews Rocky Bucano, the executive director of the Universal Hip Hop Museum in the Bronx. They discuss hip hop's 50th birthday.
The post This week’s ‘Hip Hop Hello’ radio show features museum director Rocky Bucano appeared first on Arkansas Times.
In the year since the US Supreme Court took away the constitutional right to an abortion, Arkansans have begun to feel the consequences of losing their ability to make private healthcare decisions.
The post The fall of Roe in Arkansas, one year on appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Does it matter if Arkansas's education secretary still has one foot in another state? With a new school year now set to begin, it's unclear whether Jacob Oliva ever moved his family here from Florida.
The post Does the Arkansas education secretary’s family live here or in Florida? Don’t even ask. appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Studio Gang, the architecture firm behind the recently completed Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts renovation, will design the expansion.
The post Clinton Presidential Center is getting a major expansion appeared first on Arkansas Times.
State Attorney General Tim Griffin said purchasing the building will save taxpayers money.
The post Attorney General’s office to buy Boyle Building at Capitol and Main appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Maggio taking his case to federal appeals court
The post Maggio appealing decision not to dismiss his conviction appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The new book on climate change takes a don't-worry-be-happy approach, spreading the good news that abundant oil reserves lurk under our feet and the Earth's temps have always jumped around a lot, anyway.
The post Former gov and first dad Mike Huckabee churns out new right-wing kids’ book on climate appeared first on Arkansas Times.
If there weren't already enough film events happening in Little Rock this weekend (Kaleidoscope LGBT+ Film Festival as well as a visit from Memphis director Craig Brewer), Arkansas Cinema Society will be showing a selection of movies from their Filmland: Arkansas program on Saturday, Aug. 1 and Sunday, Aug. 2 at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts.
The post Filmland: Arkansas gets an early screening this weekend appeared first on Arkansas Times.
From clean, jazzy guitar chords to borderline breakdowns, Toronto's Kicksie demonstrates an impressive emotional and dynamic range.
The post Emo-pop quartet Kicksie will join Way Away and Frances Grove at White Water tomorrow appeared first on Arkansas Times.
State Rep. Steven Meeks says his wife's comments about "swapping out" books was distorted by an activist group.
The post Legislator says wife’s post about Little Free Libraries was misconstrued appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Fidel & Co is hosting its first Latte Art Throwdown this Friday, where 32 (mostly) local baristas will be pouring up their best swans, hearts and tulips in a bracket-style head-to-head competition for cash prizes. The contest is free to attend and $10 for baristas to compete.
The post Fidel & Co hosting Latte Art Throwdown this Friday appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Ne-Yo's comments (and apology, and reversal) come at a politically fiery moment, when Republican legislators across the country are pushing to enact bans on gender-affirming healthcare for trans youth, when our own state legislators are interrogating medical professionals about their genitalia and when far-right political fearmongerers would have you believe that healthcare for trans youth is synonymous with surgery.
The post Camden-born singer Ne-Yo would like to clarify his position on trans youth appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The state paid $460,000 to resolve a federal lawsuit filed by three disabled plaintiffs who receive at-home Medicaid services under the ARChoices waiver program.
The post Disabled Arkansans obtain settlement and program improvements in lawsuit against DHS officials appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Tyson Foods announced Monday that is closing its North Little Rock chicken processing plant at 3800 E. Progress St.
The post Tyson Foods closing North Little Rock chicken processing plant appeared first on Arkansas Times.
As Arkansas embarks on school privatization with Jacob Oliva at the helm, it's instructive to see how charterization and privatization of a public school district worked under his watch in Florida.
The post Botched school privatization bids in Florida hint at Arkansas’s future as LEARNS gets underway appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Censors are coming for Faulkner County's Little Free Libraries.
The post Greenbrier legislator’s wife targets Little Free Libraries’ content appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The university system wouldn't have to keep paying Bobbitt his current salary if the board should fire him for convenience under a draft contract yet to be finalized.
The post A draft of Bobbitt’s contract extension reveals significant changes appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Rest easy, y'all, theres a new directory for wayward Arkansas cattle, swine, et al.
The post Ag department launches a lost-and-found for Arkansas livestock appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Among dozens of shorts, including several by Arkansas filmmakers, we're most excited for Kaleidoscope’s showing of “The Lost Boys" (2023), a French-language feature by Belgian director Zeno Graton.
The post Kaleidoscope LGBTQ+ Film Festival kicks off on Thursday appeared first on Arkansas Times.
To promote her forthcoming album, "The Devil I Know," Ashley McBryde announced a 30-date tour that includes a stop at Robinson Center on Sunday, Oct. 15.
The post Ashley McBryde will grace Little Rock on her upcoming tour appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The Mighty Rib pontificates on developments in the Central Arkansas food scene.
The post Pop the cork: Is the Central Arkansas food scene’s pandemic slump in the rearview mirror? appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The convicted sex offender, now serving 151 months in prison after being caught with hundreds of files of child pornography on his computer, had asked the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals to grant him a do-over in court.
The post Josh Duggar’s appeal for new trial denied, child pornography conviction stands appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Anyone who regularly drives down Kavanaugh has seen the chicken man. David Boyett regularly sits on the Promenade near the Allsopp Park entrance, where he has the world’s smallest petting zoo, consisting solely of a couple of chickens. He also sells eggs and officiates marriages.
The post A morning in chicken paradise appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Oliva's role in efforts by a Florida Department of Education employee and state school board member to win millions in public contract money for themselves seems tangential, although Oliva has been criticized for not putting a stop to what looks a lot like self-dealing during his tenure as Florida's chancellor of K-12 education.
The post UPDATE: Arkansas Ed Secretary Oliva named in federal investigation into Florida school privatization bid appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Arkansas chucks out more of its absentee ballots than most other states, disenfranchising members of the military, students away at school, people unable to reach the polls for medical reasons and many others.
The post Trash the vote: Why Arkansas rejects more of its mail-in ballots than almost any other state appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A new state law that protects gun, ammo and fossil fuel industries from bleeding heart investors who aim to avoid funding homicide and environmental devastation went into effect this month.
The post El Dorado man named to state commission protecting firearms and fossil fuel industries from woke investors appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A protest march is set for Saturday after a Conway man died in police custody. Police are saying little for now.
The post Conway man’s death in police custody spawns protest march but little comment from police appeared first on Arkansas Times.
George's, the Italian restaurant that's been under construction at the site of the former Cafe Prego at 5510 Kavanaugh Blvd. in the Heights, announced on Instagram today that it's opening Aug. 19.
The post Italian restaurant George’s opening this month in the Heights appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The final tally was "at least 978 short of the number legally required," Secretary of State John Thurston wrote.
The post CAPES fell short of required signatures for ballot measure, Arkansas secretary of state says appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Keener, a National Board Certified teacher, has worked at Episcopal Collegiate School for many years.
The post Governor appoints Leigh Keener to state Board of Education appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The Bagel Shop, Trevor Papsadora and Myles Roberson's pop up shop turned brick-and-mortar at 1501 S. Main St., is celebrating its grand opening this weekend.
The post First look at The Bagel Shop appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The death of Stefano Melani, age 15, was "a family day turned tragic," Pulaski County Sheriff's Office spokesperson Kristin Knox said.
The post Body of 15-year-old drowning victim recovered near Murray Park boat launch appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Shores is being honored for "Shared Secrets: The Queer World of Newbery Medalist Charles J. Finger," a biography published by the University of Arkansas Press in 2021.
The post Elizabeth Findley Shores wins 2023 Booker Worthen Literary Prize appeared first on Arkansas Times.
An oral history of Vino's Brew Pub penned by former Arkansas Times editor Lindsey Millar and Arkansas Times food editor Rhett Brinkley scored first prize this year at the annual Association of Alternative Newsmedia conference.
The post Arkansas Times editors Rhett Brinkley and Lindsey Millar awarded first place in music writing appeared first on Arkansas Times.
After a similar age-verification law went into effect in Utah earlier this year, Pornhub blocked all users with IP addresses from the state.
The post Pornhub blocks Arkansas users; state’s age-verification law takes effect Aug. 1 appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Every state is "unwinding" pandemic-era Medicaid eligibility rules at the moment, but some are handling it more carefully than others. Arkansas is not among the cautious.
The post States trim 4 million from Medicaid and Arkansas is among those leading the way, WaPo reports appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A sizzling hi-hat and two manic smacks on the snare drum announce that Zilla, Little Rock's zaniest rock band, is back with new music: an original song called "Coin" and a cover of "Beer for Breakfast," a Replacements b-side.
The post New music by Zilla, Little Rock’s zaniest rock band appeared first on Arkansas Times.
LaShonda and Marlon Moore promised big payouts via their company, Blessings In No Time, but victims of the scheme have lost thousands of dollars.
The post Settlement reached in case against Texas reality TV couple pushing ‘blessings loom’ pyramid scheme appeared first on Arkansas Times.
We reported on Monday that Gold Bowl, a new downtown restaurant featuring hibachi dishes, ramen bowls and boba tea, would be opening by the end of this week at 215 Center St. That opening has been delayed.
The post Gold Bowl ramen and hibachi restaurant opening delayed appeared first on Arkansas Times.
With the "Waste Watch" program, the Central Arkansas Waste Management is taking "if you see something, say something" to the next level.
The post Waste Management in Central Arkansas partners with police to report crime appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The public can pay their respects to Treasurer Mark Lowery at the Capitol rotunda from 9 a.m.-3 p.m. tomorrow.
The post Lowery’s funeral services start tomorrow at Capitol, public welcome appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Sanders' office created its own videos touting Arkansas, and the governor's record, even though the state has a multimillion-dollar contract with a prominent ad agency.
The post Just who’s creating those unusual videos touting Arkansas — and Sanders? appeared first on Arkansas Times.
In the latest episode of "Hip Hop Hello," a weekly radio show on 103.3 KOBV that will now be reposted at the Arkansas Times, host Clint Schaff interviews 607, a prolific MC from Little Rock.
The post This week’s “Hip Hop Hello” radio show features Little Rock rapper 607 appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Author Benjamin Hale writes of the 2001 search for 6-year-old Haley Zega and the eerie connections to a long-ago tragedy in the same Ozark woods.
The post Harper’s tells the tale of a little girl lost and found in the Ozarks, and another child not as lucky appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Big screen picks for August include "School of Rock," "Dead Poets Society," "Mean Girls" and more.
The post August movie screenings at Ron Robinson Theater appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Lowery passed away the day after his retirement announcement.
The post State Treasurer Mark Lowery dead at 66 appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Kids in Arkansas’s youth lockups over the last year were sexually assaulted, denied access to requisite therapy services and improperly isolated for extended periods, an Arkansas Advocate investigation found.
The post Sex, therapy, isolation: Concerns pile up in Arkansas’s juvenile lockups appeared first on Arkansas Times.
After a whirlwind 48 hours of thinking alt-pop queen Lana Del Rey might actually play in Little Rock, it's been confirmed that her first-ever Arkansas show will be in Rogers on Tuesday, Aug. 8.
The post After much ado, Lana Del Rey officially announces show in Rogers appeared first on Arkansas Times.
In a hearing that lasted most of the day, Judge Timothy Brooks heard from lawyers representing 18 plaintiffs, including the Central Arkansas Library System, as well as the state attorney general’s office.
The post Preliminary ruling on Arkansas library law coming by week’s end, judge says appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Zoo visitors can find Almond hanging out with the Saki monkeys in the reptile and primate house.
The post Little Rock Zoo welcomes new sloth, Almond appeared first on Arkansas Times.
With Sanders' Fox News photo op complete, the 80-member Guard contingent is returning to Arkansas.
The post Arkansas National Guard troops coming home this week after $1.3 million deployment to southern border appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Reward Center, a Little Rock duo now based in New York, has a peculiar, alluring way of smashing together acoustic and electronic textures.
The post New album from Reward Center artfully marries the synthetic and organic appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Lowery has served as state treasurer since January. He also served five terms in the Arkansas legislature.
The post State Treasurer Mark Lowery announces retirement following two strokes appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The next few months are anglers' last chance to fish at Lake Conway before renovations begin.
The post Catch limits lifted in advance of Lake Conway drawdown appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Two Hands Fresh Corn Dogs, a Korean-style corn dog chain, will be opening a Little Rock location in the Pleasant Ridge Town Center at 11525 Cantrell Road.
The post Korean-style corn dog chain Two Hands coming to West Little Rock appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Founded by veteran musician Correne Spero (of DOT and Northern State) in 2017, the nonprofit organization offers summer camp programming for girls and LGBTQ+ youth ages 8-18 who want to dip their toe into songwriting and visual art.
The post ‘Discover Trust Tree’ fundraiser comes back to Museum of Discovery appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Little Rock is one of 18 communities participating in a "Heat Watch Campaign" this year to identify heat islands in the city.
The post Little Rock Sustainability Office to measure the city’s hottest spots in August study appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Maggio had hoped a dismissal would help him become a lawyer again.
The post Judge rejects Mike Maggio’s effort to get charges dismissed appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Arkansas Times staff photographer Brian Chilson made his way through the crowd at Simmons Bank Arena to see pop-country legends The Chicks this past Saturday, July 22.
The post Slideshow: The Chicks at Simmons Bank Arena appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Gold Bowl, a new downtown restaurant featuring hibachi dishes, ramen bowls and boba tea, is slated to open later this week at 215 Center St. in the space that once housed Hanaroo and Three Fold's pop up restaurant, Haybird.
The post Gold Bowl ramen and hibachi restaurant opening downtown by week’s end appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Peter Stager, who previously pleaded guilty to assaulting a police officer with a dangerous weapon, was sentenced to four years in prison minus time served.
The post Conway man sentenced to prison for his role in Capitol riots appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Until recently, Hyatt was chair of the State Medical Board, the body that regulates the practices of doctors, physician assistants and other medical professionals.
The post Former state Medical Board chairman accused of ‘imprisoning’ psych patients to maximize revenue appeared first on Arkansas Times.
It seems like Lana Del Rey won't be coming to Little Rock anyway.
The post UPDATE: Lana Del Rey is actually coming ‘near’ Little Rock. Sorry, y’all appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Tim Griffin opposes a rule change that would shield the medical records of citizens who travel beyond state lines in search of abortions or gender-affirming medical care.
The post Arkansas attorney general wants to know about your out-of-state abortion appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Should we pay any attention to this made-for-Twitter tit-for-tat? Probably not, but we can't help it. Sanders loves guns and the freedom to take away freedoms, while Newsom goes in more for living, breathing children and the separation of church and state.
The post Perfect foils: California and Arkansas governors duke it out appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The Canadian indie rock/shoegaze band will perform at the Momentary on Saturday, Sept. 9, alongside Julia Jacklin.
The post Alvvays is passing through Bentonville in September appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Break out your trusty gardening gloves. The Little Rock Parks and Recreation Department has a goal to remove 10% of invasive flora each year in the parks system, and they need help.
The post Saturday volunteer opportunity aims to reduce invasive plants in Little Rock parks appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Ivianna Jordan, 4, voluntarily left with the suspect, who is also her great uncle, on Thursday around 2 p.m. The last known location of suspect Brodrick Hardman was at 1750 N. Locust St. in North Little Rock.
The post Amber alert issued for 4-year-old from North Little Rock appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The office provides licensed attorneys in Arkansas and others with guidance and advice regarding ethical conduct.
The post Update: State Supreme Court eliminates ethics office for attorneys, citing budget appeared first on Arkansas Times.
That schedule means the court won't rule on the LEARNS case until the law is already in effect, presumably.
The post Update: State Supreme Court asks for LEARNS appeal briefs by mid-August; Hiland will recuse appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Brandon Adams, who Governor Sarah Sanders appointed to the Game and Fish Commission last week, will be one of 19 new owners of SuperFarm, a medical marijuana dispensary in Texarkana.
The post New Game and Fish commissioner becomes part-owner of Texarkana dispensary appeared first on Arkansas Times.
This marks the first time that a daily oral contraceptive will be sold over the counter in U.S. history. An Arkansas reproductive rights advocate says the goal is to make birth control accessible and affordable.
The post F.D.A. approves over-the-counter birth control pill, Arkansans worry about access appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The Division of Workforce Services is rolling out a new option that might help people jump the ID hurdle that's part of the process. Post offices can now vouch for you if you present government-issued ID.
The post Securing unemployment in Arkansas perhaps slightly less impossible with new ID option appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Check out the cuteness of the tiger cubs for just $1 this Saturday, thanks to Hiland Dairy Dollar Day at the Little Rock Zoo.
The post Go wild at the Little Rock Zoo for $1 on Saturday appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Bragg, a longtime champion of school vouchers, spent a decade in the state House and served as the GOP's majority leader during the 2015 session.
The post Governor appoints former GOP legislator Ken Bragg to state Board of Education appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The production has been in previews since June 23, but opening night isn't until Thursday, July 20, after which it will be performed for a month.
The post Candrice Jones’ ‘Flex’ debuts in New York appeared first on Arkansas Times.
By Daniel Holland, Transportation Improvement Program Manager, Metroplan Central Arkansas currently enjoys an impressive collection of trails in all corners of our region. But Metroplan aspires to a pathways system […]
The post Central Arkansas Regional Greenways pave a pathway forward appeared first on Arkansas Times.
USL Arkansas, a group co-founded by former player Chris Martinovic and sports industry veteran Warren Smith, will bring a men's and women's soccer club to Rogers. A 5,000+ seat stadium is being planned in the Pinnacle Hills entertainment district.
The post Northwest Arkansas scores professional soccer teams appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Breaking: Glass bottles can be recycled into durable building material, and a new plant in North Little Rock will conduct this particular sorcery.
The post North Little Rock plant will churn out puffy recycled glass rocks for greener construction appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Hoarding the state surplus does not help the average Arkansan improve their lives, but it tees up legislators to spin tax cuts and score political points. Consider the recent water crisis in Helena-West Helena as a case study.
The post Surplus tax cuts offer political points but bring little help to Arkansans appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The Little Rock food desert task force aims to find solutions to food insecurity in the city. The group plans to share survey results and recommendations with city officials in the fall.
The post Little Rock task force to survey food desert residents appeared first on Arkansas Times.
With a federal suit pending over Arkansas's new censorship law and ongoing tension over what library books young people should be able to read, arguments are unfolding in court filings and spilling out on social media.
The post Book-banning furor rages on, from federal court to Dan Sullivan’s Facebook page appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The former Arkansas governor is nowhere close to qualifying for the first primary debate next month but said he's in the race for "the long haul."
The post NY Times catches up with Hutchinson on his long-shot presidential bid appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A proclamation from the governor's office noting Charlie Daniels' "long legacy marked by generosity, humor, and humility" calls for flags to fly at half-staff Friday.
The post Flags to fly at half-staff Friday for Arkansas’s own Charlie Daniels appeared first on Arkansas Times.
News of trouble at the University of Idaho over a plan to affiliate with the online university.
The post Just as in Arkansas, public secrecy causes problems for University of Phoenix effort in Idaho appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Officials broke ground on the city's micro-home village Wednesday morning. The project is expected to house up to 200 individuals when complete.
The post Little Rock officials take step toward micro-home village for the homeless appeared first on Arkansas Times.
In 1999, the state saw 42 Black maternal deaths per 100,000 live births. That number reached 89 in 2019, researchers found.
The post Black maternal mortality in Arkansas has doubled in two decades, study shows appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Hiland, a former federal prosecutor from Conway, will hold the seat until the next judicial election in March 2024.
The post Update: Gov. Sanders names state GOP chair Cody Hiland to fill state Supreme Court vacancy appeared first on Arkansas Times.
With Little Rock quartet Way Away and Nashville’s The Dreaded Laramie sharing the bill, this show’s for the real ones who know that “pop music” is not a synonym for “vapid.”
The post Adventureland at White Water Tavern on Saturday appeared first on Arkansas Times.
When the days are long and the smell of fresh cut grass wafts through open car windows, you know Independence Day is looming.
The post Red, white and boom! Arkansas loves a good explosion appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Adoptions fees at participating shelters won't exceed $50 and they're offering 30 days of free pet insurance.
The post Pet adoption fees reduced in July, and plenty of good boys are available appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The closure of the Galleries & Bookstore at Library Square leaves a string of broken booklover hearts in its wake, but the indie bookstore scene in Central Arkansas is still alive and well.
The post ‘Paper gold:’ A Central Arkansas bookstore crawl appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The controversy over a chalk cross drawn up by the Sanders kids outside the Governor's Mansion has given the governor the perfect opportunity to paint herself as the victim of liberal "bullying."
The post Sanders says the chalk cross stays, keep the pressure washers to yourselves appeared first on Arkansas Times.
New releases from Sad Palomino, Q.G. The BlacKnight, Honey Collective, Nick Shoulders, Always Tired, Jupiter's Flytrap, John McAteer and his Demands and Shine Eye Yell.
The post 8 recent tunes we missed from Arkansas’s finest appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Attorney General Tim Griffin said he would immediately appeal the ruling to the state Supreme Court.
The post Update: Judge blocks Arkansas LEARNS for second time while state suggests it may not comply appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Damn near perfect.
The post Indecisiveness, and finding the crab cake sandwich at The Faded Rose appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The road to recovery is a long one, but the deadline for FEMA assistance is closing in. Residents in Cross, Lonoke and Pulaski counties have until Monday to submit an application for federal funds.
The post FEMA awards $8.6 million to Arkansas tornado survivors, applications due Monday appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The first full supermoon of 2023 rises over the holiday weekend, and if cloud cover allows, it's gonna be a dazzler.
The post Check out the supermoon Sunday night appeared first on Arkansas Times.
In a 6-3 decision, the justices said the Biden administration did not have the authority to pursue such an ambitious program solely by executive order.
The post AG Tim Griffin celebrates Supreme Court ruling against student debt relief appeared first on Arkansas Times.
In the midst of grief, all this diehard can offer is a batch of memories. They may mean nothing to some, but they mean so much to me — and countless others.
The post Pearls About Swine: Ryan Mallett memoriam appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Be careful out there. The Fourth of July can be dangerous, Our Blood Institute is asking for blood donations ahead of the holiday.
The post Donate blood, get a free ticket to Magic Springs appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Lawmakers must do three things to stop the bleeding and pave the way for a healthier Arkansas: 1. Increase support for rural providers; 2. Build rural infrastructure; 3. Expand Medicaid.
The post Arkansas Rural Healthcare Crisis Part II: The Prescription appeared first on Arkansas Times.
From her childhood home at the Arkansas Governor's Mansion all the way to her current home at the Arkansas Governor's Mansion, Sarah Huckabee Sanders pulled herself up by her own bootstraps, and she expects others to do the same.
The post Governor cites MLK to applaud anti-affirmative action Supreme Court decision, and we have questions appeared first on Arkansas Times.
This week, Good Day Farm is helping customers in Arkansas send letters to Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders to ask for her to use her clemency powers to forgive some past cannabis offenses.
The post Good Day Farm helps Arkansans ask governor to support cannabis clemency appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Donations have come in from near and far to cover costs in a federal lawsuit challenging Act 372, a new Arkansas law that encourages censorship and puts librarians in legal peril.
The post Central Arkansas Library System collects $25,000 in private donations to fund censorship lawsuit appeared first on Arkansas Times.
In addition to events like barrel racing, bull riding and a relay race called the "pony express," Ja'Dayia Kursh — Arkansas's first Black Rodeo Queen — and Paris Wilburd — a 13-year-old barrel racing prodigy from Central Arkansas — will be in attendance.
The post The Black rodeo is coming to Pine Bluff appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Americans United for the Separation of Church and State told Governor Sarah Sanders in a letter yesterday that the cross at the entrance to the Arkansas Governor's Mansion sends a message that the state favors one religion over others.
The post Church-state watchdog asks Sanders to remove chalk cross appeared first on Arkansas Times.
NetChoice, an industry association that includes members such as Meta, Google and Amazon, filed suit in federal court in Fort Smith.
The post Tech industry group sues Arkansas over social media ID law appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The mother, Lunden Roberts, agreed to drop her request for the child's name to be changed to "Biden" as part of today's agreement. Monetary details are redacted.
The post Hunter Biden reaches agreement with Arkansas woman in child support case appeared first on Arkansas Times.
This year's crop will include Goldies, a stable mutation of a 19th century Abraham Lincoln, Cherokee Purple and Carbon, Leveritt said.
The post Bayou Meto farmer/publisher to deliver 200 pounds of heirloom tomatoes to Edward’s Food Giant, go get ’em appeared first on Arkansas Times.
In the June edition of Cornucopia, The Mighty Rib hits the road for food adventures in Northwest Arkansas, Sheridan and Conway. He also lists his top 20 Central Arkansas burgers.
The post The Mighty Rib’s Cornucopia: June Edition appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Also on cassette and streaming services, "Paper Airplanes, Paper Hearts" will be available in four different vinyl varieties: black, white, light blue and baby pink.
The post Everyone Asked About You double vinyl reissue gets a release date appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Javion Green, 16, has been charged with capital murder in the death of 16-year-old Raymond Hudson who was found lying in a parking lot with a gunshot wound last month.
The post Jacksonville teen arrested in homicide of fellow teen killed last month appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Wynne's death leaves a vacancy on the seven-member court that will be filled by Gov. Sarah Sanders until a successor can be elected, presumably in 2024.
The post Justice Robin Wynne is dead, state Supreme Court says appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The report is expected to cover issues in downtown Little Rock like connectivity and mobility, residential density, commercial development and more.
The post Little Rock city officials OK nearly $750,000 for a downtown master plan appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Short-term rentals like Airbnbs and Vrbos will now have to meet a roster of new citywide standards. Owners will need to secure permits, pay annual fees and follow some new regulations after the City Board's Tuesday vote.
The post Short-term rental ordinance gets the OK from Little Rock City Board appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Tickets for the Aug. 18 event are $150 each.
The post If you’ve always wanted to dine with Kevin McCarthy, here’s your chance appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Though just a duo on paper, bandleaders Alan Benjamin Thomas and Steven Rutherford made the wise choice to recruit two additional musicians, a drummer and guitar/keyboard player who added some indie rock ruffling to their otherwise very slick sheen.
The post joan’s hometown show at The Hall was euphoric yet sentimental appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The first state to ban medical gender-affirming care for youth, Arkansas now becomes the first state whose ban has been ruled unconstitutional.
The post Trans youth win in court, federal judge strikes down Arkansas ban on gender-affirming medical care appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Circuit Judge Chip Welch struck down 27 legislative changes to the state medical marijuana amendment last week. State Attorney General Tim Griffin quickly announced plans to appeal, but two lawyers say the ruling isn't yet appealable.
The post State can’t appeal marijuana ruling, at least not yet, lawyers say appeared first on Arkansas Times.
"I didn’t want anybody to be blindsided and come to staff and say, 'Why the hell didn’t you tell us about this?'" Cook told the Arkansas Times.
The post UPDATE: Concerns over Senate ’emergency clause’ votes flagged long ago, former staffer says in LEARNS testimony appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Approximately 2,717 pounds of Marie Callender's frozen beef shepherd's pie products produced at a Conagra Brands food manufacturing facility in Russellville have been recalled.
The post Nearly 3,000 pounds of Arkansas-made Marie Callender’s beef shepherd’s pie recalled over possible contamination with flexible plastics appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Sometimes a sandwich is more than just a sandwich. At least that’s true in the Arkansas Repertory Theatre’s excellent production of “Clyde’s,” which is sparse on stagecraft but extra meaty in its execution and meaning.
The post The Rep’s ‘Clyde’s’ serves up sandwiches, sorrow and a shot at redemption appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Officers arrived at a house at 7325 Fairfield Drive just before 10 p.m. Monday to find 49-year-old Ricardo Sykes with gunshot wounds. He later succumbed to his injuries at a hospital.
The post UPDATE: ‘Domestic altercation’ leaves one dead Monday in Southwest Little Rock appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Gov. Sarah Sanders needed her omnibus LEARNS package to be rushed through the legislative process and into law. Now, parents of Arkansas’s most vulnerable students are footing the bill of the governor’s decision to play political games with our kids’ futures.
The post Parents of kids with disabilities pay the price for LEARNS appeared first on Arkansas Times.
More talk, no action in the ongoing fight over the Saline County Library. A resolution to give the county judge power to hire and fire librarians and approve the library budget got its first reading Monday.
The post Saline County leaders keep aim on library as protesters bring their ‘A’ game appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A software hiccup shut down many of the state's dispensaries over the holiday weekend.
The post Data entry issue forces dispensary closures, but the state says the problem is fixed appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Saline County leaders have had it in for the county's top librarian for months now as she's stood in the way of their push to clear books about sex education and gender identity from children's shelves. The Saline County judge will likely win the power to fire library staff tonight, but library supporters plan a protest and say they'll keep fighting.
The post Saline County book ban watch appeared first on Arkansas Times.
"Amidst the darkness and pain of our past, there is a beacon of hope — a reminder of the enduring power of the human spirit," Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott Jr. said. "That beacon is Juneteenth.”
The post Arkansans celebrate Juneteenth, Little Rock offices closed in observance appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Two Arkansas locations have been announced for KPOT Korean BBQ & Hotpot, a franchise that blends "traditional Asian hot pot with Korean BBQ flavors," its website says.
The post KPOT Korean BBQ & Hotpot to open locations in North Little Rock and Jonesboro appeared first on Arkansas Times.
It's a tough week for library and freedom lovers in Saline and Crawford counties.
The post Libraries likely to be targeted in two counties’ quorum court meetings appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The attorney general aims to keep a key witness from testifying this week, seemingly arguing that allowing a retired Senate parliamentarian to testify about internal discussions could shake the very foundation of the American republic.
The post Attorney general seeks to bar legislative staff subpoenas ahead of LEARNS hearing appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Give those guys some love.
The post Father’s day open line appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Regulating Airbnb and other short-term rentals in Little Rock has long been debated. Following a community meeting in May, city directors will have the chance on Tuesday to review, discuss and vote on an updated short-term rental ordinance.
The post Little Rock directors to take up modified short-term rental ordinance Tuesday appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Buddy Johnson is retiring after working for the state House of Representatives for 38 years.
The post Q&A with outgoing state House parliamentarian Finos Buford ‘Buddy’ Johnson Jr. appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Arkansas native Doris Pryor became the third Black judge to join the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in April, drawing accolades from senators in her new home state of Indiana and securing confirmation with a notably collegial bipartisan Senate vote of 60-31.
The post Another star from Hope ascends, no thanks to Cotton and Boozman appeared first on Arkansas Times.
It’s easy for Democrats to look at party identification numbers and feel dejected. But elections are not predetermined.
The post How can Arkansas Democrats win more voters? Data from 2022 holds clues. appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Arkansas's move-fast-and-break-things approach to unwinding pandemic-era Medicaid rules could hurt families who've come to rely on the program.
The post Federal officials are keeping a close eye on Arkansas’s hasty Medicaid purge appeared first on Arkansas Times.
In an interview with the Arkansas Times, Nelson cited UA System President Bobbitt's secretive push to seal a deal with the University of Phoenix and last year's chancellor seleciton process
The post Sheffield Nelson says no to being UA System chairman, cites strained relationship with Bobbitt appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Sonny Williams' Steak Room announced this week that it has formed a partnership with South Main dessert shop Loblolly Creamery.
The post Sonny Williams announces sweet partnership with Loblolly appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Jack Brill of Neosho, Missouri, allegedly stole $513,000 from Saracen between March and June 2020 by disguising it as bonus compensation.
The post Attorney charged with embezzling Saracen Casino funds in widening probe of Quapaw officials appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A group of plaintiffs challenging Arkansas's state legislative district lines now may be looking at a stronger case thanks to yesterday's surprise ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court on a Voting Rights Act case out of Alabama.
The post Arkansas plaintiffs say U.S. Supreme Court ruling affirms individual right to sue under Voting Rights Act appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Catalyze, a new grant program for Central Arkansas artists that works in partnership with the Mid-America Arts Alliance and the Windgate Foundation, has announced its inaugural cohort of recipients.
The post Mid-America Arts Alliance announces first cohort of $10,000 grant recipients appeared first on Arkansas Times.
School board members continue the time-consuming, painstaking work of plotting a path to progress for poverty-stricken students.
The post LRSD board makes slog-ress at long but enlightening work session appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Billy Joe Taylor, 44, was arrested in May 2021 and pleaded guilty to commit health care fraud and money laundering last October.
The post Lavaca man sentenced to 15 years for $134 million fraudulent lab billing scheme appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The hospital's school program will be renamed for fast-casual Chinese restaurant chain Panda Express, ACH said.
The post Panda Express pledges more than $1 million to Arkansas Children’s Hospital appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The fight in Alabama resembles a skirmish in Arkansas, where a Republican legislative supermajority drew sweetheart congressional district lines all but guaranteed to waltz U.S. Rep. French Hill right back into office.
The post Supreme Court ruling on Alabama gerrymandering bodes well for Arkansas voters appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The state Department of Human Services continues to "unwind" Medicaid coverage for tens of thousands of people, meaning they no longer have health care coverage.
The post Update: Arkansas Medicaid closed 69K more cases in May appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Here's a timely column plucked from "The Thane of Cawdor Comes to Bauxite and Other Whimsy and Wisdom from the Pen of Mike Trimble," a collection edited by Ernie Dumas. This piece originally appeared in the Denton Record-Chronicle in 2005, and came to mind today upon the news of Pat Robertson's death.
The post On the day of Pat Robertson’s death, we polish off this old gem appeared first on Arkansas Times.
It’s been nearly two years since Arkansas doom heavyweights Pallbearer performed in The Natural State and at this year’s Mutants of the Monster festival, the band returned in epic fashion. They were joined by Mammoth Caravan, Seahag, Oakskin, Thou and Rwake.
The post Pallbearer flies the Arkansas doom flag high at Mutants of the Monster festival appeared first on Arkansas Times.
It's nothing like the East Coast, but a haze of Canadian wildfire smoke is drifting over Arkansas as well.
The post Canadian wildfires spread haze over Arkansas skies but air quality remains moderate appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Who's the rubber and who's the glue? The right-wing group Citizens Defending Freedom says the Southern Poverty Law Center, not Moms for Liberty, is the real "hate and anti-government organization."
The post Moms for Liberty’s hate group label riles fellow conservatives appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Ernie Dumas will read from his new book, “The Thane of Cawdor Comes to Bauxite and Other Whimsy and Wisdom From the Pen of Mike Trimble,” at WordsWorth Books this Saturday, June 10, at 5 p.m.
The post ‘The Thane of Cawdor’ comes to WordsWorth, as should you appeared first on Arkansas Times.
You get a line and I'll get a pole, honey.
The post No fishing license, no problem; it’s free fishing weekend, y’all appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Not only has Arkansas AG Tim Griffin cited the 2018 sovereign immunity ruling in the LEARNS suit, the case presents the Court with a similar question: Should decades of practice be thrown out in favor of a strict reading of the state Constitution?
The post 5 years later, Arkansas sovereign immunity ruling looms over LEARNS litigation appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Historic West Ninth Street will transform into an admission-free opportunity for eating, shopping and grooving starting at noon, with an incredible set of local Black performers on deck, including Akeem Kemp, Dazz & Brie and the Funkanites. Grammy Award-winning Mýa will headline.
The post Juneteenth in Da Rock is next weekend appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The longer Dave Van Horn goes without a title — and this 2023 team just made it 21 years for the iconic coach without one — the more we’ll hear whispers of curses and hexes and such.
The post Pearls About Swine: Hog Regional postmortem appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights watchdog group that keeps tabs on the most rabid racists, segregationists and hate groups in Dixie, is adding Moms for Liberty to the list.
The post Moms for Liberty are ‘extremists,’ but we knew that already appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Since the Jeff Tweedy-fronted crew last played in Arkansas in 2012, they've released four additional LPs, most recently 2022's "Cruel Country."
The post Alt-country giants Wilco will hit Bentonville in October appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The menu features traditional coffee drinks and specialties like a coffee soda and a nonalcoholic espresso old fashioned. The menu includes an entire section of mocktails.
The post First look at Pettaway Coffee appeared first on Arkansas Times.
From 10 a.m. to noon Saturday, visitors can admire the more than 400 Arkansas native plants in the garden and learn how to bring native plants to their own landscapes.
The post Allsopp pollinator garden ribbon cutting set for Saturday appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A proposed juvenile curfew extension in Little Rock's entertainment districts has the people talking. Mayor Frank Scott Jr. offered some additional background on Wednesday.
The post Little Rock mayor chimes in on potentially extending juvenile curfew appeared first on Arkansas Times.
"Because our group has successfully sued to stop the State Board of Education’s rushed plans to allow a charter school company to take over our school district, state leaders have gone to great lengths to spread disinformation about us and our lawsuit. So, I’m writing to help set the record straight."
The post A mother and community organizer gives a ground-level view from Marvell appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Former Chief Judge Leon Holmes of the Eastern District of Arkansas will represent Hutchinson, who's appealing his relatively tough sentence to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.
The post Jeremy Hutchinson has a new lawyer, a former federal judge appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Doe entered the scene in 1977 when he co-founded the highly influential Los Angeles punk band X, whose first two albums are an undeniable part of the rock ’n’ roll canon at this point, but from the ’90s on he devoted himself to much twangier solo work.
The post John Doe Folk Trio at White Water Tavern appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Even if extreme bills don’t pass, there are still consequences of weaving them into the lawmaking process in the first place. Bad bills negatively affect Arkansans, whether they pass or not.
The post The bills that died this legislative session but still haunt us appeared first on Arkansas Times.
One of two protesters fined and sentenced to jail for a nonviolent protest outside a Conway School Board meeting will have a new attorney when he goes to trial this fall in Faulkner County Circuit Court in Conway.
The post New lawyer takes on case of Conway School Board protester, says punishment didn’t fit the crime appeared first on Arkansas Times.
In early 2021, with college classrooms still sporadically shuttered by the COVID-19 pandemic, observers of higher education were already warning of the next catastrophe-level threat to enrollment numbers.
An upcoming “enrollment cliff” was on its way. Declining birth rates during the nation’s recession more than a decade earlier meant fewer young adults enrolling in college as soon as 2025.
The University of Phoenix — one of the nation’s largest for-profit and online universities — was also struggling, enrollment having dropped from about 470,000 students in 2010 to about 79,000 in 2023. In 2019, financial and regulatory problems led to Phoenix’s agreeing to a $191 million settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, severely damaging the school’s reputation.
And its owner, Apollo Education Group Inc., began actively searching for a buyer, someone to take the primarily online college off its hands.
A clandestine plan to acquire the University of Phoenix and fold it into the University of Arkansas System started to take shape, with the goal of broadening the University of Arkansas’s capability to deliver education cheaply and beyond the state’s borders online. The deal has since gone south, and the University of Phoenix is in talks with other potential buyers.
But the secret plot to acquire a struggling for-profit diploma mill for the university’s arsenal hints at the system’s struggles to stay afloat as student bodies shrink and anti-intellectualism at the state Capitol threatens campus budget numbers.
Sinking Phoenix
In the aftermath of the University of Phoenix’s embarrassing legal troubles, alumni — veterans, civil rights advocates and others who felt wronged by the university — united to warn potential buyers of the dangers that would come with purchasing Phoenix.
By early March 2021, someone at the University of Phoenix had reached out to Donald Bobbitt, president of the University of Arkansas System since November 2011 and an educator already known for his fascination with online education. In 2014, the UA System created the ill-fated eVersity, an online-only venture aimed at enrolling working adults. And in September 2021, the university system paid $1 to buy the online Grantham University, which has since become part of the UA umbrella.
So, perhaps it shouldn’t have been surprising that someone at the University of Phoenix contacted Bobbitt to see if the system or a nonprofit affiliate might be interested in buying.
Bobbitt was interested. He envisioned the UA System affiliating with a nonprofit entity that would buy Phoenix with private, not public, funds. In his view, the purchase would benefit both the UA System and Phoenix through a licensing agreement that would pay the system an estimated $20 million annually.
For almost two years, Bobbitt wooed Phoenix, enshrouding the pursuit in a secrecy seldom seen in public universities. Not until January of this year, after someone overheard trustees arguing during an executive, or closed, session, presumably allowed only for personnel matters, did word get out about Bobbitt’s own phoenix-like crusade.
Not for three more months would Bobbitt bring his proposal to the UA System’s board during a public meeting, where a few trustees lavished it with praise while a couple of others were angered by the amount of financial and legal details involving the $500 million to $700 million transaction they were expected to absorb in a single meeting.
“Fairly or unfairly, Phoenix brought significant reputational damage with it,” said Skip Rutherford, dean emeritus of the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service. “With few exceptions, most people in Arkansas higher education that I talked to were against [the proposal]. For some it was more than just mission creep; it was mission leap. Without 10-0 or 9-1 support, a divided board made the correct decision not to move forward.”
The actual vote was four for the plan, five against it and one abstention or recusal.
“Critics have also noted the secrecy surrounding the deal followed by a quick board vote,” Rutherford said. “That may be a good ‘deal making’ strategy but it is not a good ‘deal selling’ one.’
Secrets brewing
On March 9, 2021, Bobbitt signed a nondisclosure, or confidentiality, agreement with the University of Phoenix, according to now-former UA System board chairman Cliff Gibson III, who was shown a cover sheet with Bobbitt’s dated signature and was asked to sign it as well in February of this year.
Gibson said he declined to sign the document, which system spokesman Nate Hinkel said he could not find. Gibson subsequently emailed it to Hinkel, who then shared it with the Arkansas Times. Hinkel said he also could not find similar documents signed by any other trustees but did find one signed in June 2021 by Michael Moore, the system’s vice president for academic affairs.
Secrecy and Phoenix’s tarnished reputation weren’t the only problems Bobbitt faced in selling his Phoenix dream. There also were serious concerns, though not spoken aloud during the UA System board’s public meeting, about Arkansas-based Stephens Inc.’s role in the game.
Stephens, a financial services firm and the UA System’s mergers and acquisition partner, stood to make millions if the deal went through. The bigger the price tag, the more Stephens would have made.
Another problem for Bobbitt was that one of the board votes he needed was that of trustee Kelly Eichler. A deputy chief of staff to Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Eichler is married to Brad Eichler, Stephens’ chief operating officer. Though Kelly Eichler voiced her support for the plan at an April 19 meeting, she recused herself from the April 23 board vote after publicity arose surrounding her conflict of interest.
“Conflicts of interest or the perceptions of them are also not helpful,” Rutherford said.
Still, Rutherford believes Bobbitt “was sincerely trying to address the projected enrollment cliff and revenue impact” with the Phoenix proposal.
“But like with the University of Arkansas chancellor’s search, communications were fumbled early. When the Phoenix proposal was publicly unveiled, the board was already split, and Dr. Bobbitt and UA-Phoenix were paddling upstream,” Rutherford said.
Bobbitt’s debacles
Indeed, the Phoenix debacle was the second major defeat Bobbitt has suffered before the board in the past six months. In mid-November, the board unanimously voted to name Charles Robinson as the new chancellor of the system’s flagship campus, the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, despite efforts by Bobbitt to get Robinson to withdraw his application. Bobbitt had even offered Robinson a half-million dollars to drop out of the selection process and remain provost. He had favored Daniel Reed, an Arkansas native and computer science professor, who also had the support of Walmart heir Steuart Walton. Robinson had served as interim chancellor for more than a year, paving the way for him to become the university’s first Black leader.
Even after the board rejected the resolution supporting a Phoenix purchase, Bobbitt never would say publicly that the effort was over, despite emails asking about the status of it. Nor did Phoenix spokeswoman Andrea Smiley respond to emails.
Before the vote, some had feared Bobbitt might try to make the acquisition on his own without seeking board approval — something he apparently could have legally done under board policy, though not easily. So, might he still try to move ahead?
“Dr. Bobbitt has said it is difficult to move forward on the project without the support of the Board,” Hinkel said. “That remains the case and I don’t have anything to add at this time.”
Days later, when the news broke of the University of Idaho’s similar effort to create a nonprofit to buy Phoenix, Hinkel issued a statement that came the closest yet to an indication that the UA System was out of the game.
“Based on the amount of due diligence we have done on this project, we are not surprised that another university also saw the value in pursuing an affiliation with University of Phoenix,” Hinkel said. “We wish all parties involved much success as they move forward.”
Further, the federal Higher Learning Commission said on May 17 that it had not received anything from the UA System despite an attorney’s statement during a recent UA System board meeting that a document relating to the Phoenix proposal was due at the commission May 2. Unlike the UA System Board, the Idaho State Board of Education unanimously approved the University of Idaho president’s proposal, meaning it can move forward but still isn’t a done deal. UA System trustee Ed Fryar, who supported Bobbitt’s plan, said recently that at least two other institutions were talking with Phoenix. He did not name them. Further, a chart shared with Idaho’s board members in May indicated that a pending closing condition was the ability to finance the huge transaction.
Some have speculated privately that Bobbitt’s job may be in danger. His contract is due to expire Dec. 31 unless it’s extended. Neither Bobbitt nor Hinkel answered a question about whether Bobbitt plans to seek an extension.
A former chemistry professor who appears quite self-confident though clearly disappointed in the board’s rejection of his Phoenix vision, Bobbitt, 66, could opt to retire. He also could still get a contract extension. Or he could move to another institution and there pursue his vision of embracing “technology and innovation.” Along the way, he just might rise like the immortal phoenix itself did in Greek mythology and come up with yet another grand plan.
The post Mission Leap: U of A’s flirtation with buying an online university was ill-fated — and shrouded in secrecy appeared first on Arkansas Times.
It’s been a decade since Arkansas legislators passed a law creating a school rating system, and some administrators say it’s time for a change because it doesn’t take into account difficult-to-measure factors like poverty that can affect school performance.
“None of us really like the A to F system because there are flaws in it…because the data is so massive that there are mistakes in it,” Mena School District Superintendent Lee Smith said.
Differences in data reporting can negatively affect a school’s score. For instance in Mena, Smith said a reporting error resulted in not receiving credit for students’ community service hours.
Mena School District superintendent Lee Smith hands a diploma to Emily Wynn, one of 118 seniors who who graduated on May 20, 2023.
(Courtesy photo)Inconsistencies among buildings on the same campus can cause unintentional harm by resulting in a school dropping down a letter grade, Smith said. Oftentimes districts discover how they should have reported something after the fact, when it’s too late to fix it, he said.
Although it’s a flawed system, Smith recognizes “it’s the best thing we could come up with.”
“One of my sayings is we’re all misinformed about learning because we all went to school, and a big part of school is that A, B, C, D, F,” he said. “So we’ve reverted to that system because everyone understands it.”
But not everyone understands the many factors that determine those scores, and the lay person isn’t going to examine intricate details like a reporting error; they just see a letter grade, he said.
“When you dig deep into what an A means, it becomes convoluted and complex,” Smith said.
How we got hereThe law creating the A-F scale went into effect in the 2014-2015 school year. Then in 2017, Act 930 and Act 744 aligned the state’s accountability systems with federal requirements and permitted the use of the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) School Index score as the universal score for accountability, Arkansas Department of Education spokeswoman Kimberly Mundell said.
ESSA required states to include at least five indicators for success: achievement, growth, English learner progress toward English language proficiency, graduation rate, and school quality and student success. Evaluation of these indicators includes factors like attendance rate and community service credits.
“The goal of the Arkansas School Rating system is to provide a public-facing picture of school performance based on statewide measures,” Mundell said. “The letter grades are meant to convey, on a standardized rating scale, how schools are performing overall. Just like with students, the grades are not the only measure of success; however, they do provide some insight into the rate at which schools are meeting student needs.”
A school’s letter grade is calculated by evaluating indicators that have weighted scores. Weighted achievement and academic growth scores are derived from grade-level assessments for math and English language arts and account for the largest percentage of the overall score.
ADE is developing a new assessment to replace the ACT Aspire test for grades 3-8 in the spring of 2024. The department, educators and others involved in education will develop proficiency scores for the new exam next summer, and Mundell said they will use a panel of national experts to “provide a smooth transition” in the school rating system across the two assessments.
If our local community feels like it’s getting its money’s worth, then why not just accept that in Little Rock and let’s move forward on progressing the state instead of bashing schools.
– Lee Smith, Mena School District superintendent
Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ signature education legislation, the LEARNS Act, makes several changes to the state’s education system, and Mundell said the new law provides an opportunity for ADE “to take a thorough look” at the state’s current accountability system. Stakeholders will be able to provide input on what should remain versus what might need to be changed within the system through surveys, meetings and conference sessions, she said.
“The emphasis of the department is to have a seamless and aligned system that publicly reports the effectiveness of our schools,” Mundell said. “The opportunity to align our new academic standards with our new assessment provides a foundation for a stronger and more transparent accountability system.”
In addition to accountability, a school’s rating can affect eligibility for programs like the new Arkansas Children’s Educational Freedom Account. Created under the LEARNS Act, the voucher program will provide state funding for allowable education expenses, including private school tuition. The program will be phased in over three years with students at “F”-rated schools having access in year one. Students in “D”-rated schools will be eligible in the second year.
Ratings are included as part of School Report Cards published on ADE’s website. The rating system was suspended for the 2019-2020 school year when annual assessments were not administered due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Act 89 of 2021 continued the suspension through the 2020-2021 academic year.
Unmeasured factorsRatings may provide a level of accountability, but they can be stressful, and don’t include things that affect a child’s performance or learning, Bismarck School District Superintendent Susan Kissire said.
“We have been blessed to remain one of the highest achieving districts in the state, but the letter grading system does cause a lot of anxiety,” she said. “I think by including more factors to better reflect the diversity of all school districts, it would be a better representation of what we work to achieve every day.”
Bismarck School District Superintendent Susan Kissire (Courtesy photo)Ratings should include interim assessments as well as items from the standards for accreditation, such as licensed teachers and student-teacher ratios, Kissire said. The current system also does not measure things like the availability of health and wellness services or social and emotional services, nor does it evaluate student success in areas like band, agriculture and other career and technical courses, she said.
Smith said clubs and athletics also contribute to engagement by keeping kids in school. Lots of learning and personal growth happens in extracurricular activities that can be hard to measure, he said.
In the traditional classroom, Kissire said, the current system doesn’t take into consideration that some students aren’t good test takers or may be having an “off” day during annual assessments, and that can have “quite an impact” on students and the district.
Outside factors such as lack of sleep, hunger or home life can also affect how students perform on end-of-year assessments, she said.
“It’s so much pressure for our students. They work so hard to do their best, but sometimes various factors can just be overwhelming,” Kissire said.
Chronic absenteeism is another issue that’s often out of a school’s control. Smith said younger students especially can suffer because they depend on their parents to make sure they attend class.
“They can’t help it if they’re not getting that at home, but it really delays them academically to miss and then that hurts the school,” he said. “We do what we can and we try to help, offer help, but if they don’t come to school, they can’t learn, and many times it’s out of our hands, out of the students’ hands.”
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DONATEKissire said changing the system to incorporate terminology focused on whether a district is meeting standards — using words like “advanced” or “meets expectations” instead of letter grades — could be beneficial.
“I realize that we need to have some kind of ranking or grading system to help parents when it comes to choosing the right school for their child,” she said. “Our elementary school utilizes standards-based report cards. This allows us to break things down into ‘learning targets’ with a 1-4 scale. Perhaps something like this might work.”
Smith also suggested collecting post-graduation data to see where students end up and evaluating if districts met their needs. Allowing local communities to determine whether districts are doing well instead of state officials is another possibility, he said.
“That’s what the legislature is all about in accountability is really following the tax dollars,” he said. “If our local community feels like it’s getting its money’s worth, then why not just accept that in Little Rock and let’s move forward on progressing the state instead of bashing schools.”
Poverty impactPoverty is a major factor that affects a child’s education but can be difficult to measure. Nearly one in four Arkansas children live in poverty, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s 2022 Kids Count Data Book. Arkansas ranked 43rd in the nation in overall child well-being in the foundation’s analysis.
An Advocate analysis of the state’s 92 “F”-rated schools found that 51% are located in counties with a poverty rate of 20% or more. Five schools are in Phillips County, which has a 35.7% poverty rate, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
The Helena-West Helena School District in Phillips County has the state’s highest poverty rate for 5 to 17-year-olds with an estimated 47.1% of students living in poverty.
Twenty-two Arkansas school districts have a child poverty rate of 30% or higher. Of those, 16 have at least one “F”-rated school.
Census Bureau school district data does not include charter school districts.
Olivia Gardner, Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families’ education policy director, said lower-income students often have fewer resources at home to complete homework or engage in activities that equip them for success during the school day.
In addition to lacking access to technology or broadband, which is common in the state’s rural areas, Gardner said parents may not be available to help with school work because they’re working long hours or multiple jobs.
“All that adds up to students in poverty facing more challenges to being high academic achievers,” Gardner said. “We also know from research that many teachers in high-poverty schools are more inexperienced and often less effective than their more experienced peers who get recruited and targeted for being hired by high-income schools.”
This can lead to an achievement gap between high-income and low-income districts and the way to combat that, Gardner said, is to address the effects of poverty by improving access to health care and social safety net programs, creating better housing policies and “structuring our public education system so that it works for all Arkansas students.”
“We have that lofty feeling that education is supposed to be the great equalizer, and certainly we all aspire for it to be, but right now we have to acknowledge…we’re just not quite there yet and that is due in part to the incredibly high poverty rate in the state,” Gardner said.
Arkansas’ poverty rate of 16.3% is higher than the national rate of 11.6%.
Making long-term investments in improving high-poverty schools is important, Gardner said, and strategies could include advancing policies that support well-trained teachers and incentivize them to remain in high-poverty schools.
The LEARNS Act raises the state’s minimum teacher salary to $50,000, so that could help attract educators to low-income areas, but time will tell, she said.
“There are things that we can do that are within our power while we still are a high-poverty state. It’s not a hopeless situation,” Gardner said.
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Three Crawford County parents have sued the county judge, quorum court, library board and interim library director, alleging “unlawful censorship of materials,” specifically children’s books with LGBTQ+ topics, in the county’s five library branches.
Rebecka Virden, Nina Prater, Samantha Rowlett and their minor children are all Crawford County residents and library patrons, according to the complaint filed Friday in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Arkansas. The plaintiffs object to “the stigmatization of certain books by placing a prominent color label on them and moving the books to a separate ‘social section’” in each library, according to the complaint.
“Crawford County’s censorship of the ‘Social Section’ books arises from impermissible religious considerations, i.e., its extreme and malevolent view of the Bible, resulting in the County punishing the already marginalized LGBTQ+ community,” the plaintiffs state.
Virden et al v Crawford County Complaint FINAL pdf version rev final
This violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which prohibits government entities from favoring an establishment of religion, according to the complaint.
Supporters and opponents of children’s access to LGBTQ+ content in libraries have spent months sparring before Crawford County’s 13-member quorum court.
The library system’s then-director, Deidre Grzymala, “reached a compromise” with the county governing body at its December 2022 meeting after several residents complained about the LGBTQ+ children’s books, according to a transcription from the library board’s January meeting contained in the lawsuit.
The new “social section” is a separate section of the library catalog and located within the adult sections of each library branch, Grzymala told library board chairwoman Tammi Hamby.
“If there are any books that we missed, just alert the staff, and we can get it switched over,” Grzymala said. “We also put color label covers on the books for staff so that books do not get shelved in the wrong area.”
Hamby and her husband, Jeffrey Hamby, have been vocal opponents of the availability of LGBTQ+ content where children can access it, calling it “grooming a generation of children to feel this is normal and an accepted way of life” in a letter to Crawford County pastors after the December quorum court meeting.
“These children are too young to make those decisions and it should be left solely up to the parents what they want their child to be taught concerning these issues,” the Hambys wrote.
They praised the “tentative agreement to remove the offensive books from the children’s section in the library and to work on a permanent solution to the problem.”
The plaintiffs allege that the “‘tentative agreement’ was in actuality the Quorum Court engaging in viewpoint discrimination.”
Opponents of the books in question have claimed they are sexually explicit, but “none of these books could fathomably be accused of ‘grooming,’ ‘pornography,’ or ‘exposing children to explicit sexual ideas or imagery,’” the complaint states.
Some of the books in question include a children’s guide to LGBTQ+ Pride flags and a retelling of the Cinderella fairy tale with gay characters, according to the complaint.
The plaintiffs want the court to “order the Crawford County Library System to restore and maintain its books and future acquisitions to the same administrative controls and processes as they existed in June 2022,” per the complaint.
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SUBSCRIBEStatewide debate over library contentAfter Grzymala’s “compromise” with the quorum court in December, three of the five library board members resigned, including the previous chair, and the quorum court appointed Tammi Hamby as one of the new members. The full board appointed her as the new chair.
Grzymala resigned in February, and the quorum court appointed former library system director Eva White as interim director.
The library board tabled a motion from Hamby at the January meeting that would have given the board power to review and give the final say on whether the library system will purchase books and add them to the collection. The motion came up again in March, and the board withdrew the proposal and instead voted to review the library’s policy manual, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported.
The Crawford County Library System is not the first in Arkansas to face conservative attacks over content considered “inappropriate” for minors.
The Craighead County Jonesboro Public Library system saw voters cut its funding in half in 2022 after protests over an LGBTQ+ book display and a transgender author’s visit to the library within the previous couple of years.
Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Jonesboro, was the primary sponsor of a bill in the state Legislature earlier this year that became Act 372 of 2023, which will take effect Aug. 1.
The law will allow people to challenge library materials they consider “obscene” and create potential criminal liability for librarians who disseminate such materials to minors. Local elected officials will have the final say over whether a challenged book can stay on publicly available library shelves or must be moved to an area that minors cannot access.
The Central Arkansas Library System, the Fayetteville Public Library, the Eureka Springs Carnegie Public Library and 14 other plaintiffs plan to sue the state over Act 372, alleging it is unconstitutional.
Pulaski County Justice of the Peace Luke McCoy told the CALS board of directors Thursday that he and his fellow Republican justices “will probably make [the lawsuit] an issue” next time the county judge has to appoint a member of the board. McCoy is also communications director for the conservative Family Council.
Meanwhile in neighboring Saline County, the quorum court recommended in April that the county library system “relocate materials that are not subject matter or age appropriate for children, due to their sexual content or imagery, to an area that is not accessible to children” in light of Act 372.
Arkansas librarians brace for impact of law making them liable for “obscene” content
Library director Patty Hector has refused to do this and told the court that “there is nothing wrong with these books” and “it’s not illegal to be gay or trans.”
County Judge Matt Brumley said Hector’s words gave him a “high degree of concern” and reminded the board on Monday that he is responsible for appointing them.
In addition to LGBTQ+ content, supporters of relocating books out of children’s reach have cited books about sex education and systemic racism as fundamentally inappropriate for anyone under 18.
Every library system in Arkansas has a policy to address challenges from the public, and those policies will have to be altered to comply with Act 372. The existing policies are rarely used throughout the state — though Crawford County residents have submitted several complaints this year and last year — and people who challenge books often want them to be removed rather than relocated, the Advocate reported earlier this month.
Arkansas Advocate is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arkansas Advocate maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sonny Albarado for questions: info@arkansasadvocate.com. Follow Arkansas Advocate on Facebook and Twitter.
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You can kvetch about the state of the world from wherever you want.
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Plenty of Arkansans will hit the lakes this Memorial Day weekend and some might find a little extra cash under the surface.
The Hot Springs Fishing Challenge has placed 66 fish with yellow tags in Lake Hamilton and Lake Catherine. Those fish are worth cash prizes from $500 to $20,000 for a single fish.
Read all the details here and check out their Facebook page to see the fish that have already been caught.
The contest runs through July 31. Good luck our there!
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James Lecy squints against the bright morning sun, assessing the 40 feet to the hole. He’s had a good round thus far, but a wayward puff of wind has blown him a wee bit off-line on his approach. No matter – with an expert flick, his aim is true and a rattle echoes from the target.
Technically, the shot is a putt and a mighty long one in the traditional golfing world. But for Lecy, there’s not a bag or club in sight and the shot is rather pedestrian for the 20-year veteran of disc golf, save a tree branch or two, rattling his disc home on the post-and-basket that stands in place of a hole.
“I was introduced to the sport to get out of the house, get outside and get some sort of exercise,” he said. “You can run through a round as quickly as you can or you can walk and casually enjoy the outdoors with your friends. It was introduced to me as a very casual, leisurely, enjoy-the-park type of sport. I was absolutely hooked from day one.”
Sara Reeves
Lecy’s not alone — the Professional Disc Golf Association estimates 8 to 12 million Americans play disc golf, half a million of them playing regularly. The fact there’s even a Professional Disc Golf Association to begin with tells you something, a group that numbers 80,000 members in 47 countries and sanctions 3,500 events per year.
Arkansas has not been left out of the loop on disc golf, a game played and scored the same as the ball-and-club variety. DiscGolfScene.com lists 125 courses in The Natural State, while UDisc.com lists more than 150. The tracts range from private for-profit courses to a variety of municipal and amenity-type courses in parks at schools and on college and church campuses.
Rudimentary courses are fairly easy to set up just about anywhere – all you need for a beginner’s course are some posts, open space and a layout — but the state also offers courses that test the skills of a veteran player like Lecy.
Sara ReevesA perfect approach shot at renowned Persimmon Ridge.“There is a Disc Golf Pro Tour and we actually have a Disc Golf Pro Tour stop here in Arkansas, the Jonesboro Open,” he said. “One of the most prestigious disc golf courses we have here in Arkansas is in Greenbrier, Persimmon Ridge Disc Golf Resort. It’s fantastic and is world-recognized as one of the best courses that’s available to play in this region of the United States.”
Steve and Kimberly Jones, owners of Persimmon Ridge, didn’t set out to create such a renowned course. In fact, they didn’t set out to do anything other than find a modest spread at which they could entertain family and friends in the rural Faulkner County countryside.
But when the local nine-hole traditional golf course became available, the couple bought it for its natural beauty and in the hopes of turning it into a wedding and events venue. That part didn’t pan out, but Steve, who’d played disc golf here and there, thought a disc golf course might be a good Plan B.
Sara ReevesJames Lecy has been a fixture at Arkansas disc golf courses for 20 years.“We did see that surge that happened when the rest of the world was shut down [during COVID],” he said. “We welcomed disc golfers when they were looking for some freedom and a place to get out.”
The couple converted the grounds to two 18-hole courses and one nine-hole tract. The Gold and Blue courses follow the same layout, differing only in distance (10,175 feet and 7,139 feet, respectively) and both require clearing an intimidating water hazard at 18. The 2,581-foot “Chillow” nine-hole experience caters to beginners, removing doglegs, water and a lot of distance from the equation.
Kimberly Jones said giving course options to players, as well as various amenities, is a key part of expanding the clientele.
“What makes us unique is that we offer golf cart rentals and have a really extensive pro shop,” she said. “And we are offering almost one tournament a month. We also have weekly what we call ‘minis’ where you come out for one round against other players. We do that every Sunday.
“We do see mostly guys, but when we opened Chillow, our little beginner-friendly course, last summer, we’ve seen a lot more families. We’re just trying offer a little bit of something to everybody.”
Sara ReevesA group enjoys a round at Persimmon Ridge.A Good WalkArkansas has lots of options when it comes to disc golf. Some require a fee, but many municipal courses are free and open to the public. For starters, check out these three courses, ranked tops for various skill levels by disc golf longtimer James Lecy.
Beginner Course:
Burns Park Red Course, North Little Rock
This is probably the oldest course in Arkansas. It’s great for beginners because of the distance from tee to basket and there’s great signage so you know where to walk to the next hole. The lines you would throw on this course are easier than most, which makes it super fun for the newer player.
Intermediate Course:
Cedar Glades, Hot Springs
This course takes you through the woods where a player who is a little more experienced will be able to navigate the longer shots necessary to score well. No matter your score, it is a lot of fun and great exercise trotting up and down the terrain.
Advanced Course:
Persimmon Ridge Gold, Greenbrier
This venue is a perfect destination for a disc golfer looking to test their ability, as longer open shots require power and precision. The owners run tournaments year-round here and are dedicated to making your experience enjoyable.
This story was first featured in Arkansas Wild.
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Pulaski County Circuit Judge Herbert Wright granted a temporary restraining order Friday that means Gov. Sarah Sanders‘ signature school vouchers and privatization bill is not currently in effect.
Arkansas LEARNS is now on the back burner, at least until a June 20 hearing on whether votes on the bill were taken lawfully.
Attorney Ali Noland secured the restraining order on behalf of her clients, a group of public education advocates and community members from the Marvell-Elaine School District.
The state took over the small and struggling Marvell-Elaine School District in April and promptly handed it over to Friendship Education Foundation, a charter school management group. “Transformation contracts” that allow charter management groups to manage public schools are allowed under the LEARNS Act, which passed during Arkansas’s 2023 legislative session.
Lawmakers in both the House and Senate lumped in an emergency clause while voting on the bill, despite a requirement in the Arkansas Constitution that emergency clauses must be voted on separately. LEARNS supporters and Attorney General Tim Griffin have argued the emergency clause was adopted legally.
Noland said that because lawmakers failed to follow the constitution, the Arkansas LEARNS Act is not yet in effect and won’t be until after the 90-day waiting period to which all new laws are subject. In his opinion on Friday, Judge Wright seemed to agree she might be on to something.
“The courts have made clear that the governor and the Legislature are not above the law,” Noland said. “They have to follow the constitution, too.”
Noland also took issue with what she said were inappropriate attacks on the public education advocates working on behalf of their community schools.
“Judge Wright’s order vindicates my clients, who have been disparaged in the press and have been the target of misinformation by the state. As is clear from today’s ruling, these MESD parents, educators, and residents are simply trying to protect the district and do what is best for their children.”
Jesselia Maples, one of the plaintiffs and a member of Concerned Citizens of the Marvell Area, said the community should have a chance to weigh in on what’s happening to them.
“The group feels that with this win, we will have more time with either Friendship or the state or [Arkansas Education Secretary] Oliva to talk about the terms of the contract. We were uneasy with the original contract, that this was the only way that we can exist? This is not the only way to go,” Maples said.
The community is looking to partner with someone who will help them rebuild so the community can regain control of their local schools, Maples said. She and other members of her group have worried the contract signed by Oliva and Friendship in April may not deliver. “We want to do our best to make sure everyone knows this is not the only way to go. We should have a say in this. We should not have to adhere to whatever they dish out to us.”
A failure to take separate votes on the emergency clause component isn’t the only reason Wright granted plaintiffs’ request for a restraining order to keep LEARNS off the books for now. In his decision granting the temporary restraining order, Wright wrote:
Plaintiffs have demonstrated a likelihood of success on the merits, given that the emergency clause in the Arkansas LEARNS Act was not passed with the necessary separate roll-call vote that is required in Article 5, Section 1 of the Constitution of the State of Arkansas. Additionally, the Plaintiffs have demonstrated a likelihood of success on their argument that the language in section 73(a), which is the only part of the emergency clause that purports to authorize emergency enactment of the “transformation contract” provisions in the bill, cites only facts that fail to establish an emergency under Arkansas law. Finally, the emergency clause in the bill unconstitutionally attempts to create numerous differing effective dates for various provisions of the bill, and the Plaintiffs have demonstrated a likelihood of success on the merits of their argument that the Arkansas Constitution does not permit such a scheme.
That decision means the contract non-renewal notices that went out to the entire Marvell-Elaine School District staff in April are not valid. Neither is the contract Education Secretary Jacob Oliva signed with the Friendship Education Foundation charter management group that would pay Friendship $650,000 to assume control of the school district for three years.
While a filing from the state attorney general’s office said the transformation contract was the only thing keeping the Marvell-Elaine School District intact, Judge Wright gave the district temporary protections.
“Defendants are enjoined from implementing or enforcing any aspect of the Arkansas LEARNS Act, Act 237 of 2023, until such date that it becomes law. Defendant are enjoined from consolidating, dividing, or dissolving the Marvell-Elaine School District.”
Gov. Sanders issued this statement:
“As I’ve said this is an absurd lawsuit with zero merit and we will file an appeal immediately. It is sad that the radical left is playing political games with children’s futures. We are focused on making sure that every kid in Arkansas has access to a quality education, teachers have the pay raises they deserve, and parents are empowered. We expect to be vindicated at the Supreme Court and I’m confident that the AG will be able to vigorously defend it.”
Griffin provided a comment on Twitter late this afternoon:
The #LEARNSAct provides students & parents with new opportunities & better performing schools. I won’t allow one judge in LR to deprive AR’s children of those lawful opportunities. I have appealed the order to the Arkansas Supreme Court. https://t.co/OgvrH1VoTQ #arpx #arnews pic.twitter.com/uPUU37DILe
— Attorney General Tim Griffin (@AGTimGriffin) May 26, 2023
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BRIGHT EYES
MONDAY 5/15. THE HALL. 8 P.M. $35-$50.
I’ve spent a lot of energy arguing for the legitimacy of Conor Oberst, the impetus behind Bright Eyes. I’ve told a lot of people that if they could just get over his unusually angsty voice, then Oberst’s peerless songwriting would come into focus. Just pull up the lyrics to his best album, “I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning” and read them as a series of poems, I’ve suggested, hoping it’ll all make sense.
Lately, I’ve been reconsidering this thinking. What I mean is that maybe Oberst’s voice shouldn’t be considered an obstacle or even a neutral force; maybe his voice is the point. It’s undeniable that years of performing and record-making have made the 43-year-old singer-songwriter’s delivery less jagged, but refinement aside, every word that passes through his mouth is still glossed with honest terror, wonder and uncertainty. What’s more timeless than that?
Tickets are available here.
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The North Little Rock Police Department is investigating a homicide that occurred in the early morning hours on Saturday near Camp Robinson Road.
At approximately 2:02 a.m. officers responded to the 4100 block of Camp Robinson Road following reports of multiple gun shots in the area.
At 2:05 a.m., officers were dispatched to the 800 block of W. 41st St. following reports that a vehicle was in the middle of road with its flashers on. When officers arrived at the scene, they located an adult male victim suffering from at least one gunshot wound, the press release said. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
Detectives with the North Little Rock Police Department have processed the scene for evidence and are currently conducting interviews.
The victim’s name has not been released.
The police encourage anyone with information regarding this incident to contact the North Little Rock Police Department Tip Line at 501-680-8439 or Detective Cody Stroud at 501-975-8771. Those with information can remain anonymous.
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Royally pissed off, usually.
All stan our forever kings, Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar.
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Seven faculty members in the financially strapped Henderson State University‘s nursing program have submitted their resignations since January, leaving the university pressed to find replacements.
These resignations are in addition to two other nursing faculty members who departed the university almost a year ago, one through retirement and one through resignation. Henderson has since filled those positions, Henderson spokeswoman Tina Hall said.
One of those resigning from the Arkadelphia-based university warned of “serious consequences” for patients and nursing faculty members if the university continues operating a program with depleted staffing and resources.
But spokesman Jeff Hankins of the Arkansas State University System of which Henderson is now a part countered, “Henderson had more nursing faculty than needed, so not all of the positions must be replaced. Henderson is committed to recruiting and filling the needed positions to meet current student demand.”
Henderson has endured financial problems for several years now. They culminated last year when the ASU System’s board of trustees voted unanimously to cut 88 instructional positions, or 37% of the 237 total positions at Henderson. Twenty-one of those jobs were unfilled at the time. The ASU System also prepared to eliminate at least 25 of Henderson’s degree programs, including those in English, math, history, Spanish, geography, social science, early childhood development and theater arts.
Henderson’s recent nursin faculty resignations leave its program with five full-time assistant professors, two part-time adjunct professors and a full-time department chairperson, Hall said. The program has 99 undergraduate students and 37 graduate students.
“We are actively recruiting faculty to serve students in the nursing program and will fill at least five full-time positions,” Hall said in an email. “Two positions are currently being advertised, and an additional three positions will be hired as well.”
All of the resignations will take effect in May except for two that took effect earlier this year. Most of the resignation letters, obtained under the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act, did not criticize Henderson.
But in a Jan. 9 letter, Leah Wood, assistant professor of nursing, was candid about the factors that led to her decision and her concerns for the nursing department’s future.
“I experienced extreme stress in the spring semester of 2022 with furloughs, 20% cut in our salaries and uncertainty if we would even continue to be employees of the
university,” wrote Wood, who said she would leave Jan. 16. “This has taken an unrecoverable emotional toll. My heart is not in teaching any longer. I do not feel that the pay for nursing instructors is equivalent to the experience and work that is performed. I chose to go into this career as it had been a lifelong career goal of mine to teach. A practicing APRN in the state of Arkansas could make up to $120,000 per year. This is a vast discrepancy when compared to the salary of nursing professors.”
Wood also said she does “not agree with Henderson State University’s plans for the future to grow a program with less staff and inadequate resources to accomplish these goals.”
“This is a plan that will lead to less personal interaction with students who are being trained for healthcare,” she warned. “It is also a concern dealing with students as the driving force seems to have shifted where students are in control of the education they have not yet received. Students manipulate the system assuming they already have the knowledge and experience to provide patient care and faculty has little recourse to alter this. This can lead to serious consequences for patients and faculty supervising them.”
In an email, Hankins noted that “There’s a severe nursing shortage in Arkansas and nationwide with intense competition for nurses and nursing faculty. Most of the resignation letters acknowledged faculty taking other jobs that pay better.”
Hankins said ASU’s Jonesboro campus, for example, has two openings for full-time nursing faculty. “Baptist Health alone has over 300 openings for nurses,” he said.
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Arkansas Supreme Court Justice Karen Baker announced Friday that she is running for chief justice of the state Supreme Court.
Baker was first elected to the court in 2011 and is in her third term in position six on the court.
Before she was elected to the Supreme Court, Baker, who lives in Clinton, was a circuit and juvenile judge in the 20th judicial district for six years and a member of the Arkansas Court of Appeals for seven years.
Here’s the full announcement:
Arkansas Supreme Court Justice Karen R. Baker announces that she will seek election to chief justice of the court in 2024. Justice Baker is currently serving her third term in position 6 having been re-elected in 2022. Arkansas Supreme Court justices are elected in a state-wide, non-partisan election.
“I believe my experience at every level of the judiciary is unmatched and I am currently the senior, most experienced justice, on the Arkansas Supreme Court. I want to continue to put that experience to work for the people of Arkansas,” said Justice Baker.
Justice Baker has served on the Arkansas Supreme Court since 2011. Justice Baker serves as the Supreme Court liaison to the Board of Law Examiners, the Continuing Legal Education Board, and the Judges and Lawyers Assistance Program. Prior to serving on the Arkansas Supreme Court, Justice Baker served as a Circuit and Juvenile Judge in the 20th Judicial District for six years and served on the Arkansas Court of Appeals for ten years.
Prior to serving on the bench, Justice Baker was in private practice for seven years.
Justice Baker is a graduate of Clinton High School; Arkansas Tech University; and the UALR Bowen School of Law. Justice Baker and her husband, David Hogue, have been married for thirty-nine years, live in Clinton, and have three children.
The election will be held March 5, 2024.
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This past legislative session has been demoralizing for many Arkansans, to say the least. It seemed like every day the state legislature was finding a new way to hate and discriminate against a large portion of its population, whether it be women, the LGBTQ+ community, people of color, or even white men who don’t subscribe to the right wing’s particular brand of theocracy. I’m sure to many of the readers of this illustrious newspaper, it feels like things are only getting worse, and it’s not just those who identify as liberal, but those who identify as moderate as well.
The data bear this out. Figure 1 pulls from the Arkansas Poll from 2012 through 2022 and plots the percentage of liberal, moderate and conservative people who say Arkansas is going in the wrong direction. The blue line represents the trend among liberals, the purple line is the trend over time among moderates, and the red line is the trend among conservatives. You can see, more and more liberals and moderates are saying that Arkansas is headed in the wrong direction, to the point that in 2022 more than 57% of liberals and nearly 40% of moderates said the state is headed in the wrong direction. This is in contrast to conservatives who have actually trended the other direction.
But is Arkansas actually the raging dumpster fire that it appears to be becoming under the Huckabee Sanders Administration? A government is not the same as a people, which raises the question as to whether the attitudes of the people of Arkansas are in line with the positions of this government? This question can be answered using the same data sources (the Arkansas Poll) used in Figure 1.
Changes in Arkansans’ IdeologiesTo understand whether the people of Arkansas are well represented by the government, it’s useful to start by looking at ideology. The government of Arkansas has undoubtedly become more conservative over time, but has the public?
Using data on self-reported ideology, we can determine whether the state has become more liberal or conservative. Figure 2 reports the percentage of Arkansans in each year from 2012 through 2022 who self-identified as liberal, moderate or conservative.
Despite government becoming more and more extreme right wing in the last 10 years, the percentage of Arkansans identifying as liberal, moderate and conservative has remained quite stable. The only real changes we see occurred between 2017 and 2021, as more moderates identified as liberal, likely as a result of the Trump Administration polarizing voters. However, since 2021 the percentage of Arkansans identifying as liberal and moderate has returned to its pre-Trump numbers.
But this doesn’t tell the whole story. In order to understand societal change, there is one ironclad rule that needs to be remembered: People die and are replaced by younger people. So, what does ideological identity look like among the young (those 40 and under) in comparison to older Arkansans (those over 40)? Figure 3 shows the percentage of Arkansans under the age of 40 who identify as liberal, as well as the percentage of Arkansans over the age of 40 who identify as liberal. Both of these groups saw a spike after Trump took office. For older Arkansans, however, it returned to pre-Trump levels by the beginning of Biden’s term, but this didn’t happen for those under 40. The percentage of Arkansans under the age of 40 who identified as liberal dropped to a degree between 2018 and 2022, but it didn’t return to the level it was in 2016 or earlier. Put simply, this indicates that Arkansas will likely be shifting more to the left in the future.
On the IssuesOf course, ideology can be very subjective, particularly when it is self-reported. What is liberal, moderate or conservative to one person may not be the same to another person. The question then becomes, how have Arkansans shifted on the issues. As the government has begun to lean toward fascist theocracy, has the public shifted in the same direction?
Let’s start with one of the Republicans’ favorite topics, the proliferation of guns in Arkansas. As of 2021, Arkansas has 11.7 homicides per 1,000 people. And that’s the year the Republican-controlled government of Arkansas made it easier to carry a handgun by removing the requirement that a person have a concealed carry permit. Is this in line with the wishes of Arkansans?
Figure 4 shows the percentage of Arkansans favoring stricter gun laws, keeping gun laws the same as they currently are, and looser gun laws. The first thing you might notice is that there has never been a ton of support for loosening gun laws in Arkansas. In 2014 about 20% of Arkansans supported looser gun laws, while 40% supported stricter gun laws and about 36% favored keeping them the same. This is the high-water mark for support for loosening gun laws. Meanwhile, support for making gun laws stricter increased substantially in 2018, the same year as the Parkland shooting, and while support for stricter gun laws has receded to a degree, it is still substantially higher than it was a decade ago. Put simply, the Republican government of Arkansas is out of step with Arkansan people on the issue of gun violence.
Of course, gun control isn’t the only issue the Republican-run government of Arkansas is focused on. They passed a law in March 2023 that requires state entities to divest from financial providers that consider environmental, social and governance factors in decision making. In essence, the law says that financial service providers who seek to avoid investments that might harm the environment or perpetuate our gun violence epidemic are no longer eligible to provide financial services on state accounts. One of the bill’s sponsors, Sen. Ricky Hill (R-Cabot) actually talked about the need to defend fossil fuel companies. But are Arkansans concerned about the environment?
Figure 5 shows the percentage of Arkansans who believe climate change presents a serious threat. This figure begins in 2015, as that is when the data from the Arkansas Poll begins. While the percentage who say “no” is larger than the percentage who say “yes,” this difference is shrinking. In total, the percentage who believe climate change presents a threat is up by about 10 points since 2015, and the percentage saying it does not present a threat is down by more than 20 points in the same period.
If we look at self-identified moderate Arkansans (Figure 6), this trend is even more stark. The percentage of moderates in Arkansas who see climate change as a threat increased more than 20 points between 2015 and 2022, while the percentage who didn’t see it as a threat dropped more than 30 points. On the issue of the environment, it appears that the Republican-led government is momentarily in line with the overall population of Arkansas, but they’re way out of line with moderates, and things are moving in the wrong direction for them.
Finally, Republicans in Arkansas and beyond have recently succeeded in stripping half of the population of control of their own bodies. Arkansas had an abortion trigger law that went into effect once the Dobbs decision was made by the Supreme Court, banning nearly all abortions in the state. But they didn’t stop there. In the most recent legislative session, they refused to pass a bill sponsored by a Democrat to provide an exception to the state’s draconian abortion laws for cases of fetal abnormalities that would prohibit a child from surviving. After this, they decided to put up a monument to fetuses on the state Capitol grounds. But how do Arkansans feel about abortion?
The data from the Arkansas Poll on abortion attitudes from 2020, 2021 and 2022 provide a clear sense of where Arkansans stand, and it is not with the extremist government of this state. Between 2021 and 2022, the percentage of Arkansans who want abortion illegal in all cases dropped by more than 10 points, to less than 15% (Figure 7). Meanwhile, the percentage who want it legal in all cases increased by 5 points to 21%, and the percentage who want it legal in some cases increased by 10 points to nearly 60%. Put simply, the public is just not with the Republicans on the issue of abortion.
I’m HopefulI don’t blame people in this state for feeling like everything is headed in the wrong direction. In reality, without change, we are headed in the wrong direction. However, this is not because this is what the people of Arkansas want. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. We are headed in the wrong direction because we have a government that doesn’t care what the public actually wants.
While the majority of Arkansans say they are conservative, this is changing, and more importantly, the majority of Arkansans don’t hold conservative positions. Republicans have been able to remain in power by relying on votes from people who feel conservative but don’t hold conservative beliefs. While this might seem disheartening at first, there is a silver lining. The public is not made of extreme fascists, and this portends well for the future of Arkansas.
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Believe it or not: a musician who goes by “The Guy Who Sings Songs About Cities & Towns,” has a released a 50-song album called “Arkansas Songs Forever,” with each tune extolling the greatness of a different locale from The Natural State. Not exactly breaking news, given that that the album dropped in October 2022, but too hilarious not to share as widely as possible.
Before you feel too special, it’s important to keep in mind that Matt Farley, the man behind the project, has put out a similarly lengthy album about nearly every other state in the country. Moreover, he’s shared over 20,000 songs on Spotify under various monikers like “The Sorry Apology Song Person,” “The Guy Who Sings Your Name Over and Over” and “The Odd Man Who Sings About Poop, Puke and Pee.”
The whole undertaking is basically an exercise in turning the one-hit wonder model on its head. Instead of chasing virality with a single perfect piece of art, why not try to scrape together a formidable amount of cash by raking in a tiny bit of money from a gazillion different half-assed sources? Kind of ingenious, though we imagine it’s also pretty time-consuming, regardless of how unrehearsed the songs feel.
Now let’s dig in a little. To say that there’s a formula at work here is something of an understatement — every song starts with the name of a city, a moderately excited and slightly tone-deaf “oh yeah!” and then a dive into extremely superficial information about the place that’s obviously gleaned from the first paragraph of Wikipedia — but that doesn’t mean the songs aren’t entertaining in their mundanity. For some reason, the joke intensifies the more you hear it, at least for me. Waiting futilely for Farley to finally say something interesting is sort of the point, and by the time you’ve finished listening, you’ll almost be glad that he stuck to his guns.
That said, there’s at least one nugget of idiosyncrasy to be found in “Arkansas Songs Forever.” Track 44, titled “Beebe! Oh Yeah!,” has become the office favorite because of Farley’s uproarious mispronunciation of the titular town. It won’t be long before you’ll be exclaiming it at random. Listen below:
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In my opinion, a farmers market is one of the best things. Fresh-grown strawberries and just-trimmed peonies are no match for what you can pick up at the local Kroger. Trader Joe’s can’t even match the flower abundance and quality. Add in the homemade crafts and good smelling soaps and it’s unbeatable.
For me and all the other farmers market lovers out there, we can get excited about the Little Rock season starting on Saturday, May 6. Returning to the River Market pavilions at 400 President Clinton Ave. for its 48th season, the farmers market will be open every Saturday from 7 a.m.-2 p.m. through Labor Day weekend in September.
Diana Long, director of events for the Little Rock Convention and Visitors Bureau, said that the turn out on opening day is dependent on the weather. She estimated that about 75 vendors will be up on Saturday, and the Ottenheimer Market Hall will be open from 7 a.m.-3 p.m. as well.
Seven vendors meet the parameters to accept SNAP benefits or the Double Up Food Bucks program, Long said. Two are meat vendors and the other five have fresh produce. SNAP tokens can be purchased at the manager’s tent at the Farmers Market, and visitors can match $20 of tokens for use at the market.
Parking is available in the River Market parking deck and behind the market. Senior and handicapped parking is also available.
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Asa Hutchinson is polling at about 1% against the Donald Trump-dominated field of Republican presidential hopefuls, but he’s trying to stake an anti-Trump, more moderate lane, and a lot of national media eat that up.
So today he gets a lot of attention in Politico’s Playbook. Ryan Lizza, Rachael Bade and Eugene Daniels argue that, despite being a nonentity in Republican polls, Hutchinson looks a lot like the sort of candidate Democratic strategists fear in 2024:
Someone who knows how to speak in the language of inclusion
Someone who can discuss abortion and guns in a way that doesn’t alienate suburban voters in states such as Arizona, Wisconsin and Georgia
Someone who has a record of standing up to his own party on certain issues dominating the culture wars
Someone who can argue that he or she has almost as much governing experience as JOE BIDEN himself, but is still younger
Someone who handled the pandemic in their state in a way that avoided some of the most unpopular decisions of both Democrats and Republicans
And someone who spends a lot of their time explaining to Republicans why the GOP should leave Trump in the past.
They interview Hutchinson in-depth on the Playbook Deep Dive podcast.
In the excerpts, he flexes what’s long been one of his chief political skills — his ability to come across more moderate than he is. Of course, that’s increasingly easy to do in today’s wackadoo GOP and unlikely to win the hearts of many on the right.
A few interesting excerpts:
On abortion: “I’m okay with it being resolved at the state level. The states are making their own determination on those health care issues. But if it came to a national policy on it, then I would want to have more restrictions that are reasonable restrictions and then also have reasonable exceptions.”
On marijuana: “I think having medical marijuana is something that’s going to be with us and makes some sense. It does provide relief. … I don’t like the idea of going further and just simply legalizing. … [But] our democracy is not going to fall if they did legalize marijuana.”
On why he thinks he has a shot: “Sure, it’s a long shot. But, you know, I do duck hunting. I like duck hunting. And my best shot is a long shot. I could hit that bird from a long ways away. It’s the most unpredictable political environment in my lifetime — you know, what happens to Donald Trump, and his ups and downs [in] the polls, remains to be seen. We’ve already seen another leader who was a frontrunner, actually — you know, Governor DeSantis — virtually collapse in the polls. And so [voters are] going to be looking for an alternative. And Iowa’s wide open for looking at alternatives.”
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Nancy Glasper, 67, has been the cafeteria manager at Wakefield Elementary School in Little Rock for 23 years. “I’ve been here so many years that the kids that were in kindergarten when I started work here now,” she said.
Though she’ll retire at the end of this month, she treats her profession with the kind of zeal and intention that you’d find in someone who’s just getting started. In honor of School Lunch Hero Day — which happens on the first Friday of May and celebrates the tireless labor of those who ensure that children across the country leave school every day with full, healthy bellies — we spoke with Glasper about her devotion to this critical line of work in the minutes before a wobbly single-file line of first graders began trickling into her beloved lunch room.
After a few years of cafeteria work at UAMS and Cloverdale Middle School, Glasper started at Wakefield, which has been the perfect fit. When asked what she loves about the job, her initial answer was “everything,” but she quickly pivoted to talking about the kids, which are obviously the most important part for her, the thing that keeps her fire lit.
Brian ChilsonNancy GlasperAs opposed to high school-aged students, who she playfully shudders at the thought of, Glasper loves how sweet and impressionable the children she serves are, how a hug or a few kind words can legitimately turn their day around. “They’re so easy to influence and they’re so easy to love you,” she said. No matter how sad or angry a student is when a student enters the cafeteria, Glasper sees it as her mission to make sure that their frown has been turned upside down by the time they’re on their way to recess. “You’ve got to recognize the kids that need attention,” she said.
In fact, Glasper is such a natural at brightening moods and tending to hurt feelings that she sometimes gets distracted. “I usually end up out here dealing with the babies and not doing what I need to be doing back there,” she said, laughing. It’s not uncommon that she has to remove a child from her lap so she can return to the kitchen.
If, like me, it’s been a while since you’ve been greeted by the familiar smell of tray-friendly eats, you’re probably wondering what the youngsters these days are most eager to scarf down. According to Glasper, the Wakefield nachos — a simple blend of ground beef, seasoning and melted cheese over chips — are the biggest crowd-pleaser. At the other end of spectrum is the pulled pork, which typically elicits the most grimaces from her tiny customers. If the roles were reversed and Glasper was the one being served, she’d choose to come for Wing Wednesday.
Brian Chilson
Despite Glasper’s impending retirement, she’s not worried about a lack of youthful energy in her world. For starters, she plans to visit Wakefield frequently. More importantly, she’s got five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren to dedicate herself to, so she imagines her life won’t look too different.
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It’s really happening, Asa Hutchinson is really campaigning for president. He set off for New Hampshire yesterday after spending a couple of days in Iowa.
An announcement about his trip had this to say:
“New Hampshire plays an critical role in our presidential election process,” said Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican Presidential Candidate and former governor of Arkansas. “I look forward to having important conversations about how to adjust course within the Republican Party and address Biden’s failed economy in order keep more hard-earned dollars in the wallets of New Hampshire families.”
Additionally, Governor Hutchinson announced the launch of an New Hampshire-specific Online Campaign Headquarters at www.Asa2024.com. This site will enable New Hampshire to stay connected with Governor Hutchinson and keep an eye out for when he will be visiting their part of the Granite State. This New Hampshire-specific site can be accessed by pointing internet browsers to www.Asa2024.com/NewHampshire.
“New Hampshire will play a vital role in vetting the next president of the United States. I look forward to meeting with voters, discussing their concerns, and sharing my vision for America’s best,” concluded Gov. Asa Hutchinson.
Heading the announcement was a new logo, which harkens back to simpler times. Remember the “Asa!” signs and buttons from campaigns past? He’s claimed the exclamation mark as his signature punctuation over the years, and he’s sticking to it.
Arkansas Times graphic designer Mandy Keener was generally pro on his new logo, but offered one cutting criticism the campaign might consider. “Asa who?” she said. Will the people in New Hampshire know? Current polling shows him pulling Connor Roy numbers, although some say he’s got a narrow path to victory.
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The Arkansas Supreme Court has reversed a lower court judgment against former state Rep. Mickey Gates, Republican of Hot Springs, who was expelled from the House in 2019 after pleading no contest to felony charges of failure to pay income tax.
As a condition of his plea, Gates was ordered to pay $75,000 in restitution, serve six years on probation and file taxes owed from 2015-2018. The state Department of Finance and Administration initially determined that Gates and his wife owned $50,000 plus penalties and interest, but the Gateses protested the assessment, arguing that the finance department hadn’t taken into account legitimate business expenses.
From the Supreme Court’s recounting of relevant facts:
After this initial production, the parties communicated poorly. The Gateses continued to claim DFA was not recognizing some legitimate business expenses, but they conceded that some deducted expenses were personal. For example, the Gateses admitted to thousands of dollars in personal expenses to Amway, Cranford’s Village Supermarket, restaurants, Wal-Mart, and Entergy. These admitted personal expenses were listed on the profit-and-loss statement of the Gateses’ business. DFA, on the other hand, in deposition testimony, could not define what constituted a legitimate business expense when asked to explain why it had excluded some seemingly business-related expenses.
DFA continued to send the Gateses a series of tax-assessment letters reflecting differing amounts of their tax liability.
…
When the parties reached an impasse, the Gateses sued DFA in circuit court. They challenged the amended and corrected notices of final assessment. After discovery, DFA moved for summary judgment, and in response, the Gateses filed a cross-motion for summary judgment. After hearing these motions, the circuit court entered an order striking several of the Gateses’ exhibits to their cross-motion for summary judgment, granting DFA’s summary-judgment motion, and finding that the amended and corrected notices of final assessment were sustained. The Gateses appealed.
A circuit judge granted the state summary judgment against the Gateses. The Supreme Court has now remanded the lawsuit back to the circuit court.
The majority decision, authored by Justice Rhonda Wood, found that the finance department didn’t sufficiently explain how it arrived at the amount it determined the Gateses owed in back taxes.
After reviewing the Gateses’ income tax returns and 1099s, DFA computed net taxable incomes that were greater than what the Gateses had reported. DFA could be correct, but its figures throughout the audit were moving targets, and it never revealed its math to the Gateses, the circuit court, or this court on appeal.
Justice Shawn Womack wrote a concurring opinion to argue that the Gateses’ lawsuit against the state wasn’t barred by sovereign immunity because a tax assessment challenge is essentially an illegal exaction claim, which the state Constitution expressly allows.
Justice Robin Wynne, in a dissent, said the burden of proving tax deductions were legitimate was on the Gateses, not the state, and he said the state’s method for calculating tax liability was clear from the record.
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If you want a stake in the fight that is short-term rental regulations in Little Rock, mark your calendars for May 15 at 6 p.m because City Director Joan Adcock has organized a community meeting to hear public comment on the issue.
The meeting will be held at the Nugent Center at Philander Smith College, 900 W. Daisy L. Gatson Bates Drive.
Adcock said that all speakers would be heard, but speeches would likely be limited to three minutes. Debates on short-term rentals typically last a long time. Those on either side of the issue have a lot to say — take it from the state representatives who heard public comment for six hours in March.
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Robinson Center has announced the five touring musicals that will pass through Little Rock during the 2023-2024 season. Four out of the five offerings debuted on Broadway in the last 10 years, with the newest production being “Six,” which premiered on the famed New York strip in 2021 and is still running there. The only show that falls in the legacy category is “Jesus Christ Superstar,” and it’s been performed since 1971.
Theater isn’t my area of expertise, but I did see “Come From Away” — based on the story of thousands of airplane passengers who were unexpectedly redirected for several days to a small town in Canada as a result of the 9/11 terrorist attacks — on a visit to the Big Apple in 2019, and it did that thing that extremely sincere musicals are supposed to do: It convinced me to believe in the goodness and redeemability of humanity for at least a few hours after curtain call.
Here’s a full list of what’s on the docket:
“Come From Away” — Aug. 25-27, 2023
“Six” — Oct. 24-29, 2023
“Mean Girls” — Feb. 2-4, 2024
“Jesus Christ Superstar” — March 1-3, 2024
“Pretty Woman” — April 26-28, 2024
Tickets aren’t available yet, but here‘s where you should be on the lookout for them.
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Chef Ira Mittelman announced on Facebook that he is the new chef at Lonoke’s field trip-worthy restaurant The Grumpy Rabbit. The Grumpy Rabbit (105 Front St.) opened in January of 2021 with James Beard nominee James Hale in the executive chef role. Hale departed in May of 2022 and sous chefs Kyle Carson and Danyiel “EJ” Turner were promoted to share the executive role.
Mittelman is the previous owner of Ira’s Park Hill Grill in North Little Rock off JFK Boulevard and briefly Ira’s Restaurant in the historic Rose Building on Main Street before it became Allsopp & Chapple. Mittleman told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that his role is at The Grumpy Rabbit is still being worked out and that he wants to take take the menu up a few notches. On Facebook yesterday Mittelman said the new menu will debut today and he will share it the next couple of days.
Brian Chilson
The Grumpy Rabbit is open 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Tue.-Thu.; 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Fri.-Sat. and 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Sun.
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Hannah WardFrailstateThere’s no shortage of fast-paced, yet emotionally troubled indie rock in Central Arkansas, but Frailstate ups the drama by infusing that genre with the late-night danceability of The 1975 and The Weeknd, especially on their new release, which dropped on Friday, April 24.
“Array of Emotions,” the third EP from the Little Rock-based band, has a production value facelift, giving the heavily-compressed electronic drums a new depth of attack, which lends tracks like “Wonderland” an urgent sensuality as singer Noah Nichols pleads with his lover to join him in locking out the outside world: “Because last night I had a vision that we didn’t have to listen/And never had to worry bout taking care of business/And all we ever wanted fell in front of her hands/You gotta understand.”
Listen below:
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Rep. Nicole Clowney (D-Fayetteville) is one of 22 elected officials across the country who have been selected this year by NewDEAL, an organization that recognizes political leaders across the country for progressive solutions.
Clowney was first elected to the state legislature in 2018 and has worked on policies related to “common sense gun laws, renters’ rights, and protection of juveniles and workers,” according to an announcement from NewDEAL today.
Since its inception 12 years ago, NewDEAL has recognized 191 individuals from 49 states. Previous honorees include U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg who was the mayor of South Bend, Indiana and former Georgia state representative Stacey Abrams.
Here’s the announcement from NewDEAL:
Today, Arkansas Representative Nicole Clowney was selected as one of 22 leaders from across the country to join the NewDEAL (Developing Exceptional American Leaders), a selective national network of state and local elected officials with Honorary Co-Chairs U.S. Senator Chris Coons and Congresswoman Marilyn Strickland.
Members of the network have been chosen from more than 1,900 nominations over NewDEAL’s 12 years, and are united by their work to enact pro-growth progressive solutions across their diverse array of communities.
Clowney joins the group at a time when state and local leaders are on the frontlines of responding to economic issues around the cost of living and the changing nature of work, as well as challenges caused by climate change, racial inequities, and threats to our democracy. At a moment when unprecedented federal resources are flowing to states, counties, and cities from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and Inflation Reduction Act, NewDEALers are supporting each other in thinking big and sharing model policies and programs, including through in-person and virtual convenings. In one effort, NewDEAL has released an ARPA impact report highlighting some of the innovative ways members of the network have used federal funding to transform their communities. NewDEALers also led a working group that released a Democracy Playbook, featuring actionable steps elected officials across all levels of state and local government can take to strengthen elections. NewDEAL Leaders’ work also has contributed to reports of policy recommendations on education, climate change, broadband, and the future of work.
NewDEALers’ next major convening will take place at the 2023 Spring Ideas Summit, May 15-16 in Detroit, MI, where about 50 members will join other innovators from the public and private sectors to discuss a forward-looking agenda for state and local Democrats to address the biggest challenges facing our country, including housing, education, climate change, and threats to our democracy.
Elected in 2018, Clowney was selected to join NewDEAL because of her dedication to advocating for commonsense gun laws, renters’ rights, and the protection of juveniles and workers. One of Clowney’s key initiatives is promoting safety and equity through legislation, such as HB1538, which aims to support domestic abuse survivors by allowing them to break their leases early without penalty. Clowney is also the founding leader of the Northwest Arkansas group of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America showcasing her commitment to improving the lives of Arkansans through evidence-based policies that prioritize safety, equity, and justice.
NewDEAL Leaders have found broad support for their work across red, blue, and purple states and cities, with more than 20 rising to higher office in the past few years. Throughout the organization’s history, more than one in four NewDEAL Leaders has moved to higher office. These leaders include members of Congress, such as Marilyn Strickland in Washington, Brittany Pettersen in Colorado, and Jennifer McClellan in Virginia, Governor Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania, and new Mayors in cities from San Jose, CA to Stamford, CT.
“We are in a vitally important moment for state and local leaders as we work to channel transformational levels of federal aid while grappling with the challenges that will continue to affect the economic security of Arkansas for decades to come,” said Clowney. “I look forward to sharing lessons with and learning from other leaders who are setting the standard for effective governance, and I am excited to be part of NewDEAL’s efforts to expand opportunities for Americans in communities nationwide.”
About NewDEAL
The NewDEAL brings together leaders focused on expanding opportunity, helping them develop and spread innovative ideas to spur economic growth that is broadly-earned and sustainable. Most importantly, the organization facilitates the exchange of ideas among its members and connects them with other pro-growth progressive political, policy, and private sector leaders. NewDEAL alumni have included Pete Buttigieg, Stacey Abrams, Jason Kander, Alex Padilla, Ben McAdams, and more.
Today’s announcement brings the total number of NewDEAL members – statewide officials, legislators, mayors, councilmembers, and other local leaders – to 191 leaders from 49 states.
Learn more about Clowney and the NewDEAL at http://www.newdealleaders.org/leaders.
The new class of NewDEAL Leaders includes:
Alaska: Representative Maxine Dibert
Arkansas: Representative Nicole Clowney
Connecticut: Senator Christine Cohen
Georgia: Representative Phil Olaleye
Georgia: Fulton County Commissioner Dana Barrett
Louisiana: Senator Royce Duplessis
Maryland: Delegate Adrian Boafo
Michigan: Senator Kristen McDonald Rivet
Minnesota: Rochester Mayor Kim Norton
New Mexico: Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver
Nevada: Las Vegas Councilmember Brian Knudsen
New York: Assemblymember Alex Bores
Ohio: Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval
Ohio: Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb
Oregon: Representative Daniel Nguyen
Rhode Island: Providence Mayor Brett Smiley
South Carolina: Representative Marvin Pendarvis
Tennessee: Representative Caleb Hemmer
Utah: Senator Stephanie Pitcher
Virginia: Newport News Mayor Phil Jones
Virginia: Delegate Irene Shin
Virginia: Fairfax County Supervisor James Walkinshaw
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City directors Ken Richardson and Antwan Phillips met Tuesday morning with Community Programs Director Dana Dossett and Assistant Director Michael Sanders to discuss how youth-focused programs are monitored and to iron out some procedural details.
The directors wanted to hear more about what the Department of Community Programs requires from groups it contracts with to provide services and and how city officials can better communicate to the public that the services are having a positive impact. The Community Programs department doesn’t offer any programming itself; instead, it contracts with outside entities to offer programs. It also works with the city’s commission on Children, Youth and Families to coordinate services. Richardson and Phillips said they’d heard from a group of concerned citizens who questioned the success of the programs, which sparked Tuesday’s discussion.
Programs meant to get young people off the streets and out of dangerous situations have been around for decades, though referred to by different names. In the early ‘90s, Little Rock had youth initiative programs. Today, the city has prevention, intervention and treatment programs.
In 2022, the city broke the record for the number of homicides in one year, which was previously set in 1993 with 76. Crime prevention figured heavily in the mayoral race and has been a frequent topic of discussion at board meetings. Many of the board members have expressed skepticism about the prevention, intervention and treatment programs.
On Tuesday, Richardson provided some historic context from programs in the early ’90s when he oversaw the city’s youth initiative projects. He said that there is more Little Rock can do for public safety today than hire more police and build bigger jails.
“I’m seeing, creeping back in right now, what we saw in the early ’90s: young people with a dangerous mental combination of fearlessness and hopelessness,” Richardson said.
He also argued that the previous programs were evidence based and were successful partially due to a task force and subcommittees that worked in targeted areas to build relationships. He wondered how accurate current reports from programs were because the contractors were aware when monitoring would occur. Overall, Richardson said that numbers don’t lie, and he wants to see some numbers.
Phillips said that he understood that measuring a negative is difficult. If the programs were working and deterring crime, there would be nothing to measure. He suggested that Community Programs should frequently share success stories of individuals who are using the services so the public knows what is being done. City Manager Bruce Moore also suggested that a portion of the board’s meetings be dedicated to highlight a chosen PIT program.
Dossett said that the team is working on ways to show success, including sharing stories about people who have benefited from the programs. She said that a data software called Apricot 360 was recently approved for Community Programs, and the department’s data coordinator can start collecting soon.
The first step in finding contractors to provide services is a request for proposal. If a group is selected, they enter into a contract with the city and Community Programs develops a monitoring rubric based on the contract. Because different companies provide different services, they’re monitored in different ways.
Getting responses to RFPs is difficult, Sanders said. Even if groups are interested in working with the city, there aren’t a lot of folks that understand and can follow the procurement process. The Department of Human Services also has licensure requirements for applicants, Dossett said. They were put in place a handful of years ago, and Sanders said that the requirements limit program coordinators to people with college degrees who don’t have a felony on their record.
Richardson said that the licensing requirement has shut out some of the best teachers. Moore echoed that the pool for potential program providers shrunk after the implementation. Moving forward, Moore recommended that officials should meet with DHS to discuss potential changes to the requirements under Gov. Sarah Sanders’ administration and get the word out more about the work that Community Programs is doing.
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Several interesting items were approved Tuesday at the Little Rock Board of Directors meeting with little discussion from board members.
Within the group’s consent agenda, the board approved a bundle of streets and drainage improvements in the city’s seven wards for the next three years. The resolution names various projects from street resurfacing, sidewalks and intersection improvements.
The board also approved an update to the city’s financial reporting process, which was about 20 years old. The ordinance is effective immediately, and it changes various internal specifics like what information is provided to city directors and how often. The update is expected to get the city’s process in compliance with the Governmental Accounting Standards Board. Directors Lance Hines and Virgil Miller met with city staff twice outside of agenda meetings to iron out the details.
Approval of a zoning request to build a West Little Rock High School was approved as well. Three members of the planning commission had voted no on the development, but staff recommended approval. One person was signed up to speak for the ordinance on Tuesday, Mayor Frank Scott Jr. said.
Before the vote, an engineer for the project read several conditions that would be added to the ordinance including the acknowledgement of a wetland present, notes that sports lighting would not exceed 70 feet tall and would be shielded away from nearby property. The school’s event would end and lights would be shut off before 9 p.m, with exception to games that go into overtime, the engineer said.
The board approved the high school with minimal discussion. It will be built at 5619 Ranch Drive in West Little Rock, which is near the Pinnacle View Middle School.
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With LEARNS passed, we’re keeping our eyes on the state’s higher education systemsSession is over and our session roundup is complete, so let’s ponder what may be in the crosshairs of extremists during next year’s fiscal session and 2025’s legislative session. There’s no rest for the wicked!
Higher education still sits in those crosshairs.
The National Higher Ed ConversationAlongside the organized push for legislative hate, legislatures are targeting their state’s higher ed systems. Florida has been in the news lately for its takeover of New College, and it’s part of a broader strategy that’s as organized as the anti-LGBTQ+ legislative push. This is a pattern, and Sanders loves to follow a crowd.
The new Secretary of Education, Jacob Oliva, has some experience with gutting education programs, having learned the job in Florida under Governor Desantis. We have here both a broad national trend and someone with a history of attacking higher education.
Shakeups at the Arkansas Department of Higher EdLong-time director of the ADHE, Dr. Maria Markham, got a call in March unceremoniously informing her that the Governor “was going in another direction.” Taxpayers were in the dark for a month about what this “new direction” would entail.
On Monday, May 2, Sanders announced that Dr. Ken Warden of UA Fort Smith would replace Dr. Markham. We’ll likely have more to say about him later, but suffice to say his focus on workforce development, Sanders’ repeal of child labor laws, and the funding contained within LEARNS to prioritize technical education in high schools all point to an intention to restructure K-12 as incubators for businesses rather than opportunities for holistic development for kids.
University of Arkansas-Phoenix? The University of Arkansas system has been looking at acquiring the notorious for-profit University of Phoenix, claiming that the future of higher education is online and that this acquisition would generate revenue for the system more sustainably than tuition increases. The board narrowly voted against the merger, but President Donald Bobbit could still move forward on his own with the deal.
This would be a disaster for the system. Bobbitt claims this wouldn’t cost taxpayers any money, and he could be right, but it would cost the system reputation. In 2019, the University of Phoenix had to send around $50 million to students that it misled with false advertising. This isn’t something Arkansans want to put our good name on.
We don’t yet know if Bobbitt and the Sanders administration communicated about the deal, but it’s hard to imagine she wasn’t aware of it. If she does want a fight with higher education, the negative impact of this acquisition would give her a reason to attack the University of Arkansas.
Keeping Our Eyes On the SystemOn one hand, we don’t have a full picture of what the future of Arkansas higher education looks like. For once, Sanders could surprise us and avoid catering to the national right-wing extremists. Dr. Warden seems to have the experience necessary for the position. Bobbitt could turn down the Phoenix deal.
But on the other hand, we see early signs of another full-court press against the independence and effectiveness of higher education. Ripping money away from four-year institutions and coming for tenure-track professors, like Texas and Florida, will make the state’s brain drain exponentially worse.
The University of Arkansas, Arkansas State, and Arkansas Tech are some of the best parts of the state, providing jobs, opportunities and community (woo pig). We aren’t sure if Sanders really wants to pick a fight with them or what that fight will look like, but Arkansans should get ready to stand up for higher education.
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Scott FoltzHoney CollectiveHoney Collective, a NYC-based band that got its start in Fayetteville, released its debut EP, “Memento,” on Friday. Built on lithe, hushed drum grooves and unexpected chords, the four-song release borrows from the worlds of jazz, R&B, soul and indie rock.
The standout track is “Burnt Orange,” which uses varying densities of vocal and instrumental texture to mimic the waxing and waning of a foreboding feeling. It’s possible to ignore the lyrics because singer Aricka Lewis so successfully turns her voice into a droning synth pad, but if you listen closely, the situation gets clarified two syllables at a time until you’re left with the surly image of wafting smoke: “Orange juice/No news/Champagne/No use/Watch from/Back porch/Burnt sky/Burnt orange.”
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May is HOT at Saracen and the winning is non-stop!
If you aren’t a Saracen Player’s Club member, you’ll want to join so you don’t miss out on a chance to win your share of prizes—including a Ford Bronco. Beginning May 1, Saracen Player’s Club members will earn entries for this month’s grand prize giveaway!
Be sure to join us on May 27 from 7-10 PM for a chance to win a share of $10,000 in Free Slot Play, with the grand prize at 10 PM. The winning doesn’t get any HOTTER than that!
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The North Little Rock police are investigating the homicide of a 21-year-old North Little Rock man who suffered a gunshot wound Saturday night.
At about 10:38 p.m. Saturday, officers found Davonn Jordan suffering from at least one gunshot wound in the 1900 block of Poplar Street. Jordan was transported to a local hospital where he later died, according to a press release from the police department.
The police have asked anyone with information to contact the North Little Rock Police Department Tip Line at 501-680-8439 or Detective Williams at 501-771-7167. Calls can remain anonymous, the police said.
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The Arkansas State Police is investigating a suspicious death of an inmate at the Cummins Unit of the Arkansas Department of Correction early Sunday morning and foul play is suspected, according to a statement yesterday from Dina Tyler, spokeswoman for the Arkansas Department of Correction.
The victim, whose name has not been released, was 43 years old and was serving a 30-year sentence for rape. The victim’s cellmate is under suspicion and is serving a life sentence for first-degree murder and aggravated robbery.
Correctional officers discovered the death during a scheduled security check at 2:50 a.m. An internal affairs investigation is underway in addition to the criminal investigation by the State Police.
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BALLET ARKANSAS: NEW WORKS
THURSDAY 5/4 & SUNDAY 5/6. ARKANSAS MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS. 7:30 P.M. $40.
All due respect to Tchaikovsky et al., you might be more likely to see a spark appear in a ballet fan’s eye when you mention works by living choreographers, or the chance to see a world premiere. In their time at Ballet Arkansas, directors Michael and Catherine Fothergill have remained devoted to keeping contemporary and new ballet compositions in the company’s repertoire, and though a program title like “New Works” might not ignite as much name recognition as, say, “The Nutcracker,” what happens on stage is perhaps a better indicator of where ballet is in 2023 as an art form: eager to innovate, committed to being in conversation with its cultural context and very much alive.
Brian ChilsonAFMA’s Glass BoxThis May performance features five world premieres in collaboration with the newly reopened Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in the museum’s intimate Glass Box space, and is followed by a Q&A with the choreographers. Tickets are available here.
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The case of Alex Barnett, the University of Central Arkansas junior who was sentenced to 10 days in jail and fined $650 for peacefully protesting the Conway School Board’s anti-trans policies, gets a long look today from journalist Judd Legum on his Popular Information Substack. The Times Debra Hale-Shelton wrote about Barnett last week.
You can read the highlights in Legum’s thread here:
- Alex Barnett, a college student, was sentenced to 10 DAYS IN JAIL for participating in a peaceful protest of anti-trans policies imposed by an Arkansas school board.
The school board would not allow public comment, so Barnett chanted “Trans lives matter!”
pic.twitter.com/f7SEhT3x8x
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) May 1, 2023
Legum interviewed Barnett:
In an interview with Popular Information, Barnett said he learned about the issues with the Conway School Board when he saw videos of the October meeting circulating on social media. He felt compelled to take action. “Ultimately, when I’m fighting for trans rights, I’m also fighting for my own rights,” Barnett said. “If you don’t show up for… people who are marginalized, the people who are facing the most severe oppression from the government, if you don’t show up to help them, then you’re screwed whenever they come for you.”
And he digs into the record of District Judge Chris Carnahan, who imposed the harsh penalty on Barnett:
Carnahan is the former executive director of the Arkansas Republican Party. During his unsuccessful run for the Arkansas Supreme Court, he used the slogan: “Finally, a conservative judge!” Carnahan collected tens of thousands of dollars from Republican Party committees, even though the races are non-partisan and such contributions violate the Arkansas Judicial Code of Conduct. Carnahan said he was ignoring the rule because he believed it was unconstitutional.
Carnahan posted “Let’s go Brandon!” code for a profane insult targeting President Joe Biden, and a tribute to Rush Limbaugh on his public Facebook page. On his campaign website, Carnahan touts that he is “a member of Gun Owners of America and the National Rifle Association” and “follower of Christ.” Among the groups Carnahan likes on Facebook is the Family Council Action Committee, the Arkansas affiliate of Focus on the Family, a notorious anti-LGBTQ advocacy organization.
During his campaign, Carnahan claimed to support “amnesty and community service instead of fines” for non-violent offenses. He said that defendants in his courtroom “convicted of theft or other misdemeanors” are likely “to find themselves sentenced to get their GED.” But Carnahan apparently believes that Barnett’s non-violent protest supporting trans people deserved a much harsher penalty.
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The governor sent word this morning of a new appointment.
LITTLE ROCK, Ark.— Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced today that she will name Dr. Ken Warden as the Commissioner of the Arkansas Division of Higher Education.
“I am pleased to announce that Dr. Ken Warden will serve as the commissioner of the Arkansas Division of Higher Education,” Sanders said. “Dr. Warden’s extensive leadership experience in higher education makes him the clear choice to serve in this role as we usher in a bold new chapter in Arkansas education. Together, we will continue expanding access to quality education from grade school to higher education – preparing students to take on high-paying jobs in the workforce and unleashing a new era of opportunity for every Arkansan.”
“I am humbled and honored to serve as the commissioner of the Arkansas Division of Higher Education,” Warden said. “I look forward to working closely with Governor Sanders and Secretary Oliva as we empower Arkansans with education – paving a path to prosperity for all Arkansans. Governor Sanders has made education reform the hallmark of her administration, and I am ready to get to work with her and the talented team at the Department of Education as we begin a new day in Arkansas education.” Dr. Ken Warden has worked for the University of Arkansas – Fort Smith for the past 9 years, most recently serving as the Associate Vice Chancellor for Compliance and Legislative Affairs. Dr. Warden previously served as the Dean of the College of Applied Science and Technology for six years and as the Associate Vice Chancellor for Workforce Development for one year.
He also spent 17 years working with Arkansas Tech University – Ozark. Over the course of his time there, he served as the Department Chair of Automotive Service Technology, Business and Industry Coordinator, and Chief Officer for Business and Community Outreach.
His breadth of work in higher education is extensive, having worked in adult education, two-year colleges, and university systems. He has experience in program design, project management, community partnerships, career pathways, grant implementation, and senior level academic leadership.
His research interests are focused on adult learners and non-traditional students, credit and non-credit workforce aligned programs, student retention, and sustainability initiatives on college campuses.
Dr. Ken Warden holds a Doctorate in Education in Workforce Development from the University of Arkansas, a Master of Education in Educational Leadership from Arkansas Tech University, a Bachelor of Science in Vocational Education from the University of Arkansas, and an Associate of Applied Science in Automotive Service from Westark Community College, now University of Arkansas – Fort Smith.
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If you thought the tidbit in the new Arkansas LEARNS Act barring indoctrination was meant to be taken seriously, you were mistaken. It turns out indoctrination is all but required, but it must be of the right-wing variety.
The new application for Arkansas teacher of the year requires teachers to outline how they’re incorporating the anti-union, pro-segregation, elitist, pro-censorship Arkansas LEARNS Act into their classrooms.
That’s a tough question, and one for which a quick survey of a handful of teachers turns up no good answers. We’re genuinely flummoxed as to how teachers could possibly incorporate such a partisan and divisive piece of legislation into their lessons on the three Rs. Regardless, teachers hoping for top honors will have to at least take a stab.
Not surprisingly, AR “Teacher of the Year” candidates must pledge allegiance to the LEARNS Act. pic.twitter.com/18WywN53IN
— Tom Mars (@TomMarsLaw) April 29, 2023
It’s hard to anticipate how educators will respond to the two prompts in the Arkansas Department of Education questionnaire that are basically a Republican loyalty test. Good luck out there.
The recent flap over a similar loyalty test for people hoping to serve on one of Arkansas’s many boards and commissions now looks innocent in comparison. Those are political appointments, so while asking candidates to gush 500 words on how great Gov. Sarah Sanders is might make us want to die of embarrassment for her, at least we can grasp the reasoning. These folks would be working as part of her administration. When the Sanders administration walked it back, throwing an unnamed web developer under the bus and claiming the question was actually meant for interns, I don’t know that any of us felt much better about it. But OK, maybe there’s a world in which asking young people to make their oath of fealty might be reasonable.
Teachers, though? Is it right to require them to honor our Dear Leader and her signature legislation? On AR Watch, a state government watchdog group, unspools the ick factor in requiring teachers to kiss the ring:
Teacher of the Year form urges LEARNS Act praiseArkansas’s Teacher of the Year Award is a tradition dating back to 1959. To be considered for the award, teachers must submit an application with basic information and answers to open-response questions.
One can probably guess the nature of most of the open-response questions. Tell us about a lesson you’ve taught, show us evidence of student growth, describe a project you took on to improve student outcomes— all responses we would expect to read about a prospective teacher of the year.
In the most recent application for the award, candidates are being requested to finish their response section with two questions related to the LEARNS Act, the Governor’s omnibus overhaul of Arkansas’s public education system:
4. How will you implement the LEARNS legislation into your classroom practice? What positive impact do you expect LEARNS to have for Arkansas students? (maximum 750 words)
5. As the 2024 Arkansas Teacher of the Year, you serve as a spokesperson and representative for teachers. If selected, please describe your proposed platform and how it relates to the Arkansas LEARNS law. What will you communicate to your profession and to the public? Please include a personal narrative that reveals why this platform is important to you. (maximum 500 words)
This is not the first time Sanders has used her position as Governor to require praise for LEARNS from others. When the LEARNS bill was being heard in committee, one GOP Representative stated publicly that he and his colleagues were being told they would lose funding for their district in the absence of their support for the act. Around the same time, Sen. Breanne Davis (R-Russellville), the LEARNS bill sponsor who worked closely with Sanders’ team on drafting the legislation, took to Twitter attacking a rural superintendent who dared allow his teachers to speak against the bill in committee.
More recently it was discovered that the governor’s application for consideration on a board or commission was requiring an answer about the applicant’s favorite of Sanders’ accomplishments. Sanders’ communications team quickly responded with a story of mysterious website design problems, claiming the question was only intended for intern applicants to answer, as if that’s somehow better.
Now the Department of Education requires an educator to sing the praises of the governor in order to be considered for Teacher of the Year award in the state of Arkansas.
The noteworthy required short answers involve “implementing LEARNS into your classroom practice” and connecting the proposed platform to the LEARNS law.
What academic purpose is served by implementing school-choice propaganda into one’s lessons? Can applicants win without offering LEARNS a stamp of approval via their platform?
Requiring such unwavering praise signals more than just ego. For government leaders, forced affirmation is a part of authoritarianism. If Arkansas continues down this path, we all lose.
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The beneficiaries of almost unfathomable generational wealth run everything everywhere. That’s capitalism. But Arkansas is a small, poor state, so the lucky inheritors of fortunes here have an especially outsized impact — and have for several generations. Here’s a rundown of some of the most prominent powerful people benefiting from family money or fame in Arkansas. Or, to embrace a buzzword, here are our nepo babies (short for nepotism) and what they’ve done for you lately.
SAM WALTON
The WaltonsThe heirs to the Walmart fortune aren’t just the richest people in Arkansas; they’re among the wealthiest in the world. Most of them don’t live in Arkansas much or at all.
Among those who don’t go here anymore, there are a couple you might care about:
Rob Walton, Sam’s eldest son, recently bought the Denver Broncos with a group of investors including his daughter, Carrie Walton Penner, and her husband, Greg Penner, who was named CEO of the Broncos. Rob and Carrie, like others in their family, pour money into propping up charter schools.
Ann Walton Kroenke, daughter of Bud Walton, Walmart co-founder and brother to Sam, is married to Stan Kroenke, real estate billionaire and owner of gobs of sports teams, including the Denver Nuggets of the NBA, the Los Angeles Rams of the NFL, the Colorado Avalanche of the NHL and Arsenal of the English Premier League.
In Arkansas:
Jim Walton, Sam’s youngest son, is chairman of Arvest Bank and perhaps the most influential advocate for the sorts of so-called education reform found in Arkansas LEARNS — vouchers, an expansion of charter schools, merit pay. When, in a rare moment of raw honesty, longtime voucher opponent Rep. Bruce Cozart (R-Hot Springs) said, “The rich want vouchers. That’s who [LEARNS] is for,” he was probably mostly talking about Jim Walton.
Alice Walton, Sam’s daughter, is easily the best Walton. She founded Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, instantly making the Ozarks a destination for art lovers the world over. Coming soon, she’s opening the holistic health-focused Alice L. Walton School of Medicine in Bentonville. It’s scheduled to welcome its first class in 2025.
Tom and Steuart Walton, sons of Jim, have been spending big money to make Northwest Arkansas hip. They’ve paid for oodles of bike trails and invested heavily in making Bentonville the center of mountain bike culture in the U.S. (plus, they’ve poured money into the development of bike trails in state parks throughout Arkansas). They’ve got a holding company that’s invested heavily in good restaurants, and they’re behind the Momentary, the contemporary art space that often hosts concerts, and FORMAT Festival, the annual music and art fest. Steuart, who former Gov. Asa Hutchinson named to lead an economic recovery task force during the coronavirus pandemic, flew a WWII-era fighter plane over the state … to honor frontline workers battling COVID?
WILLIAM T. DILLARD
The DillardsWilliam T. Dillard, the late founder of the department store chain, had five children, who all now run the company along with some of their children. There are too many to keep up with and they all keep relatively low profiles. They’ve given you massive returns if you’re a stockholder (up more than 1,500% since April 2020) and those cool parquet floors in the Dillard’s in Park Plaza. They’re also at least partially to blame for the gap in the Arkansas River Trail because they’ve refused to allow the city to build behind their campus on Cantrell Road.
The TysonsTyson CEO John H. Tyson — not to be confused with his grandfather and the founder of Tyson Foods, John W. Tyson, or his son, John R. Tyson, the company’s CFO who recently got arrested after he drunkenly fell asleep in a stranger’s home — was something of a Kendall Roy figure in the 1980s when his father, the late Don Tyson, was running the company. John H. had a ponytail, was addicted to cocaine and alcohol, and was largely disregarded by his father. But he recovered, found Jesus and has greatly grown and diversified Tyson (and battled lawsuits over price fixing and over a lack of COVID protections for workers).
WITT STEPHENS
The StephensesThe Stephens patriarchs, Witt and Jackson T. Stephens, were perhaps the most powerful business and political figures in Arkansas in the 20th century. They founded Stephens Inc., long one of the nation’s largest investment banks not based on Wall Street, and had massive natural gas holdings, including Arkla. With Stephens Inc., they handled the initial public offerings of Arkansas’s biggest companies, including Walmart and Tyson. Witt’s children keep a fairly low profile.
Jackson T. “Steve” Stephens Jr., who inherited $40.9 million from his father, was the plaintiff in an unsuccessful 2014 lawsuit to remove an initiated act to raise the state’s minimum wage; voters ultimately approved it. He’s also long been chairman of the anti-tax Club for Growth foundation, backing the likes of U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. In 1970, he and some buddies formed Rayburn, a psych/prog-rock band that recorded for Mega Records, an RCA subsidiary, but never released anything in its heyday. Psych of the South, an Arkansas label, put out some Rayburn demos several years back and members of the band have reunited to continue making music.
Warren Stephens runs Stephens Inc. and has poured money into endeavors that make life better for rich people in or traveling to Arkansas. He restored The Capital Hotel, built the high-end private golf club The Alotian in Roland and bankrolled the development of the private Episcopal Collegiate School. He and his wife have also been major donors to the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, though he’s often wielded the influence imperiously. A major donor to Republican politicians, Stephens created a multimedia campaign called “This Is Capitalism,” promoting the widely held belief among the super-rich that market economics make everything in life better. Warren’s son John Stephens and John’s wife, Mary Olive, will soon open an Italian restaurant in the Heights in the former home of Cafe Prego.
MIKE HUCKABEE
The HuckabeesMike Huckabee, a megachurch pastor and small-time televangelist, won a special election to become Arkansas lieutenant governor after Bill Clinton became president and then-Lt. Gov Jim Guy Tucker became governor. When Tucker got railroaded in the Whitewater case and was forced to resign, Huckabee became governor. He raised taxes and lived in a triple-wide on the grounds of the Governor’s Mansion. After he left office, he made several attempts to run for president, became a Donald Trump toady and wrote goofy books. He continues to make bad jokes on Twitter and host conservative TV shows on marginal channels.
Despite career experience limited to working on political campaigns, Huckabee’s only daughter got tapped in 2017 to serve as former President Donald Trump’s press secretary. She used her high profile as liar-in-chief as a springboard to return to Arkansas and win the governorship. So far she’s governed performatively, embracing culture war battles and never missing an opportunity to castigate “the radical left.” She’s clearly angling for higher office.
Brian ChilsonWALTER HUSSMAN JR.The HussmansWalter Hussman Sr. married into the newspaper business, grew it and, in 1974, bought the Arkansas Democrat and dispatched his 27-year-old son, Walter Hussman Jr., to run the Little Rock paper. Walter Jr. waged a long newspaper war against the Arkansas Gazette, hemorrhaging money, but he ultimately prevailed and started calling his paper the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
He’s long heavily invested in his newsroom while maintaining a retrograde opinion section to which he often contributes unsigned editorials. You may own a ratty, near obsolete iPad thanks to him. Like many others in this group, he’s a major advocate for and financial supporter of school choice policies.
Hussman drew gobs of negative national press recently after he lobbied against famed journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones getting a position at the University of North Carolina journalism school, to which he’s pledged $25 million. UNC ultimately offered Jones the position, but she turned it down, citing in particular Hussman’s involvement in the process.
ELIZA GAINES
Hussman has rapidly promoted his daughter, Eliza Gaines, 35, through the family media company. She was briefly the executive editor of the Democrat-Gazette and was named as publisher of WEHCO Media on Jan. 1. She has four kids and admitted in a recent Q&A that the juggle was difficult, but maybe that ensures that a fifth generation of the family will continue in the newspaper business.
The post Know your Arkansas nepo babies appeared first on Arkansas Times.
When Brave New Restaurant’s executive chef Ben Lindley dropped his spring menu in late March, Peter Brave — the restaurant’s owner and founder — was about a month into a cross-country bicycle journey along the Historic U.S. 66 Byway that began in Chicago and would end more than 2,000 miles later in Santa Monica, California. When Brave and I spoke for this story a couple of weeks earlier, he was taking a break outside of a convenience store 20 miles west of Pacific, Missouri, eating fried chicken and drinking a beer and praising the strength of his crew back home.
“I have two months to go dodge weather and sore legs because I have that much confidence in [general manager] Randy [Beck], Chef Ben, my son, who’s out front along with my daughter holding down the fort,” Brave said. “I just have an incredible crew right now. I tell them the fact that they are so good, and they take such pride in what they do and they have such incredible capabilities, hell, I’m sitting here drinking beer on the side of a C-store in Missouri — what stronger vote of confidence could you get than that?”
Brave has worked in the kitchen alongside an executive chef for the past 15-plus years. When he hired Lindley in January of 2022, he ushered in a new era at Brave New, stepping out of the kitchen but not out of the restaurant — cycling across America notwithstanding.
“He’s definitely here most nights shaking hands, roasting coffee,” Lindley said. “He and I sit down at least a couple of times a week and go over what’s happening, plans on coming menus, things like that. He’s here. I don’t want anybody to think he’s selling the place and walking away.”
As for Brave’s location on the map during a recent tasting, Lindley said he had no idea.
“Before he left town he shook my hand and told me he had every bit of confidence in me, and I haven’t spoken to him since.”
Brave will turn 63 in November and while he said his current adventure was spontaneous and not part of a bucket list, he’s a believer in a “no sense in waiting” philosophy. People close to him understandably feared for his safety, with the exception of his mother, who he jokes might have picked up a secret policy on him.
Lindley, 35, is working for Brave for the third time. His first experience was at age 19, washing dishes and chopping vegetables and soaking up as much knowledge as he could. “This was my first taste of fine dining,” he said. “I already had a pretty good idea this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. This solidified it.”
Brian ChilsonNEW MENU: Chef Ben Lindley’s spring menu ushers in a new era at Brave New Restaurant.Lindley’s had several restaurant jobs around Little Rock. He managed Big Whiskey’s and worked at Sticky Fingerz and the Rev Room, and he spent the four years leading up to his current gig as the executive chef at Sonny Williams’ Steak Room.
Lindley said the role challenges him to maintain Brave’s vision for the restaurant while exploring his own creativity as a chef.
“In a way we’re trying to get back to what Peter started,” Lindley said. “Little bit of a new direction but at the same time kind of going back to the roots. … I’ve been doing the best I can to do it to his standards.”
Brave opened Brave New Restaurant with his ex-wife, Marie, in 1991 in Riverdale in the former Steak and Egg — a 1,750-square-foot building on Old Cantrell Road. In 2000, he moved the restaurant to its current digs in the WindRiver building at 2300 Cottondale Lane — a sprawling space with elegant dining rooms and a picturesque view of the Arkansas River and downtown Little Rock skyline, courtesy of some floor-to-ceiling windows and the adjacent patio that borders the dining area. When Brave initially rented the space it was 2,950 square feet. He’s added on over the years and now boasts 5,980 total square feet, which now includes private dining rooms and offices that serve as his coffee roasting facility.
Brian ChilsonRIVER VIEWS: Brave New Restaurant’s patio overlooks the Arkansas River.When he first opened Brave New, the staff was little more than Brave, a dishwasher, a few waiters and Marie running the front of the house. Now, he employs a crew of 40. Transitions are inevitable, he said, but it’s happening very smoothly and gradually.
Lindley said to expect the same chef-driven farm-to-table ethos, but more inclusive — that is, not just a place people consider for anniversaries, birthdays and special occasions. Lindley’s new menu features price points that are in line with fine dining but include items priced to compete with what one might find at a chain.
“We need to diversify for a lot of reasons,” Brave said. “The thing I did initially was I wanted to take the price point of what was at Chili’s or an Applebee’s and look at some of those things and say, ‘For that kind of money you’re gonna spend there, here’s what I want to do.’ And we can do a lot better than that. Same with the smoothie at Tropical Smoothie, you get a smoothie and a wrap, you’re talking $15-$20 for lunch. Shit, I can compete with that. So it’s important that we’re not just for exclusive, special occasions. Are we good enough for that? Fuck yeah. Do we have the view and food for a special date? Yes. But there is also value there, and it’s important that it’s not lost at any time.”
This decision seems wise, especially considering the state of the fine dining industry over the last three years: a pandemic dining room shutdown, subsequent capacity restrictions, supply-and-demand issues, inflation and a declining economy. All restaurants dealt with these issues, but it’s been so hard on fine dining that some in the industry have gone so far as to question whether it’s a sustainable model at all.
“Over the course of 33 years you hear a lot of warning signs and it’s important to pay attention to them,” Brave said. “Reassessing has always been an important part of operating any kind of business. The way Brave New Restaurant operates — Facebook, Instagram, ordering on my phone — all that stuff has changed. The essence of what Brave New Restaurant is hasn’t changed in a long, long time and it’s important that we don’t lose that identity.”
One of Lindley’s dishes he created to make the dinner menu more inclusive is a grilled airline chicken breast (a boneless chicken breast with the drumette attached) with cremini mushroom risotto and Beurre Blanc. It was hands down one of my favorite bites of 2023 and it’s $25. Lindley finishes the dish with peach basil chutney, Arkansas pecans from Shady Grove and fresh basil.
Brian ChilsonAIRLINE CHICKEN: Served over cremini mushroom risotto.If I didn’t know any better I would’ve assumed it was a $45-$50 dish.
“It’s still fine dining,” Lindley said. “It’s still high-quality ingredients, good service, good presentation.”
I recently popped in for lunch and ordered the grilled shrimp entree served over orzo pasta salad and it was my favorite lunch of the year thus far. It was $18. I routinely pay that much for salads around town.
Rhett BrinkleyGRILLED SHRIMPOne of Lindley’s more high-end dishes on the dinner menu is also a creative one that he admits sounds unusual. It’s a half rack of Texas wild boar ($60) that’s trimmed and butchered in-house. It’s coated with a sweet and savory raspberry rub and served with excellent sriracha mashed potatoes, grilled asparagus and a raspberry demi-glace. It’s garnished with raspberry dust.
Brian ChilsonRASPBERRY WILD BOAROther highlights from the new menu include the grilled portabella mushroom salad ($29) featuring sliced portabella caps finished with an aged balsamic. The mushrooms were some of the best I’ve tasted, which is no real surprise because Brave New always does mushrooms well. Lindley said it’s comparable to a lighter version of Brave New’s excellent mushroom Wellington available in the fall. Next time you’re in for lunch, order the mushroom soup; it’s fantastic.
Brian ChilsonPORTABELLA: Grilled and finished with aged balsamic.Arkansas Times publisher Alan Leveritt remarked that he thought he was eating lobster after trying a healthy portion of the grilled cardamom honey glazed mahi mahi ($48) served with sweet pea long grain rice. It’s sauteed with cremini mushrooms and asparagus over a pool of blueberry cream sauce.
Brian ChilsonMAHI MAHILindley also made slight adjustments to some of Brave’s classic dishes. He said he’s always felt Brave’s pesto cream sauce should be served with pasta, so Brave’s original pine nut salmon ($42) is now served over penne pasta with fresh tomatoes, spinach and a pesto cream sauce.
Brian ChilsonPINE NUT SALMONLindley said he values constructive criticism from front-of-house management, servers and the kitchen staff when it comes to new menu items.
“Peter especially,” he said. “I like running the new dishes as specials so I can get customer feedback from some of our regulars who have been eating Peter’s food forever. I want to make sure that they’re happy with it and that it still fits the restaurant. I’m very familiar with what Peter wants in his restaurant, so things aren’t going to be changing too much. I don’t want to scare anybody off. The walleye’s not going anywhere, the creme brulee’s not going anywhere.”
Lindley’s a confident chef, but doesn’t come off as arrogant. Over the course of three different conversations in the last month, he always made a point to credit the strength of his co-workers and how much he’s learned working for Brave over the years. He said that every night before he leaves the restaurant he says, “Thank you, good job,” to each member of the kitchen crew. He said he still gets nervous about menu tastings and expects that to continue throughout his career. Knowing that there’s always room to grow and improve is an important quality for a chef or a professional in any field, he said.
Brian ChilsonWORKING THE LINE: Chef Ben Lindley’s first experience in fine dining was working for Brave at age 19.“Something I learned from Peter a long time ago is you have to continue to learn and push yourself to get better, and that’s something I’ve kept in mind since I heard him say that when I was 19 years old. I feel like the only way I’m going to grow and get better is knowing I’m not as good as I can be.”
And while Brave knew the restaurant would be in good hands while he sips beer and cycles cross-country, he also acknowledged that they’re human and are going to make mistakes just like he does.
“One of the biggest things I had to talk with Chef Ben about was, ‘Don’t worry about getting it perfect. If it’s not perfect then, guess what, we’ll learn from it and we’ll do it differently next time.’”
And, he said, he has no intention of riding off into the sunset on two wheels.
“I’ve got an incredible crew and a really incredible customer base and it’s not a chore. I get done bussing a few tables and schmoozing with a few people and I get beer and food out of it — hell, who wouldn’t want that job? I ain’t going nowhere, because why would I?”
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Tyson workers in Van Buren went on strike earlier this month after they were notified that the plant would close May 12, which will affect almost 1,000 employees. Writing for Facing South, Arkansas native Olivia Paschal and University of Arkansas student journalist Rachell Sanchez-Smith interviewed Van Buren workers who participated in the strike.
Tyson, which has some 142,000 employees globally, announced this week that it would eliminate 15% of its leadership positions and 10% of its corporate jobs in a cost-cutting measure.
From Facing South:
“We want justice,” said Aurora Delgado, a deboning worker at the Van Buren plant who’s been with Tyson for 24 years. Delgado is one of 10 Tyson strikers who spoke with Facing South in Spanish about injuries they have sustained from the repetitive motion of poultry assembly lines, and about being undervalued and mistreated on the job.
For example, after months of repeated visits to Tyson’s infirmary, where she says she was treated with “cream” and “Tylenol” for searing pain in her left forearm, Delgado went to a doctor outside the Tyson insurance network. They recommended surgery.
Liliana Ledesma is another line worker who has been at the Van Buren plant for 18 years. She also spent months complaining to management and infirmary staff about the constant pain in her arm, worsened by her position on the processing line. Ledesma was told to keep working through the pain, which has impaired her life significantly.
“I can’t even comb my own hair,” she said. “I can’t lift my arm because of the pain.”
All of the striking workers Facing South interviewed cited concerns about working on a floor that is constantly slippery, flooded with chicken grease, oil, and water. Three employees also cited concerns about trench foot — a debilitating condition caused by prolonged exposure to wet conditions that can lead to serious infections and even amputation.
Here’s how the strike ended, according to Facing South:
Ruvalcaba and other workers at the Van Buren plant report that Tyson offered them a payment of $1,000 to stay at the plant until the day it closes, a 60% buyout of accrued vacation days, and an option to relocate to another Tyson facility. According to workers, the strike ended when Tyson made verbal commitments to the workers’ delegation to pay out all their vacation time, not increase employees’ workload before the plant closes, and address workers’ injury claims. Workers will still not receive the six-month severance packages they demanded.
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Arkansas Times publisher Alan Leveritt has lived on his great-grandparents’ farm in North Pulaski County for 40 years. This is the latest in a series of columns about day-to-day life on the land where he raises heirloom tomatoes and other crops for local restaurants and the Hillcrest Farmers Market.
This old log house has stories to tell, and I suppose I do as well.
A man named Mason is said to have built my house around 1859 right off Batesville Pike in North Pulaski County. Back then that was the highway to St. Louis. A band of Native Americans known locally as the Bayou Meto Indians lived along Bayou Meto creek just down from the house. Shortly after my ex-wife Mara and I rebuilt the dilapidated cabin in 1982 and moved in, I was rummaging through an old collapsed smokehouse when I came upon a rotted mule bridle wrapped around a large spear point. I’m sure that my great-grandfather, John Williamson, known as Pa in our family, had been plowing down near the bayou when he surfaced the spear point with this plow. My grandmother, Mama Grace, said that an old Indian graveyard existed somewhere downstream but if it’s still there and hasn’t washed away, I haven’t found it.
My great-grandparents were considered prosperous by the standards of North Pulaski County at the turn of the last century. Though they didn’t have running water or electricity, Pa owned his land and a Model T truck.
Forty years ago when I first moved to the farm, I still had a lot of elderly relatives out here who had known Ma and Pa. One described Pa as “peculiar,” which is polite country code for “he could be a real ass sometimes.” Ma and Pa were members of a little faith healer congregation and at some point they donated a nearby piece of land where they built the church, which is still there. On Sundays they would hitch a mule to a carriage and ride the short distance to church. If Pa was politely described as peculiar, my great-grandmother Alice (Ma) was often summed up with the comment, “Well you know she wore red dresses.” That was country code for “she was difficult.” More positively, it meant she was not afraid to give her husband a clear picture of what was on her mind.
One Sunday on their ride back from church, Ma was giving Pa hell, an argument that had apparently preceded that morning’s service. Pa had said little but about midway he stopped the carriage, got out, pulled a two-by-four plank out of the back of the carriage and brought it down over the mule’s head with all his might. He looked at his wife, threw down the board and walked the rest of the way home, leaving Ma and the dazed mule parked in the middle of the dirt road. Things never got better after that and they finally divorced, a rarity in those days.
My grandmother, who attended the faith healer church, became a Southern Baptist, though she was more like an anti-clerical Baptist. She did not like preachers. Parasites was too strong a word, but you get my drift. The church members out there would host the preacher for Sunday dinner each week and Mama Grace complained that he showed up at their farm far too often. That meant she would have to kill an additional chicken, which could be in short supply depending on the time of the year.
The church eschewed doctors in favor of prayer for sick congregants. In February of 1939, Pa came down with pneumonia after a cold, wet day in the field. He forbade Mama Grace to fetch a doctor from Cabot and instead insisted on hosting the church people, who attempted to cure him through prayer. When he slipped into a coma, Mama Grace jumped on a horse and rode the 12 miles into Cabot for a doctor. When she and the doctor returned the next day, Pa was already dead. That evening she walked out to the barn where she knew Pa had buried a coffee can filled with gold coins. The can was gone and the earth covered in coal oil to disguise its recent disturbance.
DURING RENOVATION: Leveritt (center) with friends.
We had to take the old log house down to three walls when we renovated it. Carl Gumann and Stan Phoebus, two talented interior finish carpenters, camped out in the cabin for a couple of weeks while completing the house. It was a long way into town and there was no running water or electricity yet. I drove out one morning to check on the boys and it was evident that something disturbing had happened to Stan. He said he was sleeping on his cot when he was awakened by a woman’s voice repeating over and over, “John, is that you? John, is that you?” It scared the hell out of him and he called out to her, “No, this is Stan Phoebus!”
After that there was silence.
That afternoon my mother drove out to check on our progress and I told her the story. A shadow passed over her expression and she appeared to almost start crying.
She told me this story.
After Pa’s death, Ma would take the train to McGehee at least once a month to visit Mama Grace and her young family, including my mother. Ma and my mother would sleep together in the small shotgun house on Adams Avenue. They were close, and Ma confided that she had regretted the divorce her whole life — and that she and Pa were talking of getting back together when he died. She had never recovered from his sudden death and their stillborn reunion. Many, many nights, my mother said, she would be awakened with her sleeping grandmother sitting straight up in bed, calling out, “John, is that you? John?”
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Eli Cranor, the Pope County crime fiction writer, took home an Edgar Award on Thursday. The Edgar Awards are the crime and mystery genres most prestigious awards. Cranor won Best First Novel By An American Author for “Don’t Know Tough,” his 2022 debut.
Since then, he’s already published a follow-up, “Ozark Dogs,” and has another novel scheduled for 2024.
I profiled Cranor earlier this month.
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In the third installment of ‘Fair Assessment,’ a weekly podcast about education issues in Arkansas, Little Rock School Board member Ali Noland and veteran classroom teacher Gwen Faulkenberry interview Steve Grappe. Grappe is executive director of Citizens for Arkansas Public Education and Students (CAPES), the group working to repeal the LEARNS Act. They also discuss Ali’s recent announcement that she will not be seeking reelection at the end of her school-board term, and they hand out a few grades, including an F for the communications staff running the Arkansas Department of Education’s Twitter account.
While we are still experiencing delays in getting the podcast uploaded to major streaming platforms like Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and Spotify, you can listen for free here on the Arkansas Blog.
Next week, Gwen and Ali interview state Sen. Linda Chesterfield of Little Rock, a 30-year veteran classroom teacher, two-term president of the Little Rock School Board and a proven champion for students and teachers in the Arkansas legislature.
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Cornucopia (noun): an abundant supply of good things of a specified kind.
Each month, I will be writing about a cornucopia of food topics, which include a recap of my eating adventures, food and drink news, my general thoughts on the Central Arkansas culinary scene, and a quick Top 10 list. So, with that in mind, let’s get to it.
Chicken & Dumplings Friday at The Faded Rose Kevin ShalinLunchtime on Fridays at The Faded Rose is all about chicken and dumplings. In fact, it’s not uncommon to see the special on just about every table throughout the lunch shift. Faded’s version eats more like a hearty soup than the traditional broth-based variety, which means the base is both thicker and creamier. Pieces of chicken and rectangular shaped, rolled dumplings with a nice, toothsome bite fill most of the bowl. Bits of carrots make an appearance, as does fresh parsley, along with a subtle heat thanks to what I’m guessing is a touch of cayenne. Staff will offer up a complimentary loaf of Leidenheimer with your meal. Take it. The crusty loaf is perfect for sopping up remnants of the chicken and dumplings and ensures that an office nap is in your near future.
Fried chicken at Chinese Kitchen Kevin ShalinChinese Kitchen, the predominantly takeout restaurant housed next door to The Pantry West off Rodney Parham Road, has been serving simple, no frills Chinese food to a loyal base of customers for the past 47 years. Let that sink in. Forty-seven years! I guess consistent, affordable food has a way of appealing to folks for four-plus decades. The menu is filled with classics, but there might not be a better dish than the Warr Shui Guy. Thin chicken breast is heavily coated, fried right, covered with a thin brown gravy, and then hit with some crushed peanuts. A lunch portion comes with the ever-popular fried rice and checks in at $6.36. Insane. If you’ve never been, go.And more fried chicken at Goku Ramen Bar Kevin ShalinFried chicken was also one of the highlights from my first trip to Goku Ramen Bar in Maumelle. The fast casual, order-at-the-counter restaurant is tucked in a retail strip off the main boulevard, so it is a touch hidden. Once you do find it, I highly recommend ordering the rice bowl with fried chicken, as well as the ramen bowl with braised pork. With the latter, you have the option of pork, chicken or vegetable broth. Go with the pork. It’s flavorful and pairs well with the accompanying protein, boiled egg, green onion, Napa cabbage and corn. My only knock was with the egg, as I prefer a soft-boiled variety with a gooey yolk instead of my hard-boiled half that resided in the broth. As for the rice bowl? They were not stingy with the deep-fried pieces of breast meat chicken, nor were they with the white rice, however, I wish there had been a more substantial drizzle of teriyaki sauce to cut down on the dish’s dryness. All and all, I left Goku quite content. Will I rush back across the river for the food? Probably not, but if I lived in the area, this restaurant would unquestionably be in my regular rotation.Baja Grill is nacho Nirvana Kevin ShalinIf you find yourself in a bad mood, just mosey on over to Baja Grill for an order of Cuban Nachos. Make sure to bring a friend or be ready to tote home a to-go box. Truth be told, the mountain of tortilla chips smothered in smoked pork shoulder, queso, guacamole, and a host of other ingredients could feed up to four people, especially with you’re also sucking down margaritas. Listen, I’ve written about these nachos ad nauseam through the years, but frankly, I don’t care. They’re the best nachos in the area, and I figure the more people that know this, the better. It’s all about spreading joy.Rabbit at Red Moon TavernKevin ShalinKeep an eye out for Red Moon Tavern’s new specials. They typically run three days each week and really help showcase Chef Michael Easley’s talent and creativity. This was the case with his Arkansas Rabbit Pot Pie, which provided a plentiful portion of rabbit meat, Wye Mountain Mushrooms, a creamy fennel seed sauce and house-made biscuit. Peas and carrots also made an appearance because it wouldn’t be a proper pot pie without them. The decision to feature the biscuit instead of a more traditional pie crust topper was a brilliant move, as it really helped put the focus on the rabbit and sauce.
Good times at Murry’s Dinner PlayhouseKevin ShalinWhat in the world took me so long to check out Murry’s Dinner Playhouse? What a treasure. Murry’s old school vibe and intimate setting made for a wonderful Saturday night as we took in dinner and show with friends. We were there to check out “Honky Tonk Angels,” co-starring Arkansas Times’ very own Brooke Carter Wallace. Brooke and the cast killed it, and while the show just wrapped up a month-long run, I did want to put in a general plug for this Little Rock institution. Visit the website and see what shows are coming down the pike. Oh, and this is a food column, so you know I better make mention of the food. The $44 ticket includes a delightful buffet experience, complete with options like chicken fried chicken, pasta, salad and mashed potatoes, just to name a few. Listen, this isn’t fine dining, and frankly, I don’t want it to be. The food is fine. Paired with great entertainment and a full bar (additional cost), it made for such a fun Saturday night.
Tidbits, openings, and closingsRed Bowl Noodle & Dim Sum (9700 N. Rodney Parham Road) opened in early April at the space previously occupied by Homer’s West. I’ve yet to go but early reports speak of solid food with various service issues that need to be ironed out. Hope this happens, as we could use a reliable dim sum restaurant in Little Rock. Ownership would be wise to embrace social media. As things currently stand, the Red Bowl’s online presence is nonexistent, which is a bad move.
Heather Baber-Roe and Craig Roe, owners of Baja Grill, Rober and Valhalla, are dead set on making Benton a culinary destination. The two just announced that their next project, Revival, is coming to Benton in May 2023. No location announced, but here’s the blurb on their Facebook page: “Craft burgers. Clever cocktails. Creative wings. Loaded fries. Home of the “Sausage Dog.” Vast beer list. Craveable bar fare. Brick oven pizza.” These two know a thing or ten about running restaurants, so I have no doubt in Revival’s future success.
Don’t look now, but Sheridan, the small town located forty minutes south of Little Rock, just got itself another restaurant. Lady Birds Cafe (120 W, Center Street) has a full breakfast and lunch menu. It looks promising, as does the new-ish Mill Town Coffee Co. I’m guessing a short road trip is in my future.
North Little Rock’s Diamond Bear Brewing Company will soon be teaming up with Conway’s Ol’ Bart’s Southern Eats for barbecue at the brewery. Stay tuned for more details.
Argenta’s Dogtown Throwdown is back, as is the lunch buffet at Star of India.
Do you like cupcakes? I mean, do you really like cupcakes? If so, then I have an event for you.
There’s a sign up at the old Mellow Mushroom space off Chenal Parkway saying that Walk-On’s is coming soon. No word on an expected opening date.
The Little Rock Whataburger location is officially open. I’m a born and raised Texan and can tell you that for a fast-food chain, Whataburger is pretty darn solid. With that being said, there has been less than enthusiastic sentiment regarding the food at the Arkansas locations. We shall see how the newest location goes over with locals.
The Rogue Roundabout is getting close to opening. The much-anticipated Conway microbrewery and restaurant is testing out beers and menu items, and should be ready for a grand opening in late May.
Longtime favorite Delicious Temptations will be expanding in the very near future. The restaurant recently took over the space next door, which will eventually add 2,000 square feet to its footprint. Kitchen and various dining room updates are also expected, as is the addition of a full bar.
And Finally … My Top 10 Restaurant Appetizers in the Little Rock Area1. Baked Bacon Wrapped Dates at The Pantry 2. Smoked Salmon Dip at Cheers in the Heights 3. Dragon Eggs at Kemuri 4. Shell Belly Sliders at Brood & Barley 5. Quail Lollies at Table 28 6. Triple Dipper at Baja Grill 7. Pão de Queijo (cheese bread) at Café Bossa Nova 8. Fried Pickle Chips at Copper Mule Table & Tap 9. Street Corn Dip at The Fold 10. Spring Crudités at Red Moon Tavern
That’s it from me. See you in May!
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A federal judge has sentenced a Yellville man to 30 days in prison for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the nation’s Capitol.
Jon Thomas Mott, 40, was also ordered Wednesday to serve 36 months of probation and to pay fees totaling $1,010, including $500 in restitution.
Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., allowed Mott to remain free on his own recognizance and to turn himself in to authorities.
Mott pleaded guilty in November to one count of parading, demonstrating or picketing in a Capitol building in violation of federal law as part of a plea agreement which resulted in the government dropping other charges against him.
The offense carried a maximum sentence of six months in prison, up to five years probation, a fine of up to $5,000 and an obligation to pay any interest or penalties on fines and restitution not timely made.
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Good Day Farm has released a new line of multi-dose gummies that contain four servings in a single gummy.
The four-in-one gummies have roughly 7.5mg of THC in each serving and contain 30mg of THC in each gummy. The gummies, which come in Berry Blast and Cherry Bomb flavors, have 10 gummies per bag and an activation time of 45 to 120 minutes.
The cultivator said the multi-dose gummies are ideal for patients who would like an edible that can be divided, allowing them to cater to individual dosage.
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Following the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 leading to the forced relocation of nearly 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry to 10 relocation camps across the United States. More than 16,000 of them were imprisoned in Southeast Arkansas between 1942 and 1945. The World War II Japanese Internment Museum in McGehee shines a light on the stories of those interned at the Rohwer and Jerome relocation centers in Desha County. On Thursday, May 4, the museum commemorates its 10th anniversary with a day of events, including an appearance by former internee and activist George Takei of “Star Trek” fame.
Brian ChilsonThough the sites in Rohwer and Jerome were officially known at the time as relocation centers and commonly referred to as “internment camps,” many historians have shifted to refer to the camps as concentration or incarceration camps, as characterized by the imprisonment of people by force without the conviction of any crime and confined by barbed wire, watch towers and armed guards.In 1945, the Rohwer Japanese American Relocation Center was officially closed by the War Relocation Authority. Nothing remains besides the hospital’s smokestack and the Rohwer Relocation Center Memorial Cemetery, now a National Historic Landmark. The stories of the people incarcerated there were left to family histories — or in some cases, never spoken of again.
A local public excavation of this period began in April 2013 when the McGehee Industrial Foundation announced the opening of the World War II Japanese American Internment Museum. “We really didn’t know what to expect because this has been our first opening of a museum of this nature to show and share this part of history, and the response has been overwhelming,” said McGehee Mayor Jeff Owyoung, who has also served on the museum’s board.
Gage SkidmoreON SULU AND SOCIAL JUSTICE: George Takei, who spent time as a child at the Rohwer internment camp in Desha County, played Lt. Sulu on the original “Star Trek” series and is a vocal advocate for LGBT equality through his work with the Human Rights Campaign.Housed in the renovated McGehee Railroad Depot, the museum has hosted over 18,000 visitors from 56 countries in its 10 years. In addition to exhibits that have included artworks of family members of those incarcerated and informative and moving films, the museum hosts a rich offering of primary resources: personal photo albums, diaries and letters donated by former incarcerees and their families, which tell of life in the camps from the perspective of those who lived it. Visitors are invited to pick up the materials, leaf through their pages and become immersed in these firsthand accounts.
Brian ChilsonPRIMARY RESOURCES: The museum exhibits personal photo albums, diaries and letters donated by former incarcerees and their families, which tell of life in the camps from the perspective of those who lived it.The centerpiece of the museum is the exhibit “Against Their Will The Japanese American Experience in World War II,” which was a catalyst for the museum’s creation and centers the experiences of Japanese Americans at the Jerome and Rohwer camps. Developed in part by the Rockefeller Foundation, “Against Their Will” debuted at the Arkansas Statehouse Convention Center in 2004 and was later loaned to the museum where it will be housed permanently. “The exhibit was in crates and boxed up for several years,” Owyoung recalled. “We had an old depot that was about to fall down and we got a grant to give us the money to renovate it to be able to put up the exhibit. We are the perfect spot for it.”
Visitors to the museum may also take a self-guided audio tour, available at the museum’s website, narrated by George Takei. Takei was imprisoned at Rohwer with his family and has been a supporter of the museum since its beginnings. “George Takei was here at the opening ceremony and will be the featured speaker at the 10-year anniversary,” Owyoung said.
Guest panelists will include former internees and Duncan Williams, the co-leader of the Ireichō project, the first comprehensive listing of the names of all those who were incarcerated in the internment camps. “Williams is on the board of the Japanese American National Museum in L.A. and will give an invocation,” Owyoung said. Owyoung also confirmed 200 guests will be making pilgrimages from California and other states for the anniversary, many of whom are family members of those incarcerated at Rohwer and Jerome. “They will come to Little Rock first and make their way down to McGehee on the morning of the 4th.”
The ceremony will begin at 1 p.m. Thursday, May 4 and will last about an hour, after which guests are invited to head to the Rohwer Relocation Center Memorial Cemetery historic site where two plaques erected in 1945 still stand — one dedicated to those who died while incarcerated at Rohwer and the other in honor of Rohwer incarcerees who lost their lives while serving in World War II in the 100th Infantry Battalion and 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the most decorated infantry regiment in U.S. military history comprised almost entirely of second-generation Japanese Americans.
Brian ChilsonCOMMEMORATION: At the Rohwer Relocation Center Memorial Cemetery historic site, where two plaques erected in 1945 still stand.The commemoration events are free and open to the public and Owyoung extends a personal invitation to one and all to “just walk on up” and join in. That evening, those making the pilgrimage from other states are invited to enjoy a bit of Southern hospitality at the McGehee Industrial Foundation’s annual barbecue and auction.
In spite of the museum’s impressive work over the past 10 years, many Arkansans remain unaware that this meaningful resource exists in our state, or that the Rohwer and Jerome camps existed on Arkansan soil. “What amazes me is when we first started working on this, nobody in McGehee even knew about it,” Owyoung said. “And it’s right here in our backyard.”
In a state with almost twice the incarceration rate of the national average, known worldwide for its legacy of slavery and racial segregation, and containing hundreds of miles of the Trail of Tears, it seems unnecessary to question the importance of a resource like the World War II Japanese American Internment Museum, but Owyoung was gracious in discussing its ongoing relevance. “The museum has opened a lot of eyes to this part of history and what the Japanese Americans went through. What they lived through is hard to imagine. We’re very proud of the museum. We believe it is really powerful.”
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Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson formally announced his long-shot bid to be the Republican nominee for president in Bentonville on Wednesday.
He touted his resume, including his time as a U.S. attorney, as leader of the state Republican Party, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, head of the DEA and Homeland Security and of course governor. His experience and record is unique among the field of candidates, he said. He talked about what used to be conventional Republican planks: growing the economy, reducing the national debt, maintaining a strong national defense, the rule of law and defending the southern border.
He touted his emphasis on computer science education as governor and said it was critical for the U.S. more broadly to embrace STEM and computer science education to compete with “communist China.”
He tweaked Biden for federal spending and blamed the president for inflation and rising crime rates.
“The Biden Administration has stood on the sidelines and passively watched as rampant crime destroys our cities with smash-and-grab robberies and a flagrant disrespect for human dignity and the rule of law,” he said.
He didn’t mention Donald Trump, who he hasn’t been shy about criticizing, in his speech, though he did decry isolationism and the undermining of democracy, two hallmarks of Trumpism.
Hutchinson, who has even less name recognition than the likes of Sen. Tim Scott and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, both of South Carolina and both considered long shots, will surely be spending most of his time in Iowa in the nine months leading up to its key caucuses. Maybe his anti-Trump milquetoast routine will play well in the Midwest. But the Republican Party remains the party of Trump. See today’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette article on Hutchinson’s run:
The Saline County Republican Committee has made its antipathy toward Hutchinson’s campaign official. Members approved a “no confidence” status toward Hutchinson during an April 6 vote.
“While we can’t speak for those other county committees, we have heard there will be others who join us,” Chairman David Gibson told the Democrat-Gazette on Tuesday.
Issues cited by Gibson include Hutchinson’s April 2021 veto of legislation banning gender-affirming care for transgender children and Hutchinson’s unwillingness to back Trump if the former president secures the party’s nomination.
Here’s Hutchinson’s remarks from Wednesday as provided by the campaign:
“It’s easy to blend in, and today’s Republicans, they’re not wanting their elected [officials] to blend in,” he said. “They’re wanting them to stand out and be the salt and the light that we’ve been called to be.”
Thank you for joining Susan and me on this special day.
This is a day in which our nation’s future . . . and my personal story comes together. Susan has been on this journey with me each step of the way. And Arkansas never had a better first lady.
Bentonville is a big part of my life story. But, so is Gravette where I grew up on a farm and learned the importance of family, faith, and community. I also learned hard work from my dad by cleaning out chicken houses and building fences. And my life story also includes Springdale, where I was inspired by teachers who pushed me to learn and it was in Springdale that my political awareness began with the nation’s divide over the Vietnam War and the struggle for civil rights.
But, let’s come back to Bentonville.
I was born in the old Bentonville Hospital; my first law office was across the square from where we stand today; I tried jury trials in this courthouse; I built Bentonville’s first FM radio station; I served as Bentonville’s City Attorney; and this is where Susan and I started our family and spent some of our happiest years living on 15 acres of rocks and hills west of town in a double-wide mobile home.
It was here on these steps, over 30 years ago, that I announced my run for the United States Senate. At that time Arkansas was a blue state and the Republican Party was pretty much non-existent. I stepped up to take on runaway federal spending; to fight for a strong national defense; to support the life of unborn children; and to unleash the private sector of our economy.
In other words, I ran as a conservative Republican when being a Republican was like having a career-ending handicap.
I continued to fight the establishment and over time . . . we won.
That was the beginning and since then I have been a consistent conservative through my time as leader of the party; in the U.S. Congress and as Governor.
And now, I bring that same vigor to fight another battle and that battle is for the future of our country and the soul of our party.
Today, I am announcing that I am a candidate for President of the United States.
In this campaign for President, I stand alone in terms of my experience, record, and leadership.
From Congress to DEA to Homeland Security, I have served our country in times of crisis.
As Governor of Arkansas, we cut taxes and created record surpluses.
We increased pay for teachers.
We reduced regulations; recruited industry, and the private sector grew by over 100,000 jobs.
My mettle has been tested.
It was tested when I put on a flak jacket and assisted the FBI Hostage Rescue Team in negotiating the surrender of an armed terrorist group.
My mettle was tested after the 9-11 attack when I was responsible for protecting the United States from another act of terrorism on U.S. soil.
And my mettle was tested once more as governor when I demonstrated how we can lead through a pandemic without closing down every business and shutting down schools.
When I had pressure from Washington and the national media to shelter in place, I said “no”.
And the result was that our businesses survived and we had more days of in-classroom instruction during the pandemic than almost any other state. Yes, that’s right . . . we beat Florida!
This campaign is about courage.
It is about making the tough decisions to rebuild our economy; to give peace a chance through America’s strength, and to renew the American spirit of freedom . . .
Opportunity . . . and the rule of law.
And we’ve got our work cut out for us. Let me offer some solutions.
First, we need to get our economy back on track.
The Biden Administration has turned its back on the American worker. To turn our economy around we have to stop the “break-the-bank” federal spending that has led to high inflation and rising interest rates.
Every hardworking American family gets a double hit from the Biden economy. Their paycheck doesn’t go as far, and they are paying more on car loans and credit card debt because of the high-interest rates.
That is not acceptable.
I have been Chief Executive of our state for 8 years and that means I know how to balance a budget. I did it every single year.
And while I was in Congress, we balanced the federal budget and it is high time we did it again.
And that’s just the beginning of what we must do together to bring out the best of America.
We must secure our Southern border. We need a pro-growth energy policy that is not focused on limits but on production. We should not limit American growth but rather we should unleash our energy producers.
And if America is to be the best; then we cannot yield to China in terms of global leadership.
When the Biden Administration conducted its disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, we left our friends abandoned and our allies confused.
America looked weak and that weakness was seen as an opportunity for Russia to invade Ukraine and then for China to threaten and be aggressive toward Taiwan.
Let me assure you that as President, I will bring out the best of America . . . we will stand with our allies and friends. We will not abandon our friends in times of need.
There are some who want the U.S. to disengage from the world and to isolate ourselves. Isolationism only leads to weakness and weakness leads to war. Americans want peace and the best way to secure and preserve peace is to have the most prepared military in the world.
Today’s threat is the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I join with those who say we do not want an unending war in Ukraine, and the best way to avoid a long war is to help Ukraine win today.
As a nation, we have proven resilient in our democracy and we have endured through times of war and hardship. And I am confident we will even survive through the destructive policies of the Biden administration but the time for change is now. It is time to bring out the best of America.
As a nation, our democracy’s resilience comes from our shared values and it comes from our willingness to sacrifice for the cause of freedom. We need leaders who understand the importance of democracy to our own freedoms and that with God’s blessing, we set an example of liberty throughout the world.
America is democracy’s lighthouse. We must not let the light be dimmed.
If freedom’s light goes out in the United States then other countries will have their freedom shipwrecked on rocky shoals. Our democracy demands America’s best and I will bring out America’s best.
We will do this through leadership, economic growth, and respect for the rule of law.
The Biden Administration has stood on the sidelines and passively watched as rampant crime destroys our cities with smash-and-grab robberies and a flagrant disrespect for human dignity and the rule of law.
This must change.
What separates the United States from the rest of the world is our commitment to justice.
The rule of law is the foundation for peace in our communities. I am the only candidate running for President with a breadth of experience in law enforcement.
I will enforce the law and demand that local prosecutors do the same. Lawbreakers must be held accountable. Restoring respect for the law will not only reduce crime in our country; it will also bring out the best of America.
These are solutions that work for America.
The rule of law also applies to our southern border. I have three words that will work to protect our country from the human suffering that results from an open border. That is “enforce the law”.
I know how to do this because President George W. Bush tapped me to help lead the Department of Homeland Security. Our nation is a land of immigrants who make up the fabric of our democracy. In order to respect those who follow the legal path to come to this country, we must reform our asylum laws; devote more resources to support our border patrol; quickly remove those who come into our country illegally; and go after the cartels who are killing Americans with the deadly drug fentanyl. When fentanyl is the leading cause of death for those 18 to 49 then we are losing our sons and daughters way too soon.
There are a few misguided leaders who say we should defund the FBI. I am here today in support of our law enforcement heroes. The argument to defund police is designed to undermine our rule of law.
We should not defund the FBI, but we do need serious reform to refocus the core functions of our federal law enforcement.
As someone who has worked with all the federal law enforcement agencies, I know what needs to be done. We must make them more focused, more accountable, and successful in protecting our citizens.
The FBI needs to be trimmed down and focused on its number one duty . . . leading our counter-terrorism mission. And when we support our law enforcement and enforce the rule of law we bring out the best of America.
Growing up in these hills, I learned the value of work. I hauled hay; worked in four different factories; sacked groceries; and through college, I was a janitor cleaning campus buildings.
All to pay the bills and to get an education.
In law school, I benefitted from the federal student loan program. And, yes, I paid my loan off!
In order to bring out the best of America, we must once again embrace the dignity of work! Our federal government should not reward those who sit at home when they have the ability to work and provide for themselves.
As Governor, I turned down federal assistance that discouraged a return to work. But the Biden Administration paid people more benefits to stay home than they could make working.
This is wrong.
As President, I will open doors for more worker training and better pay and we will require work for able-bodied welfare recipients.
This will grow our manufacturing workforce and we will prove that we can still make things in the United States.
An important solution to this challenge is lifting the penalties for those who want to stay in the workforce after the age of 62.
Right now, if you retire on Social Security, you are penalized for continuing to work. You should be able to both claim social security and work. Remove the penalties and let those who want to work continue to do so without government penalties.
Right now we have nearly 10 million job openings in the U.S. and by making this change we will add millions to the labor pool and increase the income of retirees at the same time. Yes, this will help bring out the best of America!
And when it comes to those who depend upon Social Security and Medicare, I will assure the strength and reliability into the future.
Right now, Social Security is financially stable until 2033. Medicare is stable until 2028. As we have successfully done in the past, I will immediately convene an independent Commission to Assure the Future of Social Security and Medicare. This Commission will be modeled after the 1983 Commission that was chaired by Alan Greenspan. It led to legislation that successfully extended the life of these vital retirement programs for Americans.
Americans need to have confidence in their future and this action will stabilize and assure the future of a supplemental retirement program Americans depend upon.
As Governor of Arkansas, I expanded access to computer science education. It was a priority of mine and the result was going from 1,100 students who took computer science to over 23,000. We went from 20 certified teachers to over 650 who are certified to teach computer science. We made it required to be offered in our rural schools as well as our urban schools. The result is that Arkansas led the nation in computer science education and made a real difference in the opportunities for young people.
It is critical that we follow this model as a nation if we are going to compete with Communist China. The fact is that U.S. test scores in math and science are falling behind other countries. The top 5 math scoring countries are in Asia and the United States places 11th as a nation in terms of math education. We must do better for our students.
As President, I will expand computer science education into every grade school and high school.
I will focus our higher education to produce more engineers and scientists. And when we do, we can not only compete with China but we will bring out the best of America!
We can once again define America’s future with the genius and creativity of our people.
Too often, our businesses and families are held back by a federal bureaucracy that is out of control, heavy-handed and wasteful. As President, I will reduce the federal civilian workforce by 10%!
You can believe me when I say I will do this because I have done it. In Arkansas, I reduced the state executive workforce by 14%. And there is a lot more room for improvement in Washington.
We will reduce the burden of government; we will lower the federal deficit, and we will unleash the power of the private sector. Our families will have more to spend and save for their children’s future.
Both Democratic and Republican Administrations bear responsibility for our current $31 Trillion national debt. I would like to say we will be “Debt Free in 33”. Well, it might take longer; but we must start.
I am from the heartland of America.
I am the son of Malcolm and Coral Hutchinson who were married during the Great Depression, who served our country during World War II, and who sacrificed to make sure their six children had a chance to live their dreams and to be all that God required of them.
They taught me that we are all equal and we all struggle in life. And because we struggle we need grace and compassion toward others. It is my hope that those farmland values will once again guide our nation and bring us closer together.
And if you look at our history, the United States of America has been challenged in every generation from threats abroad to civil unrest at home. And when we are tested we grow stronger.
We have learned that in times of turmoil, uncertainty, and division, America has always benefited from leaders who challenge us and give us hope. I am confident that America is ready to seek new frontiers; and that we are ready to channel the restless waves of our democracy into more freedom and more prosperity for those who follow after us.
I am running for President because I know that the best of America is ahead of us.
There is behind me, on the Courthouse wall, a statement that is the foundation of our nation: “Sovereignty rests with the people.” This means that you will decide the direction of our nation. The fate of the world’s greatest democracy is in your hands.
Thank you and May God Bless the United States of America!
The post Asa Hutchinson formally launches presidential bid appeared first on Arkansas Times.
In the world of cannabis, there might not be a more confusing or complicated issue than Delta-8. For about five years now, the psychoactive substance derived from the hemp plant has fallen outside virtually any regulatory guardrails, including those of the state medical marijuana program.
The products have proliferated across the state in smoke shops, CBD stores, gas stations and over the internet in recent years without regulation or even a minimum age to buy the products over the counter. Drive down U.S. Highway 67/167 and you’ll see a billboard advertising Delta-8 gummies and other products at a shop in Searcy.
That’s about to change.
Led by Sen. Tyler Dees (R-Siloam Springs) and Rep. Jimmy Gazaway (R-Paragould), the state legislature voted to ban all Delta-8 products. Gov. Sarah Sanders signed the bill into law on April 11.
From committee room to committee room at the state Capitol, the issue generated lively debate from Delta-8 advocates and business owners who wanted to protect the products that support their bottom lines and provide what they described as medicinal benefits to users.
Business owners and advocates, including two mothers of young children, testified against banning Delta-8, saying the products have helped their children battle serious diseases.
How did we get here?
It all started in 2018 when Congress passed the Farm Bill, legalizing hemp production for the first time since 1937 and allowing farmers to grow the marijuana-adjacent plants as long as they had a Delta-9 THC content of 0.3% or below. Delta-9 is the THC that you normally find in marijuana, including that sold in medical marijuana dispensaries.
Hemp plants produce flowers that have nonpsychoactive cannabinoids like CBD and stalks that can be used to make a variety of products from textiles to home-building materials.
The flowers produce a little bit of Delta-8 THC and a lot of CBD, which scientifically inclined individuals figured out could be altered into Delta-8 THC, which is psychoactive and similar to marijuana.
The Farm Bill did not address Delta-8, creating what some have seen as a loophole that has permitted psychoactive products similar to marijuana to be sold outside the state’s highly regulated legalized marijuana markets.
Without regulatory oversight, there has been no age limit to buy Delta-8 products and nothing to stop the products from being marketed to children.
That wasn’t OK with Gazaway and Dees, who saw Delta-8 as a danger to children that must be addressed.
Battle at the Ledge
It was no surprise that Delta-8 was addressed during the recent legislative session, but some wondered if the General Assembly would take the route of regulation, allowing the products to exist with some restrictions, or the route of an outright ban. Gazaway led the prohibition effort at the request of state Attorney General Tim Griffin, while Rep. Jeremiah Moore (R-Clarendon) introduced a bill for Delta-8 to be regulated by the Arkansas Tobacco Control Board.
Gazaway said in a recent phone interview he wasn’t that familiar with Delta-8 until the attorney general’s office asked him to spearhead the effort in the House.
“Apparently, there had been lots of reports come in to the attorney general’s office and other places about children who have suffered adverse effects from Delta-8 and accessing these substances at convenience stores all over Arkansas,” Gazaway said.
Gazaway said there was some debate among legislators about which way to go. He and Dees each said by phone recently that they were swayed toward an outright ban of the products by the fact that Arkansans rejected recreational marijuana at the polls in November. If Arkansans wanted recreational marijuana, they concluded, they would have voted for it.
In the end, the effort to ban Delta-8 products won the day and Moore’s regulatory bill was never heard in committee.
The first went to the Senate where it passed before setting off a firestorm in the House when advocates noted that the bill would have essentially banned nonpsychoative cannabinoids like CBD, CBN and CBG. The bill was later amended to protect those products.
Delta-8 advocates testified before the House Rules Committee, saying the products have medicinal benefits and that some customers like that they didn’t need a medical marijuana card to buy them.
The bill eventually passed the House and Senate easily before being signed into law by the governor in April.
The new law includes a trigger mechanism that would go into effect if the Delta-8 ban is rejected by a court. In that case, the products would be legal but regulated, although Gazaway said he does not believe it will come to that.
“From the attorneys in the governor’s office to the attorneys in the attorney general’s office, everyone I talked to believes that the ban will be upheld by a court and the regulation piece was unnecessary,” Gazaway said.
Advocates speak up
Many Delta-8 advocates spoke up during the hearings at the Capitol, including Roger Crawford, who owns CBD stores in Hot Springs and Hot Springs Village. Crawford said he already imposes a minimum age of 21 to purchase the products and lamented that he was being lumped in with some bad actors selling Delta-8 inappropriately.
“We’re wanting regulation,” he said in a recent interview. “We’ve been screaming ‘regulation’ for years. We want a 21-plus age restriction.”
After the bill passed the legislature, Crawford and his partner, Amy Willtrout, penned a letter, asking the governor to veto the bill. Crawford and Willtrout, who own the CBD stores together, said the bill would endanger businesses and consumers.
“There is no one that wants to rid the market of the synthetic dangerous chemicals that are targeting Arkansas children and young adults more than we do,” Crawford and Willtrout said in their letter.
The pair also said the new law would lead to “bad products being relabeled and repackaged under a different name” and that the bill does not ban other synthetic forms of THC. Dangerous products will still proliferate in the state, they said.
Audrey White, one of Crawford’s customers, told the House Rules Committee that she has given her 4-year-old son, Colton, Delta-8 gummies to help with issues related to cancer treatment. Colton, who sat alongside her as she spoke, was diagnosed with a stage 4 brain tumor and was treated with chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant. The treatments cause great discomfort to his gut, she said.
White balked at the drugs Colton’s doctors suggested, saying she preferred to find alternatives. Some of Colton’s doctors at Arkansas Children’s Hospital were not supportive of her interest in cannabis alternatives, she said, but others were, particularly those in the palliative care unit. The Delta-8 products have been helpful in soothing Colton’s discomfort, she said.
White said she pursued Delta-8 because she was familiar with it and because she feared medical marijuana would be too strong for her small child.
Asked what he thought of White’s comments about giving her son Delta-8 during treatment, Dees said it was important for Arkansans to follow the advice of doctors.
Gazaway was more direct.
“I was a little shocked that she admitted publicly that she gave a substance that has psychoactive properties that can be bought at a convenience store to her child who has cancer,” he said. “I thought that was not something maybe she would have wanted to have admitted publicly. There are lots of drugs that can treat cancer and relieve pain that are authorized by the FDA.”
Colton, who recently signed up for kindergarten, has made great advancements through his medical treatments and asks for Delta-8 gummies when he is uncomfortable, White said.
Despite the changes to the law, White said she would continue to find Delta-8 products in other states or over the internet to help with Colton’s discomfort.
“When you have a sick kid, you’ll do whatever it takes,” she said. “It makes me really distraught that I would have to try to find him a new product when this works so well. That’s frustrating for me after everything we’ve been through.”
The post Goodbye, Delta: Arkansas legislature banned rogue THC despite pleas from advocates appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The Internal Revenue Service is seeking volunteers for a committee to improve the federal agency and is specifically seeking applicants from Arkansas before Sunday’s deadline.
The IRS is seeking applicants for the Taxpayer Advocacy Panel, a committee of volunteers that has provided recommendations on improving the IRS over the past 20 years. The group has submitted more than 2,200 recommendations, including 201 recommendations last year, many of which were implemented, the IRS said in a press release.
The improvements have included customer callback technology, the option to get past tax returns through Free File and allowing for longer extension times for taxpayers filing returns, according to the press release.
The committee is seeking volunteers from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and abroad but is specifically asking for more candidates from 11 states, including Arkansas.
For more information, go to www.improveirs.org or apply at USAJobs.
The post Want to improve the IRS? Here’s your chance appeared first on Arkansas Times.
An investigation into the practices of Summit Utilities is underway, and Attorney General Tim Griffin requested Friday that the Arkansas Public Service Commission order the gas company to “refrain from disconnecting customers or charging late fees” until the investigation is over, or until enough information is found to set a resumption date.
Summit Utilities bought the assets of CenterPoint Energy in 2022, but it did not fully handle all operations until November. During the transition period when Summit gained full control, customers started to report monthly bills that were in some cases triple their average. Summit Utilities was accused of price gouging and bad practices.
In February, a Summit Utilities executive met with the Little Rock Board of Directors and explained that the expensive bills were because of harsh winter weather, an increased use of gas and the overall high price of natural gas in the country.
Thousands of customers filed complaints with Griffin’s office and the Public Service Commission. A class action lawsuit was also filed against the gas company, but it was dismissed in March so the Public Service Commission could properly act first. An investigation into Summit’s billing practices and natural gas costs started on March 20.
Summit Utilities recently announced its intent to resume normal collection activities, which would include late fees and disconnections for nonpayment, in July 2023. (Customers who also use Central Arkansas Water will be hit with the first rate increase of a 10-year plan in July.)
Griffin said the proposed time frame is “premature” while the investigation is active. “It is too soon to reinstitute late fees and shutoffs based upon what we know at this time,” he said in a statement.
The post AG requests that Summit Utilities not resume normal collection during investigation appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Gov. Sarah Sanders and Arkansas Education Secretary Jacob Oliva are taking the show to Texarkana and Hope today, where they’ll appear for a town hall on the LEARNS Act at noon and then give remarks at a coffee shop at 3:15 p.m.
The town hall will be at the University of Arkansas Hope–Texarkana in the Farmers Bank & Trust Workforce Center Community Room, 3501 U of A Way in Texarkana.
The 3:15 p.m. chat happens at Christian-themed HeBrews 11:1 Coffee at 121 S. Main St. in Hope.
The short notice on Tuesday’s events matches the short notice for the Jonesboro event Monday evening, held on the campus of Arkansas State University. Notice of Tuesday’s events went up on Sanders’ Facebook page around 8 a.m.
Who can make it out to a mid-day event on a Tuesday with only a few hours notice? Not school teachers or people with 9-5s.
The events will be streamed to Facebook, though. Watch the town hall here, and watch Sanders’ remarks from the coffee shop here.
Kenneth Heard, reporting for the Arkansas Advocate, gave this report of Monday’s Jonesboro town hall.
JONESBORO — Touting her new education overhaul during a town hall meeting in Jonesboro Monday evening, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders said she expects Arkansas will soon lead the nation in elementary and high school education.
“We’ll see significant changes,” she said to a crowd of about 120 in a small theater inside the Fowler Center on the Arkansas State University campus. “The good news is there’s no place to go but up. I’m tired of Arkansas being on the bottom of nearly everything. I know we have the capability to be in the top 10 in education.”
It’s a message Sanders’ administration has boasted in several town hall meetings across the state since she signed into law the $300 million LEARNS Act on March 7. The act contains an emergency clause, and many of its provisions took place immediately.
The law calls for restructuring the state’s kindergarten through 12th grade schools by increasing teacher salaries, bettering career readiness, ensuring school safety, improving state benchmark exam scores and providing early intervention measures for any students falling behind.
She’s repeatedly called the measure the “largest overhaul of the state’s educational system in Arkansas’ history.”
Sanders was basically preaching to the choir Monday. Audience members included Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan of Jonesboro, Reps. Jack Ladyman of Jonesboro and Jimmy Gazaway of Paragould, and Sen. Breanne Davis of Russellville, who was the lead sponsor of Senate Bill 294, which became Act 237 with Sanders’ signature.
Outside, though, about 20 Arkansas State University students stood by the entrance to the center in protest before Sanders’ meeting began. They held signs reading “Education, Not Indoctrination,” “Sarah Huckabee Sanders Will Not Survive the Revolution” and “WTF? Where’s The Funding?”
The students, mostly education, theater and communication majors, also chanted, “Hey, hey. Huck no. Arkansas LEARNS has got to go.”
Dean MacDonald, who is earning a master’s degree in public administration at ASU and was one of the protest’s organizers, said he feared the LEARNS Act could hurt rural schools trying to meet the law’s expectations.
“I think smaller schools are definitely at risk of having to be consolidated,” he said. “I think we’ll see it on a wide scale once this gets going.”
MacDonald also criticized the plan’s use of a voucher system to pay students who are in private schools or are home-schooled.
“That’s a scam,” he said. “Why give taxpayer money to private schools?”
Within days of the LEARNS Act passage, a group called Citizens for Arkansas Public Education and Students formed and began working to repeal it. Attorney General Tim Griffin on Monday rejected the group’s ballot title.
But inside the Arkansas State University theater Monday, any opposition was muted.
“Is it perfect?” Sanders asked. “No. But is it worthwhile to change the lives of the kids of Arkansas? Absolutely.”
Arkansas Education Secretary Jacob Oliva also attended the town hall meeting and with Sanders fielded questions from the audience.
He said lawmakers reviewed existing educational measures before developing LEARNS.
“We said, ‘We can do better,’” Oliva said. “Let’s come up with a way to do that.”
He called the act a way to help students go from “cradle to career.”
One of the key elements of LEARNS, he said, was to implement early intervention programs if a student is falling behind. Heavy emphasis will be placed upon benchmark test results of third graders.
“Because of LEARNS, we will stop early problems with long-term sustainability,” he said.
The state will use dozens of reading coaches to help students progress, Sanders added.
“If we don’t better literacy by third grade, we are setting them up for a lifetime of failure,” she said.
The act also calls for increasing the minimum yearly salary of Arkansas teachers from $36,000 to $50,000 and to give $2,000 raises to veteran teachers as a way of recruiting better teachers and retaining them in the state.
“Every teacher in the state will be rewarded for their hard work,” the governor said.
The plan may be feasible for larger school districts, but opponents are concerned that it may financially strap smaller districts.
Brookland School Superintendent Brent Bunch said he’s already created the yearly pay budget for his 240 teachers this year and, because of the rapid growth in the Craighead County town, he sees no problems meeting salaries.
Bunch said his school will have to build new facilities to accommodate the rapid increase in enrollment.
“We’re constantly growing, and I don’t see any issues,” he said. “But smaller schools may have trouble.”
Sanders said school districts receive an average of $73,000 of state funding for each teacher it employees. The money does not all go to teacher salaries, but under the LEARNS Act, 87% of that money received is now earmarked for salaries.
The act also eliminates salary caps that schools had implemented after teachers reach a certain number of years of experience.
“We value experience,” she said.
The governor said the law will begin implementation immediately and its success will be monitored in “real time” to assure its measures are working.
She added that she expects to see vast improvements in students’ educational performances in 2024-25.
The post LEARNS town hall with governor and ed secretary planned in Hope today, on heels of Jonesboro session appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Eli Cranor, the Pope County crime fiction phenom, has sold a new novel to Soho Crime. It’s called “Broiler,” and Publishers Marketplace reports that it’s about “two desperate couple whose troubles converge in the ruthless world of an Arkansas chicken processing plant.” It’s due out in 2024.
Cranor’s 2022 debut, “Don’t Know Tough,” was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best First Novel By An American Author. The award ceremony is April 27.
His follow up, “Ozark Dogs,” hit bookstores earlier this month. I recommend both highly.
The post Eli Cranor to continue streak of publishing novels every year appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Check out the new single from Brennen Leigh, a North Dakota-born singer/songwriter and talented picker who’s got something of an international cult following. Lee Ann Womack, Rodney Crowell and Charley Crocket have all recorded her songs.
“Running Out of Hope, Arkansas” is the lead single off her forthcoming album, “Ain’t Through Honky Tonkin’ Yet.” It’s about a woman who realizes life is passing her by and decides to make a break for it.
Here’s how it starts: “People only stop here because they’re passing through / and I ring them up for diesel, cigarettes and Mountain Dew / They’re headed on to Dallas or Memphis, Tennessee / I’ve never been past Little Rock and I’m damn near 33.”
The post Brennen Leigh pens a very fine country song about Arkansas appeared first on Arkansas Times.
He made it official this morning with this video.
The post Biden is running for reelection appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The parking lot of the Pulaski County Administration building at 201 S. Broadway St. will host eight food truck-style vendors this Thursday as part of Food Truck Thursdays at the County from 11 a.m.-2 p.m.
The lineup:
Lili’s Mexican Street Food
Banada Burger
JMG Mobile Grill
Rock City Dog’s
Mike’s Rolled Ice Cream
Fry Fry Crazy
K&J Treatz
Mr. Keith Kettlecorn
Here’s a link to the Facebook event page.
The post Food Truck Thursday at the County is back this week appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The Foundation for Government Accountability scored a big win in Arkansas during the legislative session with the passage of a a new law that eliminates work permits and age verification for teenage workers younger than 16. The Florida-based think tank and its lobbying arm, Opportunity Solutions Project, are working around the country to roll back child labor protections, restrict social safety net programs and block Medicaid expansion, the Washington Post reports.
Nick Stehle, the vice president for communications with the FGA and a fellow with Opportunity Solutions, is based in Central Arkansas. And Kristi Stahr, the vindictive former Pulaski County Election Commissioner, is data analyst for FGA.
From the Post article:
On the surface, the FGA frames its child worker bills as part of a larger debate surrounding parental rights, including in education and child care. But the state-by-state campaigns, the group’s leader said, help the FGA create openings to deconstruct larger government regulations.
Since 2016, the FGA’s Opportunity Solutions Project has hired 115 lobbyists across the country with a presence in 22 states, according to the nonpartisan political watchdog group Open Secrets.
“The reason these rather unpopular policies succeed is because they come in under the radar screen,” said David Campbell, professor of American democracy at the University of Notre Dame. “Typically, these things get passed because they are often introduced in a very quiet way or by groups inching little by little through grass-roots efforts.”
Minnesota and Ohio have introduced proposals this year allowing teens to work more hours or in more dangerous occupations, such as construction. A bill in Georgia would prohibit the state government from requiring a minor to obtain a work permit.
…
It’s one of several conservative groups that have long taken aim at all manner of government regulations or social safety net programs. The FGA is funded by a broad swath of ultraconservative and Republican donors — such as the Ed Uihlein Family Foundation and 85 Fund, a nonprofit connected to political operative Leonard Leo — who have similarly supported other conservative policy groups.
The youth hiring or employment bills, as they are often titled, represent growing momentum among conservatives who contend that parents and not government policy should determine whether and where 14- and 15-year-olds should work.
“When you say that a bill will allow kids to work more or under dangerous conditions, it sounds wildly unpopular,” Campbell said. “You have to make the case that, no, this is really about parental rights, a very carefully chosen term that’s really hard to disagree with.”
Also worth noting, Randy Zook, head of the Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce, told the Post the new law was “a solution looking for a problem.”
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The Pulaski County Sheriff’s Office released preliminary details of a Sunday morning homicide in which a man was accused of killing his wife.
Around 5:30 a.m. on April 23, officers responded to a home in the 10000 block of Szymanski Road in the Blue Hill community of Pulaski County. Donald Payne, 67, surrendered to the deputies for the death of his wife, Karen Payne, also 67.
Donald Payne was charged with first degree murder and was taken to the Pulaski County Regional Detention Facility with no bond, according to the sheriff’s office.
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In the part I overview of the 94th General Assembly, the For AR People team told you about the supermajority’s obsession with performative political games. In part II, Gennie Diaz and Hannah Bruner discuss the good policies Arleg left on the table, what they intentionally killed, and what they could have accomplished if they were motivated by helping, not hurting, Arkansans.
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Word came this afternoon that Arkansas Capitol Police Chief Alice Fulk was packing boxes and heading out.
Arkansas Secretary of State communication manager Chris Powell confirmed Friday afternoon that Fulk had submitted a resignation letter, effective immediately. No other information was yet available.
Fulk, 52, took over the Capitol Police in 2020. Before that, she was an assistant chief with Little Rock Police and past finalist to lead the department.
While on the Little Rock force, Fulk was among those with legal complaints about then-Chief Keith Humphrey. Fulk was one of the multiple members of the upper echelon of the department who criticized or sued the chief for allegedly retaliating against them for disagreeing with his decision to fire Officer Charles Starks after the fatal shooting of Bradley Blackshire.
The furor on the force eventually died down, but Humphrey has since retired.
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Arkansas medical marijuana sales yesterday, the 4/20 marijuana holiday, more than tripled the daily average for dispensary sales, according to state figures.
Medical marijuana patients spent $2,378,289 at the state’s 38 dispensaries yesterday, more than tripling the approximately $750,000 that patients spend each day on average. The amount was also 14% higher than last year’s sales.
The amount sold yesterday, approximately 500 pounds, was 34% higher than last year’s total.
The state’s first dispensary opened in May 2019 and the first 4/20 for Arkansas dispensaries occurred in 2020. Here are the 4/20 sales at the state’s dispensaries for the past four years:
April 20, 2020 – 21 dispensaries – 133 pounds, $750,970
April 20, 2021 – 32 dispensaries – 283 pounds, $1,697,865
April 20, 2022 – 38 dispensaries – 374 pounds, $2,080,057
April 20, 2023 – 38 dispensaries – approximately 500 pounds, $2,378,289
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Little Rock plant-based chef Alicia Watson, owner of the culinary wellness business, Vito & Vera, hopes to be one of three women selected to compete in the Vegan Women’s Summit Top Chef Challenge in New York City on May 19.
Watson is no stranger to cooking competitions. Last year she traveled to Florida to compete in the Food Network’s reality television cooking competition “Big Restaurant Bet,” and won the competition cooking plant-based (when the challenges allowed).
The three finalists for the Vegan Women Summit will be selected by online voting. Watson is the only competitor from Arkansas and could be competing against women from all over the country and chefs as far away as New Zealand and Tokyo.
You can vote for Watson here.
During The VWS Top Chef Challenge, three chefs from around the country will be invited to show off their culinary talents by preparing their best plant-based dishes using ingredients from the participating brands. The dishes will be judged by participating executives, Sherene Jagla, Chief Demand Officer of Impossible Foods, Pete Speranza, CEO of Wicked Kitchen, and Andre Menezes, CEO of TiNDLE. The winner will be crowned live at The Vegan Women Summit.
VOTING CLOSES FRIDAY, APRIL 28, 2023, 11:59PM PACIFIC STANDARD TIME.
Any person above the age of 18 years can submit a vote once using a valid email address. Votes sent from disposable email addresses will be rejected. The organizers reserve the right to cancel votes they believe to be fraudulent. Voting results are not legally binding and speaking spots are not guaranteed. By entering your email you agree to receiving marketing emails and other communications from VWS.
The 2023 Vegan Women Summit will take place in New York City and will be a multi-day event featuring the world’s top CEOs, celebrities, investors, and more. Attendees will get to experience some of the most cutting edge sustainable brands across the future of food, fashion, beauty, and more – including debut products not yet on the market.
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A second campus in the University of Arkansas System is now publicly expressing opposition to a proposal that the system affiliate with a nonprofit organization that would buy the for-profit University of Phoenix.
The University of Arkansas at Little Rock‘s Faculty Senate and the Student Government Association have adopted resolutions opposing the plan, which is coming up for a vote before the UA System’s Board of Trustees on Monday.
Though the UA-Little Rock faculty senate approved its resolution April 7, we didn’t learn of the matter until today. The SGA letter of opposition was undated.
You can read the faculty senate’s letter to Bobbitt along with its resolution as well as the SGA’s letter at these links.
As you may recall, the faculty senate at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville also recently adopted a resolution opposing the proposed acquisition.
At UA-Little Rock, 36 faculty senators’ typed names were at the end of their letter to Bobbitt and the system’s board of trustees.
By all accounts, Phoenix has had a troubled financial and regulatory history. Supporters of the acquisition, though, say Phoenix has changed and is no longer plagued with its past problems.
But faculty members questioned that assessment. They wrote: “More importantly, it is not at all clear that University of Phoenix really has changed. This income stream may not yet have run dry, but it most certainly is running crooked. In early 2020, three years after the so-called re-birth of Phoenix, the U.S. Veterans Administration stopped allowing veterans to use their GI Bill benefits at University of Phoenix. Six months later, they lifted the prohibition — but only after Phoenix had made requested changes. The University of Phoenix listing still has a cautionary warning on the VA’s School Comparison Tool site.”
The faculty letter closed with this statement: “We at UA Little Rock support this goal of providing accessible higher education to all Arkansans. Indeed, this is part of our mission as a metropolitan institution, which is why UA Little Rock has offered extensive night and later online programs since our inception. We urge you to stop looking outward for the solution, and to start looking inward; invest your time and energy toward expanding access to courses and programs at the existing University of Arkansas campuses. Such efforts will provide sustainable benefits to Arkansans and offer much greater long-term value to the System and state than will be an affiliation with the much-tarnished University of Phoenix.”
SGA President Thomas Forcum said in his letter, “This acquisition does not meet your stated goal of providing service to adult Arkansans without college degrees, as fewer than 1,000 University of Phoenix students reside in Arkansas.”
The acquisition plan has been under consideration about two years but only came to the public’s attention in late January. Bobbitt has said the acquisition would not involve any public funds and that Phoenix would not become a part of the UA System. Rather, an Arkansas-based nonprofit that would affiliate with the UA System, Transformative Education Services Inc. or TES Inc.would buy Phoenix and gradually convert it to a nonprofit.
In extolling the proposed deal, Bobbitt has said no public funds would be involved but that the UA System would receive $20 million annually from a licensing agreement.
But Forcum wrote, “The resources involved in this deal would be better spent at in-state schools. We believe the respect that comes with the University of Arkansas name is invaluable; therefore, major risks to that name are unacceptable. By risking harm to its name, we believe the University of Arkansas system risks long term financial harm to itself, its hardworking faculty and staff, current students, and alumni.”
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Sarah Huckabee Sanders Eats A Kid https://t.co/NtjpcYozUM pic.twitter.com/mxXeTc5ZJ1
— The Onion (@TheOnion) April 21, 2023
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Cheers to the marg devotees who turned out (and turned up their cups, and turned in their votes) during a thunderstorm for the sake of the citrus. Staff photographer Brian Chilson was there to capture the rainy, lime-garnished action.
Arkansas Times Margarita Festival 2023 by Brian Chilson 1 of 114 The post Arkansas Times Margarita Fest: A slideshow appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A divisive resolution the Saline County Quorum Court adopted this week amid fire and fury to censor content in library children’s sections won’t actually change anything.
The measure’s wording is vague enough to be meaningless:
“The Library should enact policies to relocate materials that are not subject matter or age appropriate for children, due to their sexual content or imagery, to an area that is not accessible to children.”
Not to worry, Saline County Library Director Patty Hector said. Providing age-appropriate materials in the children’s section has been her team’s game all along, so no action required, she said.
The measure that passed Monday at the densely attended Quorum Court meeting is a resolution, meaning it’s just a long-winded suggestion with fancy wording. Resolutions lack the force of law.
“It’s just a recommendation that we proactively look at our books to see what has sexual content, and remove it,” Hector said. “I stand behind what my staff has chosen. They are careful, considerate, well-trained librarians.”
A career librarian who’s been at the Saline County system for 7 years, Hector said her libraries are in compliance with state law. The Saline County Library has already tweaked wording in its policies to match Act 372, the controversial new state censorship law that villainizes librarians as evil tempters and temptresses of knowledge. Act 372 adds local elected officials into the multi-step process of reviewing materials to determine if they’re appropriate library fodder, meaning county Quorum Court members and city boards will be asked to weigh in when patrons challenge library materials. While the new state law says these decisions by local governmental bodies are final, the First Amendment has something to say about all this. Arkansas’s new law just further politicizes the issue, giving us all extra chances to get agitated.
One man speaking in favor of removing books from the library children’s section got so agitated during his testimony at the Saline County Quorum Court meeting Monday night that his internal defibrillator went off, shocking his heart back into action and causing quite a commotion as he yelled and clutched his chest.
Also agitated are the Saline County Republican Women, who have been busy on their Facebook page in recent months advocating for more censorship in the county’s two libraries. In their posts, the Republican women’s group identified such dangers as worm-on-worm hermaphrodite marriage, a boy who wears skirts and a family with two dads.
Worms are hermaphrodites, meaning they all possess both male and female organs. Does that make them gay? Unclear. Regardless, Saline Republican women reject the worm lifestyle.
Passing measures that don’t actually change anything, but that make lots of noise and get people mad at each other, has become standard operating procedure among Arkansas right-wingers of late. See: the drag show ban that doesn’t actually ban any drag shows, the bathroom bill that simply reiterates already existing laws against peeping toms and sexual assault, the stop-the-steal prohibition on ballot collection boxes that have never even been used here.
Caught in the middle of just such tempest, librarian Hector said she’s trying remain steady. “I get where he’s coming from,” she said of Jim Whitley, the Saline Quorum Court member who sponsored the resolution. “Nobody wants to have books that hurt children.” And because her librarians choose their content with care, he can rest easy there, she said.
In the children’s section meant for ages 0-7, “The books that we have that have sexual content for children are very specifically for use by a parent who has a child who has been molested, or it’s sex ed at the most basic levels. ‘Where do babies come from?’ ‘What are our bodies like?'” And a library rule requires anyone under 12 to be supervised by a parent or guardian at all times.
But is all this uproar really about protecting children? Hector notes that neither the Saline County Republican Women nor anyone else has made formal challenges to any books in the children’s section recently. Filling out a paper slip asking for a book to be reviewed for appropriateness is not only the obvious first step; it’s also the first step for anyone following the proper procedure that’s existed for years. This first step is reiterated in the new Act 372.
A decades-old court case over the Harry Potter series prohibits librarians from relocating books to make them less accessible, so Hector said there would be no way to accommodate the resolution from Monday night, even if she felt like she needed to move a book or two (which, to be clear, she doesn’t). “I’m between a rock and a hard place.”
Her fear is that shuffling books around to high shelves or back rooms is not the end game. Hector looks eastward to Craighead County, where what started as performative hand-wringing over a book in the children’s section about two penguin dads devolved into a successful effort to defund the library system. She looks westward to Crawford County, where a group of Christian ideologues that call themselves the River Valley Elders have for months fanned panic over books that include gay or transgender characters or themes.
The chillingly named Watchmen on the Wall are on the offensive against Crawford County librarians.
Other marginalized groups in the Saline County book banners’ line of fire include Black people. Black people are killed or wrongfully detained by police at a much higher rate than white people, but acknowledging such is “a Critical Race Theory agenda,” Saline County Republican woman Stephanie Duke said.
A children’s book to help explain to Black children that they’re statistically more likely to be hurt or wrongfully detained by police is CRT, book banners say.
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Now that abortion is illegal in nearly every instance in Arkansas, surely state legislators were gung-ho to pass laws in the recently concluded session to make sure pregnant mothers and newborns have more support, right?
Not a chance. The Arkansas Advocate’s Tess Virbin surveys the legislation aimed at improving maternal health filed this session and finds that most all of it got beat.
Rep. Aaron Pilkington (R-Knoxville), wrong on most issues, proposed several commonsense measures to help pregnant mothers that got nowhere with his colleagues.
Pilkington said Arkansas policymakers should “put our money where our mouth is” in light of the abortion ban.
“The next fight is to take care of mothers and children so they have what they need in order to have happy and healthy pregnancies,” he said.
Improving outcomes for pregnant Arkansans and their babies was within the state’s ability but not important enough to most lawmakers this legislative session, said Laura Kellams, Northwest Arkansas director of Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families.
“We have the highest maternal mortality rate, so we should be prioritizing [these policies] the most, but we didn’t,” Kellams said.
Pilkington’s most consequential proposal would have extended Medicaid coverage for new mothers from 60 days to 12 months, as the vast majority of other states do. It would’ve cost the state less than $2 million per year. That apparently was too much to bear in a session when lawmakers approved more than $120 million in tax cuts that will overwhelmingly benefit wealthy Arkansans and out-of-state shareholders, vouchers for rich families to send their kids to private school, the divestment of state funds from financial firms that consider environmental or social factors in their investments and the initial funding of a half billion dollar prison.
And Little Rock Democrat Rep. Ashley Hudson’s bid to provide an incest exception to the state’s abortion ban? It didn’t even make it out of committee.
The post What did the legislature do to help maternal health in Arkansas? Next to nothing. appeared first on Arkansas Times.
We’ve done a fair bit of reporting on the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts renovation from afar, sifting through pictures and sneaking glances as we walked or drove by MacArthur Park, but — as you might expect — getting to step inside this mammoth is another experience entirely. If you were one of the lucky ones who snagged a ticket to the grand opening before reservations filled up, you know firsthand that there’s simply too much dazzling stimuli to absorb (much less write about) in a single visit. Check out our conversations with Executive Director Victoria Ramirez and Curator Theresa Bembnister. And here are a few highlights you’ve gotta see in person:
Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts by Brian Chilson 1 of 10 Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts Despite the entire facility being something of a work of art, the most arresting feature might be the ceiling. Above the grand staircases of the massive atrium — which now intuitively unites a previously Frankensteinian facility — over 6,000 slats of differently sized plywood have been individually strung, no two pieces being parallel as they follow the elegantly undulating shape of the roof, the space between each board creating geometric patterns. According to Juliane Wolf — one of the design principals at Studio Gang, the acclaimed firm responsible for envisioning the new AMFA — the installation process involved placing a projection on the floor, which was then used to shoot lasers onto the ceiling in order to mark the hangpoints. It’s a detail like this that tempts me to say that the AMFA might be as, if not more, architecturally interesting as Bentonville’s Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
Also under this stunningly intricate vaulting, the Cultural Living Room is where I found myself most drawn to. A furniture-filled, glass-enclosed semicircle suspended over the front entrance of the building, the only stated purpose for this space is relaxation, a spot for the liminal time before or after whatever officially brought you to the museum. The Cultural Living Room perhaps errs on the sleek and bougie side at this point, prioritizing magazine-worthy vibes over maximum seating and hominess, but in time it’ll likely be broken in and feel more inviting. Through its gigantic slanted windows, you’ll find a panoramic view of Little Rock that you’ve definitely never seen before and a new appreciation for downtown structures that you’ve long grown numb to.
It’s hard not to focus on the flashiness of the building, but the art inside is just as worthy of exalting. Much like the overall design’s thrust toward giving the AMFA more cohesion, the galleries — all of which were endowed and named by Harriet and Warren Stephens in recognition of individuals and groups who were critical players in the museum’s history — have been relocated to reside in conjunction, emphasizing the interconnectedness of all the work on display and making the wandering experience that much more instinctive. My favorite part of the layout is the fact that you’re forced to walk underneath a colorful and constellatory installation by Anne Lindberg in order to find your way to “Together,” the premiere exhibition.
Derek Porter/Arkansas Museum of Fine ArtsAnne Lindberg (Iowa City, Iowa, 1962 – ), “andante green” (detail), 2012, cotton thread and staples, 24 x 18 x 6 ft., Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, Nevada.Once inside “Together,” I rushed to the pieces I’d encountered so many times online — like “Carving Out Time, Scene 1: Morning” by LaToya M. Hobbs, “Triptych (3.20.15, 5.21.15, 6.8.15)” by Oliver Lee Jackson and “Meet You There” by Alison Elizabeth Taylor — and learned that they are far more impressively vast and far more accessibly human than I could have imagined from a distance.
Ariston JacksLaToya M. HobbsThe post A first look at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Victoria Ramirez became the executive director at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in October 2019. A lifelong player in the world of museums, especially in moments of growth, she previously served as the director of both the El Paso Museum of Art and the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin as well as the education director at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Brian ChilsonSTATE-OF-THE-ART: The new AMFA building — designed by Studio Gang — is so architecturally interesting that it rivals Bentonville’s Crystal Bridges.You started working at the AMFA during a pretty transitional time, when plans for the construction of a new building were already significantly underway. How was the project pitched to you? What challenges did the museum have that the improvements were designed to meet? The building really needed to do two things. It needed to be state-of-the-art. It needed to function like a 21st century art museum. It needed to be able to store, preserve and display its collection. It needed to be able to function like a 21st century art school. That’s part of who we are. We needed to have a state-of-the-art theater, lecture hall and educational spaces. The second thing is that it needed to be able to serve people and be a place that people wanted to go to. And I think we’ve achieved that with the design. It’s a beautiful building, inside and out. It’s an inspiring place to be. I think people will really feel that specialness when they come to the museum. That’s what we want museums to be, to be these unique, really nurturing places. It can’t just function; it’s got to be a magnet that draws people. And a place that people want to come back to.
Now that you’re on the other side, what’s really special about this facility? What are some unique features that you love?
Oh my gosh, there’s so many. I love the fact that we’re located in a park. I love the fact that landscape architecture and the natural world is a part of the museum experience, not only when you come to the museum, but when you’re inside. With all of our windows and glass, it really creates this sort of seamless relationship between the interior and the exterior. I love the fact that you could be driving down Ninth Street or on the south side of the park and you can peer into the museum and see what’s happening. To me, it’s almost like there are no secrets. I love the fact that when you come in, it’s very intuitive, the way that you navigate the museum. You can stand at certain points in the atrium and you can see clear through north to south. What you can also see are all the amenities of the museum: the restaurant, the store, the school, the lecture hall, the theater, the galleries and even the bathrooms. It’s not a maze.
Also, in this new building, there are a lot of open social spaces. There’s a great signature space called the Cultural Living Room, which is really going to be Little Rock’s living room. It’s a place where anyone can come in and bring their laptop, make friends or grab a drink or a coffee, before or after walking through the galleries or going to see a performance.
The last thing I think is so special about this building is that it’s really, really stunning. Every material for the floor and the walls and the ceilings and the lights was so carefully selected. We want people to realize that they’re in this kind of gift to the community when they come to the museum. When you’re in a special space where people have taken a lot of thought and care into crafting, I think people feel that.
Brian ChilsonARRESTING: The Cultural Living Room and the intricate ceiling work throughout the atrium are some of the AMFA’s most striking new features.How has programming been expanded in light of the renovations?
Well, one of the strengths of this museum is our legacy programs. I’m really pleased to say that we will continue to have an art school, but we’ve also modernized it a bit. In addition to classes, we’re offering workshops, and offering expanded programs for children. We’re continuing the Children’s Theatre legacy of offering performances for young people and for families, but again it’s been modernized. One of our very first performances will be “The Very Hungry Caterpillar,” which we know is near and dear to a lot of people and will just be fun and familiar. But it’s a performance that involves over 70 puppets, and puppetry has been one of our relatively new offshoots of the Children’s Theatre program. For us, theater has always been about main stage, but now it’s about playwriting and puppetry and costuming.
We’ll also have a range of programs for both children and adults. We’ll have a whole mobile audio tour that people can access through their phones. We’ll have regular tours with one of our fabulous volunteer docents, where visitors can learn more about the building and the art on view. And we’re branching out into more performing artists. In addition to some of the artist talks, we have concerts coming up. We have films that we’ll be adding to the schedule. We have a performance with Ballet Arkansas coming up. Coming to MacArthur Park will really be an opportunity to see a broad spectrum of the arts.
In January, the AMFA announced that it would be partnering with the Arkansas Cinema Society and Ballet Arkansas. Could you speak to those alliances as well as any other collaborations that are on the horizon?
What was really interesting about both of them is that they, like us, have a statewide commitment. All three of us as organizations have Arkansas in our names and we are committed to serving the people in this state. In talking with them, we learned that Ballet Arkansas was really interested in performances in nontraditional spaces. While we have a formal theater, they’re interested in some experimentation. Given our brand-new building, we could be that venue and backdrop for them. They certainly have gotten to know our collection a bit, and they’re looking at some works and thinking about the intersection of dance and visual arts. There’s so much overlap there. The Arkansas Cinema Society was the same way. They’re interested in expanding their programming, they’re interested in exploring multidisciplinary programming, and what the intersection of art and film looks like.
Brian ChilsonWe are talking to some other organizations right now. Some of them are smaller organizations, too, because one of the things we can offer is our space. So more partnerships to come. They may not all be formal partnerships per se. Sometimes, a great collaboration for an evening can really be something very interesting. In fact, we have in July a partnership that we’re doing with a handful of other museums in our region, bringing curators and artists from throughout our Delta/Mid-South region. We’re working with Crystal Bridges, the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth. I think a lot of cultural organizations across the country realize there’s so much value in working together. When you do that, you really can oftentimes create a more lasting or impactful program than when it’s just one organization going at it on their own.
The post Balancing Art & People: A Q&A with Victoria Ramirez appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Editor wanted. Come work at the Arkansas Times!
ISO witty, flexible journalist with institutional knowledge of Arkansas politics and culture. The ideal candidate should have reporting experience, strong editing chops, the ability to write and edit for print and web, the ability to manage contributors’ deadlines and payments; and a passion for developing editorial assignments in news, politics, culture and food.
Arkansas Times is a progressive news source, so we’re looking for someone who can both break stories and offer some perspective on why those stories matter. The person in this role will be responsible for producing, editing and planning content in collaboration with other editors.
Full-time. Based in Little Rock. Send resume and clips to austin@arktimes.com.
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Theresa Bembnister is one of three curators at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, along with Brian J. Lang and Catherine Walworth. Before joining the AMFA in 2020, Bembnister worked at the Akron Art Muum in Ohio and the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art in Manhattan, Kansas. She provided us with some inside knowledge about the exhibitions the museum is unveiling as part of its grand reopening.
Let’s start by talking about “Together,” the lead exhibition accompanying the reopening of the AMFA. How was it dreamed up?
“Together” is really about celebrating the fact that we can finally be back together with all of our guests after the museum has been closed to the public for so many years. It’s this joyous reflection on themes of togetherness. We’re dividing it up between ideas of together with friends and family (and we mean family in the broadest sense), together with community (however you want to see that word) and also together with nature.
Brian Chilson ART MEETS ARCHITECTURE: At the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts.And the works in the exhibition, some of them fall into more than one category. When you walk through the door, you’ll see some photographs by an artist named Sarah Sense. She lives in California, but she has Choctaw and Chitmacha Native American heritage. The Chitimacha reservation is in this very bayou-esque land in Louisiana and she traveled through with a boat and took a lot of photographs. Afterwards, she talked to people on the land about what their idea of this place was and she took the words and stenciled them on top of the photographs that she created. She also cut the photographs into strips and wove them using basket techniques that were handed down throughout the generations. So that work is both about nature, because she’s showing photographs of her ancestral homeland, and also about community, because she made it with the help of other people.
Brian ChilsonTHOUGHTFULLY CURATED: The premiere exhibition accompanying the reopening of the AMFA, “Together,” explores themes of communion.Another one of the new exhibitions, “Drawn to Paper,” is an assembly of pieces that exist in the AMFA’s permanent collection. Tell me about that.
The Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts is known for its drawing collection. We had a former director, Townsend Wolfe, who led the museum for decades. He decided in the early ’70s that he really wanted to focus the institution’s collecting activities on drawing. He thought the institution could make its mark by collecting drawings because they’re unique works of art and they’re relatively affordable compared to paintings and sculpture.
With “Drawn to Paper,” we wanted to highlight some of the best works in the collection. We have the largest collection of works by an artist named John Marin outside of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. He’s known for his watercolors. They kind of hover in between abstraction and realistic depiction of things. To me, watercolor is one of the most difficult mediums because if you mess up, it’s hard to fix it. He just has this magical touch with the brush. He’ll make a mark and it just seems perfectly predetermined.
“Tears of Chiwen” by Sun Xun is the first-ever exhibition in the AMFA’s New Media Gallery. What makes it special?
The New Media Gallery is what they call a black box space in the art world. It’s basically a really slender room. The walls are painted black. You go in through curtains, there’s benches and the work is projected on the wall. Picking Sun Xun’s work, which is animation based off of his incredible drawings, I thought it would create a bridge, like a way for people to approach new media that would feel somewhat comfortable and familiar. It’s also really fast-paced, and visually exciting animation. It’s a series of vignettes loosely based on the story of the chiwen dragon.
Conceptually, Sun Xun is really interested in history and culture and the ways in which information about those two things are dispersed. He was born shortly after the Cultural Revolution in China. He realized that the stories he learned in school about the Cultural Revolution in his history book were very different from what he was told by his parents. And so he grew up with this suspicion of the official, government-sanctioned story of history vs. what the oral history version of things are. “Tears of Chiwen” is from 2017, so it’s a little older, but it’s the first time it’s been exhibited in a museum in the United States and I think it’s really relevant to so many of the cultural conversations we’re having right now. If you think about all these debates that are happening in our state legislatures around the country about how we can and cannot talk about the history of our nation, I think Sun Xun’s work is really applicable to those conversations.
The AMFA is also debuting two installations. How is your thinking different when it comes to an installation rather than an exhibition?
Nash Baker/Arkansas Museum of Fine ArtsNatasha Bowdoin (West Kennebunk, Maine, 1981 – ), “Power Flower” (detail), acrylic on cut wood panel and wall, Installation commissioned by Rice Public Art for the Anderson Biological Laboratory, Rice University, Houston, Texas, 2021. Image courtesy of the artist and the Moody Center for the Arts.They’re different in that they will be up longer. Anne Lindberg’s installation will be up for three years and Natasha Bowdoin’s installation will be up for two years. Also, they’re site-specific in the sense that each artist traveled here and made the work specifically in response to the architecture of the building.
Natasha was here for pretty much the entire month of December. Her installation is called “Spring Song.” She makes these things that she calls blooms out of a plywood type of board. She has them CNC routed and she paints on top of them. They become these sort of flower garden scapes. They’re flat, but they’re sculptures. She layers them almost like stage scenery. She also paints the walls. If you’ve driven down or walked down Ninth Street recently, you might have noticed that on the north side of the building, there’s a really big window. It’s like the size of a billboard. Once all the curtains and the signs come down and we open up, you will be able to look through that window and see Natasha’s installation.
Anne Lindberg was here for a week in March. She works with miles of a really thick cotton string and she pulls it from wall to wall and staples it in place. Her work is installed above you so you’ll be able to walk underneath it. When light goes through it, it creates this really ethereal soft glow of the colors above you. It’s mostly this really pretty blue and green and yellow with a little bit of sherbet orange and lavender coming through. She’s really inspired by the colors of the landscape around the building.
What do we have to look forward to in the coming months and years?
What I can say is that we will be showing more international artists and a more diverse roster of artists. Also, since so much of our collection is paper drawings, those all have to be switched out, because if they’re on display for too long, they’ll be damaged by the light. We will be rotating works in our permanent collection about every six months. When we use the word “permanent,” that doesn’t mean that every work is permanently going to be on display; it just means that the museum owns the work. So if you come back in six months, you’re going to see new things on the wall. I can promise that for sure.
The post Covering the Walls: A Q&A with Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts curator Theresa Bembnister appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Philander Smith alum Terrell Starr is on a break from covering the war in Ukraine and visiting his alma mater to talk about his work as a globetrotting independent journalist with serious geopolitical chops.
Starr will speak at the Kendall Nugent Center on the Philander campus at 7 p.m. Doors open at 6:30 p.m., and no RSVP is required for this free event. Starr’s appearance is part of the long-running Bless the Mic series.
We’re big fans of Starr’s bighearted approach to getting the story out of a war zone while also doing all he can to help ease the suffering of besieged Ukrainians. Providing this public service while rocking an eye-catching Santa-adjacent ensemble lands him squarely in the legend category in our book.
The college is at 900 W. Daisy L. Gatson Bates Dr. in Little Rock.
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Let’s everyone try to remain calm. Whataburger, the Texas-based fast food burger giant with regular and spicy ketchup, is opening its first Central Arkansas location Wednesday, April 26, at 17100 Chenal Parkway, FOX 16 KLRT-TV reports.
When I was a small child I wondered why my Texas family always raved about “water burgers.”
We’ve certainly come a long way, baby.
This will the be tenth Whataburger location in Arkansas joining one in Texarkana, Siloam Springs, Springdale, Rogers, Magnolia, Fort Smith, El Dorado and two in Fayetteville.
In the past year Whataburger locations have been announced for Benton, North Little Rock and Searcy.
If you want to show up to the opening in style, you can grab a Whataburger Igloo Fanny Pack by clicking the image below and exploring the gifts tab.
The post The wait is almost over: Little Rock Whataburger opens next week appeared first on Arkansas Times.
THE ROOTS
SATURDAY 4/29. The Momentary, Bentonville. 8 p.m. $25-$55.
The Roots — superstar hip-hop collective led by Questlove and Black Thought that eschews beats and samples for jazzy, progressive live instrumentation — have served as Jimmy Fallon’s house band for almost 15 years. Regardless of whether that makes you like them more or less, their nightly submission to an international audience of millions serves as a guarantee that they’re one of the tightest and most comfortable groups performing right now. If you’re the type to bristle at mainstream approval, just glance at their credentials, which include starting on the streets of Philadelphia and ending up in Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time for 1999’s “Things Fall Apart.”
KOKOKO! — an electronic group from the Democratic Republic of Congo who’s known for fashioning their instruments out of literal junk — will kick off this outdoor gig.
Tickets are available here.
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North Little Rock police have identified the victim in a homicide this week as 57-year-old Jimmy Dale Turner of North Little Rock.
Late Monday night, officers responded to the 500 block of W. 17th Street in reference to a subject being shot and found a male victim suffering from at least one gunshot wound, according to a report from the North Little Rock Police Department.
The police department has asked anyone with information on the incident to contact the department’s tip line at 501-680-8439 or call Detective Coburn at 501-771-7155.
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The last major piece of legislation to come out of the 94th General Assembly was a Gov. Sarah Sanders-supported income tax cut plan. Proponents of the policy, which will cut the state individual and corporate income tax rates by $124 million a year, say the new law is a game changer for everyday Arkansans, arguing the policy puts more money back into people’s pockets.
As nice as this sounds, the messaging is inaccurate. The nonprofit group Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families says the policy benefits only the wealthiest Arkansans; the 80% of Arkansans with moderate to lower incomes will not see substantial savings from the cuts.
Additionally, supporters argue the cuts will lead to increased investment and job creation, which they say has potential to benefit our working class. Lower taxes could incentivize corporations to repatriate overseas profits, which could be reinvested domestically and stimulate economic growth, proponents say.
But this is not the economic reality here in Arkansas; the new cuts not only aid the wealthy, they also help large, out-of-state corporations. Moreover, income tax cuts do not necessarily lead to trickle-down benefits for working class people.
Instead, the new policy will likely exacerbate income inequality — meaning more state wealth will be concentrated into the hands of a few. The majority of workers in our state will continue to struggle with stagnant wages and rising living costs.
Income tax cut repercussionsIn addition to how these cuts endanger state safety nets for hardworking people, let’s take a look at other potential fallouts:
- Reduced state revenue: Eliminating state income tax would result in a loss of revenue for the state government, which could impact funding not only for public services programs but also infrastructure projects.
- Reliance on other revenue sources: If income tax is eliminated, Arkansas may have to get creative and rely on other sources of revenue to fund programs mentioned above. This means increases in sales tax or property tax, which negatively impacts low-income folks. Middle and working class people spend a larger portion of income on consumer goods. Sales + property tax increases would really hurt those of us simply trying to make ends meet.
- Potential economic growth? Not so fast. Proponents argue that eliminating our state income tax will stimulate economic growth for Arkansas, as it could make the state more attractive to businesses and high-income earners who are looking for tax savings. However this effect is not guaranteed; growth has worked in other states that have much larger populations and robust tourism industries, which Arkansas lacks. Potential benefits to the state economy are also contingent on the availability of skilled labor and infrastructure; Arkansas lacks both skilled labor and reliable infrastructure.
- Increased income inequality: Eliminating state income tax could exacerbate income inequality, as higher-income earners would benefit the most from the tax cut while lower-income residents would be left with fewer public resources. Increased income inequality leads to higher mortality rates, poorer education scores, greater social inequality, and lower economic growth over time.
Data-driven solutions that help working peopleUnfortunately, our state legislature did little to alleviate economic anxiety for everyday Arkansans this past session. But there are things lawmakers can and should do if they truly believe in helping hardworking people get ahead. Here are a few examples:
- Increasing the minimum wage: Raising minimum wage helps low-wage and hourly workers earn a decent wage, which in turn reduces reliance on state programs. Arkansas already took this matter into our own hands when we passed a minimum wage increase through a 2018 ballot initiative.
- Strengthening worker protections: Stronger labor laws means fairer wages and better working conditions. The bummer is that Arkansas has abysmal protections for workers and as a right to work state, it’s difficult for unions to generate membership. If Arkansas wants to strengthen worker protections, we need to elect lawmakers interested in helping working people, not big industries and special interests.
- Expanding access to education and training: Access to affordable education and training can help folks develop new skills which can lead to better paying jobs. The legislature has prioritized this through expansion of votech programs and scholarships.
- Providing affordable, accessible health care: Access to affordable health care helps working people, including rural Arkansans, avoid financial hardship. No one should go broke just because they get sick. Arleg has done a few things to help shore up rural health care access but we still have a lot of work to do.
- Providing affordable, safe housing: Affordable housing policies like rent control and subsidies for low-income renters not only helps people get ahead, it also keeps us safer. Unfortunately, Arleg has not prioritized safe, affordable housing. If we want our lawmaker to usher in housing protections, we must elect leaders who will cater to renters and homeowners over landlords and commercial realtors.
People-first policyPolicies that prioritize worker protections, access to education and training, and access to affordable healthcare and housing are proven to help working people get ahead. But right now, our state government is more interested in protecting those at the top than helping the majority of Arkansas make ends meet.
Arkansas are proud, hard working people; we deserve state leaders who will prioritize meaningful tax policy that benefits all Arkansans. For AR People will continue to fight for your right to a fairer, better Arkansas.
The post Despite what proponents say, Arkansas’s new income tax cuts won’t help working-class folks get ahead appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A shooting on West 36th Street in Little Rock left one man dead Tuesday, according to the latest from the Little Rock Police Department. The exact location of the shooting was not reported, but it was near the Fair Oaks Apartments off John Barrow Road.
Officers responded to a call around 8 p.m. Tuesday, and found 47-year-old Derek Wilborn with gunshot wounds. He was transported to a local hospital where he later died.
The investigation is ongoing. The LRPD has reported 16 homicides in 2023, as of Tuesday. One additional death not included in their tally was from an officer-involved shooting in January.
Investigation is ongoing pic.twitter.com/3xMYf54eQg
— Little Rock Police (@LRpolice) April 19, 2023
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An inmate serving time for a gruesome hammer attack was discovered missing from Pulaski County Regional Detention Facility this morning and a pair of investigations are underway to find out what happened.
Henri Hatten, 56, of Little Rock, was discovered missing during a headcount at the jail this morning. Hatten was serving time at the jail while waiting for space in the Arkansas Department of Corrections, according to a tweet from the Pulaski County Sheriff’s office.
Hatten is listed in court records as Henri Dubois Hatten but has used several aliases, including Frederick Randolph, Henri Hatton, William Hatten and Howard Hatten.
In February, Hatten pleaded guilty to domestic battery in the first degree, a class B felony, in which he faced five to 40 years and a fine of up to $15,000.
On March 30, Circuit Judge Karen Whatley denied Hatten’s attempt to withdraw his guilty plea and sentenced him to 35 years in the Arkansas Department of Correction.
Earlier this month, John Lynch of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette recounted the events that led to Hatten’s conviction. Prosecutors said Hatten attacked his 51-year-old romantic partner, Sherice Johnson, with a hammer so severely that her brain was exposed. Johnson survived the attack and testified at Hatten’s sentencing.
Here’s how the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette described it:
That morning, Johnson said Hatten came into the bathroom looking for his wallet. He left when she told him she didn’t know where it was but he quickly returned to ask her for money, Johnson said. When she told him she didn’t have any cash, he swung at her with a hammer they kept in the kitchen.
The first blow to the head knocked her into the bathtub, she said, describing for the judge how he kept after her with the tool, hitting her in the face and head before she could flee the apartment. Hatten left in her car before police arrived, leaving the broken hammer behind, with officers finding Johnson bleeding in the street with brain matter exposed.
Deputy prosecutor Justin Harper showed the judge photographs of the bloody bathroom and hammer, with the judge saying the pictures were more gruesome than some murder crime-scene photographs she’d seen.
Court records list Hatten’s address as 4700 W. 24th Street in Little Rock. The Democrat-Gazette reported the incident took place at a home on Howard Street.
Anyone with information on Hatten can call the Sheriff’s office at 501-340-6963 or leave an anonymous tip at 501-340-8477 (TIPS).
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Two-month-old Kaia Pennington died four days after she arrived at Arkansas Children’s Hospital. Following an autopsy, her father, Tamar Pennington, was charged with capital murder, according to the Little Rock Police Department on Tuesday.
The infant arrived at the hospital on April 14 in “critical condition suffering from severe internal and external injuries,” the LRPD report stated. Detectives interviewed both parents, but the mother, 21-year-old Keiaura Smith, was not charged. Tamar Pennington, 22, was charged with first degree battery. The father’s charges were upgraded after Kaia Pennington’s death on April 18.
Investigation is ongoing pic.twitter.com/7cVETZdVBQ
— Little Rock Police (@LRpolice) April 18, 2023
As of Tuesday, the LRPD has reported 15 homicides in 2023. One additional death not included in this count is the death of an individual through an officer-involved shooting. This is the second death of an infant this year. On March 12, a father was charged for the death of his 6-week-old baby.
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The Saline County Quorum Court on Monday approved a resolution requesting the Saline County Library move materials deemed age inappropriate out of the children’s section of the library. Residents showed up in large numbers to debate the proposal.
The courtroom in downtown Benton had a capacity of 115 people, and folks were crammed in every allowable crevice. An hour before the meeting, a line of about 200 outside filled the sidewalk. Some brought signs and wore themed shirts to show their opposition to the proposed resolution. Others passed around a petition to note their support for the county library. The line outside stayed about 100-people long when the cutoff for entries was made.
Brian Chilson‘FREADOM:’ A line of about 200 trailed outside the courthouse Monday an hour before the Quorum Court convened.Inside, the Quorum Court met for more than two hours, most of which was dedicated to citizen’s communication. A total of 53 people signed up to speak, and they each had a limit of three minutes to get their point across. Some quorum members pushed back, but this story ends with an approval from the court to essentially relocate the children’s books — there was also a dash of dramatic threats from residents to defund the county library.
The resolution up for debate was drafted by Justice of the Peace Jim Whitley. He described it as a step toward making libraries a safe space for children, who are already inundated daily with sexual content. Specifically, the resolution will relocate books with “sexual content or imagery” out of the children’s section.
Here’s a glimpse at some of the books the Saline County Republican Women took issue with. The books they mention include gay couples and discuss racism. There’s no mention of sex.
Brian ChilsonRELOCATE THE BOOKS: Jim Whitley’s drafted resolution called for libraries to relocate children’s books that had material that was deemed not “age appropriate.”The resolution doesn’t defund libraries, and it doesn’t remove books with sexual content from the library as a whole, Whitley said.
But the move made Monday looks a lot like the first steps to defunding the county library, those in opposition to the resolution said. Sen. “Book ban” Dan Sullivan (R-Jonesboro) made the 160-mile journey down to Benton to, if nothing else, be in the room when the resolution passed. The Jonesboro area recently voted to defund its own libraries. Sullivan sat buddied up with Rep. Mary Bentley (R-Perryville) in the silent viewing area of the courtroom.
Brian ChilsonNOT THEIR FIRST RODEO: Sen. Dan Sullivan and Rep. Mary Bentley spearheaded restrictive library legislation in Arkansas’s 94th general session.Citizen’s communication was tense. One county resident said that God himself had chosen each quorum member to be on the court for exactly this moment. He argued that the library debate was spiritual and said everything we needed to know was in the book of Matthew in the Bible. Another supporting the resolution said that they were not woke, or going broke — but the library staffers will be broke soon because they’ll be out of a job.
“I’m sorry that we donated the land to the library,” resident Stephanie Duke said.
Brian ChilsonPROBLEMATIC: Saline County Resident Stephanie Duke explained the book “Sex: A Book for Teens” to the crowd. It was indeed about sex.Duke also said that she struggles to find books in the library that aren’t anti-Christian, anti-white or gay. She said to expect her back with books she wants to challenge in a few months.
The battle for those against the resolution was well-fought. A handful of librarians vouched for the actual practices in place for children in the library. It didn’t matter. Former educators, parents of various walks of life and young people hoping to sway the court gave it their best shot.
Edith Baker, a 22-year-old librarian, said that the resolution was opening the door for people in power to push their political beliefs and censor marginalized communities.
Brian Chilson
“I am a queer woman, and if I was old enough to experience homophobia, then children should be old enough to read about it,” Baker said. “This is a systematic approach to taking away individual freedom, in the name of freedom.”
Critics among the members of the Quorum Court noted that there was no communication with the library during the resolution’s drafting process. Members voiced that they could not support it without involving the key players. A separate pitfall of the resolution is that the court didn’t determine who would have the responsibility of subjectively determining what or wasn’t appropriate for young kids.
Coverage of the Quorum Court meeting will continue on Tuesday.
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The Arkansas State Police arrested a Camden man last week after he made a threat against a school in Lafayette County, the state police announced today.
Jamal Hawkins, 22, was arrested Wednesday and charged with threatening to commit an act of mass violence on school property.
The arrest was made less than 24 hours after Hawkins was identified as the person who had used social media to threaten violence at Lafayette County Elementary School in Lewisville on April 6.
The U.S. Marshals Fugitive Task Force and the Camden Police Department assisted in the arrest.
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Southeast Arkansas College, a two-year college in Pine Bluff, has hired Belinda Hendrix as the school’s first softball coach despite the coach being fired from her last job after players accused her of making inappropriate racial comments and using other offensive language.
Hendrix, who won three national championships in a 17-year coaching stint at Chipola Junior College in Florida, was fired in November after one year at East Tennessee State University after players leveled accusations of mental abuse. One player, Saxon Radcliffe, said Hendrix cut her from the team for bringing concerns to the university’s administration.
Alana Collins, a former player at East Tennessee State, accused Hendrix, who is white, of saying she was on “colored people time” when the coach was late. Collins also accused the coach of calling players “retarded,” calling them “heifers,” not feeding them for 12 hours between games and treating the players in a generally abusive manner.
Mental Health at ETSU softball: @ETSUSoftball @ETSUPrez @ScarterETSU @ETSUAthletics @etsu pic.twitter.com/FcmwXZR9GC
— Alana Collins (@alanacollins08) March 28, 2022
The East Tennessee State interim athletic director said the administration worked with Hendrix to improve the situation but did not see results.
“The mental health and overall well-being of our student-athletes is our top priority as an athletics program,” Interim Athletic Director Dr. Richard Sander said in a release. “We have been working with Ms. Hendrix for some time in an effort to improve the situation. Unfortunately, we have not seen the results we expect.”
Hendrix’s husband, Jimmy, coached alongside Hendrix at Chipola and at East Tennessee State before being fired. Jimmy Hendrix was hired in February as the head softball coach at Arkansas State University-Mid South, a two-year college in West Memphis, but resigned last week after less than two months on the job to take an assistant coaching position at SEARK, according to ASU-Mid South’s website.
Jimmy Hendrix resigned from his coaching position at Chipola for “personal reasons” in March 2021 and was fired from East Tennessee State last year, according to TV reports from Tennessee and Florida.
Southeast Arkansas College, commonly referred to as SEARK, hired Belinda Hendrix after two candidates, including Hendrix, interviewed on campus recently. SEARK’s athletic program is set to start during the 2023-2024 school year with men’s baseball, women’s softball and E-sports set to start in the fall. Men’s and women’s basketball and cheerleading are set to start in late 2024, according to a Facebook post by the school.
Southeast Arkansas College President Steven Bloomberg praised the hiring of Belinda Hendrix in a quote in the Pine Bluff Commercial last week.
Here’s what Bloomberg said:
“We are thrilled to have Belinda Hendrix join the SEARK family. Her experience and accomplishments speak for themselves, and we believe she will be an exceptional addition to our athletics program. We look forward to seeing the impact she will have on our student-athletes and the SEARK community.”
We reached out to Bloomberg this morning with a number of questions, including whether he was aware of the allegations, how Hendrix explained them and whether the school’s board of trustees was aware of the allegations or had any concerns. We have not heard back yet. We will update this post if we receive a response.
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‘BATBOY: THE MUSICAL
FRIDAY 4/21-SUNDAY 5/7. The Weekend Theater. $18-$20.
If you’re looking for faithful, impressively professional renditions of big-name theater productions, your first stop in Little Rock might be The Rep. However, if what calls your name is something more strange and scrappy, The Weekend Theater is where it’s at. Their upcoming show, “Batboy: The Musical,” which The Guardian compares to the gothic oddness of both “Rocky Horror” and “Edward Scissorhands,” perhaps best encapsulates what they’re all about. Inspired by a satirical tabloid headline, “Batboy” tells of a town and family who must decide whether they’re more disgusted or enthralled by Edgar, a half-teenager, half-black-winged-beast discovered in a nearby cave. By its resolution, this musical finds a way to brush up against blood-sucking, interspecies romance, incest and sexual abuse, all while maintaining what The Guardian calls a “campy B-movie-style” tone.
Tickets are available here.
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You may have noticed that the Arkansas legislature and Gov. Sarah Sanders took a break from using government to criminalize the way people live their private lives in order to cut taxes on the wealthiest Arkansans and corporations.
Sanders recently signed into law a tax break with the top individual tax bracket being slashed from 4.9% to 4.7%, while the corporate tax rate was reduced from 5.3% to 5.1%. State officials have said this reduction will cost the state $186 million in its first year. In signing the bill, Sanders said, “Today, we are taking another step to regain our competitive edge.”
The argument from Republicans is simple: Lower corporate taxes attract businesses to the state, which in turn bring jobs and increase wages.
An alternative explanation of what will occur takes into account the complexities of economics, governments and social processes. Cutting taxes that are already at a relatively low level (such as 5.3%) does little to increase competitiveness, but it does lead to a loss in state revenue ($186 million in the first year, for example). This loss in state revenue means that Arkansas will have less money to invest in education, infrastructure, mass transit, transportation links, etc. In fact, Sanders actually acknowledged that Arkansas would cut spending.
Corporations look for locations that have high levels of education, have reliable infrastructure and mass transit systems, and are well connected via road and air to the rest of the world. You don’t have to take my word on this, these are precisely the things that Amazon prioritized when looking for a second headquarters in 2017.
So, if Arkansas, which is already one of the worst states in the country for education, has little to no mass transit, and doesn’t have an international airport, has less revenue to invest in the state, how will the state become more competitive? It won’t.
So, we have two competing hypotheses as to what will happen if taxes are cut. We can actually examine which is more accurate by looking at annual wage data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and corporate tax data from the Tax Foundation. If states with lower corporate tax rates are more competitive, attracting businesses that provide well paid jobs, we would expect that states with lower corporate tax rates also have higher median annual wages. However, if lower corporate tax rates make a state less competitive, we would expect to see lower median annual wages in the states with lower corporate tax rates.
I plotted the highest corporate tax rate against the median annual wages for each state and fit a basic regression line to show the relationship between these two factors (see Figure 1). The most important part of Figure 1 is the navy line. This line has a positive slope (i.e., the right side of the line is higher than the left side), indicating that overall, those states with higher corporate tax rates also have higher median annual wages. For example, we can look at New Jersey, which is labeled on the right side of the figure. New Jersey’s top corporate tax bracket is the highest in the country at nearly 12%. Yet, New Jersey’s median annual wages are $48,200; in the top 6% in the United States.
Meanwhile, Arkansas’s highest corporate tax rate (before to the new legislation was signed into law) was 5.3%, but its median annual wage was $36,680; the second lowest in the United States. Thank God for Mississippi, which has a median annual wage of $35,070 and a top corporate tax rate of 5%.
Of course, it’s true that corporations don’t always pay the highest tax possible. In Figure 2 I looked at the relationship between the bottom corporate tax rate in a state and the median annual wages in that state. You don’t have to look hard to see a very similar pattern to that in Figure 1. The navy line again has a positive slope, showing that states with a higher bottom corporate tax bracket also have higher median annual wages.
Minnesota, for example, has the highest bottom corporate tax bracket at 9.8%. The state also has median annual wages of $47,590. Arkansas, in contrast, with the second lowest median annual wages in the country, has a bottom corporate tax rate of 1%.
We have a very clear picture, lower corporate tax rates do not lead to higher median annual wages, and in fact, they lead to lower median annual wages. This seems to suggest that the very simple Republican explanation of what will happen (i.e., lower corporate taxes lead to more businesses moving in, which is good for Arkansans) is just not true.
Of course, this doesn’t mean, however, that investment in society through things like education will produce higher median annual wages in a state. To examine the veracity of this claim, I turned to data from the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP). In Figure 3, I plotted each state’s score for 8th grade reading against its median annual wage.
Again, we see the navy line has a positive slope, indicating that higher 8th grade reading scores are associated with higher median annual wages. New Jersey is leading the pack with the highest 8th grade reading score, and one of the highest median annual wages. Massachusetts also performs extremely well, with the second highest 8th grade reading score, and the highest median annual wage ($58,540). Conversely, Arkansas still brings up the rear, with the 10th lowest 8th grade reading score and second lowest median annual wage.
Figure 4 plots each state’s 8th grade math score against its median annual wage. In what should not be a shock to anyone at this point, states with higher 8th grade math scores also have higher median annual wages. Massachusetts has the highest 8th grade math score (284) and the highest median annual wage among all states. Arkansas, unsurprisingly, has the 9th lowest 8th grade math score and the second lowest median annual wage.
So, what does this all tell us about Sanders’ tax cuts? Most importantly, don’t expect them to bring businesses running to Arkansas. Rather, expect them to lead to lower state revenues, which combined with Arkansas’s balanced budget amendment, will necessitate cuts to the exact programs that might make Arkansas competitive. Simply put, wages are not likely to increase relative to other states any time soon.
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Visit once Saturday, come back for more Sunday. Can we get 70 comments?
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On Friday April 14, Gov. Sarah Sanders used executive power to make political statements in the first four vetoes of her administration, with one being a line-item strike from a budget bill. Here’s the rundown on all four bills and why Sanders claims they needed to be vetoed:
- Sanders struck a $5 million appropriation in a budget bill allocated to the Department of Corrections for pandemic related expenses, stating the “pandemic is over” and invoking “freedom and personal responsibility” as values guiding her decision.
- Sanders rejected HB1189, which had bipartisan sponsorship and would have created a license requirement for behavior analysts under the Psychology Board. Sanders claims Behavior analysts are already regulated under a different board. However, this bill would have provided much-needed clarity in the field of behavior analysis by protecting the field from potentially fraudulent professionals holding themselves out as behavior analysts. This in turn protects the public by erasing confusion around a provider’s level of training or education. Sanders incorrectly called the proposed license “duplicative.”
- Sanders vetoed SB509, which increased stipends for members of the State Board of Corrections from $85 to $110. This is perhaps the least exciting of the vetoes, but rest assured the governor is taking the $25 hike as an opportunity to remind us she only increases government spending when it’s politically beneficial for her to do so. SB509 was sponsored by Republican legislators.
- Sanders threw out HB1622, which would have created a Heart Attack Task Force, stating duplicity as her reason. Specifically, Sanders claims the STEMI Advisory Council already meets the needs addressed in the legislation to create this new task force. A sponsor of the bill, Representative Andrew Collins, explained that they worked with the STEMI Advisory Council and it would have been subsumed into the new task force. We’re sure the governor knows this task force could be lifesaving for Arkansans as our state has the fourth highest mortality rate for heart disease in the nation.
Once again, the governor’s political ambitions have taken precedence over the well-being of the people of Arkansas. We can’t say we’re surprised. Stay tuned to see if there is pushback from more sponsors of these bills, and if there is any intention to override one or more of the vetoes.
The post A closer look at this week’s vetoes appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A federal judge today granted a defense request to postpone the May 3 sentencing of Richard “Bigo” Barnett, a Gravette man convicted in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.
Judge Christopher R. Cooper rescheduled Barnett’s sentencing on eight charges for May 24 in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.
The judge even gave Barnett’s two attorneys a couple suggestions on topics they might want to address in court filings before sentencing
“Among any other issues the parties would like to raise, the briefs should address the effect of the defendant’s failure to object, or to offer an alternative, to the Court’s definition of the term ‘corruptly’ in the jury instruction on Count 2,” Cooper wrote in his brief order.
That count refers to the charge that Barnett “attempted to, and did, corruptly obstruct, influence, and impede an official proceeding … before Congress, specifically, Congress’s certification of the Electoral College vote as set out in the Twelfth Amendment” of the U.S. Constitution and federal law. Rioters were protesting the certification of election results that showed Joe Biden defeating Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
Barnett, who is free pending sentencing, was the protester who became infamous because of a picture that showed him with one foot propped on a desk in then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi‘s office.
The post Judge agrees to delay sentencing for Barnett in Capitol riots appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Sylvan Hills High School announced the hiring of Shekinna Stricklen as the head coach of its girls basketball team for the 2023-2024 academic year. Stricklen has recently been coaching the girls basketball team at Sylvan Hills Middle School, and a press release from Sylvan Hills High School said she will officially take on the new title effective immediately.
Stricklen has a storied career in Arkansas basketball. She attended Morrilton High School, won a state championship there and was twice named the Gatorade Arkansas Player of the Year in 2007 and 2008. She was a McDonald’s All American and played for the University of Tennessee under legendary head coach Pat Summitt. When Stricklen was a member of the Lady Vols they were three-time SEC Conference and SEC Tournament champions. In the 2010-2011 season for the Lady Volunteers she was named SEC Player of the Year and the SEC Tournament’s Most Valuable Player.
She was selected second overall to the Seattle Storm in the 2012 WNBA draft. During her 10 seasons in the WNBA, she accumulated 2,245 points, 726 rebounds, 242 assists and 213 steals. Four years ago she won the WNBA Three Point Contest the day before the 2019 WNBA All-Star Game.
“It’s going to be exciting to see the experience and the knowledge that Shekinna has learned over her career to our community but most importantly to our girls basketball program,” said Coach Denny Tipton, athletic director for the Sylvan Hills feeder.
“I am excited about this opportunity,” Stricklen said. “I am ready to take my knowledge and expertise to share with these girls and work hard as the Sylvan Hills girls head coach.”
Stricklen, along with eight others, will be inducted into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame on April 14 at the Statehouse Convention Center in Little Rock.
The post Former WNBA pro Shekinna Stricklen named head coach of Sylvan Hills High School girls basketball team appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Bethany Reid
Straddled between Marion and Memphis, singer-songwriter Bailey Bigger has a new song out today called “Arkansas Is Nice.” The tune — a slow-paced, sneakily wistful 70s jukebox throwback — is easy on the ears, and portrays our state as the kind of place that’s easy to get smitten with and hard to disentangle yourself from, especially if it’s your first love.
Even if your mind occasionally wanders to what else might be out there, something about Arkansas’s modest allure, its “good enough” quality, will pull you back and tell you that it’s always simpler to just stay put and be satisfied with what you’ve got. The chorus lays it all out: “I’m lazy, I’m a fool, I’m a fool for ya / I’m so crazy staying home / Sometimes, I wonder what it’s like to move away from ya / Though it’s always been a dream / Just a dream.”
Listen here:
The post New Arkansas-themed song from Marion’s Bailey Bigger appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The application to develop a Bale Chevrolet dealership at the corner of Highway 10 and I-430 in Little Rock was withdrawn from the city’s Planning Commission agenda on Thursday.
The applicant submitted a withdrawal letter to staff on March 8, though the reasoning was not explained. As part of the consent agenda on Thursday, the commissioners did not discuss the item in detail. They approved the withdrawal without prejudice as requested.
Joe White and Associates was listed as the surveyor/engineer, and Flake and Company was listed as the developer. The development of the dealership would have changed 33 acres in Little Rock’s Ward 4 — which Director Capi Peck oversees — from residential to commercial, according to city documents.
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported Friday that Peck said based on her recent communications with Bale, developers can still act on the property deal through August. However, she also suggested that the developer will be busy with tornado recovery on Highway 10. Peck is against the development, the ADG reported.
The post Plan to put a car lot near I-430, Highway 10 withdrawn appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Tonight’s Little Rock School Board meeting was a sober reminder of the damage Sarah Sanders’ Arkansas LEARNS Act is causing all over the state. Our board heard about many of the changes that will have to happen under the law and had a long discussion about how to pay for salaries in such a way that will continue to reward the hard work our teachers do year in and year out. New principals were appointed as Dr. Wright reshapes our district in ways he thinks will help all kids. And the shocking news of the night was the board member Ali Noland will not be running for reelection. Her term ends November 2023.
Tonight’s meeting began with a special board meeting. Our board cannot take votes outside of their monthly meeting unless they announce a special meeting. This allows we the people to be involved and to speak on action items if we wish.
The first item they worked on was a new bus contract. Back in December 2022, the district issued a call for new bids for our bus contract. This used to be operated by the district but in 1995, the district began to outsource our busing services. They have found that they save money with this method. The contract went to First Student out of Cincinnati. The contract will run for five years and expire at the end of June 2028. The board voted unanimously to support this contract.
The second item the board voted on was a proposal to allow Jefferson Elementary PTA to raise funds and to build a pavilion at Jefferson. Members of the Jefferson PTA made a presentation saying that they plan to raise funds to build a pavilion on the campus. A parent will be drawing up the plans. In the future they will work out the legal documents for building the structure with private funds. The PTA wanted the board to approve this and they did unanimously. I have no problem with this, but we must be honest and somber in admitting that this is a clear example of the privileges that many of the schools on the northern tier of our city have over the schools on the south side of our city. We are a city of mostly poor and middle-class families that are struggling to put food on the table and to pay their bills. We have to find a way to support our struggling schools as a community.
The final matter before the board in this special session was a resolution that would grant the superintendent authority to grant leave to employees impacted by natural disasters. With the recent tornado in Little Rock, many staff members found that they were using up their sick days and personal days trying to put their lives back together after losing their homes. This is a compassionate move by our superintendent Dr. Jermall Wright and our board to help people out in their darkest times. This would allow Wright to grant more time off for impacted employees if they had run out of sick days or personal days. It is a good move. This motion passed unanimously.
The board then went into executive session to address personnel matters. They discussed Wright’s hires for the following schools and approved them.
Hall principal: Carlton McGee
Forest Heights Principal: Barbara Kirkpatrick
Watson Principal: Christopher Jackson
Marion Lacy K8 – Donterio Porter
Wright announced that he wants to spend more time reflecting on Parkview and Mann Middle School’s new principals.
After their special meeting the board began their monthly work session where they hear reports and get to discuss items they will vote on in the future.
SCHOOLS AND ACADEMICSThe first report our board heard was on the goals and constraints the board assigned Wright and his team to address this year. Each year our board sets specific goals for our schools and they are receiving monthly reports on these. On Thursday, the board heard a report on Constraint 2: Parent/Family Partnerships. The board identified constraints that they believe are hurting the Little Rock School District’s effort to educate every child.
The lack of parental and family involvement in some of our schools is a tragic reminder of the class disparities in our city. While schools like Jefferson and Forest Park are able to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to build pavilions for their kids, most of the schools in Little Rock are out begging businesses for paper and pencils.
We know from study after study that if a student has an adult invested in their lives, they succeed at a higher rate than those who don’t. The instinct of so many in our culture is to blame poor parents and lament that they don’t love their kids, but the reality is, many of the families in our district are struggling to eat and pay the bills.
In terms of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, going to the PTA meeting or showing up for a teacher conference are not even on their radar. Poor parents love their kids deeply, but the economic system we have chosen to live under and the generational neglect of education by past school boards and officials, have damned another generation to poverty. We have a superintendent and board that want to bridge the gap for these families.
Under Wright’s new network organization for our schools, our Priority schools (D and F schools) will all be grouped together under one team specifically assigned to them. These priority schools will have someone responsible for parent engagement. They will be introducing a parent engagement model that is being used in other schools around the country called the Academic Parent Teacher Teams (APTT). This program allows parents to come in and meet with teachers three times a year, to look at class data, learn a skill that the child is learning, and to set a smart goal for their kids. They believe this will allow parents to become educational leaders in the home.
Here are a couple of videos you can watch on the program:
https://vimeo.com/256613488
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKkj163XJ00
In a study by New York University of schools using this model in New York state, researchers found the following issues with the program:
“Through our observations and conversations with educators, we found relatively low fidelity to the APTT model for the third of three APTT meetings, and found that schools did not facilitate APTT individual sessions meetings with families. Of the three in-depth study schools, none facilitated individual sessions as outlined in the APTT model. This does not mean that teachers did not meet individually with parents as needed, only that schools did not do this as part of APTT.
In part, citywide guidelines on parent engagement time limited teachers’ ability to hold extended one-on-one meetings with every family.
We understand that training facilitators encouraged teachers to utilize weekly family engagement time to continue the work from whole-class APTT meetings. However, this brief weekly time often did not align with parent schedules. APTT implementation in middle school also proved challenging, because middle school faculty tend to teach more students than elementary faculty, meaning that there are more families with whom to develop relationships.
- How does the APTT program help families connect with their children’s teachers and schools? 2. What are the experiences of families participating in the APTT program: how does the program help them work with their children, their children’s teachers, and their schools to improve their children’s academic capacities? 3. How do the APTT program’s family engagement strategies align with other NYC DOE family engagement strategies? Evaluation of Academic Parent-Teacher Teams in New York City Middle Schools 4. Finally, we found a gap in the model’s cultural responsiveness as currently implemented in New York City middle schools. Parents are positioned as learners rather than assets, and they have limited voice, agency, or decision-making power in the context of APTT. Further, the content presented at APTT meetings is not rooted in the learning concerns of students or their families; rather, the content is selected by school staff without parent input and is not differentiated based on student need. The selected content presented at APTT meetings – including student data and learning games – was overly narrow and lacked emphasis on comprehension or becoming a better reader.”
It appears that the program only works when implemented properly. I worry that this puts another burden on teachers. Our district, in the past, has also had a long history of talking about programs, building excitement about them and then letting them die. Wright and his team will really need to hold the new parent engagement network leaders accountable.
They will also be using the Inventory of Present Practices of School, Family, and Community Partnerships put together by John Hopkins University. This inventory helps schools identify present practices for each of the six types of involvement that are part of a comprehensive partnership program. These six types of involvement are: Parenting, communicating, learning at home, volunteering, decision making and collaborating with the community. You can see the survey here.
The network parent involvement person will be responsible for the survey and for using the data to increase parental involvement. It seems this will be a very important and hands on position.
FINANCE AND OPERATION Under the Arkansas LEARNS Act, all teachers will start working in any school in Arkansas at $50,000 a year. The Republican legislature and Republican governor have only funded teachers to that level, so schools are scrambling all over the state to figure out how to give experienced teachers a raise each year. In the Little Rock School District, we pay our teachers in two ways. First, we reward them for getting more education. And second, we provide them a small yearly step raise to offset inflation and cost of living increases. The district has put together 4 pay scale options for our certified staff. The current pay school gives a 2.5 percent raise for education and a 2 percent raise each year.
You can see the 4 options on pages 7-46 of the agenda found here.
Option 1 is very expensive. It adds the $50,000 and then keeps the scale like it is now. District CFO Kelsey Bailey said this is not affordable since the state has not provided funding. Option 2 is the bare minimum and won’t allow us to be as competitive. In this option, a teacher would be making 50,000 until year 4. Options 3 and 4 pay teachers the most and we can afford them. I like option 4 the best.
The board expressed a lot of frustration at the chaos the LEARNS Act has caused. The administration was honest that they are still waiting on information from the state. They also said that we have lost a lot of students and that will hurt our funding.
All in all, this ridiculous act by Arkansas Republicans will mean that Little Rock is going to have to tighten its belt further.
Wright said that the district is meeting with the Personnel Policy Committees to bring the board a recommendation. Board member Greg Adams cautioned that we all must think of this decision as a one-year solution. We just don’t have enough data from the state, so we have to make a choice for a pay scale with the understanding that we will have to come back next year and adjust this. Noland wanted the public to remember that this board did not create this chaos. This was forced on us by the Republican supermajority that rules our state.
POLICY, PERSONNEL AND LEGALThe Arkansas LEARNS Act was created to hurt teachers. It removes the Teacher Fair Dismissal Act, which was a law that guaranteed teachers due process if they were going to be fired. The law stated that teachers had to be notified if they were deficient and then provided with a step-by-step action plan to improve. If they did not adequately improve, they could be fired. This was a humane law that respected educators as professionals. Under Gov. Sarah Sander’s new law, teachers are treated like low-wage workers who can be fired for any reason. The new law also repealed the Public School Employee Fair Hearing Act.
Chris Heller from the Friday Law firm briefed the board on all the policy changes that must be made by the board to meet the new law. Heller pointed out that under the law, contracts are now year to year with no guarantee of rehire. Under this law, the board is not allowed to provide employees more rights than are in this law.
This is a direct infringement on the right of local communities to govern themselves. The law also gets rid of seniority as a reason to transfer or fire someone. Now some vague thing called “effectiveness” will determine if someone gets fired or moved. The law does not tell us how to define effectiveness. This is pure legislative negligence by the Republican lawmakers who wrote this.
The district explains, “Current Board Policy as well as the Personnel Policy Manual have provisions that contradict the new statute and must be revised to assure full compliance with the law. One example is that the LEARNS Act specifies that ‘seniority and tenure’ shall not serve as the primary criterion when making decisions regarding hiring, assignment or dismissal of public-school teachers and other public-school employees. This provision will require revisions to the Reduction in Force Policy in both the classified and certified sections. It will also require revisions to the Personnel Policy Manual. There are multiple comparable examples in which revisions will be necessary in all LRSD policy documents.”
Tonight, the district was seeking guidance on how to go about addressing and executing the policy changes. The original draft of this agenda called on the board to suspend the personnel policy manuals until they are updated. But that has been removed. There is no reason to suspend the personnel policy manuals. Wright has been very clear that he believes that administration and teachers must collaborate more closely than they have in the past. Our legal team, our teacher leaders and administration should be working on this document together.
Next the board heard a report on the Personnel Policy Committee (PPC) idea to revise the grievance process.Currently if a teacher feels their rights are being violated there is a process to address this. First, the immediate supervisor will review the complaint, then the employees may appeal to the superintendent, and finally a level three complaint would go to the school board. This process gives employees due process rights and allows their complaints to be heard. The PPC wants to remove the superintendent from the level two hearing position and replace him with a neutral hearing officer. This was the way the policy was written before the state takeover.
The district does not support this change. Now, here is the problem. If the board says no to this, it looks like they do not support the teachers. If the board says yes to this then it is a vote of no confidence for the superintendent. Under this proposed policy the neutral hearing officer would cost money. The cost would be split between the employee and the district.
Next Wright and his team want to move elementary principals to a 12-month contract. They currently work on an 11-month contract. The administration argues that principals are expected to recruit/interview to fill vacant positions during the summer, meet with staff throughout the summer, plan and prepare for the upcoming school year, be available to parents/students for registration/orientation needs and attend required and self-selected professional learning opportunities throughout the summer. This change would align elementary school principals’ contracts to secondary school principals’ contracts. This would cost the district $292,683.00.
Finally, the board will need to make changes to Wright’s contact under the new state law.
This was a long meeting tonight with a lot of emotion. It is beginning to dawn on the administration and the board that the Arkansas LEARNS Act is going to cause great chaos and really set back education in Arkansas.
It was during the public comment period tonight that board member Noland announced she will not be running again. Her seat, which covers mostly the Heights and Hillcrest, will be up for election this November. Ali has been a consistent voice for students and educators, and for following the law. She has a strong heart for social justice and human fairness. She has been one of the greatest board members that has ever served Little Rock. She will be greatly missed.
The post LRSD Board meeting news: Ali Noland won’t seek re-election, new principals appointed, district scrambles to meet problematic LEARNS Act requirements appeared first on Arkansas Times.
There’s something about Easter and resurrection that brings even nonreligious people together. Last Sunday’s sold-out show, kicking off Arkansas native Nick Shoulders “Better Western” tour with his band, nicknamed the Okay Crawdad, was no exception. Everyone in the community seemed to be out, and whether it was just the allure of good old-fashioned Arkansas folk music, or to celebrate the lifesaving work of the Central Arkansas Harm Reduction Project, it was the place to be. Even before either of the artists arrived or the music started, the familiar stomping ground of White Water Tavern buzzed in the way it does only on the best sorts of nights. In the minutes leading up to opener Emily Fenton’s set, there seemed to be an inhalation of breath amongst the audience. By the time she stepped up to the microphone in a worn denim jacket, that breath was held, only to be released by the first sinewy twang of guitar strings and the familiar dip and sway of her voice.
This show, while a rarity, was not the first of its kind. Both Fenton and Shoulders have graced the White Water stage numerous times, and CAHRP has previously hosted benefit shows in the same venue, one notably including burlesque. That said, the cause and the performers on Sunday seemed tailor made for one another. According to River Mackenzie Bolt, a founding member of the project, the event came about by coincidence. Bolt, who frequently listens to Shoulders’ music, was sent an Instagram post in which he was wearing a shirt bearing the logo of Stop Harm on Tulsa Streets, a friend’s harm reduction organization. A few messages and phone calls later, the show was scheduled, with Shoulders generously donating 100% of the profits.
CAHRP is a Little Rock-based grassroots organization whose primary mission is to reduce deaths from drug overdose. They not only hand out an average of over 500 overdose-reversing naloxone kits every month, but also provide safe smoking supplies, clean syringes, free referrals for STD testing services and advocate for those with addiction through local political activism, which leads to the saving of countless lives.
Hunter DeaverFrom left to right: Rahem White, River Mackenzie Bolt, Shelby Darden, Olivia Cleveland and Amber Kincaid, all staff and volunteers working the merch booth for CAHRPNick Shoulders feels deeply connected to this cause. “I’m a survivor of this opioid crisis in various ways and having lost as many friends as we all have, just putting any resources into people’s hands that go beyond incarceration practice is incredibly powerful,” he said. “I wanted to help out in any way that I could.” Shoulders’ music also has metaphorical resonance with CAHRP’s efforts, which was on display on Sunday night. Much like the organization intervenes in moments of life-threatening crisis to keep those it serves breathing, his unique singing style keeps breath at the forefront of the listener’s mind. From the warbly, high-pitched yodels of “Snakes and Waterfalls” to the longing whistles in “Miss the Mississippi and You,” Shoulders’ performance relied on the kind of vocal range and skill that only someone with an incredible set of lungs can.
Another notable part of Shoulders’ set was when he broke out his homemade mouth bow. For almost four minutes straight, he plucked at the instrument while holding it delicately in his teeth, the voices at the bar melting away. Only the sound of a passing train and the occasional whoop interrupted the meditative twang. There was something ancient in the air, a calling to the mountains we often forget we are nestled in the middle of. The Christmas lights of the bar became almost starlike and I was reminded of the days when our ancestors used to sit, fireside, bobbing their heads to the low tones. It was hard not to enter a reflective state.
For as long as humans and music have been around, we have been drawn to substance use in many forms. Modern circumstances have only exacerbated that. “It is not an unreasonable response to the society that we live in to use drugs,” Bolt said, when I interviewed them. I tend to agree, along with the statement that some substances are more stigmatized, with more extreme legal and physical repercussions attached. Considering the general political climate as well as the abundance of recent laws within Arkansas and the nation at large that threaten to infringe on the bodily autonomy of queer and BIPOC people especially, many of us are all too familiar with the need to find something that offers an escape. Would we not all, in seeking escape from whatever pain we are in, wish to still be held in love and compassion? To know that there are people out there — an entire organization even — working to keep us alive and breathing as we attempt to survive in a world that sometimes feels like its only goal is to harm us? I know that I do.
There is still great need at CAHRP, even after Sunday’s show. According to Amber Kincaid, the organization’s street outreach coordinator, they lost out more than usual on grant funding this year, through no fault of their own. Much of their capacity hinges on the help of individual donors willing to commit small amounts of money every month. My true hope — having seen many of their benefit shows and having packed plenty of naloxone kits myself — is that one day the people of this city will give back as much as CAHRP gives to them.
Good music is a gift, especially the kind of passed down, traditional folk music both Fenton and Shoulders call back to. As Shoulders ended his set, hooting to the owls out in the woods beyond the bar doors flung open to the spring air, you could almost hear them hoot back in response. You can donate to CAHRP here.
Kaitlin Slack Nick Shoulders & the Okay CrawdadThe post Community shows up for CAHRP benefit concert featuring Nick Shoulders and Emily Fenton appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Richard Walton is the civic engagement coordinator of Get Loud ArkansasCrossett native Richard Walton is the civic engagement coordinator with an Arkansas nonprofit that works to educate, engage, and mobilize voters to shape a better future for our state. But before diving into civic engagement, Rich served as a corrections officer for ten years at the Cummins unit, a state prison that is part of the Arkansas Department of Corrections.
Rich graciously took time to chat with us about his experience as a corrections officer. Our talk covers what Arkansans should know about life inside state prison and how lawmakers can craft policy to keep us safe — not further endanger those in the prison system already putting their lives on the line everyday. Below is an edited excerpt from our conversation.
Q + A with Richard WaltonAs a former corrections officer, what do you think about he new state requirement that inmates who commit certain crimes serve 100% of a sentence?
From my experience, I don’t think that’s the route we should go. Requiring 100% time served doesn’t help at all. What reason would an inmate have to try to behave or be rehabilitated?
There are already so many things a person has to do in order to be released early for a sentence. Let’s say an inmate has a 10 year stretch and has to do 100% of that time. Why would that person waste their time listening to anyone? It simply puts prison workers in more danger.
The governor and some lawmakers also want to build a new prison, but opponents have said the Department of Corrections can’t even properly staff the prisons we have now. Why is that?
It’s a tough profession and a tough environment, including the mental aspect of it. You have to normalize things you wouldn’t be used to normalizing just to work in that environment everyday. And staffing shortages do have an effect on peoples’ safety.
Shortages in staff make it harder to maintain control as an officer, and it presents a more dangerous environment, because officers can’t pay attention to the all the things we need to when we are short handed.
I don’t know why they would want to build a prison if they cannot staff the ones they have now. They should definitely offer higher pay for prison staff. It’s a serious job, and people put their lives on the line to work there. Instead, we should focus on ways to keep people out of prison in the first place — their legislation should address that, not building new prisons.
Arkansas already locks people up for longer and at higher rates than most other states, yet our crime rate hasn’t gone down. How do you feel about that?
I don’t know if rehabilitation for inmates is even the goal of lawmakers? There is so much that goes on in prison… We already have programs — like welding — in place to help with rehabilitation, but I’m not sure more programs will solve the problem of reducing crime. We need to focus on longterm solutions for why crime is so high, and focus on the areas in Arkansas where crime is.
What are some of these things lawmakers should focus on to address crime?
We need to focus on neighborhoods. Again, I don’t think building more prisons is the answer. We can also focus on getting more employees to work in the prison system — and paying them more money.
Another thing: the furthest prisoners can be from their families is 250 miles, which in Arkansas can be a really long distance. I think it would be a help to put people closer to their families. When you don’t have anyone on the outside supporting you, it’s really tough. And those on the outside probably don’t realize that.
As an officer, you’re responsible for 80-160 inmates at a time; you can’t watch everyone at once, and that not only makes the job tough, but it also compromises everyone’s safety.
There are over 7,000 inmates that come through in a 10 year span. Yes, there is crime and some people deserve to be in there. But, we’ve got to figure out what steps we can take to get crime down. And we should figure that out together, as a whole.
So the job causes a lot of stress and trauma?
Yeah, I’m not the same anymore. Sometimes it’s hard to relax, and now, I’m always aware of my surroundings. It has its effects — I don’t want to go too deep into it, but you see stuff you don’t want to see, and it sticks with you.
When I was working as a corrections officer, I wasn’t aware of lawmakers and politicians being the ones making the decisions about my job. I was just happy to make it through the day and make it home safely.
Now that you work in civic engagement and talk with people about why it’s important to vote and be engaged, is it strange to think back to that time when you were unaware of how much power lawmakers have? What’s it like now to see them shaping criminal justice for the better or the worse?
Some folks I talk with now in my job agree that a lot of these state policies do have an affect them. But a lot of people don’t.
I hope this isn’t true, but things may get worse in the prison system going forward, especially if those on the new violent crime list have to serve 100% of their time. And that will change the attitudes of those who work in the prison system. The state is going to take away people’s hope… and people need opportunity and hope to get through.
And the inmates that aren’t in there for violent crime? Those inmates will also be in more danger going forward.
What else do you want Arkansans to know about your experience?
It’s already so hard for people to get out on parole. And time and time again people are denied parole. It’s really very tough to get out early.
Really? Then why are lawmakers saying it’s super easy for state prisoners to get out early? In fact, the attorney general says serving in state prison is a joke for most offenders.
I don’t know. It’s hard for inmates to get out. They go up for parole but so many know they will get rejected even before they go up.
So it sounds like our state lawmakers aren’t really sure how to fix things. Instead, they pass policies that aren’t real solutions for crime — and these new policies make it more dangerous for people that have your old job. Is that accurate?
Yeah I agree with that.
We need to get crime down, and we need to focus on communities; that’s a good start. Start with minority communities in the state that don’t get a lot of positive attention. There are plenty of problems in Arkansas that we could work on. Really, we need to put money into people, not prisons.
The post Crime policy and prison: Q+A with a former state corrections officer appeared first on Arkansas Times.
As Arkansas pursues a new golden era for school segregationists with the Arkansas LEARNS universal voucher scam, some old court orders are still keeping white flight at bay.
But time might be nearly up for South Arkansas school districts that have successfully fought state efforts to force them to allow white-flight transfers under the state school choice law of 2013.
The districts are Camden Fairview, Hope, Lafayette County and Junction City.
But this week, Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin filed briefs to repeal the federal desegregation supervision that keeps the districts from having to comply with the state law that allows students to leave their home districts and enroll in other public school districts.
It’s not unheard of for white parents to take their children out of predominantly Black districts and flee to majority white districts instead. But in a news release from Griffin’s office this week, he declared segregation ended decades ago.
“School choice is the law today in Arkansas. Unconstitutional, race-based consent decrees from decades past are denying equal rights to parents to select the school that best meets the needs of their children. I have filed motions to terminate federal consent decrees in the El Dorado, Hope and Lafayette County school districts so that students there can realize the educational opportunities available to their peers across the rest of the state.
“Despite segregation ending decades ago, several school districts have left outdated consent decrees on the books and rely on them to opt out of school choice, thereby avoiding competition and retaining funds for students who would otherwise leave. Schools must be accountable to parents, and children should not be stuck in schools that aren’t meeting their needs. Parents, not the government, must be allowed to decide what’s best for their children.”
Griffin’s full statement, with links to the briefs he filed, is here.
Of course, not everyone agrees with Griffin’s assessment that segregation is no longer a problem.
Whitney Moore, an attorney for these school districts with deseg orders still in place, told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that what Griffin is seeking to do will be “segregative.”
Segregation spurred by school choice is also a worry for Rep. Jim Wooten of Beebe, one of only five Republican lawmakers to vote against the LEARNS Act. “We’re headed down the path to where we were 50 years ago,” he said.
Rep. Jim Wooten (R) of Beebe warned against this last month when voting NO against the LEARNS act.
5/6 pic.twitter.com/y3BeBePAcx
— Calés McGinnis (@CalesMcGinnis) April 12, 2023
The post South Arkansas school resegregation likely as AG taps courts to erase integration measures appeared first on Arkansas Times.
We wrote yesterday about a question on the application for Arkansas boards and commissions appointments that requires hopefuls to pen up to 500 words on what they adore most about our dear leader.
Specifically, the question was, “What is an accomplishment of the Governor’s that you admire the most?”
Appointments to Arkansas’s hundreds of boards and commissions are made by the governor, and it looks like Gov. Sarah Sanders wants to make sure her appointees like her, they really like her.
But technical difficulties are gumming up the works today. The page for applications churns up a 404 message. Go figure.
Applicants for Arkansas boards and commissions will have to wait.
It’s unclear if the glitch has anything to do with the wave of criticism over Sanders’ requirement that applicants declare their admiration.
On AR Watch, a government watchdog group, points out that boards and commissions are often bipartisan, and their focus should be on issues that affect the state, not on serving as a fan club for their governor.
These boards and commissions are often bipartisan, focusing on the issue or topic assigned by the statute that created it. The administration’s website claims “The Governor … seeks the most qualified candidates for these appointed positions.” The application asks several expected questions about educational history, employment experience, certificates, titles, licenses, etc. While these are standard questions to apply for any job or appointment, they are not required like the prompt to admire the Governor.
We can’t believe we have to type this, but a statement of admiration does not qualify one to serve on a state board or commission.
The post Applications for Arkansas boards and commissions on hold, so keep your ‘Why I love my gov’ drafts on standby appeared first on Arkansas Times.
In a New York Times story by Samantha Ege and Douglas Shadle, two musicologists who are working on a biography of Florence B. Price, new research about the Little Rock composer is revealed.
In addition to the revelation that Price was likely born in 1888 rather than 1887, the article reckons with the “history of racial ambiguity in her family”:
Newly available photographs whose labels include Price’s maternal grandmother, Mary McCoy, and great-grandmother, Margaret Collins, appear to confirm that they would have been perceived as white according to post-bellum racial thought. Although no photograph of Price’s maternal grandfather, an Indianapolis barber named William Gulliver, is known to survive, local newspapers described him as “colored.” Curiously, the 1860 census lists the entire Gulliver family as “mulatto,” while the 1870 census lists them as “white.”
The piece also documents Price’s own ever-shifting relationship to racial identity:
In 1876, Florence Irene married a prominent dentist named James H. Smith and moved with him to Little Rock, where they both lived openly as members of the city’s Black elite. Despite their racial ambiguity, the Smiths clearly aligned themselves with Black political causes and at times continued to use the courts to resist tightening Jim Crow constructions of race, largely without success.
After Dr. Smith died in 1910, however, Florence Irene deserted the family altogether to pass as white, entering what the historian Allyson Hobbs has called “a chosen exile.” The musicologist Michael Cooper has recently uncovered that she likely passed as white until she died in 1948, only five years before her daughter’s own death.
Despite her efforts to pass, Price’s work is undeniably influenced by her connection to Black culture:
Price’s engagement with Black folk idioms in her symphonies and chamber music has also entered the spotlight as listeners have encountered these works for the first time. Often extracted for family performances, her dance-inspired “Juba” movements are especially popular. But limiting engagement to Price’s folkloric music is a mistake. As the composer George E. Lewis has argued, expanding conceptions of the possibilities in Black music must accompany an expanding understanding of Black life.
A prolific song composer, Price was deeply inspired by the outstanding Black poets of her era, including Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson and Joseph Seamon Cotter Jr. She even set some of her own poetry. She was a voracious and eclectic reader who could bring extraordinary musical dynamism to texts across styles and themes. Her setting of “Debts,” by Jessie Belle Rittenhouse, is a profound meditation on the inward experience of love, while “Tobacco,” her setting of a comic poem by Graham Lee Hemminger, shows off her dry wit.
The post New biographical details about Florence Price emerge in the New York Times appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A group of educators worried about the effects of Arkansas LEARNS, a universal voucher and charter expansion bill, filed official paperwork Monday. CAPES (Citizens for Arkansas Public Education and Students) is angling to ask Arkansas voters to repeal the massive K-12 public education system rework.
Antoinette Grajeda at the Arkansas Advocate has a thorough write-up, with no paywall.
The repeal process is pretty intense, requiring citizens wanting to walk back an action of the legislature to collect loads of signatures to get the issue to a ballot. Here’s the fine print:
The second power reserved by the people is the referendum, and any number not less than six per cent of the legal voters may, by petition, order the referendum against any general Act, or any item of an appropriation bill, or measure passed by the General Assembly, but the filing of a referendum petition against one or more items, sections or parts of any such act or measure shall not delay the remainder from becoming operative. Such petition shall be filed with the Secretary of State not later than ninety days after the final adjournment of the session at which such Act was passed, except when a recess or adjournment shall be taken temporarily for a longer period than ninety days, in which case such petition shall be filed not later than ninety days after such recess or temporary adjournment. Any measure referred to the people by referendum petition shall remain in abeyance until such vote is taken. The total number of votes cast for the office of Governor in the last preceding general election shall be the basis upon which the number of signatures of legal voters upon state-wide initiative and referendum petitions shall be computed.Upon all initiative or referendum petitions provided for in any of the sections of this article, it shall be necessary to file from at least fifteen of the counties of the State, petitions bearing the signature of not less than one-half of the designated percentage of the electors of such county.
This means CAPES will need to collect nearly 55,000 signatures to bring their beef to the ballot. The CAPES group is well-organized, and driven. Here’s how they describe themselves: “Citizens for Arkansas Public Education and Students (CAPES) is a broad, nonpartisan movement of public school advocates. Over the past decade, teachers have borne the brunt of budget cuts, a pandemic, and the politicization of their classrooms. Instead of elevating teachers that need our help, the Arkansas legislature has chosen to defund them. This cannot stand.”
The group is looking for volunteers, and will likely be hitting you up for a signature. Learn more about their efforts on their website.
The post Public school supporters organize against LEARNS Act, aim to put a repeal option on the ballot appeared first on Arkansas Times.
ARKANSAS MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS GRAND OPENING
SATURDAY 4/22. AMFA. Free. Reservations required.
At 10 a.m. on Saturday, April 22, the massive, long-shrinking digital countdown on the outside of the new, 133,000-square-foot Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts — a building so impressive as to be lauded by Architecture Digest — will finally hit zero. Following the requisite cutting of ribbon, the museum’s doors will open to the public, releasing anyone who’s reserved a free timed ticket to explore the Performing Arts Theater, the Windgate Art School, the Cultural Living Room, the revamped permanent collection — stretching back to the 14th century and boasting work from critical artistic forebears such as Rembrandt, Rivera, Monet and Wyeth — and, perhaps most excitingly, four brand-new exhibitions.
“Snowflakes” by Andrew Wyath
“Together,” on display until Sept. 10, gathers the work of over 30 homegrown, national and international artists to capture AMFA’s “institutional commitment to openness and inclusivity.” Organized around themes of “family, friends, community and our connection to the natural world,” the exhibit takes a kaleidoscopic meander through a diversity of forms, tones and perspectives. Highlights include an immense, stoic photograph by Osage Nation member Ryan RedCorn; a felt, chalk and paint collaged triptych by Oliver Lee Jackson; a massive, meticulous woodcut of sacred domesticity by LaToya M. Hobbs (read our Q&A with her here); a colorful, perforated curtain made of silk flowers and thread by Jim Hodges; and an abstract piece fashioned from electrical wires and computer keys by Ethiopian artist Elias Sime.
“Triptych (3.20.15, 5.21.15, 6.8.15)” by Oliver Lee Jackson
Gracing the AMFA until Dec. 21, “Drawn to Paper” is a curation of 20th-century charcoal, watercolor, crayon and pencil sketches from Paul Signac, John Marin, John Woodrow Wilson, Edward Hopper, Elizabeth Catlett, Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Demuth, Inez H. Whitfield and more. By focusing on drawings — some of which were done as studies or practice in preparation for later, more polished work — the exhibit has a heightened feeling of spontaneity and intimacy, allowing viewers to better understand the inspiration and process behind great artistry.
Special No. 30 (Banana Flower)” by Georgia O’Keeffe
Featured in the New Media Gallery — an inaugural space designed to house immersive and interactive audio-visual works — will be “Tears of Chiwen” by Sun Xun, a Chinese artist based in Beijing. The project, played on a loop until Aug. 13, blends an assortment of hand-crafted mediums to create a 9-minute, 7,500-frame stop-motion film that’s content interrogates the ways in which Western culture has been “accommodated, sometimes resisted, and eventually absorbed in different ways throughout East Asia.”
Still from “Tears of Chiwen” by Sun Xun
The last exhibit, “Intentional Risks,” available until Dec. 3, centers on the work of Chakaia Booker, best known for devising huge, almost menacing sculptures out of rubber tires and steel. In addition to one of those pieces entitled “The Fatality of Hope,” the show spotlights a body of experimental printmaking work that Booker has received less credit for. Two longer-lasting installations, site-specific commissions by Natasha Bowdoin and Anne Lindberg, will also debut at the AMFA’s opening.
“The Fatality of Hope” by Chakaia Booker
If you’re more enticed by festivities than art, you’re invited to stroll through MacArthur Park from noon to 8 p.m. on opening day, where there will be “performances, music, food vendors, and other exciting events.”
After a week of supplementary, somewhat exclusive events such as Design and Construction Appreciation Day (available only to those involved in the physical making of the building) on April 23, School Day at the Museum on April 24 (visits from school districts across Central Arkansas), Member Weekend on April 29-30 (another opportunity to view the museum in advance if you pay for an annual membership) and A Toast Together (an invitation-only reception for larger donors) on April 29, the AMFA will officially begin to observe regular museum hours (10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, and noon to 5 p.m. on Sundays) starting Tuesday, May 2.
All the tickets for the opening day have already been spoken for, but you can reserve a spot for a later date of museum viewing here.
The post What to expect from the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts grand opening appeared first on Arkansas Times.
An inmate at the Pulaski County Regional Detention Facility was found dead Sunday morning and an autopsy has been ordered to determine the cause and manner of death, the Pulaski County Sheriff’s office said late Monday.
Isaish Sinclair, 26, of Little Rock, was found unresponsive in his cell around 6:34 a.m. yesterday. A medical unit responded and provided life-saving measures and a MEMS ambulance arrived before Sinclair was declared dead.
Sinclair was booked into the jail on Saturday at 10:12 p.m. after an arrest by the Arkansas State Police for fleeing, drug possession and firearm violation charges.
An autopsy will be performed to determine the cause and manner of death as occurs with all deaths in its custody, the Sheriff’s Office said.
The office said the state Medical Examiner will conduct the autopsy and that investigations are underway by the Sheriff’s Office’s Criminal Investigation Division and the Professional Standards Unit.
The post Inmate found dead at Pulaski County jail, autopsy will determine cause of death appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Looking to serve your state in some official capacity? First, you must kiss the ring.
The application form you must fill out to be considered for a post on state boards and commissions includes this question: “What is an accomplishment of the Governor’s that you admire the most?”
If you’ve got 500 words ready to go about how much you love Gov. Sarah Sanders, you could be eligible for a post on the state’s dozens of boards.
A book that defines your life only gets half that word count?
Hat tip to former legislator and intrepid tweeter Nate Bell for posting on social media about this ego-tastic Easter egg hidden in the online application form.
Seems like an important qualification for service on an Arkansas board or Commission. #TIC #arpx #arleg #BananaRepublic pic.twitter.com/qx1cBSYqn6
— Nate Bell (@NateBell4AR) April 10, 2023
Bell would not be caught dead reading this progressive rag, so if you know him, tell him we said thanks.
The post Gov. Sanders wants to know how much you like her before you can be on a state board or commission appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The 94th General Assembly has officially adjourned. Take a deep breath and let yourself feel some relief.
As we’ve combed through the last 13 weeks of legislation, here is the takeaway: Our new governor and the 2023 General Assembly squandered their chance to help regular Arkansans.
By focusing on performative, extremist policy that doesn’t actually solve problems and by killing good bills that would have helped hardworking Arkansans get ahead, the supermajority chose political points over fixing our state. In this recap, we look at what Arleg prioritized: government overreach, marginalizing groups, owning the libs, and punishing public schools.
Watch, listen, or read on for the details in part I of this session’s summary.
Performative, extremists policy dominates For three straight months, the supermajority’s effort to “own the liberals” has been undeniable. Sanders too wasted no time punishing “wokeness” by banning CRT and the term “Latinx” via executive orders. The orders, along with the shallow legislation meant to punish liberals for being — well, liberal — signaled to extremist Republicans outside of Arkansas that Sanders and her legislature would not tolerate any progressive policy, messaging, or programming, even if it helps Arkansans.
For Arleg, the anti-woke legislation included bills (now laws) like divesting state retirement accounts from big financial institutions and preferential treatment for investors that prioritize support of gun manufacturers. Additionally, members ran “religious freedom” bills similar to the legislatively referred ballot initiative from 2022 that voters handily voted down. These bills sought to give individuals, groups, and businesses a cause of action to sue the state for “burdening” religious beliefs, even if those beliefs cause discrimination for other groups or individuals.
Perhaps the culmination of punishing the left was SB71, Sen. Dan Sullivan’s bill that would have criminalized state-sponsored affirmative action. The bill experienced a roller coaster of near-deaths and revivals up until the last minute when the House chamber voted against the bill and moved to clincher it — a parliamentary procedure effectively killing the bill’s chance of resurfacing.
National anti-LGBTQ legislation in Arleg Like many Arkansans, we’re grateful the House squashed SB71, as it would have erased critical economic and academic opportunities for women, minorities, veterans, and people with disabilities. But other legislation meant to virtual-signal to the extreme right did pass and will have devastating consequences for some of the most marginalized Arkansans. The national push for anti-LGBTQ legislation again dominated Arkansas’s most hateful bills, which specifically targeted trans people and trans youth.
Our new anti-trans laws include policies like strict liability for medical practitioners who provide kids gender-affirming healthcare. Last session members passed a law that banned these procedures outright, but the law is tied up in court under the argument that it violates trans Arkansans’ constitutional rights.
2023 members took a creative yet cruel approach to end this kind of care: run legislation under the guise of helping trans people by creating strict liability for these procedures. If patients decide gender-affirming healthcare caused harm, they can sue providers. The strict liability for gender care turns medical malpractice law on its head. The bill is meant to end trans-affirming healthcare for youth because doctors would not be able to obtain medical malpractice insurance for these procedures.
The work-around means trans kids won’t be able to get the health care they need no matter the result of the earlier law banning the procedures altogether. And let’s not forget the drag bill and the anti-trans bathroom bills, each of which passed. The new laws affect kids in public schools and trans people who want to use public restrooms (though the latter was amended to only target bad actors as was the drag bill, thankfully).
Another example of “owning the libs” is the yet-to-be-constructed Capitol monument in memory of aborted fetuses. Unquestionably, the monument is meant to shame those who have sought abortion care. It also allows anti-abortion lawmakers the chance to gloat. We’re in a red state in a post-Roe United States, and the supermajority does not want Arkansas to forget that.
New Arleg target: Public SchoolsLGBTQ folks weren’t the supermajority’s only object of hostility; public schools were next, which was a surprise for those less accustomed to the Arleg methodology. Members targeted public schools in the past but it was neither as organized an effort nor as important a priority as it was this session.
Enter the LEARNS Act: Governor Sanders’ signature piece of legislation aimed at advancing her reputation among Freedom Caucus politicos. Disguised as a parental empowerment bill, LEARNS endangers public school funding, teacher retention, and Arkansans’ continually guaranteed access to public education. Sanders and the bill’s sponsor forced through LEARNS in a secretive and sloppy manner. Then they attacked public school administrators for critiquing the bill and forced legislators to vote for it despite reasonable concerns over the legislation’s merits.
And tucked alongside LEARNS are new laws that further mess with public schools and employees. One bill restructures education co-ops — regional public school associations where administrators and teachers share best practices and educational services. Another new law prohibits teachers from deducting union dues from paychecks, which is standard practice for public employees like police and firefighters. The blatant, targeted attacks on public school employees have never been more apparent or egregious.
Big lobby, big government, big overreachIn her inaugural address to lawmakers, Sanders said she would not sign legislation members passed if it expanded government at the expense of personal freedom. The line proved superficial; almost immediately legislators filed bills that did the exact thing Sanders said she was against, and unsurprisingly, she has signed these bills into law.
The LEARNS Act is a prime example of government expansion in deference to special interests. The school choice lobby, for which the Reform Alliance runs point guard, was the special interest behind passing LEARNS. Those in the school choice industry are paid handsomely, and the creation of universal vouchers in Arkansas means private and charter school business stand to make millions, as do voucher account vendors, from taxpayer dollars.
Moreover, Arleg and Sanders made national headlines for repealing child labor laws. In an extraordinary move disguised as parental empowerment, state leaders cleared a path for industries to hire kids as young as 13 without work permits, risking exploitation of children — all because big industry is experiencing labor shortages.
In the final days of session, Arleg and Sanders unveiled more “child protection” legislation, this time regarding big tech. Once again, the laws are meant to signal to the national extreme right that Sanders, like her former boss, wants to take down large, liberal tech companies. Arkansas’s new tech laws, which will require those opening new social media accounts — including children — to provide the state personal information in the form of a digital ID. Sanders and Co. attempted to persuade Arkansans that the laws protect us from big tech’s bad intentions. The laws pose a security risk to users instead; a state database of residents’ personal information could be hacked or misused by government bad actors.
We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention how the legislature punished poor people with work requirements for public housing and the gutting of a good SNAP asset bill. They also spent a lot of time on nonsense election bills just to increase Arkansas’s score with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that produces copy-and-paste legislation for red states across the country. Oh, and that big tax cut bill? It’s probably not meant for you.
Tough on crime or tough nut to crack?The governor’s last major bait and switch was rolling out a criminal justice bill. Though not as lengthy as LEARNS, the policy proposal was dense and focused on tougher sentencing for those who commit violent crimes and a major overhaul in our parole system. Sanders held a press conference where she said Arkansas is tough but fair and where Attorney General Tim Griffin spoke at length about lawless dirt bike bandits and the need for more and more prisons.
The long and short of it is that Arkansas does have a crime problem, which has yet to be solved despite being a state that locks people up — and keeps them locked up for longer — than nearly all other states. As we said last week, building more prisons and keeping people in them for longer doesn’t solve for crime.
In essence, the governor, the AG’s office, and the supermajority determined it would be simpler — from both a policy and a messaging sell to the public — to spend a very large amount of money on only one lever to address. The result will be prison beds, a hefty taxpayer bill, and a crime rates that stay the same.
What’s coming in part IISee how Arleg and Governor Sanders missed the mark? With a big purse and a lot of power, they could have made big policy changes to substantially change the lives of Arkansans for the better. Instead, they focused on culture war tropes, political posturing, and big government expansion; it’s quite the shame.
There are some good policies that have passed, and we’ll tell you about them in part II, along with good bills members killed (again with the political posturing and spite) or ignored all together.
So go take a nap or a walk outside, stop thinking about our state government for a second, then come back in a few days ready to hear about and become part of the solution for making our state better.
The post That’s a wrap: week 13 legislative report and part one of overview appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The plant is slated to close in May, but workers at a Tyson processing facility in Van Buren are striking today in hopes of claiming severance pay and improving working conditions for the final stretch.
Venceremos, a Springdale-based human rights organization that advocates for poultry workers, sent word of the strike.
Today, workers at the Van Buren Tyson facility in Arkansas launched a strike, demanding fair pay before Tyson closes the facility and lays off workers in May.
Since Tyson announced the closure, many workers have left the plant – which previously employed nearly 1,000 workers. Tyson has not filled the resulting gaps in the production line. The remaining workers are forced to risk their health to cover multiple jobs. At the same time, the workers face new restrictions, including a freeze on vacation time and threat of termination for workers who miss three days of work, even for sick leave.
Ahead of the facility closure, Tyson workers are demanding:
- Equal treatment compared to supervisors and corporate employees, who will receive a severance package based on years of employment, while workers on the production floor receive no severance.
- Full payout of unused vacation time at the end of employment. Tyson is refusing this and also barring workers from taking any vacation days before the plant closure.
- Full accountability for workers’ compensation claims, which Tyson has historically dodged or retaliated against. Many workers who were injured on the job, but feared losing their job in retaliation for complaints are now able to come forward to file claims ahead of the plant closing.
- Fair working conditions. Workers are forced to risk their health to cover multiple jobs without proper compensation.
“Tyson is treating its workers as disposable, denying them the pay they are owed and the basic respect they deserve, not only as employees but as humans,” said Magaly Licolli, Executive Director at Venceremos, an organization that advocates for poultry workers in Arkansas and supports the strike. “These frontline workers who are being exploited are mostly people of color. Many have been working for 10 or even 20 years, but they aren’t offered the same severance package as the majority white corporate employees. The frontline staff are working harder than ever, in even more dangerous conditions, to make up for understaffing, but they are only being treated worse in return. It’s time to hold Tyson accountable for fair pay and treatment.”
Venceremos is sharing a live feed of the strike on their Facebook page here.
The post Tyson workers in Van Buren strike appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Even as Arkansas grapples with questions of cannabis legalization and regulation, the state medical marijuana industry is becoming more complex and more lucrative. Here, we put a spotlight on crowd favorites in the first-ever Arkansas Times Cannabis Awards, talk with Robert deBin of Natural State Medicinals, examine the ways cannabis industries in neighboring states impact Arkansas and review some innovative products — including a weed-infused local honey and a THC-infused lubricant designed for use in the bedroom.
On weed regulations across state lines, and why the biggest competition for the Arkansas cannabis industry lies just across the border.
Check out the results of our 2023 Arkansas Times Cannabis Awards, in which our readers weighed in on their favorite picks from the medical cannabis industry.
A Q&A with Robert deBin of Natural State Medicinals, whose strains won awards in every category — indica, sativa and hybrid — in our inaugural Arkansas Times Cannabis Awards poll.
A review of Good Day Farm’s weed-infused honey, perfect for brewing up a sleepytime tea before bed.
A review of Shake Extractions’ THC-infused sex lubricant, reviewed by our very own Mary Jane Doe.
The post Growing Green: strain reviews, weed regulations across state borders and the results of our Arkansas Times Cannabis Awards poll appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Arkansas Times readers have selected strains from Natural State Medicinals as the best in every category — indica, sativa and hybrid — in our inaugural Arkansas Times Cannabis Awards poll. Our readers favored a few particular strains: Blackwater, End Game and the distinctively named Matanuska Thunderfuck. We caught up with Robert deBin, the chief executive officer at the White Hall-based cultivator, to find out how his facility is putting out the strains that Times readers love the most — and how that last strain got its saucy name.
Readers named your Blackwater strain as the best indica. Leafly says it has notes of grape, pine and lemon and offers an effect that begins mellow before spreading across the entire body. What can you tell us about it?
Our goal with Blackwater was to target that deep indica feeling of relaxation and pain relief. To do that, we set out to find something new and potent for our Arkansas patients. Our team finally came across a blend of San Fernando Valley OG Kush and Mendo Purps known as Blackwater. This California strain has a strong reputation on the West Coast. We were immediately attracted to this specific strain for its Cannabis Cup awards, high THC percentage, relaxing terpene profile, and punchy floral smell. Blackwater is great for those times when you need to wind down and get some relaxation or just a good night’s sleep.
The best hybrid strain was your End Game strain. Weedmaps says patients use it to treat a wide variety of ailments. Do you think that contributes to its popularity?
We’re a proud grower of End Game from Ethos Genetics. Ethos has been a phenomenal strategic partner of ours since early on in our operations, enabling us to bring innovative quality genetics to the state. When it comes to End Game, you’re 100% correct in calling out the broad application with this strain. Whether it’s midday or midnight, End Game brings a happy balance and a fruity aromatic smell from its parents Cherry Punch and Ethos Cookies.
Matanuska Thunderfuck was named the top sativa strain. Why do you think it is so popular?
Well, the name is certainly part of its popularity, but its popularity would have faded fast if it weren’t also a heavy hitter. People love MTF because it gives an almost immediate euphoric effect that helps to alleviate symptoms of stress and depression, while giving a sociable, “heady” high. At the same time, it’s a very accessible strain. A new patient can be confident that MTF will deliver relief without discomfort. It’s safe to say that we’ve tamed Matanuska’s wild growing requirements to bring Arkansans a unique, premium buzzy sativa.
How do the strains get their names?
My mom couldn’t believe I was selling something with that name. We get that question quite a bit, especially with a name like MTF. Strains are named by their creators. If you make a new strain, you get to name it. A strain is “made” when two or more strains are interbred. Growers usually like to name the baby strain something that lets people know who its parents are. A good example is NSM’s Sour Tangie which is a cross between East Coast Sour Diesel and Tangie.
So in the case of Matanuska Thunderfuck, you’re seeing the homegrown roots of a classic strain. The growers in Matanuska Valley, Alaska, wanted to name a strain after their home and probably had no idea it would become so well-known. Natural State Medicinals honors this tradition when we name our strains. For example, our Dogtown strain, a cross of Skywalker OG and Rare Dankness #1, is named for Argenta, a rare and dank neighborhood, if you ask me.
The post Flower power: A Q&A with Robert deBin of Natural State Medicinals appeared first on Arkansas Times.
When the powerful EF3 tornado formed in the sky over West Little Rock Friday, Benjamin Hoanzl was standing outside of Taziki’s Mediterranean Cafe on Chenal Parkway watching the clouds.
“I saw it starting to form, starting to come down and it was heading towards us,” Hoanzl said.
An assistant director of operations for the restaurant chain, he’d stopped by to check on things unrelated to severe weather but heard the tornado sirens going off on the drive over. Hoanzl went over tornado procedures with the store’s general manager, Joey Cline. If and when the tornado hit, the plan was to cut the gas and usher everyone in the store to the downstairs walk-in cooler.
Minutes later, Cline was on the phone with his boss, who lives nearby and abruptly ended the call because he thought the tornado was about to pass over his house. “So me and one of the other crew members ran out the front door to see what was happening and sure as heck it was coming down right over there,” Cline said. “So we just start yelling, you know, ‘Everyone get inside! The tornado’s coming!’”
Cline went inside and saw that some customers were still enjoying their lunch.
“I’m like, ‘Hey, put your food down. Let’s go.’”
Ivy Chenault was in her car with her daughter Jessie parked in front of Rock N’ Roll Sushi after placing an order at Taziki’s. Chenault, a Camden resident, was in town doing some last minute prom dress shopping. Chenault tried to figure out which direction the storm was coming from and she was planning on driving north, when all of a sudden, she looked up and saw debris flying through the air.
Chenault and Jessie abandoned the car and started running toward the storefronts. She said they couldn’t hear each other over the strong winds. They ran from store to store seeking shelter but the doors were locked, she said.
After everyone inside Taziki’s had sheltered in the walk-in, Hoanzl made one more round through the restaurant to make sure everyone was accounted for, checking the restrooms and making sure no one was out in the parking lot taking selfies or pictures of the tornado.
“At this point in time, the tornado is about to hit the parking lot,” Hoanzl said. “And there were these two girls, I guess a mom and her daughter, who are running and like beating on windows going up and down the strip.”
Hoanzl yelled at them to come inside.
“By the time I got to the door I turned around and my daughter was three storefronts down. The wind was pushing her back and it had already ripped her shoes off of her feet. It was like she was running on a treadmill and not going anywhere,” Chenault said.
Hoanzl held the door open and helped pull Chenault and Jessie into the store. Cline ushered them into the walk-in.
“Her daughter’s shoes blew away, so she gave her her shoes,” Cline said. “Her feet were soaked, so we helped her out, gave her something dry to stand on, we got her some towels, an apron, basically anything we could think of and tried to make everyone as comfortable as they could be for a scary situation like that.”
Chenault was impressed with how concerned they were about her feet being wet. “They were very nice and very calm,” she said. “Taziki’s saved us. They waited for us. They were prepared, and they grabbed us and saved our lives.”
Hoanzl never made it downstairs. When the tornado cut a path through the parking lot, the doors to the restaurant blew open and pictures flew off the walls. He said it sounded like a freight train. He and Cline went outside to survey the damage and found the Baskin-Robbins across the parking lot was demolished.
“The ceiling was coming down, the top right side of their wall was ripped off, dumpsters were thrown down into the forest,” Cline said. Hoanzl said there was so much debris in the Baskin Robbins he feared that people might be trapped inside. “Fortunately, someone came out and was like, ‘We got everyone out.’”
Hoanzl called the Taziki’s location on Cantrell and told them to take cover. The crew was already hunkered down in the walk-in. Both locations sustained damage, but the Cantrell location got the worst of it, said Jim Keet, president of JTJ Restaurants. No one was injured. Keet praised Hoanzl and Cline for their leadership.
“They were real heroes,” Keet said. “They put themselves in danger to save someone they had never met. I was just very proud of those guys.”
When we reached Chenault for this story, she was in Wynne (Cross County) with her husband volunteering for the relief effort there after the same storm system spawned an EF3 tornado that did extensive damage to the city’s high school and killed four in the community.
“Wynne is my hometown,” Chenault said. “It’s my alma mater, it’s where I grew up. All my family lives here. So I had to go help.”
Chenault was living in Wynne in April of 2006, and her home was one of the many damaged when an F3 tornado struck the community of Fitzgerald Crossing. She was three months pregnant with her daughter at the time.
“She is a two-time EF3 tornado survivor as well,” Chenault said.
Hoanzl didn’t get a chance to speak to Chenault after the storm, but he saw a message she sent to the Taziki’s Facebook page thanking the crew for saving her and her daughter.
“We just did what we needed to do to take care of our crew and our customers,” Hoanzl said. “That’s why we’re here. We’re service industry, so people are number one.”
Katie Sanchez wasn’t aware of Friday’s tornado warning until she arrived to pick up her kids and found out their midtown school was on lockdown. Sanchez and about 15 other parents were checking their phones in the parking lot trying to track the storm, she said. The tornado had been reported to be near I-630 and one of the mothers realized that meant that it was probably directly behind the school and out of their line of sight.
“We kind of peeked around the alcove, and you could see it coming toward us,” Sanchez said.
Sanchez said she had to make the decision to either stay put or try to find a place to shelter. “I just sprinted to my car, and I remember there was the Dunkin’ and McDonald’s right there, and I figured maybe somebody could help me,” she said.
When she pulled into the parking lot at Dunkin’ on Rodney Parham, she could see the tornado coming.
“I remember at the school it was really quiet,” Sanchez said. “You could see it coming, but everything was silent, and then at Dunkin’ it was windy as all get out, and a lot louder.”
Sanchez sprinted across the parking lot and started banging on the door at Dunkin’.
“I saw somebody locking the back door. Her name was Sarah, and she made eye contact with me and sprinted up to the front and unlocked the door for me and pulled me in. They closed a little earlier, so it was just the two employees, Sarah and Rowan. They brought me into the walk-in and helped me calm down. They were on the phone with their manager, and he was taking us through breathing exercises, trying to help us all calm down because it was just terrifying, you know. I just kind of remember flashes of it. It’s almost like I blocked it out because it was so scary. We came out afterwards and kind of looked for a minute and just saw the devastation across the street.”
When Sanchez and I spoke on Tuesday she’d just visited Dunkin’ again to thank Sarah and Rowan. “It was so incredible how the whole time they were just thinking about other people. After the storm they were like, ‘Oh, we have all these donuts. Let’s box them up and get them to the police officers outside and the people walking around.’”
Sanchez shared her story with Kevin Shalin’s The Mighty Rib blog and was interviewed by THV-Channel 11, who reported that Dunkin’s corporate office sent the crew at Dunkin’ care packages with $1,000 gift cards.
Courtesy of Katie SanchezDUNKIN’ HEROES: From left: Katie Sanchez, Sarah Scarborough, Tim Wharton and Rowan Bax.“My goal in sending it to Mighty Rib is to highlight these employees and what they did for me,” Sanchez said. “I want these people to get the recognition they deserve.”
City Director and Trio’s owner Capi Peck wasn’t allowed to enter her restaurant when we spoke on Monday because of concerns over structural damage to Pavilion in the Park, located off Cantrell Road. But she and her crew and volunteers had been there Saturday to navigate through the dark, powerless restaurant to clear everything out of the coolers and freezers.
Brian ChilsonPAVILION IN THE PARK“We donated everything to Potluck [Food Rescue],” Peck said. She said Potluck was able to take about three huge loads — $7,000 worth of product.
“We were gearing up for a big weekend,” Peck said. “Everything from tenderloin to fresh fish, quiches. We’ll be able to recover that from our insurance, but Potluck could make immediate use of it. So it was good we got that done before they kicked us out.”
Peck said the restaurant had just closed after lunch when the tornado hit Friday afternoon, but about 20 customers were still dining in the restaurant when alerts started going off on everyone’s phones. The Trio’s staff turned the television on behind the bar and heard the orders for Little Rock to take cover.
Peck said her staff and customers, which included a couple of kids, Rep. Ashley Hudson and Judge Wendy Wood, a total she estimates to be around 31, were all corralled into Trio’s walk-in coolers.
Peck said she couldn’t get the picture out of her head of the people who survived the Rolling Fork, Mississippi, tornado earlier this year by taking shelter in a walk-in cooler. “It was kind of surreal. It was pitch dark and we all experienced that pressurization drop in our ears. People say it sounds like a freight train. I don’t know what it sounds like, it just sounded like rumblings from hell.
“And then it was over. We walked out and I thought, ‘Holy shit, how did we survive this?’ Most of our cars were totaled. It didn’t do a lot of damage to the restaurant except blow the glass out, and it blew the doors off the hinges. All the debris from outside came in. It was hard to get out of the doors, but man we were lucky.”
Peck is City Director of Ward 4 and walked around some of the parts of the ward that were hit the hardest by the storm around Colony West and Green Mountain neighborhoods and Walnut Valley. “There were just teams of volunteers out there with water and toiletries and hot meals and burgers. There were as many volunteers as the people who live in those homes that were trying to just salvage what they could. I mean, it was unbelievable.”
Peck said she doesn’t know when Trio’s will reopen. Landlords from two restaurants not under lease have reached out to her offering their space if she wants to try to gear up and open while Trio’s is being repaired. “If Pavilion in the Park sustained serious damage that will not allow us to get back in there for quite some time, that’s an option,” she said.
Peck said a friend walked up to her after the emergency briefing on Monday and handed her 10 $100 bills and told her to give it to her staff.
“That made me cry,” Peck said. “I mean, the goodness and kindness of people, it’s just overwhelming.”
The post Tornado sheltering in the walk-in: Tales of safety and hospitality from Little Rock restaurant coolers appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The Arkansas Senate on Thursday approved an amended version of a bill that will require new users of most social media platforms to provide identification to create accounts. The bill now goes to Gov. Sarah Sanders, who championed it and reportedly leaned heavily on lawmakers to pass it.
The legislation is somewhat modeled on a bill from Utah, which was recently approved but won’t go into effect until 2024. So expect Sanders to trumpet Arkansas’s position at the vanguard of standing up to Big Tech and protecting children from pedophiles or some such. Sen. Tyler Dees (R-Siloam Springs), the sponsor of Senate Bill 396, has never talked publicly about the proposal without invoking the specter of “groomers.”
(There are absolutely evil people on social media who win children’s trust, or “groom” them, in order to exploit or abuse them, but A) even in the wake of Pizzagate, there seem to be an increasing number of conservatives who believe that sexual predators are ubiquitous and B) the word “groomer” has become a political slur conservatives throw at the likes of librarians who won’t get rid of sex ed books. Good piece here in Education Week from former Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reporter Evie Blad on that pernicious trend.)
SB396 is slated to become law in September. It will require social media companies to contract with third-party companies to perform age verification on new users. Because the legislation specifies that it only applies to companies that derive 25% of their revenue from operating a social media platform, YouTube will be exempt.
I don’t think I’ve been alone in reading the bill to apply to everyone. Sen. Ricky Hill (R-Cabot), during his fiery testimony against the bill today, said he believed it would apply to everyone. But I talked at length today to a knowledgeable critic of the bill, and the person felt confident that it had been amended sufficiently to only apply to folks who register for a new social media account after the bill becomes law.
That might make it less onerous for many Arkansans, but it’s still nuts. Say I start a side business and want to create social media accounts. After September, I would have to provide my digital ID to some unknown third-party verifier. Or as my kids get older and I decide that they can handle a social media account, I’d have to signal my permission somehow via the third-party.
How all that will work remains unclear. Dees repeatedly referenced Idemia, a third-party verifier based in France, as a good actor.
This legislature has done a lot of things that make little sense, but in the same breath that they talk about the national security concerns TikTok poses, they want Arkansans to give sensitive personal information to a foreign company?
The bill applies to TikTok, which if it opts to comply, would probably use a Chinese-based verifier.
Senate President Bart Hester (R-Cave Springs) said the bill was another reasonable protection of children like bans on underage smoking or drinking or going to R-rated movies. There’s of course no law against a kid going to an R-rated movie, and while there’s zero benefit to kids smoking or drinking, there’s a long list of potential benefits to them using social media that go along with all the ill effects and risks.
Sen. Ricky Hill (R-Cabot) absolutely went in on the proposal, calling it a Communist China bill and invoking his son in his military fighting to uphold freedoms that would be stripped away by this bill. He rightly noted that this was an issue that should be left entirely to parents and said it would likely lead to identity theft.
It garnered 21 yes votes with several Democrats joining in.
Many legislators were told that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, believe that there’s no way to comply with the law. The way it’s written a private citizen can bring a legal claim against a social media company if their child gets an account without the parent’s permission, but the soon-to-be law also forces third-party verifiers to delete personal information. So how could the social media company defend itself?
Add this to the long list of bad bills that are almost certainly going to get challenged in the courts.
The post Arkansas will be the first state to require users to show ID to use social media appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The president of a northeast Arkansas dispensary told a state commission Thursday his store has lost 15% of its business since nearby Missouri legalized recreational marijuana this year. State regulators, however, said they need more time to determine whether the dispensary should be allowed to move from its location in Brookland to Jonesboro.
We reported recently on the challenge Arkansas border dispensaries are facing since Missouri legalized marijuana at the polls in November. Missouri marijuana sales have skyrocketed, jumping to $102.9 million in the first month of recreational sales compared to $26.6 million in the same month a year ago.
In July, the state Medical Marijuana Commission approved a request by NEA Full Spectrum to move from Brookland to Paragould but the move was never executed.
Gerald Scot Sale of NEA Full Spectrum said he still ultimately wants to move the business to Paragould and is keeping a location there in case the state legalizes recreational marijuana.
The proposed location in Jonesboro is about four miles from CROP dispensary, which opposed the move at the commission meeting.
Eric Gribble represented CROP and said patient access will suffer by having two dispensaries located near one another.
Gribble also said NEA Full Spectrum’s proposed Jonesboro location is about 1,000 feet from a facility that serves individuals with developmental disabilities and that the commission’s rules require a 1,500 distance from such facilities.
He also said NEA Full Spectrum’s application was false because it said the business is located in Paragould when it is still located in Brookland.
The commission voted to rescind its previous decision allowing the dispensary to move to Paragould before voting to table the move to Jonesboro until the commission’s May 4 meeting.
In other business, the commission approved minor ownership changes for cultivators Carpenter Medical Group, Good Day Farm and Natural State Medicinals as well as processor Dark Horse Medicinals.
Natural State Medicinals’ change allowed Dr. Scott Schlesinger to leave the ownership, while his wife Kelly Schlesinger is staying on. The change is the result of arbitration that arose from a business dispute that was detailed by Arkansas Business last year. Kelly Schlesinger will have an opportunity to buy Scott Schlesinger’s shares of the company.
The commission also approved licenses for two new processors. Morph Cannabis Co. is owned by Shawn Keefe and will be located in Mountain Pine. The other processor will be M&M Cannabis Ventures but the ownership and location were not immediately available.
The post Marijuana commission puts off dispensary’s request to move to Jonesboro appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Over to you.
The post The Daniel has a new hat open line appeared first on Arkansas Times.
After voting down the bill during a Wednesday night session, House lawmakers resuscitated and passed a bill Thursday morning that singles out educators as the only public sector employees barred by law from having their dues deducted by paycheck.
It was a sneaky move, but not unheard of, for lawmakers to pull the bill back up for a surprise vote.
Public school teachers have taken it on the chin this session, weathering accusations from lawmakers and the governor that they’re liars and indoctrinators.While the Arkansas LEARNS universal voucher act boosts minimum teacher pay significantly, it does little for experienced teachers with advanced degrees.
The Arkansas Education Association sent out this statement after Thursday’s vote.
Little Rock, AR – The unrelenting attack against Arkansas educators abated for less than a day between the failure of SB473 and the ultimate passage of the bill that targets educators and removes local control from school districts by prohibiting them from deducting membership dues from educator’s paychecks. It is expected the bill will be signed into law this week.
Speech-language pathologist, twin mom, and Arkansas Education Association President Carol B. Fleming responded to the retaliation against educators:
“What have the educators of this state done to deserve the attacks on our profession, our students and our schools? Public education has faced an unrelenting onslaught from the legislature this session and the final act is an effort to weaken our ability to advocate for our students and the communities we serve–ironically while taking local control away from school districts.
It is unconscionable that no other public sector employees – firefighters, police, first responders, or any state employee – are subject to the same restrictions being imposed on educators. These are the same public servants – teachers, bus drivers, food and nutrition workers and school support staff – that were hailed as heroes during the pandemic for making sure our children continued to learn, and who work tirelessly every day to ensure every student succeeds and thrives. Attempts to weaken our organization will subsequently weaken our public schools.
Retaliation will not intimidate us. Despite every effort to stifle educator’s voices, we will not be silenced. We will continue to stand up for the public schools where 90% of Arkansas children get educated.”
The post AEA president calls out legislators for punitive bill that singles out educators appeared first on Arkansas Times.
As a bill to ban Delta-8 THC products in Arkansas inches closer to passing, the owners of two Arkansas CBD stores say the bill won’t stop dangerous Delta-8 products from proliferating and have asked the governor to veto the bill.
Roger Crawford and Amy Willtrout, owners of Sunmed Your CBD stores in Hot Springs and Hot Springs Village, say in a letter to Governor Sarah Sanders that responsible sellers of Delta-8 products have been tarnished by bad actors. Even if Senate Bill 358 passes, Arkansans will still get their hands on the dangerous products, they say, since the products will still be available on the internet and through potentially mislabeled products.
“There is no one that wants to rid the market of the synthetic dangerous chemicals that are targeting Arkansas children and young adults more than we do,” Crawford and Willtrout say in the letter. “We have been advocating for better regulations for years now. The chemically sourced and largely synthetic-based Delta-8 products that are proliferating the Arkansas market are dangerous and misleading – much like this bill.”
Crawford extolled the virtues of Delta-8, at times tearfully, during a phone interview today, citing Delta-8’s benefits for his customers. Crawford also spoke about a 4-year-old child whose mother testified before the House Rules committee last month about how Delta-8 helped her child through cancer.
Crawford said his business, which is part of a nationwide chain of CBD stores, operates responsibly. Crawford said comparing the Delta-8 products that are sold in his store with Delta-8 products sold in gas stations is “mind blowing.”
Crawford said Arkansans will still be able to get Delta-8 products even if the bill passes because it can still be legally purchased over the internet from other states.
“These dangerous products will continue to pour into the state and will in fact proliferate under this new ban as law-abiding proprietors such as us will be precluded from selling only legitimate naturally occurring hemp-derived Delta-8,” they say in the letter.
The letter says the business owners want a regulated Delta-8 market in which products are not marketed to children and only available for adults 21 and older.
Delta-8 products were legalized when Congress passed the 2018 Farm Bill, legalizing hemp. The products have existed in a legal gray area and states have struggled with how to regulate the products or whether they should ban them.
SB358 has cleared the Senate and House but must go back to the Senate because the House added an amendment. Prior to the amendment, the bill would have banned non-psychoactive CBD, CBN and CBG.
The post Delta-8 advocates ask governor to veto bill likely headed to her desk appeared first on Arkansas Times.
When Missouri voters legalized recreational marijuana in November (and Arkansas voters rejected a similar measure), it was only a matter of time until the results began to impact dispensaries in North Arkansas.
An executive with one dispensary near the border said he has noticed a decrease in business and thinks it could be related to changes across the border. “We have seen a downward trend in terms of just our overall sales, our overall foot traffic,” said Matt Shansky, chief operating officer at the ReLeaf Center Dispensary and Farm in Bentonville.
Shansky said he attributed a portion of the decrease to Missouri’s legalization of recreational marijuana — not just because Arkansas consumers are crossing the border for Show-Me State weed, but also because Missouri consumers are trying the recreational dispensaries at home rather than using visitor patient cards to shop in Arkansas.
In February, Missouri saw its first legal recreational cannabis sales and today boasts 213 dispensaries and 67 cultivators, according to the latest data from the state. Nearly all of the facilities are approved to serve both medical and recreational consumers.
The first month of recreational sales in Missouri was enormous. The state reported $102.9 million in overall marijuana sales with $71.7 million coming from recreational sales and another $31.2 million coming from medical sales in February. In the same month last year, the state reported $26.66 million in medical sales, according to Lisa Cox, communications director for the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services.
Thanks to lots of favorable votes in the St. Louis and Kansas City areas, Missouri passed recreational marijuana by a vote of 53.1% to 46.9%. The ballot measure included provisions for forgiving some past marijuana-related offenses and for home-grown cannabis.
An Arkansas measure that would have legalized recreational marijuana for adults failed by a vote of 56.25% to 43.75%. The measure would have legalized new, small cultivators and increased the number of dispensaries but it did not include provisions related to past convictions, did not allow for home grows and was criticized for being too favorable to the existing marijuana industry.
A legal recreational marijuana program in a neighboring state, especially one that raked in more than $100 million in its first month, is bound to have an impact on Arkansas, but it might be too soon to tell exactly how much.
Bill Paschall, executive director of the Arkansas Cannabis Industry Association, said the magnitude of the impact is “to be determined.” Paschall said he has spoken with dispensaries in northern Arkansas and said they have been “holding their own,” crediting their success to lower prices in Arkansas compared to the prices in the early stages of Missouri’s recreational program. As the Missouri market matures, though, prices could fall there, which could result in more impact on Arkansas dispensaries, he said.
“It’s too early to really know,” he said.
We reviewed the sales numbers from Arkansas dispensaries near the border, comparing the sales of February through mid-March with the same period last year. Sales were mostly even, although there were notable dips at the ReLeaf Center in Bentonville and NEA Full Spectrum in Brookland, near the Missouri bootheel.
Pounds sold at the ReLeaf Center fell from 464 to 370 and at NEA Full Spectrum from 220 to 162. Pounds were also down slightly among Fayetteville dispensaries over the same period.
Oklahoma
Out-of-state cannabis competition in Northwest Arkansas is not new. Neighboring Oklahoma’s medical marijuana program has been a frequent talking point in Arkansas cannabis circles for a while. The Oklahoma program takes a less-regulated approach to medical marijuana that insiders regularly refer to as the “Wild West” and say it’s practically a recreational market rather than a medical one.
Take the number of dispensaries and cultivators, for instance. Arkansas’s constitution limits the state to eight cultivators and 40 dispensaries. Oklahoma, on the other hand, has 2,884 dispensaries and 6,872 growers. (That’s not a typo.)
Oklahoma does not limit the number of cultivators or dispensaries, although its state legislature passed a bill placing a moratorium on the issuance of new licenses.
“Within the United States, I really don’t think you could have two programs that differ any more than Oklahoma’s and Arkansas’s,” said Scott Hardin, spokesman for the state Medical Marijuana Commission. “Arkansas’s is arguably as strictly regulated a medical marijuana program as there is in the country.”
The differences are also clear on the patient side. Oklahoma does not have qualifying conditions for medical marijuana, instead allowing doctors to certify for the program any resident they feel would benefit from marijuana. Arkansas, by contrast, requires applicants to have at least one of 17 qualifying conditions, such as cancer, post-traumatic stress disorder or intractable pain.
Oklahoma’s model brought more access to consumers, lower prices early on, more product variety and, according to some, less certainty about the products.
David Lawson of The Source dispensary in Rogers said he hasn’t noticed an impact from Missouri yet, but said Oklahoma has “felt like a factor for some time.” Lawson said he’s noticed the sales of some product categories, particularly concentrates, are not in line with other sales and believes it might be from Arkansas patients shopping in Oklahoma dispensaries.
Lawson said he’s visited dispensaries in Oklahoma and said it was hard to determine which products were of high quality because there are so many products in that market.
“I feel a little better about coming to the shelf in Arkansas knowing we have a dependable, clean, safe product for patients,” Lawson said. Arkansas patients are beginning to appreciate what Arkansas’s regulatory structure provides to the consumer, though, Shansky said. In the early phases after Oklahoma’s legalization of medical marijuana, consumers “just saw cheaper stuff and more options and that was all that really mattered in those early phases,” Shansky said. “Over time, I think people have realized, it does matter. The quality standards are a big factor.”
In March, Oklahoma voters rejected a ballot measure that would have legalized recreational marijuana 61.7% to 38.3%.
Other states
Mississippi and Louisiana have small, fairly new medical marijuana markets. Mississippi voters legalized medical marijuana at the polls in 2020 but the results were thrown out by the state Supreme Court due to some outdated language regarding ballot petitions. The Mississippi legislature approved a medical marijuana bill last year and the first sale took place earlier this year but the program is off to a slow start.
Mississippi has issued “very few” patient cards, according to Paschall of the Arkansas Cannabis Industry Association. One industry source said Mississippi has more people waiting to get approved for patient cards than they have cardholders.
Paschall said Mississippi requires patients to obtain authorization from two doctors in order to be approved for the program, making it more difficult for patients to get a card.
“I don’t anticipate Mississippi is going to be much of a competitor for the near future,” Paschall said.
Louisiana’s medical marijuana began in 2020 with restrictions that did not allow sales of cannabis flower, but has since allowed flower and other products to be sold. The state requires the products to be sold in pharmacies and there are only 10 approved pharmacies.
Paschall described the Louisiana program as a full-fledged medical marijuana program similar to Arkansas’s but with less access.
Texas has a medical marijuana program that is extremely limited, allowing only patients with a very limited number of conditions to access marijuana with 1% THC content.
Tennessee has not legalized marijuana for medical or recreational use.
The post One toke over the (state) line appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Starting today and continuing through the weekend, the large SoMa-themed mural on the Rock Town Distillery building — which has been up since September of 2015 — is being repainted. Los Angeles-based artist Drew Merritt was selected for the project from a pool of around 40 applicants.
Merritt, an experienced muralist whose work “merges street art and portraiture,” was one of three finalists who were given $500 to come up with a thorough mock-up. Though Merritt’s style is serious and highly technical, almost resembling oil paintings, a press release from the Downtown Little Rock Partnership states that his mural design will honor SoMa’s lively vibe. The cost for the mural was split between Phil Brandon, the owner of Rock Town Distillery, and the DLRP’s Public Art Grant Program.
Merritt began work on the mural this morning by covering the entire wall in purple paint, but otherwise the design is a mystery. From now until Sunday, April 9, drive down Main Street to see the final product be gradually unveiled.
The post SoMa is getting a new mural appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Sen. Alan Clark (R-Lonsdale) saw his seniority stripped last year after fellow lawmakers determined his claims against Sen. Stephanie Flowers (D-Pine Bluff) were made-up and mean-spirited.
But on Wednesday, as the clock ticked down on the final week of the Arkansas legislative session, senators voted to let Clark off the hook, reinstating his seniority so he can claim dibs on committee assignments and chairmanships next session. The vote came after a similar attempt to vacate Clark’s punishment failed on March 29.
Busted for fraudulently claiming per diem expenses for a meeting he didn’t attend, Clark lashed out, taking to social media with odd threats about burning things down and slaying monsters. He also filed his own ethics complaint against Flowers, who had been mistakenly paid mileage for meetings she attended virtually. The mistake was a clerical one by Senate staff, but Clark refused to withdraw his complaint.
The Senate Ethics Committee found Clark’s attack on Flowers “spurious, frivolous and retaliatory.”
As with the March 29 attempt, it was Sen. Jimmy Hickey (R-Texarkana), who asked senators to vote to repeal Clark’s punishment.
When the issue came up last month, Flowers was justifiably outraged. “I deserve better than this and y’all ought to be better than this!” she told her colleagues, noting that Clark had never apologized to her for making a spurious complaint against her. She called him a “doggone scoundrel.”
Siding with the guilty white Republican man over the innocent and wronged Black Democratic woman is a horrible look, but we’ve come to expect nothing less from the Republican supermajority at the Arkansas Capitol.
The post Arkansas Senate lets Alan Clark off the hook for ‘spurious, frivolous and retaliatory’ attack on a fellow legislator appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Grab your track shoes and your fried chicken tenders, it’s time to race the hurdles.
Slim Chickens, the Fayetteville-based purveyor of chicken tenders and wings, is specifically sponsoring the men’s and women’s 400-meter hurdles races at Harding Open track meet today at Harding University. Do you think Slim’s got to choose which event their name was going to be attached to?
The sponsorship struck us as a little unusual. We definitely love Slim’s, but we don’t normally associate it with track and field. Our office’s most-recent college graduate, however, had a different perspective.
“That’s cute,” she said. “I would run faster if Slim Chickens was sponsoring me.”
Another Arkansas Times editor was inspired to eat Slim’s for lunch today, so it seems like the sponsorship is working.
You can find the full list of sponsors below:
Burrito Day 3,000 meter steeplechase
The Bugman 4×100 meter relay
Crum Chiropractic 1,500 meter run
Ace Home Hardware 100 meter hurdles
The Bugman 400 meter dash
White County Farm Bureau Insurance 100 meter dash
Young Tire and Auto 800 meter run
Slim Chickens 400 meter hurdles
Crum Chiropractic 200 meter dash
Bobby T’s Mattresses 5,000 meter run
Young’s Tire and Auto 4×400 meter relay
The post Slim sauce and track shoes: Harding track meet attracts interesting sponsors appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The clock is running out on the Arkansas legislative session, and some bills are falling by the wayside. Included in those that won’t make it through by Friday is a bill to extend Medicaid coverage to new mothers for 12 months after giving birth.
Sponsor Rep. Aaron Pilkington (R-Knoxville) filed House Bill 1010 back in November, but it’s been stalled in a House committee since Jan. 9. Over text on Thursday, Pilkington said that sadly, the bill’s not going to make it through this year.
“It’s my biggest disappointment this session,” he said.
Arkansas had the highest maternal mortality rate per 100,000 births from 2018-2020, data shows. The state reported a rate of 40.4 during this period, while the country’s rate was 20.4. New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that the already-high maternal mortality rates in the United States continued to climb in 2021.
Maternal deaths are fatalities during pregnancy or within 42 days of termination of the pregnancy. Duration of the pregnancy does not affect the data, and the death can be from any cause related to the pregnancy aside from “accidental or incidental causes.” The maternal mortality rate is the calculation of those deaths per 100,000 live births.
More than 1,205 women died of maternal causes in 2021, an increase from 861 deaths in 2020 and 754 in 2019, according to the CDC. The national 2021 maternal mortality rate reached 32.9, which Arkansas’s previous individual rate still exceeded.
The deaths among Black mothers were 2.6 times the rate for white mothers — or about 70 deaths per 100,000, according to the national data. The latest figures aren’t yet available for Arkansas specifically, but the racial disparity was already a trend in the state’s past maternal mortality data.
Racism plays a significant part in how Black women and mothers are treated medically, which contributes to the demographic’s increased mortality rate. Social determinants of health — things like access to healthy food, economic stability and education opportunities — also contribute to pregnancy outcomes. The Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families dove deeper into this research in a publication from April 2022 titled “The Critical State of Black Women’s Health.”
So with abortion banned in Arkansas and women more at risk of dying during their pregnancy or shortly after giving birth than ever, the Arkansas legislature instead spent time on an education overhaul, a plan to pack prisons and the ugly side of a culture war against vulnerable trans Arkansans.
The post Arkansas won’t hear bill to help new moms on Medicaid as maternal mortality rates in America worsen appeared first on Arkansas Times.
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Cultivator: Shake Extractions
$61.95/100 mg bottle
When I was first approached to review this THC lubricant, I was a bit wary. I knew I’d have to get my husband, Mr. Not-So-Sure-About-It, on board. I thought it would be easy to convince him seeing as this product would prompt us to hop in the sack. Plus, it was his birthday and I had a free hour in between rehearsals for a fancy event I was performing at the following weekend. I came home to spend enough time with him for us to have a quickie. We were a bit messy with our measurements — we just kind of lathered it on and went to town. The recommended dosage is 5mg and I had some anxiety that I was going to be stoned out of my head for a music rehearsal with a bunch of people I didn’t know. Sight singing three harmonies under fluorescent lights? Stoner nightmare. When I started expressing this fear, I realized that I didn’t even know exactly how this product was supposed to work. Mr. Not-So-Sure explained to me something about fluids and membranes and how they intake the lubricant, but it sounded like the adults from “Peanuts” were talking. After I relinquished the worry of being too stoney bologna, I felt super zen and wasn’t in my head anymore. Maybe the weed was kickin’ in or maybe I just had sex. I’m sure it must have been a combination. The lubricant resulted in a high about as mild as one of those Lark drinks that have appeared all over town. We’ve used it several times since. It’s not too shabby of a sexual lubricant; however, the biggest drawback for us is the smell; it has a sort of pungent odor that I haven’t wanted to necessarily taste despite the fact that the product is edible. Other than that, this coconut oil THC lube has been a fun way to experiment with our physical intimacy. I was 10 minutes late to the rehearsal.
Mary Jane Doe is a local stoner-socialite here to provide you with hot gossip on fresh bud, best strains and how to make the most of your high.
The post Shake Extractions is making a THC-infused sex lube, and we reviewed it appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Here’s a rare piece of good news from this terrible legislative session: The Arkansas House overwhelmingly voted down a proposal to end all affirmative action programs in the state.
Senate Bill 71, sponsored by Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Jonesboro) and Rep. Justin Gonzalez (R-Okolona), would have criminalized any action by governmental entities that considered race, gender, ethnicity or nationality. The bill would have also applied to cities, counties, colleges and universities and school districts. It would strike the word “minorities” from many sections of law, which critics of the bill noted would affect disabled veterans, who are included in the state’s official definition of “minorities.”
The bill has traveled a bumpy road since it was introduced. Sullivan got pilloried by the Legislative Black Caucus, where he suggested that Black lawmakers should introduce bills to end discrimination. It passed the Senate with 18 votes, the bare minimum, all from white men. Then it got tabled for a time in House committee.
It was also the rare extreme piece of legislation Gov. Sarah Sanders didn’t endorse. When asked about it by reporters, she said only that she was closely monitoring its progress.
House sponsor Gonzales echoed Sullivan’s line that “you can’t end discrimination with more discrimination.”
But legislators weren’t hearing it. The bill failed 27-51 with 17 not voting and 5 voting present.
Without affirmative action, Rep. Deborah Ferguson (D-West Memphis) wouldn’t have become a dentist, she said. She was among only the third class of women admitted to dental school in 1976.
Rep. Jay Richardson (D-Fort Smith) noted that the bill eliminated the word “equity” in law. There’s a difference between equality and equity, he said. “We represent people who don’t look like us,” he asked his colleagues to remember.
Arkansas leads the country in maternal mortality, and Black women in Arkansas are more likely to die while giving birth than white women, Rep. Jamie Scott (D-Little Rock) said. Several state programs are working to address the issue. “This is about lives,” she said of the bill.
Rep. Jon Eubanks (R-Paris) said that his son, a veteran, had recently been admitted to the MBA program at the University of California at Berkley in large part because he’s a disabled veteran. His grandfather was a legislator in Mississippi who fought against suffrage, Eubanks said. That wasn’t that long ago, he said. “I don’t know that we’ve corrected all the things we’ve done wrong,” he said.
Rep. Ryan Rose (R-Van Buren), a pastor, said he ministered to an ethnically diverse congregation and was well acquainted with their accounts of racism.
The bill would effectively end all programs that help women become entrepreneurs, Rep. Les Eaves (R-Searcy) said. As a business owner and father to girls, Eaves said, “This is not what I signed up for.”
Rep. Mary Bentley (R-Perryville), who has repeatedly shown that she’s incapable of empathy, said she found the idea that women might need extra help offensive. She’s been a successful business owner and lawmaker because of hard work, she said.
The post Bid to end affirmative action in Arkansas dies in the House appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Update: After a late-night victory for the teachers when the House voted down SB473, representatives sneakily took up the bill again this morning and passed it. Teachers’ association members will no longer be able to choose to have their dues automatically deducted from their paychecks if the governor signs this bill into law.
After taking a beating in the House Education Committee meeting, teachers’ organizations came out on top Wednesday night when the full House voted down a bill aimed at further chipping away their status and power.
Senate Bill 473 sponsored by Sen. Joshua Bryant (R-Rogers) and Rep. Grant Hodges (R-Centerton) would have changed the way members of the Arkansas Education Association, a local union affiliated with the National Education Association, could pay their dues.
The Arkansas Legislature already pummeled teachers’ unions last session, taking away their collective bargaining rights. This bill would have prevented members from having their dues automatically deducted from their paychecks. In addition to being a petty snub, the bill had the potential to drain membership numbers if educators opted not to hassle with setting up a new payment system.
But the bill failed on the House floor, and you can see how your rep voted here.
Carol Fleming, president of the Arkansas Education Association, issued this statement Thursday.
“We are all breathing a sigh of relief that the unrelenting assault on public school educators was put on pause last night. We’re grateful to members of the House who recognized that rather than offering our members a choice about whether or not to join their professional organization, this bill would have taken away the easiest option and preferred method of participation by the majority of our members.
AEA’s advocacy for our students and colleagues will continue. Our work will focus on finding common ground with lawmakers and community partners to further our shared goal of making Arkansas’ schools some of the best in the nation.”
The post UPDATE: Nevermind, House votes against teachers after all appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Nearly 250 pallets of donated goods have been collected for victims of the March 31 tornado in Little Rock. As donations continue, the city sent out a list of specific items that victims need, including baby formula, canned goods, cleaning supplies and small flashlights.
“Without a doubt, Little Rock has truly stepped up,” Mayor Frank Scott Jr. said in a city statement. “It’s amazingly rewarding to witness the generosity of Little Rock residents in action. And, as we’re just a few days into what we know will be a long-term recovery process, we ask for the kindness and benevolence to continue as our impacted friends and neighbors will need our help in the weeks and months ahead.”
Donations can be delivered to 7000 Murray Street in Little Rock, where items will then be distributed to assistance centers. The release said that enough bottled water has been received to meet current needs. Pop-up tops for canned goods are preferred for ease.
The goods are being distributed to folks from the city’s assistance center at 315 N. Shackleford Road, which is open daily 10 a.m.-7 p.m.
Here’s the city’s full list of needs:
- Baby formula
- Canned goods such as chili, soups, beans and chicken
- Macaroni and cheese boxes
- Crackers
- Peanut Butter
- Jelly
- Dishwashing soap
- Dish detergent
- Small flashlights
- Batteries
- Deodorant
- Shampoo and conditioner
Tax-exempt monetary donations can be sent here.
If you have the means, fallen debris (construction materials, branches and vegetation) can be taken to Reservoir Park at 8321 Cantrell Road from 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday through Saturday. The city asks that the debris are separated. Debris can also be left on the curb of residences to be picked up for free. City officials said that collection may take some time, but it will get picked up.
Volunteer clean up-crews will be heading out over the next few days, according to the city release. Residents can request services by calling 211.
The post Baby formula, canned goods, hygiene products on list of needs for tornado victims appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Introducing the dopest awards in The Natural State, in which our readers weighed
in on their favorite picks from the medical cannabis industry. Read on for the results,
from Best Badder to Best Shatter and everything in between.
Cultivators
Best Cultivator
Winner: Good Day Farm
Finalists: Natural State Medicinals, BOLD, Body & Mind, Carpenter Farms
Best Packaging
Winner: Natural State Medicinals
Finalists: River Valley Relief, Good Day Farm, BOLD, Revolution
Best Edible
Winner: Good Day Farm
Finalists: Natural State Medicinals, River Valley Relief, BOLD, Revolution
Best Shatter
Winner: Good Day Farm
Finalists: BOLD, Osage Creek, River Valley Relief, Leafology
Best Sugar
Winner: BOLD
Finalists: Natural State Medicinals, River Valley Relief, Good Day Farm, Osage
Best Badder/Budder
Winner: Good Day Farm
Finalists: Natural State Medicinals, River Valley Relief, BOLD, Revolution
Best Wax
Winner: BOLD
Finalists: Natural State Medicinals, Good Day Farm, River Valley Relief, Body & Mind
Best Tincture
Winner: Natural State Medicinals Tinctures
Finalists: Sleep Drops by Shake Extractions, ArkanRaw by River Valley Relief, BOLD, Good Day Farm
Best Topical
Winner: Natural State Medicinals
3:1 Anti-inflammatory
Finalists: Body Balm by Shake Extractions, High Bank Topical, BOLD, Buffalo Co
Best Vape Cartridge
Winner: Good Day Farm
Finalists: Natural State Medicinals, Osage Creek, Revolution, BOLD
Best Hybrid Strain
Winner: Natural State Medicinals — End Game
Finalists: Revolution – Gorilla’d Cheese, Good Day Farm — Wedding Cake, BOLD — Holy Roller OG, Good Day Farm — GG#4
Best Indica Strain
Winner: Natural State Medicinals – Blackwater
Finalists: BOLD — LA Kush Cake, Revolution — Grandaddy Purple, Revolution — Blueberry Clementine, Good Day Farm — Berkle
Best Sativa Strain
Winner: Natural State Medicinals – Matanuska Thunderfuck
Finalists: BOLD — Super Lemon Haze, BOLD — Green Crack, BOLD — Blue Dream, Natural State Medicinals — Super Lemon Haze
Dispensaries
Best Dispensary Around Arkansas
Winner: Natural Relief Dispensary, Sherwood
Finalists: Suite 443, Hot Springs; The Treatment, Pine Bluff; Harvest Cannabis, Conway; Body & Mind, West Memphis
Best Dispensary in Little Rock/North Little Rock
Winner: Berner’s by Good Day Farm
Finalists: Greenlight Dispensary and Native Green Wellness
Best Delivery Around Arkansas
Winner: Arkansas Natural Products, Clinton
Finalists: Greenlight, West Memphis; Natural Relief, Sherwood; Body & Mind, West Memphis; Purspirit, Fayetteville
Best Delivery in Little Rock/North Little Rock
Winner: Greenlight
Finalists: Berner’s By Good Day Farm, Native Green
Best Budtender Around arkansas
Winner: Christey Noble (The Treatment, Pine Bluff)
Finalists: Darius White (Natural Relief, Sherwood), Krystal Moseley (High Bank, Pine Bluff), Jennifer Burr (Natural Relief, Sherwood), April (The Treatment, Pine Bluff)
Best Budtender in Little Rock/North Little Rock
Winner: Jocelin Fuller-Brooks (Greenlight)
Finalists: Rose (Berner’s by Good Day Farm), Jared Curtis (Berner’s by Good Day Farm), Morgan (Greenlight), Aimee (Greenlight)
Best Dispensary Grown Flower Around arkansas
Winner: Suite 443, Hot Springs
Finalists: Harvest Cannabis, Conway; Body & Mind, West Memphis; High Bank, Pine Bluff; Greenlight, West Memphis
Best Dispensary Grown Flower in Little Rock/North Little Rock
Winner: Berner’s by Good Day Farm
Finalists: Native Green Wellness
Best Rewards/Loyalty Program Around Arkansas
Winner: Harvest Dispensary, Conway
Finalists: Good Day Farm, Van Buren; Natural Relief Dispensary, Sherwood; Suite 443, Hot Springs; Greenlight, West Memphis/Helena
Best Rewards/Loyalty Program Little Rock/North Little Rock
Winner: Berner’s by Good Day Farm
Finalists: Greenlight, Native Green Wellness
Best Service Around Arkansas
Winner: Natural Relief Dispensary, Sherwood
Finalists: Suite 443, Hot Springs; Harvest Cannabis, Conway; The Treatment, Pine Bluff; High Bank, Pine Bluff
Best Service in Little Rock/North Little Rock
Winner: Berner’s by Good Day Farm
Finalists: Greenlight, Native Green Wellness
Best Vibe/Overall Experience Around Arkansas
Winner: Suite 443, Hot Springs
Finalists: Harvest Cannabis, Conway; Natural Relief Dispensary, Sherwood; The Treatment, Pine Bluff; High Bank, Pine Bluff
Best Vibe/Overall Experience in Little Rock/North Little Rock
Winner: Berner’s by Good Day Farm
Finalists: Greenlight, Native Green Wellness
Best of the Rest
Best CBD Product (Edible)
Winner: CBD & Me
Finalists: Buffalo Co, Healing Hemp, Spa City Cannabis, Sunmed Your CBD Store
Best CBD Product (Topical)
Winner: CBD & Me
Finalists: Buffalo Co, Sunmed Your CBD Store, Spa City Cannabis, Healing Hemp
Best CBD Shop around Arkansas
Winner: Spa City Cannabis
Finalists: Sunmed Your CBD Store, Buffalo Co, CBD & Me, Ouachita Farms
Best CBD Shop in Little Rock/North Little Rock
Winner: Healing Hemp of Arkansas
Finalists: Heights Apothecary, Green Corner Store, Sunmed Your CBD Store
Best Delta 8 or Delta 9 Product
Winner: Spa City Cannabis
Finalists: Sunmed Your CBD Store, Buffalo Co Happy, Body & Mind, 3CHI
Best Head/Vape/Smoke Shop around Arkansas
Winner: Wonderland
Finalists: Abby Road, Spa City Cannabis, Glass Smoke Boutique, Crazy J’s
Best Head/Vape/Smoke Shop in Little Rock/North Little Rock
Winner: Abby Road
Finalists: Smitty’s Smoke Shop, Mr. Smoke, The Parthenon, Smoker Friendly Maumelle
Best Hemp Product
Winner: CBD & Me Vaginal Suppository
Finalists: Spa City Cannabis, Sunmed Your CBD Store, Jades Elevation, Buffalo Co
Best Processor
Winner: Shake Extractions
Finalists: Dark Horse Medicinals, Mink & Kimball
Best Accounting Firm
Winner: Frost
Finalist: Safe Harbor Financial
Best Advertising Firm
Winner: Bud Agency
Finalists: Natural State Cannamoms, Shake Collaboration
Best Bank
Winner: Safe Harbor Financial
Finalist: Grand Savings Bank
Best Doctor
Winner: Dr. Thomas Tvedten (The Healing Clinic)
Finalists: Dr. Brian Nichol, Dr. Daniel Whitelocke, Dr. Kyle Roper, Dr. Archie Hearne
Best Law Firm
Winner: Erika Gee (WLJ)
Finalists: Rose Law Firm, Barbar Law Firm, Central Arkansas Legal Services, Zach White
Best Security Firm
Winner: Liberty Defense Group
Finalists: Cache River Security
Best Testing Lab
Winner: Steep Hill
Finalists: F.A.S.T. Labs, Marigold Labs, AA Analytics, Arcanna Analytics
The post The winners of the 2023 Arkansas Times Cannabis Awards appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Freshman Rep. Brit McKenzie (R-Rogers) filed a bill late Tuesday that takes a shot at the state’s not-so-loved state bird, the mockingbird. He wants to scratch the copycat bird and replace it with the mallard duck.
Whose feathers will be ruffled?
McKenzie’s House Bill 1849 was filed not long after Rep. Grant Hodges’ (R-Centerton) pitch to make the glamorous painted bunting our new state bird flew through a House committee Monday. It’s a bipartisan bill now, with Rep. Andrew Collins (D-Little Rock) signing on as a co-sponsor.
The competing bill to give mallards top billing instead is on today’s agenda for House State Agencies and Governmental Affairs. Seems like we‘ve got a bird battle on our hands.
Painted buntings make a play to become Arkansas’s state bird.
The mallard duck isn’t on any state’s register, but Arkansas has a serious amount of ducks that come through the state — especially through the Delta. Nearly one million mallard ducks were spotted in the state in 2022, according to the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission.
People have been wanting to move away from the mockingbird for a while. Take this 2006 prediction of its downfall, for example.
The mallard males’ shiny green head is stunning, but is it really a better pick than the cute painted bunting?
Would this be a boon to duck hunting in the state, or would it just make things weird? “Hey y’all, come to Arkansas and hunt our state bird!” That seems odd.
By the way, the mallard is kind of a jerk. Supposed to be monogamous, a male duck will cheat on his female partner. To make matters worse, mallards are rapists. It’s common for males to chase down females to force mating, and females are left to incubate the eggs and take care of the ducklings alone.
Chime in: Is this the bird we want representing our state?
The post Representative quacks back, files duck bill to make mallard Arkansas’s state bird appeared first on Arkansas Times.
In an effort to jumpstart the documentation process for future generations, the CALS Butler Center for Arkansas Studies has put out a request for citizens to submit personal media related to the tornado outbreak of Friday, March 31. Individuals can share up to 10 pieces, including but not limited to strict documentation like diary entries, photographs and videos, as well as creative responses to the tragedy like poetry, artwork and oral history interviews. Here’s more about what CALS is asking for:
Do you have before and after views of damaged sites? Have you written about your experience in a diary or taken part in recovery efforts and documented the storm’s destruction? Did anyone call and leave you a voicemail during their experience in the storm? Can you screenshot images of your Instagram stories or Snapchat to share? Did you share anything via TikTok?
CALS makes it clear in their request that they are not encouraging citizens to “venture into affected areas for the purpose of photographing or taking video” because it “causes congestion and prevents necessary workers from getting into the area for clean up and repair.”
The post CALS needs your help to document tornado for future generations appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Tacos Godoy, the Mexican food truck/brick and mortar located at 14710 Cantrell Road, is hosting a free Easter lunch for victims of Friday’s tornado on Easter Sunday. From Tacos Godoy’s Facebook page:
Tacos Godoy, along with the generosity of an anonymous donor, will be providing a warm meal on Easter Sunday at our brick and mortar for those affected by the tornado. The meal will include your choice or chicken or ham along with green beans, mashed potatoes and a roll.We have 100 meals available so we will require reservations to ensure enough seating. We hope to continue to be able to help people in such a hard time during a big holiday.Reservation required, please call501-541-5443
Thanks to Tacos Godoy, which has been busy this week serving food to first responders and their neighbors affected by the tornado. It’s always a good time for tacos if you’re in the area.
Stephanie SmittleAlejandro Gutierrez of Tacos Godoy (file).Here’s its weekly schedule.
The post Tacos Godoy hosting free Easter lunch for tornado victims appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The Arkansas General Assembly is wrapping up in frenzied fashion, so I’m glad to be able to draw from strong reporting by Tess Virbin of Arkansas Advocate on a topic we covered previously: a bill from Sen. Jonathan Dismang (R-Searcy) that, at least initially, would have stopped punishing people whose monthly income qualifies them for SNAP benefits, commonly known as food stamps, from saving money.
Arkansas is one of only nine states with restrictive asset limits for SNAP recipients. Most states don’t have any kind of asset limit. According to Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, most families with assets of more than $2,500 exceed the asset limit:
If they have set aside more than that for emergencies like car repairs, they’ll lose their SNAP benefits even if they meet the income requirements. And it doesn’t matter whether the family has children or not – the limit is the same.
We don’t have to do it this way.
We’re one of only nine states that have the most restrictive asset limit possible under federal law. Why? In Arkansas, we take pride in providing the rest of the country with quality meat, rice, soybeans, fruit, and other healthy foods. We shouldn’t be making it harder for our own essential workers to put food on the table.
SNAP helps more than 340,000 Arkansans afford food – more than 1 in 10 of our state’s residents. Most families that participate, about 74 percent, have children in the home. On average, each household member gets about $5 in SNAP benefits, per day.
In Arkansas, 117,000 workers live in households that participate in SNAP. Top occupations of workers participating in SNAP include cashiers, home health aides, cooks, laborers and drivers. Thirty percent of nursing home, psychiatric and home health aides in Arkansas participate in the SNAP program. If we want these essential workers to achieve the economic security they need to meet their families’ needs, we must allow them to build their own modest savings accounts before losing SNAP benefits.
Dismang’s bill initially would have raised the asset limit to $12,500, but it was amended to $6,000 in March and passed the Senate with a bipartisan vote just before spring break.
In the wake of the vote, Sanders’ spokeswoman Alexa Henning must have typed “Miss Trunchbull,” “the poor are to blame for poverty” and “WWRDD?” (What would Ron DeSantis Do?) into ChatGPT, because the official line she came out with is bullying, cruel and surly: “We oppose expanding welfare and trapping more people in lifetime dependency that is paid for by the labor of hardworking taxpayers.”
Then the bill went to the House, where it was then amended into oblivion. From the Arkansas Advocate:
It would maintain the current limit of $2,250 for most families receiving SNAP benefits, but it would allow the state to ask the U.S. Department of Agriculture for exemptions for individual families with more assets.
Those families would have a new asset limit of $5,500 and remain enrolled in SNAP as long as they receive an exemption within a year of exceeding the current limit, said Sen. Jonathan Dismang, R-Searcy, the primary sponsor of Senate Bill 306. Recipients who qualify for the “temporary increase” would only be allowed one exemption every five years, the bill states.
The post Rare bipartisan bill that would help the working poor, amended to be almost meaningless after diss from governor appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Simmons Bank Arena is asking everyone attending the Harlem Globetrotters game this Friday and The O’Jays “Last Stop on the Love Train” concert with The Spinners on Saturday to bring a nonperishable food item to donate to the Arkansas Foodbank for people affected by Friday’s tornado.
Tickets to both events can be found here.
The post Going to see the Harlem Globetrotters or The O’Jays at Simmons Bank Arena this weekend? Bring a nonperishable food item appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Chef Flint Flenoy, owner of Flint’s at the Flight Deck, is bringing a Southern-style all-you-can-eat buffet concept called Flint’s Southern Spoon to Hot Springs Village at 4409 Highway 7 North Hot Springs Village.
The buffet will run daily specials and feature a variety of vegetables and a salad bar. Flenoy said Wednesdays will feature meatloaf and herb chicken, Thursdays will feature spaghetti and fried chicken, and he plans to do a seafood boil on Fridays. The restaurant will also have a carving station and about eight high-end items like ribeye and T-bone steaks, beef tenderloin or beef shoulder in addition to the buffet, Flenoy said.
Flint Flenoy
Sundays will be an all out Southern brunch, Flenoy said. “We’ll have fried chicken, meatloaf, chicken and dressing, the whole spread.”
Flint’s Southern Spoon will be open from 3-8 p.m. Wed.-Sat. and 10:30 a.m.-2 p.m. Sun. The restaurant’s weekly afternoon schedule will give Flenoy time to commute to Hot Springs Village after working lunch shifts at Flint’s at the Flight Deck. The restaurant’s soft opening is planned for Wednesday-Friday of this week. The official opening is Wednesday, April 12.
For the past three years, Flenoy owned Flint’s at the Regions in the Regions Center in downtown Little Rock. Flenoy said when his lease came up for renewal recently he decided to move on.
“People bring up a lot of excuses when it’s time to part,” Flenoy said. “It just ran its course, and I wanted to do something different. I had an office crowd there; here, I have people that are settled coming from home to eat.”
Flenoy is also planning a menu change at Flint’s at the Flight Deck, located at Central Flying Service at 2301 Crisp Drive. Flenoy said Central’s opened up a new terminal, and he expects airport passenger traffic to pick up.
Brian Chilson
Flint’s at the Flight Deck currently has a pretty extensive menu with about 27 items that he’s planning to cut down to about nine. He said trying to carry inventory to offer that many items isn’t sustainable with current food costs.
Brian Chilson
“I can’t drop the quality for quantity, so we’ll remove some of them and bring them back as specials.” He said to expect higher-end sandwiches and that the burger would be “critiqued to the fullest.” Flenoy expects the new menu to drop next week.
Flenoy did a radio interview recently and said the host asked him how he plans to curb food costs with an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Flenoy said he values feeling like he’s getting his money’s worth when he goes out to eat. Flint’s Southern Spoon buffet will range from $15.99-$18.99 (high-end steak options and certain seafood items will not be on the buffet).
“You know, you’re going into McDonald’s now and paying $12 bucks for the same burger, fries and coke. With this buffet, we’ve got good herb baked chicken, meatloaf, eight different vegetables, a salad bar — I may not even make it to dessert. But I can walk out of there saying, ‘Man, I was stuffed for $17, 18 bucks.'”
Flint Flenoy
The post Chef Flint Flenoy opening Southern-style buffet in Hot Springs Village appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Hillery StoneSharon OldsSHARON OLDS
THURSDAY 4/13. Staples Auditorium, Hendrix College, Conway. 7:30 p.m. Free.
It only takes a handful of keystrokes and clicks to locate a YouTube video of Sharon Olds — an 80-year-old woman with small, thin-rimmed glasses and long gray hair — reading her poem “Ode to the Clitoris.” As she stands behind a wooden podium and talks about the notoriously evasive body part, the audience chiming with laughter, she keeps a straight face.
Perhaps this incongruity — the tension between the brazenness of her content and the assumptions we make about her based on age and appearance — is interesting enough on its own, but there’s much more here. Olds may use humor and provocativeness to hook readers, but you don’t become a Pulitzer Prize winner and a National Book Award finalist for just being unexpectedly saucy. Olds, one of America’s greatest living poets and the author of 13 celebrated volumes of verse, employs “aggressive intimacy” — as The New York Times Magazine calls it — not for cheap gimmicks, but in pursuit of truth. When she describes the clitoris as a “flower-girl basket of soft thorn/and petal,” she’s not joking around.
No reservations are required for this Hendrix-Murphy Foundation reading, but “Ms. Olds’ staff requests that members of the audience wear masks,” according to a press release.
The post Pulitzer Prize winning poet Sharon Olds to read at Hendrix College appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Four school districts in Pulaski County will move to online learning today as storms approach the area.
The Little Rock School District, North Little Rock School District, Pulaski County Special School District and Jacksonville North Pulaski School District will use Alternative Methods of Instruction today.
The Little Rock School District said on Twitter that some families still do not have power after last week’s storms but that schools will work with those students regarding assignments and other concerns. The district said its offices will open at 10 a.m. today unless severe weather dictates otherwise.
The North Little Rock School District will have an AMI day today after announced yesterday that today’s classes would begin with a two and a half hour day. Today’s AMI classes will begin at the delayed times, the district said. Students who do not have power, Wifi or a Chromebook will have until April 11 to complete assignments, the district said.
Here are the online start times for North Little Rock schools:
Pre-K/Elementary School: 10:20 a.m.
Middle School: 10:40 a.m.
High School: 11:10 a.m.
The Pulaski County Special School District said some students do not have power but that schools will work with those students regarding assignments and other concerns
Jacksonville North Pulaski schools will also use AMI today, according to a post to its Twitter account.
UPDATE:
North Little Rock announced late this morning that it is closing all school buildings for the day, including after-school activities and athletic practices. The district had hoped to assess Amboy Elementary School today after power was restored to the school yesterday. Classes at Amboy are closed until further notice.
Here’s the district’s full announcement:
The threat of severe weather has been extended to 4:00 pm in our community making school operations potentially unsafe. Due to the extended forecast and out of an abundance of caution for all our employees, all North Little Rock School District Central Office and school sites will be closed on Wednesday, April 5, 2023. There will be no on-site instruction, after-school activities, or athletic practices and events, as all Central Office and school sites will be closed. No transportation or food services will be provided.
Remote learning for students will remain for today as previously communicated.
Although power has been restored to Amboy Elementary School, due to today’s predicted severe weather, our teams are not able to conduct a thorough assessment of the building. Therefore, Amboy Elementary School will remain closed until further notice for in-person learning. No school means no virtual assignments or remote learning.
The post UPDATE: LRSD, NLRSD, others will use AMI today as storms approach appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The lineup for the second annual FORMAT Festival in Bentonville has officially been released, with LCD Soundsystem, Alanis Morissette and Leon Bridges set to headline.
Other exciting names include Modest Mouse, Jamie XX and Little Rock-raised rapper Kari Faux. Not sure if I’m out of touch, or if the approach is a just little less mainstream than last year, but I don’t recognize the vast majority of these performers. Perhaps I’ve got homework to do.
The festival runs from Friday, Sept. 22 through Sunday, Sept. 24, and the ticket pre-sale starts at 10 a.m. CST on Thursday, April 6.
The post FORMAT Festival announces its 2023 lineup appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Taking a direct hit from the tornado that tore through Little Rock on Friday, Reservoir Park at 8321 Cantrell Road will serve as a debris drop-off site. Only vegetative and construction debris will be collected at the park, and it needs to be separated beforehand.
The drop-off will be open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday, according to a city release. Regular yard waste routes and individual bulky waste pickups are suspended in the city this week. Solid waste and recycling will continue as scheduled.
Construction debris includes things like building materials, drywall, lumber, carpet, furniture and plumbing. Vegetative debris is tree branches, leaves, logs and plants. If you can’t make it out to Reservoir Park, debris can be left at the curb of your home. City officials may take a while to get to it, but it will be collected for free.
City of Little Rock.LEAVE IT AT THE CURB: City officials may take a while to collect the debris, but it will be collected for free.In addition to Reservoir Park’s closure, Murray Park and the Rock Creek Trail are also closed.
The city opened a family assistance center at 315 N. Shackleford Road Monday. The center offers water, food, ID and document recovery, mental health services and more. The center provided more than 600 grocery packages to displaced residents on Monday. The center is open 10 a.m. – 7 p.m. daily until further notice. FEMA officials are also stationed at the center to help with applications for disaster assistance. That can also be done here.
A separate temporary shelter is open at Calvary Baptist Church at 5700 Cantrell Road. Since the tornado, about 200 five-day housing vouchers have been administered.
Non-perishable food and water donations can be delivered to 7000 Murray Street from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Specific needs include cans of tuna, soup, pasta, peanut butter, jelly and cereal. Flip-top cans are preferred, and manual can openers are also requested. Toilet paper, paper grocery bags and quart- and-sandwich-sized plastic bags are needed, too.
People who want to volunteer should sign-up first. It is less helpful to show up unannounced, officials said Monday. Driving around to look at damage was also discouraged because traffic slows down clean-up crews. Tax-exempt monetary donations can be sent here.
The post Take your tornado debris to Reservoir Park appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Luis GarvanAlice DriverAlice Driver, a writer and journalist who grew up in the Ozark Mountains and now splits her time between Little Rock and Mexico City, has sold a book of creative nonfiction to Princeton Architectural Press. According to a Publishers Marketplace deal report, “Artists All Around” tells “the story of a lifelong friendship between the author’s mother and the writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak.” Sendak, the author and illustrator of “Where the Wild Things Are,” and Driver’s mother, fiber artist Louise Halsey, exchanged letters for 57 years, beginning when Halsey was only 8 years old and continuing until Sendak’s death in 2012. “Artists All Around” is expected to release in Spring 2025.
Driver, who has previously written for the Arkansas Times, has another forthcoming title called “The Life and Death of the American Worker,” a text intimate to our state through its documentation of “immigrant essential workers at America’s largest meat and poultry processing company Tyson Foods.” This book, pitched as appealing to readers of “Nomadland” and “The Undocumented Americans,” is slated to come out in Spring 2024 via Astra Publishing House.
The post Arkansas journalist Alice Driver now has two forthcoming books appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The governor and her press shop insist Arkansas LEARNS is a gift to school districts, with fat teacher raises fully funded by our kindly benefactors at the Capitol.
But wonky accounting types have known from the start that some caveats lurk in the 144-page bill.
Blue Hog’s Matt Campbell has posted a deep dive exploring all the cases in which Arkansas LEARNS does not fully fund the raises it requires.
Take, for instance, teachers who work on extended contracts, meaning they put in more days and hours than some others. Should they make the $50,000 minimum like everyone else, even though they work more? Obviously not. But the state’s not paying extra here, so local districts are on the hook there. Also, for teachers who are funded with federal dollars. There are a few exceptions that might not seem like a big deal, but that will likely cost school districts either millions of dollars or the goodwill of its (now slighted) employees.
Here’s Blue Hog’s exhaustive explainer. No paywall! But I’m sure a thank you for wading through all the charts and codes and whatnot would be appreciated.
As noted in the post, the legislation could easily have taken into account all eventualities had Arkansas lawmakers given educators even the minimal courtesy of heeding their concerns. Instead, the Arkansas Republican supermajority rushed to do Gov. Sarah Sanders‘ bidding without much question or pushback, either ignoring valid concerns completely or making dubious assertions that all would be remedied in the rule-making process. The rush to push the bill through before anyone could complain too much left us with a shoddy piece of legislation full of holes.
It passed easily, though. Sponsor Sen. Breanne Davis (R-Russellville) accused educators who challenged the math in Arkansas LEARNS of lying, and claimed anyone with concerns should have somehow magically shared their suggestions and complaints in the two years before the legislation was introduced. The fix was in.
Sanders threatened to primary anyone who didn’t get on board, is the rumor at the Capitol. Even so, a handful of Republican lawmakers voted against Arkansas LEARNS, choosing the well-being of their constituents over the whim of a bully governor happy to foresake Arkansas’s students to score some headlines in national rightwing media.
When Sanders moves on to her next thing, taking her education secretary from Florida, her chief of staff from Arizona and her press secretary from Texas with her, Arkansas will still be stuck trying to figure out how to make the math work on Arkansas LEARNS.
The post Blue Hog breaks down the tricky Arkansas LEARNS math that leaves school districts holding the bag appeared first on Arkansas Times.
State finances are up this fiscal year, despite a March that saw an overall 3.5% drop in revenues from the previous year.
State coffers are up 5% in gross revenue over last year and 4.9% over forecasts made by the Department of Finance and Administration, according to Tuesday’s General Revenue Report from the department.
Since the beginning of the fiscal year in July, the state has brought in more than $6.1 billion, the largest of which has come from the individual income tax and the sales and use tax. Individual income taxes are up 1.1%, but sales taxes are up 8.2% and have brought in $190 million more than last year.
The revenues for March told a different story with the state suffering an overall 3.5% drop in revenue compared to last year. Economic prognosticators seem to have predicted such things, since the revenues were 4.2% above the state forecast.
The state also calculates net available revenue, which shows the revenue after things like income tax refunds and bond requirements are deducted.
Net available revenue is up 2% over last year but was down 19.6% last month.
The post State revenues up 5% for year, down in March appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Eli Cranor is not resting on his laurels. Just a little more than a year after he published his acclaimed debut novel, “Don’t Know Tough,” the Forrest City native has a follow-up in bookstores April 4. It’s called “Ozark Dogs,” and like his first book, it’s a propulsive, gritty thriller that’s all Arkansas. If you like crime novels, or fiction that thoroughly inhabits places you know, Cranor is your man.
But he’s not just a local sensation. “Don’t Know Tough” was nominated for an Edgar Award, the crime genre’s Pulitzers, for Best First Novel and was included among The New York Times Book Review’s best crime novels of 2022. “Ozark Dogs” has gotten early positive notice from Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus. Thriller star author Megan Abbott called it “superb,” “thrillingly told, deeply wrenching, not to be missed.”
It took Cranor, 35, about five years to break into publishing. “Don’t Know Tough” was rejected by more than 200 literary agents before it won Soho Press’ Peter Lovesey First Crime Novel Contest. Now that Cranor has a foothold in the industry, he’s not letting up.
“I don’t idle well, and I like to write,” he said. “My path to success, I hope, is always having a book ready. Whenever they ask for another, I’m going to have one or two for them to pick from.”
“Don’t Know Tough” is about Billy Lowe, a volatile high school running back who’s terrorized by his stepfather, and his head coach, Trent Powers, a born-again Christian who’s recently moved to small-town Arkansas from California and who thinks he can save Billy.
Cranor followed the “write what you know” adage. He began drafting “Don’t Know Tough” during his lunch breaks when he was an assistant football coach at Morrilton High School. Football was a focus for much of his young life. He was a standout quarterback for Russellville High, which took him to Florida Atlantic University for a season before he transferred to Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, where he set single-season passing and total offense records.
He was an English literature major in college and figured he’d follow some literary-minded buddies to Ole Miss to get a master of fine arts. But out of the blue, the Carlstad Crusaders, a professional football team in Sweden, asked him to come serve as a sort of player-coach, installing an offense and playing quarterback.
“It made me love football again,” Cranor said of the experience. “All the bullshit was gone. It was like pick-up games.” He got to travel all around Europe for nine months, and his team won the 2011 Swedish National Championship. That led to other offers from European clubs, and he planned to play the following year for the Cannes (France) Iron Masks.
But then he met the woman who would become his wife, and he broke his contract. “The only damn job I could get was coaching football,” he said. Stints in Arkadelphia, Clarksville and Morrilton followed. “A story like ‘Don’t Know Tough,’ it would’ve never happened without those five years of being a coach,” Cranor said. “I call them ‘dog years.’ I got educated in way more things in life than any writing degree could teach.”
Sports had been a passion since childhood, but Cranor’s parents, both teachers, emphasized reading and writing. Somewhere around fourth grade, Cranor’s dad began to force him to read at least 20 pages of a book and write at least one handwritten page in a journal. “I hated it,” Cranor said. “Every day, the journal would start off with ‘I hate this journal.’ ” He read widely as a youth, but a favorite from that era, the “Goosebumps” series, particularly inspired him during the pandemic to self-publish a middle-grade book called “Books Make Brains Taste Bad.” It’s about a school run by zombie teachers who are using screens to fry students’ brains.
After he stopped coaching, Cranor, who lives with his wife and two small children on the banks of Lake Dardanelle in Pope County, spent time teaching at-risk kids at the alternative learning environment in the Russellville School District. This school year, he took a job with Virtual Arkansas, teaching 11th- and 12th-grade English to incarcerated youth. When he surveyed middle-grade kids during events for “Books Make Brains Taste Bad” around Arkansas, he found that most of them said they took tablets or phones to bed with them, that a screen was the last thing they saw before they fell asleep. The incarcerated youth don’t have access to the same technology, and they’re all voracious readers. “They can talk to me for hours about what series they’re reading or books they’ve read,” Cranor said.
All of Cranor’s 9-to-5 experience bleeds into his fiction. “Ozark Dogs,” like “Don’t Know Tough,” is set in a world of generational trauma. “The heart of those books is the cycle of poverty,” Cranor said.
“Ozark Dogs” is about a Vietnam veteran ex-sniper who owns a junkyard, replete with an armory, and tries to keep his high school-aged granddaughter safe. He’s raised her since she was little after his son got sent to prison for capital murder. But then a family of white supremacists, eager to settle an old blood debt, come calling and things spiral from there. It’s a white-knuckle thrill ride filled with all sorts of evocative detail.
One of my favorite moments is when Cranor describes the Christ Zone, the nondenominational church the protagonist occasionally attends. It’s in an old Walmart that smells like pancake syrup and there’s a band featuring a boy on electric guitar who sings like he’s doing karaoke at the VFW. It’s one of many moments in Cranor’s fiction where I found myself nodding along in acknowledgement of places and people I recognized.
“Barry Hannah [the late novelist] told one of my writing buddies, ‘I’ll read and write anything as long as it’s true.’ I’ve always remembered that. He didn’t say it had to be pretty. He didn’t say it had to be nice. I’m trying to paint a picture that’s true of these people.”
“Dogs” is set in the fictional town of Taggard, which resembles an alternative version of Russellville. “The Mother,” the famed rapid on Big Piney Creek, and Nuclear One both feature prominently in the plot. “Don’t Know Tough” happens in the nearby fictional town of Denton, which could be Dardanelle or Dover. “It helps to make it real,” Cranor said of including Arkansas-specific details. “You start with the real and you extrapolate and you bend and you enhance.”
Since 2021, Cranor has written a monthly “Shop Talk” column for crimereads.com, where he interviews authors about their process. “It’s been a golden damn ticket,” Cranor said. “I get to meet all my heroes.” Among the advice that stands out to him, Megan Abbott said it was important to make weird choices. Perhaps it doesn’t qualify as a weird move, but Cranor plans to make a swerve with his next book. It’s tentatively called “Memphis Blue 42,” which he describes as a “true whodunit” about college football recruiting that’s like “The Blind Side” meets “Knives Out.”
Whatever direction Cranor turns, he knows his mom will always be his biggest fan. Part of his writing process is calling her every night and reading her what he’s written that day.
“It provides me with this beautiful momentum,” he said. “At the end of every night, when I finish reading to her, she’s like, ‘Oh my God, Eli, that’s the next best thing.’ So I go to bed like, ‘Hell, yeah, I’m the man,’ and I carry that juice with me over to the next morning.”
The post Pope County’s Eli Cranor appears poised to break out big appeared first on Arkansas Times.
It isn’t out of the ordinary to find Arkansas/New Mexico singer-songwriter Jude Brothers singing alone with a lesser-known folk instrument as accompaniment, but one of the things that makes their new single, “practicing silence / looking for water,” unique is that it’s been stripped almost entirely of the reverb drenching their previous releases. A gutsy decision that evokes loneliness and self-reliance, this echoless recording style puts more pressure on Brothers’ voice, provides more room for the wandering plucks of their Celtic harp and echoes the profound romantic grief running throughout the tune’s lyrics: “Truth be told, we called it because it just wasn’t right/ And I wish I’d never held onto you so damn tight.” Listen below:
Brothers opens for Willi Carlisle at Stickyz Rock ’n’ Roll Chicken Shack on Saturday, April 8 and tickets are available here. Their sophomore LP, “render tender / blunder sunder,” is out via Gar Hole Records on Friday, May 12.
The post Jude Brothers explores self-reliance in new single appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Tornado clean-up efforts are still underway in Little Rock after a strong EF3 ripped through parts of the city on Friday afternoon. An estimated 3,000 buildings were damaged, and the city has set up a family assistance center for anyone displaced by the storm. There are no known fatalities, but about 50 people were injured.
The assistance center is at 315 N. Shackleford Road and will be open daily from 10 a.m. – 7 p.m. Free lunches and dinners will be offered every day this week. Clothes, mental health services and assistance recovering IDs and important documents will also be offered.
The preliminary path of the tornado showed that several neighborhoods were impacted. The Shackelford, Breckenridge and Rodney Parham areas were heavily damaged.
This @LRpolice map shows the path of yesterday’s tornado. Please avoid the area today as responders continue to work to clear debris and restore power. #LRwx #ARwx pic.twitter.com/6rvSV2ybMH
— Frank Scott, Jr. (@FrankScottJr) April 1, 2023
Several roads in the city are closed while crews work in the areas. Here’s an updated closure list from Monday morning.
Update: Some intersections have opened up, please look at the updated list of intersection closures. pic.twitter.com/EY8qhT4yBN
— Little Rock Police (@LRpolice) April 3, 2023
Over the weekend, Mayor Frank Scott Jr. and Gov. Sarah Sanders surveyed the damages. Deanna Criswell, the FEMA administrator, also visited the city. Criswell said that federal funding would be available for impacted residents. The funds can help with temporary housing, home repairs, overtime for law enforcement and other programs for recovery. Those without insurance can register for help with FEMA.
Those wanting to help can bring non-perishable food items, water, hygiene products and baby items to an emergency operation center at 7000 Murray Street. The center is open 7 a.m. – 3p.m. Clothing donations can be taken to Goodwill locations. The monetary value of the clothing will be given to the Arkansas Red Cross, according to the city of Little Rock.
The post Assistance center opens for Little Rock tornado victims appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Heather LittlefieldNick ShouldersNICK SHOULDERS, EMILY FENTON
SUNDAY 4/9. White Water Tavern. 7 p.m. $20.
Nick Shoulders and Emily Fenton are some of the finest vocalists in the Arkansas folk scene. The best way I can describe Shoulders’ zippy voice is by comparing it to a bottle rocket, minus the connotation that it’s ever out of control. Fenton, on the other hand, can often be found letting her voice unspool, surrendering to the glorious unpredictability of her vibrato. The two singers and their respective bands are joining forces to raise money for the Central Arkansas Harm Reduction Project, a judgment-free organization that treats drug users with dignity and works “to prevent HIV, hepatitis and overdose deaths in our community by meeting people where they’re at, and offering [their] services with no strings attached.”
Tickets are available here.
The post Nick Shoulders & Emily Fenton to play benefit show for Central Arkansas Harm Reduction Project appeared first on Arkansas Times.
North Little Rock schools are closed to students today as the district continues to recover from the tornado and storms that tore through the city on Friday.
Staff were still set to report today but no virtual assignments or remote learning would take place so students and families could continue to assess their conditions, North Little Rock School District Superintendent Gregory Pilewski said in a statement Sunday night.
Classes will resume tomorrow, although Pilewski said more information will come today on Amboy Elementary School and Indian Hills Elementary School, which lost power in the storm.
The district will hold a Community Support Day from 2-5 p.m. today at North Little Rock High School where families can get food and allow their children to play while adults can charge their electronics and attend to personal matters and seek resources, Pilewski said.
The post North Little Rock schools cancel classes today, will hold community event this afternoon appeared first on Arkansas Times.
In order for us all to thrive, families need to have good schools with great teachers to send their kids, businesses need talent pools of skilled workers to get their products to market and workers need roads and adequate infrastructure to get to work. Taxes are how we come together to pay for those things. All of us, regardless of income or ZIP code, contribute, and all of us benefit.
But Arkansas has an upside-down tax system, where Arkansans who earn less pay a larger share of their income in state and local taxes than the wealthy. Only income taxes ask the wealthy to pay more than the poor and middle class, and a decade of cuts to the personal income tax in Arkansas has shifted the burden of state services onto those who can least afford it by making our state budget more reliant on sales taxes.
In fact, our most recent economic forecast shows that our state already expects to bring in less revenue from personal income taxes than sales taxes this fiscal year, possibly for the first time ever.
Source: Official General Revenue Forecast, Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration, Nov. 11, 2022
Residents of our state perennially see some of the highest sales tax rates in the nation; currently, Arkansans face the third highest sales tax burden in the country. But since at least 2014, the Arkansas legislature has prioritized personal and corporate income tax cuts for the wealthy in nearly every legislative session. According to an analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, these cuts have totaled more than $1 billion annually, and the vast majority have gone to the Arkansans with the highest incomes:
Source: Analysis of major PIT cuts since 2014, Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, 2022
Senate Bill 549 continues us down this path, shifting the burden of state government more onto everyday Arkansans, and further reducing revenues mostly to the benefit of high-income earners and wealthy corporations. ITEP estimates a cost of $115 million in revenue lost from cutting the top personal income tax rate to 4.7%, and 80% of those dollars lost in revenue would go to the top 20% of Arkansans:
Source: Analysis of SB549, Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, 2023.
A household in the top 1% would be getting back thousands annually, while most Arkansans might get a few dollars.
Somehow, it gets worse than that. The corporate tax cut portion of SB549 would cost $24 million according to ITEP, and nearly $20 million would be passed onto to wealthy out-of-state shareholders, leaving little left for Arkansan residents at any income level:
Source: Analysis of SB549, Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, 2023.
That $139 million annually could go a lot farther for a lot more Arkansans — particularly the $20 million that will be leaving our state entirely.
A higher share of mothers in Arkansas die within a year of having a child than in nearly any other state in the country, but we haven’t yet expanded Medicaid coverage for women after they give birth, something that would save lives and only cost the state less than $2 million annually. We’ve heard a lot about workforce issues this session, but modest investments to improve access to and the quality of preschool or early childcare didn’t pass — when even the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has explained that Arkansas’s lack of childcare costs our state hundreds of millions of dollars in economic activity annually. Rising wages haven’t kept up with the explosion in costs for things like housing for all workers, but our state’s housing trust fund continues to lack regular sources of funding.
Taxes help pay for the foundations of opportunity that create broadly shared economic prosperity. Each dollar lost in a tax cut for the wealthy is a dollar that can’t be used to make these critical investments. But imagine what our state might look like if we had the political will to invest hundreds of millions of dollars expanding these programs that benefit us all.
The post More tax cuts for the rich and wealthy corporations appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson has announced his bid to seek the Republican nominee for president. A formal announcement will happen in Bentonville later this month, Hutchinson said.
“I’m convinced that people want leaders that appeal to the best of America, and not simply appeal to our worst instincts,” Hutchinson said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. “That inspires me when I see everyday Americans just saying, ‘Give us good leadership. Give us commonsense, consistent conservatism and optimism about our great country.’ ”
Host Jonathan Karl noted that no one outside of Arkansas knows who Hutchinson is.
Hutchinson said that he’s already gotten good response in Iowa, and that it remains all about retail politics in many states. It’s also the most unstable political environment he’s ever seen, he said.
Trump should drop out of the race, Hutchinson said. The indictment will be too much of a sideshow for the the race. Hutchinson said he didn’t like the charges, but defended “the system.”
“We don’t want to erode confidence in our entire criminal justice system, simply because we don’t like the beginning parts of the case,” Hutchinson said.
Hutchinson said he was very optimistic that evangelical Christians would be looking for “alternatives” to Trump.
The post Asa is officially running for president appeared first on Arkansas Times.
I take all winter to spread tons of turkey litter on about 60 outdoor, 120-foot raised bed rows. It is a winter spent stirring in the compost, repairing chewed up irrigation drip tape and finally unrolling big rolls of hay onto the rows creating a deep hay mulch over all of the fields.
Now is planting time. Due to a deadly manifestation of bacterial wilt in my 96×30-foot hoop house, I have built a hydroponic system this year where I planted 285 heirloom tomatoes on March 23 in blue 5-gallon buckets full of pearlite. The hoop house will protect the plants from light frosts and I will have a head start on the season. I never really liked the idea of hydroponics. I thought it was kind of cheating, but now I am intrigued. The hydroponic house barely resembles a garden, with 20 small water pumps in 27-gallon totes supplying nutrient-infused water to 285 tomatoes via a series of tubes and pipes. With all the tubing, my tomatoes look like they are in an intensive care ward rather than a garden.
Hydroponic vegetables get a bad rap for flavor for the same reason “hothouse” tomatoes do. The varieties one usually finds under plastic are bred for fungal and disease resistance to withstand that humid environment. Flavor is an afterthought. In my case I am growing Carbon, Goldie, Cherokee Purple, Ananas Noire and Creole heirlooms in the buckets. These varieties are all flavor and little disease resistance, but I’m betting that I can control fungus and other diseases with Neem Oil spray and a sterile planting medium replacing soil. Life is an experiment but I believe if I plant great varieties and keep them healthy, the flavor will take care of itself. After all this time, I am learning something totally new and that is what has occupied much of my time since November.
Toward the end of this month we will plant about 2,000 heirloom tomatoes outside through the hay mulch along with Ambrosia cantaloupes, cucumbers, Moon and Stars watermelons, climbing zucchini, Kentucky Wonder green beans, peanuts, purple Peruvian potatoes and cut flowers. Asparagus beds, blackberries and elephant garlic are already up and my small vineyard of table grapes is leafing out underneath a plastic canopy that keeps the rain and fungus off the leaves.
I try to cover all my rows and aisles with a deep hay mulch before the end of December. The hay mulch creates a petri dish of beneficial soil microorganisms and fungi, and the sooner I can start that process, the better it is for the plants. With the exception of a light stir to mix the compost in with the soil, I have nearly stopped tilling in order to prevent weed seeds from coming to the surface and germinating. The hay smothers whatever does come up and weeding takes up little of my time during the growing season. My aisles used to look like Pig Weed prairies but now hardly any get through the hay mulch. Hardwood tomato sticks are driven into the ground every 6 feet in January and baling twine for plant support is strung in between them in what we call a Florida Weave. By the time spring arrives, all we have to do is plant.
Almost all of my outside heirloom tomato plants are grafted onto a wild rootstock that is very resistant to a host of tomato diseases. The only exceptions are Caspian Pink, a Russian heirloom sent this year by Tomatoman (a commenter on this column) and Creole, an heirloom I found in the Mercado San Juan in Mexico City and saved the seed from. My grafter would not accept them because they were not “inspected” so they will be going into some virgin ground. I try to rotate my crops as much as possible but I still get disease and the grafted tomatoes help.
I have what I call my “pain hat.” It is an old, sweat stained slouch canvas hat that I keep by the door and put on as I head to the fields in the 100-degree heat of summer. I know that in a few minutes I am going to be bent over, covered in sweat and — if I stay out long enough — fire ants. I think there is a difference between satisfaction and pleasure. Now in the cool of spring it is all pleasure but by July, the pleasure will be gone and replaced by satisfaction, as I sort through hundreds of pounds of beautiful, fragrant, multicolored heirloom tomatoes.
The post The Pain Hat: on hydroponics, heat and the difference between satisfaction and pleasure appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Storm recovery continues in Central and Eastern Arkansas, a day after tornadoes and severe storms tormented the area and left behind a damaged landscape and five deaths.
A report from the Associated Press this morning says five have been confirmed dead in Arkansas, including four in Wynne and one in North Little Rock. Eleven people have been killed in the storms across the Midwest and South.
The Twitter account of Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott Jr. is a must-follow for updates on the city’s storm recovery efforts and resources. Scott also shared a map of the path of the tornado.
This @LRpolice map shows the path of yesterday’s tornado. Please avoid the area today as responders continue to work to clear debris and restore power. #LRwx #ARwx pic.twitter.com/6rvSV2ybMH
— Frank Scott, Jr. (@FrankScottJr) April 1, 2023
Scott, who appeared at a press conference with Governor Sarah Sanders last night, said there have been 24 people hospitalized in Little Rock.
Entergy Arkansas said last night that 56,000 customers were without power. The power utility has not provided an update this morning.
A statement from Pulaski County last night said there had been one fatality, according to the county coroner’s office, and that the death occurred in North Little Rock.
Sanders has not updated her Twitter account this morning but said last night that two people had died in a tornado in Wynne.
Pulaski County provided an update on its recovery efforts this morning:
This morning, the Pulaski County Office of Emergency Management (OEM) is joining the National Weather Service to assess damage in Pulaski County, starting in West Little Rock.
OEM and the Pulaski County Road and Bridge Department started clearing road blockages yesterday. Most of the roads still blocked this morning are due to downed power lines.
As for cleanup, utilities will be the top priority, followed by debris collection.
There is one confirmed fatality in Pulaski County as a result of yesterday’s storms. The fatality was in North Little Rock.
The Little Rock Fire Department training facility at 7000 Murray Street is a location for donations to assist those affected by the storm.
Please continue to stay home and stay off the roads so the roads are clear for emergency personnel.
The post Storm recovery continues, five confirmed dead in Arkansas appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Republicans all over the country have raised a battle cry against the “woke” left, deriding “cancel culture” and pointing out the dangers of “wokeness” to freedom, namely freedom of speech. Chief among these “anti-woke” warriors is Gov. Sarah Sanders, as well as a handful of other Republican governors like Ron DeSantis (Florida), Greg Abbott (Texas) and Kevin Stitt (Oklahoma). In their fight against the “woke” agenda, these governors have focused much, but not all, of their ire on schools and universities. DeSantis, for example, recently installed a new, less “woke” board of trustees at the state’s famously liberal New College. This new board has already begun changing the university by abolishing the office that oversees the college’s diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
But where does this focus on “wokeness” come from? Is it possible that those on the left are giving ammunition to the right in the “Battle of Woke Island?” After all, left-wing individuals, particularly on social media, have called for boycotts and firing of many artists, authors and celebrities who have expressed unpopular opinions, including J.K. Rowling, Chrissy Teigen, Dave Chappelle, Matt Damon and James Corden. Luckily, we can actually turn to data to understand if there is even a kernel of truth to Republican claims of out-of-control “wokeness.”
What is “woke”?
Before examining the right-wing argument that the left’s “wokeness” is dangerous to freedom, we have to define “woke.” It can mean any number of things to different people, but since we are trying to understand whether there is any truth to Republican concerns about “wokeness,” it makes sense to define “woke” based on Republican rhetoric.
Of course, Republican rhetoric on “wokeness” encompasses a large swath of positions, but it generally refers to the left’s desire to control messaging on socially salient issues, such as race relations and LGBTQ+ rights. Importantly, within this right-wing understanding of “woke,” this desire does not stop at wanting a platform to share their ideas and beliefs, but also seeking to block those who don’t subscribe to a left-wing position on these social issues from discussing them, and even bullying them with threats to their jobs if they do. Put differently, the right-wing definition of “woke” involves a desire to silence individuals who espouse negative attitudes towards marginalized groups, but not those who hold opinions that the left doesn’t find objectionable.
Is there any truth to the right’s contention of left-wing “wokeness?”
If we turn to the 2021 General Social Survey (GSS) — a probability-based nationally-representative poll that has been run for decades, currently overseen by sociologists at Stanford University, Johns Hopkins University and Georgetown University — we can compare left-wing attitudes towards silencing those they don’t agree with to left-wing attitudes towards silencing those they likely do agree with. Two questions in the 2021 GSS are of particular import for measuring these attitudes.
The first question asks, “(There are always some people whose ideas are considered bad or dangerous by other people. For instance, somebody who is against all churches and religion…) Should such a person be allowed to teach in a college or university, or not?” While many progressives are religious, or at least believe in God, atheism is typically not offensive to those on the left. Thus, this is perhaps a good measure of the degree to which left-leaning folks want to silence people with whom they likely agree or are at least not concerned by.
The second question asks, “(Or consider a person who believes that Blacks are genetically inferior…) Should such a person be allowed to teach in a college or university, or not?” This question serves as a measure of the desire to silence people with whom those on the left do disagree, namely those holding racist positions.
Using inferential statistics (a multivariate logistic regression), I looked at the effect of an individual identifying as extremely liberal, liberal, slightly liberal, moderate, slightly conservative, conservative or extremely conservative on whether that individual believes an atheist professor should be fired, and whether a racist professor should be fired. These statistical models control for a host of factors that might cause us to see a relationship that isn’t really there, and thus allow me to determine the probability that an individual of a certain ideology supports firing each of these hypothetical professors. These probabilities are displayed in Figure 1.
The red bars are the 95% confidence intervals for the likelihood of supporting the firing of a racist professor for each ideology, and the blue bars are the 95% confidence intervals for the likelihood of supporting the firing of an atheist professor for each ideology. The white diamonds represent the best estimate of each of these likelihoods.
The likelihoods of supporting firing a racist professor are clearly higher than for an atheist professor for all ideologies, but the two become much more similar to each other the more conservative a person is. Turning to extremely liberal people, however, we see a 62-percentage-point spread between supporting the firing of a racist professor and supporting the firing of an atheist professor. Extremely liberal people have a likelihood of supporting the firing of a racist professor of about 72%. However, they only have a 10% likelihood of supporting the firing of an atheist professor. The split between these two drops to 55 points for liberal individuals, about 44 points for slightly liberal people and around 41 points for moderate individuals. In comparison to moderates, extremely liberal individuals are substantially more likely to support firing a racist professor than an atheist professor.
Figure 2 displays the results of statistical models that are identical to those in Figure 1, except they look at party identification rather than ideology. The overall pattern, however, is the same. Those who identify as strong Democrats have a much larger spread between support for firing an atheist professor and a racist professor than self-identified Republicans. However, self-identified Republicans, even strong Republicans, are still more supportive of firing a racist professor than an atheist professor.
These data indicate that there may be something to the right-wing discourse that left-wing “wokeness” is focused on silencing people who hold positions that are seen by the left as unacceptable. If a person were truly committed to free speech, we would expect to see support for firing people because of their beliefs at close to 0.
Are conservatives and Republicans protecting freedom from “wokeness”?
These data suggest no, conservatives and Republicans are not defenders of free speech. Again, if a person were truly committed to free speech, one would expect to see the probability of supporting the firing of a racist professor and an atheist professor at or close to 0. The data show, however, that conservatives and Republicans are not a bastion of support for free speech.
Rather, the likelihood of more conservative people and Republicans supporting the firing of racist professors is more than 50%, which is lower than it is for more liberal people and Democrats, but still high in absolute terms. At the same time, they have a more than 20% likelihood of supporting the firing of atheist professors, which is higher than amongst more liberal and Democratic individuals.
Feeding the right-wing narrative
It is important to recognize that none of this suggests that racist or atheist professors should or shouldn’t be fired. That is a normative belief that each individual person needs to determine for themselves (however, democratic political philosophers, such as Voltaire, John Locke and James Madison would probably oppose firing just about anyone for their beliefs).
All of this said, the willingness of more liberal people and stronger Democrats to support firing people they don’t agree with at a higher rate than people with whom they do agree likely feeds into right-wing narratives about the dangers of “wokeness.” This, in turn, provides Republicans like Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott and others with ammunition in the “Battle of Woke Island,” which is very useful to them come election time.
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By now, you’ve surely heard that former President Donald Trump was indicted yesterday by a New York grand jury that determined he should stand trial over charges related to paying off porn star Stormy Daniels to stay quiet about their sexual encounter.
The recent rumblings about a possible indictment or arrest sent us scrambling through the Arkansas Times archives and elsewhere for stories about how Arkansas legislators have embraced the controversial reality star-turned-president-turned-criminal-defendant over the years. We found some doozies.
The best of all, which had slipped our minds, was that the first Arkansas legislator to endorse Trump was Jon Woods. That’s the same Jon Woods who was sentenced to more than 18 years in federal prison after being convicted in a kickback scheme involving a state fund and Ecclesia College in Springdale. Woods would eventually ask Trump for a suspended sentence in exchange for working on Trump’s border wall. Yes, really. A conservative columnist urged for a pardon for Woods as well but Trump didn’t offer one. So much for that early endorsement, I guess.
After Woods threw his support behind Trump, the Arkansas Times’ David Ramsey caught up with Woods to ask him about it. Here’s a snippet:
I asked Woods what issues were most important to him in the campaign.
“I think the reason why he’s doing so well,” Woods responded, “is that he tells it like it is. He calls individuals and organizations out for what they are. He knows how to deal with bullies. And I think a lot of people know what it’s like to be bullied. A lot of people see him as being bullied. That makes people gravitate toward him more. He’s someone who can take a tremendous amount of pressure and heat and not back down, which is rare. That’s a big turn-on for a lot of people, that appeals to a lot of folks.”
There’s also the tweet where Woods extolled his favorite tie, which was from the Donald Trump collection:
My favorite tie has always been my blue @realDonaldTrump tie. I’ve had it for 4 years. Vote @realDonaldTrump today! https://t.co/SzpJvyTuif
— Jon Woods (@Jon_Woods) March 1, 2016
In addition to Woods, obviously, there’s Governor Sarah Sanders who worked as Trump’s combative press secretary. There are plenty of instances of Sanders praising Trump, but let’s limit this to the criminal matter at hand. In 2018, Trump was reportedly upset with how Sanders responded to questions about the president’s affair with Daniels (whose real name is Stephanie Clifford). When asked if the president knew his attorney Michael Cohen had paid Daniels $130,000, Sanders told the media “not that I’m aware of.”
Former state Sen. Trent Garner was also a big Arkansas Trumpian, telling Andrew DeMillo of the Associated Press that Arkansas is now basically Trumpland and that then-Gov. Asa Hutchinson was a “relic of the past.” Garner, full of bombast and venom for a while, has quietly faded away after his bid to become a public defender didn’t go as planned.
There was the time Sen. Missy Irvin urged the Arkansas Legislative Council to pass a resolution condemning Congress for impeaching Trump. In her testimony before the committee, Irvin seemed more bothered by the impeachment process than she did Trump’s holding back of military aid to Ukraine in exchange for political pressure on his opponent Joe Biden. Irvin said she was speaking up for Arkansans who were bothered by what they were seeing. Twenty-six Arkansas Republican legislators signed on to Irvin’s resolution.
Finally, remember the hubbub Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) caused when he refused to endorse Trump on stage at the Republican National Convention in 2016? Here’s a video of then-state Sen. Jason Rapert (R-Bigelow) being confronted by Cruz supporters on the convention floor. Rapert had first supported former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee before turning to Cruz. Rapert eventually landed on Trump, tweeting “never experienced more arrogance than I just endured from #NeverTrump backers. Very sad to see GOP members behave that way. I’ve committed everything I have to support the #GOP to elect conservatives to save our nation – we MUST now support Trump.”
These are just a few of the greatest hits of Arkansas’s most prominent Trump supporters. Have any other favorite moments of Arkansas pols praising the twice-impeached, once-indicted former president? Add them in the comments.
The post Let’s relive the greatest hits of Trump-loving Arkansas Republicans appeared first on Arkansas Times.
LAURA JANE GRACE
FRIDAY 4/7. White Water Tavern. 8:30 p.m. $25.
The narrative swarming around “Stay Alive” — the 2020 solo album from trans punk rock icon Laura Jane Grace — is that it was originally supposed to be recorded by her band, Against Me!, until the pandemic came along and separated the members from each other. Why not just hang tight until things resolved? Grace claims that “waiting was going to kill the record and kill the songs.” Typically, I’m a little wary of borderline mystic statements like this that make it seem like art has control over its creator rather than the other way around, but when I heard these songs, their urgency immediately quieted my skepticism.
In the opening track, “The Swimming Pool Song,” Grace sings the following words: “I don’t know the source of my faith/ But I know I will be full again/ Come on in and take a swim.” Hearing her scratchy voice over nothing but a clean acoustic guitar doesn’t feel like a last-ditch effort to save this song from an otherwise inevitable death. It’s not “a pale shadow of the real thing,” as Pitchfork suggested in their review. Instead, these lyrics sound like they were meant to be presented this way, more high-strung and hard-hitting because of how exposed they are. Weakened Friends will open for her show at the White Water Tavern.
The show is already sold out, but sometimes last-minute room opens up, so if you’re eager enough to wait outside the venue late into the evening, you might have a chance.
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Should Gov. Sarah Sanders sign Senate Bill 262 into law, Arkansas’s smallest school districts will be free of the worry that they’ll be forced to consolidate with other districts.
SB262 by Sen. John Payton (R-Wilburn) passed out of the House Tuesday. It had already cleared the Senate. The bill amends a law that’s been on the books since Sanders’ dad, Mike Huckabee, was in the governor’s office. Current law forces schools that drop below 350 students to consolidate with another district for efficiency’s sake. Such consolidations could mean long bus commutes for students, job losses and culture shifts for small towns whose identities are tied to their schools.
Payton’s bill leaves consolidation open as an option, but removes the requirement.
The future is looking brighter for the Marvell-Elaine School District too, thanks to a bill by Rep. Mark McElroy (R-Tillar) that’s tailored to fit the exact tough spot where Marvell-Elaine finds itself stuck. His bill, which passed the House Tuesday but still has to make its way through the Senate, would save schools from having to consolidate if any students would then be forced to ride a bus more than 40 miles to get to their new district, and if the district is in level 5 academic distress. House Bill 1504 stipulates that a district that meets both of these criteria, as the Marvell-Elaine district does, will be taken over by the state, and its superintendent will be out of a job.
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CALS Ron Robinson Theater has announced another month of cinematic treasures. April’s showings lean older than last month’s, with half of the eight movies released before 1940 and three of those being silent movies from the 1920s. The overall tone of the offerings is less serious, too, including a screening of the seminal stoner film “Up in Smoke” on Friday, April 21, which seems like a typo, but isn’t. No explanation as to why it’s being shown a day late.
All screenings begin at 7 p.m. and cost $7, except for “Rocky Horror,” which starts at 9 p.m. and costs $10. Tickets can be purchased here, and beer, wine and concessions will be sold on site. A full list of the offerings:
Tuesday, April 11 — “The General” (1926, NR)
Thursday, April 13 — “The Lady Vanishes” (1938, NR)
Saturday, April 15 — “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” (1975, R)
Tuesday, April 18 — “The Gold Rush” (1925, NR)
Friday, April 21 — “Up in Smoke” (1978, R)
Saturday, April 22 — “The NeverEnding Story” (1984, PG)
Tuesday, April 25 — “Safety Last!” (1923, NR)
Friday, April 28 — “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” (1978, PG)
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Senate President Bart Hester said yesterday that he and House Speaker Matthew Shepherd remain committed to wrapping the Arkansas General Assembly up by April 7. If by Wednesday of next week that seems impossible, the leaders will move to extend the session a couple of days.
So there’s a flurry of activity at the Capitol. Here’s what we missed yesterday:
Senate Bill 296, sponsored by Sen. Tyler Dees (R-Siloam Springs) and supported by Gov. Sarah Sanders, would require Arkansans who use social media to verify their age through a third-party service. It’s aimed at protecting children; Dees talks extensively about “groomers” whenever he pitches the bill. It squeaked through the Senate with the bare minimum, 18 votes, with 11 voting present (same as a no), five not voting (also same as a no) and one voting against. More libertarian-minded Republicans were deeply skeptical of the bill during questioning. Sen. Missy Irvin (R-Mountain View) pointed out the disconnect between the legislature voting to roll back a simple child labor protection and this nanny state bill. Dees said the work issue was a “cultural” one and that his social media bill was about “empowering parents.” The bill now heads to House committee.
Sonny Albarado with the Arkansas Advocate has a good recap on Maumelle Republican Rep. David Ray’s attempt to gut the state’s Freedom of Information Act. House Bill 1726 failed in committee despite support from Sanders. But another bid to weaken the FOIA law, House Bill 1610, from Rep. Mary Bentley (R-Perryville), passed after it was amended. It would define public meetings as a gathering of more than one-third of the members of government bodies.
House Bill 1468, more petty anti-trans hate, sponsored by Rep. Wayne Long (R-Bradford), would require written permission from parents for a teacher to use a pronoun or name that’s inconsistent with a student’s birth certificate. Even with that permission, teachers wouldn’t have to use that pronoun or name if it conflicted with their religious beliefs. It cleared a Senate committee and now goes to the full Senate for final passage.
The post The beginning of the end at the legislature appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A Pulaski County operation to address more than $1 million in copper thefts has resulted in the apprehension of 19 individuals with more charges expected, the Pulaski County Sheriff’s office said Wednesday.
The operation nabbed the 19 individuals with the help of a variety of Arkansas law enforcement agencies and the New Hanover’s Sheriff’s Office in North Carolina.
The sheriff’s office said additional suspects are believed to be involved and more charges are expected.
Utility companies such as AT&T and Brightspeed, formerly CenturyLink, have reported more than $1 million in copper thefts in the county, the sheriff’s office said.
From the sheriff’s office:
For the past year, Pulaski County and surrounding areas have been plagued with utility wire thefts. In the unincorporated areas of Pulaski County alone, there have been over one million dollars in damages and thefts reported by the utility companies, primarily AT&T and Brightspeed (formerly CenturyLink). These thefts caused service interruptions to citizens and interfered with emergency communications as repairs were needed to restore service.
PCSO Deputies were tasked with identifying suspects involved with these thefts. Nineteen individuals were identified and evidence was collected against these individuals. Deputies, drafted affidavits for each of these individuals and presented the affidavits to the Prosecutor Attorney’s Office. On 03-29-2023, an arrest operation was conducted involving the nineteen individuals identified in the investigation. The following individuals were taken into custody: Jesse Spann, Savanna Spann, Lauren King, David King, Bill Long, Phillip Nesler, Amber Gaskill, Brad Lirette, Waymond Barnhart, and Zachary Baker. PCSO is currently searching for additional individuals who are believed to be in the central Arkansas area. These individuals are Donnie Butler, Christina White, Eric Thompson, James Justice, Richard Tomboli, Bryan Wickliffe, Gunner Baine, David Crawford and Kaylee Sipe.
There are additional suspects believed to be involved and further charges are expected.
PCSO was assisted by Redfield Police Department, Arkansas State Police, Benton Police Department, Rockport Police Department, Saline County Sheriff’s Office, Arkansas Probation and Parole, and the New Hanover Sheriff’s Office in North Carolina.
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To regulate or not to regulate? That is the question.
People across Arkansas made their voices heard about Senate Bill 197, which would have mostly prohibited municipalities from regulating short-term rentals like Airbnb and VRBO houses. For six hours on March 15, the House Committee of City, County and Local affairs heard testimony. Following their spring break, committee members voted against the bill on Wednesday morning, which stopped its move through the Arkansas Capitol.
“Everybody that was here, got heard,” said Committee Chair Lanny Fite (R-Benton) of the previous testimony. “I think that everything that could be said, was said. And what wasn’t, was sent to us in emails.” There was no public comment Wednesday.
Rep. Brit McKenzie (R-Rogers), one of the bill’s primary sponsors, continued to argue for equality among property owners. His main selling point for the bill was that short-term rental owners should not have to abide by additional regulations. McKenzie also ran through amendments to the bill on Wednesday. He said that a previously introduced amendment for three violations to a local ordinance during a 90-day period was extended to six months.
If an owner was responsible for a wrongful death on the property, municipalities would have the authority to take the home offline for 12 months. McKenzie also added that a $50 capped registration permit would be included under the bill.
Still, the bill was shut down.
Regulating short-term rentals is a topic that gets people talking. Rental owners and money-makers are typically against regulation. Some neighbors, residents in big tourist towns and law enforcement are for it. The Arkansas Association of Chiefs of Police released a statement against the bill on Monday.
“Let me be clear, this bill will not make our communities safer. As you all are aware, the men and women in blue risk their lives every day ensuring that Arkansas is a safe place for our families to grow and thrive. Daily we are exposed to more dangerous and complicated challenges with gun violence, domestic disputes, vehicular accidents, robberies, home invasions, and the opioid epidemic.”
With the bill now dead, it’s likely that the Little Rock Board of Directors will continue their attempt to agree on some regulations for the city’s short-term rentals. The ordinance has been deferred eight times since September 2022, and is back up for discussion at the board’s Tuesday meeting.
As a fun aside, I recommend the 2022 horror/thriller film “Barbarian.” No spoilers here, but the main character’s short-term rental turns out to have an unexpected occupant that has made me look closer at the places I’ve stayed since watching it. It’s rated R and is streaming on HBO Max.
The post Short-term rental bill dies in House committee appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The federal court system is putting a pin in Arkansas United v. Thurston for now, until the question over who can sue when voting rights are violated is settled.
The case, which challenged an Arkansas law limiting who can help people needing assistance in the voting booth, is on hold pending an answer from another Arkansas case, Arkansas State Conference NAACP v. Arkansas Board of Apportionment. That’s the one about how a map of new state House districts drawn by three white Republicans dilutes the power of Black voters in clear violation of the Voting Rights Act.
While the voting rights violations at issue here are confined to Arkansas, the repercussions of what the appellate court decides are huge. The question before them — Can we the people fight back when our voting rights are violated, or not? — is as far-reaching as it is infuriating. The obvious answer, that of course we can sue for a remedy when we’re disenfranchised, is up in the air as we speak, as conservative Federalist Society types make their convoluted legalese arguments that only the Department of Justice can bring such lawsuits.
There’s no doubt that the redistricting of 2021 left Arkansas Black voters with a weaker political voice than they had before, despite the state’s Black population having grown in both number and in proportion to white Arkansans.
U.S. District Judge Lee Rudofsky of Little Rock, who heard Arkansas State Conference NAACP v. Arkansas Board of Apportionment, said the case might have merit, but he couldn’t rule one way or another because he can’t say for sure whether regular people and groups like the NAACP even have the right to sue over this type of thing. So Rudofsky threw it out.
This standing to sue question is relatively new, and the Voting Rights Act worked pretty well before conservatives started asking it. Is it just me, or does this question feel like a stalling tactic, an excuse to leave racist district lines in place, to disenfranchise disabled voters who need help, to otherwise block people from voting based on a newfangled argument someone just pulled out of a hat to gum up the works?
Plaintiffs in the NAACP v. Arkansas Board of Apportionment appealed, and judges with the 8th Circuit heard their arguments on Jan. 23. We’re still awaiting their decision on whether Rudofsky was right to throw out the case, or if people can sue when their right to vote is violated.
Depending on what those judges in St. Louis decide, voters whose rights are violated might have to either suck it up or convince the DOJ to take up their cause. If the court decides the NAACP doesn’t have the right to sue here, game over. We’re stuck with a bad map that squeezes Black voters out. If the court decides the NAACP can sue over violations of Black Arkansas voters’ rights, game on. Let’s have a ruling on the merits.
Democracy Docket, a relatively straightforward legal explainer publication that’s somewhat understandable to non-lawyers, explained it this way:
If the 8th Circuit rules in this manner, only the DOJ, not private litigants or groups, would be able to bring Section 2 [of the Voting Rights Act] challenges in Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota. On the other hand, if the 8th Circuit reverses the lower court’s decision, it will clarify that there is indeed a private right of action under Section 2. Importantly, the pending voter assistance lawsuits out of Arkansas and Missouri, both of which bring claims under Section 208, could be impacted as well.
Read their full explanation on the status of these two Arkansas voting rights cases here.
The post A nerve-racking update from the 8th Circuit regarding your voting rights appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Once shrouded in stigma, the autism spectrum has steadily become better understood over the past couple of decades, and with that has come wider acceptance. But for those families dealing with the condition, the struggle is as intensely personal as it’s ever been.
“I think it’s true that the stigma is not what it used to be, but when it’s your kid, stigma or no, I think this is something that’s still hard for some families to accept,” said Dr. Angela Scott, associate professor of pediatrics at UAMS. “You get pregnant, you have this baby, and you can’t help but imagine what kind of person they’re going to be in the future. When the path deviates from what you’d imagined, it can be hard to kind of readjust.”
According to the National Autism Association, the condition now affects one in 44 children with more than half classified as having an intellectual disability or borderline intellectual disability. Diagnoses of autism have grown rapidly in recent years, although many experts suggest awareness and better diagnostic protocols have merely brought to light what was always there, either misdiagnosed or hidden by families entirely.
Whatever the explanation, the surge in numbers has put a strain on diagnostic, educational and therapeutic resources, especially in smaller, predominantly rural states like Arkansas. Scott said that not unlike health care in general, access to services related to autism continues to be a thorny issue for many families.
“There’s a lot of data now about health disparities and diagnosis, and the reality is [that]it’s a relatively privileged set of people who can navigate the path to diagnosis — unfortunately, people who can take the time, who can pester their primary care physicians, drive up to Little Rock and afford to stay in a hotel overnight,” she said.
UAMS has an outreach program that conducts diagnostic assessments on a quarterly basis in rural areas of Arkansas, Scott said. “But there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done.”
Once a diagnosis is made, too, challenges arise, like where to access the kind of specialized educational and therapeutic services needed to help a child reach his or her individual potential.
“I’ve done testing and evaluation and diagnosed autism for well over 20 years now, and I find a big part is not only educating my families on what autism looks like, but also how to serve in the advocacy role for their child,” said Kimberly Newton, a licensed psychological examiner who’s evaluation and resource center director for Access in Little Rock.
“Their child’s disabilities are protected by law, and I encourage them to be aware of that, especially for my families who are coming from a public school setting. Some families need more help to understand they are truly their child’s advocate now.”
As for specialized schools such as Access, the field of therapy for children on the autism spectrum continues to evolve. Access serves clients both through its full-time academy and as supplemental education for kids attending regular school, as well as a bevy of therapies to meet individual needs.
“I think we’re moving towards more of an individual-centered focus, which is not to say that hasn’t always been the case, it just means we’re more open to and mindful of aspects of autism coming from a positive standpoint,” she said.
“Let’s focus on the strengths and not the weaknesses or negatives. We really make a very concerted effort to not talk about what is ‘wrong’ with someone’s child, but their abilities and what they are able to do. I think that shift in presentation and focus helps not just our professionals working with students, it really helps our families so that the diagnosis doesn’t feel as heavy, enabling them to go forward.”
As the mother of a child with autism, Scott knows what families today go through from diagnosis to education to worrying about their child’s ability to function in adulthood. She said the outlook of parents, family members and other people within a child’s support group is the most critical success factor in navigating the challenges of the condition.
“This is your kiddo, and it may not be what you expected but what your kiddo needs right now is for you to get moving, get going with it,” she said. “[Autism] is a way of being in the world; it’s not necessarily viewed as something terribly wrong, it’s just a particular pattern of strengths and weaknesses with some people having more severe trouble and medical problems associated with it.
“Sometimes the pattern of strength is just as remarkable as the pattern of weakness. Yes, your kid may have trouble communicating initially and it may not come naturally to them to understand body language and small talk, but they’re smart in other ways. Where other kids are going to need good teachers to teach them calculus, these kids need good teachers to teach them social skills and communication. Our job as parents is to support these kiddos in the areas where they need help so that they can shine in the areas that they’re really good at.”
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THIRD EYE BLIND
WEDNESDAY 4/5. JJ’s Live, Fayetteville. 7:30 p.m. $39.50-$79.50.
Whether your memory of Third Eye Blind is rooted in slick, falsetto-laden hits like “Semi-Charmed Life” and “Never Let You Go” or more explicitly serious but still a bit schmaltzy songs like “Jumper” and “How’s It Going to Be,” they probably exist in that part of your brain that’s reserved for nostalgically pleasant bands from the past. Maybe nostalgia alone is enough of a reason to go see them play at JJ’s Live in Fayetteville, but I’m convinced that they’re a band with sneaky substance. Try cranking “Graduate” — a heavier-than-usual deep cut — on a moody Thursday night and I swear you’ll be yelling “knock it all down!” and banging your head in no time.
Tickets are available here.
The post Third Eye Blind is bringing nostalgia and more to Fayetteville appeared first on Arkansas Times.
When state representatives start filing bills to combat the red menace, maybe it’s time to pack up and go home?
Rep. Scott Richardson (R-Bentonville) filed House Bill 1736 Tuesday to require that public school students be taught “the perils of communism and autocratic governments.”
Specifically, the bill would require all public schools to teach students about “the record of mass murder and oppression committed as a result of communism and autocratic governments, the economic structures and related collapses of the economic structures in countries that have adopted communist policies, the issues and failures associated with communist economic systems … ”
Beginning in the 2024-2025 school year, public schools would have to learn specifically about Russia, China, North Korea and surprise guest Argentina.
Lessons on communism and autocrats are already a given for any student of history, right? A high school teacher assures me this is still standard fare in public schools. But this bill bakes in some ideological flair, insuring no one walks away thinking communism sounds neat. I thought we were teaching students how to think, not what to think? Guess not.
While Arkansas has evolved into quite the autocracy, with Gov. Sarah Sanders calling all the shots, the state won’t qualify as a subject of this new curriculum.
Under HB1736, “communism and autocratic government” is defined as a system that has “resulted in the murder of approximately one hundred million (100,000,000) of its own citizens.”
The post The Red Scare is back, but a brave Arkansas Republican steps in with a bill on ‘the perils of communism’ appeared first on Arkansas Times.
You may have noticed an uptick this session in bills targeting LGBTQ+ folks. It’s worth talking about why this is happening, because it’s not unique to Arkansas.
The ACLU is currently tracking a whopping 429 bills across the nation that have some kind of negative effect on LGBTQ+ rights. Eight are from Arkansas, and they range from the disgusting attack on free speech and expression in HB1615 (the Arkansas supermajority only cares about freedom of speech for their stakeholders, remember) to Rep. Bentley’s darkly hilarious attempts to regulate bathroom usage for trans kids in HB1156.
We can’t give Arleg any points for creativity. Similar bills are hitting the legislative floors in Texas, Florida, Wyoming, Georgia, and too many others.
Alongside these legislative attacks, the anti-LGBTQ+ crowd’s use of targeted rhetoric toward our queer neighbors has worsened the last few years. Despite national legal wins for LGBTQ+ folks over the past decade, today’s anti-LGBTQ+ efforts give the impression we’re backsliding as a country.
The two-bit extremist Christopher Rufo is largely responsible for driving the escalation to increasingly severe anti-LGBTQ+ language. If that name sounds familiar, he’s also responsible for the right’s focus on the “dangers” of critical race theory. A quick reminder about CRT: though it is not taught in any secondary or elementary setting, extremists perpetuate misinformation that it is.
Rufo is running the same playbook on anti-LGBTQ+ rights as CRT, which shows this new generation of right-wing activists are a one-trick pony — demonize and punch down on the marginalized because politicians are either uninterested or unequipped to offer helpful policy.
The state is hurting badly but our legislature is wasting time, energy, and money fighting a culture war.
The method is an easy way to stoke fear and discomfort and to drive their base to the polls.
Why the hostility mattersWhy should Arkansans care about the broad, nationwide attack on LGBTQ+ rights? Here are at least two reasons to pay attention to the legislative bullying.
First, it demonstrates how little our supermajority cares to address what worries Arkansans. Last November, the University of Arkansas released its annual poll that showed the economy was the most important concern among voters by a solid 20 percentage points. This kind of culture war garbage we’re seeing now? It didn’t even crack the top five for Arkansas voters.
Additionally, the number of Arkansans who were most worried about the economy increased nearly 20 points from last year’s poll. The state is hurting badly and our legislature is wasting time, energy, and money fighting a culture war instead of delivering effective economic aid to Arkansans, despite a 2022 budget windfall.
Lawmakers could be trying to make our lives tangibly better; yet they have settled for making life worse for a certain groups. These legislative policies unfairly target Arkansans already experiencing marginalization — folks who deserve respect and privacy, which are two values conservatives allegedly uphold, like right to be free from government interference. The themes of unprincipled motivation and ideological hypocrisy are again on full display in our legislature.
Second, the coordinated strike on LGBTQ+ Arkansans is a precursor to attacks on libraries, school boards, and other educational institutions and policies. And we’ve seen such a policy progression here in Arkansas. What started in 2021 as a ban on trans girls in sports has become a full-fledged takedown of any perceived “woke” norm, system, industry, or public service.
Fear is a powerful weapon, and it’s easy for those in power to deliberately target groups of people that are already on the metaphorical ground. Arleg’s punch-down intent is clear: bully their way to total control. The more harm lawmakers bring to specific groups, the more likely fear will keep us from standing up for policies and programs that help — not hurt — Arkansans.
For AR People is a nonprofit group that aims to help Arkansans take ownership of their state government and hold elected officials accountable.
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Rain is in the forecast on Friday, so the 10th annual Arkansas Times Craft Beer Festival is being relocated from the Argenta Plaza to Diamond Bear Brewing at 600 N. Broadway St. in North Little Rock. Two hundred beers from all over the world are still in the forecast.
When a festival celebrates its 10th annual event, it’s stood the test of time and cemented itself as an enduring symbol of importance. We’re talking about craft beer here. That’s right, the Arkansas Times Craft Beer Festival, presented by Colonial Wine & Spirits, is back and better than ever! Benefiting the Argenta Arts District of North Little Rock, the annual beer festival will be held from 6-9 p.m. on Friday, March 31, at Diamond Bear Brewing in North Little Rock at 600 N. Broadway St. Thanks to our supporting sponsors Charlotte Potts State Farm Agency and Edwards Food Giant, over 150 beers will be available for your enjoyment from more than 50 participating local and national breweries. If you’re more of a hard seltzer fan, there will be an entire section dedicated to the bubbly, fruity refreshing beer alternative. Arkansas Times has always discouraged drinking on an empty stomach, so several local food trucks will be on hand providing food for purchase — Charleston’s Chick’n and Catfish, Top Dog Catering, Nach’Yo Nachos and Crissy’s Pub Style.
General admission will be $40. Tickets are available here or at the door, and VIP tickets are still available for $100. VIP tickets include access to special beers, food from Mr. Cajun’s Kitchen, early entry (5:30 p.m.)and a swag bag full of goodies.
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The Little Rock Police Department announced a homicide on Monday afternoon, which marked one dozen homicides in the city in 2023.
The police report isn’t available yet, so details are scarce. Preliminary information from the LRPD stated that the shooting was called in at 4 p.m. at the 4700 block of Fairlee Drive, a residential area just south of Interstate 30.
The Arkansas State Police building is located about one mile from the shooting site. The Monday afternoon shooting was reported less than 24 hours after a different shooting in Little Rock killed two people and injured five more.
The homicide data from the LRPD does not include the death of one individual from an officer-involved shooting. At the end of March in 2022, the LRPD reported 16 homicides.
We will update this story as more information becomes available.
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The furry scourge of 2021 that had Arkansas legislators running scared about children identifying as house pets reared its head again Monday, as House lawmakers voted up a bill to free teachers from having to use transgender students’ preferred names and pronouns.
“A child may come in one day and want to be called one name and want to be called she, he, it, cat, dog. I mean they don’t let it go, it keeps going” Rep. Cindy Crawford (R-Fort Smith) said as she made the case for lawmakers stepping in to solidify laws about what teachers can and cannot call their students.
Crawford said we shouldn’t have to make laws like this, but this is the wacky world we live in today. “Let’s get back to the basics of he and she,” she said.
House Bill 1468 by the pony-tailed, tam-sporting freshman Rep. Wayne Long (R-Bradford), is called “The Given Name Act.” It contends that students’ preferred pronouns are a matter of public concern, and says teachers and school staff shall not address students by names or gender pronouns that differ from student’s birth certificates unless parents give written consent. School staff who refuse to respect preferred pronouns and names after that cannot be disciplined, according to the bill.
Long conceded under questioning that Arkansas teachers are not out there clamoring for this bill. He has heard from one teacher who doesn’t want to use a transgender student’s preferred pronouns, but only one. Rep. Hope Duke (R-Gravette) said she knows of other teachers worried about the legalities of pronoun usage, but did not share names or specifics.
This bill, like so many others targeting defenseless and harmless transgender children, is being driven by out-of-state groups who write up the bills and then have local folks like Long sponsor them. In this case, it’s the Alliance Defending Freedom that’s driving the bus over the innocents.
Alliance Defending Freedom is the same group that pushed through the bill in 2021 that bars trans girls from playing on girls’ sports teams in school, even though that’s never been a problem in Arkansas in any way. An attorney from the Alliance Defending Freedom presented this bill alongside Long in committee. It’s a cookie cutter piece of legislation the Alliance is shopping around to any red and hateful state legislatures that will have them.
While transgender people make up less than 1% of the population, supporters of House Bill 1468 said students are switching their gender identities every other week, and teachers are scared of getting fired if they don’t go along.
Would Jesus respect the wishes of transgender children struggling with their identity in a hostile environment? Apparently some teachers think not, and they want a guarantee that they won’t get fired for dead-naming their students.
House minority leader Rep. Tippi McCullough (D-Little Rock) noted that the main tenets of any religion are about respecting people and loving them. This law does not do that. How hard is it to be nice to trans kids? McCullough asked.
“This is about people and how we treat them. The ask is simply for a small accommodation to help a struggling kids whose mental health hangs in the balance,” she said. You can’t legislate away transgender people, McCullough said.
In fact, HB1468 creates more opportunities for teachers and schools to be sued, attorney and lawmaker Rep. Nicole Clowney (D-Fayetteville) said. A gym teacher in her district calls students by personalized nicknames, like “Curly” for Clowney’s older daughter who has a remarkable halo of ringlets. Under this bill, school staff who use nicknames could be sued, she said.
Legal advice is often of no consequence to the ideologues of the Arkansas Legislature, who passed this Given Name Act with 65 yeahs, 18 nos, 12 not voting and five voting present. The bill now goes to the Senate Education Committee.
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The Democratic Party of Arkansas is rightfully skeptical of Gov. Sarah Sanders’ plan to build a massive new prison.
From a release:
LITTLE ROCK – On Monday, Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, State Senator Ben Gilmore (R-Crossett), and State Representative Jimmy Gazaway (R-Paragould) held a press conference to unveil a plan to uphold the failed status quo. Their plan will authorize the construction of a new prison to the tune of half a billion dollars with an additional $31 million required each year for continued operation. Democratic lawmakers in the House and Senate caucuses have continued to put forward research-backed legislation to reduce overcrowding in our jails, correct terrible conditions in our prisons, and combat violent crime in our communities.
In Governor Sanders’s limited, flawed view of criminal justice, there is no difference between a user of marijuana and a violent felon nor any willingness to pass bipartisan legislation to limit a violent person’s access to dangerous weapons. Her plan will not make Arkansas families safer.
“If Arkansas really needs to lock up more people than many countries do, then we are failing,” said Democratic Party of Arkansas Chair Grant Tennille. “Building a new prison is just an admission of failure. Failure to care for children, failure to educate our people, failure to invest in Arkansas in all of the ways we know can prevent crime. Democrats in this legislative session and previous sessions have put forward bills to make Arkansas safer. Sanders’s plan will result in more nonviolent arrests, more mentally ill Arkansans in jail rather than in treatment, and less money for the services our people actually need.”
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Two people were found dead in a residential fire in Cabot early Monday morning, the Pulaski County Sheriff’s office said in a statement yesterday afternoon.
At about 3 a.m., the sheriff’s office responded to a structure fire at 2213 Lusby Court in Cabot in northeast Pulaski County where three volunteer fire departments responded to the fire.
The sheriff’s deputies found a camper trailer on fire and, when it was extinguished, discovered two bodies. Detectives from the sheriff’s office began a fire and death investigation and the bodies were taken to the state Medical Examiner’s Office for identification as well as a determination of the cause and manner of death.
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The 120th issue of the Oxford American makes its premiere on newsstands tomorrow, Tuesday, March 28. Though not one of its famed music-specific issues, the simple yet provocative cover of the Spring 2023 edition of the Conway-based magazine calls to mind two sporadically-polka dotted vinyl records, overlapping just slightly in the middle. Additionally, while this issue lacks an explicit theme, Editor Danielle A. Jackson‘s introduction hums with vision and particularity:
When brainstorming with the art team about how we kick 2023, I said something about wanting the new issue to feel like the morning after an enormous house party, when you wake up to silence, empty bottles, maybe an overturned chair and a rug rolled up out of the way in a corner. One might be a little hungover, or at least somewhat fatigued. Amongst all that is strewn about and awaiting tending is the love left hanging in the air, thick with the memory of camaraderie and laughter. For the start of our thirty-first year, I wanted to clear the room of all but the love and well wishes.
Here are some highlights: In “Pinocchio,” a story by Jeffery Renard Allen, a fictionalized version of Miles Davis assumes the role of the first-person narrator. “Dear Atlanta: Manipulation of the Reflection,” a gorgeous photography feature by Nicole Hernandez, makes urban Georgia look like heaven. With “The Long Wake of the Storm,” Justin Nobel widens the OA’s gaze to reach the global South, taking stock of the longterm effects of Hurricane Irma on the island of Barbuda. There’s even a lovely essay from Julia Thomas, a former Arkansas Times contributor, about her visit to the Appalachian String Band Music Festival in West Virginia.
Buy your copy here.
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Former Gov. Mike Huckabee, appearing on Newsmax over the weekend, channeled Tony Soprano while wading into to a popular conservative debate: Whether Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis should be more deferential to former President Donald Trump. Even though his daughter, Gov. Sarah Sanders, has declined to endorse Trump for president so far, Huckabee is staying loyal to The Don.
Raw Story reported on Huckabee’s remarks on Newsmax:
Ron DeSantis wouldn’t have been governor of Florida without Donald Trump’s intervention. Yeah, and I think Donald Trump, like a lot of us, think that somehow loyalty matters in politics. I think it does. I think there are two virtues: loyalty and confidentiality. Be loyal to the people who helped you and learn how to keep your mouth shut if you have information that, uh, could be hurtful to someone. Be confidential if you’re truly close to someone.”
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The Little Rock Police Department reported early Monday that separate shootings Sunday night resulted in two homicides. In total, seven people were shot.
According to a preliminary announcement on the department’s Twitter account, the LRPD responded to a call around 9:30 p.m. March 26 about a shooting near Asher and University avenues. Officers found two people who were shot with non-life-threatening injuries.
Soon after, the LRPD responded to a shooting near Asher and Adams Street, and officers found multiple people shot, two of whom died. The shooting locations are about one mile apart.
The victims have not yet been named. It is unclear if the shootings were related or if the violence was among acquaintances. The investigation is ongoing, and the LRPD will hold a press conference Monday at 12:30 p.m. to release additional information.
The Sunday deaths brought the 2023 homicide total to 11, according to LRPD data. However, one additional officer-involved shooting is not included in that count.
At the end of March 2022, the LRPD reported 16 homicides.
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Four officers at the Little Rock Police Department were promoted on Friday morning, two of them Black officers who, with their simultaneous promotions to assistant chiefs, made history.
Police Chief Heath Helton presented the ceremony to a packed room of visitors, new recruits and current police staff at the department’s training center. Absent the stereotypical donut refreshments, a spread of Chick-fil-A breakfast was prepped in the back.
Brian ChilsonPOLICE CHIEF: Heath Helton closed out the ceremony with reference to Mayor Frank Scott Jr.’s goals to improve the quality of life in Little Rock.Though in different recruit classes, Maj. Andre Dyer and Maj. Troy Ellison both started with the LRPD in 1995. Nearly 30 years later, they will start as assistant chiefs tomorrow, March 25. Dyer will be over the patrol divisions and special operations, and Ellison will oversee the executive bureau.
Brian ChilsonMAKING HISTORY: Andre Dyer (left) and Troy Ellison (right) being promoted on the same day makes LRPD history.Helton said that Dyer and Ellison are only the sixth and seventh Black chiefs in LRPD’s history.
“We’ve come a long way; we’ve got a long way to go,” Helton said. “So I’m very excited about these two men, what they’re going to bring to the table.”
The Little Rock branch of the NAACP sent out a release prior to the promotion ceremony.
The Little Rock NAACP says Police Chief Heath Helton’s recent decision to simultaneously promote two African American officers to the rank of assistant chief was an independently made impartial judgment.
Daniel Bowman, President of the civil rights organization said Helton’s actions demonstrate a balanced approach to identifying candidates who are eligible for promotions based on their qualifications and work performance.
Dyer, who was joined by his brother-and-sister-in-law during his promotion, thanked God and his mom for getting him to the place he was today. He said that his mother “stands about five feet tall on a good day” but gave him his “pitbull mentality, my will to work, my will to never give up.”
Brian ChilsonPROMOTION: Andre Dyer’s brother-and-sister-in-law Rob and Alice Calhoun, joined him for his promotion.He also promised that residents would see a change.
“We’re gonna police these streets the way that all of us that have been here more than 15 years remember policing these streets,” Dyer said.
One of Ellison’s daughters, Shelby, secured his badge Friday. He said that he was born and raised in Little Rock and has chosen to raise his own family in the city.
Brian ChilsonGIRL DAD: Troy Ellison said he is raising three women. His daughter Shelby helped with the ceremony Friday.“I’m deeply committed to the great quality of life that they [his family], and this community, deserve,” Ellison said.
In his new role, Ellison will be responsible for internal affairs, the officer wellness program, vehicles, the Real Time Crime Center and more. He said that he is confident in the leadership team to embrace and overcome challenges, welcome all suggestions, inputs and insight all while standing on the “principles of equality, inclusion and treating our citizens and officers with dignity and respect.”
Zachary Farley and Eric Hinsley were also promoted to the rank of Major on Friday.
Brian ChilsonPROMOTION TIME: Zachary Farley was bumped up to Major.Brian ChilsonMOVING TO MAJOR: Eric Hinsley receives his new gear.The post Black majors make LRPD history in simultaneous assistant chief promotions appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A federal judge has warned two of the attorneys who were among those representing Richard “Bigo” Barnett — a Gravette man convicted in the Jan. 6, 2021 riots — of potential disciplinary action for repeated delays in a separate case also involving the insurrection.
In an order filed Thursday in the case of Christopher Joseph Quaglin, U.S. District Judge Trevor N. McFadden told attorneys Joseph McBride and Jonathan Gross to “show cause as to why they should not be referred to the Committee on Grievances for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia for attorney discipline.” McFadden cited the Rules of Professional Conduct on competence, diligence and “candor to the tribunal.”
“Quaglin’s attorneys have now delayed this trial multiple times to the detriment of their
client, who remains detained, and to the inconvenience of his co-defendants and the Government who seek a speedy resolution to this matter,” McFadden wrote in the Order, which you can read here.
The judge set a hearing on the matter for April 18.
McBride filed a motion to withdraw from Barnett’s case earlier this month, as have two of Barnett’s other attorneys.
A federal jury convicted Barnett in January of eight counts. Barnett, who is free, is to be sentenced May 3.
Barnett is notorious for a photograph showing him propping one of his feet on then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi‘s desk during the Capitol riots.
WUSA9 has reported that Quaglin is a New Jersey electrician who the Justice Department says is a member of the Proud Boys. Quaglin faces felony charges of assaulting police with a dangerous weapon and inflicting bodily injury on officers for allegedly attacking police with a stolen riot shield and pepper spray, according to WUSA9.
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Cowboys checked their guns at the door of Miss Kitty’s Long Branch Saloon and so should lawyers in Arkansas courtrooms. So says a ruling from Circuit Judge Chip Welch, who this week dismissed a case brought by conservative provocateur Robert Steinbuch.
Quoting TV’s “Gunsmoke” and more, Welch dismissed the case in which Steinbuch argued lawyers were unconstitutionally prohibited from carrying firearms into a courthouse and courtroom.
Plaintiffs did not have standing to sue, Welch said. One plaintiff, Little Rock attorney Chris Corbitt, could not bring the suit because he had already brought a similar suit in a different court. Welch said he would have reached the same conclusion as the previous judge anyway.
“Even in ‘Gunsmoke,’ when the circuit-riding judge came to town to convene court there, the cowboys had to ‘check their guns’ at the door of Miss Kitty’s ‘Long Branch Saloon’,” Welch wrote in his dismissal.
Steinbuch cited Act 1087 of 2017, sponsored by then-Sen. Bob Ballinger, regarding who may carry guns in courtrooms.
Welch said in his five-page dismissal that the state Supreme Court should determine whether guns are allowed in courtrooms but has not assigned such a consideration to any of its committees or subcommittees.
“The Supreme Court should, if it deems it necessary, determine how to populate courts with weapons – not the legislature – and WHEN NOT TO DO SO,” Welch wrote, including the all-caps portion.
Even if the legislature should be the body that determines whether guns are allowed in courtrooms, Act 1087 only allows officers to bring guns as “authorized by the court,” Welch said.
Judges regularly prohibit police officers who are litigants from bringing guns into the courtroom, Welch said, adding that cases involving domestic violence, child abuse and child custody often lead to hallway arguments after court.
“It takes scarce imagination to envision a court in which guns would be used to ratchet up these kinds of violence,” Welch wrote.
Welch allowed two additional plaintiffs, Steinbuch and Little Rock attorney Ben Motal, to join the case after dismissing Corbitt, but said they had not demonstrated any actual problems associated with the issues surrounding the case. The state Supreme Court has ruled that “hypothetical future events” are not enough to give the plaintiffs standing in the case, according to Welch’s dismissal.
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If parents are free to do what they like with these new “Education Freedom Accounts,” private school parents can choose to send their voucher money back to their public school districts. Right?
That’s the thinking behind a bill filed this week during the 94th General Assembly’s spring break hiatus. Lawmakers haven’t been at the Capitol en masse, but many of them have still been busy filing new bills to take up when they return next week.
Among them is Senate Bill 471 by Little Rock Democrats Sen. Clarke Tucker and Rep. Ashley Hudson. Their bill would amend the “Education Freedom Account” program to allow parents of a participating student to redirect the funds back to the resident public school to which that student is assigned.
Arkansas LEARNS, Gov. Sarah Sanders‘ charter expansion and “school choice” bill signed into law earlier this month, will supply taxpayer-funded vouchers to any families who want them by 2026. Sanders and her supporters emphasized the parental choice component of vouchers, saying parents can decide what’s best for their own kids.
Opponents point out that this parental choice will lead to worse outcomes for kids in general. Similar programs in other states have resegregated schools by race and socioeconomic levels. Voucher amounts won’t cover the full cost of tuition for many private schools, meaning parents who can’t pay the difference don’t really have the same options. Families who rely on free lunches, bus services, special education and other perks of public school education are unlikely to find what they need in most private schools.
The gradual defunding of traditional public schools as more white and well-to-do families pull their kids out tops voucher opponents’ list of concerns. SB471 could help by allowing families who send their children to private schools that don’t accept vouchers to turn over their voucher cash to their assigned public schools. Even parents who send their children to private schools that do accept vouchers, or who home school, would be able to simply decline to use vouchers for themselves and send the money back to their traditional public school system instead.
So for instance, the governor, who sends her children to private school, could continue paying those tuitions in full and turn her family’s voucher funds back to the Little Rock School District instead.
The bill is listed on the Senate Education Committee agenda for Monday, although it’s unlikely to be heard then. Committee agendas list all bills pending before them, even though lawmakers can only get to a few at a time. And bills are rarely considered in the order they appear on the agendas. This system makes it a challenge for citizens who want to come testify at the Capitol, but can’t ever quite figure out when the bill they’re interested in will come up for debate.
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Crystal Ridge Distillery, located in Hot Springs at 455 Broadway St., will host its three-year anniversary party at the distillery on Saturday from 4-7 p.m. The event will also feature an unveiling ceremony for a new flavor of Crystal Ridge Arkansas Moonshine, as well as a new flavor of THE PACK, the distillery’s line of vodka-based ready-to-drink canned cocktails. The new flavor of the THE PACK will be the distillery’s first with no sugar added. Featuring live music from John Jordan, free tastings all day, and special sales on merchandise, the family-friendly event is free and open to the public, according to the press release. Local children’s book author Abigail Meredith will be in attendance along with her goat, Leonard, as part of a small petting zoo for children. Meredith will also be signing copies of her new book.
Brian ChilsonFlavored moonshines are the specialty at Crystal Ridge Distillery in Hot Springs.“We’re thrilled to be celebrating this milestone,” said owner Danny Bradley. “We opened our doors just days before COVID-19 forced many businesses to close permanently, so we’re very fortunate to have not only survived but to have thrived. We look at this anniversary as a celebration of not only our distillery and staff but all the people who have supported us over the last few years.”
Crystal Ridge produces and distributes more than a dozen original flavors of premium moonshine, utilizing both traditional methods of distilling and modern technology. The distillery also recently entered an agreement for their ready-to-drink canned cocktail line, THE PACK, with Arkansas Beverage Sales, expanding the drink’s distribution to Garland, Saline, Pulaski, Clark, and seven additional Arkansas counties. A woman and veteran-owned business, Crystal Ridge is owned and managed by Danny Bradley, his wife Mary, and their son Asher. Crystal Ridge Distillery is located at 455 Broadway St. in Hot Springs, AR, the site of the historic F.C. Stearns warehouse, which the Bradleys restored in 2019 using repurposed materials from the original structure.
Crystal Ridge is open from 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Mon.-Thu.; 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Fri.-Sat.; noon-6 p.m. Sun. Crystal Ridge features a saloon, gift shop, private event space, and daily tours and tastings.
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State Sen. Ricky Hill (R-Cabot) has filed a bill to prevent state-funded medical schools from spending money on the name, image and likeness of student-athletes.
Avid watchers of college athletics have seen plenty of TV ads from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, featuring Arkansas Razorbacks such as football player Jalen Catalon, basketball player Nick Smith, Jr. and others.
Hill happens to be a graduate of Arkansas State University and even founded the ASU Rodeo Club before going on to compete on the professional rodeo circuit.
Here’s what Hill’s campaign site says:
While at ASU, Ricky founded the ASU Rodeo Club and competed as a bull rider on the ASU Rodeo team. This led to him joining the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association and competing on the professional rodeo circuit for 4 years. During this time, he married his wife Cynthia who was a professional barrel racer.
We don’t recall seeing any UAMS ads featuring athletes from Arkansas State or any other Arkansas university for that matter.
UAMS Health is the official orthopaedics and sports medicine provider for Razorback athletics and provides daily medical coverage all 19 Razorback athletic programs, according to the UAMS Health website.
Hill’s bill is Senate Bill 456.
Here’s the UAMS ad with Catalon:
UPDATE:
Leslie Taylor, vice chancellor for communications and marketing at UAMS, has provided a response:
UAMS has not utilized NIL contracts in advertising for our medical school or any of our other colleges. However, Razorback athletes have been featured in advertising for our health system, UAMS Health, which is proud to be the official orthopaedics and sports medicine provider for Razorback athletics. The athletes featured in advertising are just a few of those who have been cared for by UAMS orthopaedic surgeons and sports medicine specialists who attend games, practices, and work with the athletes throughout the year. No taxpayer dollars are used to pay for advertising. UAMS is different than other universities that receive state funding in that we don’t receive the majority of our funding from the state. Rather we are dependent on revenue generated by our clinical programs. Our state appropriation is about 6 percent of UAMS’ nearly $2 billion budget. Earned clinical income from the hospital and health system subsidizes our education and research missions.
We are proud to be aligned with athletic programs at our sister institution, the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, just as we are proud to provide care to athletes at other UA System schools including UA Little Rock, UA Monticello and UA Pine Bluff. We are making plans to feature some of the other athletic programs we support in upcoming advertising. As the state’s largest public employer, UAMS has many ASU graduates who proudly support the Red Wolves. We would be pleased to take care of any of those athletes as well.
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Doctors who provide abortion-inducing drugs out of step with federal guidelines would lose their medical license, according to a bill filed this week by Sen. Bart Hester (R-Cave Springs).
Hester’s Senate Bill 463 seeks to amend the Abortion-Inducing Drugs Safety Act, which was passed in 2015 and prevents off-label uses of abortion drugs such as the Mifeprex regimen. Hester’s bill would add the loss of a medical license to the list of consequences for violating the law that already includes a class A misdemeanor and civil liability.
Hester’s bill says that if the state Medical Board finds that a physician violated the law, the board “shall revoke the physician’s medical license.”
The Abortion-Inducing Drugs Safety Act states that such drugs must be provided by a doctor and must be administered within the first seven weeks of a pregnancy and cannot be administered at home.
Rep. Wayne Long (R-Bradford) filed a separate bill this week taking aim at medical abortions but his shell bill did not provide any details.
The bill, called the Arkansas Chemical Abortions Ban Act, could be similar to a bill passed in Wyoming this year and signed by Governor Mark Gordon last week that prohibits medication-based abortions and uses the term “chemical abortion.”
Tennessee passed a similar bill last year, outlawing the mail-delivery of abortion pills and requiring anyone wanting the pills to visit a doctor and return to pick up the pills.
Rep. Denise Garner (D-Fayetteville) also filed an abortion bill this week, seeking to broaden the terms under which women undergoing a medical emergency would qualify for an abortion. The bill, House Bill 1684, would make eligible women whose “health” is threatened by pregnancy rather than only those whose “life” is threatened. Garner’s bill would also eliminate the word “physical” from the definition of disorders, illnesses and injuries that qualify as a medical emergency for an abortion.
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Gov. Sarah Sanders almost immediately declared that the pandemic was over in Arkansas during her first week in office in January. In the time since, at least 16,708 Arkansans have tested positive for COVID-19, according to data from the state health department.
Sanders’ political stance aside, the Arkansas Department of Health recently created a new COVID-19 dashboard that will be updated every Tuesday. It breaks down cases and death data from 2020. The new site also keeps track of other illnesses like monkeypox, hepatitis and STDs. Some parts are still being set up, ADH Spokesperson Danyelle McNeill said. A flu page will be coming soon.
The new dashboard went online on Monday, and it will replace the department’s previous reporting page.
At-home testing changed the game for the state’s reports on positive COVID-19 cases. Without test results being required to the state, the data was referred to as the “tip of the iceberg.” Hospitalization numbers then became the thing to look toward for infection trends, which were publicly available on the ADH’s previous dashboard.
It’s now been over three years since the virus was deemed a national emergency, and hospitals are no longer required to report daily COVID-19 hospitalization numbers to the ADH. However, the new dashboard will include a cumulative seven-day count of COVID-19 hospitalizations.
“This was a time consuming process for hospitals and not currently justified based on the disease statistics trends,” McNeill said. “ADH continues to receive and monitor overall hospital bed availability as we did prior to the COVID pandemic.”
When asked how the ADH felt about Sanders’ approach to health for COVID, McNeill replied with the following:
“Over time, a pandemic disease transitions to an endemic disease, meaning the disease is still present but has more predictable behavior with less spikes. As the disease has entered the endemic phase, ADH has appropriately returned to normal operations. ADH is also turning our attention to other public health issues.”
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A Faulkner County developer is turning a vacant cinder-block facility into a social gathering site that will offer a restaurant, pickle ball courts, a golf simulator and more in downtown Conway.
Zach Saxion, co-owner of Eagle Rock Capital, said the complex now under construction at 565 Front Street spans 25,000 square feet, and will include about 4,000 square feet in green space, which will serve as a performance area for live music and such.
The social and recreational complex should open by November, Saxion said. The site will be called Conway Social or CoSo for short.
Among its features will be a restaurant that should seat about 300 people and a rooftop bar, Saxion said. The complex will feature four pickle ball courts, three of them indoors. They can be accessed for $7 to $14 per hour, Saxion said.
The site also will offer four large outdoor projector screens for movie nights, indoor pool tables indoors and more. It’s expected to employ 70 people, including part-time workers, Saxion said.
Here’s a look at the pre-renovation facility.
“Conway Social will add to the diversity of recreational opportunities we have to offer in Conway,” Mayor Bart Castleberry said. “I’m glad to see this property come back to life and be put to good use.”
Conway should be in good shape on pickle ball courts. The city offers three indoor courts at Don Owen Sports Center and two outdoor courts at Gatling Park.
The post Conway Social, new restaurant and recreational complex, expected to open in November appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The Democratic Party of Arkansas sends out the sad news about the death of attorney and legislator Sen. Roy C. “Bill” Lewellen. He was 71.
From the party’s release:
One of two Black lawyers in Lee County, Roy C. “Bill” Lewellen was a strong advocate for equal representation and treatment in his community, serving as a Marianna city councilman before election to the state Senate in 1990. He served for 10 years in the Senate and was the second Black person to serve in the Arkansas Senate in the 20th century. He was the sponsor of the law that created the Minority Health Commission in Arkansas.
In 1992, after his first session in the Senate, he served as an attorney for the Lake View School District in their historic fight for an equitable and efficient public school system.
After leaving the Senate, Lewellen continued to advocate for small rural school districts facing consolidation and inequitable treatment.
“Bill Lewellen was a friend and mentor from my earliest days as a reporter covering the State Capitol,” said Democratic Party of Arkansas Chair Grant Tennille. “If I was confused over the true motivations behind any piece of legislation, Senator Lewellen was the one who set me straight. At the same time, Bill was reliably hilarious, often at my expense, and I will miss his laughter most of all.”
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If a person throws a firecracker under a horse knowing the sound will cause that horse to buck and throw its rider, then the person who threw the firecracker is responsible for the injury. The damage was predictable.
We know that while school vouchers do very little to improve student performance, they will upend and dismantle school communities. The arguments I hear in favor of vouchers are about parental choice, not about helping students do better in school. That’s because we know vouchers won’t really do that. What they’ll do is divide students along socioeconomic lines. This damage is predictable, and we’re doing it anyway.
Vouchers are of little value to children who need expensive interventions to get the appropriate education to which they are entitled by law and by our state constitution. Neither charter schools nor private schools have shown the willingness to provide suitable environments and effective instruction for children with the greatest needs.
Public schools struggle mightily to serve the children of greatest need, and in the eyes of some they still fall short. But they accept every challenge.
The funding mechanisms (which are based on prototypical student composition, with categorical funding adjustments) break down when public schools are tasked with educating only the children of greatest need. That problem will get worse with vouchers, as students who are relatively easy and inexpensive to serve leave public schools behind. The fundamental ruling of Brown v. Board of Education was that separate schools can never be equal. That is still the law, yet the LEARNS Act takes us in the wrong direction.
Gov. Sarah Sanders said, when she announced her education reform bill, “With new education freedom accounts, parents will be able to send their kids to whatever school works best: Whether it is public, private, parochial or homeschool.”
If the evidence indicates that vouchers do not improve student performance, and their main benefit is an economic perk for those already in private schools, why are we going down this path? And why are we doing it now?
Is it fair to assume the leaders who pushed and voted for Arkansas LEARNS — intelligent people who are capable of reading the research and reviewing the results in other states — intend the predictable consequences of their actions? In the fullness of time, does intention even matter if the predictable result is educational stagnation, with economic and racial segregation?
Arkansas has an ugly history of segregation. Even so, the majority of our leaders seem unconcerned about resegregation as it overtakes Central and Eastern Arkansas.
Orval Faubus was a huge part of that ugly history. He grew up poor in an all-white area. He was a decorated veteran of World War II. His father was a socialist, and Faubus attended a loosely run communal college that espoused socialist principles.
Faubus was governor at a time when school integration was heavily disfavored in Arkansas. Even with his poor, socialist background, Faubus willingly and infamously championed the cause of segregation. Almost nothing else that he did is remembered. Whatever his beliefs in his earlier years, when the issue rose to prominence, Faubus fervently supported segregation.
The actions Faubus took were extremely popular at the time, and served his political aspirations well. Faubus received over 82% of the vote in the 1958 general election.
During the Faubus years, the people who opposed him were disheartened, but never ceased working to correct the mistakes he was making. My mother was a member of the Women’s Emergency Committee to reopen public schools in Little Rock. Those women, Black and white, were indomitable.
Faubus was in power until he decided not to run in 1966. Winthrop Rockefeller, who had run unsuccessfully in 1964, ran again and was elected by an unlikely coalition of liberal Democrats, Blacks and Republicans. Segregationist Jim Johnson was the defeated Democratic nominee. Rockefeller’s election gave hope back to many Arkansans. That 1966 election is worth further study as a possible way to bring like-minded public education supporters together.
Dr. Sybil Hampton is a friend of mine, and a person I admire very much. She is, among other accomplishments, a successful educator and the former president of the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation. She is a civil rights pioneer, and was the first Black student to graduate from Central High School after attending for all three of her high school years there. She remains a graceful, persistent and persuasive advocate for public education.
Dr. Hampton recently reminded me that public schools do not just serve students and parents. Dr. Hampton says we must not forget that public schools serve the public. The public as a whole benefits when students are equipped with the knowledge and interpersonal skills they need to be informed, productive and involved. She is right.
The majority of our legislators and our governor have elevated private choice over the public interest. They have elevated their short-term political interests over the longer term public interest.
We were warned about this kind of thing by a governor who took a number of courageous stands during his time in office.
We have to be willing “to sacrifice our political lives for the sake of our children’s future, in order that we would fulfill our obligations that we swore under oath that we would fulfill.” Those are the words of former governor and Sanders’ dad, Mike Huckabee. I remember the speech as one of the most inspirational and aspirational speeches on the future of Arkansas education.
All of the rhetoric about parental choice as a fundamental American right has been said before, and in earlier years some even advocated for the use of public money to fund that choice. It was a mistake in the past, and it will be a mistake in the future.
Implementation of universal vouchers will have the same result that was intended when the concept was first introduced in our state by a person who knew how to ride a wave of public sentiment to his own advantage.
“A student seeking an education in another school, either private or public, because of a situation such as exists here now, will have the benefit of all funds to be expended for his education. The funds follow him to the school of his choice anywhere within the state.” So said Gov. Orval E. Faubus on September 18, 1958.
History will judge us not by our words, but by the results of our actions.
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Things are changing in the fight against Summit Utilities, the gas company that was accused of overcharging its customers and acting with bad practices.
Federal Judge Billy Roy Wilson on Tuesday dismissed the class-action lawsuit at the request of the attorneys who were suing. Additionally, the Arkansas Public Service Commission ordered that two investigations related to the company will be opened.
Scott Poynter, one attorney who was suing the utility company, said Tuesday that the case was voluntarily dismissed. Poynter that the class-action suit may be refiled in the future if necessary.
“We look forward to working quickly and deliberately with the [Public Service Commission] and the Office of the Attorney General for the benefit of all our clients,” Poynter said.
Jeff Hilton, the interim director of the Public Service Commission, said Tuesday that the agency will open two investigations into the billing and the price of natural gas, as Attorney General Tim Griffin requested on March 16.
The class action suit claimed that Summit Utilities was overcharging customers through price gouging and stated that the company had poor customer service practices. The lawsuit included all Summit Utilities customers in Arkansas, regardless of contact with an attorney. Thousands of customer complaints have been reported through the Attorney General’s Office, the Public Service Commission and the lawsuit. Many say that their gas bills were double or triple what their average bill once was.
Last week, the case moved from a Pulaski County court to the federal court at the request of Marshall Ney, the attorney representing Summit Utilities. Shortly before that move, Circuit Judge LaToyna Austin Honorable established a temporary restraining order against the company, which allowed customers to refuse payments for two weeks. With the case now dismissed, the temporary restraining order has ended.
Summit Utilities bought the assets of the former provider, CenterPoint Energy, at the start of 2022, but it did not start providing its own customer service until around November. The transition period is when bills spiked, Poynter said.
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The Little Rock Board of Directors has an interesting array of proposals to vote on at tonight’s meeting.
The meeting’s consent agenda — items that often are approved without discussion — may include a contracted raise for security guards at city buildings. The resolution states that guards would each receive a $4/hour raise, which would bring the rates to $18.50 and $20.50 for unarmed and armed guards, respectively. The city has been in a contract with Quality Security Services, Inc. since 2020, according to the resolution.
The raises would be effective through Dec. 31, 2023. The total funds for the raises are not spelled out in the resolution, but it states that various department budgets would cover the expense. Police officers and firefighters in Little Rock received a structured raise through the 2023 budget. It is likely that the board will approve the security guard raises.
A different resolution on the agenda proposes that 89 replacement ballistic vests be purchased for the Little Rock Police Department. The previous vests were purchased in 2016, according to the resolution. The total cost is set at $161,922. About $36,000 of that would be covered with grant money and the rest will come from federal forfeiture funds within the department.
The board has a history of approving police equipment purchases with little or no discussion. They will likely pass this resolution.
The board will also have the opportunity to discuss mountain bike trails slated for Boyle Park. The project would use funds from the Arkansas Department of Transportation to construct a $287,275 trail system. The city of Little Rock would be responsible for 20% of the funding, according to the resolution. That would be about $57,000.
Members will discuss several other items, including a proposal for new tech in its renovated board chambers, vans with wheelchair lifts for the Parks and Recreation department and the renewal of crime-reduction programs.
The meeting starts at 6 p.m. and can be streamed on the city’s YouTube channel and Facebook page.
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The man captured in the video of an altercation with anti-abortion activists doesn’t work here anymore and hasn’t for months, so please stop calling us. That’s the message Eric Mahfouz, communication director for the city of Stuttgart, is desperate to get out to members and supporters of a newfangled Christian conservative group that’s been clogging the city’s phone lines for nearly a week now.
Ever since Abolitionists Rising posted a video to YouTube, the lines have been flooded, Mahfouz said. People needing city services are having a hard time getting through.
The misleadingly and offensively named Abolitionists Rising is an anti-abortion group that appropriates anti-slavery messaging and imagery in a bid to eradicate abortion care completely. The group’s exceptionally good branding and graphic design skills seem aimed at attracting young people to the movement.
The video prompting all the phone calls to Stuttgart City Hall shows Jacob Cain, a former part-time Stuttgart police officer who resigned in May 2022, in an argument with anti-abortion demonstrators at The Keeper of the Plains monument in Wichita, Kansas. The footage opens with a clattering sound, then captures demonstrators saying Cain broke the camera of someone who had been filming him, and also possibly injured the cameraman’s hand. In the footage, Cain can be heard saying that he did not give permission for his photo to be taken.
Text embedded in the video says the incident happened March 4, 2023. It was posted to YouTube March 15.
The Stuttgart Daily Leader reported on the incident last week, but the calls haven’t let up. And it’s not just phone calls. Mahfouz temporarily disabled the commenting feature on the city’s Facebook page after supporters of the anti-abortion group spammed them with comments calling for Cain to be fired.
Mahfouz said he’s still working hard to get the word out that Cain hasn’t worked for the city of Stuttgart since last spring.
“He does not work for the city of Stuttgart, and we have to operate. We have to keep our lines open for the citizens who need us,” he said.
The post New anti-abortion group clogs Stuttgart municipal phone lines, city and emergency services plead for mercy appeared first on Arkansas Times.
I forgot that I pulled my car over a couple weeks ago to snap a photo of FRANKS, the new quick service/drive-thru hot dog restaurant that took the place of the former Church’s Chicken at 2511 McCain Blvd. in the parking lot that houses Kroger, Waffle House and Santo Coyote. Church’s took over the space after Back Yard Burgers closed some ten years ago.
FRANKS opened March 1. The company’s Facebook page description says it’s run by local restaurant vets trying to make a go of it on their own.
FRANKS offers 10 signature beef hog dogs like the Nacho Mama’s Dog (sour cream, tortilla chips, nacho cheese, jalapeños, tomatoes) and the Yankee Dog (New York-style frank with sauerkraut, caramelized onions, spicy mustard). Customers can also build their own hot dogs. FRANKS also offers traditional burgers and the Bodega Burger — a chopped cheeseburger served on a hot dog bun.
FRANKS | Photo: FRANKSTHE SINGLE CHEESEBURGER: at FRANKSBy the looks of the Facebook page, FRANKS is still trying to get the word out. Yesterday, it was offering free meals to people named Frank and last week it was giving away free bodega burgers. The restaurant’s hours are 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Mon-Sat.
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The Faulkner County Library Board heard from two members of the public upset about cancellation of community-led events in the Conway library’s meeting rooms.
Library policy that had before allowed groups to reserve meeting spaces free of charge changed recently after Faulkner County Judge Allen Dodson cautioned the board it needed to take preventative action lest it end up like the Craighead County Jonesboro Public Library. The library system in Craighead County saw its funding slashed last year after an attack from the far right, who was angry about the library’s content offerings.
The worry is that allowing drag queens to read books to children in a library meeting room, or hosting any other event that might suggest progressive politics, could draw the ire of conservative groups gunning to censor books and shut down the free exchange of ideas. So the Faulkner County Library Board has chosen to shut down access to meeting rooms altogether in hopes of staying out of the political fray.
Unlike a past meeting that was heavily attended, Monday night’s gathering was relatively uneventful, attended only by a few spectators other than library workers.
One speaker from the public was a student who said he has ADHD and prefers to study in the meeting rooms. Another was a man who said his church used to meet in the library’s meeting rooms and now has to rent a room elsewhere for $200 a service.
The man said he understood there had been some controversy, a reference to an inclusive children’s story hour where a drag queen showed up and read a book aloud.
“I understand there’s something going on here I don’t agree with,” the man said, but they have as much right to be here “as I do.” He noted the library is a “public library” and should be open to the public.
Library Director John McGraw explained that the library cannot constitutionally deny meeting-room access based on content. “That’s an invitation to get sued,” he said.
In other words, if the library denies access to an inclusive reading group where a drag queen might show up, it also must deny access to a pastor story hour, arts groups and other meetings the library has allowed in the past.
The Faulkner County board did not discuss or vote Tuesday night on a proposal to extend the temporary cancellation of community-led gatherings in meeting rooms. But McGraw said after the meeting that events are still being canceled for the foreseeable future. Last year, he said, the meeting rooms were booked more than 600 times. Events that are organized in partnership with the library and a tax-assistance program are still allowed in the rooms.
The library is now considering other ways to use the rooms for library services in a facility already short on space.
The board voted to continue removing books from shelves during any challenges. The last time a book was challenged was in 2021. McGraw expressed concern that challenges will increase substantially, though, in light of the political climate.
“It feels like a … loss of freedom,” board member Ben Thompson said.
Dodson did not attend Monday night’s meeting, and there were only a few spectators.
The post Faulkner County Library Board hears complaints about meeting room cancellations appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Last week, Rep. Mindy McAlindon (R-Centerton) passed House Bill 1559 through committee and said that Gov. Sarah Sanders’ office and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences were “comfortable with the bill.”
HB1559 would allow teachers at public and charter schools — as well as at state-supported higher education — to walk out of any training that they determined focused on how to identify and avoid implicit bias. McAlindon argued that implicit bias training increased anger and frustration. Teachers who walked out of the training would be protected from “adverse employment action” under the bill.
UAMS Spokesperson Yavonda Chase said Monday that the institution was neutral on the bill and did not either support or oppose the legislation.
“We do not have a comment on the language pertaining to K-12,” Chase said. “In terms of higher education and UAMS, we will make necessary adjustments to address health disparities and still comply with the law.”
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It’s only a 22-hour drive, you can make it if you leave now!
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If you’ve driven by the new Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts building, you’ve probably noticed that it’s pretty nifty looking. Even if you’re not architecturally savvy, it’s easy to tell that the 133,000-square-foot structure, which announces itself with an irregular roofline and massive glass windows, was designed to stand out, so much so that Architectural Digest magazine has taken notice. In a short online article highlighting noteworthy discoveries in the way of design and decor, AMFA has received a nod. Here’s what they have to say:
Architect Jeanne Gang of Studio Gang and landscape architect Kate Orff of SCAPE have teamed up to transform the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts—and to cement Little Rock’s place on the cultural map. Set on an 11-acre campus at the heart of the capital, AMFA had become a warren of inward-facing additions since its opening in 1937. Today, with some deft demolition, the introduction of a biodiverse landscape, and a 133,000-square-foot extension, the museum has the look and feel of the local artistic anchor it has long been. “The museum was already doing all the things museums try to do these days to build community,” says Gang, whose expansion reorients the complex toward MacArthur Park with a petal-shaped central structure. The original Art Deco façade shines anew as an entrance, protected within a courtyard created by Gang’s striking volume of cast-in-place concrete. Inside, visitors can admire the undulating slatted-wood ceiling and clerestory windows as they head to performances in the restored 1960s theater or grab a meal at the vast restaurant. Outside, the museum now extends along 2,200 feet of walking paths dotted with sculptures. Says Gang: “The project was about liberating the museum, giving it order, and making these really beautiful spaces.” arkmfa.org
The Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts reopens on Saturday, April 22, or 32 days, 18 hours and a handful of minutes from the time of this publication.
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A judge has agreed to give former state Sen. Henry “Hank” Wilkins IV more time before reporting to federal prison in light of Wilkins’ ongoing health problems.
Under a recent order by U.S. District Judge Brian Miller in Little Rock, Wilkins is now scheduled to report on May 1. Miller granted the extension after Bill Stanley, an attorney for Hankins, said the former senator underwent a colonoscopy which revealed multiple polyps. Stanley said Wilkins, 68, also was undergoing treatments for degenerative spinal disease and kidney failure.
Wilkins, a Pine Bluff Democrat, was charged in a sprawling bribery/kickback public corruption case and was sentenced to a year and one day in prison. Wilkins also faces three years of supervised release after prison and $123,000 in restitution to the state of Arkansas.
Like Republican Jeremy Hutchinson, Wilkins was convicted in the Preferred Family Healthcare bribery/kickback public corruption case. Wilkins pleaded guilty in 2018 to conspiring to commit bribery. He admitted taking $80,000 in bribes, masked as contributions to a church for which he was a pastor, in return for steering nearly a quarter-million in state money to Medicaid-financed health care providers.
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The Arkansas State Conference of the NAACP and the Pine Bluff NAACP branch are standing against Pine Bluff’s proposed sales tax changes, according to a Saturday press release.
The proposed sales tax is sponsored by Go Forward Pine Bluff. It would renew a five-eighths cent sales tax for seven years and add an additional three-eighths cent sales tax.
The NAACP has historically opposed regressive sales taxes because they hit poor people the hardest. Poor people and households lacking financial assets do not benefit equally from economic development tax initiatives. Yet, they bear the burden of the economic development tax on every purchase they make, e.g., food, clothing, shelter, etc.
The release states that the NAACP branch in Arkadelphia is also against its town’s proposed sales tax. Here’s a full copy of the release.
Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott Jr. proposed a sales tax increase during his State of the City address on March 6, though he didn’t provide any figures along with it. He said his team had learned lessons from the last failed attempt at a sales tax increase.
In 2021, Scott’s “Rebuild the Rock” tax proposal lost the vote 62-38.
The Little Rock Board of Directors will have to approve to forward the recent tax proposal to voters, but the timeline for that hasn’t been spelled out yet.
Tommy Daniels, the president of the Arkansas State Conference of the NAACP, said Monday that he wasn’t aware of Scott’s sales tax increase in Little Rock. He said that the organization would take a similar stance against it if the city’s residents voiced concerns.
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Former state Sen. Jeremy Hutchinson, who’s already facing almost four years in prison in one bribery case, is scheduled to be sentenced in a second federal court next month.
Hutchinson — a Republican like his uncle, former Gov. Asa Hutchinson — is to appear before Judge Brian C. Wimes of U.S. District Court in Springfield, Missouri, on April 25 at 4 p.m.
In July 2019, Jeremy Hutchinson, 49, entered a negotiated guilty plea in the Missouri court to a bribery scheme with former top officials of Preferred Family Healthcare.
Hutchinson was sentenced in U.S. District Court in Little Rock in February to 46 months in prison for bribery and tax fraud after being convicted of misallocating campaign money from his time as a state legislator and filing false returns.
Hutchinson has yet to report to prison in the Arkansas sentencing. Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Kristine Baker, ruling in Little Rock, denied Hutchinson’s request that he not have to report to prison until after March 27. Baker, however, granted his request that he not have to report until he gets assigned to a specific prison facility. The Bureau of Prisons is holding off on assigning Hutchinson to a prison until that final piece is in place, Baker’s order suggests.
The post Jeremy Hutchinson to be sentenced in Missouri in April appeared first on Arkansas Times.
When lawmakers focus on “owning the libs,” or rather, punishing the so-called radical left, their policy quickly deteriorates. After ten full weeks, it’s time they focus on helping, not hurting Arkansans. Listen, watch, or read on for the rundown.
Good news first, thanks to the House State Agencies Committee* Dan Sullivan’s bill that would end affirmative action has been tabled, for now. Good on Chair Rep. Tosh for putting the bad legislation to bed. * One of several democracy bills, HB1601 would have required permits for ballot initiative canvassers collecting signatures. It also failed in House State Agencies. * A Mary Bentley bill that would have allowed public boards and committees to legally meet in private failed in State Agencies. Three cheers for preserving the public’s right to transparent governance. * The League of Women Voters of Arkansas and Senator Bryan King filed suit against the state for ACT 236, an unconstitutional new law that requires ballot initiatives to have signatures from 50 Arkansas counties. We’ll keep you posted on the lawsuit’s status.
Sarah Sanders tries to take down big tech, but it’s not about the kidsGovernor Sanders, in an echo of her former boss, is geared up to take down big tech. Her policy proposal would require parental consent for children to access social media sites or require proof of digital identification to confirm one’s age. Once again, it’s framed as a child-protection and parental-empowerment bill, complete with shallow rhetoric we’ve come to expect from her administration. Here’s some context:
- It will pass. The first Gov. Huckabee bought his daughter a legislature. And the continual bullying from her office will keep #arleg voting for her bills.
- It likely won’t be enforceable. If passed, the bill may not be enforceable due to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule, a federal law that preempts state attempts to add additional requirements to social media companies.
- It won’t fix the problems it’s meant to address. Internet safety and teen mental health are two interconnected and complex issues that require complex solutions in order to be effective. This bill does not address these issues.
- This isn’t about the kids, it’s about Sarah’s political future. Sanders keeps herself in the headlines using talking points that signal national aspirations while she does little for the people of our state. This big tech legislation, just like everything she’s done for the past two months, does nothing for those who actually need help. Her administration cares about owning the libs but little else.
Financial institutions got “woke” and the legislature gets revengeHB1307 prohibits the state from investing in financial businesses with progressive investment standards. The bill will have an expensive impact on the state’s retirement accounts, jeopardizing the livelihoods of Arkansas firefighters, police, and teachers — just so lawmakers can punish companies too liberal for the legislature’s taste. It’s another example how Arleg’s “own the libs” obsession distracts lawmakers from solving real problems in the state.
The bill is part of a national push to retaliate against financial institutions for supporting ESG standards. ESG stands for environmental, social, and governance practices, which are the standards financial institutions use to determine investments. Recently, many large companies have taken progressive stances on social issues and are increasingly public about these stances. Texas banned investment with certain financial institutions in 2021 and the move cost the state between $300 million and $504 million.
Arleg is posed to effect the same outcome for our public retirement accounts, which are also tied up in some of the world’s most well known financial institutions. If HB1307 becomes law, Arkansas will be forced to withdraw funds from banned accounts and place them with smaller companies that do not adhere to ESG standards. Smaller companies, however, charge higher fees and rates, costing states like Texas millions of dollars in lost revenue. The move is neither good banking nor good policy. It’s punitive, and either retirees or taxpayers will be punished for the legislature’s anti-woke posturing.
Arleg’s obsession with owning the libs is going to cost us. Literally.
Bill would allow faith-based groups, businesses and individuals to sue the stateHB1615 would allow private businesses and organizations, like Christian foster care and adoption groups, to sue the state of Arkansas for nearly any reason — so long as the state “burdens” or attempts to burden a group’s beliefs.
The bill’s sponsors want Christian entities with certain state licenses and accreditations to be able to deny services to those who don’t uphold their traditional family values. In other words these state-licensed groups wish to discriminate against those with whom the groups disagree and not face any consequences from the state. Sponsors then want these groups, businesses, and individuals to be able to sue the state if the state penalizes groups for discriminatory practices.
For example, this bill would allow a faith-based adoption organization to legally deny gay couples service. If the state revokes the group’s license because the group denied a gay couple child placement, the group can sue the state per HB1615. But Arkansas maintains state sovereign immunity via a provision in which a state cannot be sued in federal and state court without its consent. HB1615 carves out a private, religious discrimination path from the sovereign immunity statute.
The proposed legislation is problematic, as it allows private beliefs to trump the state’s responsibility to fair and equitable practices, as well as the state’s own sovereign immunity.
Library book ban passes but DeAnn Vaught surprisesThe House passed Sen. Dan Sullivan’s SB81, which would subject public school employees to criminal prosecution under obscenity laws for any books, ebooks, and educational resources in their library.
But Rep. DeAnn Vaught was a bright spot during the bill’s dim discussion on the House floor. The lone representative to vocalize disapproval of the bill, Vaught made compelling and rational arguments regarding the proposal’s blatant overreach. The General Assembly should not be passing state laws to address a few bad actors at the local level, Vaught said.
“When will we stop with the message that all superintendents, teachers, and now librarians have intentions to harm our children? That could not be further from the truth… We cannot regulate everything in the lives of Arkansans. We have to stop with the government overreach,” said Vaught.
It’s rare these days to see a Republican legislator stand with the principles of small government and local control; we’re pleased that Vaught surprised us on this account. But more so, we’re thrilled to see a member of the Arkansas legislature stop with “owning the libs” and focus on preventing unnecessary and burdensome legislation.
More owning of libs, bureaucratic ballooning, and problematic policy* Arleg passes an anti-abortion memorial bill. TBD on when it will be constructed and what it will look like. * Anti-trans youth medical malpractice bill becomes law. Doctors won’t be able to get malpractice insurance to cover procedures, essentially ending treatment options for youth in the state. * An amended bill requiring a digital ID to view internet porn heads back to Senate committee. If it passes, is the state going to collect the data, and if so, what happens if there is a leak? Yikes. * Remember that anti-trans school student name bill? Somehow it got worse, the Arkansas Times reports. * The Senate passes Sen. Payton’s anti-trans bathroom bill, criminalizing trans people using public bathrooms in Arkansas. To say this bill is harmful and the most extreme anti-trans legislation in the country is not an exaggeration.
Neither here nor there: dirty dog fight in the Arkansas HouseThis has nothing to do about Arleg owning the libs! Instead, the House supermajority turned on itself this week all because of a proposed dog breed policy. Things got heated among members, but the next day one of the bill’s sponsors apologized.
The post A quick rundown on the ridiculous stuff Arkansas politicians did last week, plus some progress for once appeared first on Arkansas Times.
New homicide details from the Little Rock Police Department revealed that the weapon used during a homicide on March 12 at the Spanish Willow Apartments was not a gun or a knife, but a crossbow bolt.
The LRPD initially reported that a man was found with “injuries consistent with a homicide,” though the crossbow was left out of the conversation. According to the police report, the victim was 66-year-old Charlie Williams.
LRPD also reported that a suspect in the homicide was arrested on Saturday. Jerry Crutcher, 66, was charged with first degree murder.
Homicide Update pic.twitter.com/JvB5n7G9Qy
— Little Rock Police (@LRpolice) March 18, 2023
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ILYA KAMINSKY & KATIE FARRIS
TUESDAY 3/28. Reves Recital Hall, Hendrix College, Conway. 7:30 p.m. Free.
Since poetry is an associative form, liberated from always having to make literal sense, it is often constructed from disparate ideas and images placed so close together that they produce unexpected resonances. By that logic, staging a commingling of verse by asking two accomplished poets to read back to back might be one of the best possible poetic experiences. What might be even more spectacular is the pairing of poets who are married, who share an intimate life, but whose work still stands alone. Ilya Kaminsky — a hard-of-hearing National Book Award finalist whose poems in “Deaf Republic” explore deafness and political violence — and Katie Farris — whose soon-to-be-released collection, “Standing in the Forest of Being Alive,” captures “both the pleasures and the horrors” that come from breast cancer and all of its accompanying bodily awareness — are that exact couple, and will share their poems at Hendrix College, courtesy of the Hendrix-Murphy Foundation. American Sign Language interpreting services will be provided by Communication Plus+.
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Arkansas Razorbacks Men's Basketball
How’s your weekend?
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I was off work yesterday and told to stay off our company Slack channel and to literally take the day off, so I don’t know who to blame for yesterday’s open line blunder. But I do sincerely apologize.
Winner of Arkansas vs Kansas has to permanently change the pronunciation of their state’s name.
— Brandon Baker (@BBakerHogs) March 17, 2023
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Thursday’s monthly board meeting covered much ground. The board approved Superintendent Jermall Wright’s plan to redesign the Little Rock School District into three tiered networks that will allow the district to more effectively and efficiently meet the needs of all kids in our district without forsaking the most vulnerable and most in need. They also tried to address the mess that is the career academies. I am not sure they made this much better, nor am I convinced they have passed the equity test on this one. Finally, we learned that Gov. Sarah Sanders and the Republican legislature misled us. The state is funding far less than the total amount needed to raise the starting salaries to $50,000 and to provide the $2,000 raise to all teachers. This could mean serious trouble for school districts across our state.
After the distinct celebrations, our board started its meeting by approving the consent agenda. This is just a formality. The issues in the consent agenda are routine or things the board has been discussing for months and have reached a consensus on. Notably this month there were some new appointments. Morgan Ealy, the current assistant principal at Watson Elementary, has been appointed to interim principal at Watson. Anthony Goods will replace her as interim assistant principal. Goods is the current physical education teacher. Dr. Shoutell Richardson was moved from interim principal to principal at Bale Elementary. And finally, Judy Zink was appointed interim assistant principal at Parkview High School for the reminder of the year. The consent agenda was passed unanimously.
SCHOOLS AND ACADEMICS
Wright and his team have been providing the board monthly updates on the changes coming next year in how we deliver instruction in our schools. Tonight was the night our board was asked to give its full approval to the plan.
Working with former Superintendent Mike Poore and Jermall Wright, the school board identified four goals and two constraints, which stated the most important priorities of our district in ensuring every child who walks in our doors receives a full, fair and equitable education. Wright and his team then developed this three-tiered network program to best implement these goals.
The problem that has plagued the Little Rock School District for generations was how to categorize schools, prioritize support, align district resources and identify ways to attract and retain high quality personnel. Wright is proposing that we organize all of our schools into three networks.
Network 1 will be all of our secondary schools. Within this network our schools will be broken into three categories.There will be autonomous schools that have more flexibility and freedom because they are succeeding. They will still receive help for individual kids falling behind. There will be Tier 2 schools that require a little more help, and finally there will be priority schools that are rated as D or F schools by the state, that will receive intensive help from the district. There are 13 schools in this network. Four middle schools will be priority schools.
Network 2 will be our autonomous and Tier 2 elementary schools. There are seven autonomous schools and six Tier 2 schools. The Tier 2 schools will receive some intervention from the district.
Network 3 will be all of our priority elementary schools and this group will receive the most intensive help from the district. There are nine elementary schools in this network.
In each network the schools will have a dedicated leader who will be responsible for coordinating the services needed. These three positions will eliminate the current positions of assistant superintendent of elementary and secondary education. Each network will have its own dedicated literacy coordinators, math coordinators, science coordinators and social studies coordinator. On top of this each network will have its own Social Emotional Learning coordinator, a human resources partner, a technology partner, an English as second language partner and finally a special education team.
We will no longer have one team or person over 40 schools; instead, we will have more people helping a smaller group of schools. This is a great plan. Not only does it get help closer to the point of contact with the students, but we will now be able to better hold support staff accountable for helping our schools. I have a lot of hope this plan will help our schools help all children in our district.
You can read all the details at this link. There are many other links in the documents so don’t miss those.
The administration requested that the board approve this version of the plan with the understanding that the LEARNS Act might restrict some of the incentive pay, but that the general outline of the plan would be as described above.
Board member Ali Noland said that the board brought Wright here to make big and serious changes. She said that they have worked on this plan for months and that while change will be hard, it has great potential to help all kids.
The board voted to approve this unanimously.
The next action by the board was on a memorandum of understanding for Chicot Community School. Chicot Elementary wanted to enter into a MOU with United Way and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. The MOU with UA-LR was to help prevent child abuse and neglect by providing an evidence-based parenting program called Positive Parenting Program (Triple P), which will be offered in a variety of settings for the parents of the school. The triple P programs have been around for a number of years. They hold training for parents to deal with childhood behavior problems that can lead to problems are school. The programs have been evaluated over the years are deemed to be effective. Here is one study that ranks the program very highly.
The agreement with United Way was to help deliver food to families in need. The school will help identify families in need and United Way will deliver food to the household. This is great for families that do not have reliable transportation. United Way will be working with Door Dash.
These MOUs were approved unanimously.
The next action by the board was on Wright’s recommendation that the district enter into a relationship with Communities in Schools. It’s a national organization that ensures every student, regardless of race, gender, ability, ZIP code or socioeconomic background has what they need to realize their full potential in school and beyond. CIS approached the district and wants to provide wraparound supports in partnership with our school district. They look at barriers that can be prohibitive for kids. They identify issues like hunger, poor health, vision issues, lack of school supplies, lack of shoes and clothing, homelessness and transportation issues. Once issues are identified with specific kids, this group works in the community to meet these needs when their families can’t. This group will train our community school coordinators to do this work.
Our administration believe that CIS could be a way to strengthen and expand services in our community. According to CIS’s website, they “work in 3,20 schools across 25 states and the District of Columbia.” They have developed a method to surround low income and marginalized students with a network of community members that will mentor and encourage them. They appear to be totally funded by philanthropists. The agreement with this group comes with a $1 million grant to implement these plans. Slowly but surely, Wright and his team are getting all the pieces in place that will help our most vulnerable kids.
Board member Vicki Hatter asked if this would also apply to non-community schools. Reginald Ballard, LRSD chief of staff, said it would. He reminded the board that the district will be adding five schools at a time. Wright made it clear that the administration will be discussing with the board on the most effective way to use these funds to meet the greatest needs in the district.
This motion passed unanimously.
The next presentation was a report on board goal two, which was Career Pathways. The board set a goal to increase the number of students in career pathways by 5% for the next 5 years. As I have repeatedly made clear, I oppose all focus on careers. This is not the purpose of a school. The purpose of a school is not to create career academies and then push kids into them. We are not social engineers, and we have no right picking out career academies for students. We do not know what the jobs of the future will be. Let me be clear, I do not think we should be creating scholars either. We will create scholars and we will create good workers, but we will do that by recognizing we must educate the whole child in all things. We are here to create better humans, not cogs in the capitalist machine.
The district has already rolled out the career academies. They announce boldly that students will be “learning through a career lens.” This is being driven by the Little Rock Regional Chamber of Commerce through the “Academies of Central Arkansas.” All of our freshmen take a course called Freshman Academy, which appears from documents I have seen to be the old communications class with some business curriculum added. Things like how to do an interview and how to make a resume. Good skills I am sure, but in district with serious academic problems wouldn’t this class be better used to teach reading skills and critical thinking skills? The way the Little Rock plan is written seems to indicate that all freshmen will join an academy. But at a recent meeting at the new West High School the parents there were told the academies would be optional. At Central High School there are no academies. Students at Parkview, Southwest, and Hall are not being told these classes are optional. On top of this, the new LEARNS Act says students “shall have the OPTION” of joining a career academy. Why are Black and Latino majorities at Hall and Southwest being told that the career academies required? Why are Parkview parents being told their kids must sign up for academy classes, but when they call downtown they are being told these classes are optional? Something needs to be done to clarify these issues and to provide equity to all our students.
Let me be clear, I am not opposed to Career and Technical classes, my issue is building education around them. Education is about far more than finding one’s job. At the end of the day, we should let business do its business and let’s let schools work on teaching humans how to think, analyze, critique, feel, create and explore. This has been the task of education for millennia. We don’t need to let the Chamber of Commerce dictate how we deliver instruction to our kids.
Board members continue to support this which is fine, but I dissent.
STUDENT DISCIPLINE, SOCIAL EMOTIONAL, AND MENTAL HEALTH NEEDS IN LRSD
The LRSD has experienced an increase in certain student discipline infractions in some schools and is also experiencing more students with social, emotional and mental health needs. The district knows that there are many contributing factors to these issues. So many of our kids are experiencing trauma, community violence, substance abuse, social media influences and general impacts of poverty on kids. The Little Rock School District is developing a tiered approach to address these issues. The end goal here is to develop a LRSD Student Success Strategy that will allow us to have a consistent application across the district.
The district is proposing a multi-tiered program for helping students with social and emotional needs. Tier 1 would include 100% of our students. Tier 1 Support would include school counselors. Under the district plan they would:
- Provide all students with a standards-based school counseling curriculum to address universal academic, career and social/emotional development
- Analyze academic, career and social/emotional development data to identify struggling students
- Identify and collaborate on research-based intervention strategies implemented by school staff
- Evaluate academic and behavioral progress after interventions, revising interventions as appropriate
- Refer to school and community services as appropriate, collaborating with administrators, other school professionals, community agencies, and families in the design and implementation of MTSS
- Advocate for equitable education for all students and working to remove systemic barriers
Tier 1 would also include school nurses. As the health services expert, the school nurse serves as the health professional for the school community. Today’s school nurses provide episodic care, manage chronic conditions, track communicable diseases, promote healthy behaviors, connect children with insurance and health care providers and handle medical emergencies.
School nurses will collaborate with school counselors and the school site administrator/principal to keep the student safe.
Tier II Support would affect 10-25% of our students. This work would be done by our school social workers.
- For student’s impacted by adverse traumatic experiences, the social worker focuses on the reduction of trauma symptoms through individual and group therapy. Moderate to severe cases will be handled via wrap-around services with community agencies and/or school-based mental health.
Types of group therapy will focus on anxiety, depression, grief/loss, peer support and regulating emotions.
- Administer biopsychosocial and screeners of students who are referred by counselors and administrators. Use social history and assessments to identify underlying conditions that are impacting students’ mental health. Develop a treatment plan that addresses individual student needs. Refer to mental health school-based agencies as needed.
- Assess for self-harming behaviors. Coordinate with mobile crisis and follow through with participating mental health agencies with services.
The district will also be introducing success coaches are interns attending college to attain a bachelor’s or masters’ level degree. LRSD is providing their intern experience. Interns abide by the NASW code of ethics.
- Conducts a needs assessment and connects students with agencies that can be used to coordinate wrap-around services that are major, involving health, mental health, housing and food.
- Address homelessness and food insecurity
- Coordinate services through the school or via local agency resources to provide short-term food stability while attempting to address long-term food insecurity. Success coaches connect families to resources — food banks, shelters, applications for SNAP, housing, etc.
- Provides psychoeducational groups and individual sessions for social skill training, meditation techniques, coping strategies and conflict resolution.
Tier III would affect less than 10% of our students. These students need help beyond what we can provide in our schools and they would be recommended to outside sources that include:
Acute and Residential Hospitalization
Services focused on stabilizing students in crisis mode: suicidal/homicidal ideations
Community-Based Providers
Provide similar services to school-based mental health programs
School-Based Mental Health
Twelve mental health partners with licensed therapists and QBHPs (case managers) Partners offer individual, family, and group counseling, medication management, QBHP interventions, crisis intervention and stabilization.
This seems like a solid way to think about how we will help all of our children. They are drawing on ideas developed by the Winston-Salem/Forsyth Country School District, Code of Character, Conduct, and Support. You can see that document here.
FINANCE AND OPERATIONS
The first finance action was on the audit and project proposal for a net-metering solar facility. This audit will not cost the district anything. After interviews the district is recommending Enegrity Partners to perform the audit. Entergy was able to pass legislation to hinder future solar development. Entergy does not give a care about the environment and has clearly bought the Arkansas Republican Party. The district can still save money, and reduce its carbon footprint, the change will just be smaller because of Entergy’s shortsighted greed.
The motion passed.
Next Kelsey Bailey, the chief financial officer of the district, reported on district finances. Tax revenue is up. Expenditures are down. Our fund balances are secure. Things look good in the LRSD financially. He also reported that we still have federal funds related to COVID.
Board member Evelyn Calloway asked about the LEARNS Act and teacher pay. She wanted to know if the teacher step raises were going to be done away with. Under the new law all teachers will begin with $50,000. There are no steps required under the new law. Bailey Ddid not see the district getting away from educational lanes or from yearly steps. Each teacher will get a $2,000 dollar raise. This will destroy smaller districts. Noland said that Bryant School Board reported that for them to just meeting the district’s responsibility to meet the $50,000 dollar raise and the $2,000 step required under this law will cost them $7 million dollars, but the state is only going to give them to $1.9 million from the state. If LRSD stays at the same level of steps and meet the $50,000 dollar raise it will cost us $12.5 million but we will ONLY get $4.3 million from the state. We can’t afford this. Wright stated when he saw the numbers from the state he called Bailey to see if this was a joke. The state is funding less than half of what we need if we leave the salary schedules at the same. Instead, it appears the state wants us to pay all teachers $50,000 and then give them $2,000 raises. We have teachers here and around the state who make more than that and now the state won’t fund them. This is not good. It is clear that the state of Arkansas is not committed to adequately funding education. We will have to make cuts and that will hurt kids. Imagine the damage this will do to small rural districts.
The district also presented a cyber security update. You will remember that our network was attacked a few months ago and our board had an illegal meeting, which Noland and Hatter walked out of. Other board members continue to refuse to apologize for betraying our trust. They had a public meeting after lawyers told them they could not meet in private, and now they are properly and legally doing their updates in public on this matter. The district has implemented additional monitoring and threat detection software to supplement the security measures already in place and has taken steps to further secure its network. They reported to the board that they are committed to completing a detailed review of our internal systems and will take everything learned from the incident to strengthen networks for the future.
Next was a report on new construction at Little Rock Central High School. Construction is scheduled for a new education building and a field house The district team has been working with Polk Stanley Wilcox Architects and Nabholz & Doyne Construction on this project. It is now time to start site work to prepare for the construction project. This will allow the district and the construction companies to begin to prepare the site for construction. This phase of the project will cost $6.6 million out of the capital improvement fund. A question was raised about the lawsuit settlement that stated that new construction could not begin until Southwest High School and the Marion Lacy Middle School were completed and whether this would violate that settlement. The district’s attorney, Eric Walker, stated that he believed it did not. I tend to agree with Walker here. The settlement intended to make sure that West Little Rock construction was not prioritized over the southwest and southeast parts of the city as they had been for generations. Mike Poore made sure that the district stopped that unfair practice and we now have a state-of-the-art high school at Southwest and the Marion Lacy K8 school is well under construction. The Central High School construction benefits kids on the east side of town. We are building buildings for the kids who have traditionally been left behind. This is a good thing.
This motion passed unanimously.
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You ever encounter a song that just keeps bombarding your brain unprompted? In the four years since I first heard “Leona” by Portland/Philly/New York indie rockers Strange Ranger, it won’t leave me alone. The tune is incredibly simple, never deviating from its two-chord structure and Third Eye Blind-esque “bad-da-da”s, but — as far as I’m concerned — the lyrics are a perfect, diaristic encapsulation of what it feels like to be a teenager who’s confused about everything except for the person you have a crush on. Meandering through lines like “I miss the morning before it comes to me” and “I can still taste your kisses/ Never wanna do my dishes” will make you long for the time in your life when you were on the cusp of adulthood, stuck between accidental profundity and proud childishness.
For just 10 bucks, you can catch Strange Ranger on their drive back from SXSW at Stickyz Rock ’n’ Roll Chicken Shack on Sunday, March 19. The show starts at 7:30 p.m. and you can get tickets here. Puppy Angst and Rock Eupora are set to open.
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We knew there would be madness. We knew there would be chaos. We didn’t know there would be two wedgies (when the basketball gets stuck between the rim and backboard) less than five minutes into Arkansas Razorbacks men’s basketball team’s opening NCAA Tournament matchup versus The Fighting Illinis of Illinois. That’s the kind of March Madness that can’t be predicted. If a first half double wedgie bet existed on the Bet Saracen app and you put $100 on it, you’d probably be taking the rest of the tournament off work to just enjoy the games and rest during the week.
"It's the rarest of all feats, it's a double wedgie in Des Moines" #MarchMadness pic.twitter.com/9cBkDUagpM
— NCAA March Madness (@MarchMadnessMBB) March 16, 2023
There were a record six wedgies today across all games, and the night was still relatively young as I wrote this at 9:49 p.m.
The 8-seeded Hogs (21-13, 8-10 SEC) were led by junior guard Ricky Council IV, who had his first double double as a Razorback with 18 points and 10 rebounds.
Heck of a time for your first double-double as a HOG @Rickythe4th pic.twitter.com/of1ztX2u3I
— Arkansas Razorbacks Men’s Basketball (@RazorbackMBB) March 16, 2023
Junior guard Devonte “Devo” Davis — who seems to be at his absolute best in March — was disruptive for Illinois in every way possible, forcing turnovers, grabbing rebounds and knocking down three pointers. Davis finished with 16 points, six rebounds and four steals.
March Devo sighting pic.twitter.com/Ojf2WEK72V
— Arkansas Razorbacks Men’s Basketball (@RazorbackMBB) March 16, 2023
“Devo is always ready for the moment.”
On Devo Davis turning in another NCAA Tournament gem against Illinois on Thursday, and leading Arkansas from a production and emotion standpoint: https://t.co/xLPt6hNyHH pic.twitter.com/4Px6LSP2eT
— Scottie Bordelon (@NWAScottie) March 17, 2023
Devo Davis will be the first player in team history to play against three NCAA Tournament 1 seeds for @RazorbackMBB.
Note, Reggie Merritt was on the team during three games against 1 seeds in the '90s but only played in one of those games https://t.co/RGTHIlIBOM
— HogStats.com (@HogStats) March 16, 2023
Some March moments are just too big, and the madness can’t be contained. For the Razorbacks that moment occurred when freshman guard Nick Smith Jr. fouled his own teammate, senior forward Kamani Johnson, after Johnson made a basket under the rim between three Illinois defenders.
I got to hyped my bad my boy @KamaniJohnson20 https://t.co/5LvIS981Kz
— Nick Smith Jr (@lif3nick) March 16, 2023
The Razorbacks defeated 9-seeded Illinois 73-63. Razorbacks Head Coach Eric Musselman is now 3-0 in the first round of the tournament since joining the Hogs in the 2019-2020 season, and his shoes are always impeccable.
Fit check pic.twitter.com/3YX1jTjPbV
— Arkansas Razorbacks Men’s Basketball (@RazorbackMBB) March 16, 2023
Three straight opening round Ws for @RazorbackMBB pic.twitter.com/zcnhioegZj
— SEC Network (@SECNetwork) March 16, 2023
Immaculate vibes for the Razorbacks #MarchMadness @RazorbackMBB pic.twitter.com/TYNpIAoW46
— NCAA March Madness (@MarchMadnessMBB) March 16, 2023
You simply must hit play on the tweet below to see the locker room celebration, one of Musselman’s greatest strengths.
WE PLAY ANOTHER DAY pic.twitter.com/IqJib5oOqL
— Arkansas Razorbacks Men’s Basketball (@RazorbackMBB) March 16, 2023
Before the game, Musselman got to meet Vice President Kamala Harris and second gentlemen Douglas Emhoff. Vice President Harris was in Des Moines to see her alma mater, No. 16 seed Howard University, play No. 1 seed Kansas.
Really cool getting to meet the @VP and @SecondGentleman before the game today! #WPS pic.twitter.com/8ow3hcENXn
— Eric Musselman (@EricPMusselman) March 16, 2023
Illinois fans were dejected but respectful in the Twitter comment sections despite all the memes from Razorback fans and Twitter trolls.
Razorbacks like to dance! @RazorbackMBB advance! pic.twitter.com/UPeqz3Xnvw
— FOX College Hoops (@CBBonFOX) March 16, 2023
The Hogs will play Kansas on CBS at 4:15 p.m. Saturday in the round of 32.
Sleep tight Hogs, we've got more dancing to do pic.twitter.com/PGbAzO3YRs
— Arkansas Razorbacks Men’s Basketball (@RazorbackMBB) March 17, 2023
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Officials from Central Arkansas Water announced Thursday that qualifying individuals can now register for up to $2,000 in assistance for current and future bills. An additional $2,000 also can go toward past bills.
Formally called the Low-Income Household Water Assistance Program (LIHWAP), the expanded program is available to any CAW customer who qualifies. However, the federal funds are limited and will be doled out on a first-come, first-served basis. The money is expected to help for up to a year’s worth of water and wastewater bills.
Tad Bohannon, CEO of Central Arkansas Water, said that the utility service does not determine how much assistance is granted. That’s left up to the state, he said. People who already use other assistance programs like LIHEAP — assistance with energy bills — SNAP and Supplemental Security Income, automatically qualify for the additional help.
Brian ChilsonCALL IF YOU NEED HELP: Customer Service Director Terry Frazier said that customers can call for help or schedule and in-person meeting.Terry Fraizer, director of customer service for CAW, said that customers who previously applied and received LIHWAP funds for past-due water bills do not have to take any action to get help. That’s nearly 2,000 CAW customers who will immediately receive the expanded help, Frazier said. Those customers should expect an email from state officials about the credit.
Customers can apply for the funds directly, here. Or, others who aren’t sure about their qualifications can answer a few questions on the CAW website to find out. It asks things like address, previous assistance and household income.
Local leaders were also on-site Thursday to talk about the impact and importance of the assistance for residents.
“This program is more than just the financial assistance program,” Pulaski County Barry Hyde said. “This is a humanitarian program. If you have a neighbor, a friend, a family member who you believe could benefit from this program, be an ambassador and let them know that help is available.”
Brian ChilsonTELL YOUR FRIENDS: Pulaski County Judge Barry Hyde emphasized getting the word out.Hyde emphasized how essential it was to apply quickly. There’s no guarantee that there will be more funds once these run out, he said.
Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott Jr. noted similar importances and suggested that folks put this in their church announcements. He recognized the cooperative efforts of the Biden administration and Gov. Sarah Sanders to have the funds available.
Brian Chilson‘HELP OUR MOST VULNERABLE COMMUNITIES:’ Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott Jr. said that a bill as low as $30 could lead to a utility shut off for some folks.“Water is very key to the foundation of life,” Scott said. “There are many of us that have grown up and have been a paycheck away from bankruptcy. … We think about up to $2,000, how many lives can be changed.”
By the time North Little Rock Mayor Terry Hartwick took the microphone, there wasn’t much else to be said about the program. Instead, he shared a quirky story about how some young kids mistook him for Biden recently. Using that, he said that “from both me, Terry Hartwick, and I guess Joe Biden, we thank you.”
Brian Chilson‘$2,000 GOES A LONG WAY:’ North Little Rock Mayor Terry Hartwick pushed the importance.Though it wasn’t mentioned at the press conference, Central Arkansas Water approved in January a 10-year rate increase that would double the average household bill by 2023. Little Rock Director Lance Hines is working on a resolution to state the city’s opposition to the increase.
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The Arkansas Supreme Court on Thursday reversed a lower court ruling that would have prevented the state Department of Transportation from spending money on the $1 billion 30 Crossing project.
In November 2020, voters approved Amendment 101, which continues the half percent sales-and-use tax that voters initially approved with Amendment 91, which was passed into law in 2012. Amendment 101 goes into effect in July.
Amendment 91 explicitly said the tax would go to fund highway improvement bonds for “four-lane highway improvements,” but the Department of Transportation spent tax proceeds on the six-lane stretch of 30 Crossing over the Arkansas River, and they planned to spend more.
An illegal exaction lawsuit put a stop to that in 2020, followed in 2021 with a $121 million judgement against the department.
In a separate case, Little Rock attorney Richard Mays, representing a coalition of downtown neighborhoods and residents, successfully argued that the Department of Transportation couldn’t spend $350 million of proceeds from Amendment 101 on 30 Crossing. Pulaski Circuit Judge Mackie Pierce ruled that because Amendment 101 was a continuation of Amendment 91, the same four-lane restriction applied.
But today the Supreme Court ruled that Amendment 101 doesn’t explicitly limit the highway department to only four-lane projects.
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Arkansas Times editor emeritus Max Brantley sums up today’s scuffle between Attorney General Tim Griffin and Lt. Gov. Leslie Rutledge quite nicely here.
Griffin, who trailed Rutledge badly in polling that drove both from governor’s race, works to tarnish her for future. It so happens he’s right about her lavish ad spending and usurping appropriation authority. https://t.co/WxmmJYstAc
— Arkansas Blog (@ArkansasBlog) March 16, 2023
Both entrenched now as professional politicians, Griffin and Rutledge swapped offices in 2022. There’s a good possibility they’ll square up against each other for another run at the governor’s office someday. If so, it’s a safe bet that this dispute over opioid settlement money will come up.
Griffin told Mike Wickline at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that he’s hired an auditor to pore over the books to account for expenditures during Rutledge’s tenure. Griffin also pokes Rutledge’s habit of spending public money on public service announcements that just happened to feature her name and likeness prominently.
Dem-Gaz subscribers can read Wickline’s story here.
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The Arkansas Razorbacks men’s basketball team is going dancing in the NCAA Tournament for the third consecutive year under Head Coach Eric Musselman. The 8-seeded Hogs (20-13, 8-10 SEC) tip off against 9-seeded Illinois (20-12, 11-9 Big 10) at 3:30 p.m. Thursday on TBS. The Hogs are in the West region of the bracket and the game will take place in Des Moines, Iowa, at Wells Fargo Arena.
Coming off back to back Elite Eight appearances in the tournament — coupled with the signing of freshmen McDonald’s All American 5-star recruits Nick Smith Jr., Anthony Black and Jordan Walsh — expectations were high this year. But the Razorbacks suffered injuries. Smith, a Jacksonville native and a projected NBA lottery pick, was out for more than a month with a knee injury. Trevon Brazile, a standout sophomore Missouri transfer (and surely a dunk of the year candidate), suffered a season ending ACL tear in December. Being down two starters for much of the season made it fair to question whether the team would even make the tournament. But despite the chaos and the team’s sometimes erratic play, Musselman’s Hogs still finished the season ranked #21 in the NET rankings.
Reminder that today we see Arkansas make its third consecutive NCAA Tournament under a single coach for the first time since Nolan Richardson in 1999-2001.
— JC Hoops (@JacksonCollier) March 12, 2023
I’ve listened to several gambling podcasts and college basketball podcasts this week to prepare for the tournament in hopes of making some serious cash, and I’ve heard many people predict that Hogs could make some noise in this year’s tournament.
From a metrics standpoint, Arkansas and Illinois look shockingly similar.
Arkansas vs Illinois comparisons:
PPG: 74.8 vs 74.7
BPG: 5.3 vs 5.7
FG%: 47.5% vs 45.1%
3P%: 32.1% vs 30.9%
FT%: 69.0% vs 68.0%
TPG: 12.3 vs 12.4
Lst 10: 4-6 vs 4-6
Off Eff: 51 vs 58— Brandon Baker (@BBakerHogs) March 14, 2023
The betting line on the game on the Bet Saracen app has the Razorbacks favored by 2.5 points. I don’t bet on the Hogs, but I’m taking them with extreme confidence in my annual March Madness bracket pool. Arkansas Times editor Lindsey Millar has them cutting down the nets in Houston after defeating Alabama in the finals (Editor’s note: He knows it’s dumb but has always felt that true fans are obligated to pick their team to win it all every time they make the tourney). I’m happy to lose all my bets and tear up my sheets if Millar’s correct.
If the Hogs win today, they’ll likely meet No. 1 seed Kansas on Saturday. Let the madness begin.
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In 2003, Bill Solleder and Shea Childs, while expecting their second daughter, moved from Chicago to Shea’s hometown of Hot Springs to put down roots in a city where they could actually afford a house. Childs’ father offered Solleder a job as a construction project manager, but it wasn’t long before he started longing for the world he’d recently thrived in: the DIY art scene, where he sang in a band called Blue Meanies and worked for Thick Records, an small independent label. Instead of complaining about how much he missed the “cool, underground, experimental” music that was much easier to come by in Chicago, Solleder decided to bring some of it to Hot Springs.
What began as an effort to throw some shows for a few friends who would be in the area to play at South by Southwest led to the accidental formation of a festival. “Word got out that I was booking shows,” said Solleder. “Without even trying, I had booked a couple dozen — maybe three dozen bands — in no time because everybody was looking for a gig on the way to and from Austin.” The multi-night series of all-age performances, hosted in March 2005 by an earlier version of Maxine’s in downtown Hot Springs, was so spontaneously formidable that it demanded a name: the Valley of the Vapors Independent Music Festival.
Robbie BrindleyShea Childs and Bill SollederSolleder was quick to remind me that the first VOV was almost two decades ago and therefore looms foggily, but if his memory serves him correctly, performers at the original fest included New Black from Chicago, Viva Voce from Portland, Oregon, Drove from Hot Springs, Soophie Nun Squad from North Little Rock and many more. The inaugural event was met with so much unexpected enthusiasm by both the performers and the locals that they held two more fests in 2005 — one in the summer and one in the fall — but by the close of the October affair, it became clear that the connection to SXSW artist traffic was an essential part of making the festival work, so from that point forward, VOV would happen once a year in March.
That first year, the location of VOV was constantly in flux. Movement from venue to venue across town left Solleder and Childs exhausted and led them to seek out a permanent space that could house the festival for good. They settled on a warehouse at 118 Arbor Street that had once functioned as a laundromat for the Velda Rose, a now defunct hotel. When Solleder and Childs discovered the property, the electricity was still on, but it was mostly being used for hotel storage and had drifted into disrepair. Solleder described the building as “dilapidated” and “a breath away from being condemned,” but Childs — coming from a construction-minded family — could tell that the concrete and steel foundation meant that “its bones were good even though the roof had fallen in.”
Aaron BrewerThe Low Key Arts building on Arbor Street.The time crunch between purchasing the Arbor Street location — which was owner financed — and the 2006 VOV in March was extremely tight. “The day the festival started, we had all the inspectors there to give the final occupational permit,” said Childs. “We really raced it down to the clock.” Mere hours before music started, an electrician installed a kill switch that would allow them to shut off the PA in the event of a fire. The first band to take the stage was Peelander-Z, a Japanese-American punk rock outfit. Lucero, fronted by Little Rock’s Ben Nichols, headlined a sold out show on the second night.
While they made the transition to Arbor Street, Childs finalized the legal formation of Low Key Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization under which Valley of the Vapors would exist. Solleder was named Executive Director. In the years since its inception, Low Key Arts has expanded its programming to also encompass the Hot Water Hills Music & Arts Festival, Arkansas Shorts Short Film Festival, Inception to Projection filmmaking workshops, and KUHS-LP 102.5 FM, the only solar powered community radio station in Arkansas, all of which are artistically rich enough to warrant their own histories.
For the next 14 years, VOV thrived, surviving largely by way of countless unpaid volunteers. Averaging over 100 guests per night, the limits of the Arbor Street 175-person capacity were joyfully pushed. That said, it wasn’t always easy to convince musicians to pitstop in an Arkansan town they’d never heard of. “All the stereotypes that ran through their heads,” said Solleder. “They probably had the worst scenario in mind.” In order to counter these less-than-flattering expectations from traveling bands who were accustomed to playing in far hipper cities, VOV made it their mission to become known for exceptionally generous hospitality.
Aaron Brewer13th Valley of the Vapors, 2017, at Arbor Street.The heart of that welcoming spirit was the Adopt A Band program, which asked eager locals to sign up a specific artist to take care of during their time in Hot Springs. “When bands would roll up, someone would be there waiting for them with a gift bag or a present,” said Solleder. “The present might contain something to drink or maybe some clean socks or a book or a piece of art or food or all of the above.” After that benevolent exchange, the adopter would become the point of contact for anything the musicians might need, including but not limited to a place to crash, rides to the drugstore, recommendations for vegetarian restaurants and cultural guidance regarding the spas and gangster history of Hot Springs. “Sometimes, those relationships would extend way beyond just that one night,” said Solleder. “I know people that have friends from 15 years ago that they’re still in contact with.”
Additionally, bands grew fond of the upstairs green room area at Arbor Street that VIP ticket holders were encouraged to mingle in. Outfitted with a pool table, old furniture and, briefly, a halfpipe for skateboarding, it was a grungy oasis that facilitated meaningful interactions between musicians and fans over shared drinks and eats.
Another way VOV stood out from other festivals was in its commitment to doing secret shows. While the majority of the concerts took place at the Arbor Street building or Maxine’s, it quickly became a tradition to announce last-minute, one-off performances in notoriously cramped and nontraditional spaces. Some of the most memorable locations for these spontaneous gigs include the top of the Hot Springs Mountain Tower, a moving school bus, the steps of the Ozark Bathhouse and a Waffle House.
Aaron BrewerSecret show at a Waffle House, 15th Valley of the Vapors, 2019.As for what kind of music the festival has become known for, the question of genre is less important than you might think. Solleder initially did most of the booking on his own and his guiding metric was authenticity. “I think I have a pretty good radar for what feels sincere,” he said. “Agents used to ask me what I was looking for, and I would just say ‘anything with heart.’” When Bobby Missile — who became the Artistic Director at Low Key Arts in 2016 and was previously acting as VOV’s pro bono talent buyer since moving to Hot Springs in 2006 — designs each year’s bill, he’s looking for “unique, original” and “cutting edge” groups that “people wouldn’t hear on the regular,” regardless of their stylistic leanings. “We’ve had country, rockabilly, indie, hiphop, folk. Last year, we had a duo from New York that was just double bass and violin. It was operatic,” Missile said. “We do not limit ourselves to anything.”
Per the Low Key Arts website, VOV “has hosted nearly 3,000 musicians and artists from such faraway places as Japan, South Korea, China, Norway, England, Germany, France, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico and Canada,” but some of Solleder and Missile’s favorite acts to come through over the years include Fenster, Jamaican Queens, Juicebox, Lost in the Trees, Andrew Anderson, Grandchildren, Weaves, A Place to Bury Strangers, Guerilla Toss and Joan of Arc.
In 2016, Solleder stepped down as the Executive Director of Low Key Arts to take a job at Visit Hot Springs and relinquish the role to someone with a younger spirit. His job was split in two and filled by Bobby Missile as Artistic Director and David Hill, author of “The Vapors,” as interim Executive Director. The next year, Sonny Kay — a DIY veteran, visual artist and the founder of indie record label Gold Standard Laboratories — was recruited to be the organization’s permanent leader.
Aaron BrewerSonny KayLike so many scrappy entities, the pandemic hit Low Key Arts hard. With the halting of in-person programming, paying rent on the Arbor Street building was unsustainable, leading its owners — Solleder and Childs — to sell it in 2020, the only year in which VOV was canceled. When the festival returned on a year-and-six-months-late weekend in October 2021, social distancing was still being widely practiced and the idea of gathering hundreds of people indoors felt irresponsible. Beyond concerns about coronavirus outbreaks, Kay viewed the moment as an “opportunity to examine the model that we had established” and made the decision to indefinitely move the festival outside.
Growing up in Los Angeles, Kay had some of his first concert experiences in outdoor venues like the Hollywood Bowl and the Greek Theatre, both of which are “theatrically lit” with “dramatic backdrops.” “For my money, it’s the most compelling, exciting and enchanting way to see live music,” he said. After Kay discovered that Cedar Glades Park — just a few miles away from the former location — had an already existing and underused band shell, everything clicked into place. The humble, triangular stage, which Kay described as “something you might imagine in a country jamboree,” needed a bit of electrical work, but it wasn’t something that a few hundred dollars worth of rewiring couldn’t solve.
Gabby CalvinBegonia performing at the 18th Valley of the Vapors Independent Music Festival, 2022, at Cedar Glades Park.Since relocating, VOV volunteers — which make up about 90% of those involved in the fest — have worked tirelessly to turn Cedar Glades Park into a spectacle. Through an experimental combination of lighting, lasers, digital projections, analog televisions and creative backdrops, the breathtaking natural beauty of the Ouachita Mountains is tastefully accented. Additionally, the new location has allowed the fest to grow in size, with a new average of 400 to 500 people per day.
Another advantage of moving to Cedar Glades Park is that VOV is now a camping-friendly festival. On top of providing attendees with more of a chance to immerse themselves in the foliage of Arkansas, it also makes overnight stays more accessible to out-of-towners who might otherwise struggle to pay for a hotel in Hot Springs on St. Patrick’s Day weekend, one of the busiest times of the year. The number of campers so far is modest, but it’s growing.
When I spoke with Solleder and Childs about the direction the festival has taken since their departure, I expected at least a hint of resentment around the loss of their charmingly disjointed homebase on Arbor Street, but that wasn’t the case. “Arkansas is the natural state,” Solleder said. “For those bands who are coming to play and for the people who are coming to visit the festival, being outside with that grove of pine trees behind you is just magical.” “Bill and I are like, ‘why didn’t we ever think of bringing it out here?’” said Childs. “It’s just gorgeous. The hillside and that little valley is beautiful.”
The 19th Valley of the Vapors Independent Music Festival is this weekend, Friday, March 17 through Sunday, March 19. According to Leslie Blackstock, a longtime volunteer who’s leant her construction expertise to over a decade of VOVs, you can expect an exact replica of the iconic red door that led into the old Arbor Street building “standing up out in the middle of a field as the entrance to the Cedar Glades festival.” Tickets and camping passes are still available and can be purchased here. The schedule and lineup are as follows:
Friday
9:15 – Locate S,1 (Athens, GA)
8:00 – Modeling (Fayetteville)
6:45 – Sky Creature (NYC)
5:30 – Constant Smiles (MA)
4:30 – Weird Music (Philadelphia)
Saturday
9:30 – Deaf Club (LA/SD)
8:30 – Fuck Money (Austin)
7:30 – CDSM (Atlanta)
6:30 – The Foreign Resort (Copenhagen, Denmark)
5:30 – Truth Club (Raleigh, NC)
4:30 – Living Hour (Winnipeg, MB)
3:30 – Cosmic Cream (Hot Springs)
Sunday
9:15 – Begonia (Winnipeg, MB)
8:15 – Shutups (Oakland)
7:15 – Zzzahara (Los Angeles)
6:15 – Gloin (Toronto)
5:30 – Baby Baby Explores (Providence, RI)
4:30 – Motherhood (Fredericton, NB)
3:30 – Johnny Germ & The Membrains (NJ)
The post Devotion, decency and the DIY spirit: a history of the Valley of the Vapors Independent Music Festival appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The massive universal vouchers+charter expansion+teacher raises+don’t say gay+CRT-banning school privatization package known as Arkansas LEARNS raced its way into the law books before most of us had a chance to read the damn thing.
But the Arkansas Department of Education is throwing us a bone, accepting applications for people interested in helping to shape the rules for how Gov. Sarah Sanders‘ signature big, bad, bold plan will go down.
Arkansas Education Secretary Jacob Oliva released a public memo Tuesday calling for volunteers to serve on six working groups. Here it is:
Dear Stakeholders,
On March 8, 2023, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed Act 237, known as the Arkansas LEARNS Act, into law. The Arkansas LEARNS Act is bold and comprehensive and will transform education in Arkansas. Arkansas LEARNS focuses on these critical areas for student success:
- Improving literacy for all;
- Ensuring students come to kindergarten ready to learn;
- Empowering parents;
- Promoting accountability:
- Strengthening career and workforce readiness programs;
- Improving access to broadband;
- Focusing on school safety; and
- Moving teacher starting salaries to the top five of the nation.
The next step is a call to action, and we invite Arkansans statewide to engage with us in the implementation of LEARNS. We are seeking volunteers to become part of working groups to provide ideas, expertise, and feedback to the Department of Education in the development of rules and policies. The work groups will submit recommendations to the ADE secretary for consideration.
If you are interested in participating in one of the volunteer work groups listed below, please complete the form and upload your resumé using this link: dese.link/work-group . The deadline for submission is March 31, 2023.
Meetings will be both virtual and face-to-face, and those selected must agree to commit the time needed over the next few months.
Work Groups will be organized by the following topics:
- School Safety
- Early Learning
- Parental Empowerment
- Teaching and Learning
- Educator Workforce
- Career Readiness
To review the law, please visit Arkansas State Legislature, Act 237.
Education department spokesperson Kimberly Mundell said the department is promoting the work groups on social media, and that Oliva is traveling the state to meet with superintendents at every education service cooperative. She said notifications are also going out to educators.
Parents, teachers and anyone else interested in weighing in will need to submit their resumes for a chance to serve.
“ADE is casting a wide net to give everyone who is interested the opportunity to submit an application. We want to ensure each group has members knowledgeable about the subject area and has representatives of various backgrounds and areas of the state,” Mundell said by email.
Education department leadership will pick the winners. Those people won’t be paid, but they can get reimbursed for travel expenses.
The post Applications accepted through March 31 for Arkansans hoping to help shape LEARNS rules appeared first on Arkansas Times.
During the March 15 Arkansas House debate on Senate Bill 81, filed by Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Jonesboro) to criminalize librarians, Rep. DeAnn Vaught (R-Horatio) asked the question, “What happens when someone challenges a book that talks about God and Jesus? It gets challenged or banned because someone doesn’t agree with the content. I think many of us would lose our minds if that happened.”
Well, let’s help these Republicans lose their little minds and start challenging some books about God and Jesus. In fact, let’s start with the most popular book about God and Jesus, the Holy Bible.
First, you will need to locate your local library’s “reconsideration of materials” form. These can usually be found on the “policies” page of your local library’s website. For example, here are the links for the Central Arkansas Library System and the Craighead County Jonesboro Public Library. As you will see, these forms ask for your personal information, the item against which you are lodging a complaint, and whether you have read the item in its entirety, to which you will, of course, answer yes. Then follows a question about which particular passages you happen to find objectionable. Here is some information you can cut and paste into your own forms demanding the reconsideration of the Bible:
Genesis 19: 31-36. Contains the story of two daughters making their father drunk and sleeping with him for the explicit purpose of becoming incestuously pregnant.
Genesis 38. A woman named Tamar sees her first husband killed by God, then her second husband also killed after he is caught masturbating, and then she seduces her father-in-law by dressing as a prostitute.
Deuteronomy 20: 16-18. The character of God orders his followers to commit genocide against a number of ethnic minorities, and not for the first (or last) time.
Deuteronomy 25: 11. A passage not only suggests that a common method of conflict resolution when two men are fighting was for the wife of one man to grab the testicles of her husband’s antagonist, but then also demands that, if she does so, her hand must be cut off. This is a commandment presented as statutory for the community of believers.
Judges 11. It narrates the story of a follower of God sacrificing his own daughter due to a religious oath. The passage presents the sacrifice of children in a positive light.
Judges 19: 22-29. Contains a scene of the gang rape of a “concubine” followed by her dismemberment and the distribution of her pieces throughout the country.
Ezekiel 23:19-21. This passage in a racist and pornographic fashion describes African men as possessing “members” like donkeys and ejaculating like stallions.
Song of Songs (a.k.a. Song of Solomon). The whole work constitutes an extended poem promoting lascivious desires and engaging in sexual innuendo.
Ezra 10. A character in authority demands that men in the city divorce their wives if those wives do not belong to their same ethnic group as the men. Contributes not only to the normalization of divorce and broken homes but also promotes a racist worldview.
Luke 9: 57-62. Encourages the idea that obedience to a religious guru entails the necessity of the believer separating himself from his family. Gives divine sanction to children disobeying and dishonoring their parents.
Now, that’s just a handy selection of objectionable passages from the Bible. After relaying those, the person lodging a challenge to any library collection will be asked whether the presence of the work in question violates the library’s collection development policies. The Jonesboro public library, for example, headlines their policy thusly: “The library aims to provide all individuals in the community with carefully selected books and other materials to aid in the pursuit of education, information, research, and entertainment.”
So do the passages in question seem informative or entertaining? They might appeal to specifically perverted adults, but they should not be considered appropriate for children. In fact, many of the passages outlined above could easily be judged as being “harmful to minors,” as described in Sullivan’s SB81, given that many describe “nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement, or sadomasochistic abuse.” (This might be the reason there are so many Bibles in hotel rooms. They promote fornication.)
One might well imagine that Sullivan would approve pulling the Bible from the shelves of state libraries. After all, the belief in the Bible has long been central to the ideology of the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups, while Sullivan has nobly been promoting his vision of a color-blind society.
Vaught asked, “What happens when someone challenges a book that talks about God and Jesus?” Let’s find out.
The post Challenging library materials: Bible edition appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A state Senate committee advanced a bill Tuesday that would ban the sale of marijuana-related products known as Delta-8 and other similar products. The bill heads to the full Senate for a vote today.
The hemp-derived products have skirted state regulations by falling into an unregulated loophole that was created when Congress legalized hemp production in the 2018 Farm Bill. Hemp processors can legally extract psychoactive components such as Delta-8 from hemp and sell them in Arkansas without regulations on the products, packaging or marketing. There is no age limit to buy Delta-8 products either.
The products are not regulated under the state’s medical marijuana program and are not sold in the state’s 38 dispensaries.
State Sen. Tyler Dees (R-Siloam Springs) presented Senate Bill 358 to the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Forestry and Economic Development along with Fort Smith attorney Amy Martin, whose family owns The Greenery, a medical marijuana dispensary in Fort Smith.
Martin placed on the committee’s table a pile of Delta-8 products that included products similar to ice cream cones and Rice Krispie treats. The ice cream cones contained 100mg of THC each, which is about 10 times the amount that is allowed in a single dose of edible products sold through the state medical marijuana program.
The committee also heard from a number of people who own stores that sell Delta-8 products. The owners said the bill would hurt their businesses and would like to see the industry regulated rather than eliminated.
One owner said her business would close within two days of passage of the bill because so much of her business is reliant on Delta 8 sales.
The owners agreed that the products should not be sold to children and blamed a few bad actors for creating problems.
Jeremy Dennis, who owns a small CBD and hemp shop in Lonoke County, said he believed the concern about children getting the products was a “scare tactic” and that the bill was being pushed by the state medical marijuana industry that did not want competition.
Sen. Fred Love (D-Little Rock) asked one store owner that favored regulation or prohibition if he had ever contacted a legislator about regulating the industry in Arkansas. The store owner said he had not, adding “we’re not legislators.”
The bill passed on a voice vote with no audible dissent.
Bill Paschall, executive director of the Arkansas Cannabis Industry Association, said his organization has not taken a position on SB358 or House Bill 1605, which seeks to regulate Delta-8 products.
The bill does not ban industrial hemp, which is used to make textiles, rope and other products, according to the bill’s proponents.
The post Senate panel advances bill to ban Delta-8 THC products appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A House committee on Monday tabled a bill that would end affirmative action programs and practices in state and local governments, state colleges and universities and public schools. That means it’s unlikely to come back for consideration this session.
Senate Bill 71, sponsored by Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Jonesboro), would criminalize consideration of gender, race and national origin by public officials. The bill squeaked through Senate last week with 18 white men voting to pass it.
It’s a terrible bill with far-reaching impacts.
Rep. Dwight Tosh (R-Jonesboro), the chairman of the House Committee on State Agencies, proposed to place the bill on the committees deferred list, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported. That would have meant that it could have come up for consideration at the bill sponsor’s request. But Rep. Marcus Richmond (R-Harvey), the House majority leader, successfully moved to table the bill.
From the Democrat-Gazette:
“I think something like an interim study would be a better way to approach it [with] everyone coming in having the discussion,” Richmond said. “I’d rather have the discussion and have buy-in from all parties that may be affected.”
The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Jonesboro, said he was surprised to see the committee table his bill, saying on the morning of the meeting he spoke with Tosh and told him he wanted the bill to be deferred for further discussion.
[It] seems odd to have a majority Republican committee unwilling to debate or even discuss moving [Arkansas] closer to our constitutional principles,” Sullivan said in a statement to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Asked last week about the bill, Gov. Sarah Sanders was very circumspect, saying she was closely monitoring it and wouldn’t weigh in until she saw a final product.
The post Bid to end affirmative action in Arkansas dead for now appeared first on Arkansas Times.
POTLUCK & POISON IVY: RACHEL REYNOLDS
THURSDAY 3/23. The Joint Theater and Coffeehouse. 7 p.m. $35.
Maybe you’ve heard Rachel Reynolds bow an old-time tune on her fiddle. Maybe you’ve eaten one of her award-winning pies. Maybe you’ve listened to her enthusiastically lecture on the ecology, history and folklore of the Ozark Mountains. Maybe you’ve been to one of the barn concerts or square dances she hosts at Meadowcreek, a 1,600-acre nature preserve where she serves as the Project Steward. Maybe you’ve visited the People’s Library, a community space that she co-founded on the same land in Fox. Even if you’ve been lucky enough to do every single one of these things, I guarantee you that there’s something about Ozark culture that Reynolds can still teach you. Carefully balancing the scholarly with the rowdy, she’s one of the state’s premiere preservationists of rural living.
The post Ozark culture expert Rachel Reynolds to speak at Potluck & Poison Ivy appeared first on Arkansas Times.
With new experiences and exhibitions like Diego Rivera’s America and Listening Forest on view starting in March, Crystal Bridges is absolutely worth a weekend drive to Northwest Arkansas.If you’re anything like us, after all the winter weather you’re probably dreaming of sunny spring break destinations. But, you’d probably also rather think about long, fulfilling days in gorgeous locales than the hassles of long-distance travel: airports and Ubers and security. Ugh.
To skip all the headaches, we’d recommend checking out some of the must-see sights right here in the Natural State first, such as Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville. With new experiences and exhibitions like Diego Rivera’s America and Listening Forest on view starting in March, Crystal Bridges is absolutely worth a weekend drive to Northwest Arkansas.
Here’s our five favorite reasons to plan a mini-road trip to Crystal Bridges this spring.
Diego Rivera, Dance in Tehuantepec (crop), 1928, oil on canvas, 79 x 64 1/2 in. Collection of Eduardo F. Costantini, Buenos Aires; © 2022 Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. (Cropped)
- There’s not been an exhibition like Diego Rivera’s America in over 20 years. Featuring rarely seen works from private collections, major paintings on loan from museums in the United States and Mexico, studies for mural projects in Mexico City, San Francisco, Detroit, and New York, and large-scale digital projections of Rivera’s epic murals, this collection of over 130 works is the first and most comprehensive exhibition focused solely on Rivera’s work in over two decades.
- With its focus on everyday people, the power of labor, and a vision of a unified, transnational America, Rivera’s work is timelier than ever. Between the 1920s and ‘40s, Diego Rivera worked in both Mexico and the United States, finding inspiration in the social and cultural life of the two countries. He imagined an America — broadly understood — that shared an Indigenous past and an industrial future, and where cooperation, rather than divisions, were paramount.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Listening Forest, “Pulse Forest”, 2022, Bentonville Arkansas / United States, Photo by Stephen Ironside.
- The outdoor, nighttime experience Listening Forest makes it easy to make the most out of a trip to the museum. Returning for a spring season after its successful debut last fall, the interactive experience in the North Forest isn’t just for the holidays anymore. The long spring evenings make it a breeze to book a time to visit, spend the afternoon in the galleries, then head into the forest to explore and control 20-foot stick figures made of light.
- The museum’s trails and grounds offer the perfect opportunity to take advantage of one of Arkansas’s best seasons. We’re all ready for warm weather, but not the August heat (yet!) Get outdoors without the sweat and enjoy more than 120 acres of Ozark mountain forest and trails on the museum grounds. Not too hot, not too cold—all you need is a light jacket.
- A packed calendar of events means it’s easy to pick a great time to go. With insightful lectures, concerts by world-class pianists, evening cocktail tours, and free, family-friendly activities, it’s hard to find a time when there’s NOT something fun and affordable to do.
Ready to make your spring daydreams a reality? Check out the museum’s Spring Guide and start planning your visit today!
The post New Experiences and Exhibitions Make Crystal Bridges a Must-See Destination This Spring appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Alice: “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
The Cheshire Cat: “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.” — Lewis Carroll, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”
Where are we headed in Arkansas? Where is our leadership taking us?
I am astounded daily by the things the Arkansas governor and legislature are doing. The legislature is passing bills which undermine the fundamental rights of LGBTQ, transgender, disabled and minority Arkansans. There are bills that purport to ban indoctrination and discrimination, but the real purpose of that legislation is to shut down freedom of expression and cultural diversity. The legislature is even targeting librarians who allow someone to check out a banned book. Are librarians really subversive or dangerous, or is the government trying to tell me what I can read, or believe?
The legislature destroyed our solar energy future by rewriting a statute it had passed overwhelmingly only four years ago. The legislature gave the powerful electric utilities a major financial benefit by lowering the value of electricity sent back to those companies from solar installations paid for by government entities and the private sector. The electric utilities claim they are being damaged, but they have declined the invitation of our Public Service Commission to prove it. The legislature caved in to the special interests with no analysis. The people with the power got their votes behind closed doors. There was no serious analysis of the actual data, or the impacts of the data.
There seems to be a theme developing here. Make big decisions in a hurry. Don’t get the data, or the cost or talk to those most directly impacted. Take the money from the lobbyists and the big contributors. Like the Nike commercial says, “Just Do It.”
Are we going to be a state that persecutes minority groups, shuts down the solar power industry, limits teacher rights, pays public money to private schools, cuts taxes for the rich, builds more and bigger prisons and calls people who disagree “crazy”? Are we going to stifle voter initiatives and ban public schools from “indoctrinating” students, whatever that means, while sending public money to private institutions that can advocate whatever they want? I guess the state would be obligated to give vouchers to Critical Race Theory Private Academy, or the Skinhead School of Fascism. Did they think about that?
A few other conservative states are slowing this mania. Others are going full steam ahead, with these canned bills promoted by American Legislative Exchange Council, a self-described “non-partisan organization dedicated to the principles of limited government, free markets and federalism.”
The Idaho Senate has 35 members. There are seven Democrats and 28 Republicans. The Arkansas Senate has six Democrats and 29 Republicans.
The Idaho Senate just defeated a voucher bill by a vote of 23-12.
In Idaho, the conservatives asked the hard questions, and got no answers. So they voted the bill down. They may never do something like that again, but at least once they stopped, thought things over, and did not cave in.
The lesson there is that elections matter, and all conservatives do not think alike. If we want to live in a place where freedom of thought, expression and association are respected, we need independent thinkers in Arkansas, and it doesn’t matter which party they claim.
Abraham Lincoln was careful not to vilify those with whom he disagreed. He knew that often those same people would be part of a solution to a common problem. Our futures in Arkansas are intertwined, whether we agree or not, and whether we like it or not.
With all that said, any elected official who is blinded by ambition, and solely motivated by the need to be re-elected, is not cut out to lead. Leadership often involves taking unpopular stands, or telling someone who is powerful that they are doing the wrong thing. I think the best leaders know their constituents, and talk to those who are going to be most impacted before making big decisions.
The current administration and legislature are not checking and balancing each other, as they should. They are using the legislative process like a wrecking ball, and they are knocking our state out of contention for almost any new economic development. Our state will not attract top talent, and a lot of people will not live here, even if they go to college here, if opportunity knocks elsewhere.
It’ll take a few years, but we are going to pay a very high price for our legislative foolishness festival. The decline will be gradual. But it will be steady, and ultimately catastrophic for our state.
If we don’t change, in three years folks will say that it is just be too bad that we don’t have any better jobs, and that the local school district was consolidated. They will hate that their county jail is falling in, their roads are bad, and their small towns are shrinking away. We will all wish that our relatives hadn’t moved, and older folks with miss their grandchildren. Small towns in eastern Arkansas won’t be able to send the mosquito buggy around town at dark, but it won’t matter. The mosquitos won’t have anyone to bite. It is already happening. Two-thirds of Arkansas counties lost population between 2010 and 2020. These macro-trends will continue if we don’t start to work on the big problems. What we have been doing for the last two months is funeral pre-arrangement.
We need to start electing folks who are big thinkers, not folks who play follow the leader. I want somebody running this state that cares, and who wants to take us to kinder, more tolerant, prosperous places. Good candidates are out there. They may not be the best politicians, or the folks that you have been seeing holding forth on “major issues” that have nothing to do with your daily lives. The new folks are going to be your neighbors. They will be the ones who ask questions and listen, rather than tell you what they are going to do for you before you have a chance to say anything.
And they will come from both political parties.
The movement will not come from the top down. The new Arkansas will have to be built from the ground up, when good people get tired of politicians ignoring their real problems, like lack of health care, no economic opportunity, ramshackle housing, lack of road maintenance, low salaries and declining traditional institutions like churches, civic clubs and schools.
We are going to hit rock bottom. But rock bottom is a good place to turn around.
Where do you want to go?
Alice: “I don’t much care.”
The Cheshire Cat: “Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go.”
It is high time everyone starts caring.
The post Contemplating Arkansas’s political future appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A bill that allows teachers and other school officials to decline to use a student’s preferred name or pronouns was amended in a House committee on Tuesday to make it clear that, even if parents sign a permission slip indicating that their child should be called by identifiers that don’t match their sex at birth, school officials don’t have to comply.
Rep. Wayne Long (R-Bradford), the sponsor of House Bill 1468, said the amendment was important to insure that teachers weren’t compelled to violate their conscience. He said a Fayetteville teacher had reached out to him to thank him for the bill because she said she was being forced to call a trans student by a name that didn’t match the student’s birth certificate, and that violated her religious beliefs.
Rep. Vivian Flowers (D-Pine Bluff) pointed out that there’s no evidence that anyone has ever been fired or disciplined for the issue this bill seeks to address. It’s just more picking on a very small population by the legislature, she said.
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In response to the appalling lack of protections for tenants in Arkansas, human rights attorney Stephen Coger and Iron Lotus Creative have put together “A Safe Place To Sleep,” a 17-minute documentary featuring conversations with the vulnerable renters across Arkansas who have been most affected by this legislative oversight and the advocates who are working to make things right.
You can view the documentary above or come to the in-person premiere in Fayetteville on Monday, March 20, which will include a Q&A with Monique Jones and Sen. Greg Leding (D-Fayetteville). The screening is at 7 p.m. at the Squire Jehegan Outreach Center (115 S. Willow Ave., Fayetteville, AR 72701).
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Little Rock attorney Brook Augusta Ware announced her candidacy today for the Pulaski County Circuit Court judgeship being vacated by Judge Mackie Pierce.
Pierce announced last week that he is seeking the Little Rock District Court seat being vacated by Judge Melanie Martin, who is running for circuit judge.
Ware is senior litigation attorney at Cordell & Cordell where, she focuses on family law, including divorce, custody, child support, guardianships, adoptions and related appeals, according to a press release.
Cordell & Cordell has offices in 35 states, including an office in Little Rock. The firm’s website says its divorce attorneys “focus on men’s divorce and dads’ rights” and lists the phone number 1-866-DADS-LAW.
Ware previously worked as the director of development at the University of Arkansas at LIttle Rock Bowen School of Law and as the director of planned giving at Hendrix College. Ware was also previously a law clerk for two circuit judges.
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HB1307, a bill that prohibits the state from investing in woke financial businesses passed the Arkansas Senate Monday. The bill will mean less money for the state’s retirement accounts, jeopardizing the livelihoods of Arkansas firefighters, police and teachers — just so lawmakers can punish companies too progressive for the legislature’s taste.
That’s right: Arkansas state employees stand to lose money because state lawmakers want to make their ideological stand that protecting the profits of gun manufacturers and fossil fuel companies is more important than protecting Arkansans’ retirement accounts.
A bill entitled “An act concerning the regulation of environmental, social justice, and governance scores” is part of a national push to retaliate against financial institutions for supporting ESG standards. ESG stands for environmental, social, and governance practices, which are the standards financial institutions use to determine investments. Recently, many large companies have taken progressive stances on social issues and are increasingly public about those stances. But the banking industry in particular needed a social rebrand after the financial crisis of the mid-2000s. In an attempt to move away from perceptions of being morally bankrupt, banks began prioritizing investments based on forward-thinking standards, which ultimately became financial best practice for the industry.
But deep in the heart of Texas, fossil fuel companies were not thrilled with the progression of investment standards. Global financial institutions’ prioritization of green energy meant less investment in traditional oil and gas. Fossil fuels took action; a powerful lobby force in Texas, the industry used its influence with lawmakers to pass legislation punishing financial institutions that refused oil and gas investment. By 2021, the Texas treasury divested its public retirement accounts from “woke” firms, namely titans in investment banking that provided the most flexible, cost-effective returns for public accounts. The result was costly; the divestment lost Texas between $300 million and $504 million in fees and interest rate increases within the first year of implementation.
Arkansas is headed in the same direction. The legislature is poised to effect the same outcome for our public retirement accounts, which are also tied up in some of the world’s most well-known financial institutions that practice ESG standards. If HB1307 becomes law, Arkansas will be forced to withdraw funds from banned accounts and place them with smaller companies that do not adhere to ESG standards. Smaller companies, however, charge higher fees and rates, costing states like Texas millions of dollars in lost revenue.
Sen. Jimmy Hickey (R-Texarkana) pointed this out during his speech on the Senate floor. His colleague, Sen. Blake Johnson (R-Corning), noted that Arkansas guarantees retirement funds to public employees, meaning the state is required to pay out pensions in full regardless of their rate of return. As a result, Arkansas taxpayers will foot the bill for whatever potential losses the state incurs from its divestment. This is neither good banking nor good policy. It’s punitive, and either retirees or taxpayers will be punished for the legislature’s anti-woke posturing.
Moreover, the retaliation move puts the GOP’s breakup with Wall Street on full display. Over time investment companies have evolved away from conservative social stances toward more progressive ones because as Americans progress socially, so do financial institutions.
Thus the market’s intuition is to freely respond to supply and demand. Consumers are younger, more socially tolerant, and as diverse as ever, and the market has shape-shifted to address these demands. True fiscal conservatism would support these changes, allowing the market do what it needs, which is the definition of the French term Laissez-faire — the economic philosophy of minimum governmental interference. The free market economy is a key function of US capitalism and a core pillar of the Republican Party.
So what happens when conservatives abandon a core principle to get political payback? Identity crisis. Today’s GOP is experiencing an ethos earthquake, with some members hanging on to traditional values like fiscal conservatism, while others abandon party principles to win political fights. The Arkansas supermajority has embraced the latter and has become a body of big government mandates, business prohibitions and economic meddling. The Arkansas GOP has abandoned its identity to own the libs.
Again, power and control are driving this change, and the shift has fractured the Arkansas caucus. Only three Republicans voted against the bill: Sen. Jonathan Dismang (R-Searcy), a champion of fiscal conservative values, and Senators Jane English and Jimmy Hickey. Members who voted for the bill are ones consistently guided by resentment, not conservatism.
In his address to the body, Sen. Clarke Tucker (D-Little Rock) stated, “We are costing the Arkansas taxpayers their money, and for what reason? To make a point.” So far, the GOP’s retaliation on “wokeism” has been pointed and specific, targeting limited groups of Arkansans. HB1307 is an audacious next step, one that risks public retirement security and the allegiance of true conservative voters.
The legislature’s obsession with the culture wars is going to cost us. Literally.
The post Financial institutions get ‘woke,’ Arkansas legislators get revenge, taxpayers get robbed appeared first on Arkansas Times.
ARKANSAS TIMES FILM SERIES: ‘THE GLEANERS AND I’
TUESDAY 3/21. Riverdale 10 Cinema. 7 p.m.
The year before she died, French filmmaker Agnes Varda was described by the New Yorker as someone who “loves the burnt edges of cinema, finding treasures in images or ideas that other directors might reject.” When a critic says something like this, I often wonder if they’re just exaggerating in service of an artful argument. Sure, every creative brings something unique to the table, but how truly inimitable can any one artist really be? Varda’s idiosyncratic work gives us a definitive answer to that question.
In “The Gleaners and I” (2000), an unusual and discursive documentary, Varda wields a handheld digital camcorder for the first time and offers a poetically associative perspective on those who glean — or collect and make use of what is discarded by others — out of either poverty or conviction. The subject material itself feels stumbled upon, spontaneous and genuinely discovered, as well as the conclusion she comes to that the movies she makes are also animated by the spirit of gleaning. Another distinctive feature of this film is the way its production process intrudes upon the viewing experience, through self-reflexive acknowledgements of Varda’s presence behind the camera and playful inclusions of accidental footage.
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VALLEY OF THE VAPORS
FRIDAY 3/17-SUNDAY 3/19. Cedar Glades Park, Hot Springs. $50 weekend pass, $20 single-day tickets.
Valley of the Vapors calls itself an “underground” music festival, but when you consistently corral dozens of incredible bands from around the globe to the Ouachita Mountains for nearly 2 decades, that descriptor starts feeling like something of an understatement. Maybe what they really mean when they say “underground” is that the festival has effortlessly retained its welcoming DIY ethos. With low ticket prices, uncommonly obliging hospitality and a dedication to prioritizing hidden, eclectic artists on the cusp of something greater, VOV is an unpretentious institution.
This year’s fest includes performances by zzzahara (Los Angeles), Begonia (Winnipeg, Canada), Constant Smiles (Martha’s Vinyard, Massachusetts), Shutups (Oakland, California), Truth Club (Raleigh, North Carolina), The Foreign Resort (Copenhagen, Denmark), Modeling (Fayetteville) and much more. Since the festival moved to Cedar Glades Park in 2021, camping has become a more enticing option, which is available for $30 per day per vehicle, or $75 for the whole weekend.
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Providing only minimal details, the Little Rock Police Department reported on Sunday the city’s eighth homicide of 2023.
Officials found a man with “injuries consistent with a homicide” around 4:40 a.m. at 7515 Geyer Springs Road — the site of the Spanish Willow Apartments.
The victim has not been identified. The investigation is ongoing.
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When a Senate committee heard Senate Bill 71, Jonesboro Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan’s anti-affirmative-action bill, on Tuesday, it was as if there were two separate meetings happening in the Old Supreme Court room at the same time.
On one side, Sen. Clarke Tucker (D-Little Rock) and several members of the public asked insightful and substantive questions about the proposal’s far-reaching effects. The bill would criminalize any state actor from discriminating or giving preference based on race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin, even if done unintentionally. It would also delete all mention of civil rights in the Arkansas legal code and would eliminate certain programs aimed at opportunity and advancement for women and people of color.
Tucker and the people who came to speak that day calmly explained (and explained again, and again) that creating opportunity programs for marginalized groups is not the same thing as “discrimination.”
On the other side, Sullivan was having a very different conversation, one defined by an inability or refusal to answer direct questions and insistence on repeating the same trite, disingenuous platitudes that he has trotted out every time this bill is discussed.
Tucker pointed out to Sullivan that the bill would go far beyond ending affirmative-action programs in education and employment, arguing that the plain language of the bill would effectively destroy the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center, a publicly funded state museum in downtown Little Rock that highlights Black history, culture and art. He explained that, regardless of the bill’s intent, its effects would be devastating for many Arkansas museums and cultural programs, historically Black colleges and universities and statewide efforts aimed at increasing women- and minority-owned businesses. In response, Sullivan accidentally told the truth about his bill, saying:
“At some point, we have to say state-sponsored discrimination ends, and at some point, people are going to be impacted by that positively and negatively. And I can’t go through every what-if situation, but clearly, many will be impacted. Clearly, their part of life will be improved. Many, it’s going to hurt.”
Yeah, Dan, most of us know exactly who this bill is designed to help and who it will hurt.
Tucker also pointed out that the bill contains a glaring omission of religion as a factor on which the state could not discriminate or show preferential treatment. When Tucker asked Sullivan if he was willing to amend his bill to include religion, he said he was not. When asked why, he said he wanted to keep the bill as is.
It may seem odd that a bill purportedly aimed at “ending state-sponsored discrimination” would allow the state to discriminate based on religion, but there’s a nefarious reason why religion was intentionally left out: school vouchers. Under the new Arkansas LEARNS Act, state money will be used to fund religious private schools that routinely discriminate or show preferential treatment based on a student’s religion. Many Christian private schools require families to sign a statement of faith, and many refuse to accept LGBTQ students or those who have LGBTQ parents. State Rep. Tippi McCullough (D-Little Rock) was famously fired from Little Rock’s Mount Saint Mary Academy for marrying her wife, an action the school defended by insisting that its employees must adhere to the tenets of the school’s Catholic faith, which did not permit same-sex marriage. Many Catholic schools also have different tuition rates for Catholics and non-Catholics.
While the LEARNS Act has a vague statement saying that schools accepting vouchers cannot discriminate, the bill’s loudest proponents (legislators and “school-choice” advocates alike) say that the LEARNS Act would finally allow parents to educate their kids in a religious school that reinforces their own particular faith. So much of the LEARNS bill has yet to be worked out in rulemaking, so as it stands we don’t actually know if religious private schools will be able to discriminate in admissions based on religion. But one thing is clear: If Sullivan’s “anti-discrimination” bill contained religion as one of the characteristics on which the state could not discriminate or show preference, those schools would have to choose between accepting vouchers and serving all kids equally regardless of their religion. Refusing to amend the bill to add religion as an element lets Republican lawmakers have their cake and eat it too by banning opportunity programs for minorities while protecting the types of discrimination they like.
Anna Beth Gorman, the CEO of the Women’s Foundation of Arkansas, explained to the Senate committee that her own mother was 22 years old before she was legally allowed to get a credit card in her name without needing her father or husband to cosign for her. She explained that women and minorities have long been excluded from the networks that have allowed white men to build wealth and credit, which has created huge economic disparities in Arkansas.
“I don’t believe that the state of Arkansas discriminates,” Gorman said, “but I know people do.” She said that this bill will help perpetuate the inequities that women and minorities in Arkansas still face. She made an economic argument for why state support for minority- and women-owned businesses benefits everyone. Gorman also noted that Arkansas has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the country and that maternal mortality is especially high for Black women, but this bill could hinder efforts to address that problem (its plain language would seem to bar state funding of medical research and outreach aimed at helping just one sex, race or ethnicity).
When the bill was heard on the Senate floor Thursday, Sullivan failed to adequately address any of these concerns, simply saying that claims about the bill’s far-reaching impacts were “absolutely false.” He claimed that Attorney General Tim Griffin promised him in a text message that the bill would not negatively impact the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center.
Sullivan promised that “we are going to hold people accountable for this.” That’s because the bill doesn’t just prohibit the state from funding affirmative action, it actually creates a criminal offense for anyone found to have “negligently” discriminated or provided preferential treatment based on race, sex, color, national origin or ethnicity. Violating this section is a Class A misdemeanor, the most serious level of misdemeanor offense in Arkansas, punishable by up to one year in jail and a fine of up to $2,500. Tucker noted in committee that it is rare in the Arkansas criminal code to criminalize negligent behavior in this way. He urged lawmakers to think twice before passing a bill that would allow for the imprisonment of a person who accidentally, not intentionally, discriminated or showed preference. The bill also allows people to sue if they believe that a violation of this bill caused their rights to be impacted. The threat of such suits would almost definitely have a chilling effect on the hiring and promotion of minorities and women.
Tucker again spoke forcefully against the bill in the Senate, reiterating many of the concerns he raised in committee and illustrating that the bill would negatively impact the Minority Health Commission, Arkansas’s four historically Black colleges and universities, the Women and Minority Owned Business Enterprise Division at the Arkansas Economic Development Commission and many other programs across Arkansas.
Then came Sen. Alan Clark (R-Lonsdale), who spoke “on” the bill (a designation to indicate that you aren’t speaking for or against it). Although Clark started by saying that this is “a difficult subject, especially in this day, where we have folks who are woke in admissions offices at universities doing crazy things, and we have folks that go from trying to help people to actively discriminating in society, reverse discrimination,” he then went on to give a personal testimony about why affirmative action is still needed, saying that, at one point in his career, he had taken a hard look at his own employment practices.
“I started out, decades ago, with ‘let’s just all be equal, no discrimination, etc.,’ and then I looked at my own hiring practices and the fact that, although I didn’t want it to be, my staff was all one color. And, besides running newspaper ads, one of the things that I found that I could do to get the best employees was go to friends and friends-of-friends, and say ‘I’m looking for somebody.’ But I realized, part of the problem there, if I didn’t want my staff to all be homogenous, was that most of my friends were white. So I actively started going to friends who were Black pastors and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got job openings.’ But that’s rare.”
When the votes were cast, the bill passed 18 to 12. Clark, who had struggled so much with his vote, waited until the last minute to cast it, and in the end he voted no. So did every Democrat, every Black senator and every woman. That’s right, an anti-affirmative-action bill claiming to finally “end state-sponsored discrimination” passed the Arkansas Senate with only the votes of straight, white Republican men, and even then, those men still somehow failed to recognize their disproportionate power and privilege.
The bill now heads to the House, where the public needs to show up and loudly speak out against it. In addition to all of the important issues raised above, there is a strong case to be made that affirmative-action programs are still necessary and that they benefit everyone. A 2013 Harvard study looked at four states that have banned affirmative action (notably, their laws are not as far-reaching as Sullivan’s bill), and found that, after the bans were enacted, the percentage of minorities working in state and local government declined, while the percentage of white males working in such jobs increased. Notably, for Black women, that decline grew larger over time, with the gap increasing each year.
Even if lawmakers don’t care about addressing systemic inequities in order to help marginalized groups, there is plenty of evidence that affirmative-action policies and opportunity programs benefit everyone. The ACLU notes that numerous court cases have upheld affirmative action based on evidence that race-conscious college admissions policies help create a diverse, inclusive educational environment that benefits all students, including white students who gain valuable experience learning to live, work and socialize with people of diverse backgrounds, which helps to better prepare them to live and work in a diverse world.
Moreover, providing opportunity programs for marginalized people creates economic growth that benefits society as a whole. A 2021 study conducted by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth calculated the negative economic impacts of the persistent employment disparities in America, finding that, in 2019, if equal opportunity had been the reality for all workers, the U.S. Gross Domestic Product would have been $7.2 trillion higher; federal, state and local tax revenues would have been $1.82 trillion higher; the overall U.S. poverty rate would have dropped from 10.5 percent to 6.6 percent; and there would have been a $429 billion improvement in the finances of the U.S. Social Security system.
Beyond the arguments for why affirmative-action programs are still needed in Arkansas, the representatives who will be voting on this in the House should consider a few more of the bill’s unintended consequences (not all of which are bad).
For example, the bill prohibits discrimination or preference based on sex. So, does that mean that a trans girl could use this piece of legislation to get a court order requiring a school to allow her to join an all-girls sports team? Does the bill set up a cause of action for Black Arkansans to prosecute police officers for racial profiling? How will schools apply all these new rules about which students can use which bathrooms if they can’t make designations based on sex? How about the state employers who run certain job applicants through the federal E-Verify system to check their legal eligibility to work in the United States? Isn’t that discrimination based on assumptions about a person’s national origin?
And how do we evaluate “buy American” policies, aren’t those things also preferences based on national origin? Could the Springdale School District seek to hire a social worker who speaks Marshallese, is familiar with the Marshallese culture and has relationships within the Marshallese community without running afoul of this legislation? How about the tradition in many Arkansas high schools and colleges to either have two homecoming queens (one Black and one white) or alternate each year between Black and white homecoming queens? Are we going to come in and arrest the school principal in the middle of the homecoming dance for finding an equitable solution that has worked for that community for decades and helps keep the peace at his or her school?
Would this bill effectively prohibit gender-studies and African-American-studies programs at Arkansas colleges and universities? Could the Minority Health Commission continue to fund research and outreach trying to reduce the shockingly high rates of maternal mortality among Black women in Arkansas? And is anyone going to risk a year in prison to test these things out?
In practice, Sullivan’s bill would become a state mandate for all government employers, agencies, school districts, colleges and universities to pretend that disparities based on race and sex do not exist. Tucker has said many times this session that lawmakers cannot afford to ignore what’s really happening in Arkansas. “If we’re actually governing in reality,” he told his Senate colleagues on Thursday, “we have to understand the impact of the laws we pass outside of this marble building.”
Gorman hit the nail on the head in her committee testimony when she explained that the state of Arkansas doesn’t discriminate, but unfortunately some of the people in Arkansas still do, and as long as that is true, we can’t afford to throw away opportunity programs that help balance those scales. Instead of framing Arkansas’s efforts to address disparities as “state-sponsored discrimination,” the legislature should reaffirm the fact that promoting the advancement of women and minorities in Arkansas benefits all Arkansans and helps move our state forward.
At the very least, Arkansas voters should take note of how blatantly self-serving it is for a group of straight, white, male lawmakers to pass a bill that will benefit them by taking opportunities away from women and minorities. The fact that the white guys in the Arkansas Senate hold such a disproportionate number of seats that they could pass this legislation without the support of any female or Black senators should really be all you need to know about why this state still needs affirmative action.
The post White men in the Arkansas legislature think women and minorities have too much opportunity appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Go Hogs. Let the madness begin.
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Rootin’-tootin’, liberty loving Gov. Sarah Sanders announced three appointments to the Arkansas State Medical Board Friday.
None of the new board members will ever require masks or vaccines or any of those other pesky inconveniences that save lives at the expense of your freedom, Sanders says in the release:
“Dr. Wesley Kluck, Dr. Matthew Sellers, and Dr. Michael Birrer are proven, successful physicians who have improved the lives of Arkansans across the state with their work, and today, I am proud to be appointing them to the Arkansas State Medical Board,” Sanders said. “Together, we will make sure that under my leadership Arkansas will never have COVID mask and vaccine mandates or shutdowns – because my administration stands for freedom.”
Doctors Wesley Kluck, Matthew Sellers and Michael Birrer will replace doctors Sylvia Simon, Rhys Branman and Robert Breving. Simon’s and Branman’s terms were up, but Breving’s was not.
The Arkansas State Medical Board saw another membership change recently when Dr. Bryan Hyatt, who was appointed in 2019 and had been the chairman, stepped down. Hyatt is under investigation for Medicaid and Medicare fraud.
Here’s the release in full, which includes short biographies of the new members.
LITTLE ROCK, Ark.—Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced today that she will appoint Dr. Wesley Kluck, Dr. Matthew Sellers, and Dr. Michael Birrer to the Arkansas State Medical Board.
Dr. Wesley Kluck will replace Dr. Sylvia Simon, and his term will expire on December 31, 2028. Dr. Matthew Sellers will replace Dr. Rhys Branman, and his term will expire on December 31, 2028. Dr. Michael Birrer will fulfill the remaining term of Dr. Robert Breving, and his term will expire on December 31, 2026.
“Dr. Wesley Kluck, Dr. Matthew Sellers, and Dr. Michael Birrer are proven, successful physicians who have improved the lives of Arkansans across the state with their work, and today, I am proud to be appointing them to the Arkansas State Medical Board,” Sanders said. “Together, we will make sure that under my leadership Arkansas will never have COVID mask and vaccine mandates or shutdowns – because my administration stands for freedom. I am confident that they will excel in these new roles by ensuring that every Arkansan receives a high standard of care and our physicians operate with professionalism and integrity.”
Dr. Wesley Kluck Bio:
Dr. Wesley Kluck is the university physician at Ouachita Baptist University and serves as a pediatrician and the president of Arkadelphia Clinic for Children and Young Adults. He is a graduate of Arkadelphia Public Schools and Ouachita Baptist University and earned his M.D. at the University of Arkansas Medical School. He completed his pediatric residency at Arkansas Children’s Hospital, where he received the “Excellence in Primary Care” award.
He was named to Arkansas’ 250 Most Influential Leaders 2022 and was the Arkadelphia Area Chamber of Commerce “Person of the Year” in 2021. He has received the “Best Doctors in Arkansas” award every year since 1999.
Dr. Matthew Sellers Bio:
Dr. Sellers is a graduate of Bryant High School and the University of Central Arkansas. He obtained his medical degree at University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, where he also completed his residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology. Dr. Sellers is a Board-Certified OB-GYN with a clinical emphasis on OB-GYN and gynecological surgery.
Dr. Sellers has been practicing obstetrics and gynecology at Cornerstone Clinic for Women in Little Rock, Arkansas, since 2008. He lives in Little Rock with his wife and three children. An active member of his church, Dr. Sellers and his family are passionate about serving the community and the world. When he’s not working, Dr. Sellers enjoys spending time with his family, biking, hunting, playing tennis and traveling.
Dr. Michael Birrer Bio:
Dr. Birrer is the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Vice Chancellor and Director of the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute.
Dr. Birrer earned his undergraduate degree at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and graduated with a BS in Biology. He was accepted into the Medical Scientist Training Program at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and completed his MD and PhD in 1982 with his principle area of study in microbiology and immunology. He then performed a medical internship and residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital.
Dr. Birrer entered the medical oncology fellowship at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland and upon completion performed a postdoctoral on the molecular genetics of lung cancer. After completing his fellowship, Dr. Birrer joined the faculty at the NCI in the Division of Cancer Treatment as an investigator in 1988. Three years later, Dr. Birrer was appointed as a senior investigator and established the molecular mechanism section in the Division of Cancer Prevention and Control.
Dr. Birrer is recognized nationally and internationally as an expert in gynecologic oncology. He has published over 400 peer reviewed manuscripts and another 30 book chapters and review articles.
In November 2008, Dr. Birrer was appointed Professor of Medicine at the Harvard School of Medicine. In August 2017, Dr. Birrer accepted the position of Director of the Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). While there, he was a Professor of Medicine, Pathology, and Obstetrics and Gynecology, and the recipient of the Evalina B. Spencer Chair in Oncology. During his tenure, Dr Birrer raised over 40 million dollars in philanthropic funds including a 30 million dollar gift to name the Cancer Center. In addition, during this time he designed and open the first cancer service line at UAB.
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During a Senate Education Committee session this week, students from Little Rock Central High School took to the state Capitol to weigh in on the Arkansas LEARNS bill. Time after time, Sen. Jane English (R-North Little Rock) cut students off mid-sentence, claiming that the content of their testimony was not germane to the syntactic amendments under discussion.
“I’m speaking on the insufficiency of these amendments as they relate to the bill,” sophomore Rhône Kuta asserted, without success. By the end of the meeting English had shut down all 10 students, launching some of them into frustrated tears.
Refusing to hear these students’ suggestions is not the state legislature’s only deficiency this session. The actions of the Arkansas GOP send a message that constituent voices can be ignored in the pursuit of steamroller policymaking. That these particular constituents were children makes it all the more shameful.
Watching the committee session, I felt both a swell of pride to see the next generation of Arkansans engaged in this uncertain political moment and abject horror that children are forced to beg for – and are repeatedly denied access to – consultative, participatory government.
How can we expect students to take seriously their civics lessons in the classroom when our state leaders can’t exemplify these ideals in their professional capacity as elected officials? A cursory review of the state’s high school Social Studies academic standards shows the centrality of familiarizing youngsters with political participation. The first civics disciplinary standard highlights the need for students to comprehend “personal civic rights, roles, responsibilities, and processes by which laws are made and amended.” The third standard requires students to understand “the role of citizens in society,” even encouraging evaluation of Arkansas laws and their impact on students specifically.
If anything, LEARNS was born for such a time as this! If there is an education reform I can get behind these days outside of a clean bill raising teacher pay, it would be to require every member of the Arkansas Legislature to show mastery in the state’s own civics requirements.
What do we stand to lose when young Arkansans are silenced, brushed aside when their only aim is civic engagement?
Apathy is a helluva drug, a characteristic that some members of older generations carelessly assign to millennials and Gen Z at large. I would venture that the callousness of adults in power plays a far greater role in youth disengagement than memes or smartphones or the TikTok-ification of popular culture. Any funding pumped into education or workforce development is shoddy window dressing in the mind of an adolescent told they don’t have a place in a dialogue that directly concerns their futures.
There is a particular disquiet that accompanies coming from a place worth fighting for, from a community that raised and rendered you nearly whole but feels as though it’s rejecting you just as you’re coming into yourself. That is the consequence of legislating by evasion and force, but calling it rule-keeping.
As someone who lost several years to Arkansas expat purgatory, I understand what it’s like to feel overwhelmed by a sense that my home state was actively rejecting me and any aspirations for my future. As a high schooler, I loved my social studies and Arkansas history classes, poring over U.S. government trivia and developing para-social attachments as ardent as they were dopey to long-dead U.S. political figures. I attribute my extant earnestness about the political process to my 12th-grade AP U.S. government teacher. She advocated for excused absences for students volunteering at polling sites during the 2012 election, and she taught me that loving a place doesn’t mean never critiquing it.
When it came time to apply for college, I couldn’t see myself achieving what I wanted in Arkansas. Not because I didn’t want this community, but because I felt it didn’t want someone like me. So I left. And for a while, I didn’t look back. But then my frontal lobe and something I can only understand as deeply layered, beautiful ancestral guilt caught up to me, tugging me back home.
The question of how to combat persistent brain drain, for which I am a most repentant poster child, is one that has plagued state leaders and regional economic developers for decades. In 2021, Arkansas lost 21% more of its four-year college graduates than it gained from other states. The policy calculus for our state’s growth has to grapple with the economic and political realities fueling this flight of young Arkansans.
While the policymaking misdeeds of the LEARNS bill sit squarely on the shoulders of Republicans, underestimating the political will of young adults is by no means a partisan phenomenon.
In the second week of the Arkansas Governor’s School’s 2012 session, I watched then-Gov. Mike Beebe take the stage of Hendrix College’s Staples Auditorium to tape the quarterly episode of AETN’s “Arkansans Ask.” During the Q&A, a young woman inquired about what Beebe’s administration planned to do to protect reproductive rights for the next generation of Arkansas women. With a wink and a handwave, he said something to the tune of “Don’t worry, honey, I’ve got your rights protected,” before explaining that engaging directly with the War on Women movement was a politically challenging choice for a southern Democrat.
Ten years and five days later, the U.S. Supreme Court released the Dobbs v. Jackson decision and Arkansas began enforcing its trigger ban on abortion. The young Arkansan who asked her state leader what she could do to help is now working as a surgical oncology fellow in another state. This type of exchange felt wrong at the time, but watching the political theater of the LEARNS bill makes me wonder if it’s a link in a much longer chain.
Sen. English’s behavior demonstrates a particularly egregious decline in our state leaders’ ability to do their jobs. Their role is to represent the people of Arkansas, not to wield unchecked power and ego. The story of the LEARNS bill is not one of transformative education reform. It’s the death knell for good, decent civic engagement and the democratic process in Arkansas.
The memory of English haughtily hushing students will no doubt burn bright in the minds and hearts of the 10 brave students for years to come. My hope for the students fighting against the LEARNS bill is that the wanton dismissiveness of adults propels them deeper into civic engagement, that it doesn’t deaden their political imaginations that have just come into first bloom.
Youth human capital is perhaps the most wasted resource in the Natural State these days. Our political leaders can’t seem to make the connection between honest-to-goodness educational investment—for every child—and future workforce payoffs for communities statewide. The staying power of home is a gift of which we shouldn’t deprive our students.
As a community, we must create spaces for young Arkansans to feel integrated into the political process. We govern over their futures. I want Arkansas to feel like home for our students. For decades to come, I want to see them thrive as people and professionals—and hopefully even as local and state public officials who will take seriously the concerns of the generation that follows.
Marlee Stark is a native of Fayetteville and a public policy graduate student at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She studies regional growth, workforce development and transportation policy. She plans to finish her degree, then head back to Arkansas in May.
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Arkansas Times editors Austin Bailey and Lindsey Millar talk about the latest from the legislature, including the continued assault on trans kids, a bid to criminalize affirmative action, an effort to essentially ban books and more.
On Dylan Earl‘s third full-length album, “I Saw the Arkansas,” out today via Fayetteville’s Gar Hole Records, he further hones the very convincing loner country-boy schtick and image he’s been cultivating ever since he left Swampbird. His signature croon — hushed and sleepy and stretching for the lowest and saddest notes — drifts over spare upright piano flourishes and unhurried pedal steel like someone slowly driving a truck through open landscapes, cursed by wanderlust. Standout tracks include “White Painted Trees” and “Buddy.”
Earl has two album release shows — both with a handful of local vendors — tonight at White Water Tavern and tomorrow at George’s in Fayetteville. The first is sold out, but you can still get tickets to the latter here.
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Oaklawn Racing Casino Resort track announcer Vic Stauffer has “separated” from the business, likely over a tweet he sent earlier this month about being caught masturbating as a teen.
While Stauffer, now in his 60s, hasn’t verified which tweet jerked Oaklawn out of shape, we think it’s this one:
TWEET IN QUESTION: Vic Stauffer sent this tweet on March 1 and announced today he has separated from Oaklawn.
Stauffer deleted his account for a while, but his @goofonroof Twitter account is back up now. He tweeted this about the separation this morning:
I’ve separated from @OaklawnRacing I thank them for 6 1/2 GREAT yrs. We disagreed about the severity of a tweet I recently posted. Respect their opinion. In LV to enjoy competing vs fellow horse players in the NHC. Humbly appreciate all the well wishes. Our game is the BEST! VJS
— Vic Stauffer (@goofonroof) March 10, 2023
We emailed Jennifer Hoyt, Oaklawn’s director of racing, about the matter on March 2 but she didn’t respond.
The Daily Racing Form has reported Oaklawn has hired Jim Byers, announcer at Lone Star Park in Texas, to replace Stauffer.
The post Masturbation comment comes back to bite now-former Oaklawn announcer appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Little Rock attorney Molly McNulty announced yesterday she is seeking a position on the Arkansas Court of Appeals.
McNulty is seeking the Court of Appeals, District 6, Division 1 seat, which is being vacated by Judge Rita Gruber who is not running for reelection. Little Rock attorney Pam Hathaway announced her candidacy for the position earlier this week.
McNulty is a law clerk for Court of Appeals Judge Raymond Abramson and said in a press release that she has written hundreds of draft opinions in the position. McNulty began her career as a law clerk for federal Judge Joe Volpe in the Eastern District of Arkansas and is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Arkansas Bar Association.
The post McNulty announces candidacy for state Court of Appeals appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A scented wall plug-in led to the evacuation of the North Little Rock school and prompted a day of remote learning, according to a letter from the district superintendent.
North Little Rock’s seventh and eighth-grade campus was evacuated Tuesday after students and teachers complained of dizziness and nausea. On Wednesday, the school moved to remote learning to investigate a “strong odor” that caused concern.
District Superintendent Gregory Pilewski said in a letter yesterday that a wall plug-in was the source of the odor and cause of the students’ and teachers’ symptoms. We’ve inquired about the scent of the plug-in but haven’t heard back yet.
The school, located at 2400 Lakeview Road, is back to normal operations today.
Here’s part of Pilewski’s letter:
However, after a thorough evaluation from the North Little Rock Fire Department Hazmat Team, the district learned there was adequate oxygen and the air quality was, in fact, good. We appreciate the quick response and assistance of the North Little Rock Fire Department.
After another building assessment today, we discovered a scented, wall plug-in as the source of the strong smell. The plug-in is believed to be the cause of the symptoms our students and staff identified. The plug-in has now been removed and oxygen levels and air quality remain safe for students and staff to return to the building on Thursday, March 9, 2023.
It’s North Little Rock schools’ second bout with strangeness recently. The district battled bats that had taken up residence in the high school and forced three days’ of remote learning last month.
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SUNNY WAR
TUESDAY 3/14. White Water Tavern. 8 p.m. $15-$18.
Guitarist David Rawlings shows up all over singer-songwriter Sunny War’s new album, “Anarchist Gospel,” but this is no Gillian Welch record. Take the track “Higher,” for instance, which complicates Rawlings’ taut, high-pitched fingerpicking by overlaying it with synth pads, distorted drums and War’s low and gospel-tinged voice.
Another unexpected utilization of Rawlings comes on “Swear to Gawd,” which features a bluesy harmonica and electric piano that ooze with attitude. War calls herself “folk-punk” and though I’m not sure I agree with the “punk” side of that genre distinction, maybe she just means that her version of roots music can’t be contained. Sarah Shook & the Disarmers will also play. Tickets are available here.
The post Sunny War and Sarah Shook & the Disarmers at White Water Tavern on Tuesday appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Growing up, The Observer had three somewhat regular neighborhood babysitters who were each able to teach me palate-sharpening food lessons in the short amount of time we spent together while my parents were away. When the crushing reality of adolescence set in and my need for babysitting ended, I found myself a better eater and more curious about food than I was in the days before neighborhood teens were paid to hang out with me.
Nick was just a few years older than me and would scream, “I’m the babysitter; I’m the babysitter!” whenever my little brother and I questioned his authority. He introduced me to early ’90s cinematic bangers like “Silence of the Lambs,” “Talkin’ Dirty After Dark” and “Kindergarten Cop.” Most importantly, he gave me my first bite of Mexico Chiquito cheese dip after his mom dropped some off for him at our house. It was an extraordinary first bite, one that easily ranks in my childhood top 10. It was being able to identify cumin without knowing what cumin was. I chastised my parents for not introducing me sooner. Little did I know, the restaurant would later be credited as the inventor of cheese dip. Who knows how I would’ve reacted if Nick had filled me in on that detail? “The inventor of cheese dip is down the street, and you kept it from me? Mom, really?”
Jordan was also just a couple years older than me. He lived right next door and taught me how to spell Mississippi. He would later sell my brother the scooter that he’d break his arm riding. Jordan imparted the valuable yet unsanitary lesson that the gross green olives in the fridge could be legitimate snacks if you suck the delicious red pimentos out of the bitter oval fruit before discarding the pimento-less olives back into the jar. I still do this from time to time, but rather than putting the olive back in the jar, the pimento serves as a kind of amuse-bouche to the olive. Jordan also taught us that a Hershey’s Kiss is way more fun if you put a heaping glob of peanut butter on it. Jordan was ahead of his time. A visionary.
Katrina was our most regular babysitter when I was around age 5-10. She lived down the street, and she’d already graduated from high school and was attending college at UALR. She was a great babysitter and became really close with our family. She’d take my brother and me fishing at the pond and give us Wonder Bread to feed to the ducks. I remember her quoting the “strange things are afoot at the Circle K” line after seeing “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” in the theater, so this would’ve been around 1989.
At this point in my culinary upbringing, I was on a steady diet of total garbage. Katrina gave my palate the assist it needed on a particularly embarrassing day from early childhood when my brother and I insisted on eating McDonald’s rather than Chinese food at a restaurant we’d never been to. She got us Happy Meals to go and then took us along to a little place called Hunan in Jacksonville.
My first lesson that day was realizing how painfully shameful it feels to eat American fast food while dining in a beautifully decorated Chinese restaurant for the first time. Being a little kid was no excuse for that kind of bratty, culturally asinine behavior. Katrina was eating Moo Goo Gai Pan, a dish with chicken, mushrooms, water chestnuts, baby corn and other veggies in a white sauce. She knew that I was eyeballing it. She asked if I wanted a bite and grabbed a straw mushroom with her chopsticks and passed it across the table. Looking back, it was an interesting choice. She had to have known I would’ve been more inclined to partake in a piece of the chicken, given the level of sophistication and maturity prominently displayed by the fast-food bag in front of me from a restaurant whose mascot was a clown. But she went for the straw mushroom, a type of fungi I’d never seen in my life until that point. I didn’t hesitate. I cast my mass-produced cheeseburger aside and bit down on my babysitter’s chopsticks. It was a glorious bite, and I wanted more.
“Told ya,” Katrina said.
My family started going to Hunan for lunch every Sunday. My parents became friends with the husband and wife who owned it. All my best friends ate there with us at some point. We were happy there. The restaurant closed many years ago, and it’s by far the one from my past that I miss the most. I stopped by once in a dream and awoke, saddened by the reality that I was only just visiting.
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Brian Chilson
When the 2023 Arkansas legislative session comes to an end, can we all agree to give Rep. Tippi McCullough of Little Rock a few weeks to just ride her bike, read some good books and maybe hide out in a cabin somewhere? The job of keeping House Democrats organized and not demoralized in the face of an insurmountable Republican supermajority would be tough for anyone. An introvert who’s happy to talk with the press and show up to all the mix-and-mingles as long as she gets to occasionally recharge, McCullough is likely in the market for some down time.
When did you first get elected? And what does being the House minority leader entail?
I got elected in 2018, and this is my second time as House minority leader. In some ways, my job is the same as the other representatives. We get together and talk about bills and whip votes if we’re trying to get together on something. We meet pretty much daily.
And I end up talking to the press quite a bit as a spokesperson for the party.
Part of it’s organization, part of it’s political, part of it’s media-related. My role is just for someone to hold us together as much as possible.
What are the Democrats’ goals this year? We’ve known since early on the agenda set out by the governor, with education and public safety and taxes. We’re huge public ed supporters, and our goal, even as far back as the special session [in 2022] has been the RAISE act, with teacher and staff raises. We feel like those are clean bills for one purpose and with no strings attached.
We want a healthier, safer, fairer, brighter Arkansas. Anything we do, it’s to achieve those goals. Whether it’s teacher raises, or Ashley Hudson’s bill to help pregnant teenagers finish school, or Deborah Ferguson’s constitutional amendment to repeal the abortion ban, or Andrew Collins’ election bills, that’s what we’re doing.
What’s a typical day for a state representative? My day starts the night before. When I get home, I look at the calendars for the next day, all the committees and agendas, not just my own. I’ll formulate some questions and talking points.
Between morning meetings and afternoons, groups come in for lunches and presentations, and we have receptions with different groups in the early evenings. So I usually get home around 6-ish and unwind for just a second or two and then get right to working again.
Last night I was at the Capitol later doing a podcast, “The Girl and the Gov,” that’s trying to get young women interested in government and politics.
It’s a really high-energy day where you can feel pulled in a lot of directions. It never becomes easy, but there’s a rhythm to it that you learn.
That unwind time you mentioned, what does that look like? I eat dinner with Barb. [McCullough’s wife, Barb Mariani, is a Pulaski County prosecutor.] Sometimes I’ll ask her about bills she might know about. We discuss our days.
Last weekend, when we got done Thursday we went out of town. Barb had a bike race, and I was going to have some quiet time to read and catch up on calls and texts.
And I read every night before I go to bed.
Does being the only openly gay member of the Arkansas Legislature create extra responsibilities for you? I’m a caucus of one in that respect. But I represent 30,000 people in my district. A certain number of those are members of the LGBTQ community and a certain number of those are allies, but I’ve got all kinds of people and I try to represent all of them. And of course I do feel that I’m a voice and a representative for the LGBTQ community. I’m a lesbian out of those letters, but I’m not trans, I’m not bisexual, so I have to listen a lot to those voices and try to stand up for them.
How could your constituents be more helpful or effective? I want them to know me and reach out to me. … And come up to the Capitol! This should be a place where everybody feels comfortable and everybody understands how it works. When I walk in there, I feel like I did when I walked into Central High School in my teaching career, just in awe of that history. I feel the same when I walk into the Capitol. In the end, my time here will come and go, but it’s always going to be the people’s house.
How do you stay level-headed when you’re dealing with emotional issues and lack of understanding?
My teaching and coaching career prepared me, in a lot of ways, for this. When you’re a coach you develop thick skin pretty quickly or you get destroyed by it. You have to lay your head down every night knowing you’re fighting for the right things and the right values.
We try to concentrate on the bill, and not to be personal.
Sometimes people are doing things because that’s what they believe. Sometimes it’s for constituents, sometimes it’s political. I try to not be too judgmental, I try to listen and not close the door on people. … It’s not always easy. I just found out I’m better off if I listen more than I talk.
Some good books she’s read lately: “These Precious Days” by Ann Patchett, “Evicted” by Matthew Desmond, “Dopesick” by Beth Macy, “Demon Copperhead” by Barbara Kingsolver, “Lost & Found” by Kathryn Schulz
Movie recommendation:
“Women Talking”
Favorite wheels: We mountain bike a ton, and road bike. I just got an electric mountain bike and I can keep up with Barb on that.
The post Coaching the political game: Tippi taps the power of collaboration to steer House Dems through rocky year appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Judicial races continue to take shape as two more candidates announced for Little Rock District Court and the Arkansas Court of Appeals yesterday.
Circuit Judge Mackie Pierce is running for the Little Rock District Court seat occupied by Melanie Martin. Pierce has served as a circuit judge in the Sixth Judicial District since 1998. Martin announced yesterday she will be running for the circuit judge seat occupied by Judge Karen Whatley who is not allowed to run for reelection by state law.
Pam Hathaway announced her candidacy for a seat on the Arkansas Court of Appeals. Hathaway said in a release today she is seeking the District 6, Division 1 seat held by Judge Rita Gruber who is not running for reelection. Hathaway has been an attorney at Friday, Eldredge and Clark law firm, a solo practitioner and has been a law clerk to five judges on the Arkansas Supreme Court and Arkansas Court of Appeals, according to a press release.
Three candidates previously announced for a variety of judicial races.
The elections will be held on March 5, 2024.
The post Two more candidates announce for judicial races appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Some students in the North Little Rock School District will use remote learning today, a day after their campus was evacuated due to low oxygen levels and students and teachers complaining of dizziness.
The seventh and eighth grade students will pivot to remote learning today, but the change does not affect the sixth grade campus, North Little Rock School District Superintendent Gregory Pilewski said in a letter Wednesday.
The campus was evacuated around 10:30 a.m. yesterday because of low oxygen levels in a classroom after students and teachers complained of dizziness and nausea, according to school district spokesman Dustin Barnes.
Pilewski said a review of the building by the North Little Rock Fire Department and others found a strong odor in one of the classrooms but they do not yet know the cause of the odor.
It’s the second building-related concern recently for the district, which closed its high school campus for three days to remove bats from the building.
The post North Little Rock school goes to remote learning a day after evacuation appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Arkansas lawmakers have already ambushed public education, transgender youth and reproductive health this week, and it’s only Wednesday!
Now, legislators are turning their attention to your voting rights. Specifically, many of them seem keen on making voting as unpleasant and inconvenient as possible, likely in hopes that you just won’t do it.
I don’t have the time/bandwidth to read through each of these bills. But my goodness! It looks like someone is trying to chip away at our voting rights today. https://t.co/HGAVtV6ipg /1 pic.twitter.com/r15ytXxVMj
— Jenny (@bluetruedream21) March 8, 2023
Prohibiting ballot drop boxes, barring write-in candidates for school board races and creating a new and intimidating “election integrity unit” to further police the polls are all on the day’s agenda.
The House Committee on State Agencies and Governmental Affairs will meet at 10 a.m. Also on the agenda, the bill to build a monument to aborted fetuses on the Capitol lawn.
But what is this? A bright spot? House Bill 1537 would bring us into the 21st Century by allowing online voter registration in Arkansas.
Wednesday’s meeting comes on the heels of an outrageous power grab at the Capitol that attempts to rob Arkansas citizens of constitutionally granted rights to petition. Arkansas voters nixed limitations on their right to put initiatives on the ballot twice in recent years, so lawmakers are trying this new path to shutting them up. No way it’s legal. But Arkansas lawmakers seem more than willing to waste time and money on a taxpayer-funded lawsuits to make it official.
The post Under attack today at the Arkansas Capitol: Your voting rights appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Two new education bills aimed at promoting good governance seem likely to face an uphill battle solely because they’re sponsored by Democrats.
Senate Bill 364, sponsored by Sen. Clarke Tucker (D-Little Rock) with all of Little Rock Democrats and Rep. Vivian Flowers (D-Pine Bluff) as co-sponsors, would return a school district that’s been taken over by the state to local control after five years and the election of a school board. State law already required a school district to be returned to local control after five years, but through a dubious legal opinion forwarded by state education department lawyers, the state hung onto the Little Rock School District for nearly six years.
Senate Bill 367, sponsored by Sen. Stephanie Flowers (D-Pine Bluff), would make unused or underutilized public school facilities available at no cost to district’s city government. Current law gives charter schools first refusal to purchase or lease unused traditional school facilities. In Flowers’ bill, they’d still have that opportunity if municipalities didn’t want the buildings.
The post Democrats propose bills to limit state takeover of school district, give municipalities first dibs at unused school buildings appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Living in Arkansas, much less trying get our children a quality education without political interference, is getting harder.
Take a look at this Washington Postarticle and its disclosures about some of the things that have happened in the Bryant Public Schools. The Post story links to Arkansas Times original reporting on this issue from 2022.
The Post notes our reporting that in 2021 the school district overhauled its middle and high school English curriculums to eliminate books including Anne Frank’s classic The Diary of a Young Girl. Officials cited a need for more rigorous texts and stories that were not “overly dark and heavy.”
The post Bryant Public Schools make national news, but the district won’t be bragging about it appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Three people announced their candidacies yesterday for judgeships about a year before the 2024 elections.
Circuit Judge Morgan “Chip” Welch announced yesterday morning that he is running for the Little Rock judgeship held by Judge Wayne Gruber. Welch’s announcement said Gruber is retiring, and Chief District Court Clerk Carol Wilkins confirmed the news late Monday.
North Little Rock attorney Robert Tellez followed up yesterday afternoon with an announcement that he is seeking the judgeship in Little Rock District Court, division 2. That seat is held by Judge Vic Fleming in what is commonly referred to as traffic court.
Late yesterday, Little Rock District Judge Melanie Martin announced she is running for circuit judge in the Sixth Judicial District’s seventh division. That seat was held by Judge Barry Sims, who retired last year and was replaced by Judge Karen Whatley. State law prohibits Whatley, who was appointed by Governor Asa Hutchinson, from running for the seat.
Given the announcements today, you’d be forgiven if you thought the races were coming up soon. They will be held in about a year during the 2024 primary elections on March 5, 2024.
UPDATE:
Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Jill Kamps announced her candidacy this morning for the district court seat being vacated by Melanie Martin. Kamps has served as a deputy prosecuting attorney in the Sixth Judicial District since 2004, according to a news release from her campaign.
The post UPDATE: Welch, Tellez, Martin announce candidacies for judgeships appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The Little Rock Police Department reported the city’s seventh homicide Monday morning after officers found a man dead in the vacant Pizza Hut building at 913 McMath Ave., a spokesperson said.
The victim has not yet been identified, Mark Edwards with LRPD said. He said that law enforcement ruled the death a homicide because of the state of the injuries, though he said he didn’t yet know if the wounds were from gunshots or otherwise.
The investigation is ongoing, and we will update when we have more information.
Investigation is underway pic.twitter.com/dPIubbTc0I
— Little Rock Police (@LRpolice) March 6, 2023
Edwards said that Monday’s homicide is the seventh of 2023. Five homicides were reported in January and one in February. (In comparison to last year, a total of 12 homicides were reported by the end of February 2022.)
Two officer-involved shootings have also been reported this year — one in January that did involve a death, and one in February that did not.
The post Body found Monday marks seventh 2023 homicide appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Brian Chilson
What was your finishing time?
The post The marathon open line appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Thousands of athletes flooded into Central Arkansas this weekend to run through the streets of Little Rock and North Little Rock for the 20th annual Little Rock Marathon. It was a beautiful weekend of running weather following what seemed like endless consecutive days of rainfall.
Arkansas Times photographer Brian Chilson was on hand Sunday to cover the 26.2-mile race, which included a 1,207-foot elevation gain, 15 aid stations, 41 cheering stops, 640 gallons of Gatorade, 3,840 pounds of bananas and 241 porta potties, according to Little Rock Marathon Executive Director Geneva Lamm.
Mandy KeenerLITTLE ROCK MARATHON: By the numbers.Colin Boerger was the winner of the full marathon, with an unofficial finishing time of 2:40:48.
“I really didn’t even train,” Boerger said.
Brian ChilsonFIRST PLACE: Colin Boerger.Jessy Sorrick was the first female finisher of the full marathon.
Far out! The first female finisher of the 2023 #lrmarathon is Jessy Sorrick! Congratulations!! https://t.co/bN2knSwbwK
— Little Rock Marathon (@LRMarathon) March 5, 2023
Little Rock Marathon by Brian Chilson 1 of 17 The post The 2023 Little Rock Marathon in pictures appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Sorry about the double open lines yesterday. It actually wasn’t Rhett’s fault this time.
The post Basic open line appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Arkansas’s ongoing legislative session can best be described as a full-on assault on secularism, as Republican legislators push us toward their version of a Christian theocracy. This made clear by Sen. Gary Stubblefield (R-Branch) when he said, in defense of the drag show bill (Senate Bill 43) that he sponsored, “I had one [person] email me and say that I hate drag queens, and that’s a lie. I don’t hate anybody. I do hate sin … I think that I know what’s wrong in God’s eyes because that’s the way I was raised, and I believe the Bible.”
It is for the lawyers and courts to determine whether this bill, and the myriad like it coming out of this legislature, are constitutional or not. However, democracy is not just about constitutionality, it is also about the public having some control over the policies made by the government. This, of course, raises two questions, do Arkansans share legislators’ attitudes towards “morality” issues, and do they want the government to legislate “morality?” We can actually turn to data from the Arkansas Poll to answer these questions.
What do Arkansans think about LGBTQ+ rights?
The Arkansas Poll surveys a representative sample of around 800 Arkansans every year. The most recent poll available, which is from 2022, asked a number of questions that seek to understand the public’s preferences on a several issues, including issues surrounding “morality.” Specifically, the poll asked whether respondents “think gays and lesbians should or should not have equal rights in terms of housing … renting and leasing, for example,” as well as whether respondents “think gays and lesbians should or should not have equal rights in terms of job opportunities.”
Figure 1 shows the percentage of all respondents who think gays and lesbians should have equal housing rights, and then breaks this down by party identification (Republican, Democratic, independent). Among all Arkansans, support for ensuring equal housing rights to members of the LGBTQ+ community is over 77%. It is nearly 88% among Democrats and 79% among independents. Most notably, however, about 69% of Republicans support ensuring equal housing rights for LGBTQ+ individuals. Put differently, nearly 7 in 10 members of the Republican base don’t think the LGBTQ+ community should be discriminated against in housing.
Figure 2 shows even greater support for the LGBTQ+ community when it comes to nondiscrimination in jobs. More than 81% of Arkansans believe those in the LGBTQ+ community should not be discriminated against when it comes to work, with over 91% of Democrats and 80% of independents believing this. Interestingly, nearly 75% of Republicans support equal rights for members of the LGBTQ+ community when it comes to working and jobs.
These numbers tell a very clear, and positive story about Arkansans. The culture warriors of the Arkansas legislature do not appear to represent the attitudes of Arkansans well at all. While there is a clear difference in the attitudes of Democrats, Republicans and independents, it seems from the data that the Republican legislators who are very concerned about “sin” don’t even represent the beliefs of their own base very well.
Of course, understanding the public’s attitudes about an issue is only part of the story. You can get a person to tell you their beliefs about anything, but that doesn’t mean that they think often about the issue. This is what political scientists refer to as issue salience; a more salient issue is one the public is thinking more about.
Do Arkansans want legislators to address “morality”?
The 2021 Arkansas Poll asked respondents to name “the most important problem or issue facing people in Arkansas today.” Respondents were given a list of issues to choose from, including the economy, education, health care, taxes, immigration, etc. This question is really useful in getting at the salience of these “moral” issues, because one of the issues on the list was “Morality/Family breakdown/Religion (God/Bible, etc.).” Further, respondents could choose “Other” if the issue they believed to be most important was not on this list, and were asked to specify what the most important problem is in their mind if they chose “Other.”
To ensure that all individuals who are concerned about “morality” are included in this grouping, I counted anyone who chose “Other” and then specified an answer with the word “God” or “sin” as believing “morality” was the biggest issue facing Arkansas. Figure 3 shows the percentage of individuals who named each issue area as the most important in Arkansas.
A total of 2.4% of respondents named “morality” as the most important issue facing Arkansas, which is slightly less than the percentage of Arkansans who simply think Democrats are the most important problem facing Arkansas. In fact, “morality” was the 12th most important issue facing Arkansas according to the respondents to the 2021 Arkansas Poll.
Likely, the ordering of these issues has changed, particularly as the COVID-19 pandemic has drawn to an end. But even if every person who mentioned COVID-19 as the most important issue decided that now “morality” is the most important issue (something that in all likelihood is not the case), it would still only be the third most important issue facing the state, according to this poll. Simply put, this data show the public, in general, is not concerned with legislating “morality.” Rather, they are much more concerned about the economy, and, interestingly, believe that politicians are a substantially larger issue in Arkansas as well.
Of course, it is possible that Republicans are simply responding to their base. Figure 4 uses the same data from the 2021 Arkansas Poll, but restricts the data to only those who self-identify as Republicans. The issue of “morality” is slightly more important among Republicans than it is among Arkansans generally, with the percentage saying that “morality” is the most important issue increasing from about 2.4% among all Arkansans to about 3.1% among Arkansas Republicans. This is still a very small number of people saying “morality” is the most important issue. The top-two most important issues identified by Arkansas Republicans were the economy and politicians, which are the same two issues identified by all Arkansans as the most important.
To contrast this, Figure 5 shows the percentage of Arkansas Democrats who have identified each issue as the most important in Arkansas. Only 1.26% of Democrats believe “morality” is the most important issue, while nearly 25% identified the economy, and 13% identified COVID-19 and politicians as the most important issues, respectively.
What does this mean electorally?
To parse this out, we need to think about the relative importance of issues and partisanship for vote decisions. Partisanship is the idea that people identify with a political party, and they have a strong tendency to vote for that party. Political scientists have known for nearly a century how strong partisanship is, but it does not completely determine the outcome of elections.
There are a large percentage of people in any state, Arkansas included, that don’t identify strongly with one party or another. In fact, according to the 2022 Arkansas Poll, about 32% of Arkansans identify as independent. While these voters might lean towards one party or another, party is a much less important factor determining vote for them than it is for people who identify as a Republican (34% of Arkansans) or as a Democrat (23% of Arkansans).
Additionally, while party identification has a strong effect on vote choice, it can be broken. The fact that nearly one-quarter of Republicans is most concerned about the economy, and Republican legislators are ignoring economic issues to address what bathroom a person can use provides Democrats an opportunity to gain votes among not just independents, but also some Republicans. Put simply, it is in the Republicans’ best interest to focus more on issues the public cares more about, and it is in the Democrats’ best interest to make sure the voters know the Republicans aren’t dealing with issues the public cares about.
The post How some conservative Arkansas lawmakers ignored their base appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Arkansas Times editors Austin Bailey and Lindsey Millar talk about the latest from the legislature, including the near passage of Arkansas LEARNS.
Pulaski County Judge Barry Hyde highlighted the county’s successes over the past year during his State of the County address this week, and criticized divisive politics that he says have afflicted the state.
Hyde has served as county judge since 2015. He noted the county’s advancements on clean energy, services for people who are homeless or mentally ill and upgrades to parks throughout the county. He gave his address Tuesday morning at the Arkansas Regional Innovation Hub in North Little Rock.
A former Democratic state representative, Hyde closed with some strong words.
“Pulaski County is a community, it’s a way of life and there is no other county like us in the state,” Hyde said. “While retrograde policies and divisiveness have afflicted many within our state, Pulaski County will not stand for it. We will continue to innovate and move forward, never backward.”
Madeline Roberts, a spokeswoman for the county, said Hyde’s remarks were about Arkansas politics in general and not about any particular elected official or policy.
You can read the full speech here.
Here are a few of the highlights:
Economic development
The county has invested in the Port of Little Rock by bringing Zeuber Road up to industrial standards and by improving traffic controls for main arteries. The port employs more than 10,000 people from 23 central Arkansas counties and new industries there will create 2,500 new jobs, Hyde said.
Sustainability
By the end of the year, more than 90% of the energy usage of the offices of the county and port will come from solar energy, saving $250,000 a year in electrical costs. By year’s end, the county will have two solar farms: One near the Pulaski County Regional Detention Facility and one near the Little Rock Port on Zeuber Road.
Improved efficiencies in energy and water have allowed the county to reduce its consumption by 68% and save $446,000 a year.
Pulaski county is the first county in the state to offer curbside recycling in unincorporated areas of the county. The program diverts 3 million pounds from the landfill each year.
Housing
The county is developing the Community Village project in southern Pulaski County to provide tiny homes and a variety of services to people experiencing chronic homelessness. “Let’s be clear, the Community Village will not be a homeless shelter or transitional housing,” Hyde said. “This is permanent, affordable housing. This is a place where the chronically homeless can finally be home.” Modeled after a similar project in Texas, it will be the first of its kind in Arkansas. Here’s more about the project.
Parks
The county will soon unveil the largest inclusive playground in the state at Two Rivers Park. Inclusive playgrounds are built for children of all abilities. The county is also upgrading 10 parks in the unincorporated areas of the county to meet ADA standards.
The post Pulaski County judge celebrates successes, assails divisive politics in annual address appeared first on Arkansas Times.
State medical marijuana regulators were considering changes to some statewide cannabis restrictions, including the prohibition on pre-rolled joints, before Attorney General Tim Griffin advised them to forget it. They do not have the authority to consider these issues, he said.
State Medical Marijuana Commission chair James Miller said he had been asked during conversations at the state Capitol to consider changes to the rules prohibiting pre-rolled marijuana joints and restrictions on advertising.
At Thursday’s commission meeting, Miller began a discussion on the pre-roll issue but commission counsel Doug House from the attorney general’s office said Griffin does not believe the commission has the authority to consider the issue. Miller asked the commissioners if they wished to continue the discussion but none spoke in favor of moving forward.
Griffin made his negative opinion of marijuana use clear during a debate among candidates for attorney general last year. Griffin said he opposed a recreational marijuana amendment to the state constitution and said it might be all right if we wanted to have “a bunch of poets in Arkansas” but not if we want people who can pass drug tests to work in tech jobs.
House said a pending lawsuit complicates the matter. When Miller asked for more information about the lawsuit, House told him he would tell him “offline.”
Miller then began a discussion on cannabis advertising but House chimed in again, saying Griffin did not believe the commission had the authority to consider the issue and the discussion ended.
The prohibition on pre-rolls, a commonly sold item in dispensaries in other states, comes from Act 1024 passed by the state legislature in 2017. That act prohibits the manufacture or sale of “marijuana paraphernalia that requires the combustion of marijuana to be properly utilized.” The act specifically lists pipes, water pipers, bongs, chillums, rolling papers and roach clips. It has been interpreted to include pre-rolls, which require combustion but are not specifically listed in the act.
Arkansas cannabis businesses are also prohibited from advertising to the general public, according to commission spokesman Scott Hardin. The restriction does not specifically prohibit billboard advertising, for instance, but businesses would have to prove that the majority of people who see a particular billboard are not minors, commission spokesman Scott Hardin said.
Hardin did not immediately know if the restriction is part of the constitutional amendment that legalized medical marijuana or if it is a commission rule.
The advertising issue has been complicated by changing cannabis laws in neighboring states. Missouri voters legalized recreational marijuana in November and the first sales took place last month. Missouri cannabis businesses are not prohibited from advertising in Arkansas, giving Missouri businesses access to Arkansas consumers that Arkansas businesses don’t have.
Oklahoma, which already has medical marijuana, will hold a special election on recreational marijuana on Tuesday. Mississippi’s medical marijuana program started around the beginning of the year as well.
Interim director
The meeting was the first for interim Alcoholic Beverage Control division director Michael Lewis who was appointed on an interim basis by Governor Sarah Sanders. Lewis has worked for the ABC for several years, Hardin said.
Former director Doralee Chandler submitted a resignation letter dated Feb. 1 and her last day was Feb. 18.
Chandler was later announced as a deputy attorney general for state agencies in the attorney general’s office.
Ownership changes, new processor
In other business, the commissioners unanimously approved ownership changes at Carpenter Farms Medical Group, Good Day Farm Monticello, NEA Full Spectrum and Dark Horse Medicinals.
At Carpenter Farms cultivation, Abraham Carpenter Jr. reduced his 91% ownership stake to 85% and brought on six new owners.
At Good Day Farm Monticello, TJ Patterson reduced his sole ownership to 20% and brought on 13 new owners, including William E. Clark III and Margaret W. Clark.
NEA Full Spectrum dispensary in Brookland brought on Brad Anthony Hartwell, Bradley Scott Hartwell and Gerald ‘Trae’ Scott Sale III as owners. The previous owners are staying on but reduced their ownership stakes.
Dark Horse Medicinals, a Little Rock processor, made changes to its holding company but ownership percentages did not change.
The commissioners also approved High Speed Extracts as a cannabis processor. The business will be solely owned by former Mountain Valley Spring Water CEO James Breck Speed who is the chief operating officer of a Louisiana company that performs hemp extraction, according to his LinkedIn profile.
The post Attorney general office shuts down discussion of pre-rolls and advertising appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The ink’s not yet dry, but Arkansas stands to collect well over $250 million over the next dozen years in settlement money won in litigation against the pharmaceutical companies, drug store chains and other businesses that profited from the nation’s opioid epidemic.
Though the COVID-19 pandemic swallowed up headlines in recent years and nearly relegated the opioid crisis to back-page news, the state has been ravaged by opioid addictions and overdose deaths since 2020, and is second only to Alabama in the number of legal opioid prescriptions per 100 people. In 2021, 618 Arkansans lost their lives to opioid overdoses, up from 546 Arkansans in 2020 and 401 Arkansans in 2016. Sixty percent of the fatalities in 2021 were caused by illicit fentanyl, a wildly potent synthetic opioid that flooded into the state from the drug-trafficking world, marketed to a swelling population of addicts created when unchecked pharmaceutical companies pushed unprecedented amounts of legal prescription opioids into doctor’s offices across the country for their own profit.
Brian Chilson‘CAN YOU SEE ME NOW?’: Staci James, founder of a group called Hope Movement Coalition, lost her son Hagan to fentanyl poisoning in 2019.One of those deaths was Hagan Jones, a 22-year-old Arkansan who died on March 19, 2019, within minutes of inhaling a single line of what he believed to be cocaine. His toxicology report, his mother Staci James told us, showed that he actually ingested five times the lethal dose of fentanyl. “I had heard of fentanyl in passing,” James said, “but didn’t even know how to spell it.” Distraught by the immeasurable and sudden loss and feeling alone, she took a “raw, emotional” text message she’d composed to a close friend and posted it on Facebook instead. “I’ve historically been a person who did not air out my dirty laundry,” she said. The post circulated widely, and within days James was hearing from families and organizations across the country and began, in her words, “basically stalking” memorial services of people she knew had died as a result of an overdose. “I know that sounds morbid,” she said. (It doesn’t sound especially morbid when James says it; she’s warm and effusive and addresses me as “Hon,” and when she reports that she identified strongly as a “team mom” to Hagan and his high school football buddies, it tracks.) “But I would go, and I would stand in front of them just so they could look in the eyes of someone who knew exactly what they were going through. Because that’s what I was lacking. I have a very loving family, and I had amazing friends, but … how do I put this in the words that are gonna make sense? I was so lonely. I could have been standing in a room of 1,000 people — and known every one of them, and loved every one of them, and I still would have felt like I was completely and utterly alone.”
DIRECTING THE DISBURSEMENT: Kirk Lane oversees the Arkansas Opioid Recovery Partnership.Along with two other grieving mothers, James paid a visit to then-state drug director Kirk Lane, who encouraged them to start a nonprofit to tell their stories. That group, Hope Movement Coalition, spent much of the pandemic doing advocacy work around the opioid crisis — raising funds to offset funeral costs for impacted families, purchasing headstones, paying for daycare in cases where the deceased left behind a young child. “I’ve been to the border wall,” James said. “I’ve been to the White House. We had our ‘Can You See Me Now?’ banners on the National Mall. I was invited to sit at the DEA’s first opioid family summit this past summer.” The coalition is partnering with a New York City-based group called Partnership to End Addiction, which is building a text messaging platform to connect opioid-impacted families who don’t use social media.
Now, with funding from opioid settlements, the nonprofit is hiring two case managers to assess and meet the needs of families impacted by an overdose death. “We will figure out if they’re food secure, housing secure, financially secure,” James said. “Are they going to have to take in a little one they weren’t prepared to take in? If so, do we need to go through the court system? Was there something already in place for guardianship?”
When it comes to perceptions about the opioid crisis, James said, the focus tends to be solely on the person who died, but that’s not the whole story. “Hagan left behind 39 close family members across four counties in Arkansas. Four parents, five grandparents, four siblings, a fiancee and a baby on the way, 10 aunts and uncles and 13 cousins, and a great-grandmother. … Last year, we lost 618 people. If we did the same math — if those families are about the size of mine, that’s 24,000 people in Arkansas.”
Since James visited Kirk Lane’s office in 2019, Lane’s taken a new gig as director of the Arkansas Opioid Recovery Partnership, meaning he now oversees the dispensation of Arkansas’s opioid settlement money — $16 million so far, with an additional $200 million-plus to come over the next decade or so.
Talking to Lane feels like talking to someone who’s half-officeholder, half-cop, and there’s a good reason for that. Lane started out in law enforcement, working at the Pulaski County Sheriff’s office and later as chief of police in Benton. It was during that time that he became interested in medication disposal programs like Arkansas Takeback, the state’s prescription drug monitoring program, and programs to increase the availability of naloxone — a medication that can reverse an opioid overdose. It was also a time, he said, when he began to realize that not everyone in law enforcement was connecting the dots between legal opioid prescriptions and the dependencies they fostered — dependencies that could swiftly turn a patient recovering from a sports injury or a wisdom tooth extraction into an addict. “A lot of times,” Lane said, “the prescription pills were discounted by law enforcement as not being part of the problem.”
Arkansas was primed to be hit hard by opioids “because of our culture, and the fact that we were a strong meth state,” he said, but also because “we have a tremendous problem with overprescribing in our state. We’ve been No. 2 in the nation for overprescribing for over 15 years, and even though we’re at our lowest point that we’ve ever been at in 15 years, we’re still almost twice the national average. The criminal cartels took advantage of that … flooding us with heroin and synthetic opioids like fentanyl.”
Another big misunderstanding? That the best way to help someone after an opioid overdose is to lock them up for possession.
“For a long time, I’ll just tell you, I was one of those investigators that went to an overdose scene and did not pursue anything. Society had taught law enforcement, pretty much, that stigmatizing language — that that person got what was coming to them because they were using drugs. And that is the wrong mindset.” Instead, Lane said, addiction should be treated like the disease that it is. “Help doesn’t always have to mean going to jail. I think we need to be creative in rethinking, ‘Do these people need to be handled in a criminal fashion, or are these people being victimized? Should we be criminally incarcerating them or pushing them to seek help and making that available to them?’”
Staci James
Lane and the team at the Arkansas Opioid Recovery Partnership are hoping that the influx of settlement cash should equip the state to do exactly that.
On March 15, 2018, a coalition of Arkansas cities, counties and the state began a long and often contentious legal battle which originated in the Crittenden County Circuit Court, unifying as co-plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed against 65 opioid manufacturers, distributors and criminally convicted Arkansas pharmacies and health care professionals. The agreement yielded a settlement fortune to be divided, as literature from the Association of Arkansas Counties details, in “an equal split of Arkansas settlement dollars among the state, counties and cities — one-third of every Arkansas dollar is allocated to the state, one-third of every Arkansas dollar is allocated to cities and one-third of every Arkansas dollar is allocated to counties.”
Arkansas’s approach to the litigation, Little Rock lawyer Colin Jorgensen told us, was a bit of an anomaly. “We’re the only state where the governments actually united as plaintiffs together in a single case instead of everybody filing individual lawsuits.” Jorgensen spent a decade working at the attorney general’s office and was then recruited by the Association of Arkansas Counties. Since 2018, he has served as attorney for Arkansas counties in litigation against opioid companies.
The money Jorgensen helped secure for the state, two-thirds of which (the city and county shares) is overseen by the Arkansas Opioid Recovery Partnership, is under court supervision and held in what’s called a Qualified Settlement Fund at a custodial bank. The settlement document dictates where the money can go; it is strictly for programs to address the opioid epidemic. Established nonprofits, like sober living facilities, are eligible to apply for settlement funding. “The recovery community is already there,” he said. And meetings with support groups are typically provided at no cost.
The Partnership does not fund programs that are duplicated elsewhere in government infrastructure; naloxone for law enforcement officers, for example, is already provided for by the University of Arkansas’s Criminal Justice Institute. “My opinion is that naloxone should be like defibrillators and fire extinguishers,” Jorgensen said. “It should be that available.”
Jorgensen has a personal connection to the work he’s doing; he’s in recovery himself. “Wild Turkey’s my favorite drug,” he said. “And what I tell people is: The stigma is baseless. And people know this, if they’re honest, that addiction is a disease. The medical community is unanimous on this. There is no outlier, medical professional or otherwise, that says addiction is a moral failure that arises from bad choices. That’s incorrect, and there’s nobody involved in this effort who had that misconception.”
The partnership program went live Nov. 4, 2022, with its application process, meaning that organizations aimed at combating the opioid crisis in Arkansas could apply for funding from the state’s opioid settlement fortune. By mid-February, a total of 34 applications had been filed and 16 programs had been approved to receive funding. Crucial, Jorgensen said, was that local governments drove the effort. “It was always perceived first as a local problem,” he said. “Where the county, city, first responders, all the types of boots-on-the-ground public servants we have — were in the best position to do something about it to help people.”
Not everybody doing work around opioid abatement will get funded. An organization called Central Arkansas Harm Reduction, which operates a drop-in center in Southwest Little Rock, does not expect to be funded by the settlement money. When this reporter visited the headquarters on Chicot Road, I found four people working at laptops set up in a multipurpose room: Amber Kincaid, Shelby Darden, Eric Reese and Rahem White. Collegial and quick to laugh, the quartet gave a tour of the office, which it shares with other adjacent organizations, and which gave a glimpse into the group’s day-to-day efforts — corkboards advertising mail-order HIV testing kits, access to fentanyl testing kits, Central Arkansas Library System’s gender-expansive clothing closet pop-up and Our House’s career center program. In another room, boxes of inventory are tracked on a dry-erase board: latex gloves, naloxone vials, tampons, toothpaste, syringes, condoms.
Stephanie SmittleNO STRINGS ATTACHED: From left to right, Eric Reese, Shelby Darden, Rahem White and Amber Kincaid of Central Arkansas Harm Reduction.When asked what the organization does, Kincaid said, “We help reduce the harms associated with drug use, whether that means providing naloxone for overdose reversal, or safe injection kits with syringes and alcohol pads. With our partnership with Arkansas RAPPs [Reaching Affirming Positive Progressive Systems], we’re also able to offer HIV testing, and we can actually deliver that to them or send it through the mail so there’s a really low barrier” to access. “We help people stay alive through their journey with using substances so that they can ultimately make decisions about their health, because you can’t make decisions about your health if you’re dead.”
The group delivers supplies each Sunday afternoon within Pulaski County, taking orders on a hotline and filling them in-house. They mail naloxone to anyone who wants it, free of charge, with naloxone kits provided by a Clinton Foundation-adjacent organization called Direct Relief. The demand for naloxone, Kincaid said, is “extreme. We run through our supply every week.”
“Our approach is a no-strings-attached, resources no-matter-where-you’re-at approach,” Darden said. “For other organizations, abstinence is a requirement for care.”
Reese, who’s been the resource development coordinator at the organization for about a year and a half, said his interest in harm reduction work is twofold. “My dad died of a cocaine-induced stroke,” he said. “This was 11 years ago, and my dad, as well as my uncles, have always dealt with substance abuse issues. And my family was usually like, ‘Get away, get outta the house, we don’t want anything to do with you.’ And that’s pretty hard. Going through that with my dad really stuck with me.” Watching his relatives bounce in and out of recovery, Reese said, was illuminating. “For me there was too much of that in the Black community, and no one was really doing anything around addiction and harm reduction. If we’d had harm reduction when my dad was going through this, he would still be here.”
Secondly, Reese is a social worker, and that work, he said, intersects with harm reduction. “These issues are hitting Black and brown communities in Arkansas more than the white community. But we always see a white face with it.”
Kincaid, a former pre-K teacher who’s served as the organization’s outreach/operations coordinator since July 2020, was drawn to working with marginalized Arkansans because she’s experienced housing insecurity herself. “My perspective was like, I’ve been there. I know how hard it is to get benefits, keep benefits, the recertification process, where the food banks are, when they’re open, when you should go to get the best selection vs. going at the end of the month and getting 30 cans of beans. That you possibly can’t even open!”
A bulk of the organization’s funding has historically come from private donations, “usually outside of Arkansas,” Reese said, and from organizations like AIDS United and Gilead Sciences, a pharmaceutical company that focuses on treatments for HIV/AIDS, hepatitis B, hepatitis C and other conditions.
If there’s a tension between abstinence-focused models like the ones the partnership funds and the efforts of Central Arkansas Harm Reduction, it’s one that is not presented as adversarial. “Recovery is included under the harm reduction umbrella,” Kincaid said. “It’s part of our family. It’s a way of reducing harm. It’s not the only way of reducing harm. If recovery worked for everybody, we wouldn’t have substance abuse problems. So obviously something else is needed.”
“But we’re the right hand in recovery,” Reese said. “You can’t do recovery if you’re dead. We meet people right where they are to keep them alive, to get them to the next step so they may be able to go to recovery.”
“Nobody objects to naloxone,” Jorgensen told us. “Of course you should save somebody’s life if they’re dying. But then you move toward things like fentanyl strips, and clean needle exchange programs, and safe use sites like the ones they have in Canada,” he said, and abatement efforts become more controversial. And, importantly, settlement funding becomes unlikely. “We won’t see all forms of harm reduction in Arkansas. There’s too much important work that everybody agrees on, so let’s do it.”
“Fentanyl took my child from me,” James told us. “But stigma is what nearly killed me. Stigma silences. Stigma makes you think that you or your loved one are less than. Stigma puts us in a place of isolation that we’re terrified to come out of. These leaders in the churches, in the schools, in the counties, in the cities, in the small towns, have got to be the ones to stand up and say something because their silence is going to keep families from information they need, and they are literally aiding and abetting. Stigma is simply not understanding that it can, and it might, be you. If my son had died from cancer, I would have had more support than I knew what to do with.”
Arkansas’s opioid problem, Lane echoed, “is something that every person needs to be involved with to solve. It can’t be pushed off on law enforcement, or the medical field, or any one field. It’s gonna take all of ’em to make a real difference.”
The post Fighting fentanyl: How Arkansas is spending its opioid settlement fortune appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A thousand young learners in the Little Rock School District are working on their reading skills with daily 15-minute, one-on-one sessions with tutors beamed in on the computer screen.
A student at Western Hills uses a new literacy tool.
District students and Jessica Reid Sliwerski, founder and CEO of the tutoring company Ignite, gave a demo today at Western Hills Elementary. Adding the Ignite tutoring program to the district’s literacy tools will hopefully help make up some of the pandemic learning loss that put students behind.
Werewolf content, always a winner.
Students using Ignite tutoring program in the 2021-2022 school year recorded an average of 2.4 weeks of reading progress for every week in the program, with no achievement gap for students of color, students with IEPs, multilingual learners or students receiving free or reduced-price lunches, a release from the district said.
The online tutoring program takes 15 minutes a day.
“We’re always looking for effective, innovative ways to improve outcomes and elevate academic excellence. That is why we are extremely excited to partner with Ignite! Reading to deliver targeted, one-on-one reading foundational skills tutoring that will ensure Little Rock’s students have a strong foundation in literacy – the building block for future success in life. We’re confident that a proven program like Ignite will be the spark that levels up our next generation of leaders,” said Little Rock School District Superintendent Dr. Jermall Wright.
The 15-minute sessions happen during the school day and help deliver differentiated instruction for students reading at different levels.
The post Cute kids learning alert! LRSD tries on virtual reader tutoring tool appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The Arkansas Legislature, aka the broligarchy, does not believe in the people’s right to the ballot process. This is as disappointing as is it unconstitutional, though the unconstitutionality isn’t stopping the bill’s sponsors.
Last month, another bill attempting to amend the constitution by hampering citizens ballot initiatives flew through the Senate. SB260 would require signatures of residents from at least 50 counties and requires a higher threshold of signatures from each of those counties than current law. HB1419 is similar, though the bill does not specify that it would amend the Arkansas Constitution. Members are hoping to sneak it through by avoiding constitutional amendment language.
HB1419 is more “streamlined” version of SB260, said Senate bill sponsor Jim Dotson. By streamlined, perhaps he means murkier. According to State Agencies Chair Blake Johnson, the bill is not a constitutional amendment but rather a statue. By removing constitutional amendment language, sponsors hope to avoid legal challenges since amendments must be referred to Arkansas voters, not passed via the standard bill drafting process.
Democrats didn’t fall for the cutesy legislative trick. “This [bill] plainly violates the language of the state constitution.,” said Sen. Clarke Tucker. “Let’s be real: this bill is about power and control. The legislature wants to have total control over the ballot initiative process.”
Tucker also noted that in a previous session, the legislature referred a similar amendment to the people of Arkansas, who ultimately voted it down. The defeated legislative referral had a lower threshold requirement than what HB1419 proposes.
Indeed, Arkansas voters have made it clear time and time again that they support and uphold their right to the ballot process. “The message I’ve received from Arkansans is ‘stop trying to mess with our ability to put issues on the ballot,’” said Tucker. Sen. Bart Hester disagreed; Arkansans are fickle and change their minds a lot, said Hester. HB1419 passed Senate State Agencies by a vote of of 5-2.
The legislature’s super majority is uninterested in protecting the people’s sacred right to propose laws via the ballot process. Rather, they are threatened by what Arkansas voters have chosen to pass and strike down via the ballot process.
Some members are also fearful of substantial primary reform, which have been successfully enacted via community-led ballot initiatives in other states. Primary reform, including methods like a like top-two primary system, discourage partisanship during primary elections. Arkansas’s current super majority exists because extremism provided a path to power. The ballot initiative process, as it currently stands in Arkansas law, directly threatens Arleg’s current power structure.
PS:Chair of Senate State Agencies, Blake Johnson, said in committee that our government is not a democracy but rather a republic, which was echoed by Sen. Dotson. This is incorrect: our government is a representative democracy. Our leaders are democratically elected to represent the people’s interests, not eradicate their power.
The post Legislators try new tricks to tank citizens’ right to put issues on the ballot appeared first on Arkansas Times.
You offer NARCAN Overdose Reversal Training at Wolfe Street. What is NARCAN and how does it work?
NARCAN is the name brand for what’s called a naloxone nasal spray. It’s really easy to use and it literally saves lots and lots of lives in Arkansas every year. The TL;DR on naloxone is that it reverses overdoses by replacing the opioids in your opioid receptors. It’s a miracle drug to combat overdoses from fentanyl and other synthetic opioids because that’s what’s really driving the problem. It’s not the people who are using the substances. It’s this synthetic opioid that’s really hit the streets hard. We’re finding fentanyl in a lot of drugs. People think they’re getting hydrocodone or a prescription opioid when they’re really getting a counterfeit fentanyl pill. It’s hundreds of times more powerful than a natural opioid. So people are stepping up and saying, “Hey, I’m willing to get trained and carry NARCAN in case I encounter an overdose.”
Why is fentanyl showing up in all of these drugs?
It comes through Arkansas in bulk. The DEA has put out a threat assessment for this year and talked about how there are a lot of distribution cells in Arkansas that send fentanyl onto other major markets in the Eastern United States. It’s just flooded the streets. It’s a cheaper, more powerful opioid. Folks who know they’re getting fentanyl, someone is saying, “Hey, try this, this is a much more potent version of what you’ve been using for the same or less money.” It’s synthetic, so it’s manufactured and it’s easier to get your hands on it. Also, some people who are trafficking drugs are covertly slipping fentanyl into other drugs for that hook and it’s really doing some damage.
Can you walk me through what one of your trainings consists of?
We do our trainings on the fourth Saturday of every month from 10:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. here at Wolfe Street. One of our certified peer recovery support specialists leads, so you’re hearing from someone with lived experience in addiction and recovery who’s made a career out of this and received extensive training about how to help people get the resources they need to recover. What we teach people is how opioids work, how NARCAN works and is administered, how to recognize an overdose, what you do when you recognize one and — very importantly — how you follow that up with resources for you as a person who has experienced that, and with resources for the person you’re helping.
The most important thing that we want people to know is that using NARCAN isn’t the end of the interaction. When you start the process, you need to call 911 and get medical help on the way. The NARCAN is going to reverse the overdose and revive that person, but it only works for a short amount of time. The other thing we want people to know is that when you’re performing that service for someone, you’re protected by Good Samaritan laws because you’re rendering aid to a person. Also, if you’re the one seeking medical help for an overdose, you’re not going to be arrested during that time.
How long has Wolfe Street been offering these trainings?
We started doing regular NARCAN trainings in January or February of last year. At first, it was difficult for us to access NARCAN, but a lot of that has changed because we have a partnership with the Arkansas Opioid Recovery Partnership, which is an initiative of the Arkansas Municipal League and the Association of Arkansas Counties. That partnership now funds all of the doses of NARCAN that we need. When you finish the training, we give everyone two doses. That said, individuals can actually walk into a pharmacy and request NARCAN. It can be expensive, but sometimes it’s covered by insurance and if you have the GoodRx app, it’s pretty affordable to get a two-dose carton. I think it’s around $46.
How many people have been trained so far?
Last year, we trained about 300 people. And we’ve trained 113 more people since Jan. 1. We’re going to be training probably more than a thousand people this year. Previously we were restricted on who we could train, but this partnership has busted that wide open so now we’re not only training people who have a direct connection to someone with a substance use disorder.
You also offer on-site trainings for groups outside of the Wolfe Street facility. Who are you seeing take advantage of this?
So far, we’ve been training people who live in sober living and chem-free houses. We’ve partnered with several of those to train house managers, staff members and some residents. We’re targeting and seeing a lot of traction with schools, nonprofit organizations and some larger churches as far away as Texarkana. We’ve also trained a lot of individuals coming in from government agencies who are in public-facing agencies.
If an individual or group wants to sign up for a training, what should they do?
You can sign up for either at wolfestreet.org/register. We do accept donations, we are a nonprofit organization, but it’s always free to anyone who wants to join us. The individual training is on the fourth Saturday of every month and I can’t imagine a Saturday where we would be overfull. We have a really large facility here on Louisiana Street. We have the capacity to comfortably train as many as 80 people on any given Saturday.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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Gov. Sarah Sanders has appointed Kevin Crass, a Little Rock lawyer, to the University of Arkansas System Board. Crass replaces C.C. “Cliff” Gibson III of Monticello.
Crass of the Friday, Eldredge & Clark law firm recently served as the head of Sanders’ transition team. He’s a long ally of Sanders’ father, Mike Huckabee.
Here’s what Max Brantley wrote about him when he was announced to lead the transition team:
He’s been a Huckabee man since he began defending the then-lieutenant governor against multiple ethics complaints and has stood by him through Mansion expense account boodling, hard drive destruction, and all the rest of the Huckabee years, now set for a reboot. He knows where the bodies are buried, in other words, and has shepherded the Huckster legally into his richly remunerative post-gubernatorial life.
Gibson had been the most vocal critic on the board of the deal UA System President Donald Bobbitt has been cooking to buy, through a nonprofit, the for-profit University of Phoenix.
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The Bagel Shop
Monica Chatterton, owner and operator of Flake Baby Pastry — the wildly delicious cottage bakery known for its signature flakes (like Pop-Tarts, but 1,000 times better), inventive cakes and fun variety boxes — has signed on to create and run a pastry program for The Bagel Shop‘s flagship brick and mortar to be located at 1501 S. Main St. in downtown’s SoMa district. The announcement comes on the heels of The Bagel Shop adding restaurant industry veteran McNeill Eggart to its team. Eggart most recently worked at Raduno Brick Oven & Barroom.
“We couldn’t be more thrilled to have Monica as part of our team! These partnerships line up perfectly with our mission of building a strong community of bakers and service industry professionals with Arkansas roots,” said Myles Roberson, co-owner of the Bagel Shop. “Monica’s dedication to her craft, her creativity, and her modern flavor choices make her the perfect fit to lead The Bagel Shop’s pastry program. This is a big step for us and we’re ecstatic to continue to build out our dream team,” Roberson added.
A press release from The Bagel Shop said that Flake Baby fanatics need not worry. Chatterton’s baked creations will be available at The Bagel Shop very soon.
Flake Baby Pastry“Flying solo these past few years has been deeply rewarding and taught me so much, but I’m super excited to join a team of passionate and talented folks who will push me to continue to grow and learn,” Chatterton said.
In addition to Flake Baby Pastry’s traditional offerings, Chatterton said she is looking forward to creating her favorite nostalgic pastries with modern twists. “I’ve been lucky enough to build a successful business within the confines of cottage law, but I’m really looking forward to getting back into a commercial kitchen where I’ll be able to thrive creatively. Also, BIG thanks and shoutout to my amazing friends and customers who have supported my journey as Flake Baby Pastry, it’s kept me going through the pandemic and been a joy to meet so many incredible people. I can’t wait to keep baking for y’all!”
Trevor Papsadora, co-owner of The Bagel Shop, said he was elated when Chatterton agreed to join the project. “Monica and I have connected through our shared love of food on both a personal and professional level. She’s doing an amazing job of bringing cool stuff to Central Arkansas. She’s a total badass, and I’m excited to share our kitchen with her! It’s funny, Flake Baby Pastry was an Instagram account that Myles and I both followed before we moved back to Arkansas. I’ve been admiring her work for a long time, you can tell she cares a whole hell of a lot.”
The Bagel Shop began in July 2022 as a farmers market pop-up bagel operation that soon became a Little Rock phenomenon, bringing in long lines and crowds to their pop-ups despite brutal summer temperatures. When The Bagel Shop announced the news about the SoMa storefront in January of this year, Roberson and Papsadora said they hoped to be open by early summer and and plan on serving breakfast and lunch five days a week, from 8 a.m.-3 p.m. Thu.-Mon.
Flake Baby Pastry has been the one-woman cottage bakery run by Chatterton out of her home in North Little Rock for the past five years. Chatterton is sunsetting Flake Baby for the time being but isn’t closing the door forever. You can check out her delicious Instagram here www.instagram.com/flake_baby_pastry to keep up with Monica’s food goings on in and out of the Bagel Shop kitchen.
The Bagel Shop currently operates out of a commissary kitchen in Little Rock Arkansas and offers catering services, pop-up bake sales, and bagels & cream cheese for pick up on Thursdays and Saturdays in the parking lot of their soon-to-open location at 1501 South Main Street. You can find more information and sign up for the email list at www.thebagel.shop or find out all of the latest details on Instagram at www.instagram.com/thebagel.shop .
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The onslaught of bad bills coming out of this General Assembly is nearly impossible to comprehensively follow. One especially pernicious proposal we haven’t talked about is up for a final vote in the Senate today: House Bill 1410, dubbed the “Youth Hiring Act of 2023” would dispense with the requirement that businesses who want to hired children under age 16 receive a permit from the state Department of Labor. It’s sponsored by Rep. Rebecca Burkes (R-Lowell) and Sen. Clint Penzo (R-Springdale)
Laura Kellams, Northwest Arkansas Director at Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, has a Twitter thread that outlines why this is a bad idea.
Arkansas is on the cusp of dispensing with the permits businesses obtain to hire workers younger than 16. Doing this would make it easier to commit child labor violations. The claim is that the permits are useless pieces of paper. They are not. They protect kids.#arpx #arleg
— Laura Kellams (@LauraKellams) March 1, 2023
This bill is part of what appears to be part of a nationwide effort to ease child labor restrictions. It comes as the Biden administration has announced plans to crack down on child labor following the U.S. Labor Department’s revelation that they have seen a nearly 70% increase in child labor violations since 2018.
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Distracted drivers who cause accidents will face significant extra penalties under a law that passed through the Arkansas House yesterday and is now headed to the Senate side.
State law already makes a crime out of texting and driving, but if fiddling with your phone contributes to an accident, there aren’t currently any additional penalties for that.
House Bill 1486 by Ashley Hudson (D-Little Rock) and Josh Miller (R-Heber Springs) adds some. Texting drivers who cause accidents would face additional fines up to $2,500, up to a year in prison and up to 100 hours of community service.
HB1486 cleared the House Wednesday with 80 votes, and now heads to the Senate side, where it’s sponsored by Sen. Missy Irvin (R-Mountain View).
The law is named after a woman who was killed in 2022 by a distracted driver, Hudson said.
Ashton Rae Woods, a missionary who came home to Arkansas during the COVID-19 pandemic, died in a car accident caused by a distracted driver on Oct. 7, 2022. Woods’ dad reached out to Hudson see what current law applies, and Hudson said she was surprised to find out there are no enhancements on the books.
“We do have fines for people who are pulled over for texting and driving, but no current enhancements for people who are texting and cause serious injury or death,” Hudson said.
“Just weeks after his daughter was killed, her dad decided to take Ashton’s legacy of living a life of service and try to make her death a service to her community as well,” she said.
To a question from Rep. Justin Gonzalez (R-Okolona) about what constitutes distracted driving, Hudson indicated that listening to music or talking on a hands-free device is not included, but messing with your phone and not watching the road would be.
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The 90-some people who signed up to share their thoughts on Gov. Sarah Sanders‘ Arkansas LEARNS universal voucher bill got five minutes each, and testimony was still rolling at 6:30 p.m. Members of the House Education Committee planned to hear them out, then vote on Senate Bill 294 tomorrow in a special afternoon meeting.
Advocates speaking in favor of the Arkansas LEARNS bill included private school administrators, homeschoolers, young Republicans and a Washington County Mom for Liberty who said she has evidence proving critical race theory has infiltrated public schools. Supporters of the plan to provide vouchers to any and all Arkansas students within three years said public schools are one-size-fits-all systems that don’t do the trick for all. Some of them said it’s time to admit public schools are failing, churning out under-achievers who boost crime rates.
Little Rock resident Heather Turchi linked the quality of public education to high crime rates in Little Rock and Pine Bluff, and said injecting CVS vs. Walgreens-style competition into the education environment will fix that.
Former state Sen. Joyce Elliott opposes the Arkansas LEARNS voucher bill.
Former educator and state Sen. Joyce Elliott rejected the theory that running schools like competing businesses will make them better.
“Something that really bugs me that we keep talking about is competition. We need to grasp that public schools were never meant to be a business and they’re not businesses,” Elliott said. “They should be about cooperation, not competition.”
Other opponents of the Arkansas LEARNS bill, most of them teachers who stand to make a nice raise if Arkansas LEARNS passes but oppose it nonetheless, said public schools offer all kinds of programs for all kinds of students and are far from one size fits all. They agreed Arkansas public schools need lots of improvements, but said Arkansas LEARNS will make them worse.
Special Education advocate Allison Sweatman noted that private schools won’t accept all students even if they come with voucher money in hand, injecting discrimination into the public education environment.
A member of the Teenage Republicans of Arkansas speaks in favor of Arkansas LEARNS.
A number of superintendents added their voices to the opposition, noting that Arkansas educators were largely left out during the crafting of the 144-page Senate Bill 294, and that both school administrators and teachers have been belittled and accused of lying when they questioned why.
Mount Ida Superintendent Tristan Knoedel said he hated looking his veteran teachers in the eye yesterday and explaining to them that while new teachers are likely getting raises of up to $14,000, they’ll see only $2,000 raises. And he pointed to evidence that vouchers don’t move the needle on student achievement. Sending money to fund vouchers will close rural schools, and that will kill the communities that revolve around those schools, he said.
Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families Education Director Olivia Gardner also rejected the talking point shared by Arkansas LEARNS supporters that vouchers will boost test scores.
“I disagree with the assessment that vouchers work,” she said. “We actually have decades of research that have shown us that vouchers do not improve educational outcomes. At the same time they worsen outcomes for students who remain in public schools.” Vouchers will drain public dollars from public schools and create a tiered system that divides students based on income, she said.
Career educator Deanna Klaus said this bill doesn’t focus on the students who need it most. “They deserve our best. They do not deserve for us to give up on them,” she said.
Harmony Grove Superintendent Heath Bennett said putting more resources in public schools is the way, not diverting money from the for vouchers.
“For some of these students, the absolute best place they have is from 7:30 to 2:30 every day,” he said.
Bryant Superintendent Karen Walters said she’s run the numbers and can probably make it work, but in Hector, where she used to work, and in other small districts, the budget won’t support raises without serious cuts.
Supporters of Arkansas LEARNS had different priorities.
What matters is parents’ choice to take children out of public schools in favor of private schools on the taxpayer dime, Jason Maxwell of Gravette said.
Jessica Saum, 2022 Arkansas teacher of the year, was also in favor of the bill, which she said will help students find alternatives to what are sometimes overly restrictive special education environments in public schools. In addition to the raises and maternity leave in the bill, Saum said she likes the emphasis on early childhood education. She said she was not aware the bill does not provide funding for expanding pre-K access.
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The underdog Democratic Party of Arkansas sent out a plucky press release Tuesday evening to point out that after a daylong hearing, we still don’t have a good explanation for how the state will cover vouchers for any student who wants to go to a private school or homeschool. The long-term effects on public school budgets are still unknown.
The Democrats’ message came as people were still testifying before the House Education Committee on Senate Bill 294, a 144-page monster that includes significant public school teacher raises even as it fuels the privatization of education in the state.
Here’s the Democrats’ take:
Education Secretary and LEARNS Sponsor Admit Possible Reductions in Foundation Funding for Public Schools, Fail to Address Bipartisan Concerns on State and Federal Funding, Accountability for Tax Dollars, Disability Requirements at Private Schools, and CRT
LITTLE ROCK – Today, the House Education Committee heard testimony on Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s LEARNS voucher scam. Bill sponsor Representative Keith Brooks (R-Little Rock) and Education Secretary Jacob Oliva heard bipartisan criticism from committee members, policy experts, educators, and parents.
“It is our job to vet and flesh out legislation, especially anything that would change the face of public education in Arkansas,” said Representative Vivian Flowers (D-Pine Bluff). “Constituents in all of our districts have questions on how this bill will work and how we will be able to pay for it. Sadly, we did not get those answers today.”
Rep. Flowers asked what the projections for funding a “universal” program in year three were based on in the fiscal impact statement. State Budget Director Robert Brech confirmed that if there are a higher number of students leaving the public schools than projected, the voucher amounts may need to be prorated and that the state “will shift that foundation funding from that school to the private or homeschool.” He noted that scenario would be a significant cost reduction for public schools and school districts in Arkansas.
Representative Denise Garner (D-Fayetteville) asked if private schools receiving public dollars through the proposed vouchers would have to “comply with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) as public schools must.” Rep. Brooks stated that “this legislation does not address that.”
In a striking moment, Rep. Brooks confirmed that if LEARNS were to become law a private school receiving public dollars would be able to refuse a student because of their disability. Under pointed questioning by Rep. Garner, Rep. Brooks could only cite personal experience of some private schools “wanting to be accepting” where they can.
“What is CRT?” questioned Rep. Flowers. “We are putting it in state law, and our Education Secretary cannot even define what it is. He was asked in the Senate Education Committee and again today. How can teachers follow it if you don’t even know how to define it?” Rep. Flowers asked why the LEARNS proposal prohibits instruction or discussion of sexual orientation in a “country where gay marriage is legal” and where many students have same-sex parents. Secretary Oliva said the state had an obligation to teach “all sides” of our nation’s history.
“This bill will define you,” said Superintendent Heath Bennett of Harmony Grove in Benton while speaking against the bill. “As a superintendent I have been called a ‘liar’ and ‘untrustworthy’ by lawmakers. There are a whole lot of students that will never get accepted into private schools [even with a voucher]. As the salaries are compounded, is the money going to be there? In year three [of LEARNS], who knows?”
“If you don’t have 800 students this is not going to work for you,” said Bryant Superintendent Karen Walters regarding teacher pay raises in LEARNS. Before serving Bryant, the state’s ninth largest school district, Walters served as superintendent in smaller districts such as Hector. In her opposition to LEARNS, Walter noted that she has numerous teachers whose salaries are paid for via federal dollars and LEARNS does not provide funding to meet the $50,000 annual salary.
Republican Representatives Hope Hendren Duke (R-Gravette), Charlene Fite (R-Van Buren), and DeAnn Vaught (R-Horatio) said that superintendents and teachers in their districts are questioning them about how this will affect their limited federal education dollars. “I have no hard answers for them,” admitted Rep. Duke. Neither Rep. Brooks nor Secretary Oliva provided firm clarity, citing decisions would have to be made “district by district.”
“The teacher pay plan that the Governor campaigned on is not the raise that’s in this bill,” said Rep. Flowers. “The raises in LEARNS come with restrictions and waivers that guarantee not all schools will be able to pay their educators and staff fairly.”
The bill is expected to be voted on Wednesday afternoon upon adjournment of the House Floor.
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An Arkansas medical marijuana patient has filed a lawsuit in Pulaski County Circuit Court accusing a Little Rock cannabis testing lab and three cultivators of fraudulently inflating THC content in their clients’ marijuana and asking for a jury to determine compensatory and punitive damages.
The suit claims testing lab Steep Hill Arkansas and three of the state’s cannabis cultivators intentionally misrepresented THC content on product labels because products with higher THC content are more valuable.
Jakie Hanan, an Arkansas resident and medical marijuana patient, is the plaintiff in the suit filed by Saline County attorney Luther Sutter.
In the suit, the plaintiffs say they tested 36 samples of marijuana flower and found that local labs produced results within 10% of each other while Steep Hill, according to its labels, averaged 25% higher than other labs.
In the 36 tests, the biggest difference was in the Rainmaker flower produced by BOLD Team cultivation, the suit says. In that example, Steep Hill found the flower had a THC content of 28.48%, while the plaintiff’s lab found it had 18.74% THC. The plaintiffs allege that Steep Hill reported a higher THC percentage in 35 of the 36 tests of cannabis flower, according to the suit.
Hanan was part of a similar federal suit filed by Sutter last year before they asked U.S. District Judge Kristine Baker to dismiss the case. Baker dismissed the case earlier this month without prejudice on the condition that any new federal case would be filed in her court.
The Arkansas Advocate said Steep Hill denied the claims and will seek to have the case dismissed.
Here’s what Steep Hill CEO Brandon Thornton told them:
“We are an ISO-accredited lab and have our processes audited each and every year by reputable 3rd parties, which we’ve done since we’ve been in business,” said Steep Hill CEO and co-owner Brandon Thornton. “We stand behind the quality, integrity and efficacy of our lab, employees and impartial test results.”
The three cultivators named as defendants did not respond to Arkansas Advocate’s requests for comment.
The Arkansas Advocate said that both the Alcoholic Beverage Control division and the Arkansas Department of Health say that they do not have regulatory authority over testing labs.
The defendants in the suit filed last week are Overlook Partners LLC doing business as Steep Hill Arkansas, Brandon Thornton, Brent Whittington, BOLD Team LLC, NSMC-OPCO LLC doing business as Natural State Medicinal, Osage Creek Cultivation and John Does 1-10.
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Is there a pipeline from rural Arkansas to “American Idol”? Not one, but two women from our state have been plucked from their small communities to appear on the famous singing show. Two weeks ago, Holly Grove’s Lucy Love scored a “yes” from all three judges (Katy Perry, Luke Bryan and Lionel Richie), and on Sunday, March 5, Marybeth Byrd — a 21-year-old college student and radio personality from Northeast Arkansas — will attempt to do the same.
Byrd still lives in Armorel, the three-digit-population town where she grew up, but this isn’t her first time singing on national television. In 2019, when she was only 17, Byrd competed on “The Voice,” where she was coached by John Legend into the top 8.
“Being so young and doing something that big — it was an amazing experience, don’t get me wrong — but I didn’t really know who I was,” Byrd said, describing her time on “The Voice.” “I lost my grandpa in the midst of that, right in the middle of that process. It was a really hard time as such a young person, exploding into the world in that way, being thrown into it. So now, I feel like this new opportunity with a new show has kind of been a saving grace for me.”
Before finding success on “The Voice,” Byrd fell in love with music via her family’s passion for it. She never took lessons, but her grandfather on her dad’s side and grandmother on her mom’s side were both musically-inclined and were informally involved in her musical education. Eventually, Byrd’s knack for singing became a tool that allowed her to overcome a childhood stutter.
On top of her pursuit of music, Byrd studies Strategic Communications at Arkansas State University and works as one of the hosts at KJBX, a radio station in Jonesboro.
ABC/Eric McCandlessMarybeth ByrdOn Sunday, Byrd will sing “If It Hadn’t Been For Love” by the SteelDrivers, selected because of the “rawness” and “realness” that she hears in Chris Stapleton’s voice. Though she characterizes her own vocal style as sharing some of Stapleton’s raspiness, her rendition of the song will be softer and cleaner. In addition to Stapleton, some of Byrd’s favorite musicians include Adele, Ed Sheeran and Elvis Presley.
Regarding her audition, Byrd was significantly more nervous than she expected to be. “This is a weird thing to say, but the judges all just looked so perfect,” she said. “None of them had a flaw.”
Byrd obviously couldn’t reveal the results of her audition, but in a preview clip from “American Idol,” Luke Bryan says he sees “a very bright future” for her, so we’re feeling hopeful.
So far, Byrd has two songs out in the world — “Just Ain’t Right” and “Truly Livin’” — both of which can be found on Spotify. Word on the street is that she has a new single coming out on Friday as well. In addition to watching Byrd on ABC at 7 p.m. CST on Sunday, you can follow her on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.
The post Marybeth Byrd is the second Arkansan to compete on ‘American Idol’ this season appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The Arkansas Times office received a letter from a third grader in Northern Virginia today. She asked for help in teaching her school about the state of Arkansas and included some questions.
Can our beloved commenters help get this girl an A?
Here’s what she wants to know:
- Why do you live in your state? / What first brought your family there?
- How do you make money / What is your job?
- What does your state look like?
- What do people do for fun?
- What animals live there?
- What traditional food/recipes does your state have?
- What type of music is native to your state?
- Do you have a state athletic team?
- What geographic features are unique to your state?
The post You’ve got homework: open line edition appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Officials with the Central Arkansas Library Systems called in the press for a media day Tuesday, and while they detailed several upcoming events, the renderings for the renovations of the Main Library acted as the grand finale.
Though not set in stone, Polk Stanley Wilcox Architects whipped up some proposed configurations for the space. Nate Coulter, CALS executive director, said that the expected layout maximizes efficiency for both the public and employees. One rendering showed that children would have an outdoor and indoor space to hang out with the Darragh Center adjacent to Cumberland Street being reconfigured as the youth services wing. Children would also have easy access to a planned park across 2nd Street and to the proposed teen area on the floor above.
Polk Stanley Wilcox CONFIGURATION: This proposed rendering shows a new layout for the five floors at the Main Library.Click here for a better look at the configuration rendering.
Books would be located across three consecutive floors and the top floor of the library would transform into primarily public meeting spaces. The basement of the library, which currently houses thousands of donated used books, would gain studio, podcasting and video suites. The library rendering also shows the existing elevator space would be filled up with books and other programming, while an outdoor addition would house the new elevator.
The renovation isn’t expected to start until the fall of 2023, Lance Ivy, the CALS director of operations, said. Officials set public meeting dates from 10 a.m.-noon Saturday, March 11, and from 5:30-7:30 p.m. Thursday, March 30, for folks to weigh in on what services they’d like to be included in the renovation. The meetings will be held at the Ron Robinson Theater.
CALSPOSSIBLE OUTDOOR SHOT: This rendering highlights the possible youth outdoor area that would connect to a nearby green space.Coulter said that the library is working with about $20 million in bond millage funds for the project. While construction is active — the library will likely open back up in 14-16 months after renovations begin — about 50 staff members will move out to the Little Rock Port to keep things up and running across the branches. Many used books will also be transported out the to port, where the used book sales will be held in the interim.
Mary HenniganA LIBRARY OF USED BOOKS: In the basement of the CALS Main Library, shelves are full of used books.A “Mini Main” will come into play around July 2023 in three locations near the Main Library as an effort to keep library services downtown. This idea was met with some backlash in January, and library staff wasn’t able to say Tuesday if the spaces would return to their current state after the renovation.
The gallery space at Concordia Hall will be transformed into an area for the children and teens to gather, the nearby meeting rooms will serve as a computer lab and what is now the bookstore area will become a space for books, reading and administrative work. The artwork from the gallery will be featured around the branches during construction, staff said.
CALSA NEW VIEW: This rendering shows the proposed easy access from youth to teen space.Brant Collins, a CALS content creator, acted as a tour guide following the press conference and with his “What’s more punk than a public library?” shirt, he showed all the nooks and crannies from the basement to the fifth floor.
Collins explained how libraries bring so many opportunities to the community, and said that the Main Library was “not just books on shelves.” He noted online audio books, leasable rooms for weddings and other special occasions, hundreds of video games available for teens, a safe space for children to wait after school and a building the unsheltered community can spend time in.
On the fourth floor in the teen center, Collins talked about how the library also was a safe space for the kids. He said that staff was always focusing on programs around themed months or LGBTQ+ support. A banner that read, “Young, gifted and Black” hung at the entry way.
“So I have issues with what’s happening in our legislature because we are the safe space for some of these people,” he said.
Throughout the tour, Collins acknowledged several areas that needed more space to create a better flow for efficient work. For the library’s marketing department, Collins said that there was limited room to print posters, cut posters and work on distribution. He was also particularly excited about the upcoming podcasting and audio studios, which would be open to the public. Collins said he was a filmmaker himself and was hoping to have enough equipment publicly available if someone wanted to make a short film.
LIBRARY SUPPORT: Brant Collins said that it’s important the library be an accepting place.
The renovation is still in the planning stages, so Collins is still waiting to see what will come of his workplace. He said that the public meetings will show what the community wants and needs.
Other announcements during the press conference included upcoming events across CALS like the early-spring opening of the playground at the Hillary Rodham Clinton Children’s Library and Learning Center and the branch’s 10 year celebration, Manager Shya Washington-Webb said.
A bookmobile is on its way, too, Ivy said. Though not exactly like the one pictured here, a compact sprinter van will be coming soon to reach more communities.
CALSVROOM VROOM: Lance Ivy, director of operations, said that the bookmobile will increase outreach to places like assisted living homes and daycares.CALS will also observe Earth Day during the whole month of April, complete with a “Naturally Arkansas” program to encourage natural plants for pollinators on April 22, said Ellen Samples, the youth services coordinator.
CALS app users can also expect the Bibliocommons software to return to their smart devices, said Lisa Donovan, director of literacy and learning said. A change of services didn’t perform the way they were expected to, and Bibliocommons is the return to what users had previously.
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The House Judiciary Committee will take up two controversial bills next week and the chair of the committee advised members to prepare for an all-day affair.
The committee on Tuesday did not take up Sen. Gary Stubblefield’s bid to effectively ban gender-affirming care for youth or Sen. Dan Sullivan’s bid to open up librarians to prosecution if they lend “obscene” materials. But chair Rep. Carol Dalby (R-Texarkana) said the committee will hear those bills on Tuesday, March 7.
Dalby advised members that it could be a long day and to be prepared for the committee to reconvene in the afternoon after the full House meets that day.
Stubblefield (R-Branch) is sponsoring SB199 concerning medical malpractice and gender transition in minors. The bill would open up medical providers to medical malpractice suits and other regulations for providing gender-affirming care. It’s the bill that inspired Sen. Matt McKee (R-Pearcy) to ask a transgender woman testifying before him if she has a penis.
Sullivan (R- Jonesboro) is sponsoring SB81 concerning libraries and obscene materials. The bill would give elected officials the power to ban books and make librarians criminally liable if they allow minors access to certain materials.
A hearing on Sullivan’s bill in the Senate Judiciary Committee produced this interesting moment:
https://arktimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/RPReplay_Final16769258091.mp4The post Mark your calendars: House Judiciary to take up gender-affirming care and library bills next week appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Rep. Keith Brooks (R-Little Rock), House sponsor of the Arkansas LEARNS bill, kicked off the morning session by singing the praises of the free market’s hand in education and painting his quest to pass overarching education reform legislation featuring school vouchers for all as a holy war.
“Arkansas LEARNS is our call to arms,” he told the crowd packed into the Big MAC auditorium on the state Capitol grounds. “It’s a battle for Arkansas’s education future and we refuse to stand down.”
brian chilsonFrom left, Rep. Keith Brooks, Education Secretary Jacob Oliva and DFA Administrator Robert Brech answer questions on the school choice bill.Hundreds of educators, parents and supporters of traditional public schools are still fighting for the other side, though. The hearing didn’t start until 9 a.m., but the crowds started assembling hours before. By shortly after 8 p.m. all seats in the Big MAC hearing room were taken, with overflow filling the lobby.
These opponents point to evidence that diverting public money to private and charter schools increases socioeconomic segregation and will leave poor and under-resourced students behind in public schools starved of the attention and money they need. The same free market arguments we’re hearing on vouchers were made to sell us on charter schools, and those haven’t boosted Arkansas’s test scores even after more than a decade of trying.
On Tuesday morning, legislators poured out questions about how vouchers for any student who wants one and teacher raises across the board will get paid for without pulling money from small schools already on tight budgets.
The tide seemed to be turning Tuesday, with Republicans less reticent than they were before to point out flaws in the rush bill that got filed a week ago and is being shoved through the legislative process at lighting speed. Brooks defended his bill as thorough and crafted with input from a quarter of Arkansas state legislators, but few of the representatives on the House Education Committee seemed prepared to sign off quite yet.
Rep. DeAnn Vaught had lots of questions about how rural districts would cover new costs.
Republican Reps. DeAnn Vaught (Horatio), Steven Walker (Horseshoe Bend), Hope Duke (Gravette) and Ron McNair (Harrison) along with Democrat Reps. Denise Garner (Fayetteville) and Vivian Flowers (Pine Bluff) spent roughly three hours asking Brooks, Arkansas Education Secretary Jacob Oliva and Department of Finance and Administration administrator Robert Brech how all the bells and whistles contained in the 144-page bill will get paid for, and who’s on the hook for the bill.
Duke worried schools might be forced to lay off teachers. Oliva assured her that should any districts find themselves in that position, “We will work with them.”
Vaught noted it’s not clear what school districts’ responsibilities will be toward the raises promised in Arkansas LEARNS, especially for positions funded with federal dollars. Brech said he’s mapped out a budget for the first three years, but that future funding will be up to the legislature to hash out when we get there.
“Can we see the matrix to see how these funds will be utilized before we vote on the bill? I’m trying to figure out how we’re going to pay for all these things,” Garner asked Brech, who agreed to share what he has so far with he caveat that the budget isn’t final.
brian chilsonCount Rep. McNair of Harrison unconvinced.The voucher component of the Arkansas LEARNS bill is expected to cost $185 million in new spending by year three, Brech said. But since we don’t know or even have any good projections about how many students will want a voucher, there’s really no way to say. Flowers noted Arizona found itself short when they projected $30 million in voucher expenses but actually needed $300 million. And the amount set aside for year three will only cover half of the current private school and homeschool students Arkansas already has. Do we need to set caps on how many vouchers we give out? Flowers asked.
Brech said homeschoolers will likely not ever claim the full voucher amount because only certain expenses are allowed, and that many private schools won’t want to accept vouchers. Still, he acknowledged those future lawmakers could face a choice between funding vouchers or funding existing public schools.
To questions about salary scales, Oliva said the LEARNS bill does away with the state teacher salary schedule and calls on local districts to implement their own, which means the state will no longer pay step increases for years of service or graduate degrees. Oliva couched this shift as an opportunity for more local control, as districts can choose to give raises based on other things, like working on a high-needs campus.
Brooks noted that teacher salaries are being boosted so much under Arkansas LEARNS, with starting salaries going from $36,000 to $50,000, that the existing state salary is already blown out of the water since it tops out at only a little over $50,000.
Oliva acknowledged that the state will no longer pay more for educators with advanced degrees, but said we still value and need these educators.
Districts can still pony up raises for advanced degrees if they have the money for it.
Rep. Ron McNair (R-Harrison) pointed out that a lot of the questions people are asking about the bill get the same answer, that the details will be determined in the rule-making process, which would be finished up by July 1.
“Who all will be at the table?” McNair asked. “It seems like when the bill passes out then we’re going to decide how it’s going to work.”
McNair said he’s not really buying that Arkansas LEARNS is “a public school bill,” and that he’s been contacted by financial institutions in his district who can’t make the numbers work. “They can’t figure out where the money is coming from.”
Flowers pushed back on the anti-CRT and “don’t say gay” facets of Arkansas LEARNS, and the strict language limiting sex education. Arkansas has the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the nation, so we should probably be teaching more sex education in schools, not further limiting it, she said.
Flowers also noted that there are loads of pretty awful theories out there that could potentially be taught in Arkansas schools. The bell curve theory that Black people are intellectually inferior to white people is one, she said. Why does the Arkansas LEARNS bill only target critical race theory, which we already know isn’t being taught in Arkansas’s K-12 public schools? she asked.
Oliva said the bill follows the language in Gov. Sarah Sanders‘ executive order banning critical race theory.
Flowers also took issue with a provision in the bill allowing D and F schools at risk of state takeover to contract with a charter school company to avoid takeover. State takeovers haven’t worked, and in fact have put districts in worse shape than they were before. How will this charter set up be better?
This is another local control issue, Oliva said. Districts can choose to hire charters to help them avoid state takeover, but they don’t have to, he said.
The committee took a midday lunch break and will reconvene after the regular full House session that started at 1:30 p.m. Public testimony will happen this afternoon, and 96 people are signed up to speak on Arkansas LEARNS.
Even with public engagement like that, it’s virtually a foregone conclusion that the bill will pass. Arkansas’s legislative Republicans blocked former Gov. Asa Hutchinson from passing teacher raises last summer, likely saving pay boosts as a spoonful of sugar to help the unpalatable vouchers go down.
While a few rural Republican legislators are joining Democrats in opposition, putting up a fight because of the economic and existential threats Arkansas LEARNS poses to small and poor districts, the numbers to move the bill to the governor’s desk are already there.
The post Hundreds come to the Capitol, pack into House hearing on Arkansas LEARNS appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Early this morning on the Capitol steps, Republican Rep. Jim Wooten of Beebe told a crowd of educators that he would vote “no” on The LEARNS Act. “I’m voting no because wrong is wrong and right is right,” he said.
According to Wooten, threats have been made to certain House lawmakers regarding their position on the bill. Wooten told this morning’s group that funding would be withheld from Representatives’ districts if they vote “no” on The LEARNS Act. This is not the first LEARNS-related threat that has been reported.
During this morning’s House Education Committee, several Republican representatives seemed wary of specific LEARNS policies. But so far, no Republican committee member has stated they are a “no” vote.
Rep. John Carr (R-Rogers) told a constituent that 20 House members will vote “no” on LEARNS, indicating that at least two Republicans (Wooten being one) will vote against the Governor’s signature education plan.
As the 94th General Assembly plows ahead, there are concerns that under the Sanders administration, representatives must toe the party line. Arm-twisting by the administration is meant to silence the public and bully legislators. To some extent, the coercion is working.
Wooten also communicated with teachers attending the House Ed Committee that a poll was conducted among House members to determine how they will vote on LEARNS. We do not know if the poll was issued before or after threats to withhold state funding as political punishment for a “no” vote.
Wooten is one of several Republican House members who have vehemently opposed voucher expansion, which is a central component of the omnibus LEARNS bill.
A House floor vote on the bill is expected tomorrow — Wednesday, March 1st.
The post House Republican: legislators being threatened to vote ‘yes’ on LEARNS bill or they will lose district funding appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Origami Sake, the new sake production facility located in Hot Springs at 2360 E. Grand Ave., was featured in a story yesterday published by The New York Times about the sake boom currently underway in the U.S.
Origami’s founders, Matt Bell and Ben Bell, saw this boom coming, as we reported in October of last year.
From The New York Times:
In Hot Springs, Ark., a 24,000-square-foot brewery for Origami Sake — almost 10 times the size of Kato’s new brewery — is scheduled to open in May. Master brewers from Nanbu Bijin, a Japanese brewery, will act as advisers, but the financing and ownership is American.
“It will be the largest U.S.-owned brewery, with a capacity of one million liters a year,” said Matt Bell, the chief executive of Origami. “The goal, really, is to move sake into the mainstream.”
If Arkansas seems an odd place to put a sake brewery, the state is by far the leading producer of rice in the United States, growing nearly 40 percent of the national production. As for the other major necessity for sake brewing, Mr. Bell points out that Hot Springs is renowned for the quality of its water.
Ben Bell, Origami’s vice president of operations, spent two years brewing sake in Japan at Nanbu Bijin brewery. Origami President Matt Bell, a former partner and co-founder of Entegrity Energy Partners, has an extensive background in construction, solar and energy production. In addition to being the largest U.S.-owned sake brewery, it will also be generating all of its power with renewable energy solar panels onsite, Matt Bell told us in September of last year. Additionally, Isbell Farms is using solar energy to produce Origami rice, “which will make it one of the most sustainable beverages probably made in the U.S.,” Matt Bell said.
The Times article also mentioned New York wine importer Skurnik Wines, Ben Bell’s former employer from 2019-2022.
The upward trajectory of sake sales has been mirrored at Skurnik, said Jamie Graves, who manages its Japanese beverage lineup.
The jump in the last few years has been particularly noticeable in retail, as you might expect, given the restaurant shutdowns during the pandemic.
“Retail sake exploded in 2020 and never went away,” Mr. Graves said. “It went from 15 to 20 percent of our sake sales to 40 percent, staying steady even after restaurants reopened.”
The NYT reporter spoke to the owner of a Japanese goods and ingredients store in Oakland, California, who spoke of sake’s versatility, something Bell also illustrated when he spoke to Arkansas Times last year.
When Yoko Kumano and Kayoko Akabori opened Umami Mart in Oakland, Calif., in 2012, specializing in Japanese goods and ingredients, they did not sell sake. But they got a license in 2014, and now, Ms. Kumano said, sake is their No. 1 seller.
She has also seen an evolution in her clientele. In 2014, customers would ask for a dry sake and maybe for a daiginjo, a common style.
“Now, people are waking up to the fact that sake is much more versatile than people thought,” she said. “They are trying sake with foods other than sushi, and now, they are asking for nama — unpasteurized sake — or nigori — unfiltered sake.”
Here’s Ben Bell from our story last year:
“We want to show 100% that you can pair sake with anything,” Ben Bell said. “If I want a good glass of wine, I don’t have to go to a French or Italian restaurant. If I want a good beer, I can go to any kind of restaurant. That’s what sake’s future is. It’s easier to pair with food than wine and it’s more versatile. The biggest change is sake taking its place as a legit category that you can find anywhere,” Ben Bell said.
The post Origami Sake featured in The New York Times story ‘Sake is Booming in America’ appeared first on Arkansas Times.
For the first time in over a decade, the Foo Fighters are returning to Arkansas on Wednesday, June 14. Hosted at the Walmart AMP — an outdoor amphitheater in Rogers with a capacity of 9,500 — the concert is one of the three headlining shows that the Foo Fighters have announced for this year amidst nearly a dozen other festival appearances. We’re not sure why they chose Arkansas, but we’re grateful.
The Foo Fighters’ most recent album is 2021’s “Medicine at Midnight,” their 10th LP and the record on which they were touring when their drummer, Taylor Hawkins, tragically died in March 2022.
If you happen to do your banking with Citi, you’re eligible to buy pre-sale tickets now, due to a sponsorship agreement. Otherwise, tickets for the public go on sale at 10 a.m. on Friday and can be purchased here.
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Mr. Miyagi. Obi-Wan Kenobi. Professor X. Splinter. Pop culture has perfected the mentor-teacher archetype who patiently guides a reluctant young protege into becoming the hero of his or her own story. In real life, though, we don’t have Dumbledore or Yoda, Gandalf or Mr. Keating, but we do have something better: a pink-haired, National Board Certified, third-grade teacher named Barbara Hall.
Hall, who is in her 19th year of teaching, has decorated her classroom at the Little Rock School District’s Pulaski Heights Elementary School with a colorful comic-book theme and calls her students “Hall’s Heroes,” helping them each discover their own unique talents and superpowers. For many of her students and their families, though, it is Hall who is the real Superwoman. Not only does she help her third graders grow academically, she works hard to create a safe, affirming, joyous classroom where all students can shine.
“Students cannot learn if they feel invisible, disrespected or unsafe,” Hall said. She considers it an integral part of her job as a teacher to maintain a classroom environment where all of her students can feel comfortable enough to explore and grow. “Every day in my classroom, we make a commitment to being safe.” She and her students regularly discuss what that means. “When we discuss any classroom issue, we pass it through the lens of safety. For example, if we have problems with unkindness or disrespect, we talk about how it contributes to people feeling unsafe, and we revisit our commitment to making school a safe place for everyone.”
Hall’s focus on making school a safe and welcoming place for all students has become especially important in recent years. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed and amplified students’ emotional, behavioral and mental health needs, and outside of school, young people today absorb pervasive messages about the political, religious and cultural rifts in America. These divides show up as efforts to ban Black history courses and censor library books, backlash against diversity and inclusion programs and an array of legislation targeting LGBTQ+ Arkansans.
Hall, who is a lesbian and has been married to her wife, Amanda Linn, since same-sex marriage became legal in Arkansas in 2014, said her third graders are thankfully shielded from the bigotry and hate on display in state and national politics. But she still worries about how these attacks on vulnerable and marginalized groups affect her students and their families. “I know when I was a teenager, I was acutely aware of the homophobic comments from family members, classmates, church leaders and media, and I remember how that message impacted me.”
Brian ChilsonVISIBILITY: Hall understands that having a happy, successful, openly queer teacher can be incredibly affirming for students who need to see themselves represented in a positive way.Hall said she has been lucky to work in schools that have long focused on the whole child, prioritizing students’ social, emotional and physical well-being along with their academic performance. She notes that she and her peers have learned to adapt to the changing educational needs of their students by equipping them with strategies to manage their emotions and stress. She also understands that simply having a happy, successful, openly queer teacher can be incredibly affirming for students who need to see themselves represented in a positive way. “I so often think about what it would have been like as a child to have had such adults around me.” Hall explains that while she avoids bringing her personal life into the classroom, her students often ask her if she is married (a question that most elementary school teachers hear frequently), and it is important to her to be able to answer honestly and say, “Yes, my wife’s name is Amanda.”
Hall’s life experiences have led her to advocate for policies to help protect the mental health and well-being of all students. One such policy Hall strongly supports is having a full-time counselor in every school, a step that Hall praises the Little Rock School District for taking, saying, “I see the impact of that change every day.” She also hopes that schools will expand school-based health clinics to include mental health services for students and their families, and she hopes that more districts will adopt nondiscrimination policies that protect LGBTQ+ staff and students. She remembers when the school district added sexual orientation and gender identity to its nondiscrimination policy, and she notes that “even though I was lucky to work for and with people who accepted me, there was a giant sense of relief and pride in that acknowledgment.” Hall said that she also appreciates the fact that LRSD board members and the district’s new superintendent, Dr. Jermall Wright, have spoken out during board meetings and on social media in support of the district’s LGBTQIA+ students, staff and families (Full disclosure: I’m a member of the LRSD School Board).
Hall emphasizes, though, that creating a classroom environment conducive to learning isn’t just about protecting her students’ safety and mental well-being; it’s also about making sure that school is a place where kids can have fun. “Joy and fun are so important in a classroom,” Hall said. She reflects that with all the demands placed on teachers, it can be easy for adults to forget that they are working with children who still need laughter and play every day. “I use humor a lot in my classroom,” she explained, and she consciously monitors herself so that “if I ever feel like I’m being an old crank trying to rush through the learning, I try to take a breath, crack a joke and have some fun.”
Hall also admits she works hard to demonstrate vulnerability and bravery for her students because she wants them to be bold and take chances. She said she tries to help students learn to believe in themselves, which is crucial for their long-term happiness and future success. Hall said that, like all teachers, she worries about not being able to do enough for her students, especially when they are facing difficulties and challenges beyond her control. But she hopes all of her students will look back on third grade as a time they loved school, had fun and felt loved and accepted. “When I look back at my own time as a student, what I remember most are the times I felt that way.”
The post Educator Barbara Hall’s superpower: honesty and kindness appeared first on Arkansas Times.
PONY BRADSHAW
THURSDAY 3/2. White Water Tavern. 8 p.m. $12.
If “North Georgia Rounder,” the newest album from twangy singer-songwriter Pony Bradshaw, sounds like it was meant to be performed on the White Water Tavern stage, it might have something to do with the fact that it was recorded at Jason Weinheimer’s Fellowship Hall Sound, just a couple miles down the road from the beloved tavern. Bradshaw’s dark, aching voice makes mournfulness his natural mode, but don’t let that scare you away: There’s plenty of counterpointing instrumental pep to get your toe tapping amidst the sadness.
If you’re not sure what I mean, listen to “Foxfire Wine” and tell me it doesn’t make you want to simultaneously cry and dance. When you hear him sing about being stuck “upon this matchless earth,” you’ll wonder if he’s condemning our planet for lacking spark or if he’s praising it for being beautifully incomparable. His lyrics, too, will place you right between disappointment and admiration.
The post Aching twang from Pony Bradshaw at White Water Tavern on Thursday appeared first on Arkansas Times.
After much fanfare, Senate Bill 294 was filed in the state legislature last week. Also known as the Arkansas LEARNS Act, this bill will enact sweeping changes to the educational system in Arkansas. The bill touches on almost every aspect of schools in Arkansas, from vouchers to teacher pay to transportation. However, one aspect of the bill which has not received as much attention is the changes it makes to the requirements for mental health training for teachers, staff and school resource officers and the effect those changes could have on students with mental health issues.
The bill replaces the phrase “Youth Mental Health First Aid” with “youth mental health training.” Youth Mental Health First Aid is an existing training program developed by the Arkansas School Safety Commission. This training is an 8-hour course that “teaches a five-step plan to address common signs and symptoms of mental health challenges in this age group, common signs and symptoms of substance use challenges, how to interact with a child or adolescent in crisis, and how to connect the youth with help.” It is unclear why this already existing certification program is being abandoned. There is no indication in the bill of what the “youth mental health training” consists of which will replace it.
Students in Arkansas and across the nation are experiencing a mental health crisis. Our students need professionals in their schools who are appropriately equipped with evidence-based trauma-informed care strategies. School resource officers are neither teachers nor mental health professionals. Yet, schools routinely rely on them to intervene when students are experiencing a mental health crisis. This is unfair to the students and the officers.
Without adequate training, the outcomes will be disastrous for students and school personnel. The LEARNS Act also follows an emerging national trend in schools for responding to campus violence, the creation of “Behavioral Threat Assessment Teams.” Members of these teams will be supplied with 15 hours of training to identify and respond to their perceptions of threats.
The underlying implication of this policy is that children with mental health issues are ticking time bombs that can explode at any moment and must be monitored as potential threats. There is nothing in the bill to ensure that these teams include mental health professionals, members of a student’s Individualized Education Plan team or teachers who engage with the students regularly. Nothing in the bill would require a school to increase direct services to students, employ professional behavior specialists, or otherwise improve mental health outcomes for students in school to prevent potential threats.
The focus is solely on responding and reacting to threats once students are in crisis. In other states where they are in use, these policies have increased informal and formal removals of students with mental health issues from schools. School safety and student mental health support are essential issues that must be improved in the state to create a solid foundation for learning, but education reforms that will lead to a more significant number of students being removed from schools are not what we need in Arkansas.
If the governor and the legislature want to address the mental health needs of the children of this state, a good place to start would be by increasing the availability of professional services available to them. More qualified therapists and behavioral specialists in schools employ proven methods to care for the children of this state, especially in our traditionally underserved rural and minority communities. We all want children to be able to feel safe at school so that they can learn and for teachers to feel safe so that they can do their job, but creating teams to look for highly subjective signs of “suspicious” or “threatening” behavior in schools does nothing to address the root of the problem.
Christian Adcock is voting and public policy specialist for Disability Rights Arkansas.
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Public school advocates have shown up in full force this morning to protest Governor Sarah Sanders‘ education overhaul bill that is set to be heard by a House committee.
The House Education Committee is meeting in the state capitol building known as Big MAC at 9 a.m. A live stream of the meeting is available here.
PACKED HOUSE: The meeting of the House Education Committee is packed this morning. (Photo by Austin Bailey)
THUMBS DOWN: A crowd lined up outside Big MAC this morning before the House Education Committee meeting began. (Photo by Brian Chilson)
PUBLIC SCHOOLS: Governor Sanders’ education bill would allow for spending public money at private schools and would change the pay scale for public school teachers. (Photo by Brian Chilson)
BANNER DAY: The Progressive Arkansas Women PAC joined the protest on the capitol steps. (Photo by Brian Chilson)
Brian ChilsonCAPITOL STEPS: Public school advocates protested Governor Sanders’ education overhaul bill on the capitol steps. (Photo by Brian Chilson)The post Public school advocates protest education bill before House Education Committee hearing appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A national coalition of veterans, students and faculty, civil-rights advocates and others has urged the University of Arkansas System of the reputational and financial risks should a private affiliate of the school buy the University of Phoenix.
A UA System spokesman countered that the coalition’s allegations “show a misunderstanding of the potential acquisition structure and the affiliation being considered.” Further, the system’s president said the proposed acquisition might bring in $20 million annually to the UA System.
The proposed buyer would be Transformative Education Services Inc., or TES Inc., a nonprofit created in August and affiliated with the UA System. Officials with the UA System have said that the purchase — estimated by a source to cost $500 million to $700 million — would be with private, not public, funds and that Phoenix would not become a part of the UA System.
That said, the publicly paid UA System President Donald Bobbitt is working to make the purchase happen and believes the UA System would profit financially because of a licensing agreement, which would to some degree link the two institutions’ images.
In a letter dated Feb. 15, addressed to UA System trustees and posted online, the coalition warned of Phoenix’s “and its successor’s potential liability for hundreds of millions of dollars in federal student loans.”
Further, a federal lawsuit that appears to be nearing a resolution in California may well have an adverse impact on the University of Phoenix’s financial status by effectively canceling much of the student debt owed to the mostly online college. The lawsuit, known as Sweet vs. Cardona, is not related to President’s Biden’s plan to forgive student debt, a matter before the U.S. Supreme Court.
The coalition’s letter also warned of a potentially negative impact on the UA System’s academic reputation.
“The most recent Department of Education data, for instance, show a [UA System] retention rate for first-time students returning for a second year of 87% and a graduation rate of 70%. The most recent data for University of Phoenix, in contrast, show only a 39% retention rate and just a 14% graduation rate. Only 48% of University of Phoenix former students earn more than a high school graduate,” the coalition wrote.
“If the deal to add University of Phoenix as an affiliate of the UA System is finalized, the UA System will need to ensure that the outcomes associated with the new institution are substantially improved or it could risk reputational damage to the University of Arkansas System, as well as potential consequences with the U.S. Department of Education and other regulators,” the coalition added.
UA System spokesman Nate Hinkel said the coalition’s “allegations … are speculative and the concerns do not contemplate the specifics of this proposed transaction. It is also worth noting that the University of Phoenix is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission, the same organization that accredits more than 500 colleges and universities in the United States, including those in Arkansas.
“There would be no state or university funds at risk, and campuses would operate as efficiently and routinely as they currently do, but with the added benefits and resources of this potential affiliation,” Hinkel said.
Outgoing UA System board member Cliff Gibson III, who opposes the Phoenix proposal, however, said in a Feb. 8 email to Bobbitt that in reviewing the Higher Learning Commission’s website, he noticed a January entry that says, “Reaffirm Accreditation with Monitoring.”
Indeed, a Jan. 23 letter from the commission’s Institutional Actions Council to Phoenix’s interim president says in part that an interim report is due April 20. At that time, Phoenix representatives are “required to provide evidence … that they are disclosing their standing with other accreditors to the public.”
The UA System’s negotiations with Phoenix began about 18 months ago and are ongoing.
The UA System has not said who or what might provide financial backing for TES Inc. Bobbitt said in a recent email that “a number of financing options are still being considered with the goal of securing the most attractive financing possible to support the potential deal.”
Bobbitt estimated that a licensing agreement being negotiated could yield roughly $20 million annually for use by the UA System. Licensing agreements allow approved usage of certain brand names and images.
“This additional revenue is not an insignificant amount, and could be used to support system-wide needs such as student scholarships, staff and faculty salaries or critical deferred maintenance needs on our campuses, among many other potential projects,” Bobbitt said.
“In an era of limited state funding for higher education, we feel obligated to consider opportunities such as this that both align with our mission to educate more students and have the potential to bring in new resources for the system and its campuses,” he added.
Bobbitt said the UA System and the University of Phoenix “have tremendous brand recognization, and we believe an affiliation could be mutually beneficial for each entity without confusing any of the great work already being done within the System.”
Further, Bobbitt said Phoenix has more than “1 million alumni, including many highly successful business and industry leaders.” He said it also has “a long history of innovation in distance and career education and a number of other discipline-specific accreditations.”
Gibson, a Monticello attorney, takes a different view. “I would submit that the Phoenix’s national recognition is not the kind of recognition that most folks would want for their beloved University of Arkansas. In my mind, the name Phoenix would run off more folks than it would gather,” he told Bobbitt.
Gibson has previously said Bobbitt told him that a Japanese bank would provide financing for the nonprofit affiliate. Gibson’s term as chairman ends today, and his term on the board will end once Gov. Sarah Sanders has appointed a successor.
Hinkel dismissed what he called the coalition’s “false concerns” about “overwhelming the UA System.” He said such “would not be the case and thus is not an issue.”
Yet some observers, including the coalition and Gibson, have concerns about Phoenix’s reputation largely because of its recent history.
In 2019, Phoenix, one of the nation’s largest for-profit colleges, agreed to a $191 million settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, which said the college had lured students with fraudulent claims. Under that settlement, Phoenix agreed to pay $50 million in cash and to cancel $141 million in debts owed to the school by students who were harmed by deceptive ads, according to the FTC.
The coalition, for example, noted that the FTC alleged that Phoenix had “targeted active duty service members, veterans, and military spouses” with deceptive advertising.
“While the FTC’s settlement provided relief to certain students for institutional debt, it did not resolve the students’ federal loan obligations, nor, importantly, the school’s potential liability to the Department of Education for any approved Borrower Defense to Repayment loan discharge applications,” the coalition wrote. “The Department has the authority under federal regulations to recoup funds from the University of Phoenix for any such approved loan discharges.”
Dahn Shaulis, editor of the New Jersey-based Higher Education Inquirer blog, has followed the University of Phoenix closely for years. “An important part of the story is that we don’t know the total number of Borrower Defense claims [that] have been made against the University of Phoenix,” Shaulis said in an email.
From January 2015 through Jan. 1, 2022, there were 32,040 claims against Apollo Group Inc., which has since sold the University of Phoenix to Apollo Global Management. Of those, 20,140 were denied, according to records shared by the Inquirer with the Arkansas Times.
The Inquirer has made a federal Freedom of Information Act request seeking more current data up to Jan. 1 of this year, but the U.S. Department of Education can take several months to reply.
Coalition members include the Center for American Progress, New America Higher Education Program, Project on Predatory Student Lending, The Institute for College Access & Success, Veterans Education Success, attorney David Halperin, and Robert Shireman, a senior fellow with The Century Foundation. Halperin’s credentials include his time as a special assistant during Bill Clinton‘s presidential administration. Shireman has previously worked for the U.S. Senate and the Clinton administration.
Stephens Inc., a Little Rock-based financial services company, has contracted with the UA System to help analyze, structure, plan, negotiate and bring about the proposed acquisition of Phoenix. Bobbitt said, however, that while Stephens “is providing guidance, “Stephens is not negotiating the purchase price.”
As the Times has previously reported, the contract provides that Stephens would be paid $25,000 upon an acquisition and up to $1.65 million once a transaction is completed. The amount could be higher, depending on the transaction’s value.
It remains unclear if the UA System’s Board of Trustees will be given an opportunity to vote on the proposal should it get to that stage. Gibson said Monday that, despite his request, Bobbitt still has not shared a report by Stephens on the proposal.
If the board does consider the plan, there could be another issue — whether a board member with ties to Stephens votes or recuses. Brad Eichler, whose wife Kelly Eichler is a trustee, was just promoted to Stephens’ chief operating officer effective May 1. Kelly Eichler did not respond to a request for comment.
On whether the board must approve such an acquisition, Bobbitt said that “it is still unclear precisely what approvals would be required on many levels. Regardless, as has been the case from the outset, we are fully committed to informing the Board and seeking its support if and when we have a finalized proposal.”
Board Policy No. 340.1 says in part: “A separate legal entity owned or controlled, in whole or in part, by the University, and any other entity that may otherwise be reflected in the financial statements of the University under applicable accounting rules, may only be created or dissolved with the consent of the President, who may exercise the discretion to bring the matter to the Board of Trustees for approval. If the matter is not presented to the Board for approval, the President must report the matter to the Board at its next regularly scheduled meeting. In all such instances, prior to submitting the matter to the President, the proposal and all relevant documents must be reviewed by the General Counsel.”
The post Veterans’ group warns against a Phoenix deal; UA System president defends moving forward appeared first on Arkansas Times.
North Little Rock police have charged a 57-year-old man with first-degree murder in a weekend stabbing that left one man dead.
Michael Williams was arrested in connection with the stabbing death of 39-year-old Nikista Jackson in the 700 block of E. Bethany Road on Sunday.
At about 2:36 p.m. Sunday, officers responded to a stabbing and found Jackson on the ground with multiple stab wounds. The officers provided medical aid to Jackson who was transported to a local hospital where he later died, according to a statement from the police department.
Williams was at the residence when officers arrived and was immediately detained as a person of interest in the case. Williams was taken to the North Little Rock Justice Center where he was interviewed and identified as a suspect in the case.
Williams has been charged with one count of first-degree murder and is being held at the Pulaski County Regional Detention Facility without bond. He is scheduled for an initial court appearance this morning.
The department said anyone with information on the case can anonymously contact the North Little Rock Tip Line at 501-680-8439 or Detective Williams at 501-771-7167.
The post North Little Rock police make arrest in weekend stabbing appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Last week, Sen. Breanne Davis (R-Russellville) publicly accused the superintendent of Star City Schools of violating policy by allowing teachers from his district to travel to the state Capitol on work time for a hearing on the controversial Arkansas LEARNS bill. Davis called on the Arkansas Department of Education to investigate Superintendent Jordan Frizzell for the alleged infraction.
Today, Frizzell called Davis’ allegation a “false public statement” and defended his decision.
“The policy allows for professional leave for ‘meetings and conferences related to education,’ and certainly the senate education committee hearing over the LEARNS Bill was just that,” Frizzell wrote in a public letter he shared to social media Monday evening.
Davis is a lead sponsor of the governor’s omnibus Arkansas LEARNS education bill.
She and other Republican lawmakers, along with the governor and members of her staff, went on the offensive last week, accusing opponents of the voucher bill of spreading lies. Teachers who missed school Wednesday to testify on Senate Bill 294 were accused of abandoning their students and putting their own interests ahead of kids.
Frizzell said he’s been surprised by how aggressive politicians and voucher supporters have been in going after opponents.
“It’s just unbelievable, really. It’s shocking to me they would reach this far,” he told Gennie Diaz of For AR People.
Here’s the post in which Davis made her accusation.
Nice to have the Star City School District teachers & admin with us today to witness successful passage of #SB294.
That does not excuse the fact that the superintendent allowed for blatant violation of its policy. @ArkEducation must investigate & hold leadership accountable. https://t.co/zjuZiN7PqK pic.twitter.com/F3JuN4rIzm
— Breanne Davis (@BreanneDavis) February 23, 2023
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The governor named a popular Little Rock OB-GYN as Arkansas’s new surgeon general.
Here’s the release:
LITTLE ROCK, Ark.—Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced today that she will appoint Dr. Kay Chandler to serve as the Arkansas Surgeon General.
“I am pleased to announce that Dr. Kay Chandler will serve as Arkansas’ next Surgeon General, bringing strong leadership and years of medical expertise to the Department of Health,” Sanders said. “Dr. Chandler is a skilled, qualified OB-GYN who has spent decades serving women across Arkansas. I promised that when I was elected governor, Arkansas would not have mask mandates or vaccine mandates and we would not shut down churches and schools because we believe in personal freedom and responsibility. I look forward to working together to protect the health, well-being, and individual freedoms of Arkansans.”
Dr. Kay Chandler Bio:
Dr. Kay Chandler has served as an OB-GYN at Cornerstone Clinic in Little Rock since 1997 and has been named Best OB-GYN by Little Rock Family Magazine and AY Magazine.
She graduated with her Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry from Hendrix College, received her M.D. from University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, Texas, and completed her residency training at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
Dr. Chandler has been included on the national Best Doctors, Inc. list since 2005. She is dedicated to promoting health and wellness through true lifestyle change and has served as Medical Director of Ideal Health NOW! since 2011. She shares new women’s health care information on the Medical Monday segment on THV11’s morning show, “THV This Morning.”
She also currently serves on the board for the Pulaski County Medical Society and on the Board of Trustees of the Arkansas Medical Society. She is married to her husband of 30 years, Jeffrey K. Chandler DDS, who serves the Little Rock area at Chandler Family Dentistry.
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Arkansas Times editors Austin Bailey and Lindsey Millar talk about Arkansas LEARNS and other legislative happenings.
It’s a different era at the Arkansas Capitol these days, with emboldened and Trumpy Republicans unafraid to mislead, obfuscate and say the quiet parts out loud.
Innocent and harmless trans kids get crammed into metaphorical lockers over there all the time now, a convenient scapegoat for white evangelical bullies virtue signalling their Aryan heteronormativity. Poor people who need housing and food are also sitting ducks, powerless to punch back at upper-middle-class legislators chastising them to get a job already.
But the most deafening quiet part blaring in our ears this week was the message that providing a solid education to all children in Arkansas is kind of a drag, so the state should give up on that idea altogether and let the free market handle it. Sure, we will be leaving families who lack the cash, resources or elitism required to bail on democracy’s greatest invention to languish in public schools whose funding bases shrink as taxpayer money goes to private schools. But for those who stay put in those starving public schools — either because they love them, or because there are no other options close by, or because a $7,000 voucher covers only part of the tuition and other expenses required for a private education — well, that’s their “choice.”
Brian ChilsonRep. Bruce Cozart is plumb worn out.Rep. Bruce Cozart (R-Hot Springs), former chair of the House Education Committee and a 10-year Capitol veteran, all but admitted this week that the fight for equity in education is lost. Cozart met with a cluster of public school teachers who came to Little Rock from across the state to try to figure out what the hell is going on. Gov. Sarah Sanders continues to dangle foreboding sound bytes about “bold, conservative reform,” “education freedom accounts” and merit pay, but there’s nothing yet on paper and teachers are understandably desperate for details.
A veteran in the fight against school vouchers, Cozart is laying down his sword.
“I know you are disappointed in me, but I have been fighting vouchers for eight years and I am just tired. There is nothing I can do,” he told teachers Wednesday.
Call/email and tell your senator/rep to vote NO to private school vouchers.
Make sure they hear from the right folks. Especially school superintendents & admins. pic.twitter.com/deJ5o5NISX
— Jenny (@bluetruedream21) February 18, 2023
Did he really say this stuff? Yes! Reached by phone Friday morning, Cozart gave some lip service to what he said were the good intentions of his Republican colleagues, but confirmed the conversations.
There are other Republican advocates of public schools in the Arkansas Legislature, but they’re seemingly a dying breed. Sen. James Sturch, an educator and reliable public school champion, got primaried and lost his seat in 2022 to pro-voucher candidate John Payton. Republican Rep. Jim Wooten of Beebe is still hard at work trying to push bills to keep vouchers from widening the gap between “haves and have-nots.” A couple of Republicans recently went along with Wooten’s bill to require private schools that accept public money in the form of vouchers to issue standardized tests and admit all comers, but most Republicans in the House Education hearing did not. The bill died in committee.
Sanders’ Arkansas LEARNS is expected to drop any day now, and it’s going to whip the rug out from under all the educators, families and students who believe in the ideals of community and collective opportunity our public schools still embody.
It’s absolutely true that many Arkansas public school students struggle in the classroom. That’s because they struggle outside the classroom, too. Arkansas kids face more than their share of poverty, food insecurity and trauma, and without fixing those external factors, these students won’t have the energy and focus they need to excel in the three Rs.
But ending hunger and poverty is hard; shitting on public schools is easy. The governor and her compliant stairwell full of cheering white conservatives know it’s much easier to blame poor showings on national standardized test dashboards on bleeding heart teachers and their crumbly old schools.
Arkansas LEARNS, this looming assault on the children who need help the most, will literally send hundreds of millions of public dollars to families already paying private school tuitions without taxpayers’ help, and we need to talk about it.
“The rich want vouchers. That’s who this legislation is for. The rich. They want it and they are going to get it. I am sorry but that’s just the truth,” Cozart said. Sometimes saying the quiet part out loud isn’t a bad thing.
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Arkansas Times · The Ledge Continue To Attack Trans Arkansans EditionOn this week’s podcast, Austin Bailey and Lindsey Millar talk about the latest from Arkansas General Assembly. It’s pretty much all bad.
Subscribe via iTunes or listen on Spotify.
PS: I completely bungled Toots Hibberts’ name.
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The troops gathered at the roundtable in Gov. Sarah Sanders’ meeting room Thursday to talk about crime and violence reduction strategies in Little Rock, according to a press release sent from her office afterwards. The release said the meeting was the start of coordination between groups, but lacked details on what approaches they discussed or any action plans they created.
Here’s the full release from her office. It wasted no opportunity to include remarks about Sanders’ education efforts, which have taken center stage recently.
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – Following Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ roundtable discussion on reducing crime and violence in Little Rock, Sanders’ spokeswoman Alexa Henning released the following readout:
“Today, Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders held a roundtable discussion focused on reducing violence in Little Rock with local law enforcement and nonprofit leaders, including Colonel Mike Hagar, Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott, North Little Rock Mayor Terry Hartwick, Pulaski County Sheriff Eric Higgins, and Dushun Scarbrough, executive director of the MLK Jr. Commission. The group discussed ways to end the crime wave plaguing our capital city by supporting our brave men and women of law enforcement and shutting the revolving door in our prisons, while also helping those incarcerated overcome addiction with mental health treatment, faith-based programs, and workforce development. As 70% of those incarcerated cannot read at a fourth-grade level, the group also emphasized the need for education reform and thanked the Governor for her commitment to improve literacy rates in Arkansas. The Governor said this is only the start of coordination and cooperation between these officials – and the first of many conversations – as the group works together to empower Arkansans with a safer, stronger capital city.”
A record number of homicides plagued Little Rock in 2022, even beating out the former record set in the ‘90s when gang violence was rampant.
Mayor Frank Scott Jr. sat at the governor’s roundtable Thursday. Still at the start of his second term leading Little Rock, Scott has continued to push a holistic approach to curbing crime. Scott’s plan involves effective policing and support for organizations that work directly with the city’s youth.
Attendees offered few details about their meeting with the governor. Aaron Sadler, the mayor’s spokesperson, gave the following comments for Scott and the Little Rock Police Chief Heath Helton:
Mayor Scott and Chief Helton appreciated the opportunity to have a meaningful dialogue with the governor centered on crime prevention, parole reform, re-entry programs, and continued collaboration among all law enforcement agencies.
The Mayor and Chief are encouraged by the decrease in overall violent crime in Little Rock as the City continues to implement its holistic crime reduction strategy. Violent crime is down more than 18 percent this year compared to 2022.
The governor’s release read like the discussion centered on Little Rock, but other entities joined, too. North Little Rock Mayor Terry Hartwick was in attendance, but said Friday that he would leave any further comments to the governor’s office.
Members of the Arkansas State Police and the Pulaski County Sheriff’s Office often collaborate with the LRPD and manage the crimes that fall under their jurisdiction within Little Rock.
Pulaski County Sheriff Eric Higgins said he estimated the meeting lasted for a few hours on Thursday. It was mostly an introductory gathering to get Sanders familiar with all the players, he said. No followup meeting is scheduled, but Higgins said he got a sense the collaboration will continue.
“It’s clear we’re all on the same page of wanting to have a safe community … and looking at how do we do that holistically,” Higgins said.
Sanders’ office did not release a list of everyone present on Thursday.
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When you take a sip of the crisp, clean, dry finish of the 5-minute slow-poured North Coast Scrimshaw from Brood & Barley, you can almost forget about the fact that you posted two open lines in one day. Take it away.
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The Little Rock Marathon attracts thousands of athletes every year, and the same will be the case come the weekend of March 5. The race may not be the most recognized in the country, but it certainly brings the heat in terms of medals — reportedly the largest in the world. This year, the marathon finisher’s medal is 8.5 inches around and weighs three pounds. That’s a pretty necklace to celebrate trekking 26.2 miles with a 1,207 foot elevation gain.
Geneva Lamm has organized the event since its start 20 years ago, and she’s serious about getting all of the details set straight. There’s extensive budgeting, pre-planning, designing and checking — and then double checking — public safety aspects. Lamm, with dozens of prepared spreadsheets that track participants and budgets since the inaugural race, said that she’s particular about how things get done. And with three on the staff for all things Little Rock marathon and no money allocated in the annual city budget to put on the race, Lamm works hard to make sure it all runs smoothly.
“I just want people to enjoy the time they’re here, and I want them to go, ‘This was awesome,’” Lamm said. “We don’t have much money to spoil them. I give them a big medal, I give them a shirt, but what you can’t put a price on is how you treat people.”
Brian ChilsonIT’S ALMOST MARATHON TIME: Executive Director Geneva Lamm has worked to get all the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed in time for the Little Rock Marathon.Five different events fall under the umbrella name of the Little Rock Marathon. Kids can join in the Little Rockers race, which is a 1-mile run that completes a collection of 25.2 miles logged privately before race day. Others can lace up for the 5k, 10k, half or full marathon. The Statehouse Convention Center serves as a marathon expo for two days, too. A challenger’s medal is awarded to folks who complete a race on both March 4 and 5, and a “run local” medal is given to anyone who participated in each of the Creep ‘n’ Crawl, Ugly Sweater and marathon races.
Race day also brings in a good amount of first time marathoners each year, something that Lamm said she is proud of.
“They trust us for us to be their first race, which is a big deal for me,” Lamm said. “That tells me we’re doing something right. You never have another first marathon.”
Courtesy of the LR MarathonMARATHON CROWD: A group of racers at the 2022 marathon.The logisticsRegistration fees make up the biggest chunk of change to put on the races — depending on the time of year, runners can pay up to $140 to join the race. As of Jan. 31, about $350,000 came from marathon event fees, and Lamm said she expects to an additional $150,000 to come in as it gets closer to race day.
More than a dozen sponsors have donated a total of $80,000, and 16 other sponsors have supplied things like Gatorade, advertising, hotel rooms, medical services, food and more.
Mandy KeenerBY THE NUMBERS: The Little Rock Marathon will have lots to offer — look at all those bananas. In the history of the marathon, three have died. Lamm said that she remembers each one.Registration fees and sponsorship dollars may seem like a lot of money, but the expenses are steep. Ordering enough medals for finishers in all five events will eat up the current sponsorship money almost entirely. Runners also receive a T-shirt and poster to remember the race, both of which come with their own costs.
Lamm also makes it a goal to donate money to the Little Rock Department of Parks and Recreation each week. She said that residents can really see their money being put to work when it goes into parks, and she’s happy to give what she can.
Police presence has a hefty fine, too. More than 100 officers from the Little Rock Police Department are stationed at intersections along the route, and 27 North Little Rock officers patrol what falls on that side of the river. Public safety is crucial to putting on the race, Lamm said. It’s an expense that can’t be cut.
Expect road closures on race day. Check out the marathon course here.
Nineteen different safety entities play a part in preparing for the race and ensuring that all goes well on event day. In addition to the local police departments, the Coast Guard, National Guard, State Capitol Police, FBI and more do their due diligence to ensure the runners’ protection. Lamm also takes the route herself to ensure there are no potholes or piles of trash along the way.
A key component of making sure all the pieces are in place, the marathon has a large group of volunteers that register and show up unannounced to provide entertainment, hand out drinks and guide folks in the right direction. It takes about 2,000 in help to put on the gig, Lamm said.
Lamm said that the Little Rock Marathon attracts folks from all over the world, and the Little Rock Convention and Visitors Bureau tracks the fiscal impact with tourists in town.
Total business sales in Little Rock during marathon weekend came in at about $2.5 million each year from 2019-2022, according to event impact summaries. In 2022, restaurants brought in about $412,000 and lodging $372,000. Transportation, retail, recreation and sales tax contributed to the rest of the dollars.
The marathon also attracted an estimated 2,000 out-of-town visitors, according to the 2022 summary. Lamm said that marathon organizers are still working with folks on races that were paid for and not run during years when the COVID-19 pandemic stopped large gatherings. Registration numbers are still bouncing back to pre-pandemic numbers, she said.
Tips and trainingLamm finished her first marathon when she was eight weeks postpartum with her son 24 years ago. She joined a friend for the race in Dublin, Ireland, and caught the bug. Lamm said that she’s lost count but has probably finished more than 100 marathons in the time since.
Her best tip for first-time marathoners was to leave the watch at home, and really enjoy being surrounded by the sounds of the traffic, the wind and the birds.
Sandip Bose, 57, has run a race at the Little Rock Marathon on-and-off since 2005. With a mix of walking and running, Bose is a regular to the 5k on Saturday and the half marathon on Sunday, which also gets him an additional “challenger” medal. A two-time full marathon finisher, Bose said that he prefers the shorter race because there’s less recovery time so he can get right back to work.
Mary HenniganRACER: Sandip Bose is a regular to the Little Rock Marathon.Bose is a runner loyal to Central Arkansas, and he hasn’t joined in on any races out of the state, he said. His favorite training spots in Little Rock are Two Rivers Park and Pinnacle Mountain State Park, though he also runs around downtown with the marathon’s free year-around training program.
Not trying to break any speed records, Bose said that his favorite aspect of the race is talking with folks during his walking breaks. He also made friends and built relationships during his race training.
Sandip BoseON DISPLAY: Sandip Bose is no stranger to a Little Rock race. He keeps all of his medals on display in his home.The Little Rock Marathon offers a free training program for all of its racers. Hobbit Singleton, with her husband Tom and other volunteers, organizes weekly runs around the city year around.
Singleton has been involved with the marathon since its inception, and as the organizers discussed training, Singleton said that it was important that it was accessible and available to everyone at no charge. The training is a 50-week program that only takes time off the weekend of race day and the weekend after, Singleton said.
Courtesy of Hobbit SingletonHAVING FUN: Hobbit and Tom Singleton at the 2022 ugly sweater race.A finisher of about two dozen marathons herself, Singleton said that she focuses on training runners so there is “nothing new on race day.” She cautioned trying out new breakfast foods on race day or wearing the cute outfit just bought at the expo. There will be plenty of time to test new products after runners get to the finish line in their tried and trues.
Not everyone is as easy to train as others, Singleton said. In fact, the easiest people to coach are the people who haven’t run a race before, she said. The trickiest are those who were track athletes in high school decades ago and have the expectation that they can move as easily as they used to.
“Your goal at your first race — whether it’s a 5k, 10, marathon, a half marathon — your goal should be to finish,” Singleton said. “That’s it. You want to start something, and you want to finish the race.”
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At least five North Little Rock businesses are hosting happenings for Third Friday Argenta Art Night, starting at 5 p.m.
Bang-Up Betty, a jewelry and gift shop, will spotlight two guests: Daisy Pastry Shoppe — a mother-daughter bakery inspired by ’70s aesthetics whose recently advertised treats include a fruity pebble lemon blondie, a matcha strawberry blondie and a brownie cookie sammie with peanut butter filling — and Katy Childs — a photographer who will be snapping artful headshots on the spot.
Daisy Pastry Shoppe
Custom XM, which specializes in marketing, printing and promotional services, is opening up their space to the Monet-influenced work of Barry Thomas, an impressionist painter with a special interest in natural settings.
Barry Thomas
The Thea Foundation, a non-profit organization with an emphasis on arts education for Arkansas youth, is hosting “Artcessories” by Bryant Phelan, a master artisan whose intricate, high-end leather purses straddle the line between art and functionality. More about his brand, O’Faolain, can be found here.
Jason MastersBryant PhelanAt the NLR Welcome Center, Shelbey Morris — of Creative Press — will be showing off her pressed floral arrangements and sharing some pointers on how to do it on your own.
Creative Press, Shelbey Morris
Finish your night off at the House of Art gallery, where the Lemon Pepper Poetry Slam, open to anyone who’s interested in competing, will kick off at 8 p.m.
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Gov. Sarah Sanders announced Friday that Arkansas will be bringing tough guys and tougher laws to fight opioid addiction in the state.
She appointed a new drug czar, former federal DEA officer Tom Fisher, to coordinate the state’s drug enforcement strategy. And Sanders said Sen. Ben Gilmore (R-Crosset) and Rep. Jimmy Gazaway (R-Paragould) will be filing a bill to allow prosecutors to charge drug dealers with murder when people die from overdoses, and to seek longer sentences and large fines for drug traffickers.
Biden's refusal to secure our southern border allows deadly drugs like fentanyl to pour in and kill Americans.
But we will step up where he has failed.
Today, I am announcing my support for legislation that will crack down on killer drug dealers and save lives.
We will… https://t.co/5AIDJLNEnp
— Sarah Huckabee Sanders (@SarahHuckabee) February 17, 2023
Speaking just briefly, Fisher said he views his new role as “urgent every day, in every way,” and that stopping overdose deaths will be his top priority.
Overdose deaths from opioids have risen drastically and steadily across the country over the past 20 years, with more than 100,000 Americans dying of opioid overdose in 2021. The vast majority of those deaths are linked not to heroin, but synthetic opioids including fentanyl instead.
A potent synthetic opioid that’s relatively cheap and easy to make, fentanyl is also dangerous and unpredictable. Because it’s so much more powerful and also cheaper than other opiates, dealers often add it to their products, with deadly results.
Sanders touted the anti-opioid efforts of the Trump administration in which she worked as a spokesperson, but said the COVID pandemic and the election of President Joe Biden ruined all that. (In fact, opioid overdose deaths have been rising for more than a decade, regardless of who was in the White House.)
“Despite this crisis, the Biden administration has refused to secure out southern border and stop the flood of fentanyl pouring into our country through Mexico. So states like Arkansas are going to have to step up and lead where our federal government is not.” (FACT CHECK: FALSE!)
Misguided anti-Biden rhetoric aside, tougher drug laws seem fine. Lt. Gov. Tim Griffin certainly seems excited about them. In his characteristic cattle auctioneer style, Griffin mixed bombast and banter as he blamed foreigners for the problem and explained why he thinks tougher laws will be a solution.
While before it was the pharmaceutical companies peddling their wares, the crackdown on prescription opioids created a new market. “So who steps in? The same folks. It’s the Chinese, the Mexicans and South Americans,” Griffin said. “That’s what happening here, and they don’t give a rip about any of you or your families. They care not.”
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A new documentary series about Morgan Nick, a 6-year-old Alma girl who disappeared from a Little League baseball game in a suspected abduction over 27 years ago, was released on Hulu on Feb. 16.
“Still Missing Morgan” — executive produced by Ridley Scott and made by ABC News Studios — contains four, hour-long episodes that focus heavily on heartbreaking interviews with Morgan’s parents, who are still actively searching for their missing daughter. In addition to making room for their strife, the documentary offers a thorough history of the investigation, as well as new developments in the case that have unfolded in the last several years. An investigator in the trailer claims that there are “8,300 leads on [Morgan Nick’s] case.”
Morgan’s mother, Colleen Nick, created the Morgan Nick Foundation, which offers abduction prevention education and provides support to the families of missing children. Also, the AMBER alert service in Arkansas was named after Morgan.
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Senate Judiciary bullies constituents, lacks basic understanding of Arkansas Law SB199’s intent is to dissuade medical practitioners from providing gender affirming health care for trans youth. The bill would create strict liability for minors receiving trans health care — a big jump from all other types of medical procedures, which in malpractice claims require a hefty burden to prove a procedure caused injury. Unsurprising to those who follow Senate Judiciary, most members misunderstood what the bill would do, including its sponsor Sen. Gary Stubblefield and representatives from the AG’s office, who testified in favor of the bill. It’s not a requirement that judiciary members have law degrees. But at the very least, members should understand how their legislation will impact the law.
Gwendolyn Herzig reacts to Sen. McKee’s appalling questionBut we can’t tell you about this legislation without mentioning Sen. McKee’s wildly inappropriate behavior in committee, which you’ve likely heard about. During public testimony, Sen. Matt McKee asked a trans female pharmacist if she had a penis. The crowd reacted with distain, and Sen. McKee’s vulgar question went viral — perhaps the intended result of asking the question at all?
Pilkington’s punitive maternity leave bill passes House Rep. Pilkington’s bill, which would require certain businesses that provide employee abortion access to also provide maternity leave, passed the House this week. Rep. Andrew Collins spoke against the bill, arguing it is blatant government overreach. “Why do we need to get involved in what a company is doing with its financials?“ Collins asked members. Pilkington responded with cringey, anti-choice rhetoric where he said businesses that help pay for “babies to be torn limb from limb” must be held accountable to the other side of reproductive choice. In his closing arguments, Pilkington admitted his bill aims to disincentivize businesses from “paying for babies to be murdered.” The bill passed along party lines.
House Ed says ‘No’ to accountability for private schools taking public cashWooten’s HB1204 would require private schools to admit any student who comes along, and require these schools provide yearly assessment tests for these students. This seems fair, right? Wrong, according to the committee members charging toward unfettered school choice on the public’s dime. Wooten’s bill was defeated in a 12-5 vote.
House Education CommitteeThe bill’s failure sends a message that’s contradictory to the prevailing school-choice message, which is that students should not be trapped in failing schools because of where students live. “My biggest issue is that if the school accepts public funds, every student would have to be admitted,” Rep. Hodges admitted. By voting against this bill, the majority of House Education members indicated choice is less about the quality of education students receive, and more about state-funded elitism.
Teachers flood Capitol, ask lawmakers for support There isn’t much better than teachers schooling our legislators, like they did Wednesday at the Capitol. Educators from across the state, including small but mighty districts like Two Rivers, met with lawmakers to share their concerns. Some teachers were able to corral lawmakers in the hallway for more in-depth conversation. During one tense discussion, Senate majority leader Bart Hester was heard saying public administrators are the enemy. Another lawmaker acknowledged he had let teachers down and admitted he would no longer fight voucher expansion.
A recurring message from Wednesday was teachers need to be supported and valued by their elected leaders, not used as political pawns. Teachers were moved to tears and shared they worry for their job security and the future of their schools. Educators don’t want to be called indoctrinators. They don’t want their salaries to be weaponized by partisan rhetoric. And they don’t want to worry about their schools closing.
P.S. Six weeks into legislative session and still no LEARNS Act
Senate State Agencies passes unconstitutional constitutional amendment to protect the constitution You read that right. SB260 would toughen the requirements for citizen-led ballot initiatives, requiring a massive jump in the signatures from every county in the state. Right now a percentage of signatures need only be collected from 15 counties. The legislation is a clear attempt to undercut the citizen-driven ballot process. But the bill is a regular piece of senate legislation that attempts to amend the AR constitution, which is the inappropriate mechanism for such a change. Instead, a proposed constitutional amendment must be filed as a legislatively referred amendment, for which the deadline to file was last week. The bill should have no leg to stand on in court, but passing a blatantly unconstitutional bill out of committee is an egregious move by lawmakers — especially in the name of protecting the Arkansas Constitution. Wild.
Neither here nor thereSenator Stubblefield doesn’t think women who farm and ranch are as good as men who do the same. “Females don’t rope too good,” he said. Sen. Missy Irvin, whose daughter is studying to be a vet, disagrees — and so do we. Cattle women would make for better Senate Judiciary chairs, too.
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The Guardian explores the trend of conservative state legislators filing proposals to outlaw aspects of sexuality. Arkansas’s proposed bill to require porn sites to verify users’ ages and the proposal that originally would have effectively banned drag show performances get some attention.
Also, perhaps coming our way soon?
In Texas, a new bill requiring age verification on websites with pornographic content defines images of the female breast “below the top of the areola” as porn, potentially hitting at business advertisements. In West Virginia, a bill outlawing all sexually oriented businesses is on the docket, with a definition that includes art studios with nude models and wrestling arenas. In South Carolina a bill would criminalize using “profane language” related to “sexual or excretory organs or activities” in front of minors during performances. The punishment? Up to a decade in prison.
Why such a focus on sex? Conservatives need a new moral issue to rally around after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe.
Historian Whitney Strub, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University, doesn’t think these ideas are well-founded. “Framing pornography as a public health crisis is not driven by serious engagement with the social scientific literature,” he said. “They’ve even got fake peer-reviewed journals that give the imprimatur of scholarship … It’s been a very smart rebranding of evangelical Christian conservatism.”
Why are all these bills being proposed now? Strub thinks it’s partly because of the overturning of Roe v Wade. “Abortion gave a certain coherence to conservative politics in the United States. And it certainly still does … but they’re in the position of Ahab if he slayed the white whale … I mean, there’s no more Moby-Dick.”
There is hypocrisy on display also.
In many of the states where the anti-porn bills are being put forth, minors can legally have sex and get married. “In Louisiana, you can have sex when you’re 17 with a person in their 30s, but you can’t watch porn,” said Jason Kelley, associate director of digital strategy for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
In Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana, the age of consent is 16. With parental permission, Mississippi allows 15-year-olds to marry, Louisiana 16-year-olds, Arkansas 17-year-olds, and West Virginia kids of any age.
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Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin has asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the the Eighth Circuit to overrule the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s rejection of Arkansas’s plan to comply with the Clean Air Act.
The announcement of the lawsuit gave Gov. Sarah Sanders and Griffin an opportunity to work in political jabs at the Biden administration. At a press conference yesterday, Sanders promised to “get the over-regulating, micro-managing bureaucratic tyrants in Washington off of Arkansans’ backs.”
The EPA in February rejected the State Implementation Plan that outlines how Arkansas would reduce dirty air and haze.
Wesley Brown, writing for the Arkansas Advocate, provides some background:
In 2015, ADEQ first submitted its first SIP to the EPA that addressed Clean Air Act requirements for particulate matter and sulfur dioxide as they relate to the best available retrofit technology for electric generating units, like the natural gas-fired Oswald power plant.
In 2019, the EPA conditionally approved revisions to Arkansas’ clean-air plan for regional haze and withdrew a portion of the Obama-era federal plan that addressed “downwind” dirty-air emissions from Entergy Arkansas coal-fired power plants and factories that cross state lines. In June 2020, EPA’s Dallas office gave final approval to the state’s infrastructure SIP plan following a 30-day public comment period.
Griffin said Sanders’ Department of Energy and Environment is now challenging EPA’s disapproval of Arkansas’s revised SIP that was first approved in 2019. He said the Biden administration rejected the state’s plan without giving Arkansas officials the opportunity to revise it.
“In this particular case, we are on strong [legal] footing,” Griffin said. “The bottom line is this: the Biden administration wants to impose a one-size-fits-all federal implementation plan (FIP) instead of allowing the states the opportunity to tailor their own plans to their specific needs, balancing environmental regulation with economic growth. [That] will cost Arkansas jobs and significantly impact many of our industries, including energy, construction, steel production and manufacturing.”
Under the proposed EPA standards, first introduced to Arkansas officials in 2014, the Obama administration proposed to set the new ozone standards within a range of 65 to 70 parts per billion (ppb), or possibly as low as 60 ppb. According to the rules established by former EPA Director Gina McCarthy, who is now the White House’s first national climate advisor, the benefits of meeting the proposed ozone standards will significantly outweigh the costs.
For example, the EPA estimates the “large health benefits” to be gained by avoiding asthma attacks, heart attacks, missed school days and premature deaths are valued at $6.4 billion to $13 billion annually in 2025 for a standard of 70 ppb, and $19 billion to $38 billion annually in 2025 for a standard of 65 ppb.
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ARKANSAS TIMES FILM SERIES: ‘TIME’
Tuesday 2/21. Riverdale 10 Cinema. 7 p.m.
What kind of representation of memory comes from taking 20 years of lived experience and trying to capture its essence for an absent party with just 100 hours of camcorder archives? It’s a remarkable amount of access, but it’s still not enough. What kind of artistic product emerges when you take those same hours of moving images and whittle them down to a feature-length film? Eighty-one minutes is a good chunk of time to spend with any singular subject, but it’s nothing compared to the original material it was gleaned from. Questions like these make you ponder the inherently subjective process of selection, cutting and ordering that undergirds nonfiction filmmaking.
These are just a couple of the extremely existential preoccupations that are explored in “Time,” a 2020 documentary by Garrett Bradley about Sibil Fox Richardson’s fight for the release of her husband, Rob, who spent over two decades away from his family due to an armed robbery prison sentence. The film is shot entirely in black and white, but alternates between scraps of home movie footage from Rob’s incarcerated years and the family’s present-day attempt to transcend the scars left on them by the prison-industrial complex.
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The Arkansas Times is seeking two energetic and motivated sales account executives for Arkansas Times magazine and our special publications division including Bike Arkansas, Arkansas Wild, Arkansas Flavor, Blueprint, Block, Street & Building, IT Arkansas and Visitor’s Guide.
Account executives are responsible for maintaining current client lists and bringing in new business. Successful team members need great communication skills and a strong work ethic, motivated by a sense of purpose in their role and an interest in marketing that helps their clients succeed.
Qualifications
- Sales experience is a plus
- Digital or print media experience is a plus, but there are a variety of work backgrounds that could equip a candidate to excel
- Great communicator
- Self motivator
- Networking and negotiation skills
- Verbal, written, and interpersonal communication skills
- Ability to multitask and work efficiently and effectively to meet required deadlines
Compensation Package
Salary plus commission. Full-time benefits include 401(k), health insurance, a flexible health spending account, paid vacation, and life insurance.
Interested applicants should email publisher, Brooke@arktimes.com with their resume.
The post The Arkansas Times and their special publications division is hiring full-time account executives! appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A bill that would make it more difficult for citizen-led initiatives to make the ballot passed a sSenate committee Thursday afternoon despite testimony from opponents who said the bill violates the state constitution.
SB260 would increase the minimum number of counties from which signatures must be gathered from 15 to 50 and increase the percentage of electors in each of those counties from 50% to 75%.
The state constitution sets the number of signatures required and the number of counties those signatures must come from for initiatives to make the ballot. The constitution states that the signatures must come from “at least 15 counties,” which the bill’s sponsors interpreted as a “floor” and said the legislature could set a higher threshold.
Opponents to this bill that would make it harder — in fact virtually impossible — for regular people to get issues on to the ballot, disagreed with that interpretation.
Sen. Clarke Tucker (D-Little Rock), who sits on the committee, spoke at length about his problems with the bill and said he believes the bill violates the state constitution.
Misty Orpin of Common Ground Arkansas and Little Rock attorney Ross Noland said the bill would violate the state constitution, and defending such a law in court would be expensive for taxpayers.
Orpin said the legislature already demonstrated its belief that it does not have the power to change this provision of the initiative process because the legislature referred an amendment on the matter to the people in 2020. If the legislature thought it could make such a change with a statute, it would have done so rather than referring an amendment to the people.
That amendment, Issue 3 of 2020, failed with 55.93% of the voters voting against it.
“We’ve already had this discussion and the voters of Arkansas have already said that they do not want to do this,” Orpin said.
Senate sponsor Jim Dotson (R-Bentonville) and House sponsor Kendon Underwood (R-Cave Springs) argued before the senate committee on state agencies and governmental affairs in support of their bill, saying that the constitution allows the legislature to raise the floor from where it is set in the constitution.
The sponsors also argued that increasing the number of counties would require petition drives to have more buy-in from citizens across the state, particularly in rural areas.
The sponsors and committee member Sen. Bart Hester (R-Cave Springs) expressed concerns about “out-of-state billionaires” trying to buy the state constitution through the initiative process. Hester said the bill protected average voters and brought integrity to the process.
Tucker said the bill violated the constitution and said the bill would create a playing field that forces out lesser-financed campaigns.
“If this were the law, only the biggest money – only the biggest money – will be able to come in and influence initiated acts and citizen-initiated constitutional amendments,” Tucker said.
Noland said the bill might also change the number of signatures that are required to make the ballot but more analysis was needed to make such a determination. By requiring signatures from more counties and by requiring a higher number of signatures in each of those counties, the bill might indirectly increase the required number of signatures, he said.
The bill passed on a voice vote, with only Tucker casting an audible dissent.
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It’s Thursday and the Times staff is headed to the bar. Cheers!
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Ballot drop boxes don’t exist in Arkansas, but that did not stop Sen. Tyler Dees (R-Siloam Springs) from pushing a bill through the Senate State Agencies & Governmental Affairs Committee Thursday to make it seem like they do.
Senate Bill 258 prohibits Arkansas election officials from setting up drop boxes that have worked in other states for decades to make it easier and more convenient for people voting by absentee ballot to get their votes in.
Dees called voter drop boxes a beacon for voter fraud and said they sow distrust in our election process.
While none of those boxes have ever been used in Arkansas, they’ve long been used successfully and without controversy in plenty of other states. But with Donald Trump’s 2020 defeat, these tools for voter convenience have become part of the national “stop the steal” narrative in which butthurt losers desperate for excuses blame their losses on voter fraud, and not their own personal failings. These pushes to make it harder to vote, especially for poor voters and voters of color who just happen to usually vote for the Democrats, are usually labeled by Republicans as “election integrity.”
And election integrity is what SB258 is all about, said Dees, who worked with the right-wing extremist Heritage Foundation and the Arkansas Secretary of State’s office to craft his bill. He acknowledged ballot drop boxes are not an actual issue in Arkansas, but said his bill will make sure they won’t ever be.
FYI: "ballot integrity" is really about efforts to limit who can vote. There is no election fraud in Arkansas #arpx #arleghttps://t.co/6w8LmSw02V
— For AR People (@ForARPeople1) February 16, 2023
The boxes heighten the potential for fraud and ballot harvesting, Dees and Leslie Bellamy from the Secretary of State’s office said.
Under Arkansas law, people who choose to vote absentee because of medical conditions, being out of town or for other reasons can send their ballots in by mail, deliver them to their county clerk or have their ballots delivered by a designated bearer.
How would ballots delivered via a drop box be more vulnerable to fraud than ballots delivered by mail, Sen. Clarke Tucker (D-Little Rock) wanted to know.
People could stuff the boxes full of fake ballots or somehow destroy the ballots already in there Bellamy answered.
Sen. Bryan King, a Republican from Green Forrest, said that while he’s not a fan of the idea of ballot drop boxes, he noted that polling sites are vulnerable to bombings and shootings. A bomb was found once in a polling site in Osage, he said. What if polls have to close down in an emergency and we need to set up ballot drop boxes as an alternative? he asked.
Before the vote, Tucker noted that his repeated questions about how ballot drop boxes present increased fraud risks remained unanswered.
“I respectfully asked a bunch of times what the increased risk for fraud is opposed to what currently exists in mail. I still don’t seen any increased risk for fraud. No explanation I heard makes any sense to me,” Tucker said.
He understood concerns about ballots inside the boxes being vulnerable, but why not just require ballot drop boxes to be secure or even manned, he asked. There have been only three cases of voter fraud in Arkansas in this century, Tucker noted. None of those involved a ballot drop box.
Facts, shmacts, who cares? Not the Senate State Agencies & Governmental Affairs Committee. Tucker was the lone no vote. The bill to ban ballot drop boxes in Arkansas now goes to the full Senate.
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The first portion of the Little Rock bond millage money has been distributed, and Zoo Director Susan Altrui already has plans in mind for the $5 million received. An amphitheater makeover and upgrades to the lemur, lorikeet and former spider monkey enclosures are first on the pecking order for improvements.
“Right when you come into the zoo, you’re going to see a nice, big, beautiful area redone,” Altrui said. “That’s going to be great for the zoo — very impactful, makes a nice, bold statement, and makes the zoo look really good.”
The timeline for the improvements is still unknown as a bid will need to be put out for the architecture. Altrui said that she has thought of bringing in a temporary exhibit as construction may be disruptive to the visitor experience.
In place of the former spider monkey enclosure, Altrui said multiple things are being considered — including a human climbing play area paired near a primate climbing area or tortoise feeding zone — but the expectations need to stay realistic with the cost restrictions. Money gets spent quickly at the zoo, and the $5 million won’t go far, Altrui said. Where some may want an extravagant hippo enclosure in place of the spider monkeys, something like that can cost upwards of $20 million.
Behind the spider monkey zone sits the mew, a building that houses the zoo’s animal ambassadors. Altrui said that the bond money may also help with a renovation of the mew that increases visitor access to those animals.
“I think the more animals people can see, the more exciting the zoo is,” Altrui said.
The upgrade to the amphitheater is also expected to increase how often the public can see the animal ambassadors. Absent a permanent roof now, birds can’t fly and the public often doesn’t want to sit in the sun for a performance. With an improved community area, Altrui said she also expects the space to be available for rent for weddings, parties or community programs.
Mary HenniganAMPHITHEATER UPGRADE: Renderings for the possible upgrade to the amphitheater include a permanent roof.The city’s bond millage money must be spent within a certain time period — in this case, it’s three years. After the first disbursement is spent, the zoo will receive the rest of its millage allocation, which is an additional $7 million. Altrui said that she hopes to build a new sloth bear exhibit and introduce a new species to the zoo: the okapi.
Altrui described the okapi as a combination of a giraffe and a zebra. National Geographic gives some cool details about the hoofed animal here. The okapi uses its long tongue to eat vegetation, and it has four stomachs to digest its food. Visually, the animal has zebra-like stripes on its hind legs and those little giraffe horns on its head.
If you were hoping for pandas at the Little Rock Zoo — sorry. Altrui said that China owns all pandas in American zoos and each are rented for about $500,000 a year. It’s not financially feasible for the Little Rock Zoo to house one.
In more recent zoo improvements, Altrui said that fencing behind a maintenance building will cause a lane closure on I-630 west at night come the beginning of March. A new fast-paced membership lane is also being added to the zoo’s entrance and should be ready in time for spring break.
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A Conway man accused of beating a police officer with a flagpole during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots pleaded guilty in Washington, D.C., today.
Peter Stager, 43, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court to one count of assaulting police with a dangerous weapon. Prosecutors in turn agreed to dismiss other charges against Stager, including felony counts of obstruction of an official proceeding and civil disorder, reported Jordan Fischer of WUSA9.
U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras set sentencing for 2 p.m. July 24.
Stager was one of nine defendants indicted in the assaults of police officers at the Capitol on the day of the insurrection, aimed at preventing certification of Joe Biden’s election as president.
After a District of Columbia police officer identified in court documents as “B.M.” was dragged down stairs, rioters, including Stager, began beating the officer. “Stager climbed the stairs while holding a flagpole with a United States flag affixed to it and used the pole to repeatedly strike B.M. while B.M. remained prone on the steps of the U.S. Capitol Building,” investigators wrote in a January 2021 affidavit, WUSA9 noted.
In a video outside the Capitol and later played on national television, Stager, who had long hair at the time, said, “Everybody in there is a treasonous traitor. Death is the only remedy for what’s in that building.”
Stager has been jailed in Washington since his arrest shortly after the riots.
Other charges against Stager included:
*Entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds with a deadly or dangerous weapon.
*Disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds with a deadly or dangerous weapon.
*Engaging in physical violence in a restricted building or grounds with a deadly or dangerous weapon.
*Violent entry and disorderly conduct in a Capitol building.
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Little Rock ZooMAYHEM THE HORNBILL ate named cockroaches Monday.Read about Mayhem here if you haven’t. Over to you.
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One of two former Crawford County sheriff’s deputies accused in a violent arrest erased all data from his county-issued cell phone less than two hours before turning it over to the FBI, according to a federal affidavit.
On Aug. 21, the day of the arrest, then-deputy Levi White, who was later fired, “made comments that tend to show he knew he used excessive force,” according to the affidavit, signed last month by FBI special agent Jacob Stokes.
A federal indictment accuses White and another former deputy, Zackary King, of violating the civil rights of Randal Worcester, 27, of Goose Creek, S.C., when they arrested Worcester in the tiny town of Mulberry. Worcester was accused of threatening and spitting on a grocery worker.
White sent and received text messages indicating that he and other officers knew White had used “excessive force” in the arrest, the affidavit says.
KNWA/KFTA in Fayetteville reported on the affidavit earlier this week. The affidavit has apparently been sealed as requested by the FBI.
The affidavit reveals that unreleased dashcam video exists that was taken from the vehicle of a third officer involved in the arrest, Thell Riddle of the Mulberry Police Department. Riddle has not been charged with a crime but has been on paid administrative leave.
A cellphone video taken by a woman who arrived at the scene “shows that Riddle did not strike [Worcester],” the affidavit says, perhaps explaining at least in part why Riddle has not been charged.
White has contended Worcester punched him repeatedly in the head, but Stokes’ affidavit says Riddle told a federal grand jury “that he did not see [Worcester] throw any punches at White.”
Further, Riddle told the grand jury that he was “appalled” when he saw the passerby’s video of the arrest. Riddle also said that, once officers had subdued Worcester, he did not believe any strikes to Worcester were necessary, according to the affidavit.
“He testified that White’s head strikes violated ‘morals” and ‘human decency,'” Stokes wrote.
In seeking a warrant to obtain and search White’s personal cell phone and any other phones he may have, Stokes said investigators have since determined that White’s personal cell also contains relevant information, “including text messages that indicate White and other officers recognized that White used excessive force.”
“Specifically, within two hours of the [Worcester] incident, Officer Riddle sent White a text message” that described the incident as an “ass whipping,” the affidavit says, noting the FBI obtained this information from Riddle’s phone. “In the same text — sent before White wrote a report that claimed [Worcester] hit him in the head while he was out of view of the dashboard camera — Riddle disclosed to White that the hood of his police vehicle blocked much of the dash camera’s view of the incident.”
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A fight and an employee’s medical emergency led to a ‘modified lockdown’ at North Little Rock High School Thursday morning, although official accounts varied about what took place at the school.
Dustin Barnes, spokesman for the North Little Rock School District, said an employee at the high school had a medical emergency that required outside medical services, sending the school into a “modified lockdown” before school resumed shortly afterward.
Barnes did not describe the circumstances that led to the employee’s medical episode and did not provide details on the employee’s condition.
Lieutenant Amy Cooper of the North Little Rock Police Department said there was a “disturbance” at the school that she described as a “little fight.” At the end of the fight, an adult passed out and was transported to the hospital for evaluation, she said.
The adult was not involved in the fight and the school was not placed on lockdown as far as Cooper knew when reached Thursday morning.
Cooper said she did not know if the adult involved in the incident was a teacher.
On Facebook, parents expressed concern, shared information and wondered “What in the world going on at NLR HIGH SCHOOL??!!”
One person said their son told them “three or four fights broke out” and another said “apparently two girls jumped a sub.”
Another person described a chaotic scene at the school, saying there had been five to six fights in two hours, two bats flying around and teachers having heart attacks.
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Yesterday we reported news from Fayetteville Flyer that Austin-based cinema-eatery Alamo Drafthouse was likely coming to Northwest Arkansas after a Fayetteville addition had been added to the Alamo Drafthouse website. However, a representative from the company wouldn’t confirm the news when Fayetteville Flyer reached out for comment yesterday.
Today a press release from the company confirms that Alamo Drafthouse Cinema and its franchise partner Catchlight Entertainment will be opening its first Arkansas location in Fayetteville, and it will be the cinema company’s first with permanent drive-in capabilities.
Alamo Drafthouse CinemaRENDERING: The new 38,000 square-foot cinema will feature 798 luxury recliner seats across 8 theaters.The new 38,000 square-foot cinema with 798 luxury recliner seats across eight theaters will be located at The Aronson, an upcoming multifamily, entertainment and retail destination with new restaurants and more than 200 rental homes. It looks like the fever dream neighborhood of a young cinephile who lives in the sticks and isn’t allowed to watch movies. Named after cinema pioneer – and Arkansas native – Max Aronson (aka Gilbert Anderson and “Bronco Billy”), the bike and pedestrian-friendly entertainment neighborhood will be a beacon of community and fun for all of Fayetteville and Northwest Arkansas, the press release says. The drive in will be located in the former 112 Drive-In space at 3552 Hwy 112.
Alamo Drafthouse CinemaAlamo Drafthouse will commemorate the announcement with a special Rolling Roadshow screening of Universal Pictures’ “Cocaine Bear” from director Elizabeth Banks on Thursday, Feb. 23. The event will feature an outdoor screening of “Cocaine Bear” — which appears to be about a Tennessee bear going on a cocaine rage bender — with a live intro from Executive Chairman and founder of Alamo Drafthouse, Tim League. Bear-themed props will be on hand, as well as food and drinks from Fossil Cove Brewing Co., T-Boys BBQ, and Meaux Beignet. There will also be an opportunity to have your photo taken with a real (stuffed) bear.
Alamo Drafthouse opened in Austin in 1997. It’s known for combining a carefully curated selection of independent, foreign and major studio films, local craft beers, a chef driven menu and weekly themed nights to the movie theater experience. The new Fayetteville theater is slated to open in 2024.
“Our mission at Alamo Drafthouse is to preserve, celebrate, and innovate the cinema experience,” says Alamo Drafthouse CEO Shelli Taylor. “Drive-in theaters deeply influenced the Alamo Drafthouse preshow, programming, and design from the very beginning, but we have never managed to incorporate a permanent drive-in into any of our theaters. We are beyond excited to launch the first Alamo drive-in screen in Fayetteville!”
Here’s more information from the release:
In addition to the drive-in screen, the new location will feature 798 luxury recliner seats across 8 theaters equipped with 4k digital projection, including The Big Show, Alamo Drafthouse’s Premium Large Format theater with Dolby Atmos sound and 70mm projection capabilities. Like all Alamo Drafthouse cinemas, the new Fayetteville location will offer a scratch-made food menu, local beers on draft, and craft cocktails brought to guests in their seats by stealthy servers trained to not disrupt the movie experience. Speaking of not disrupting the movie, the cinema chain’s famed No Talking/No Texting policy will be in effect at the location to ensure guests can watch films free from annoying distractions. Guests are encouraged to arrive up to 30 minutes early to screenings for an ad-free preshow with funny clips, informative video essays, and more. Drafthouse is in the name for a reason, and guests will be able to enjoy a cold drink and chatting with other movie fans at the cinema’s standalone bar and beer garden. The bar will have dozens of beers on tap, craft cocktails, and will be set up to host small events, parties, and screenings. Guests can also hang out in the spacious beer garden with a view of the drive-in screen.
“This is more than the best movie theater in Arkansas – we’re planning the best cinema destination in America,” said Catchlight’s Dave Anderson. “Fayetteville will be home to the absolute pinnacle of experiential moviegoing, pairing what is already known as ‘the best theater in the world’ with the area’s beloved drive-in roots. Even better, it will all anchor The Aronson, a premiere entertainment community coming in 2024.”
The Drive-In
The Alamo Drafthouse Cinema + Drive-In pays homage to the beloved 112 Drive-In that audiences long flocked to at this location. The giant outdoor screen will rise from the south corner of the property where guests can watch films under the stars from the comfort of their own cars, cyclist seating or the cinema’s outdoor beer garden. In keeping with the cinema’s commitment to delivering the “Best Film, Food, and Fun All In One Seat,” Alamo Drafthouse’s entire scratch-made food menu will be available for delivery to guests at their vehicles. In addition to the latest first run films, guests can expect to see drive-in favorites, cult classics, and other beloved repertory films on the outdoor screen.
Alamo Drafthouse Cinema + Drive-In Signature Programming
In addition to showing all the latest blockbusters, indie films, and gems from around the world, Alamo Drafthouse Cinema + Drive-In will continue the exhibitor’s long tradition of repertory programming and memorable live events. Guests can look forward to interactive Movie Parties of classic films complete with games and props, such as their famous ELF Movie Party which saw guests packing theaters throughout the holiday season, brunch screenings with a specialty menu of mid-morning favorites, specialty series like Terror Tuesday and Weird Wednesday celebrating the best of genre filmmaking, and Live Q&A events with filmmakers, actors, and more.
About Alamo Drafthouse Cinema
Founded in 1997, Alamo Drafthouse has been heralded for unique programming events, great food and drinks, and high exhibition standards, earning accolades including “Best Theater Ever” by Time Magazine and “The Coolest Theater in the World” by Wired. A September 2018 Market Force Information survey of nearly 13,000 moviegoers across the country gave Alamo Drafthouse the #1 ranking for Favorite Movie Theater, Best Service, and all food and beverage-related categories.
Alamo Drafthouse provides a unique combination of theater and restaurant, showing first-run movies, independent films and special events with an extensive menu made from scratch. Guests order all food and drinks from servers who quietly attend to them throughout the movie from inside the theater. Patrons are encouraged to arrive early to enjoy the pre-show entertainment. Instead of a barrage of advertising, Alamo Drafthouse shows a curated collection of rare and humorous clips themed to each feature.
Additionally, Alamo Drafthouse protects the theatrical experience with a zero tolerance policy for people who disrupt the film with talking or texting. Alamo Drafthouse’s “Don’t Talk” PSAs have frequently received national attention, and have featured former Texas Governor Ann Richards, Jeff Goldblum and a velociraptor, Georgie from IT, THE ROOM director and star Tommy Wiseau, and one very angry voicemail.
Alamo Drafthouse Fayetteville Social Media
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AlamoFayetteville
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AlamoFay
Website: https://drafthouse.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/AlamoFayetteville
Additional Alamo Drafthouse Social Media:
Facebook: facebook.com/alamodrafthouse
Twitter: twitter.com/alamodrafthouse
YouTube: youtube.com/alamodrafthouse
Instagram: instagram.com/drafthouse
Alamo On Demand: ondemand.drafthouse.com
Website: drafthouse.com
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It’s been a long five weeks of Arkansas legislators drawing lines in the sand against the state’s LGBTQ+ members, specifically transgender youth. Other things have been happening, too. Like the beginning of Gov. Sarah Sanders’ push for school vouchers that opponents say would prioritize private schools at the expense of public education.
While some of the bills pending at the Capitol get more attention than others, Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families (AACF) keeps a running list of the bills it’s tracking online, and offers a little explainer with each.
AACF is a nonprofit that started 45 years ago, and it focuses on protecting children, improving their health and fighting for early education and out-of-school opportunities. As part of its advocacy work, the organization tracks bills from eight categories including education, equity and health. In a recent interview, Loretta Alexander, the health policy director, walked through what goes into the organization’s support for health-related bills.
Alexander said that members meet every day to discuss legislation. They support bills that improve the lives of children and families. The organization doesn’t weigh in on health bills about specific medical practices because they don’t have any clinicians on staff, Alexander said.
In post-Roe Arkansas, the organization is supporting bills that provide aid to pregnant people or those who just had babies.
“People are taking a position that ‘We’re going to take care of these kids,’” Alexander said. “If women have to be forced to have a baby, and some of them may not be in the ideal position to raise a child … then absolutely take care of those babies after they are born.”
Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families looks at all legislation through an “equity lens.” She said AACF supports screenings for postpartum depression, Medicaid coverage for mothers 12 months after giving birth and doing away with a Medicaid prescription cap.
Supporting the bills that help people after they’ve had a baby would likely help lower the rate of maternal mortality in Arkansas. Black mothers in Arkansas are twice as likely to die after giving birth, and the overall maternal mortality rate in the state is one of the highest in the country. Likewise, Arkansas’s infant mortality rate is also one of the highest in the country.
“If you’re not healthy yourself, you’re not going to have as good of an outcome of taking care of your children,” Alexander said. “You’re not going to be able to work, you’re not going to manage your life nearly as well as you need to.”
The organization also gives the thumbs up for higher reimbursement for outpatient services at Arkansas’s rural hospitals, doing away with the sales tax on wheelchair accessible vehicles and expanded authority for surrogates.
Check out all the legislation AACF is tracking here.
The post Feeling overwhelmed by all the bills flying around at the state Capitol? This Arkansas organization helps keep track of the good and bad appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A House committee on Wednesday approved a bill that would ban public entities from doing business with financial providers that make investments using environmental, social justice or governance factors, or in the framing of Republicans in Arkansas and elsewhere, discriminate against fossil fuel companies and firearm and ammunition manufacturers.
This is more culture war posturing, but with the potential to cause some real financial harm to the state.
From Axios:
Texas is one of the states that’s effectively said it’ll pull back from doing business with banks like JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup — on the grounds that these banks are too into ESG (environmental, social and governance) policies for the tastes of conservative state leaders.
This could cost Texas taxpayers about $416 million per year, in the form of higher interest payments on its municipal bonds, estimated a 2022 paper by Wharton Business School professor Daniel Garrett and Federal Reserve economist Ivan Ivanov (highlighted this week by Bloomberg’s Matthew Winkler).
Sponsor Rep. Jeff Wardlaw (R-Hermitage) unconvincingly argued that Arkansas would avoid a similar hit. From Hunter Field in the Arkansas Advocate:
Asked if Arkansas would see similar financial hits from the bill, sponsor Rep. Jeff Wardlaw (R-Hermitage) said the bill exempted “indirect holdings;” for example, many retirement plans such as 401(k) and 403(b) plans.
“We exempted indirect holdings trying to avoid some of that major hit,” Wardlaw said. “But we also want to make sure that we’re following our beliefs in the state and make sure that we’re ensuring no one is discriminating against the industries that are important to Arkansas.”
Essentially, Wardlaw and others around the country don’t want investment managers to use their positions to harm industries they dislike for political reasons, putting ideology ahead of sound investing. However, investment experts say that some ESG criteria — like a company’s resiliency to a changing climate — should be taken into consideration.
The bill now heads to the full House for a vote. A similar-themed bill that would require state contractors to pledge that they’re not engaging in investments that discriminate against oil or gun companies is on the deferred list of the Senate State Agencies Committee.
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Go home already! The bigots at the legislature continue their multi-pronged assault on transgender Arkansans very existence. The latest attack, Senate Bill 270, would make it a crime for a trans person to use a bathroom or locker room that matches their gender identity if anyone under 18 is present in one of those facilities.
From Harvard’s Alejandra Caraballo, an expert on legal issues facing the transgender community:
This law would in effect ban trans people from public restrooms and that’s the point. If a trans person uses the bathroom consistent with their gender identity, they could be arrested. If they don’t, they could be assaulted by others thinking they are using the wrong restroom.
The bill is sponsored by Sen. John Payton (R-Wilburn) and Rep. Cindy Crawford (R-Fort Smith). Sens. Ben Gilmore (R-Crossett), Missy Irvin (R-Mountain View), Blake Johnson (R-Corning), Mark Johnson (R-Little Rock), Matt Stone (R-Camden) and David Wallace (R-Leachville) are co-sponsors. Surely, Rep. Mary Bentley and Sen. Gary Stubblefield will jump onboard before too long.
The post Yet another Arkansas bill filed to criminalize trans people using the bathroom appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Rep. Mary Bentley (R-Perryville) is a one-hit wonder with her fixation on transgender children that spans the years and the legislative sessions, but her fellow Arkansas lawmakers seem happy to stay stuck in the time warp with her. On Wednesday, Bentley sold her shoddy bathroom bill to the Senate Education Committee, moving it another step closer to becoming law and getting the state sued again for violating transgender children’s civil and constitutional rights.
Bentley’s bill, co-sponsored by Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Jonesboro) was hateful and mean and dangerous to trans kids when it passed through the House Education Committee in January. It was still hateful and mean and dangerous to trans kids when senators voted it up today, despite conservatives’ assurances to the contrary.
“For me, this has nothing to do with targeting transgender children, and I’m actually quite offended to be put in that narrative,” said Sen. Breanne Davis (R-Russellville), who has three children in public schools. She said schoolchildren are changing their gender identities and preferred pronouns multiple times throughout the school year, and she was worried about the idea of her middle schooler being in a locker room with someone of a different sex at birth. Davis said she cares about those children and doesn’t want them to be hurt, and she believes carving out separate accommodations for trans students is a good plan.
Opponents who testified Wednesday noted that trans children likely will be hurt, though, and that medical experts warn against bathroom bills like this one that single out transgender students. The bill also prevents transgender youth from using the locker rooms that correspond with their gender identity, or rooming with people of their same gender on overnight school trips.
Brian ChilsonOlivia Gardner, education director with Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, said trans children will be put in harm’s way with a bathroom bill that passed through a Senate committee Wednesday.Olivia Gardner, the education director for Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, said transgender children are at higher risk of harassment and abuse. This bill ostracizes them further. “This bill was written under the premise that it will ensure student safety. Instead, we’ll put some of our most vulnerable students in harm’s way.”
Brian ChilsonMoms for Liberty member and Conduit News personality Ginny Dowden testified in favor of the bathroom bill.Moms for Liberty member and Conduit News personality Ginny Lauren Dowden said she supported the bathroom bill because of common sense, not politics. “CRT and gender identity ideology are already the tools of entry into our educational institutions with the goal of fundamentally transforming schools’ environments and culture,” she said. “Do we as a society adhere to the age-old biological fact that men are men and women are women, or not?” See? Not political.
The conservative Family Council also testified in support of the bathroom bill.
Sen. Greg Leding voted against the bathroom bill, but it passed with strong support from Republican committee members.
Allison Guthrie, a psychology student, read from the American Medical Association’s policy that clashes with bathroom bills like this one. The AMA has knowledge, research and expertise on this subject, which legislators continue to ignore, Guthrie said.
“It seems to me that this government rather than protecting children intends to be the gender and genital police of them,” she said.
Sarah Everett, the policy director for Arkansas’s American Civil Liberties Union, said that in addition to concerns she has about the violation of constitutional rights, it will put everyone in strange and potentially unsafe situations.
“This bill would require trans girls to spend the night with boys and trans boys to spend the night with girls on overnight trips,” she said.
The question about how these rules will be enforced continued to go unanswered. While penalties for violations are outlined in the bill, enforcement mechanisms are not. Without some clarity there, “I’m concerned about what situations we’re going to be putting children and their families into,” Sen. Greg Leding (D-Fayetteville) said.
Leding and Sen. Linda Chesterfield (D-Little Rock) voted no, but the bill passed on a voice vote and now goes to the full Senate.
The post Conservative lawmakers plunge ahead with school bathroom bill targeting trans kids appeared first on Arkansas Times.
On this week's podcast, Austin Bailey and Lindsey Millar talk about Gov. Sarah Sanders' delivering the Republican response to President Biden's State of the Union address, the Arkansas LEARNS education plan and more news from the legislature.
Little Rock Parks & Recreation just erected this sculpture along the Arkansas River Trail at Murray Park. Any weirder news than that?
The post The rollerskating banana open line appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The bill that’s gotten the most attention thus far in the Arkansas General Assembly cleared the House on Monday. But it looks a lot different than it initially did. Senate Bill 43, co-sponsored by Sen. Gary Stubblefield (R-Branch) and Rep. Mary Bentley (R-Perryville), originally would have classified drag performances as adult-oriented businesses, which are subject to all sort of zoning restrictions that keep those businesses far away from public life.
But despite sailing through the Senate, the bill got completely overhauled in a House committee after Attorney General Tim Griffin apparently signaled that it wasn’t likely to hold up in court. Now there’s no mention of drag anywhere in the bill. Instead, the bill defines “adult-oriented performance” as something that’s intended to appeal to the prurient interest and involves the exposure of genitalia or breasts either real or prosthetic, or the depiction sexual activity, and says that minors can’t attend them.
Bentley proudly told the House that before this effort it wasn’t illegal for a child to go to a strip club. But it effectively is because of alcohol laws.
Bentley read a letter from a man who said he’d retired from the military with his family to Batesville because it was far away from the corrupting influences of big cities. But then Batesville had a Pride event that included a drag show in which genital areas were exposed. (Yeah, right.) He called on Bentley to keep “small town Arkansas from becoming San Francisco.”
The bill probably does nothing at this point, but it might! Rep. Tippi McCullough (D-Little Rock) noted that “prurient” wasn’t defined in the bill. If people are going to get penalized for violating a law they should understand it, she said.
The bill passed 78-15 with two voting present. It now heads back to Senate committee and the full Senate for votes on the amended version.
The post Former anti-drag bill, amended to take on ‘prurient’ semi-nude performances, passes House appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A third Whataburger is on the horizon for Central Arkansas. A call to the North Little Rock Chamber of Commerce today confirmed that there is a ribbon cutting ceremony for a new Whataburger scheduled for 10 a.m. Monday, Feb. 20 on Maumelle Boulevard. There isn’t a specific address listing yet, but it will be located in a vacant lot in front of the Walmart Supercenter located 12001 Maumelle Boulevard.
In August of last year it was announced that Whataburger would be coming to Benton at at 7520 Alcoa Road. Little Rock got in on the Whataburger hype train a month later when The Mighty Rib reported that a location was coming to 17100 Chenal Parkway, about a half mile south of the Promenade.
The Texas-based burger mecca currently has eight stores operating in Arkansas: Two in Fayetteville and one each in Rogers, Magnolia, Texarkana, Fort Smith, Springdale and El Dorado.
If you can’t hide your enthusiasm until one of the Central Arkansas stores open, you can grab one of these Igloo Fanny Packs at the Whataburger Whatastore.
Whataburger
The post Whataburger coming to Maumelle Boulevard in North Little Rock appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Arkansas Democrats are standing by, ready to offer a rebuttal to Gov. Sarah Sanders’ speech after tomorrow’s State of the Union address by President Joe Biden.
TUNE IN TOMORROW
Arkansas Democrats To Respond Governor @SarahHuckabee Sanders's National Address on Tuesday
State Representative Ashley Hudson Will Address Arkansas Following the Governor's Response to President Biden's State of the Union
Tuesday, Feb 7th
9:30 PM pic.twitter.com/bBSydNAGdf— Democratic Party of Arkansas (@ArkDems) February 6, 2023
Rep. Ashley Hudson of Little Rock, who’s made a name for herself as an advocate for women’s and girls’ health, will speak on Democrats’ efforts to boost teacher pay and defeat vouchers that send public funds to church and private schools.
Hudson’s speech will be streamed on Facebook.
WHAT: State Representative Ashley Hudson (D-Little Rock) will address Arkansas following Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech to a joint session of Congress. Rep. Hudson will outline Democratic legislative priorities for Arkansas, noting both opportunities for bipartisan efforts like raising educator pay and areas of contrast such as the Governor’s stated proposal to rob Arkansas’s public schools dollars for an unproven voucher scheme.WHEN: Tuesday, February 7th at 9:30 PM (or following the Governor’s nationally televised address)
WHERE: Democratic Party of Arkansas Headquarters // 1300 West Capitol Ave, Little Rock, 72201
WHO: State Representative Ashley Hudson (Democrat – District 75, Little Rock) and Current Officers of the Democratic Party of Arkansas
The post Arkansas Democrats set to answer Gov. Sanders’ State of the Union response Tuesday appeared first on Arkansas Times.
LEAH GRANT
THURSDAY 2/9-FRIDAY 4/28. Arts & Science Center for Southeast Arkansas, Pine Bluff. Free.
Fayetteville-based visual artist Leah Grant sometimes makes use of audio, video and the written word in her work, but her most striking project combines photography, collage, cyanotype and screenprinting to create textured, blue-and-red portraits that exist at the intersection of solemn dignity and smeared, colorful chaos. She received an MFA from the University of Arkansas and a BFA from Henderson State, and her new exhibit, “Becoming Once More,” opens with a free reception from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 9 at the Arts & Science Center for Southeast Arkansas, a 22,000-square-foot museum in Pine Bluff that’s also home to theater productions and art education.
Art by Leah Grant
In the words of Kevin Haynie, ASC’s curator of collections and exhibitions, Grant’s work “is a contemplative and captivating blend of media and materials that examines the complex makings of identity, and the components that help to shape it.”
Art by Leah Grant
Grant’s display will overlap with another exhibit entitled “Spectrum Dynamic,” which presents visual interpretations of the repetitive physical movements commonly associated with people on the autism spectrum.
From “Spectrum Dynamic” exhibit
The post Exhibit from Fayetteville artist Leah Grant opening in Pine Bluff appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A bill that would add a work requirement for people who live in public housing cleared the House on Monday with a 79-18 vote.
House Bill 1196, sponsored by Rep. Kendon Underwood (R-Cave Springs), would require public housing authorities to verify that “able-bodied” adults, ages 19-64, worked, volunteered or participated in job-training for an average of 20 hours per week. The proposal provides no funding for housing authorities to complete the verification, something several Democratic lawmakers pointed out.
Among those exempted from the requirement are people who are disabled, pregnant or receiving unemployment benefits. The bill also exempts parents of children under 4 months of age, but Underwood said he and his co-sponsor, Sen. Ben Gilmore (R-Crossett), would amend it to extend the exemption to parents of children up to age 5.
It still has to clear a Senate committee and the full Senate before it hits the governor’s desk.
The bill would require public housing authorities to request approval for the work requirement from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. The Biden administration — and other future administrations of Democratic presidents — almost certainly won’t go for this. But the bill requires the housing authorities to make the request every 24 months.
Underwood cited a report from the state Chamber of Commerce that Arkansas has 60,000 unfilled jobs. He said the bill would promote self-sufficiency and help able-bodied adults escape government dependency. Rep. David Ray (R-Maumelle) said it would “promote human flourishing.”
Rep. Vivian Flowers (D-Pine Bluff) said as hard as it might be to believe, she had communities in Arkansas where there were no jobs available.
Rep. Roger Lynch (R-Lonoke) said the director of the Lonoke County Housing Authority told him he was concerned about the time and potential cost of the requirement. Lynch wondered whether the legislature was creating an unfunded mandate. He voted present, the same as a no vote.
Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, in a blog post called “Work Requirements Still Don’t Work,” has a thorough takedown of the proposal:
Arkansans should by now be well-acquainted with the failure of work requirements on public programs. In 2018, more than 18,000 Arkansans lost Medicaid expansion coverage (referred to as Arkansas Works at the time) even though 97% of the population were either meeting the necessary hours worked or qualified for an exemption. There is no evidence this increased anyone’s employment or earnings, though it likely increased uncompensated care costs for hospitals by disenrolling participants who met the qualifications but couldn’t navigate the byzantine online reporting system.
Our experiment with work requirements on Medicaid was a total failure, but the negative impacts were at least mitigated because the work requirements were designed to piggyback off already-existing work requirements on other federal programs. For example, we allowed participants who were meeting work requirements on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to be exempted from similar requirements on Arkansas Works due to the redundancy and bureaucratic red tape of subjecting participants to multiple program requirements.
HB1196, in contrast, would not allow that, and it would make the requirements much stricter.
The post House passes work requirement for public housing appeared first on Arkansas Times.
North Little Rock voters will begin deciding tomorrow if they want to increase their property taxes to fund improvements to the North Little Rock Public Library’s buildings and increase hours at the system’s two downtown branches.
A proposal on the ballot would increase the millage rate from three to five mills. A mill is a tenth of a penny and the tax is applied to 20% of the appraised value of property. If passed, the tax on a $100,000 house would increase from $60 a year to $100 a year.
Early voting starts tomorrow and election day is Feb. 14.
Crystal Gates, executive director of the library system, said the North Little Rock libraries have not had an increase in millage rate in more than 20 years and could use the extra cash to make improvements to the system’s aging buildings.
The library has been in good financial shape, Gates said, but the building repair needs have begun to pile up.
“These aging systems just started cascading, all of the replacements that are needed,” she said. “All of those are big projects.”
During a recent interview, Gates rattled off a litany of building improvements that need to be made for the library system that operates Laman Public Library on Orange Street and Argenta Public Library on Main Street. The North Little Rock Library System is independent and is not part of the Central Arkansas Library System.
LAMAN LIBRARY: The North Little Rock Library System’s Laman Library is more than 60 years old and needs building improvements, the executive director said. (Photo by Brian Chilson)
The North Little Rock library system operates the 50,000 square-foot Laman Library, which is more than 60 years old. The system also operates the Argenta Public Library in a 15,000 square-foot former post office that was built in 1931.
Each location needs infrastructure improvements, Gates said, such as a new roof at Laman, half a new roof and $20,000 of weather stripping at Argenta, a heating unit at Laman that is attached to a boiler system that requires an $80,000 replacement and on and on. The system is getting more quotes on the Laman boiler issue to see if there’s another solution, Gates said.
The library system also needs security upgrades at a cost of more than $120,000 and improved ADA access for the children’s entrance at the Laman location near the all-inclusive playground.
“We have a lot of families with unique needs that need access to our restrooms, need access to the building,” Gates said.
Gates compared the library system’s infrastructure problem to that of aging people who need knee replacements, hip replacements and medicine as they get older.
“Buildings are just like that,” she said. “Once you hit a certain age, you just have maintenance things that must be done.”
ARGENTA LIBRARY: The library system’s Argenta branch is housed in a former post office built in 1931. (Photo by Brian Chilson)
One of the library’s top requests is to increase hours, especially at the Laman Library. The Laman branch is open all day Monday through Thursday, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Friday and Saturday and closed on Sunday. The Argenta branch is open all day Monday through Friday and closed on weekends.
Gates said library patrons want the libraries to be open more, which she said requires staffing and other costs.
“They want weekend hours, they want a full day on Friday, a full day on Saturday,” Gates said. “That takes extra funding because of staffing and the building costs, what it costs to run a building that size. The millage would allow us to do that.”
Gates also said the cost of many things libraries must purchase, like books and electronic materials, has also increased significantly. Books are already more expensive for libraries to purchase than for the average consumer with popular fiction titles typically costing $50-$120 with library bindings.
What happens if the millage fails?
The library won’t close, Gates said, but the library will probably cut some hours, services and other budget items to shift funds to address the building needs over a couple of years.
“We don’t want to do that,” she said.
The post North Little Rock to consider millage increase to repair library infrastructure, increase hours appeared first on Arkansas Times.
This morning, the Arkansas Legislative Black Caucus met with Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Jonesboro) regarding Senate Bill 71, his bill to end affirmative action for public entities like school districts, city government, public universities or state agencies.
Sullivan was selling the line that his anti-affirmative-action bill would end “state-sponsored discrimination” in Arkansas. Nobody was buying it.
In reality, Sullivan’s bill would end programs aimed at providing opportunities for Arkansans who have historically been denied access to those benefits. While Sullivan was quick to admit that discrimination continues to exist in Arkansas, he apparently views these opportunity programs as the biggest and most pressing form of discrimination facing our state.
SB71 has already passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee, but Sullivan said today that he promised his Senate colleagues he would wait at least a week before presenting it for a vote of the full Senate in order to meet with and hear the concerns of legislative and community groups.
Andrew Epperson/KARKReps. Denise Ennett and Fred Allen did not seem impressed with Sen. Dan Sullivan’s proposal.If today’s meeting with the Legislative Black Caucus was any indication, Sullivan seems unlikely to really listen to these concerns. Many members of the Black Caucus urged Sullivan to withdraw or hold his bill until he fully understands the harm it will do. But as Rep. Fred Allen (D-Little Rock) observed in today’s meeting, it appears Sullivan has already made up his mind.
The bill states, in part, that “The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, an individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in matters of state employment, public education, or state procurement.” It would, among other things, end affirmative-action programs in higher education, meaning that race could not be used as a factor in admissions or for recruitment and selection of faculty and staff.
Sullivan noted that the United States Supreme Court seems poised to strike down affirmative action in university admissions nationwide in two cases heard last October involving Harvard University and the University of North Carolina. Those institutions, like many others around the country, use race as one factor in a holistic admissions process that also looks at students’ socioeconomic status, geographic location, family history, academic performance, volunteerism, personal story and extra-curricular activities. Schools that use race-conscious admissions policies do so because they seek to create a more diverse and inclusive educational environment (promoting diversity is the only goal that the Supreme Court has allowed for the use of affirmative-action plans; goals aimed at remedying historic patterns of racism, discrimination and oppression were rejected).
Sullivan’s bill goes far beyond the affirmative-action plans that the Supreme Court may soon strike down. The bill removes the legal requirement that individual school districts and the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education develop plans for recruiting and retaining diverse teachers and administrators. It would repeal the section of the Arkansas Code aimed at helping minority students stay in college and graduate.
SB71 would also repeal Arkansas’s “Equal Employment Hiring Program,” which requires every state agency, board, commission, department, and institution of higher education to “pursue a comprehensive equal employment hiring program” designed to increase minority employment in state government. Not only does the bill prohibit “preferential treatment” based on race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin, it also creates a private cause of action for people who believe that their rights were impacted due to a violation of this bill (i.e., they think they were passed over for admissions, hiring, advancement, contracting, or any other benefit based on affirmative action). With a private cause of action, people who feel their rights were violated can sue.
Rep. Jamie Scott (D-North Little Rock) asked Sullivan to confirm that his bill would prohibit (and even criminalize) local policies such as the Little Rock School District’s “Minority Spending Goals” (LRSD’s policy states that the district works at “ensuring that responsible minority businesses enterprises (MBE) and labor surplus area firms (LSA) are afforded a fair and equal opportunity to participate in the procurement process.” To that end, the district has established a goal that at least 10% of its overall expenditures should go to minority-owned businesses and at least 10% should go to women-owned businesses). Sullivan responded, as he did to many of the legislators’ questions, simply by repeating that he believes that discrimination is wrong.
Brian ChilsonSEN. DAN SULLIVAN (file photo)Sullivan relied heavily on Chief Justice John Roberts’s quote that “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s 2003 prediction in Grutter v. Bollinger that “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest [in student body diversity] approved today.” Sen. Linda Chesterfield (D-Little Rock) reminded Sullivan that quoting Supreme Court justices “doesn’t carry the same weight for us,” since the U.S. Supreme Court also decided Dred Scott, holding that African-Americans could not become citizens of the United States, and Plessy v. Ferguson, in which it upheld “separate but equal.”
Sullivan claimed his bill is necessary because he sees a trend in more and more groups claiming “aggrieved status” and seeking preferential treatment. He also argued that Arkansas needs to establish a metric for determining when affirmative-action programs should end. Sen. Reginald Murdock (D-Marianna) countered that SB71 addresses neither issue. Instead, it completely ends programs designed to help level the playing field for women and minorities.
Rep. Fred Allen (D-Little Rock) and several others admonished Sullivan for not coming to members of the Black Caucus to privately discuss this idea before filing his bill, repeatedly telling him that he did not understand the discrimination that Black Americans still face and the harm that this bill will do. Sullivan, who may not have realized that the legislators were trying to be charitable when they gently suggested that he did not fully grasp the damage that his bill would do, vocally took offense to those comments, arguing to a group of Black lawmakers that he does, in fact, understand racism and discrimination just as much as they do.
Andrew Epperson/KARKRep. Vivian Flowers (D-Pine Bluff) was not won over.Rep. Vivian Flowers (D-Pine Bluff) questioned why Sullivan chose to remove all preferences based on race, ethnicity and sex, but not the preferences currently in Arkansas law for military veterans. Sullivan, caught off guard, said that he thought that was a valid point. He then invited Flowers to propose an amendment, and she clarified that she did not think the bill was needed at all and should just be withdrawn rather than amended. In fact, she said, we need to do a better job enforcing the existing law.
In one of the more illuminating exchanges, Sullivan cited Arlo Washington, the president and CEO of People Trust Community Loan Fund, as an example of a Black Arkansan who proved that affirmative-action programs aren’t necessary. In response, Flowers and Scott pointed out that Washington had benefited from some of the opportunity programs Sullivan’s bill would end.
Sullivan was defiant in response to the lawmakers’ personal stories about how affirmative-action programs had made a difference in their lives or their community. Sullivan asked the Black Caucus why, if ending discrimination was so important to them, they had not already filed a similar bill. Sen. Fred Love (D-Little Rock) asked incredulously, “How are you going to ask people who have been discriminated against to bring a bill to end discrimination?” He implored Sullivan to withdraw the bill, stating, “You can say that you understand, but you do not understand the plight of my community.” Love summed up the Black Caucus’s objections to the bill by advising Sullivan that, “this bill does not end discrimination, it only widens the gap.”
If today’s meeting made anything clear, it’s that Sullivan and the Black Caucus have very different definitions of “discrimination.” Members of the Black Caucus attempted to explain to Sullivan that their communities experience real and tangible forms of racial discrimination that Arkansas’s affirmative-action policies help mitigate. Sullivan, on the other hand, calls his bill “An Act to Prohibit Discrimination,” but he probably should have replaced the word “discrimination” with the word “opportunity.”
The post Legislative Black Caucus nonplussed by white senator’s attempt to end affirmative action appeared first on Arkansas Times.
If you have Valentine’s Day marriage proposal plans, consider changing your predetermined setting if you want to save money on meals throughout 2023, or if you and your partner love you some Old Country Store fare. Cracker Barrel has entered the wedding industrial complex with the “I said yes at Cracker Barrel” contest that will award five future spouses who film their proposals at any Cracker Barrel location nationwide between Feb. 10-16 free Cracker Barrel for a year.
There are so many variables involved in a marriage proposal and the setting is at least the third most important behind the ring and whether or not the love between the two is strong enough for a lifelong commitment. If one and two check out, but three is a total dud, the proposal could be a sore spot for the rest of the couple’s life or ruin the relationship all together. And there’s other factors at play that are out of our hands like weather, or the plan going awry due to human error. Remember the guy who booked a trip to Disneyland Paris to propose only to have a Disney employee in Mickey Mouse ears take the ring while the guy was on one knee and escort the couple away from the sacred stairs?
Chances are that won’t happen at Cracker Barrel, and if it does you’re probably only out about $100. But what if you go through with this and don’t win free Cracker Barrel for a year? Can’t win if you don’t try, but will you both see it that way? What will your in-laws think? These are critical questions.
If you do decide you want to propose at Cracker Barrel this Valentine’s Day, here are the contest rules that you mustn’t screw up. To enter, upload an original in-feed publicly viewable video to Instagram between Feb. 10-16, depicting the wedding proposal at a Cracker Barrel Old Country Store. Also, include a description in the post of why the submitter chose to propose at Cracker Barrel. Include hashtags #IsaidYesAtCrackerBarrel and #Contest. Lastly, tag Cracker Barrel’s official Instagram account handle @crackerbarrel.
If you’re wondering what free Cracker Barrel for a year actually means, it consists of multiple gift cards totaling $2,000 that can be used to provide one meal or entree for two people per week ($35 average per visit per couple) over the course of 52 weeks. You can look up the full contest rules here.
If you want to hit up Cracker Barrel with your partner this holiday season without a marriage proposal, the Old Country Store is also offering free Valentine’s dessert with the purchase of two entrees from a selected Valentine’s Day menu.
The post Say yes to a marriage proposal at Cracker Barrel this Valentine’s Day, potentially win a year’s worth of Old Country Store cookin’ appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A Japanese bank would provide financing for a nonprofit affiliate of the University of Arkansas System to buy the University of Phoenix, according to the chairman of the system’s board of trustees.
Cliff Gibson III said UA System President Donald Bobbitt told him of the bank, but Gibson did not know its name. Bobbitt has previously identified the nonprofit, created in August, as Transformative Education Services Inc., or TES Inc.
Asked about the bank, UA System spokesman Nate Hinkel said, “I understand that the nonprofit is looking into financing options but I can’t comment any further at this point.”
Pressed further, Hinkel said, “As we’ve previously said, this is an ongoing potential negotiation and many options and details are subject to change. It’s premature to comment on any of the details at this point. I suppose it’s also possible that there is more than one financing option that is being considered.”
Phoenix now has about 79,000 students, compared with about 470,000 students at its peak in 2010. University of Phoenix spokeswoman Andrea Smiley has said 99.5% are online students.
Gibson, a Monticello attorney, voiced his objections to the proposed affiliation in a series of recent emails exchanged with Bobbitt, which the Arkansas Times obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. The negotiations with Phoenix have been underway for about 18 months but became public only last month.
A source speaking on condition of anonymity told the Arkansas Times recently that a cost estimate of $500 million to $700 million was about right. Gibson said Bobbitt told him a sum, but Gibson declined to disclose it.
In a series of emails to Bobbitt, Gibson said, “I would first note that Phoenix has a generally poor reputation as evidenced by the Wikipedia page, but when you couple that name with the University of Arkansas’ good reputation for excellence in higher education, the dynamics completely change.”
Indeed, Phoenix, one of the nation’s largest for-profit colleges, has had its share of problems in recent years.
In 2017, Apollo Group sold Phoenix to Apollo Global Management, a huge investment company, according to the Higher Education Inquirer. In December 2019, Phoenix agreed to a $191 million settlement with the Federal Trade Commission. The commission said the college had lured students with fraudulent claims.
In January 2022, George Burnett was named Phoenix’s president. But months after taking the post, Burnett resigned following an inquiry by the U.S. Department of Education of a college that he had previously led, according to a USA Today article in June 2022.
Gibson said in one of his emails to Bobbitt that he wondered why the UA System “would want to buy or create another institution to compete with our existing campuses. And it makes me wonder why we don’t put our efforts toward strengthening the online offerings of our existing campuses.”
Hinkel again stressed in an email to the Times that the UA System would not buy the University of Phoenix but only be affiliated with it through the nonprofit. He also said Phoenix would not become a part of the UA System as other campuses are.
As to how the UA System stands to benefit from a nonprofit purchase, Gibson said in an interview today that Bobbitt “thinks it will yield profits,” though it was unclear how that would happen. Gibson said he thought there was a licensing agreement that might be a factor. “I don’t understand it,” he said.
“You don’t see the SEC going out and creating its own football team to play against its own colleges,” Gibson said. “Why would you do that here?”
Gibson said Bobbitt also told him that the University of Phoenix paid for a “due diligence study” about the prospects of the proposed purchase. Other than that, Gibson said, he does not know who’s paying for any expenses related to the purchase negotiations.
“We need to know how this whole thing is being put together,” Gibson said.
Gibson had earlier complained in an email to Bobbitt that he had been getting only “bits and pieces” of information about the proposed purchase.
While perusing emails and other information shared under the Freedom of Information Act, the Times noticed that Gibson wasn’t the only board member left out of the loop.
One or more emails, for instance, were addressed to various people, only one of which is a board member — Ted Dickey. According to the UA System’s website Dickey is, among other things, the portfolio manager for Dunklin Investments of Stuttgart and previously worked six years in corporate finance at Stephens Inc., the UA System’s mergers and acquisitions partner.
“It’s fairly common for trustees with certain expertise to be involved in initial discussions of potential projects before they are vetted by the entire Board,” Hinkel explained. “As noted above, Dr. Bobbitt’s intention has always been to present this proposal to the entire Board if and when it gets to the point of an agreement.”
But when the Times asked Hinkel if the UA System’s board would have to sign off on the nonprofit’s proposed purchase of Phoenix, he notably did not say yes or no. Instead, he wrote, “At this stage of any potential acquisition or affiliation, there are several steps to be taken before determining exactly what approvals would be needed. As Dr. Bobbitt has previously stated very clearly, it has been his intention to fully inform the Board of the aspects of this project at the appropriate time.”
In one of his emails to Bobbitt, Gibson wrote: “Certainly we have a choice as to which course to take, and I tend to think that strengthening our existing campuses and their online offerings is the better course given their longstanding reputation for excellence in higher education, rather than get involved with an institution whose reputation in that arena is in serious question.”
In an email to Gibson, Bobbitt said the University of Phoenix currently has about 1,000 students in Arkansas. He said he thought the number considered full time was closer to 650, though.
“So I am not concerned that it will take enrollment from other institutions,” Bobbitt wrote. “Besides, it is doing business right now in Arkansas, as are Southern New Hampshire, Western Governors, Arizona State, University Maryland Global, etc.”
Bobbitt also defended Phoenix’s reputation.
“For example, there are really two different histories of Phoenix; before and after Apollo,” Bobbitt wrote “The Wikipedia entry is focused on before – TES, Inc. is acquiring the university after. In fact, if you look at the screen shot I have attached to this note you will see that the entry for UoP that you read has a notice at the beginning stating that the entry may be biased. I have included a similar entry for UAF and no such concern is noted. We plan to provide much more information than the simple Wikipedia entry provides. We have been doing our due diligence for over 18 months.”
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The Gravette man convicted last month in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the nation’s Capitol has asked a federal court either to acquit or grant him a new trial.
Lawyers for Richard “Bigo” Barnett, 62, filed the two motions Sunday in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., where a jury convicted Barnett on eight charges related to the riots. Barnett, who remains free, is to be sentenced May 3.
The defense motion seeking acquittal accuses the prosecution of failing its job on several points. Perhaps the most interesting is that the defense says the prosecution presented “two separate demonstrations before the jury of a Zap Hike ‘N Strike after agreeing that neither side would present a weapons expert qualified to perform a demonstration.”
The stick had a high-voltage stun gun attached to it. During the trial, Barnett testified that it quit working the night before the Capitol uprising, though he still carried it with him into the Capitol the next day. Barnett contended he was pushed inside and was looking for a restroom when he accidentally found himself in then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office. There, he posed for a photo with one of his feet propped on a desk, thereby gaining international notoriety.
The defense complains that one charge not included in Barnett’s original indictment was wrongly added at trial. It also argues that the government failed to prove Barnett had committed any of the eight crimes charged even though jurors convicted him of all eight in about three hours.
The defense further claims that the U.S. attorney’s office “lied that aiding and abetting is the same as ‘attempting,'” and “was deficient in relevant, honest evidence for any charge.” The prosecution “provided only legal conclusions not founded in evidence to the jury,” the defense argues.
Barnett’s attorneys further contend “no reasonable, impartial, fair jury could have found” him guilty of any of the charges for which he was tried and say the government misapplied the law to prosecute him for “innocent acts.”
The riots were aimed at protesting the election of Joe Biden for president over Donald Trump in 2020.
“The government never showed evidence of a civil disorder when and where Mr. Barnett was located inside the Rotunda or Capitol building,” the defense argues. “The government admitted Mr. Barnett was not accused of violence.
“Instead, in its guise of showing context, the government showed violence on the west that was nowhere near Mr. Barnett’s location and not visible to anyone in the Rotunda,” the defense adds.
In the alternative motion seeking a new trial, the defense again brings up the prosecution’s Hike ‘N Stick demonstrations.
“Both demonstrations were performed after it had been established that only experts could perform demonstrations, after the Government canceled its expert, and after the Court encouraged the defense to do the same,” the defense argues. “These two demonstrations were both performed on the same day that [the] Government rested his case, giving the defense no time to arrange for an expert on such short notice. The prejudice of the two surprised demonstrations is incalculable, and by itself justifies a
new trial in the interest of justice.”
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BIG THIEF
FRIDAY 2/10. George’s Majestic Lounge, Fayetteville. 9 p.m. $33-35.
As musicians attract a larger audience, their music often trends, however incrementally, toward the slick and mainstream. It’s not always for the worse, but it frequently is. Maybe it feels like a cliche, but how often have you heard someone complain about how this or that group just doesn’t sound the way they used to? There’s a sense that something unique or essential that was present and scrappy at a band’s inception has been ruthlessly scoured to make room for more listeners. I wouldn’t dare claim that indie folk rock royalty Big Thief is immune to change because they’re constantly reinventing themselves, but they are one of the few bands who sound both better and more themselves with every album, despite also having made massive gains in popularity. For Big Thief, fame and integrity somehow go hand in hand.
Their latest record, “Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You,” is relaxed, sprawling and close to the earth, with production that balances the crisp with the spontaneous. Paste named it their 2022 album of the year, calling it singer Adrianne Lenker and company’s “loosest album and most ambitious album all at once.” Catch them at George’s Majestic Lounge, a 700-cap spot on Fayetteville’s Dickson Street, before they outgrow venues of that size.
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The Little Rock Police Department has provided information about Sunday’s officer-involved shooting. Police shot 49-year-old James Mosby after he fired a handgun toward officers. Spokesperson Mark Edwards said Monday that three officers were involved and have been placed on administrative leave until the investigation is complete. The LRPD has not released the officers’ names.
The LRPD released a short narrative Sunday afternoon. According to the release, officers were responding to a wellness check around 1:30 p.m. on Sunday at the 5000 block of West 65th Street. An exact address was not provided, though the block is near the 65th Stop & Shop convenience store in Southwest Little Rock. The release only notes the location as a parking lot.
While Mosby was firing shots, “Those officers immediately took cover while returning fire. After another exchange of gunfire with officers, Mosby was struck and fell to the ground as officers maintained cover,” according to a release.
Mosby soon stood, and officers approached to find him unarmed, according to the release. Officers recovered Mosby’s gun and he was taken to a nearby hospital, treated and put back into custody.
LRPD is completing an internal investigation because of the officers’ involvement. A separate criminal investigation is also ongoing.
This is the second LRPD officer-involved shooting of the year. The previous one was reported on Jan. 27. Two officers, Larry Mears Jr. and Scott Hampton, are on administrative leave while the investigation is ongoing.
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Editor’s note: Chris Jones made an unsuccessful run for the Arkansas governor’s office in 2022. In January, as he watched the inaugurations of both Gov. Sarah Sanders and his friend Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, Jones was taken aback by both the similarities and the contrasts in these noteworthy events.
In January I witnessed two inaugurations, both historic. There was ours here in Arkansas, where we inaugurated the first female governor and the youngest governor in this country. To that, I again say congratulations to Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders. And I got a front row seat at the inauguration of Maryland’s first Black governor, the third elected Black governor in U.S. history. To that, I again say congratulations to Gov. Wes Moore. In full disclosure, Governor Moore is a friend, so being there to support him and his family was extra special. Also in full disclosure, I was invited and given tickets to Governor Moore’s inaugural. That was not the case for Sanders’ inauguration.
Chris Jones and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore.
Of course, I’d envisioned the Arkansas inauguration much differently. Maybe you did, too. I couldn’t help but think of how I would have loved to serve Arkansas as its governor. We fell short, but I still claim a few wins. I became the first African American to win a major party nomination for governor in Arkansas history. We expanded the electorate by 37,000 votes (13%) over the previous gubernatorial election. We created the most viewed campaign launch video of the cycle. I personally visited all 75 counties. I even walked a mile with our neighbors in most of those counties and together we took over 3 million steps. Was it enough to change the narrative, and change hearts and minds? Absolutely. Was it enough to win the election? No. But, I’m so proud of what we did and how we did it.
My wife and I had a blast at Moore’s inauguration. The crowds were energetic, the atmosphere was exciting and we even spotted a few celebrities on the scene (Oprah Winfrey, former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, Chelsea Clinton, Chris Tucker). And after watching Sanders’ inauguration, I was intrigued by the parallels: similar rhetoric, patriotic imagery, the weight of history in the making. At the same time, I couldn’t help but be taken aback by the contrasts.
Chris and Dr. Jerrilyn Jones with former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick.
Both Sanders and Moore were first-time candidates, running in states heavily dominated by their own party, and both won the election with a very high percentage of those who voted. Arkansas’s first woman governor and Maryland’s first Black governor both have young families and committed spouses. It’s a marked change from the older white men who came before them. Both Moore and Sanders included moments of reflection and church services as part of their inaugural festivities (although it appears Sanders may have been charging $100,000 for special seats to hers).
Brian ChilsonSARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS: Gives her inaugural speech.But as my wife and I navigated Moore’s inauguration, the contrasts became clear. Newly sworn-in Sanders gave a campaign-like speech heavy on fighting and “otherism.” She nodded to the significant history of Little Rock Central High, her alma mater, but also pledged to defend against “left-wing indoctrination” in the classroom, a wink and a nod to a conservative movement to withhold the truth about racial injustice from students. Her first order of business was to sign a raft of executive orders, including one to ban the gender-neutral, LGBTQ+ affirming “Latinx” descriptor on state documents, another to send the state Department of Education on a mad goose chase to root out any instances of critical race theory being taught in our state’s K-12 classrooms.
Moore took a different tack, seeking unity rather than division. He pledged to initiate The Serve Act, a service year for high school graduates to take a year off before college or starting their careers to serve their communities and committed to providing historic financial support for education through an $8.8 Billion investment. He singled out no enemies or targets, as Sanders did when she held out left-wing indotrinators and critical race theory as enemies to be vanquished. The fact that these enemies don’t actually exist in our K-12 schools doesn’t make Sanders’ rhetoric harmless: The collateral damage this witch hunt will cause will likely be significant.
Before you think it or say it, let me mention something. It is OK to visit a different place and appreciate what you are experiencing, to note that what you feel is missing from home. You can still stay home to do the work of making home better. Translation: We have no plans on moving back to Maryland.
At Moore’s inauguration, I was reminded that it is possible to say we want to include and care for everyone, and to take action that includes and cares for everyone. I hope Sanders shares that goal. But that’s not the message she’s sent Arkansas so far.
Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. reminded us that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” What he does not tell us is that to continue to bend the arc, we must put enough energy into it. We must put enough energy into the arc, through our individual and collective work, if we want it to reach justice. We must put in enough energy to bend the arc toward the state and the world that we want to see and away from the one we have often felt stuck with.
Never stop believing. Never stop working. Never stop bending the arc. I am committing to putting energy into the arc. I hope you will as well.
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The car lights were still shining when officials began a vehicle removal Sunday around 6:30 a.m in Sylamore in North Central Arkansas.
The Izard County Sheriff’s office announced Sunday that officials removed a car from the White River in Sylamore and found Anita Farrier, a 52-year-old woman from Southside, inside.
Sylamore is just north of Mountain View, and it is about 40 miles from Southside. The car was removed from the river on Highway 9 at the county line of Izard County and Stone County.
Izard County Sheriff Charley Melton said Monday that he estimated the car went underwater some time during the night. At this time, Melton said that no other victims are thought to have been in the vehicle.
Stone County officials, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission and the Sylamore and Allison fire departments were all involved in the vehicle removal, according to a release. The car was brought to the bank in Izard County. These agencies, along with the Arkansas State Police and Izard County Coroner’s Office are working on the case.
The investigation is ongoing and foul play is not suspected, according to the Izard County Sheriff’s Office.
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Small town superstar Ashley McBryde, a country artist who grew up close to Mammoth Spring, received two nominations at the 65th Grammy Awards — Best Country Album for “Ashely McBryde Presents: Lindeville” and Best Country Duo/Group Performance for “Never Wanted to Be That Girl,” a cut off of Carly Pearce’s album “29: Written in Stone.” McBryde and Pearce won the latter at last night’s ceremony, becoming the first pair of women to be awarded that distinction. Impressively, they won against duets by Luke Combs and Miranda Lambert, Reba McEntire and Dolly Parton and Robert Plant and Alison Krauss.
With her first ever Grammy in tow, McBryde will play at First Financial Music Hall in El Dorado on Saturday, Feb. 25. Tickets are available here.
At least one other Arkansan scored a Grammy nomination this year. Mark Hudson — a 29-year-old producer from Little Rock who’s shared the studio with the likes of Kevin Gates, Yo Gotti, K. Michelle, Arin Ray, Eric Bellinger, Ty Dolla $ign and Cardi B — worked on “Show It” from Chris Brown’s newest record, Breeze, which was nominated for Best R&B Album. We’re not too bummed that Brown didn’t win, given his history of being a terrible person, but hopefully more nominations are in Hudson’s future.
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Generally thumbing our noses at the suburbs is what we Little Rockers do best while maneuvering down Interstate 30 on the way to Hot Springs, and who can blame us? There’s plenty to lodge grievances about in the Benton-Bryant belt, particularly as seen from the highway: retail and architectural banality, an excess of gun shops, a giant billboard next to an Applebee’s that shouts “WARNING: PREPARE TO MEET GOD.” Then again, Benton gave us musical gem Adam Faucett. And NFL player-turned-zydeco legend Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes. And scenes in “Sling Blade” and “White Lightning.” And, we discovered recently, a new wave of good eats, largely thanks to restaurateurs Craig Roe and Heather Baber-Roe. If you’re heading westward and want to skip the fast food options, here are a few spots we scouted for your dining pleasure.
Stephanie SmittleBALANCING THE BACON: The whipped feta at ROBER.ROBER: Cocktails + Culinary
302 W. South St.
ROBER’s tagline puts cocktails ahead of its food, and its menu has exactly one page of main food offerings followed by nine pages of drink choices. There are flights of scotch and sipping rum and whiskey and wine and bourbon; wines by the glass and bottle and quart; and a refreshingly thoughtful list of nonalcoholic options that includes a non-alcoholic champagne — something we didn’t even know existed. None of that means the eats aren’t good, mind you, but it does telegraph the restaurant’s intentions to flip the script when it comes to socializing over a bite. The big draw, thanks to a bevy of buzz on social media, is the bacon flight — an utterly Instagrammable pound of pork belly prepared four ways and then displayed on a metal stand embossed with the restaurant’s name, the slabs hanging vertically by metal clips, to be whittled away at with an accompanying pair of shears. There’s a strip flavored with ancho pepper and espresso, one candied with brown sugar, one dipped in pistachio and Ghirardelli chocolate and — the star of the bunch, in my opinion — the Korean BBQ. Diverse as those offerings are, you’re gonna want to order something to break up the porcine parade; we opted for the whipped feta with lemon and honey, and have no regrets.
The downtown Benton spot is divided into three areas: a sleek dining room with low lighting and high-backed furniture, a cozy bar and the Mary Ellen Lounge, a sitting area playfully and lovingly outfitted in homage to owner Heather Baber-Roe’s grandmother. Brubeck was on the box when we walked in, followed later by a smooth jazz version of “Saving All My Love For You,” both somehow entirely befitting of ROBER’s personality.
Niecy’s
1016 W. South St.
With all due respect to the stalwart greasy spoon that is Dan’s I-30 Diner, it’s cool that there’s a new kid in town — one whose menu boasts big biscuits, chocolate gravy and a breakfast burrito to beat all breakfast burritos. When we pulled off of Benton’s main drag into a strip mall and entered this spacious diner, we spotted a tiny table offering free Bibles and a 24-7 prayer hotline. Martina McBride’s “A Broken Wing” was playing on the speaker overhead, to be followed by “Cowboy Take Me Away” and “Daddy’s Hands,” no less.
BIG BISCUIT: The Biscuit wall at Niecy’s.
The service was prompt, the standard two-egg breakfast was absolutely solid and the coffee, which Niecy’s brings in from J. Brooks in Memphis, was piping hot. On our list for next time: the scratch-made jelly rolls, the Mind Your Coconuts yogurt parfait or the short stack. Owner Denise Whitworth, aka Niecy, worked for her nephew at nearby Holy Roller Bike Shop before deciding to jump back into restaurant work; it’s clear that word has gotten out to Bentonians that Niecy’s is the place for your sit-down breakfast. (Grabbing donuts is another deal entirely; see Dale’s below.)
Jalapeno margarita and tacos at Baja Grill
Baja Grill
224 W. South St.
If you’re in need of some eclectically filled tacos or an inventive margarita, this is your spot on Benton’s South Street. Brightly lit and seemingly built for family outings in which the kids need to be entertained but mom might want to get a little buzzed, it’s the B-side to ROBER’s elevated environs. Bonus points for a few things here: a decent mocktail menu including nonalcoholic takes on a margarita and a mule; a robust selection of tequilas and mezcals; and a menu item titled “My Friend Does Not Want Anything,” a doubled portion of the small guacamole with two sides of queso.
Stephanie SmittleBISMARCKS IN BENTON: The case at Dale’s Donuts.Dale’s Donut Shop
919 Military Road
Before visiting Dale’s Donut Shop, it was mostly barbecue joints at which I’d spotted signs that read “Open ’til _____ or until we sell out.” But Dale’s Donuts has such a sign, and clearly the warning is warranted; when I arrived at 10:32 a.m. on a Wednesday in January, the donut case was well picked over, bismarcks and blueberry cake being the clear unfavorites among working-class Bentonites (what gives, y’all?). Still, the crew was enthusiastic and the interior paid homage to the donut dive’s long legacy in town, with dozens of declarations affixed to the cinder block walls with clear packing tape. “Four-bag limit on kids’ free donut holes!” “No bills larger than 20.00 accepted!” One doodle in marker signed by an Aimslee M. declared “Dale’s Donuts: Yum!,” each letter of the message in a different donut icing color. Yellowing newspaper articles from the Saline Courier told tales of the late Dale Atchley’s decades-long mission to keep the people of Benton equipped with cinnamon rolls. An old black-and-white photo of two shirtless youngsters holding an American flag was captioned “Mr. Dale and his brother Joe: Proud of Their Country, ‘America.’ ” The cornflower blue siding that caps off an otherwise tavern-like building is, as a colleague noted, the stuff of David Lynch’s dreams, and the absence of any computers at the front register leaves Dale’s particularly well-situated to keep slinging donuts by the dozen in the event of a technology apocalypse. You absolutely won’t be ordering a macchiato, and you won’t miss it, either.
Stephanie SmittleTHE GODFATHER: Bartender’s choice on our visit to Valhalla.Valhalla Restaurant and Axe Throwing
224 W. South St.
Like a sports bar without the deafening decibels, Valhalla shares a building with one of its sister restaurants, Baja Grill, and boasts its very own axe throwing lounge upstairs.
Stephanie Smittle FUN GUY: Pizza at Valhalla.The cocktail selections here are arguably way more creative and sophisticated than they need to be at this decidedly unfussy pizzeria: an elderflower-tinged margarita, a cinnamon whiskey and pear juice-based concoction called “Grow A Pear” and a small but rotating local craft beer selection that bespeaks some beer expertise, with selections from New Province Brewing Co., Flyway Brewing and Memphis’s Wiseacre Brewing.
Stephanie SmittleBIG BLADES: At Valhalla Axe ThrowingMeanwhile, Valkyrie Axe Throwing beckons patrons to hop up a flight of stairs, take a perfunctory tutorial and hurl a blade as fast as they can toward a corkboard bull’s eye. When we were there, a starry-eyed couple on a date was making full use of the opportunities axe throwing affords to flirt with a potential sweetheart; take note, would-be Valentine’s Day celebrators.
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What are you paying attention to this sunny Sunday?
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Investigation is underway pic.twitter.com/cLOsSXxQVR
— Little Rock Police (@LRpolice) February 5, 2023
We will update when we hear more.
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The Jan. 31 raid of Neil Ravi Mehta‘s Fort Smith mansion and the search of his workplace, the firearms and ammunition manufacturer Fedarm, kicked off what’s become an international manhunt.
Officers who executed the search warrant reported finding multiple illegal explosives in Mehta’s 6,000-square-foot home. Mehta is nowhere to be found, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation cautions anyone who sees him to consider him “armed and dangerous.”
While his whereabouts are unknown, Mehta is said to have friends in glamorous places including New York; Dallas; Houston; Atlanta; Denver; Jackson Hole, Wyoming; Alburquerque, New Mexico; India and Pakistan. (He also has less-glamorous connections in eastern Oklahoma.)
On Sunday, though, a colleague of Mehta’s reached out by email to say that he and others believe there is more to the story than what the FBI has provided.
The email, with the subject line “To Austin, from FedArm managers. Our side story to save Neil Mehta.” offers up an alternative narrative that suggests Mehta is the victim of a coverup.
YouTubeThis orange Lamborghini, featured in a video on the FSAAP YouTube channel, is thought to belong to Mehta.It’s full of twists and surprises, including that Mehta’s home is indeed equipped with underground passages but that he did not use those to make his escape; and that the orange Lamborghini mentioned in press accounts of the raid is only one piece of a high-dollar fleet that also includes tanks and yachts.
Here is the email in full, which they agreed to share publicly:
Thank you for calling our front desk to get our side of the story. I am Shiraz Riaz, Comptroller and Manager at FSAAP and previously at FedArm. I can answer nearly all of your questions along with the remote Corporate team which knows everything about both entities, and all 13 factories domestic and foreign.
This first email will be short, as we must ensure you publish what we say exactly as we state it. Thus we are selecting many of our attorneys domestic and foreign to time-stamp, certify, and publicly and jointly website post the questions you ask us and our replies to you. We may give you exclusivity to break this story and the details below, which will be major for your journalism career when you see the full story.
In our next email (after the attorneys confirm on Monday), we can answer any question you have, so please write them out this weekend. Also on our own, we will correct your last posting regarding these topics:
1. He is not an employee, not CFO, and will explain the structure of the companies on Monday. He is a financier and hedge fund manager.
2. The house has an underground passage, but he did not use it. We watched him, on remote cameras, expertly escape a large FBI SWAT team that surrounded his house at every exit. The house is actually much bigger than 6k sq ft if you measure it on Google Maps, closer to 11k sq ft. It’s a solid rock-fortified mansion on many acres. We may offer you a video tour of property once the FBI releases the building back to the property ownership company.
3. The Lamborghini seems to be his daily driver car, and through investment funds “he controls but does not own” there are many more exotic cars, jets, tanks, and yachts. Please search FSAAP on youtube to see many videos of him.
4. He has A DOJ ATF Federal Explosives License! Attached is his signed copy that you can be jointly posted with the attorneys. Thus you can see why the arrest warrant is falsified, and this was the best the FBI could do instead of planting drugs or some other false evidence.
5. Our Company has an explosives lab at our factory where he does all the R&D work. Why would he keep anything in his house? You can see him on Youtube legally researching and lab-mixing explosives and compounds for the military. We will find a way to prove the evidence is planted or fake, with the FBI’s body cameras or one of the 100+ cameras surrounding his house. Even if the evidence is real, he could legally have explosives, but just be fined for improper storage.
6. He was a major donor to the Arkansas State Police and their Foundation, assisted the FSPD with many cases, and has the Governor’s award on his wall. Note that in this whole persecution of him, there is no crime alleged against him or his companies other than what you see in the warrant. He passed several intensive State Tax Audits and an Excise Tax Audit for over 8 figures. He has never harmed anyone, and even the FBI has posted no evidence of threats originating from him. Our attorney is in contact with the head US prosecutor (Steven Mohlhendrich), and we are willing to share the names and info of every agent involved in his unjust persecution. You will see how they refuse to answer questions to prove his innocence until they have him in chains and have no ability to fund his legal defense or pay us to fight for him.
7. No one has heard from him and he is totally missing. But in case he is hiding, we do not yet want to give you the most Headline breaking details and scoop of this story and case until we know he is safe, or out of the country. Hopefully, our side gets more attention, and we can get our response out to every news agency nationally that the FBI contacted, so the public (which already distrusts the FBI) will come out in our support to save Neil.
If you would like you may post this email entirely today and our attorneys will also post it and link to your story on Monday. Our office will also call you Sunday and Monday to ensure you got our email. If you can, please make the emphasis that he has an explosives license that the FBI and ATF refuse to acknowledge it, thus in an illegal effort to keep this warrant valid.
Thank you,
Attached to the email was this copy of a federal explosives license issued to Mehta and Fedarm. The license is current, and not set to expire until 2025.
We sent follow-up questions in hopes of understanding why his colleagues suspect Mehta might be entrapped in a coverup conspiracy. We look forward to updating you as soon as we hear back.
When asked about this alternative version of the story, FBI public affairs officer Connor Hagan said federal and local law enforcement are going by the book. “The only comment the FBI has is that our investigations are known for being meticulous, lawful and thorough. Additionally, the operation conducted on January 31st was authorized by a federal court and executed by multiple federal and local law enforcement agencies.”
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While quarantined from an extremely mild, nearly nominal case of COVID-19 in the middle of January, the Observer, who is approaching 30 years of age, ordered a mess of chicken fingers and fries to be contactlessly delivered to the front door of his apartment building in downtown Little Rock. Hear me out: At my most unmediated, I have the palate of a child, and I’ve accepted this. In keeping with my juvenile preferences, I also adore ketchup, and have loved it for as long as I can remember, so much so that I’m the kind of ketchup consumer who doesn’t mess with packets. There’s never enough and I’ve no interest in rationing. Instead, I keep a big bottle of Heinz original on hand at all times.
As I opened and broke down the lukewarm cardboard meal box to make a place for a heaping blob of the silly sauce, I noticed that the fries looked a little more wilted than usual, but what can you expect? Fast food is best experienced in the literal seconds after it emerges from the fryer. At the end of the day, it’s all going to mostly taste like ketchup anyway, at least if you dip like I do. As some pragmatic thinker once said, food is just a vessel for sauce, especially when the food is of questionable quality.
I’ve been told that I eat too quickly and, though there were no witnesses, I can only assume that this day was no exception. In fact, a blend of fries, tenders, ketchup and the restaurant’s namesake dipping sauce entered my mouth at such a ferocious clip that when an unexpectedly rancid flavor started kicking at my tongue, I couldn’t immediately identify the origin. With perishability in mind, I suspected the chicken.
Through rigorous triangulation, however, I deduced the real culprit: The ketchup. When savored in isolation, my favorite condiment had an awful, mouth-twisting aftertaste like rubbing alcohol. I sampled it over and over again, expecting the intruder to go away, but it didn’t. What was up? The bottle was far from expiration, had only been opened a couple months ago and had never left the chilly sanctum of my fridge for longer than a few minutes at a time. I wondered if even Heinz makes mistakes sometimes. As a lifelong patron of the brand, I could handle one preservative error. Sad but resigned, I ate the rest of my meal sans tomato aid.
While holding the three-fourths-full bottle over the trash can, ready to release my grip, I was struck with a harrowing and epiphanic thought: What if this is because of the COVID? It was, after all, my first time afflicted with the virus. People talk about changes or losses in taste and smell, but surely this couldn’t be what they mean? Wouldn’t everyone be taking the pandemic more seriously if so? After a quick phone call to my recently retired doctor mother, I learned that I was not the only person suffering from this exact phenomenon after contracting COVID-19.
Still, I was skeptical. Could my taste buds really be this sensitive to the whims of a mere disease? Was my biology really that malleable? Isn’t ketchup one of the most powerful forces in the world? Are such levels of karmic cruelty and betrayal even possible? It all just seemed so farfetched to me. And so I let the trouble slip my mind for a few days, hoping to forget it like a bad dream.
Until it was time for the weekly burger, another staple of my ludicrously simple and indulgent diet. Sure enough, upon my first dunk in ketchup from an entirely different source than the last time, the taste was back, spiteful and vinegary. It wasn’t a fluke. Who knows how long this devastating reality will last.
So what should I do? Should I keep eating it until I’m used to the taste? Or is this an excuse to get off the sauce? Maybe I could take this as a sign from the universe that it’s time to finally reexamine my eating habits in the hopes of shifting toward more sophisticated forms of sustenance that are less dependent on the red stuff. I don’t know. If it’s any indication, I’ve already discovered that, for some reason, when ingested in smaller amounts, the mystery acidity of the ketchup is significantly less intense. It’s even tolerable. If I’m being honest, I bet I’ll keep eating the same shit.
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If you can’t believe that we’ve already moved on from celebrating the new year and don’t have the energy or wherewithal or flexibility to plan an elaborate spring break vacation, we’ve got you covered. If you’re a parent or caregiver who isn’t able to take off more than a day or two from work, or who simply wants to let the kids sleep in, play with friends and decompress from the daily grind of the school year — this guide is for you. For us staycationers, spring break is about slowing down when we can, trying something new with our kids and enjoying the warming temperatures and lush beauty of our favorite season in Arkansas.
Note that, at our January deadline, many go-to Little Rock day camps were fine-tuning their programs. Be sure to check their websites weekly for registration details and schedules. In the meantime, we’ve pitched a few ideas for things to do around town, as well as day trips and overnight stays.
Day camps:
Ferncliff
Ferncliff’s spring camp is like getting to go to summer camp early. It’s a beautiful, natural setting for kids to play endlessly outdoors, doing their favorite camp activities, including hiking, games and sports. But they’ll also get the chance to try and learn new things, such as archery, bouldering and improving their problem-solving skills on a team building challenge course. It runs from 9 a.m.-3:30 p.m. March 20-24 and accommodates grades 1-8. Price varies; see ferncliff.org for more information.
Junior Naturalist Camp at Wildwood Park for the Arts
The Central Arkansas Master Naturalists who lead this day camp will teach kids through fun-filled outdoor activities about the natural wonders of this 105-acre park in West Little Rock’s Chenal Valley. Check wildwoodpark.org for a schedule and details about registration.
Little Rock Athletic Club Camp
The Athletic Club’s spring break camp is always popular with families, but the club hadn’t released details at press time. Check lrac.com or call 501-225-3600 for details.
Things to do around town:
Reserve a family field trip at the Arkansas Regional Innovation Hub, and enroll the family in an hour-long class, such as high-tech 3D and vector design, watercolor science, tie-dye or printmaking. The Hub asks for a five-person minimum (bring the grandparents or a couple of friends) and that you make your reservation two to three weeks in advance. Expect music, arts, movies, gardening and beekeeping demos at various library branches of the Central Arkansas Library System; check cals.org for details. The Little Rock Zoo and Museum of Discovery aren’t offering camps, but they’re of course two of the most reliably fun places for family outings.
DELTA HERITAGE TRAIL : A great family destination. Arkansas Department of Parks, Heritage and TourismSUNSET CRUISE: On DeGray Lake.Day trips and overnight stays:
DeGray Lake Resort State Park
If you can get away for an overnight stay, DeGray Lake Resort State Park is our top pick for Central Arkansans. Located just 75 miles southwest of Little Rock, it’s close but still makes us feel like we’ve escaped to someplace new.
An especially creative team of state park interpreters have planned a full week of activities, which are focused on quality time on the water and forests of the park, rather than over-crowded, touristy gatherings. Among our favorites: guided one-hour horseback rides along the lakeshore and soft, pine-needle trails of the surrounding loblolly forests (shorts and tennis shoes are park-approved attire!). There’s also the “Geocaching Island Hopper,” in which you embark by boat in a high-tech hide-and-seek adventure of island treasure-finding. Come sundown, you’ll experience the island’s nightlife by taking a flashlight-guided “owl prowl” boat excursion to remote coves. If you’re lucky, your interpreter will teach you how to call them and take part in this nighttime sonata. Back on land, an evening golf cart safari will cruise you along the park’s greens in search of nocturnal critters.
If guided tours aren’t your thing, rent a boat at the park’s marina and explore Iron Mountain. Hike and paddle the 3-mile “Islets Cove Paddle Trail,” or just spend the day on land mining for crystals and fishing on the lakeshores.
Note to day trippers: You don’t have to stay overnight to enjoy the resort’s amenities, like the Shoreline Restaurant and gift shop, as well as a playground, sand volleyball court, disc golf course and bicycle and boat rentals.
If you can stay overnight, there are many options. Campers can rough it on any one of 113 campgrounds available (water and electric hookups provided); glampers will love the yurt rentals equipped with cozy cots, lanterns and wood floors. Or, go all the way and book a room at the resort and lodge, which comes with all the amenities of a nice hotel with the exception of a few pet-friendly rooms. Note that many of the lodge’s amenities, such as the restaurant, are also available to campers.
Arkansas Department of Parks, Heritage and TourismDELTA HERITAGE TRAIL: A great family destination.Bike the Delta Heritage Trail day trip with overnight option
We recommend this trip for a single parent and teenage kids. The bike trail is easy enough for beginners, but everyone needs to be game for a day-long adventure that is half car trip and half bike ride.
The Arkansas Delta Heritage Trail is a work-in-progress, but some 44 miles of this rails-to-trails system through Southeast Arkansas are open to the public. Our favorite section to do in a day is Barton to Lick Creek.
A quick pitstop note: On the way to the Delta Heritage Trail, take a quick restroom break at Louisiana Purchase State Park off of Highway 49, about 25 miles from your final destination. It’s one of the last remnants of the many headwater swamps that used to dot the Mississippi River Valley, and its old-growth beauty will take your breath away. An elevated boardwalk stretches over three-eighths of a mile of this swamp, past majestic bald cypress groves. Interpretive panels point to rare species of reptiles and birds that live in this special habitat.
Back to the Delta Heritage Trail: When you arrive at the Barton trailhead, park at the Visitors Center, which offers restrooms, bike rentals, a gift shop and friendly staff. The Barton to Lick Creek trail is packed gravel but a fairly smooth and flat ride that is at first canopied by trees and then opens up to spacious wide-open farmland and creeks.
To extend your trip overnight, try the Pedal & Paddle Tour, a 12-mile bike ride from Barton to Lake View followed by kayaking on Old Town Lake, with a bike ride back to Barton. Campgrounds are available at the Barton trailhead, where the Visitors Center is located. Or, bike a full day and stay overnight in nearby Helena-West Helena, 30 miles away. Spend the next day taking in the sites of this Delta city known for its blues music heritage. Try to catch a live broadcasting of the famous King Biscuit Radio Show at the Delta Cultural Center; call to confirm but broadcasts usually happen from 12:15 to 12:45 p.m. daily.
Weekend trip to Mountain View
The natural beauty of the Arkansas Ozarks is always lure enough. But when we’re adventuring in Mountain View, we also soak in the folk music and art heritage that sets this region apart from the rest of the Ozarks. Because it’s a winding 107-mile trip from Little Rock, we recommend you make this a weekend/overnight stay. Here are some must-dos that’ll stock the family with adrenaline-pumping adventures and culture that’ll do everyone’s soul good.
Stretch your legs and picnic at the Blanchard Springs Recreational Area, located in the Sylamore Ranger District of the Ozark-St. Francis National Forest. Nearby are paved trails to Blanchard Springs waterfall, and the clear waters of Sylamore Creek, which will numb everyone’s toes in seconds. Reserve a tour of Blanchard Springs Caverns, an absolute must-see even if you’re not into caving. If it’s been years since you last visited, take notice of the transformation of this “living cave,” which changes constantly due to the continuous drip of water on limestone. A quick ear-popping elevator descent transports you to a 200-foot magical underworld of stalactites, stalagmites and other limestone formations, beautifully illuminated. U.S. Forest Service interpreters will help you choose which of the three trails is right for you, which range from leisurely and wheelchair and stroller accessible, to strenuous expeditions through water-carved passages and underground streams. Dress warmly, as the cave keeps a steady 58-degree temperature year-round. Visit recreation.gov for tour times and to make your reservation.
See Mountain View from high: Zip lines, swinging bridges, Tarzan swings, rope bridges and swinging logs make Loco Ropes Treetops Adventure Park at the Ozark Folk Center State Park an adrenaline-pumping adventure. A variety of courses range from an hour-long course for the most cautious in your bunch, to the 3-hour End of the Line course that’ll keep you swinging in the treetops for 3 hours. Check the park’s web site for weight, height and age requirements.
Folk music and craft lovers: Hang out on the lawn of Mountain View’s courthouse square, where most any evening you’re sure to find locals jamming on mandolin, guitar and other traditional mountain folk instruments. At Mountain View Music, also on the square, browse state-of-the art banjos, mandolins, fiddles and many more folk instruments for sale; they’ll also give your child a private music lesson. Just a few minutes from downtown Mountain View is the Dulcimer Shoppe, known nationally for its specialty in hand-crafted mountain dulcimers since 1962. For ticketed live shows, check online for updated event information at the Ozark Folk Center. In the car, tune into the Ozark Highlands Radio program, which broadcasts live music weekly.
Craft and arts lovers: Immerse yourself in the folk craft heritage of this area by visiting and shopping at the Ozark Folk Center, which showcases area artisans like potters, coppersmiths and blacksmiths at work in its craft village. To learn a folk craft yourself, enroll in a class offered at the Ozark Craft Center.
Where to stay: A host of lodging options are available in Mountain View and the surrounding area, from bed and breakfasts in town to cabin rentals, campgrounds and R.V. parks on the Sylamore Creek and White River. Lodging is also available at the Ozark Folk Center, Jack’s Fishing Resort and Anglers White River Resort.
Where to eat: Tommy’s Famous A Pizzeria, Jo Jo’s Catfish Wharf and PJ’s Rainbow Café.
Mountain View is dry. If parents are looking to kick it back with a beverage, we recommend Gravity Brew Works, a few miles down the road from Mountain View in Big Flat. Locals tell us that Gravity welcomes you to bring one of Tommy’s pizzas as long as you share with the bartender.
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A joyous Loblolly to all who celebrate.
We went with the cinnamon cream cheese bagel sundae featuring a mini-cini bagel from The Bagel Shop, and a strawberry Nutella waffle.
How did you observe this national holiday?
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Completing a marathon is a bucket list item for many people. There’s something about crossing the finish line after 26.2 miles that hooks athletes everywhere. This year, thousands will gather for the Little Rock Marathon events on March 4-5. Marathon finishers will be met at the end with a medal as big as a piece of notebook paper.
Marathon Executive Director Geneva Lamm said the city welcomes many first-time runners each year, and the fact that so many first-timers trust Little Rock’s team to put on a safe, well-organized event makes Lamm feel proud. Extensive budgeting and planning goes into making sure the marathon runs smoothly (pun intended). Though all encompassed under the umbrella title of the Little Rock Marathon, five events — a kids’ race, 5K, 10K, half and full marathon — will happen that weekend.
Lamm takes her job seriously, keeping dozens of detailed spreadsheets covering data compiled over decades. The city of Little Rock does not include the marathon in its annual budget, so Lamm organizes the race with a combination of sponsorship dollars and registration fees. She also makes it a personal goal to give back around $50,000 of the marathon profits to the city’s Parks and Recreation Department every year. Lamm and marathon sponsors have created traditions over the years, like passing out tubes of L’Oréal lipstick near the end of the race so finishers’ lips are perfectly colored for celebratory photos.
Much like the ancient Greek legend of the first marathoner who delivered a message and collapsed at the foot of the receiver, there is a chance that runners can die during the race or at the finish line. Three have died in the 20 years of the Little Rock marathon, and Lamm said that she remembers each of them — on-duty paramedic Maj. Dean Douglas in 2021, Michael Kelly in 2012 and Adam Nickel in 2008.
Time is ticking for the final training days, so here’s the Little Rock Marathon by the numbers.
Mandy Keener
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An incident in which Jonesboro elementary school students ingested THC-infused gummies in December resulted in misdemeanor charges for the grandmother of one of the students.
Rosie Euell, identified by a Jonesboro police spokeswoman as a grandmother of one of the children, is charged with two misdemeanors in the case and will appear in Craighhead County District Court on Monday.
Euell, 67, is charged with endangering the welfare of a minor in the third degree, a class B misdemeanor.
On December 16, six children at a Jonesboro elementary school ingested THC-infused gummies after a 6-year-old brought them to school and handed them out to classmates, according to a police report. The parents of the six children were contacted and took their children to local hospitals for evaluation. One “panicked” parent called the police as she drove her child to the hospital, the report said.
A photo of the package of gummies provided by a parent to KAIT TV in Jonesboro showed that the gummies were made in California. The packages of “Dank Gummies” and “Stoner Patch Dummies” contained 500mg of THC for the whole pack, and each dose contained 50mg of THC. That dosage would exceed the 10mg limit for cannabis products made in Arkansas and sold at the state’s dispensaries. The packages also featured graphics of marijuana leaves that would not be allowed under the Arkansas medical marijuana program.
In a separate incident late last month, three students at Dwight Elementary School in Russellville ingested THC edibles and were taken to a local hospital after a student brought what he thought was candy from home, according to information provided by the Russellville Police Department.
A spokesman for the Russellville School District declined to comment on the incident.
Andrew Reeves, public information officer for the Russellville police, said the incident involved out-of-state THC products that were not from an Arkansas dispensary. Reeves said he would not know more about the products until the state crime lab performs tests. The Russellville police have an open investigation into the matter, he said.
A study released last month in the medical journal Pediatrics analyzed data from the National Poison Data System and found a significant increase in reports of children’s exposures to edible cannabis.
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Editor’s note:* Public education advocate Baker Kurrus* is penning a series about “school choice” and voucher programs in Arkansas. This week, though, Kurrus turns his attention to what his conservative dad might think of the other issues drawing debate at the Arkansas Capitol.
I have thought a lot about my Republican father, Andrew W. Kurrus Jr., over the last few weeks, for a couple of reasons. Pop died in 2003. My son Andrew and I spread his ashes last weekend, and I would like to tell you about that. But I also have been wondering how he would react to the foolishness that is going on at our state Capitol in the name of Republican conservatism.
Pop grew up in East St. Louis, Illinois. He came to Pine Bluff to work, where he met, and then married, my beautiful bleeding-heart, affirmative action-supporting, proud liberal Democrat mother, Joan Baker. They had three kids by the time my mother was 24. They were married until Momma died in 1979. It wasn’t always smooth, but my conservative Republican dad got along with an outspoken liberal Democrat. That is certainly a rarity these days.
Ironically, they almost always agreed on major matters, but often for different reasons. They both supported Winthrop Rockefeller for governor in 1964, 1966 and 1968. My dad always wanted the most qualified person to get the job, whether male or female, Black or white. He hired Black women for the telephone company in the ’60s, and he would not tolerate racism or sexism. My mother thought that society should affirmatively make amends for years of racism, which she saw up close. I still have her ERA bracelet and Democrats for Rockefeller button. My dad didn’t wear buttons or go to a lot of rallies. But he worked hard against Orville Faubus every time he ran, and Pop was as excited as anyone when Rockefeller defeated Jim Johnson in 1966. Pop admired Rockefeller because Rockefeller was honest, and gave everyone a fair shot.
Courtesy UALR Center for Arkansas History and CultureCAMPAIGNING IN 1966: Winthrop RockefellerIn 1968 I remember watching the news and seeing the sanitation workers with their “I Am A Man” signs. I don’t recall my father’s exact words, but I remember him talking to me about the fact that those men were real men, and they deserved to be treated fairly and with respect. He respected and admired the Memphis men because all they wanted was to work for a living wage.
When my mother’s uncle used a racial epithet in our house in the mid-’60s, I remember my mother erupting and arguing. My dad calmly told him that we didn’t say that word in our house. When it happened again, Pop stood up and calmly threw him out. I think my father’s problem with racism and discrimination was rooted in his conservative view that everyone is entitled to some type of self-determination.
I know what Pop would say about bathroom bills. I remember when I was superintendent of the Little Rock School District, North Carolina was in the news with a bathroom bill. I was called by a local news station, asking me what I was going to do about the issue of who goes in which bathroom. I thought of my dad, and told the reporter that students and principals can work all of that out on site, and do so in ways that respect everyone. If it ever gets to be a problem, I will get involved. I knew that school principals and students had already worked through the few issues that had arisen. And nobody was shamed, or belittled, or singled out. My dad would not tolerate that under any circumstance. I told the reporter we had enough problems in LRSD without stirring up new ones.
I believe this “conservative” legislature is ignoring our real issues, and stirring up things that are not real problems. I believe my Republican dad would agree with me.
Pop would be disgusted by the ridiculous waste of time and money that’s gone to legislating against drag shows. He wouldn’t care how people wanted to dress as long as they didn’t impose on others, or hurt someone. He would say that people should be allowed to wear what they want to wear, and if they want to get together and have a show, have a show. As long as no one is forced to go, and no one gets hurt, keep the government out of the picture.
I know what he thought about same sex-marriage. Two of my parents’ best friends were Aunt Mary Jane and Aunt Allie Bess. My parents loved them, and so did I. It wasn’t an issue. I can hear my dad saying, “If people want to get married, what business is it of the government to tell them they can or they can’t.” That’s the conservative view. Let people make up their own minds, and live their own lives, so long as they don’t impose on others. I know the abortion issue troubled him, but I don’t think he wanted the government to make those decisions. I know he thought a person who was terminally ill should have the right to die on his or her own terms. If he had recognized his Alzheimer’s, he would have taken his own life.
He was conservative, and he thought the government should do things that people couldn’t do for themselves. He wanted the streets to be maintained, the mail to run on time, and the military to be strong. He thought the government should have programs to help people who could not help themselves, but he thought able-bodied people should work. He believed in a strong system of universal public education. He and my mother both hoped that desegregated schools would be the big equalizer.
He never missed a day of work on account of illness in his 37-and-a-half-year career with the telephone company. He led the company’s local United Way drives.
Today’s Arkansas “conservatives” want to tell people what they can do, what they can see, how they can dress and what they can read. I wish Mike Huckabee would give them all a big glass of the Jesus juice he talked about when he was governor. I hope he still drinks it, like he did when he pushed to help children of undocumented workers, and when he pushed for passage of ARKids First health benefits for children. A true conservative will offer a helping hand to folks who need it, without judgment. My dad wanted people to have a chance to work and get out of poverty. But he wanted people to work, and be independent if they could be.
My father also thought that the Corps of Engineers had no business destroying the Cache River basin. He wanted to conserve the beautiful places, especially those where mallard ducks might rest during the winter. Pop loved duck hunting, and he enjoyed cooking a steak and drinking a beer after a good day’s hunt. He started drinking Michelob when he got his first social security check. He always drank beer out of a bottle, and he always wrapped the bottle in a white paper napkin.
I started duck hunting with my dad when I was little, and my son and I have shared every opening day since he was 5. Pop loved Labrador retrievers, and as a true conservative, he did not condone the shooting of hens. He said it was like stomping on a dozen duck eggs. My children called my dad “Popu.” He gave all of my children the love of animals, especially dogs. Before Pop died he impressed on my son that we try our best not to shoot hens. We conserve them, and have more ducklings because we do.
When we finally made some improvements at our place so we could have a green timber hunting area, my son Andrew and I decided we would spread my dad’s ashes there. Pop loved hunting in the flooded timber. We decided we would spread his ashes at the exact place where the first mallard drake fell in our new green timber spot. We hunted unsuccessfully one Saturday. The next week, we tried again. The ducks were not plentiful, but we had a good chance early. Andrew shot, and accidentally knocked down a hen. I missed the drake. The hen skittered away and the dog couldn’t find it. We were dejected because this was going to be our last chance this season.
But we waited. Nothing much was happening, but finally a drake and a hen circled in. My son and I shot at the same time, and the drake fell. The Lab retrieved it. The sun was shining. The sky was blue. I looked at my son, thought of my father, and wished everyone had a dad like mine, and a family like mine.
We unloaded our guns, walked to the spot, and I poured my father’s ashes into the shimmering water. They drifted and disappeared. My son Andrew pulled a bottle of Michelob Ultra out of his backpack. He wrapped a white napkin around it, and he gave me the first sip. I gave it back to him and he took a drink. We poured the rest of it out right on the spot where the beautiful drake fell.
We cried. I felt a warm sense of relief, like I had come home from a long journey. As we walked out of the woods, the dog found the hen. I asked Andrew if we would have opened the beer if that was the only duck we shot. “No way,” he said. “Popu would not have wanted that.”
I thought of the true conservative. I now know his resting place, but I wonder where the rest of them have gone.
The post What a true conservative would do appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Arkansas Times editors Austin Bailey and Lindsey Millar talk about the latest from the legislature, Gov. Sarah Sanders' messaging and the potential deal involving the University of Phoenix and the University of Arkansas System.
The Little Rock Police Department reported that two of its officers were placed on administrative leave after an officer-involved shooting Thursday around 1:30 a.m.
The shooting occurred on the 2100 block of West 18th Street, which is about a quarter mile from Central High School. The death of the individual — information currently unavailable — is considered a “suspicious death” until the coroner rules, LRPD spokesperson Mark Edwards said.
More information will be released at a media briefing this afternoon.
Two LRPD Officers have been placed on administrative leave pending an investigation. pic.twitter.com/PRs8kRySwJ
— Little Rock Police (@LRpolice) January 26, 2023
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Springdale might be best known for tacos and tortas, but there is a new culinary curiosity in town.
Bauhaus Biergarten aims to be the prototypical German experience with an indoor taproom and outdoor beer garden with classic German beers and traditional German food. If you’re into liter-sized steins of pilsner, and knockwurst that will knock your socks off, this is your place.
The brains behind Bauhaus — and the hands behind the bar and muscle in the kitchen — belong to longtime local business provocateur Daniel Hintz and relative Northwest Arkansas newcomer Chef Jennifer Booker. Their shared interest in German fare led to their partnership in Bauhaus. Booker is a graduate of Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Paris and has authored several cookbooks. She serves on the James Beard Foundation Food Waste Advisory Council. Hintz is the CEO of the Velocity Group, whose mission includes building downtown master plans and launching economic initiatives in communities across the United States. He is the former executive director of the Fayetteville Downtown Partners, and served in the same capacity for Downtown Bentonville, Inc., where he helped breathe life into its once-sleepy downtown district.
Their concept is something new for Springdale. There hasn’t historically been an outdoor drinking culture in the city. There are a few places to drink without cover, but not many. And nobody remembers anyone doing German food like this in Springdale before.
Brian Sorensen
There is a long history of German beer gardens in other parts of the state. Henry and Alexander George, brothers who immigrated from Kelsterbach, Germany and settled in Little Rock, operated a brewery and beer garden way back in the early 1840s. Joseph Knoble of Wittenberg, Germany opened his brewery and beer garden near the Arkansas River in downtown Fort Smith in 1848. Germans most assuredly brewed beer wherever else they settled in the state — at places like Morrison Bluff, Paragould, and Subiaco — and it’s safe to assume beer gardens sprouted up around them.
Germans didn’t land in any meaningful numbers in Springdale, however, and therefore had no noticeable influence on local culture and cuisine. Springdale’s heritage starts out Native American, turns Scotch-Irish, and eventually diversifies to include Hispanic, Marshall Islander and Southeast Asian. There are lots of interesting things going on in town, but nothing German.
Brian SorensenMURAL: The building is big and boxy with a muscular presence on the streetscape.I’ve been to Bauhaus a couple of times now. The building is big and boxy with a muscular presence on the streetscape. A vibrant pastel-colored mural covers the exterior walls from ground to roofline. The taproom is in a smaller (and plain white) section to the north of the main building. Bauhaus Biergarten is written in big letters above the doors. The space inside is fairly compact, but the bar is long and welcoming. Hintz has been behind that bar on both of my visits. His interactions with customers are lively, loud and aimed at anyone within earshot.
Brian SorensenBEER GARDENThe beer garden is just outside the taproom and extends to the sidewalk. There are picnic tables and overhead string lights to keep things lit up after dark. Flanking the beer garden to the north is an Airstream trailer that has been converted to a professional kitchen. This must be the place where Chef Booker works her magic. Her pretzels, pickled vegetables and gourmet sausages certainly seem to keep customers satiated.
Bauhaus Biergarten
I met a friend at Bauhaus just before the holidays. It was chilly and damp outside, but inside the taproom it was warm and the tables were full of people drinking cold lager and nipping on German charcuterie. I don’t remember seeing a television anywhere. And I don’t recall anyone staring at the blue hue of a phone screen. German beer gardens (and English pubs) still seem to be safe havens for conversation-making.
Two specials of the day caught my eye on this pre-Christmas visit. One was a full liter of German beer for only $11. What a deal! Paulaner, Bitburger and Weihenstephaner are often on tap at Bauhaus. I went with a full liter pour of Paulaner’s Original Munich Lager. It went down fast and smooth, just like a German lager should.
Brian SorensenSTEIN: A full liter pour of Paulaner’s Original Munich Lager.The other notable offering was a spiced red wine called Glühwein served warm. It’s a traditional holiday beverage in Germany and Austria, where it’s usually featured at the famous Christmas markets. I was tempted to give one a try, but ordered a half liter of Hofbräu Dunkel instead.
My friend and I enjoyed catching up over a couple of delicious bottom-fermented beers (or beer brewed with lager yeast, which is the case with most German beers). It was obvious that other patrons were having as much fun as us. Bauhaus seems to have real potential to become a community gathering place for locals, and a fun side excursion for those living elsewhere.
I didn’t try those delicious German sausages that day. I’m watching my cholesterol, after all. At least that’s what I’ll tell my doctor if he asks.
Noch ein Bier, bitte!
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Here’s the latest Hutchinson family bad news dispatch: William Asa Hutchinson III, the hard-partying son of the former governor, is suspended from practicing law in Arkansas.
Hutchinson III was arrested Jan. 13 after being pulled over in his Maserati in Benton County. A police document says he was driving 71 miles per hour in a 45 zone.
Already marked with multiple DWIs on his record, Hutchinson surely knew better than to be speeding with cocaine and a handgun in his car. But that’s what police found in there, according to an affidavit from the Benton County Sheriff’s Office.
The Arkansas Supreme Court Committee on Professional Conduct granted a petition to suspend his law license. The petition alleges “Respondent William Asa Hutchinson, III, Arkansas Bar No. 2001115, presently poses a substantial threat of serious harm to the public and to his clients if he continues to practice law.”
Wayward nepo babies losing law licenses has become a theme in the Hutchinson family of late. William Asa Hutchinson III’s cousin Jeremy Hutchinson, a former state senator and son of former U.S. Sen. Tim Hutchinson, is also unable to practice law anymore. Jeremy Hutchinson surrendered his license in 2019 after pleading guilty to bribery, conspiracy and tax fraud charges in federal court. He’s scheduled for sentencing next month.
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When Sen. Gary Stubblefield (R-Of Course) spoke up in committee on January 19 in defense of his bill, SB43, which would designate drag shows as “adult” venues, he quoted at length from an ostensible communique he received from a drag queen, begging him to protect Arkansas’s children and assuring him that “a lot of nudity, a lot of sex, a lot of things” goes down at drag shows.
Granted, Stubblefield could give no actual examples of any child being assaulted at a drag show, but let us give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he is genuinely interested in protecting Arkansas’s children. On January 25, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders expressed total support for SB43, saying, “I think we have to do everything — I’ve been very clear and talked about this pretty extensively — to protect children. And I think that’s what this bill does, and so would be supportive of it in its current form. We’ll continue to take steps and do things that I believe protect the children of Arkansas.”
Brian ChilsonSen. Gary Stubblefield passed his bill to limit where drag performances can happen by classifying them as adult-oriented businesses akin to strip clubs and porn shops.In that case, Sen. Stubblefield and Gov. Sanders will want to take the next logical step and put forward a bill designating the state’s many, many churches to be adults-only venues. We need to protect the children, after all, and we know that the church is a hub of child sexual abuse by clergy in Arkansas and the nation.
The Diocese of Little Rock maintains a website disclosing a list of all those Roman Catholic priests who have been credibly accused of abusing children. The list was made public in 2018, 16 years after the Boston Globe broke the story of a massive coverup of known pedophile priests in the United States. Then, in 2019, the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News started reporting on sex abuse in Southern Baptist churches; a 2022 third-party report highlighted how the Southern Baptist Convention, like the Roman Catholic Church, had been hushing up cases of such abuse for years and years. The SBC eventually released its own list of accused sex offenders, which included many in Arkansas.
Brian ChilsonThe governor said at a press conference on Jan. 25 that she supports a bill classifying drag shows as adult-oriented entertainment.Churches make opportune places for pedophiles to set up shop. First, most Christian ideologies position priests and pastors in the role of God’s emissary upon this earth. It’s hard to argue with “God’s will,” or to speak up from the very bottom of this well-established hierarchy. And in a church culture that prizes “sexual purity” above all else, children who have been molested are even more reluctant to come forward. It’s no wonder churches have been at the center of child sexual abuse scandals.
And children in church are also exposed to materials that would easily qualify as obscene or harmful to minors. For example, take this passage, Ezekiel 23:19-21 (New Revised Standard Version):
Yet she increased her prostitutions, remembering the days of her youth, when she prostituted herself in the land of Egypt and lusted after her paramours there, whose members were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of stallions. Thus you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when the Egyptians fondled your bosom and caressed your young breasts.
Is it appropriate for children to be encountering this bit of prurient writing that describes men whose penises are “like those of donkeys” and who, when they ejaculate, apparently shoot large wads of semen “like those of stallions.” Moreover, given how offensive racial stereotypes can be harmful to minors, we have to point out that the Bible represents a population group in Africa as having larger-than-average genitalia.
What if, in addition to this grotesque imagery, children were also exposed to biblical tales of incest? We’ve had cause already this legislative session to quote from one particular passage of Genesis 19 (King James Version, because if you’re talking incest, you should cite European royalty):
31 And the firstborn said unto the younger, Our father is old, and there is not a man in the earth to come in unto us after the manner of all the earth:
32 Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father.
33 And they made their father drink wine that night: and the firstborn went in, and lay with her father; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose.
34 And it came to pass on the morrow, that the firstborn said unto the younger, Behold, I lay yesternight with my father: let us make him drink wine this night also; and go thou in, and lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father.
35 And they made their father drink wine that night also: and the younger arose, and lay with him; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose.
36 Thus were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father.
Is it right to tell children such sick and twisted stories? And should children be exposed to tales of gang rape and dismemberment? Let’s consider Judges 19: 22-29 (NRSV):
While they were enjoying themselves, the men of the city, a perverse lot, surrounded the house and started pounding on the door. They said to the old man, the master of the house, “Bring out the man who came into your house, so that we may have intercourse with him.” And the man, the master of the house, went out to them and said to them, “No, my brothers, do not act so wickedly. Since this man is my guest, do not do this vile thing. Here are my virgin daughter and his concubine; let me bring them out now. Ravish them and do whatever you want to them, but against this man do not do such a vile thing.” But the men would not listen to him. So the man seized his concubine and put her out to them. They wantonly raped her and abused her all through the night until the morning. And as the dawn began to break, they let her go. As morning appeared, the woman came and fell down at the door of the man’s house where her master was, until it was light.
In the morning her master got up, opened the doors of the house, and when he went out to go on his way, there was the woman, his concubine, lying at the door of the house, with her hands on the threshold. “Get up,” he said to her, “we are going.” But there was no answer. Then he put her on the donkey, and the man set out for his home. When he had entered his house, he took a knife, and grasping his concubine he cut her into twelve pieces, limb by limb, and sent her throughout all the territory of Israel.
I will guarantee that no drag queen story hour has featured a tale as depraved as any of these. No children should be exposed to works of sadomasochistic pornography just because some prurient portion of the population deems them sacred scripture.
In short, if we want to protect children from exposure to sexual materials and from sexual assault, we should protect them from the ravages of a church culture that would exploit their bodies and ravish their souls.
Sen. Stubblefield and Gov. Sanders, if you take seriously the need to save the children of Arkansas from the horrors of abuse, you will demand a bill designating churches as adult-only zones. After all, compared to drag shows, churches in this state are absolute dens of iniquity.
The post To protect the children, let’s make churches adults-only venues appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Barry Haas, who sued the Pulaski County Election Commission in federal court over its refusal to allow him to be a poll worker in 2021, addressed the commission tonight as part of a settlement agreement reached last year.
Haas sued the commission last year after then-commissioner Kristi Stahr, a Republican and chair of the commission at the time, objected to Haas working the polls after having been a plaintiff in lawsuits challenging the state’s voter ID law. Stahr claimed that Haas had stated on social media that would not uphold the state’s voter ID laws.
Haas said he had made no such statements, that Stahr “lacked a scintilla of evidence,” and called Stahr’s remarks “slanderous.”
The settlement, reached last month, required the commission to allow Haas to make a statement and to have a meeting with commission chairman David Scott.
Here is the statement Haas gave to the commission today:
I’m going to begin by giving you a sense of who I am.
I came to Arkansas in August of 1967 to serve on a Titan II nuclear missile launch crew at Little Rock Air Force Base. I had a secret security clearance, and received an honorable discharge after serving four years active duty from 1966 to 1970.
Fast forward about 30 years to around 2001 when I spotted a “Be a poll worker” brochure while voting. I applied, was approved and have been a poll worker for more than 20 years. At one time I was chief judge at Parkway Place Baptist Church in west Little Rock. For years that polling place, one of the busiest in the county and state, had about 4,500 eligible voters, far above the state mandated 3,000 voter maximum.
In November 2008 my fellow poll workers and I helped roughly 1,800 in-person voters cast their ballots in 12 hours during the presidential election. I was an Election Day poll worker until November 2020 when due to Covid and my age I transitioned to being an absentee ballot clerk.
During my two decades serving as a poll worker to my knowledge there has never been a complaint about either my willingness or my ability to comply with every federal or state law regarding voting.
Now, I’m going to ask you to put yourselves in my shoes as I continue my statement, and think about how you would respond if serious but totally false accusations were made in public against you.
On September 7, 2021 former Pulaski Co. Election Commission Chair Kristi Stahr falsely accused me of posting on social media that I would not comply with the state’s voter ID law. When then Commissioner Susan Inman asked Stahr “Do you have proof?”, Stahr responded “I’ve read their statements on social media stating this in recent months, that they are not going to uphold the law on voter ID …”.
This was a made up accusation and retaliatory act to prevent me from serving as an absentee ballot clerk in an upcoming special election. The problem for Stahr is I have never been a user or had an account at Facebook, Twitter or any other popular social media sites on which she is most likely a user. More importantly, I have never stated, written or posted anywhere online that I would refuse to follow any election law while serving as a poll worker.
Why would Stahr make such a false claim? Because I had served as a plaintiff in two lawsuits challenging the state’s voter ID law, and she brought that up in support of her false accusation.
As a military veteran, I take our constitutional right to vote very seriously. I also know the Arkansas Constitution includes very strong protections for our right to vote. My opposition to the state’s voter ID law while it was in the court system was to protect and preserve both my right to vote as well as my fellow citizens’ right to vote, plain and simple.
I filed a federal lawsuit against the Pulaski County Election Commission to correct Stahr’s false and retaliatory accusation. While only Stahr is truly culpable, the lawsuit had to include the entire commission. Former commissioner Inman contested Stahr’s accusation, and is wholly without blame in this matter.
Commissioner David Scott, the current Chair, was blindsided by Stahr’s accusation during that meeting. He and I met last week as required by the Settlement Agreement. I explained to Chairman Scott that at first I held him blameless in what had happened since he said during the September 7, 2021 commission meeting in response to Stahr’s accusation: “I don’t have any direct knowledge of what you’re speaking about today.” I told Chairman Scott that thinking about it in the days after the meeting took place I was somewhat disappointed that as an attorney and with legal training he didn’t question such a serious accusation being made without any proof. I understand from our one-on-one discussion last week he felt he had little choice under the law but to approve the list of needed supplemental poll workers with my name taken off as demanded by Stahr. I accept his explanation.
As part of the Settlement Agreement between the Pulaski County Election Commission and myself, I sought no monetary damages or reimbursement for legal expenses. I did seek to clear my good name from the unfortunate smear by Stahr. And I hope that the Settlement Agreement that includes specific training for election commissioners on the First Amendment rights of everyone, including poll workers, prevents any current or future poll worker from being retaliated against as I was by Stahr.
The position of county election commissioner is nonpartisan. Partisans have no business serving in such a capacity. You can be a political partisan, or you can be a nonpartisan election commissioner. You can’t be both at the same time. They are mutually exclusive by law.
It’s fortunate that Stahr is no longer on this election commission since she was clearly incapable of leaving her partisanship at home while a part of this nonpartisan body. It’s unfortunate she left this mess for you to clean up.
At this point I’m willing to answer any questions you may have, or discuss this issue as you may wish.
The post Election worker addresses Election Commission as part of lawsuit prompted by former Republican chair appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Gov. Sarah Sanders announced Tuesday afternoon an executive order to establish the “Natural State Initiative.” The First Gentleman, Bryan Sanders, will act as the chair of the initiative’s council on a volunteer basis with no compensation.
According to the executive order, the Natural State Initiative will work to seize economic momentum and “further establish [Arkansas] as a leader in the outdoor economy and a destination for outdoor enthusiasts from around the world.”
Here’s a copy of the executive order.
Sanders has often referred to herself as the chief salesperson for Arkansas’s beauty. Her executive order reiterated the state’s natural beauty in its rivers, lakes, forests, mountains, caves and creeks. She also noted roadways, airstrips and trails as part of the state’s “beautiful natural resources.”
The initiative will be made of advisory council members, which the governor will appoint. Members will serve on a volunteer basis, and they must have an interest in outdoor recreation through a position in state government, public commission, non-profit or in the private sector. Members are expected to advise the governor on how to make the best advancements through collaboration with parks, commerce and other departments.
Sanders’ executive order also names a number of responsibilities the council will undertake, including the maintenance and expansion of the outdoor recreation industry through business growth and developments near state parks.
The council should work with the Arkansas Department of Parks, Heritage and Tourism — now led by Mike Mills, owner of the Buffalo Outdoor Center in Ponca — to establish a plan for the maintenance of the state’s trail systems and ways to connect those trails to regional systems.
The executive order also notes that the council should advise on how to grow the outdoor recreation workforce and bring “innovative food, beverage, and vendor services” to enhance the outdoor experience.
A review of the “tax and regulatory environment, including internal agency and department policies” is also listed as part of the council’s undertakings, as is a yearly report summarizing its progress.
The post Gov. Sanders establishes ‘Natural State Initiative,’ calls first gent to lead appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts has announced that Arkansas Cinema Society and Ballet Arkansas will be its “partner companies-in-residence,” along with other yet to be unveiled collaborations that are currently in development. AMFA’s Executive Director Dr. Victoria Ramirez thinks of the partnerships as an “opportunity to create an unforgettable inaugural year of programming spanning art, theatre, film, dance performances and more,” according to a press release.
The strongest indicator of what these residencies will entail is the accompanying announcement that Filmland 2023, ACS’s annual film festival, will be held Oct. 4-8 at the AMFA. Filmland screenings will occur in the Performing Arts Theater, a newly renovated space promising cutting-edge cinematic technology via Boston Light & Sound, whose A/V installations are said to be world class. Additionally, AFMA will host other year-round programming for ACS like the Filmmaking Lab for Teen Girls and the Arkansas Filmmaker Spotlight.
As for what the alliance between AMFA and Ballet Arkansas will look like, less has been officially stated. The two organizations have been in collaboration for years, but Michael Fothergill, Ballet Arkansas’s executive and artistic director, said that the company “look[s] forward to pushing boundaries and thinking outside the box.”
The grand opening of the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts is Saturday, April 22.
The post AMFA partners with Arkansas Cinema Society and Ballet Arkansas appeared first on Arkansas Times.
During the first week of classes after winter break, Jace Bridges, president of the African American Student Association at Arkansas Tech University, was approached by a handful of Black art students who were made uncomfortable by an exhibit entitled “Artifacts” that had recently been installed in the Norman Hall Art Gallery on campus in Russellville. The exhibit featured imagery that some students found to be problematic, including a sculpture called “KLAN BRIDE” that depicts a ghostlike figure with flowing lace and a Ku Klux Klan hood.
“I didn’t understand what the purpose or intent of having it there was, or what the art was supposed to mean,” said Bridges, who is a junior from Fayetteville. “Reading the artist statement, it didn’t click for me what the whole art piece was trying to exemplify.” The artist Dominique Simmons — a white woman who self-identifies as a “a child of the South” — acknowledged that “racism is bad” and stated that she “abhor[s] the evil … found in our history” in her artist statement, but she didn’t make a connection between that sentiment and the racially charged portrayals, other than explaining that the exhibit is meant to explore “personal artifacts” that “permeate [her] memories.”
According to an email exchange between the Arkansas Times and Sam Strasner, director of university relations at ATU, “the content of the work was not known to anyone at the university until it was received by the ATU Department of Art for display,” despite the work being solicited by the same department.
After Bridges learned of the backlash around the exhibit, he notified the heads of other university groups and spoke with professors that he viewed as allies. Additionally, on Jan. 12, the Instagram page for the AASA, which is run by sophomore Jae Thomas, posted a widely circulated message accusing the artwork of perpetuating “symbols of bigotry, trauma, and discrimination.” The message also invited students to participate in an MLK March on Jan. 16 in order to speak up about these issues. Bridges believes that the post was a motivating factor behind why ATU released a statement on January 13.
In the statement, ATU President Dr. Robin E. Bowen invoked “First Amendment rights” such as “artistic expression” and “free speech” and said that “the artist has requested to meet with those who have concerns, and, after the meeting, determine which works will remain on display.” The ending of the statement is worded in a somewhat murky way, but it seems to suggest that the university was putting the fate of the artwork solely in the hands of Simmons. The AASA Instagram published another popular post in response: “But we ask: free speech at the cost of whom?”
Before the meeting happened, Simmons decided to cancel the exhibit and the artwork was returned to her possession. No additional statement from either the artist or the university accompanied its removal. The Arkansas Times reached out to Simmons via phone and email for further context and perspective, but was not able to make contact with her. When we asked ATU if it plans to issue an apology, Strasner said that “as a public institution, it is important Arkansas Tech University maintain a content neutral stance in order to guarantee the expression of free speech on its campuses.”
Even though the artwork was taken down, some students still carried signs related to the controversy at the MLK March. “Tech didn’t really do anything to highlight the people who were offended,” Bridges said. “They did more to highlight protection of the perpetrator of the offense.”
The post Arkansas Tech students react to racially charged art exhibit appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A nonprofit entity affiliated with the University of Arkansas System has been in discussions about a potential purchase of the for-profit University of Phoenix, a spokesman for the UA System confirmed today.
The University of Phoenix is one of the nation’s largest for-profit colleges.
“Because these conversations are ongoing, we are unable to provide much detail,” UA System spokesman Nate Hinkel told the Arkansas Times. “However, I do want to confirm that the UA System itself would not be acquiring the University of Phoenix and no public or university funds would be involved in this potential transaction. The contemplated structure would also not include any remaining private ownership of the nonprofit entity or the University of Phoenix.”
A source commenting on condition of anonymity said one cost estimate we’d been told — $500 million to $700 million — was probably about right.
Hinkel said he did not know but assumed the University of Phoenix would retain its name if the UA System-affiliated nonprofit acquired it.
Hinkel said the nonprofit entity affiliated “would support and facilitate the transition of the University of Phoenix to completely independent nonprofit status, while supporting the university’s mission of advancing high-quality, career focused education.” The process to nonprofit status would be a gradual one, Hinkel noted.
In a prepared statement, Hinkel said, “The goal in exploring opportunities such as this is to advance the system’s mission of providing affordable, relevant education to a broad range of students and introducing the UA System to new educational markets. As the state’s leader in postsecondary education, we feel an obligation to consider any opportunity that has the potential to both improve educational attainment and secure new resources to support our campuses, divisions and units.”
Hinkel declined to name the nonprofit or even confirm whether it exists or would be created especially for this purchase.
Contacted Monday about the matter, UA System Board of Trustees Chairman Cliff Gibson said, “I have no comment about it at this time.”
The University of Phoenix, founded in 1976, has been beset with problems in recent years. In December 2019, it agreed to a $191 million settlement with the Federal Trade Commission. The commission said the college had lured students with fraudulent claims about partnerships with major companies, the New York Times reported at the time.
That sum included a $50 million penalty to the commission and cancellation of $141 million in debts, largely for unpaid tuition and fees, owed by tens of thousands of former students, the Times reported.
The University of Phoenix website says the college focuses on “adult learners” rather than the 18-22 year-old students focused on by most colleges traditionally. Classes are offered online or at a site in Phoenix. The website says the college’s other campus sites — in California, Hawaii, Nevada and Texas — are no longer enrolling students.
In June 2022, the University of Phoenix president, George Burnett, resigned just months after taking the post, USA Today reported. Documents obtained by USA Today showed that the departure came after an inquiry by the Department of Education.The department questioned Burnett’s time overseeing Westwood College, a Colorado-based for-profit college that had run-ins with regulators over deceptive advertising among other concerns, USA Today reported.
According to the USA Today article, the University of Phoenix has about 75,000 students. The newspaper said the college, whose courses are largely offered online, received about $930 million in federal money meant for student financial aid in fiscal year 2020-2021. At its peak, the university had about 470,000 students in 2010, USA Today reported.
The post UA System-affiliated nonprofit looking at possible purchase of University of Phoenix appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Is anyone out there staying warm? Please enlighten us in the comments if you’re on a tropical vacation.
If you’re like us and in Little Rock, you probably know that the Arkansas Senate swiftly passed SB43 today. If you’re not on that aforementioned tropical vacation, sound off in the comments about the bill.
The post The gloomy, moody open line appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Are you ready for the dopest awards in Arkansas?
Voting is open for the Arkansas Times 2023 Cannabis Awards, where you can cast your vote to let us know who is doing things the best in the Arkansas cannabis world.
The awards are broken into four categories: dispensaries, cultivators, cannabis-related businesses and best of the rest.
You can vote for things like best budtender, best dispensary, best strains, best CBD products, best doctors and more.
Check it out at vote.arktimes.com. Voting closes Feb. 20.
The post Voting is open for the Arkansas Times Cannabis Awards appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A blatantly unconstitutional bill that targets transgender Arkansans and lets big government parent your kids passed the Arkansas Senate Tuesday.
Sen. Gary Stubblefield (R-Branch) made no secret about religion being the impetus behind SB43, which would prevent drag performances on public property and anywhere within 1,000 feet of schools, parks, churches, child cares, park, playgrounds, libraries, recreational facilities, houses and walking trails. So, basically anywhere not out in the sticks.
“I want to ask you one question before you vote. Would God approve of this?” Stubblefield said. The God to which he refers here is the Old Testament one, full of wrath over men dressing as women and vice versa.
A centuries-old art form dating from Shakespeare’s days, the genre is thought to have earned its name from male actors in women’s roles, unadept at navigating the stage in petticoats and dragging their costumes across the floor. Supported by all 29 Republican senators and opposed by all six Democrats, the bill would classify drag performances as adult-oriented businesses, shackling them with a raft of new zoning considerations and draping them with suggestions of shame and disrepute.
The bill still has to move through the House side before it goes to the governor’s desk.
Once it gets there (as it almost certainly will, considering the Republican supermajority), Sen. Clarke Tucker (D-Little Rock) noted that Gov. Sarah Sanders will face a conundrum.
At Sanders’ inaugural speech before Arkansas lawmakers earlier this month, she pledged that if they sent her “a bill that grows government at the expense of freedom, I will veto it.”
SB43 puts the job of parenting in the hands of the government, legislating what art forms parents can and can’t expose their children to. It does not seek to legislate heterosexual culture, Tucker noted, pointing out that scantily clad waitstaff at Hooters and Twin Peaks are free to strut their wares for underage diners.
The old adage that Republicans are the party of limited government is not panning out at all, Tucker noted. Legislation that targets the LGBTQ+ community is about controlling other people’s lives and decisions, he said. Tucker noted other bills working their way through the Capitol, like one to prevent the state from doing business with contractors who refuse to invest in the oil and firearms industries.
“We’re trying to control the conduct of businesses we disagree with,” he said.
Stubblefield’s assurances that his bill will not hinder plays or even the drag show fundraiser for the fair in his home county is not very solid legal advice. If passed into law, this measure will likely apply to parades and gender-bending plays like “Tootsie,” Tucker said. It even applies to activities that go down in private homes.
“This is a big government bill,” he said.
Arkansas lawmakers continue to throw their energy and votes behind culture war attacks, even as a quarter of the children in Arkansas aren’t sure if they’ll have dinner tonight, Tucker noted.
Sen. Stephanie Flowers suggested the anti-drag bill was an attempt by the sponsor to make national headlines.
Democratic Sens. Linda Chesterfield of Little Rock and Stephanie Flowers of Pine Bluff also spoke against the bill, pointing out that Christianity calls for us to love everyone, and that just because something makes you uncomfortable doesn’t mean you should legislate it out of existence.
“This will help no one and hurt a lot of people,” Sen. Greg Leding (D-Fayetteville) said. “Everybody in this room wants to protect kids. This bill doesn’t do that. How many kids do we think in Arkansas are unintentionally seeing drag?”
Leding speculated that number is far smaller than the numbers on children suffering from hunger, violence and mental health challenges. We should probably direct our efforts there, he suggested.
Sen. Tyler Dees (R-Siloam Springs) said he “can walk and chew gum at the same time,” and is capable of taking on education and crime bills alongside the culture stuff.
“We have an issue that is a cultural battleground right now, and our children are at the forefront of that.” Dees said he is in pursuit of “what is pure, what is holy, what is noble,” and that he is drawing a line in the sand.
Sen. Blake Johnson (R-Corning) threw in his two cents, bringing pasties into the conversation.
“Today I’m not going to be silent. You can call me intolerant if you want to,” he said. “If they have pasties on and they’re walking down the street, that’s sexualization. Our children do not need to be sexualized to the other genders.”
Sen. Alan Clark (R-Lonsdale), who got busted for charging the state per diem expenses for a meeting he didn’t actually attend last year but somehow retains status as the self-appointed arbiter of what is righteous and proper, hinted that there will be disorder in the streets unless we codify this latest attack on transgender people.
“There will be howling and protests,” he warned.
The bill now goes to the House side.
The post Senators continue crusade on trans Arkansans, pass anti-drag show bill appeared first on Arkansas Times.
By Rebecca Zimmermann, community engagement director, Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families
My job at Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families is to convince people to reach out to their state legislators on bills that would either positively or negatively impact kids in our state. And sometimes it can be a challenge. So many people feel like their voice doesn’t matter. They say they already know how their legislator will vote, and their phone call won’t make a difference. Maybe you feel that way.
I would say that’s what “they” want you to think, except I don’t know who “they” are. What I do know is 1 in 5 children in Arkansas lives in poverty. That their parents pay a greater share of their income in taxes than the people who are the wealthiest in the state. I know that teenagers in our state are more likely to give birth than in any other state in the country except for Mississippi, which is tied with Arkansas. I know that Black babies in our state are more likely to lose their mothers during and around childbirth than in most other states. I know many children are unable to go to preschool because their families can’t afford it, or they don’t have access to it in their communities at all.
And I know all of these problems have proven policy solutions. And that your voice (everyone reading this!) can make a difference in the lives of kids in our state by being an active voice for children at the Arkansas General Assembly, Congress, and beyond.
Just two years ago, the federal government expanded access to and made other changes to the Child Tax Credit that gave parents and other caregivers a little extra help to make sure that their children had the essentials they needed. While that policy was in place (it no longer is), child poverty dropped by 40%! Over 2 million children across the country were lifted out of poverty! And that policy didn’t get instant support from Congress. It took the advocacy of people like you over many years.
If this is the first time you are hearing about this history-making drop in child poverty, it’s because we are surrounded by messages focusing on the negative. The barriers. The petty political fights. The gamesmanship of governance. But all around us, every day there are people working toward and winning meaningful changes for our children and our communities. None of it happens overnight. But our determination pays off.
I hope you will join us in our determination to be a voice for kids at the state Capitol.
Every email, phone call and testimony matters. Every time you reach out, even knowing the short-term odds might not be great, matters. But every time your legislators vote, they need to consider: Will this make life better or worse for the children of our state? Your advocacy makes sure that is a question they can’t ignore.
Arkansas Advocates recently put out our new advocacy guidebook, Advocating for Change, that can help you think through your approach to advocacy.
Whether you have a minute in your week to spare or all the time in the world–it’s never a waste of time to speak up for our state’s kids.
The post It’s never a waste of time to speak up for our state’s kids appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Federal agents today arrested two of the three officers who participated in the violent arrest of a man in Mulberry in Crawford County last summer.
A federal grand jury had earlier returned an indictment charging former Crawford County sheriff’s deputies Levi White, 32, and Zackary King, 27, with civil rights offenses for using excessive force during the arrest at a Mulberry gas station on Aug. 21.
FBI spokesman Connor Hagan said the U.S. Marshals Service also participated in the arrests. Mulberry Police Officer Thell Riddle, who was also involved in the violent arrest and subsequently placed on leave, has not been arrested and is not wanted for arrest at this time, Hagan said.
Hagan said White and King were appearing in U.S. District Court in Fort Smith this afternoon. Information on whether they were jailed or released was not immediately available.
The sheriff’s office fired the two deputies from their jobs during the investigation of the August arrest of Randal Worcester, 27, of Goose Creek, S.C. Worcester required medical treatment and was then jailed briefly on assault charges. Worcester has since filed a federal lawsuit over the arrest.
The police were trying to arrest Worcester after he allegedly threatened a store clerk in Mulberry and spat on her.
The Justice Department said in a statement this afternoon that a federal grand jury had returned an indictment charging White and King with civil rights offenses for using excessive force on Worcester during the arrest outside a Mulberry gas station.
Count One of the indictment alleges that, while Worcester was lying on the ground, White struck him multiple times. Count Two alleges that King struck Worcester multiple times, also while the arrestee was lying on the ground. The Indictment further alleges that Worcester suffered bodily injury as a result of White and King’s actions.
If convicted, White and King would face a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison for the excessive-force charge, the Justice Department said. Both defendants also would face up to three years of supervised release and a fine of up to $250,000, the department added.
Emily White, a special state prosecutor, said today that her investigation of the three officers’ actions in the Mulberry incident “remains open and active.”
Participating in the federal announcement today were U.S. Attorney David Clay Fowlkes for the Western District of Arkansas, Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, and Special Agent in Charge James A. Dawson of the FBI Little Rock field office.
The post Two former officers arrested in violent Mulberry arrest UPDATE appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Arkansans all over the state are making noise about Senate Bill 43, which would at its narrowist classify drag performances as an “adult-orientated business.” In Fayetteville, a group from the University of Arkansas School of Law chimed in. The bill passed through the Senate Tuesday afternoon.
William Yandell, president of OutLaw, the law school’s LGBTQ organization, shared thoughts on how the bill would limit performers First Amendment rights. Yandell notes “the attempt to equate drag to sexually explicit adult entertainment is absurd and betrays either willful ignorance of the art form or intentional distortion.”
The bill passed unanimously in Arkansas Senate’s City, County & Local Affairs Committee the morning of Jan. 19, which was followed by a rally of those in defiance of the bill on the Capitol steps the same afternoon.
With broad language that makes it hard to fathom the bill’s actual impact, Yandell also notes that the legislation would lead to “discriminatory outcomes; judgment calls are left in the hands of human beings with human biases.”
Here’s Yandell’s thoughts in full:
On January 19, 2023, the Senate committee of the Arkansas State Legislature unanimously passed Senate Bill 43 (SB 43), which, if approved by the legislature, could prohibit all drag events in public spaces, even at pride events. SB 43 would also classify any venue that hosts a “drag performance” as an adult-oriented business. In so doing, the bill attempts to limit the First Amendment rights of drag performers to express their art form and of the public to view and participate in drag events as patrons. Critically, the bill singles out an art form that has been quintessential to the LGBTQ community as both a form of entertainment and an organizing political force for decades, if not centuries. We honor the legacy of our predecessors in the struggle for acceptance by once again rebuking the attempt to force our community out of public life.
The author of the bill, Senator Gary Stubblefield, defines “drag performance” as at least one performer exhibiting a “gender identity that is different from the performer’s gender assigned at birth,” that is held before an audience of at least two people for entertainment, and must appeal to “the prurient interest,” or, as otherwise defined, activity that tends to incite lust in the viewer.
This language and the attempt to equate drag to sexually explicit adult entertainment is absurd and betrays either willful ignorance of the art form or intentional distortion. Drag, like all expressive forms, has sub-genres, niches, and varying levels of appropriateness for different audiences. Drag often takes the form of overt political speech, and, because drag has historically been marginalized by lawmakers, is arguably always political speech. Political speech, as this legislature ought to know, is entitled to the highest level of First Amendment protection.
Further, drag cannot be properly described as appealing to the prurient interest or any other variation of obscenity as is understood under the law. Patrons of drag shows are not watching to satisfy a sexual urge, but for entertainment. This fact is obvious. For decades, major television networks have aired drag performances that could easily satisfy SB 43’s language under a TV-14 rating. Like banning all music because some music is not appropriate for children, SB 43, if passed, would be similarly overbroad and misguided.
In response to criticism, Senator Stubblefield claimed that the bill as written would only target truly inappropriate performances. Yet, like similar bills around the country, SB 43 is untenably vague. Vagueness is a problem in the law precisely because it leads to discriminatory outcomes; judgment calls are left in the hands of human beings with human biases. How many lawfully operating gay bars will be harassed as a result of this bill? How many supportive venues will eliminate drag programming out of fear of being the subject of SB 43’s enforcement? Harassment, stifling expression, and inspiring fear of retaliation, we submit, are the true purposes of SB 43.
Make no mistake. The First Amendment rights that are under attack in the form of SB 43 are not applicable only to drag performers or the LGBTQ community, but to all Arkansans. If the legislature can define an entire expressive form as unfit for public consumption, what else may be prohibited in the name of “protecting the children?” To whom do we designate the great task of acting as the authority for what political speech is fit for the public to hear, or how parents may raise their children? OutLaw answers by saying that no such authority does or can exist so long as the Constitution reigns supreme over the likes of the State Senate committee.
This statement was endorsed by the following University of Arkansas Law Student Organizations: Student Bar Association, Board of Advocates, Women’s Law Society, Young Democrats, Find the Balance, Environmental Law Society, and the Sports and Entertainment Legal Society.
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Partway through the new music video for “Me First” by Kari Faux, which depicts the Little Rock-raised, Houston-based rapper getting dolled up for a flashy shoot, a subtle trap groove is interrupted by a text ding, notifying her that her label has “pulled the budget” on the project. After 20 seconds of awkward silence, Faux puts her phone on a stand, starts filming herself and continues rapping, in keeping with the song’s message of defiant self-advocacy. When Faux refers to herself as “bossy bitch” with “presidential pussy,” you know she’s going to get what she wants, in the bedroom and otherwise.
Check out the video:
The post Kari Faux puts herself first in new music video appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The tenants at the Big Country Chateau apartments on Colonel Glenn Road are again facing a scheduled utility shut-off on March 1 from Central Arkansas Water, according to a notice sent to residents on Jan. 9.
Doug Shackelford, CAW’s Director of Public Affairs and Communications, said that he couldn’t release information about the account without authorization from Big Country Chateau. He said that “it was CAW’s goal to provide an extended grace period between the time of the notification and the shutoff date to allow residents to make any arrangements they need to make in preparation for shutoff.”
Shackelford also said that he hopes apartment management will reach out to CAW to resolve the issue and prevent the shutoff entirely.
Al Allen with Arkansas Renters United said that the tenant assistant group is still working with about 10 households at the Big Country Chateau. The group plans to present a “list of demands” — currently unreleased — Thursday afternoon at Little Rock City Hall. Neil Sealy, also with Arkansas Renters United, said that the list of demands are pointed to Mayor Frank Scott Jr. and the Little Rock Board of Directors.
Sealy said that he hopes the demands will “[urge] them to step and coordinate efforts to find housing for tenants who will displaced. Big Country Chateau has been in environmental court since 2019. Instead of conditions getting better, they have deteriorated to the point of crisis.”
He added that Arkansas Renters United may also draft a letter to the out-of-state apartment owners, Apex Equity Group.
The management at the Big Country Chateau has been in trouble with utility providers before — the most recent during the summer when CAW had scheduled a shut-off for Sept. 1 because of a more than $200,000 outstanding balance. Ultimately, the entities came to an agreement and the water was not turned off. At the same time, Entergy had notified tenants that the electricity would be shut off also because of an outstanding balance. The electricity stayed on after a $70,000 price tag was paid.
In August, then-Attorney General Leslie Rutledge sued the apartment owners under the consumer protection law after Little Rock officials found hundreds of life safety violations. The violations included exposed wires and the absence of fire extinguishers, fire alarms and carbon monoxide detectors.
A hearing on Dec. 1, 2022 found that nearly all of the violations were taken care of, but a subsequent hearing was set for Feb. 2 in Little Rock Environmental Court to address the remaining violations.
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In her ongoing campaign for national attention that hints at political ambitions beyond Arkansas’s borders, Governor Sarah Sanders appeared on Fox News this morning to lambast President Biden and spin some revisionist history from Trumpland.
Forever Trump’s defender even as her allegiance appears to be shifting to that other Florida man, Ron DeSantis, Sanders said her tenure as White House spokesman was cake compared to what poor Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is up against now as Biden faces questions after he came forward about classified documents found in his possession.
Finger pointing has always been one of her stronger skills, so Sanders naturally sides with other Trump apologists who equate the Mar-a-Lago raid that unearthed a trove of classified documents that Trump had repeatedly refused to hand over with Biden’s seemingly accidental possession of classified documents that he handed over like a hot potato as soon as he realized he had them.
Today, we learned former Vice President Mike Pence is also caught up in the classified documents web. He and his attorneys came forward with a dozen classified documents found in Pence’s Indiana home, CNN reports.
Sanders hinted something sinister is afoot, and that Jean-Pierre is dodging the truth.
I wish we could get some answers, but frankly, she has a terrible story to tell. The difference is when I was in the Trump administration, we had a great story to tell. The economy was booming. Our country was safer. Our border was more secure. Things that were positive were happening. She doesn’t have any of those things to talk about, and that makes her job infinitely harder.
You can watch her in action here.
Watch the latest video at foxnews.com
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Cornucopia (noun): an abundant supply of good things of a specified kind.
Each month, I will be writing about a cornucopia of food topics, which include a recap of my eating adventures, food and drink news, my general thoughts on the Central Arkansas culinary scene and a quick Top 10 list. So, with that in mind, let’s get to it.
Maddie’s Place is as good as ever
When talking about the Little Rock restaurant elite, the conversation better damn-well include Maddie’s Place. Everything on the menu is top-notch, including the grilled oysters, fried green tomatoes, nachos and shrimp & grits, just to name a few. But it is the entree of buttermilk fried chicken breast with mac & cheese and greens that is the star for me. To no one’s surprise, Chef Brian Deloney and his kitchen staff have mastered frying a boneless chicken breast, but it’s those subtly sweet, tender collards and gooey mac that make this dish stick in your brain. The Crystal hot sauce glaze adds a little sweet heat and pop of orange color, sealing the deal on many folks’ favorite dish in town.
Kevin ShalinELITE FRIED CHICKEN: Maddie’s Place.Rad-uno
In a town lacking truly outstanding pizza options, Raduno is one of the very few to have mastered pie excellence. But make no mistake, it did not happen overnight for the SoMa eatery whose pizza was steeped in mediocrity for several years. The transformation is now complete, as evident by my last several trips, including a recent Friday lunch when my wife and I took down the Sausage + Fennel pizza. While the combination of toppings was perfect — even for this self-proclaimed fennel hater — the crust is where Raduno has made enormous strides. Now crispy and slightly doughy on the edges with a thin, bendable interior, this version has officially put the restaurant at the top of my Little Rock pizza pyramid. Per usual, we also split a Chicken Parm Sandwich and Burrata, staples of any true eating experience at the restaurant. I also advise trying one of Courtney Stowers’ cocktails. She’s masterful behind the bar, creative with her creations, and one of the few who I trust to make an ordering decision for me, like the Hot Toddy she whipped up. It was well-received on a cold afternoon.
Kevin ShalinSAUSAGE + FENNEL EXCELLENCE: Is waiting for you at Raduno.Consistency is king at Brave New Restaurant
Bad meals don’t happen at Brave New Restaurant. That was proven true once again during a recent dinner, although the scallops that I typically consider to be a must-order were a little off. Smaller than normal and lacking that signature sear, these mollusks still had that delightful sweetness. However, overall, this dish took a backseat to other offerings, like the Goat Cheese Mousse appetizer and a vegetable pasta entree that our table of six split and treated as a second meal-starter. Yes, you’ll be tempted to order the Mushroom Wellington or Mixed Grill or Duck with Duck when at Brave New, but vegetarians and carnivores alike will find something to like in this pasta dish with its stalks of charred asparagus, red peppers, squash, tomato sauce, and balsamic vinegar a shot.
Kevin ShalinGOAT CHEESE MOUSSE: At Brave New Restaurant.Coffee at Corner Café in Maumelle
Not to knock chains but passing up Corner Café at 9823 Maumelle Blvd. in favor of the 7 Brews and Starbucks of the world is a mistake. A big one. The cafe has this easygoing, European vibe, so order an Americano or Turkish coffee and stay awhile. Pair it with a spinach and feta pastry. The buttery, flaky work of art is just as beautiful as it is delicious. The shop also has a drive-thru, which is a critical bit of information for those on-the-go.
Kevin ShalinPASTRY: Spinach and feta.The ever-popular Blackberry Market
Argenta’s Blackberry Market is already a wildly popular spot. I happen to love everything about the cafe from the mellow atmosphere to the fresh baked muffins to the Intelligentsia Coffee. Heck, I’m sitting here writing this article. Count me as a regular already. The only negative? Blackberry is almost too popular and seem to struggle with keeping up during peak times. My suggestion? Just be a little patient. It’s still early and they are still working out kinks.
Kevin ShalinVEGGIES: The veggie sandwich at Blackberry Market.The Fast and Fantastic China
Fantastic China never gets the attention it deserves. They handle takeout about as well as anyone, and the dine-in experience, whether it’s during lunch or dinner, is about as fast and efficient as it gets. Seriously, has your glass of iced tea ever gotten below the halfway point? Never. They also make my favorite wonton soup and the shrimp and broccoli dish is a vision.
Kevin ShalinA VISION: Shrimp and broccoli from Fantastic China.The Sherwood sensation, Mama’s Gyros Grill
I love to travel for food, but what I wouldn’t give for Mama’s Gyros Grill in Sherwood to be closer to the casa. Why can’t that 20-minute drive be two minutes? I’d go there once a month instead of once a year. Oh well. This is my long-winded way of saying that Mama’s is such a cool spot, and a must-stop whenever I’m in Sherwood. Get a meat-packed gyro with tzatziki, fresh diced tomatoes, and raw, chopped onion. Owner and operator Randy Akel is usually manning the kitchen. They don’t come any nicer than Randy, and the man puts a masterful grill-job on the gyro meat right before stuffing it in the pita, giving each piece a little crispiness on the edges.
Kevin ShalinMAMA’S GYROS: Worth the drive to Sherwood.Tidbits, openings and closings
Don’t look now but breakfast and brunch are booming in Little Rock. The Purple Cow just added breakfast as did Homer’s Kitchen Table (Saturdays only for now). Mockingbird Bar & Tacos introduced its Sunday brunch, and Flora Jean’s, the new downtown vegetarian restaurant at 433 E. Third St., offers brunch on Saturday and Sunday. YGFBFKitchen closed its West Little Rock location. The restaurant lasted about eight months in the capital city and apparently was plagued by a variety of issues, including staffing and slow service. There is, however, good news. The Conway location, where the restaurant started, is back open. Food has never been a question for YGFBFKitchen, which officially changed its name to a much easier to remember Your Best Friend’s Kitchen & Catering. Here’s hoping the restaurant can get back on track and continue to crank out great eats. South on Main closed as well, as did the very last TCBY location in Little Rock. The latter has already been blown off the map thanks to the business model of 7 Brew Coffee. Get ready folks, 7 Brew is coming. In more positive news … We are getting real deal bagels in Little Rock. Well, we’ve had them for a while now, thanks to the pop-up version of The Bagel Shop. They will be going brick-in-mortar later this year at 1501 South Main St. I am cautiously optimistic about a new pizza place in White Hall. Sylvia’s Pizzeria opened recently at 6715 Sheridan Road. As of this writing, I think they are still doing takeout-only, but dining room service is soon to follow. Another place to check out is Marty’s Place, which opened this month at 11501 Maumelle Blvd.
And Finally … My Top 10 Wings in the Little Rock Area
- Mockingbird Bar & Tacos
- Certified Pies
- Town Pump
- Four Quarter Bar
- HallBros2Go
- Lost Forty Brewing
- Lazy’s Petes
- Tim’s Tavern
- America’s Street Food
- Charlee’s Good Time Drinkery
That’s it from me. See you in February!
The post The Mighty Rib’s Cornucopia: January Edition appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Why does Northwest Arkansas have all the fun? Weather pros are predicting 5-10 inches of snow up there tonight, according to a report from KATV-7.
Central Arkansas can expect some very cold rain and high winds. Less picturesque, more dangerous.
Meteorologist Todd Yakoubian said in a Facebook update yesterday that Western Pulaski County could potentially get a light dusting, but accumulation is unlikely. Looks like tomorrow will be another school day in Central Arkansas, unfortunately.
Yakoubian did say winter is far from over, so our snow chances are still alive. He expects the first week of February to see below average temperatures.
For NWA snowbirds or Central Arkansans wanting to cosplay as such, here’s an adaptable mulled wine recipe Brood & Barley’s David Burnette shared with us in 2021. The Hawaiian Punch option sounds … interesting.
Just bring some cheap red wine to a very gentle simmer (not a rolling boil). Add in some holiday spices from your spice cabinet, like star anise, cinnamon and clove. Toss in some slices of orange, plum, lemon or really any fruit you may have on hand, and let it steep. I like to add a little honey to sweeten it to taste and spike up the alcohol content with a little bit of brandy (a little goes a long way). Don’t have wine, or prefer a nonalcoholic option? I like to make this same style beverage with red fruit punch (think Hawaiian Punch). I’ll just throw this in a crock pot and let it do the work.
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ARKANSAS SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA: PROKOFIEV’S ’ROMEO & JULIET’
SATURDAY 1/28-SUNDAY 1/29. Robinson Center. 7:30 p.m. Sat.; 3 p.m. Sun. $19-$77.
In addition to selections from “Romeo & Juliet,” a ballet by Prokofiev, the two-performance-only program includes a 1903 Gabriel Pierné piece that revolves around a dreamy and demanding feature from ASO’s principal harpist, Alisa Coffey, a performer who has been called “reliably magic” by Arkansas Times’ own Stephanie Smittle. Also on the bill is Beethoven’s “Leonore Overture No. 3,” which brings to life the story of a woman who dresses in a male disguise to save her husband from wrongful imprisonment. The guest maestra is Akiko Fujimoto, the first female conductor for the Mid-Texas Symphony, who appeared with ASO in April 2022, recently enough that she probably still remembers most of the performers by name.
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We’re hoping the Family Council‘s panning of a bill by Rep. Richard Womack (R- Arkadelphia) and Sen. Matt McKee (R-Pearcy) that would make women who get abortions liable for murder will be fatal.
Jerry Cox, the affably priggish head of Arkansas’s Christian crusaders, took to the internet last week to blog his opposition. Which is surprising, because Cox and the Family Council usually love punishing women who have sex.
The Family Council remains all for going after abortion providers, but charging women with murder is a bridge too far even for them.
arleg HB1174, the bananas abortion homicide bill by Rep. Womack, is too extreme for The Family Council. We rarely agree with TFC, but today we do. Women should never be criminalized for seeking repro healthcare. 1/4 #arpx
— For AR People (@ForARPeople1) January 23, 2023
The bill, HB1174, is listed on the agenda for today’s House Judiciary Committee hearing, but on the deferred list, meaning it’s on hold for now. Hoping lawmakers across the political spectrum can come to agree it’s nonviable.
The post Even the Family Council opposes the twisted bill to criminalize abortion as murder appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Gravette’s own Bigo Barnett fared poorly with jurors, who were pretty quick to call a spade a spade. Guilty!
What else are y’all watching today?
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Right-wing indoctrination alert! A ballroom full of charter school students twirled yellow school choice-branded scarves and chanted along as voucher evangelist Corey DeAngelis led them in a “fund students, not systems” cheer.
Brian ChilsonDeAngelis, the Betsy DeVos-aligned frontman for the conservative push to divert public money to private schools, came to Little Rock to appear with Governor Sarah Sanders as she kicked off what she’s proclaimed is parental choice week in Arkansas.Sanders spoke first to the crowd made up of mostly students, plus some education policy people like Laurie Lee of the pro-voucher Arkansas Reform Alliance and representatives from the Arkansas State Teachers Association, which positions itself as an alternative to the Arkansas Education Association teachers union.
Brian ChilsonPeople anxious for details on Sanders’ promised omnnibus education bill will have to wait another week or two, but Sanders did say that she will be proposing teacher pay raises and also incentive pay.“We will not trap students in failing schools in this state any longer,” she said.
Rep. Keith Brooks (R-Little Rock), one of the handful of Republican lawmakers there, along with Lt. Gov. Leslie Rutledge, introduced DeAngelis as a leader for educational freedom.
Brian ChilsonCorey DeAngelis talks to charter students in Little Rock.Mic in hand, DeAngelis led what amounted to a pep rally, telling the students they cheer and dance better than the union teachers in Chicago who protested the reopening of schools during COVID-19. DeAngelis also clarified to them that while he’s a doctor, he’s only a doctor in the Jill Biden sense, dredging up the old flap over the first lady’s doctorate. Then he did this thing, where he led the kids in a school choice cheer.
it's time for Arkansas to fund students, not systems. pic.twitter.com/4e1HNKMpod
— Corey A. DeAngelis (@DeAngelisCorey) January 23, 2023
Seems a little indoctrination-ish to me. Perhaps wasting the opportunity to enlist a roomful of innocents as pawns in the hyper-capitalist voucher scheme would make DeAngelis a not-very-good capitalist.
Both Sanders’ and DeAngelis’ speeches were only minutes long. A big fan of Ron DeSantis’ voucher program in Florida, DeAngelis will likely stick around in town a while longer to help Sanders hammer out details of her own education package.
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To no surprise, Arkansas’s latest abortion bill is getting national attention. House Bill 1174, introduced on Thursday, would allow Arkansas prosecutors to pursue murder charges against women who have abortions.
The bill states that “all unborn children should be protected under the state homicide laws as all other persons.”
Jessica Valenti, a feminist writer and host of the “Abortion, Every Day” substack, took a detailed look at the bill and found it to be even worse than expected.
“It’s exactly what we said it was going to be, but it’s so much worse when you see it written out,” Valenti said of the bill.
She notes the ways that the bill’s language of “accidental miscarriage” implies that deliberate miscarriage is prosecutable. The legislation “would enshrine the idea that it is murder to ‘cause’ miscarriage or stillbirth,” Valenti notes. She named things like having wine while pregnant, lifting a heavy object and failing to seek prenatal care as actions legislators might deem a crime if a woman subsequently suffers a miscarriage.
“There is no limit to what a zealous prosecutor could arrest a woman for,” Valenti said. “This has always been where these laws were leading, but it is so shocking to me to see it written out so explicitly.”
In addition to other concerning aspects of the bill, Valenti said that the drafted legislation removed previous language that said a “person wouldn’t be liable for the ‘death of an unborn child’ if it was caused by contraception or IVF.” That means certain kinds of birth control and fertility treatments could lead to arrest.
Valenti digs into the bill further. Check out the print-and-audio discourse here.
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The North Little Rock police have arrested 34-year-old Alison Broyles in the Sunday morning homicide of Douglas Reynolds in the 2700 block of Lakeview Road in North Little Rock.
At around 2:45 a.m. Sunday, officers responded to a residential burglary alarm at the residence and found Reynolds, 56, dead from multiple gunshot wounds. Officers also found Broyles in the residence and detained her after determining she did not live there and after she exhibited suspicious behavior, a release from the North Little Rock police said.
The police described the incident as “an isolated incident in which the victim and suspect were known to each other.”
Broyles has been charged with one count of capital murder and is being held without bond at the Pulaski County Regional Detention Center pending an initial court appearance tomorrow at 9 a.m.
The police have asked anyone with information on this incident to contact the North Little Rock tip line at 501-680-8439 or Detective Jeff Coburn at 501-771-7155.
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A federal jury in Washington, D.C., today convicted Richard “Bigo” Barnett on all eight charges for his participation in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.
WUSA9’s Jordan Fischer has been covering parts of the trial that began in U.S. District Court just over two weeks ago. Fischer reports that sentencing is set for May 3.
The prosecution asked Judge Christopher R. Cooper to jail Barnett, 62, of Gravette in Northwest Arkansas until then, but Cooper declined, the Washington Examiner reported.
The jury deliberated about three hours before returning the verdict, Fisher reported.
Barnett’s attorney, Joe McBride, told reporters that Barnett will appeal.
McBride said Barnett “didn’t get a fair trial in part because ‘Washington, D.C., is not a state’ and because Barnett was ‘not surrounded by a jury of his peers, a jury of people from Arkansas, a place where he came from,'” the Examiner reported. “McBride suggested that had Barnett been tried in Arkansas, the outcome may have been different.”
Barnett was accused, among other things, of carrying a high-voltage stun gun attached to a walking staff into the Capitol. He became notorious for a picture in which he posed with one of his feet propped on then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi‘s desk.
Testimony in the trial concluded Friday, and closing arguments were today.
During the trial, Barnett testified that he was pushed into the Capitol and decided to look for a restroom but ended up in Pelosi’s office by mistake.
Barnett also said he has some regrets and would apologize to Pelosi if he could, the Washington Post reported last week. He also contended the high-voltage stun-gun attachment to his walking staff wasn’t working during the riots even though he carried the weapon into the Capitol. Police never recovered it or Barnett’s cell phone.
The deadly riots at the Capitol were a failed attempt to prevent Congress from certifying the 2020 presidential election results in which Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump.
According to Fischer, Barnett also testified that his “long-held support for police was shaken by his belief that officers were attacking protesters.” Barnett repeatedly called riot police “stormtroopers,” Fischer noted.
Barnett testified that he took an envelope addressed to a congressman from Pelosi’s office because he got blood on it. To compensate, he has said he left a quarter.
Barnett also left a vulgar note for Pelosi and later got into a confrontation with police because he said he left his flag in Pelosi’s office and wanted to go back and get it.
Barnett is charged with eight offenses:
*Theft of government property.
*Entering and remaining in the Capitol with a deadly or dangerous weapon, a stun gun.
*Obstruction of an official government proceeding and aiding and abetting.
*Civil Disorder.
*Theft of government property.
*Disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds with a deadly or dangerous weapon.
*Entering and remaining in certain rooms in the Capitol building.
*Disorderly conduct in a Capitol Building.
*Parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building.
In another high-profile Jan. 6 case involving an Arkansan, Conway resident Peter Stager, 43, is scheduled to enter a change of plea Feb. 16 in Washington, D.C. Stager is accused of beating a police officer with a flagpole and has been jailed since shortly after the riots.
The post Gravette man convicted in Jan. 6 riots UPDATE appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Republican Sen. Gary Stubblefield of Branch cited the Old Testament as he made the case for his bill that would regulate drag shows as adult entertainment, banning them from public property and keeping them from happening close to schools, churches and parks.
That’s going to be a bummer for the fair in his home county, where a Womanless Beauty Contest is a crowd pleaser and reliable fundraiser. On public property and with children watching, the pageant looks to be in violation of Stubblefield’s SB43.
A fundraiser at the Franklin County Fair, home county of Gary Stubblefield, might be in the crosshairs of the senator’s drag show bill.
Stubblefield and other supporters of the bill insist shows have to be “prurient” to qualify. There’s no accounting for taste, but come-hither lip syncs and lap-sitting likely would count.
This is just one of likely a zillion examples of how overly broad morality police bills with all kinds of unintended consequences are a terrible idea.
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Out at the legislature, Sen. Ricky Hill (R-Cabot) and Rep. Jeff Wardlaw (R-Hermitage) have introduced another cookie-cutter anti-boycott bill, this time to deny state business to any company that is boycotting or refusing to invest in energy, fossil fuels, firearms or ammunition industries.
Once again, into the breach, comes the Arkansas Times.
Today, we are implementing a new corporate policy to continue our old corporate policy of not investing in the Peabody Coal company, Chevron, Glock or Ammo Inc. Instead, we have decided, in direct contravention of this new law, to put our money in the bank.
The Times was founded almost 49 years ago on a $200 investment from bookstore owner Jim Bell. Over the decades the Times has been able to put thousands of dollars, maybe even tens of thousands of dollars, into the bank.
Our conservative fiscal policy seems to have nearly crippled the fossil fuels and firearms industries, denying them the capital and resources to grow and prosper. Witness their pleas for protection before a malleable Arkansas legislature.
My night job is working as a tomato farmer in North Pulaski County. I say night job because it’s too damn hot to farm in the day. Try pounding in 800 tomato stakes in 100 degree weather in 100% humidity. Arkansas just came out of its hottest summer in its hottest decade in history. Yet our legislators see fit to punish companies who prefer not to promote with their investments more greenhouse gasses.
In Little Rock we killed more of our fellow citizens than at any time last year. Yet the legislature sees fit to punish any company that declines to add further financial fuel propelling gun manufacturers.
Who are these guys working for?
I seem to remember that the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision declared that money was speech, therefore government could not limit political contributions. Yet the Arkansas legislature purports to instruct us where to invest our money. If speech is money and this law tells me where to put it, it’s running pretty close to a First Amendment ditch.
The Times continues to fight an earlier anti-boycott bill from 2018 when the legislature passed a law to deny state advertising or other business to anyone who refused to sign a pledge not to boycott Israel. We aren’t especially interested in boycotting Israel, but we don’t sign pledges from state authorities requiring us to take political positions in return for their advertising.
This new anti-boycott law is the spawn of the first, a template promoted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a right-wing bill factory funded by conservative oligarchs and big business. It promotes its agenda to conservative state legislatures at all-expenses-paid, closed-door conflabs at exclusive resorts. This latest anti-fossil fuels boycott legislation was presented at ALEC’s December 2021 junket at a San Diego resort. At it, ALEC “declared war” on “critical energy theory.” Catchy, huh? Our lawmakers jumped on it like spawning crappie and here we are.
Editor Lindsey Millar asked me if we were going to sue the state to overturn this latest culture war sortie. I told him no, we were stepping back and turning things over to Randy Zook and the Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce. This is clearly an egregious intrusion by big government into the financial affairs of private business. Big business won’t let this stand. Zook and the State Chamber are without a doubt the most effective lobbying outfit in the state. A lifetime ago I worked with Zook to help shut down a bunch of anti-immigrant bills making their way through the Republican legislature. It didn’t look good until Zook made a couple of well-placed phone calls and the white-nativist caucus collapsed like a folding chair.
So I’m not worried. It’s only a matter of time before the evildoers are routed. I await good news from the Chamber.
The post The Arkansas Times, in defiance of the legislature, pledges to continue not investing in oil or gun companies appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The education policy experts at For AR People drill down on the differences between what Governor Sanders says and what’s really happening.
Any good news to report?
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Did everyone re-watch “Mad Men” in 2022? Rock Town Distillery announced today that it sold 7,217 old fashioneds in 2022 and that Facebook user Lei Pinter won a $25 dollar gift card for the closest guess to that number without going over in a recent contest. Pinter’s solid guess of 7,137 was only off by 80 old fashioneds. The plural form of old fashioned is making me wish I had an old fashioned.
The Pantry had a similar contest, announcing yesterday that it sold 1,984 espresso martinis in 2022. General Manager Joe Holland told us that despite the recent explosion in espresso martini orders, the number one seller at both Pantry locations last year was the old fashioned. Was the old fashioned the hottest Little Rock cocktail of 2022? It sure seems that way. Little Rock bartenders, please weigh in.
The old fashioned is a whiskey-based cocktail made with either rye or bourbon, bitters, sugar and water. It’s garnished with an orange slice and cherries. Some, maybe most bartenders muddle the fruit. Rock Town must have a good one, and I plan on partaking soon. It looks like they use the giant square ice cubes that dissolve slowly so you can drink the cocktail at your own pace without fear of it getting watered down. Rock Town is also beginning its weekly featured cocktail series on January 24, featuring its top three bestselling $6 cocktails from 2022.
Our weekly Featured Cocktail series sure has become popular over the last 4 years! In 2022 we sold over 10,000 unique and tasty $6 signature cocktails y’all. Let us know in the comments what your top three $6 cocktails were last year!Here’s your chance to try some of our best sellers again:
We will be featuring the top 3 best selling Weekly $6 Cocktails from 2022 starting the week of January 24th. Each week we’ll feature one drink for $6 starting with third place and progressing to first!
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Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson hasn’t officially declared himself a candidate for president, but he’s not coy about letting us know he’s considering it. He’s made multiple trips to Iowa, the first state to hold a nominating contest for the 2024 election. He’s been all over the Sunday morning political talk shows. These are the actions of a man seriously exploring a run for the White House.
Now most of you are probably saying, “Asa has no chance!” This is an understandable position. After all, Hutchinson is about as exciting as dry iceberg lettuce and has all the charisma of a wet rag. But this may actually be his selling point. Recently on This Week, the ABC News Sunday morning talk show, Hutchinson began to position himself as the candidate to end the three-ring Republican circus and bring back traditional, Bush-style conservative politics instead of Trumpist chaos.
When asked if Donald Trump is the frontrunner, Hutchinson said, “Well I – I think you have to start him out as the frontrunner simply because he’s polling that well. He’s the former president. But as I have said all through 2022, he does not define the Republican Party. And, to me, that’s the key thing for the future.” He later added, “I do think people are ready … for a healing time in both politics but also in … our leadership that can work to solve the serious problems that face us from the border to inflation to the economy … I want to be a part of the solutions for America.”
Hutchinson has begun to contrast himself with Trump, positioning himself to not only provide a different message from Trump, but also from the other Republican culture warriors, such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who will also likely vie for the Republican nomination. But is this a message that will fly in the Republican Party of 2023? Can Hutchinson actually compete for the nomination running as a pre-2016 Republican?
Unfortunately, this question can’t be answered by simply looking at how Hutchinson is polling at this point. What we can do, though, is get an idea of whether there is a path to the nomination for a candidate in his mold. To do this, we can start by looking at the public polling of the head-to-head match-up between Trump and the other presumed frontrunner and far-right-wing firebrand, DeSantis.
What the polls tell usFigure 1 displays the 23 public polls including only DeSantis and Trump since the November 2022 midterm election ended. On the bottom (x-axis) is support for Trump, on the left side (y-axis) is support for DeSantis. The polls marked with a “D” are those that favor DeSantis, while those marked with a “T” are those that favor Trump. If the polling shows a tie, this is marked with an “X”. The black diagonal line represents equal amounts of support for DeSantis and Trump. Anything above that is a poll in which DeSantis is expected to win, and anything below the black diagonal line is a poll in which Trump is leading.
As you can see, when going against one another, DeSantis is polling well. He leads in 15 of the 23 polls in which he goes head-to-head with Trump among likely Republican primary voters nationally, whereas Trump leads in 5. But is that because DeSantis is particularly popular among Republican primary voters, or do voters just not want Trump?
To answer this question, we can look at public polling that took into account other candidates beyond just Trump and DeSantis. In Figure 2, I overlay the polling for Trump and DeSantis when other candidates are included on the polling results when only Trump and DeSantis are included. The results from the head-to-head polls are represented as light-red diamonds, while the results of polls including other candidates are represented as dark red triangles. The black diagonal line again represents equal amounts of support for DeSantis and Trump. Anything above that is a poll in which DeSantis is leading, and anything below the black diagonal line is a poll in which Trump is leading.
The overwhelming majority of the triangles are below the black diagonal line, which means that there is a large drop in DeSantis’ support when other candidates are included. In fact, this drop is about 14 percentage points on average. That’s not the story with Trump. There is almost no change in Trump’s support (less than 1 percentage point on average). This indicates that the big numbers DeSantis is putting up against Trump head-to-head are at least partly a function of Republican voters wanting anyone other than Trump. Yes, DeSantis still holds on to a sizable number of voters, indicating the appeal of his culture war narrative has some pull. But it also suggests there is a large chunk of voters who don’t want Trump and don’t want the culture wars.
That 15% chunk of the vote isn’t a large enough swath of voters, given that Trump is still polling in the low-40s. But remember, primary elections are neither national nor static. They are fought in individual states, and they shift over time, and not in a random way.
Presidential primaries are differentThe primary campaign is an example of a sequential election in which different groups of people vote to fill the same position at different times. Sequential elections have a tendency to be what political scientists call “path dependent.” This means that what happens at one point in time is largely deterministic of what happens at the next point in time. If a candidate wins a primary in a particular state, they are more likely to win a primary in the next state.
Take, for example, the first two nominating elections, Iowa and New Hampshire. They are important for those seeking the nomination not because there are a large number of convention delegates up for grabs. Rather, they are important for establishing oneself as a real, viable option. You don’t necessarily need to win Iowa or New Hampshire, you simply need to have a strong showing, which leads to increased donations. Those donations are necessary to continue running a campaign. Doing well in a primary or caucus makes it more likely that a candidate can compete in the next primary or caucus.
Also consider that, voters have a tendency to jump on the bandwagon of a candidate who appears to be a contender. A strong showing in Iowa and New Hampshire could catapult Hutchinson ahead, making him a leading anti-circus candidate.
We don’t yet have much clear public polling from Iowa or New Hampshire since the midterm, which makes it hard to know exactly where Hutchinson, or even a candidate like Hutchinson stands. But we can look to the 2022 Iowa and New Hampshire primaries to get an idea of how popular different styles of candidates are.
A ground-level look at Iowa and New HampshireIn Iowa, United States Senator Chuck Grassley (R) was primaried by state senator Jim Carlin. Grassley has had the backing of Trump but has steered clear of Trump’s wild and incorrect claims about the 2020 election being “rigged.” Carlin, on the other hand, leaned into the culture wars,and clearly stated he believes the 2020 election was stolen. In essence, Carlin ran as Ron DeSantis: A candidate who promotes all the Trump rhetoric and positions but doesn’t carry the personal and legal baggage Trump does. Carlin garnered 26.5% of the vote. This relatively low number could be a function of Grassley’s incumbent status, or even Trump’s endorsement of Grassley, so, I don’t want to read too much into this. But Carlin’s poor showing may suggest there’s just not a huge appetite for extremist positions in Iowa.
New Hampshire had no incumbent Republican Senate candidate in 2022. The primary pitted multiple candidates similar to Hutchinson – Chuck Morse, Kevin H. Smith, and Vikram Mansharamani – against a Trump-style culture warrior, Don Bolduc. Bolduc won, but he didn’t even win a majority of the vote. Morse, Smith and Mansharamani split about 55% of the vote, with Bolduc receiving 37%.
These numbers suggest that voters are split into two camps based on their attitudes towards Trumpist politics. On one side of the spectrum is a large group of people who reject the Trumpist rhetoric and on the other side is a smaller group of people who embrace it. For ease of understanding, I have visualized this in Figure 3. There are a large number of votes to pick up if a candidate like Hutchinson (dark red line) positions himself at the hump closer to the left side. In fact, there are more votes to be had at this position than there are for a candidate like Trump (dark blue line) who positions himself at the hump closer to the right side. This head-to-head would probably result in a candidate like Hutchinson winning New Hampshire, as long as another candidate similar to Hutchinson wasn’t also in the race and splitting the voters closer to the left side.
If the field, however, also included DeSantis (light blue line in Figure 4), you would have two candidates positioned near the mode closer to the right. DeSantis and Trump would split the vote among those who believe the system is more rigged. This would open an opportunity for a candidate like Hutchinson to actually win New Hampshire, albeit with a small plurality of the vote, even if another similar candidate (light red line in Figure 4) was in the election. Of course, it would also be possible for the candidate similar to Hutchinson to win in this scenario. The likely outcome would depend on who is seen by the public as the “issue owner,” which is a concept in political science that is well beyond the scope of this analysis.
Given that it is almost a certainty that both Trump and DeSantis are in the race when the New Hampshire primary rolls around, New Hampshire might just provide Hutchinson a big boost early in the primary season as long as there aren’t three candidates crowding around the larger hump closer to the left.
All this to say, there’s a path to victory for Asa. It is a narrow path that could get crowded quickly. But if things break right, it is a definite path.
The post Does Asa have a chance at the presidency? A data geek charts it out appeared first on Arkansas Times.
We’ve been waiting for a return call from the Benton County sheriff’s office for details, but others, including KFSM, have confirmed the arrest Friday of former Governor Hutchinson’s son Williams Asa Hutchinson III.
KFSM reported he was stopped on 46th Street in Rogers on suspicion of DWI.
The charge of possession of drugs and firearms is a Class Y felony, punishable by a minimum 10-year sentence.
He’s been arrested for DWI before. A drug charge in Alabama led to a probationary sentence that also led to the probationary suspension of his Arkansas and Missouri law licenses.
Hutchinson, who is being held without bond, is the first cousin of former Republican Sen. Jeremy Hutchinson, son of former U.S. Sen. Tim Hutchinson, who’s jailed in Pulaski County awaiting a hearing Tuesday on a plea to be released because he can’t pay a half-million in child support owed his ex-wife. He also faces federal sentencing Feb. 3 on bribery and tax fraud charges.
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The days of homemade masks and business closures are mostly behind us these days, but COVID-19 is still spreading throughout Arkansas, the United States and the world. The Arkansas Department of Health reported nearly 6,000 infections and more than 350 hospitalizations on Jan. 12.
Arkansas Children’s Hospital in Little Rock reported four patients with COVID-19 on Jan. 12. The Central Arkansas area reported the highest count of hospitalizations in the state with 96, according to ADH data. Statewide, 49 patients were in the ICU and 20 were on ventilators.
The ADH also reported 674 active pediatric positive cases in Arkansas — that’s about 11% of all cases reported on Jan. 12.
At-home tests and unreported cases have long skewed the state’s data reporting. An accurate number of positive cases is not currently reported, and health officials have referenced the reported numbers as the “tip of the iceberg” for months.
Arkansas maskers were slim even in the worst of the pandemic, and now it’s rare to see a handful of people wearing masks at the grocery store and large gatherings. COVID-19, while not being spread at life-halting speeds like it once was, still has an effect on thousands of Arkansans.
Since the start of the pandemic, 12,743 Arkansans have died from COVID-19. According to a study from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, one in four adults in the country experienced a loss of a loved one during the pandemic.
“People who have suffered loss during the pandemic may still be suffering,” said UAMS Assistant Professor Don E. Willis. “The impact of the pandemic does not end at the point of death, but ripples out across social networks. Even if the last COVID-19 death were to occur tomorrow, the staggering loss of life from the pandemic will likely be impacting the lives and health of the bereaved for many years to come.”
Despite the data and evidence, Gov. Sarah Sanders signed an executive order Friday declaring to “move beyond COVID.”
Today I was proud to sign an executive order terminating five existing orders on COVID.
In Arkansas, we will not have mask or vaccine mandates. We will not shut down churches or schools. And we will move beyond COVID.
I stand for freedom and it’s time to get back to normal.
— Sarah Huckabee Sanders (@SarahHuckabee) January 13, 2023
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Give the people what they want, right? Daily open line at 4 p.m. it is.
The post The people have spoken! Time for the 4 p.m. open line appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Arkansas is officially moving on from this whole COVID-19 thing, per an executive order Governor Sarah Sanders signed Friday.
The order repeals five executive orders from former Gov. Asa Hutchinson, issued to help usher the state through the pandemic.
Those now-repealed orders, already pretty much defunct, had created groups, committees, boards and task forces to guide the state’s pandemic response. State government hasn’t really been doing much about COVID-19 lately, anyway. Mask requirements and social distancing restrictions are long gone even if the virus is not.
Sanders press officeGovernor Sarah Sanders signs her ninth executive order during her first week in office.“It is time for Arkansas—and America—to get back to normal,” the executive order says. You can read the entire thing here.
And here’s Sanders’ statement about the order, which is the ninth one signed during her first 3 1/2 days in office.
“Today, I signed an Executive Order that terminates five existing Executive Orders on COVID-19 that are obsolete. I also directed our government to prioritize and promote other pressing public health challenges. Unfortunately, government has prioritized COVID-19 disproportionally and allowed other health concerns like addiction, cancer screenings, diabetes, and mental health to worsen. As Governor, I will always put the health, safety, and well-being of Arkansans first. President Biden declared the ‘pandemic is over’ during an appearance on ‘60 minutes’ last year. I promised that when I was elected governor, Arkansas would not have mask mandates or vaccine mandates and we would not shut down churches and schools because we believe in personal freedom and responsibility. The first case of COVID-19 was identified more than three years ago, and it is time for Arkansas – and America – to get back to normal.”
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Brother Moses, a Brooklyn by way of Fayetteville indie rock band, has released “Apocalypse Football,” a new six-song EP. The group, formed while its members were students at the University of Arkansas, put out their last album, “Desperation Pop,” in 2020.
The opening track on the EP, “Not Right,” which happens to be my favorite, muses resentfully about a touch-and-go lover who can’t commit but refuses to leave. In an epic yet sleepy voice with hints of Coldplay’s Chris Martin and TV On The Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe, singer James Lockhart says “you could be so good settled down, but you don’t love anyone.” Wavering synth, droning guitars and softly dancing drums that move between low and high fidelity keep him afloat.
Listen here:
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Lockdowns have become pretty standard for Little Rock Central High in recent years, as school administrators err on the side of caution when whiffs of crime blow through the neighborhood. Such was the case Friday, when a murder suspect was thought to be in the area.
In a delightful Facebook post, intrepid Door Dasher Kenneth Leon Grand III recounted his strategy of getting a Taco Bell order to a hungry customer even though the odds were against him. Danger! Subterfuge! A Mexican pizza obscured in the bushes! This story has it all.
Here’s Grand’s account of that midday mission impossible:
Just had the funniest doordash. Somebody had ordered a Baja blast and a Mexican pizza to be dropped off at Central High, but apparently the school was put on lockdown and so the client called me and was like bro don’t come out here the school is on lockdown and they’ll search anybody’s car who comes near the school. So instead, I parked the car farther down the street and counted the order as delivered as to show an on time delivery, then I freaking evaded police and security and head the Baja Blast and Mexican pizza in the bushes and wrote directions to it and left a picture. They were like, “bro don’t do it, them boys will get u” and I was like “You’re going to get this Baja Blast homie.”
Hats off to Kenneth Leon Grand III. Give this man a raise.
The post Door Dash hero breaches Central High lockdown perimeter to deliver Baja Blast appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The trial of a Gravette man charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, riots at the nation’s Capitol has adjourned until Tuesday.
Two witnesses testified for the prosecution today in the trial of Richard “Bigo” Barnett in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., according to online court records. One of them, Terrence Craig, a police officer in Washington, D.C., had begun testifying Thursday and returned to the stand today. FBI Special Agent Loel Skoch was the other witness.
Barnett, 62, became infamous after he posed for a picture with one of his feet propped on a desk in then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi‘s office.
Craig testified Thursday that he saw Barnett in the Capitol Rotunda on Jan. 6, the Arkansas Democrat Gazette’s Bill Bowden reported earlier today. “This is the rioter that was in my face making threats,” Craig testified when shown a video of Barnett beside him in the rotunda, the Democrat-Gazette reported.
Barnett is charged with eight offenses. Among them are entering the Capitol with a dangerous weapon, a stun gun; and obstruction of an official government proceeding: Congress’s meeting to certify the Electoral College vote count showing Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election.
The trial won’t resume until Tuesday because Monday is Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
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Blessings on Hunter Field, a writer with the nonprofit media outlet Arkansas Advocate, for his succinct summation of a minor rule change that could bring on major headaches for regular joes trying to follow along at the Capitol.
The agenda items listed for House committee meetings this session will not exactly match up with the agenda items to actually be heard that day. Frustrating!
Here’s an explainer from Field’s Friday Session Snapshot story (no paywall, so go read the whole thing):
A rule change adopted by the House likely will make it harder for citizens to participate in the committee process.
During the pandemic, the posted agenda for committee meetings included the list of bills that were expected to be considered during that meeting.
That was different from how House committees traditionally operated. Historically, all bills that had been assigned to the committee appeared on the agenda, whether they would be heard in that day’s meeting or not.
The rules adopted this week revert to the old way of doing the agendas.
Why does this matter? Well, it makes it more difficult for members of the public to know when a bill they might be interested in will be discussed and voted on in committee. If someone wants to attend a committee hearing on a bill, they may have to attend several meetings over several weeks before the bill is taken up by that committee.
Committees generally take up bills in the order they’re filed, but not always.
The post New state House rule will send would-be engaged citizens on wild goose chases appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Central High School Principal Nancy Rousseau relayed to families via email that the total lockdown was lifted around 11:40 a.m. The lockdown was put in place for about an hour while the Little Rock Police Department and federal authorities searched the area for a homicide suspect.
LRPD spokesperson Mark Edwards said that the lockdown was lifted as there is no longer a threat in the area. He said that an arrest was not made, and the investigation is still ongoing.
Rousseau told families that Dunbar Middle School and Stephens Elementary were also in lockdown during the search. She said that students missed the first lunch period, and the day’s schedule will be adjusted.
Authorities were looking for Tyler Bland, a 15-year-old suspected in a murder at 6200 Colonel Glenn Road on December 26, 2022.
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The Pantry
In late December The Pantry announced through its Facebook page that it was offering a $25 dollar gift card to the person who could come closest to guessing the number of combined espresso martinis sold at its West Little Rock and Hillcrest location in the year 2022 without going over the number. This is the kind of content we live for over here at Eat Arkansas.
Guesses in the comments ranged from 500 to 10,000. The winning guess was 1,817, precisely 167 martinis shy of the 1,984 sold.
In the last couple of years the rich, boozy, caffeinated cocktail has seen a resurgence and was perhaps the trendiest cocktail of 2021 and 2022. We did an espresso martini deep dive in December of 2021 and made espresso martinis at the office using recipes shared with us from Trey Fincher, the head bartender over Rogers’ Fox Trail Distillery.
Over the hammering sound of schnitzel being pounded out, The Pantry’s General Manager Joe Holland told me on phone call this morning that the cocktail really started to take off at The Pantry in February and March of 2022. Holland said the cocktail was the number two seller of 2022 at The Pantry Crest. The Old Fashioned was the number one seller at both locations.
The Pantry’s West Little Rock location sold 569 espresso martinis in 2022 and Pantry Crest sold 1,415.
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The Little Rock Police Department and federal authorities are currently searching for the suspect in a December homicide in the area surrounding Central High School, LRPD spokesperson Mark Edwards said.
The school is under total lockdown while officers search the area. Principal Nancy Rousseau ensured the safety of Central High students in an email sent to parents around 11 a.m.
On Dec. 26, 15-year-old Tyler Bland became the suspect of a homicide committed at 6200 Colonel Glenn Road. He is wanted for capital murder.
You can also submit tips by using the YOUR LRPD Smartphone app. pic.twitter.com/ZtBPfjAskM
— Little Rock Police (@LRpolice) December 29, 2022
No other details are available at this time.
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The Central Arkansas Water board of commissioners on Thursday voted unanimously to approve a 10-year rate increase. Rates will go up starting July 1, and will more than double the typical household water bill by 2032.
According to a rate forecast, users will be charged one penny per gallon in 2032, as opposed to half a penny in 2022. The vote Thursday also approved the move to a three-tier system, which added one additional breakdown for CFC (hundred cubic feet) usage. One CFC is 748 gallons, and the typical household will likely fall under the first tier distinction of zero to five CFCs.
Rocky Craley, a Central Arkansas rate consultant working with Raftelis, explained the rate comparisons Tuesday before the Little Rock Board of Directors. The typical household set on a five-eighths-inch diameter uses three CFCs monthly, which costs $15.80 — the same usage is forecasted to cost $32.51 in 2032. A fixed charge infrastructure fee will also be included in the scheduled increase and is forecasted to add $4.25 on the 2032 bill. This cost will cover capital needs projects, but will retire when the projects retire, Craley said.
“In my experience in the industry and running multiple national surveys, the penny is very reasonable in terms of water rates from other utilities,” he said.
Increases will be applied on Jan. 1 each year following the first increase on July 1, 2023.
On Tuesday, utility officers met with the board to outline the details and describe the need for the increase. Chief Executive Officer Tad Bohannon called the rate increase an “infrastructure investment” to continue to provide “high-quality, outstanding water” for those in Little Rock, North Little Rock and surrounding communities. Over the next 10 years, officials expect to cover $685 million in capital improvements.
Commissioner Joe McKenzie outlined some of those projects, including a rehabilitation to the Jack H. Wilson Water Treatment Plant and the construction of a new 60-inch raw water transition line from Lake Maumelle to the Jack H. Wilson Water Treatment Plant. Lake Maumelle would also get a remediation to kill hydrilla, a dense algae that floats on the lake. Finally, McKenzie said monies would go toward aging pipe replacement in the 2,700 mile distribution zone.
The “critical, but expensive” improvements are designed to last 50 years or more, McKenzie said.
To be stopped, the rate increase must be opposed by both city leaders in Little Rock and North Little Rock within 90 days, per a local agreement. In December, then-Vice Mayor Lance Hines alerted the Little Rock Board of Directors that Central Arkansas Water was attempting to do the 10-year rate increase without a presentation to the city. He drafted a resolution that called for a consultation before such an increase.
On Friday, Hines said that he thought it was “irresponsible to propose a rate increase this big” without prior discussion. He said that he is supportive of a rate increase, but that Central Arkansas Water was acting with no concern for the rate payers. He said he questions the length of time and amount of money forecasted for capital needs.
The Central Arkansas board of commission is made up of seven members — four from Little Rock and three from North Little Rock. Little Rock Director Virgil Miller was appointed Tuesday to be the city’s liaison to the commission.
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A suspect driving a stolen car is dead after the vehicle he was driving crashed off Interstate 40 and burst into flames following a state police chase Thursday night, the Arkansas State Police said in a release today.
The suspect was spotted by North Little Rock police driving a stolen Kia Sportage near 2700 MacArthur Drive around 8:22 p.m. The North Little Rock police pursued the suspect in the vehicle until he reached I-40 and the state police took over the pursuit. The suspect attempted to exit the interstate at the Morgan/Maumelle exit at mile 142 but lost control of the vehicle, which hit a tree and caught fire, the report said.
The suspect, whose name was not released, was pronounced dead on the scene by the coroner.
From the state police:
The Arkansas State Police is investigating the crash of a suspect who fled from Arkansas State Troopers and the North Little Rock Police Department yesterday evening (Thursday, January 12th). Around 8:22pm last night, officers with the North Little Rock Police Department attempted to make a traffic stop on a stolen silver Kia Sportage in the area of 2700 McArthur Drive.
As the suspect approached Interstate 40, Arkansas State Police Troopers were asked to assist North Little Rock PD and took control of the pursuit around the 146 mile marker (White Oak Crossing).
Upon approaching the 142 exit (Morgan/Maumelle) on Interstate 40, the suspect attempted to take the exit at a high rate of speed and lost control of the vehicle, at which time the vehicle crashed into a tree and caught on fire. The unidentified driver of the vehicle was pronounced dead on scene by the Pulaski County Coroner.
The body of the driver has been transported to the Arkansas State Crime Laboratory where identification, as well as a manner and cause of death will be determined.
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Governor Sarah Sanders is appointing Clint O’Neal to head the state’s Economic Development Commission.
O’Neal of Conway works there already. He’s been the deputy director of global business for AEDC since 2018.
The governor’s office sent the news of O’Neal’s appointment Thursday afternoon. Here’s some information from the release:
“The team at AEDC is full of talented economic development professionals who believe in the mission and work every day to make Arkansas a top business destination. I’m honored and excited to lead the organization that gave me the opportunity to start my career in economic development over 15 years ago,” O’Neal said. “It is a privilege to be entrusted to serve as Executive Director of AEDC at a time when Arkansas is gaining momentum and notoriety on the national and international stage. Arkansas has an outstanding business community and the tools companies need to succeed.”
Clint O’Neal has served as the Deputy Director of Global Business at AEDC since 2018. In his role as deputy director, O’Neal provides leadership to several divisions within the agency, including Business Development, Existing Business, Small Business and Entrepreneurship Development, Marketing, Minority and Women-Owned Business Enterprise, Film, and Military Affairs. As executive director, he will continue to oversee these divisions, alongside the other functions of the agency, such as community resources, finance, science and technology, and legislative affairs.
O’Neal has nearly two decades of experience in the field of economic development. He began his economic development career as a project manager at AEDC. He then served as Vice President of Business Recruitment for the Missouri Partnership, Missouri’s principal business recruitment and marketing organization, before rejoining AEDC as deputy director.
Clint is a Certified Economic Developer (CEcD) through the International Economic Development Council. He holds a master’s degree in community and economic development from the University of Central Arkansas.
O’Neal lives in Conway with his wife, Heather, and their four children, Chloe, Ellie, Ava and Caleb.
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What time do you good folks prefer to get these open lines started? Much debate in the office about this. Is 4 p.m. too early? Is 6 p.m. too late?
We won’t know unless you tell us. Please weigh in.
The post The spirit of Max Brantley (alive! just retired) compels us to post this open line appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Big political to-dos the Gillett Coon Supper and the Berry Pre-Coon Supper Reception are happening again this Saturday, Jan. 14, in Arkansas County. The latter benefits the Marion and Carolyn Berry Scholarship. Details below.
The 11th annual “Berry Pre-Coon Supper Reception” will be held on January 14th at the Berry Farm Shop in Gillett.
“The Coon Supper has been a long-standing tradition in Gillett for over 75 years,” said Mitch Berry. “We continue to be proud for the Berry Pre-Coon Supper Reception to be associated with such a legacy.”
“Over the past 10 years we have been able to raise a significant amount of money for scholarships for Arkansas State University and we value the opportunity to invest in this group of deserving students, our next generation of public servants,” said Berry.
The Marion and Carolyn Berry Scholarship is awarded to qualifying Arkansas State University students who show an interest in public policy and public service. The most recent scholarship recipients are Magon James, Abby Moore and Olivia Gibson. Magon interned in Congressman Rick Crawford’s Jonesboro in the fall of 2022. Abby and Olivia interned in Congressman Rick Crawford’s Jonesboro office during the spring of 2022. Rachel Davis also received a scholarship to intern in Senator John Boozman’s Jonesboro office in the spring of 2022.
The Gillett Coon Supper is hosted by the Gillett Farmers and Businessman’s Club and has long been a required stop on the Arkansas political circuit. Politicians are tested on their political acumen by their wiliness to eat the smoked raccoon.
The pre-supper reception starts at 3:30 p.m. on Saturday at the Berry farm shop. Tickets are $40 each. Sponsorships are available to be a Berry Good Partner for $5,000, a Berry Good Supporter for $2,500, a Berry Good Host for $1,000 and a Berry Good Friend for $500. The 79th Gillett Coon Supper will follow at the Gillett School Gymnasium at 6:30 p.m. Tickets to the Coon Supper may be purchased by contacting Larry Bauer at 870-830-4002.
The founding hosts of the event are Campbell Ward, JPJ Consulting, Mitch Berry, Woosley Gaming Advisors, and Wright Lindsey Jennings.
All tickets will be available for purchase at the door. For more information about becoming a sponsor, please contact Becky Barnes Campbell at 501-912-7560 or Gabe Holmstrom at 479-409-3329.
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Arkansas State Police confirmed this week that newly elected Lt. Gov. Leslie Rutledge has requested a security detail.
“By statute, if the lieutenant governor requests a security detail, we will provide it,” Arkansas State Police spokeswoman Cpl. Elizabeth Hoffman said.
The detail will likely be the plainclothes variety, with troopers in civilian suits instead of the full uniform. Usually the security detail doubles as a driver, too. Beyond that, though, details about what Rutledge’s security team will look like and how many people it will include haven’t yet been determined. That information will likely be available next week, Hoffman said.
While state-funded security for the lieutenant governor has always been available by statute, Hoffman said she couldn’t think of another lieutenant governor who took advantage of it. Rutledge and Attorney General Tim Griffin effectively swapped offices in the last election, but Griffin did not have state-provided security.
Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott Jr. continues to catch flack for being the first person in that office to use publicly funded law enforcement for personal protection.
We’ve reached out to Rutledge’s office with questions and will update when we hear back.
Capitol crews worked fast to get office doors updated as new officers were being sworn in.
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Caleb Osborne, who has been the chief of staff for the Department of Parks, Heritage, and Tourism, is the state’s new director of the Division of Environmental Quality and chief administrator of the Environment.
He replaces Becky Keogh, sister to state Supreme Court Justice Barbara Webb, who is married to former state GOP Chair Doyle Webb.
LITTLE ROCK, Ark.— Today, Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced that she will appoint Caleb Osborne to serve as Division of Environmental Quality (DEQ) Director and Chief Administrator of Environment.
“From the free-flowing waters of the Buffalo River to the rolling hills of the Ozark Mountains, Arkansas is proud to be the Natural State and enjoy clean air, land, and water,” Sanders said. “We must continue to responsibly protect these precious resources – which is why I am proud to be appointing Caleb Osborne to serve as DEQ Director and Chief Administrator of Environment. Together, with Secretary of Energy and Environment Shane Khoury, we will keep our state beautiful for generations of Arkansans to enjoy.”
“The Division of Environmental Quality plays a crucial role in maintaining the beautiful natural environment and precious resources that make Arkansas the Natural State,” Osborne said. “I am grateful to Governor Sanders for giving me the opportunity to join with Secretary Khoury and the talented team at E&E in the vital work of protecting and enhancing our environment in a manner that promotes a vibrant economy and provides an exceptional quality of life for all Arkansans.”
“Having known Caleb for several years, I am excited to work closely with him in his new role as the DEQ Director and Chief Administrator of Environment,” said Shane Khoury, Secretary of Energy and Environment. “With his tremendous experience and breadth of knowledge, I am confident that he will be an invaluable asset to the Department of Energy and Environment and play an integral role in protecting our environment for the well-being of all Arkansans while promoting economic and resource development.”
Caleb Osborne biography:
Prior to returning to the Division of Environmental Quality, Caleb J. Osborne served as the Chief of Staff for the Department of Parks, Heritage, and Tourism. Caleb previously served within DEQ as the Associate Director for the Office of Water Quality. He also has worked on energy and environmental policy and regulatory issues in the energy sector at both the federal and state level.
A native Arkansan, Caleb graduated from the University of Arkansas with a degree in political science. He also has a J.D. from The George Washington University in Washington D.C. and an MPA from the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. He and his wife Stephanie live in Little Rock and have three sons.
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The Arkansas Academic Challenge Scholarship, funded primarily through proceeds from the Arkansas Lottery, largely benefits white students from relatively wealthy families. Over the last five years of available data, from those awarded in the 2017-2018 school year to the 2021-2022 academic year, at least 74% of those receiving the scholarship each year have been white and with an average family income of $103,000 or greater. Arkansas’s median household income is $52,000.
Meanwhile, the number of Black students both applying for and receiving the scholarship has significantly declined in recent years, in both real numbers and as a percentage of scholarships awarded. From 2017-2018 to 2021-22, the number of applications from and awards to Black students declined 44%. During each year of that period, Black students have made up no more than 10% of scholarship recipients; in 2021-22 they represented only 8%. Black people make up 16% of Arkansas’s population. The average parent income of Black students who’ve been awarded the scholarship has hovered just above the state median income. In 2021-2022 it was $55,000.
The Arkansas Division of Higher Education compiled information about the Academic Challenge Scholarship at the request of the Arkansas Times. The data suggests a continuation of a trend Max Brantley noted back in 2016.
Our interest in the data was spurred by a change in law sponsored by Sen. Jimmy Hickey (R-Texarkana) and passed in 2015 that replaced the standard for a lottery scholarship of either an ACT score of 19 or a 2.5 grade point average with a 19 ACT score as the sole qualification. The scholarship was also reduced from $2,000 to $1,000 for first-year students, but increased from $3,000 to $4,000 for the second year. Students must maintain a 2.5 GPA in college and earn a certain number of credit hours each year to maintain the scholarship.
The idea was to attract more qualified students and reward those who succeeded in college in the first year, and to cope with lottery revenue not keeping up with scholarship demand. Critics worried that the change would harm poorer students, particularly minorities, and the lower first-year award would make it harder for students to afford college to start with, even if they qualified. Because household income is the strongest indicator for success on standardized tests, Black students have historically underperformed.
The Division of Higher Education data bear those concerns out. The division also provided information about students who received scholarship awards in 2017-2018 and 2018-2019. In both those classes, Black students were significantly less likely to retain their scholarships in their second, third and fourth years than white students.
Maria Markham, director of the Division of High Education, last year floated the idea of creating a sliding scale for the scholarship program that would allow lower-income students the opportunity to receive more money, the Arkansas Advocate reported. Perhaps a bill to that end will be forthcoming in this General Assembly.
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Arkansas Board of Education members signed off on Thursday on Governor Sarah Sanders‘ pick for education secretary, Jacob Oliva. The board formally approved Oliva as head of the Department of Education, overseeing all things state education, including higher education and career and technical education divisions, and as the leader of the department’s Division of Elementary and Secondary Education, too. So he’s the big boss of all things education, but also the more hands-on leader of Arkansas’s K-12 schools.
The Thursday vote to expand Oliva’s role was unanimous.
A press release from the Arkansas Department of Education about the vote included this background on Oliva’s career thus far:
Prior to being named commissioner and secretary, Oliva served in numerous roles at the Florida Department of Education, most recently as interim commissioner. He joined the Florida department as executive vice-chancellor of the Public Schools Division in 2017 and became chancellor in 2019, where his division supported more than 2.8 million students in approximately 3,600 Florida public schools.In 2021, he was promoted to senior chancellor, and his responsibilities expanded to include early learning, school choice programs, school safety, and school accountability. Additionally, he encouraged statewide leadership and communication between the Florida Department of Education and the state’s school districts.Oliva is a graduate of Miami-Dade County Public Schools and Flagler College in Florida. He began his educational career more than two decades ago as an elementary teacher for students with special needs. He later served as a principal at both the elementary and high school levels and as an assistant superintendent and superintendent of Flagler County Schools.
Brian ChilsonArkansas Education Secretary Jacob OlivaSanders campaigned on expanding “school choice,” and Oliva comes to Arkansas from a state that’s actively pursued charter school expansion and tax credits for students who opt for private or homeschools over traditional public schools.
Sanders also waved a false flag about critical race theory and left-wing indoctrination in schools. Oliva has something to offer her there, too. As Florida’s education chancellor until he took the Arkansas post, Oliva helped schools come into compliance with the state’s so-called “don’t say gay” law by doing things like removing the term “institutional racism” from policy books and updating racial equity statements.
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The University of Arkansas at Little Rock has unveiled a newly renovated lab that will provide construction management and civil engineering students with an edge for their future careers in Arkansas’s growing construction industry.
With generous support from industry partner Nabholz, the new Nabholz Construction High Bay Lab in the Engineering, Technology, and Applied Science Building has been redesigned to provide an upgraded workspace for classes, student projects and demonstrations for students, faculty and industry members. In addition, Nabholz has provided a $30,000 donation to maintain and provide supplies for the lab for the next five years.
“UA Little Rock and Nabholz have had a long relationship that Nabholz values greatly,” said Greg Williams, chairman of the board at Nabholz. “In particular, Nabholz has had a wonderful relationship with the construction management and civil engineering programs. Nabholz was pleased to be the sponsor for the High Bay Lab as it complements not only the knowledge needed for traditional construction but also some of the special skills needed by our industrial services team.”
The Nabholz Lab is the latest example of UA Little Rock’s commitment to providing upgraded learning environments around campus to promote student success. UA Little Rock launched the public phase of the Centennial Campaign this fall with the goal of raising $250 million by 2027, the university’s 100-year anniversary.
Photo by BENJAMIN KRAIN —11/18/22—
UA Little Rock unveils a newly renovated lab during a dedication ceremony. The space will provide construction management and civil engineering students with practical application training and safety in scaffolding, steel erection, and concrete framework.
An upgraded learning environment, which is one of the Centennial Campaign’s four major fundraising pillars, provides well-equipped, comfortable learning environments that are imperative to the educational process.
Such classrooms and labs foster environments of inspiration, interaction and innovation. Elements of this campaign will support the learning environment in and out of the classroom, giving students state-of-the-art spaces on campus to learn, plan, connect with peers and forge long-term relationships.
The Nabholz Lab is part of a continuing partnership with construction industry partners in Central Arkansas to provide a great education, learning environment and career preparation at UA Little Rock. The Clark Project Management Lab opened last fall to provide a place for students to learn about estimating, construction scheduling, project administration and other important construction management topics. The lab was renovated by Clark Contractors and numerous industry partners.
Students in the Department of Construction Management and Civil and Construction Engineering are highly sought after by industry employers and have a 100% employment rate upon graduation.
You can learn more about UA Little Rock’s efforts to provide great learning environments that encourage student success at the Centennial Campaign website.
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On February 24, Paragould-born singer-songwriter Iris DeMent will release her first album in over 7 years, entitled “Workin’ On A World,” her seventh full-length record. So far, 62-year-old DeMent has put out two songs from the release. The title track is a hopeful and honest singalong about fighting for justice even if you won’t live to see the fully ripened fruits of your labor.
The other sneak preview is “Goin’ Down to Sing in Texas,” a bouncy 8-minute piano-based tune released a couple years ago that takes confident shots at police brutality, gun violence, unchecked wealth, war criminals, Islamophobia and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Even her home state gets its own quip of critique in the final minute of the song: “I’m going down to sing in Arkansas where anybody can carry a gun.”
Here’s the tracklist:
01 “Workin’ On A World”
02 “Goin’ Down To Sing In Texas”
03 “Say A Good Word”
04 “The Sacred Now”
05 “I Won’t Ask You Why”
06 “Warriors Of Love”
07 “Let Me Be Your Jesus”
08 “The Cherry Orchard”
09 “Nothin’ For The Dead”
10 “Mahalia”
11 “How Long”
12 “Walkin’ Daddy”
13 “Waycross, Georgia”
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This article first appeared in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas.
Sharpe Dunaway may be the most famous traveling salesman in Arkansas history, a distinction only partly due to his sidelines: politics, writing and state promotion. For nearly 50 years, Dunaway was a sales agent for newspapers, mainly the Arkansas Gazette, which earned him the sobriquet “Mr. Gazette.” He was a friend and supporter of many Arkansas politicians, notably Gov. and U.S. Sen. Jeff Davis and U.S. Sen. Hattie Caraway. Dunaway wrote two books, one about the life and speeches of Jeff Davis, and the other a collection of observations about Arkansas and its people titled, “What a Preacher Saw Through a Key-Hole” in Arkansas. The short book, published in 1925, would become an important contribution to Arkansas history for a chapter titled, “The Blackest Page in State History,” which argued that the so-called race riot at Elaine (Phillips County) in 1919 had actually been a massacre.
Louis Sharpe Dunaway was born on Jan. 10, 1870, at Beryl (Faulkner County) into a family steeped in history. His grandfather, Isaiah Dunaway, moved from North Carolina to Old Austin (Lonoke County) in 1819, the year that Arkansas became a territory. His father, John Dunaway, joined the Confederate army, was wounded in the Battle of Murfreesboro, spent part of the war in a hospital, and afterward married a Tennessee woman, Emma Blackwood. They moved to Faulkner County, where he became a planter and community leader. He was a delegate to the 1874 constitutional convention.
Sharpe Dunaway was the third of his parents’ eight children. He attended Conway High School and Hendrix College in Conway (Faulkner County) but dropped out in his third year to travel. At Mineral Wells, Texas, he was a reporter for a small newspaper and then spent a period reporting for newspapers in Dallas and Fort Worth. He moved back to Conway, buying local newspaper the People’s Advocate and changing its name to the Faulkner County Times. In 1899, Dunaway married Lela Witt, whom he had met at Hendrix. They would rear three children. He shortly went to work for the Arkansas Gazette, not as a writer or editor, but as a circulation manager, soliciting subscriptions. For a short spell, he did the same for the paper’s afternoon competitor, the Arkansas Democrat, but then rejoined the Gazette for the rest of his career.
As Dunaway traveled the state as the Gazette’s agent, his salesmanship became legendary. He was heavily responsible for the newspaper building a statewide readership. Fred W. Allsopp, whose career as a business manager and writer for the Gazette was equally legendary, described a few of Dunaway’s spiels about the necessity of a good citizen’s reading the great newspaper and his promise to barter a Gazette subscription for almost anything. Among the items he collected, according to his obituary, were “nine steeltraps, three raccoon hides, a large beef hide, two cords of cook wood (three miles from the railroad), and two hives of bees.” He traded Gazette subscriptions for a small alligator, a bear cub and a wolf cub. The wild animals were traded for either three-month or six-month subscriptions with the proviso that the animals would be delivered to his home in Conway by parcel post with the full postage paid.
Courtesy of the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, Central Arkansas Library SystemSharpe DunawayDunaway knew Jeff Davis when both were youngsters, and they remained friends until Davis’ death in 1913. Dunaway would attend Davis’ campaign speeches (he claimed to have heard 850 of them) and sell Gazette subscriptions in the crowd, although Davis sometimes attacked him from the podium. Dunaway said he had sold a number of subscriptions at one of Davis’ rallies, but when Davis yelled that he would rather be caught with a dead polecat in his pocket than with a Gazette in his possession, several men found Dunaway to get their money back. All his life, however, Dunaway insisted that Davis was one of the state’s greatest governors and senators. His book on Davis’ life and speeches, published soon after Davis’ death, collected a number of Davis’ most colorful diatribes and his taunts of opponents, critics and newspaper editors, particularly Dunaway’s employer.
During his travels for the Gazette, Dunaway met a young soap-and-pencil salesman named Huey P. Long at the Gleason European Hotel in Conway. When Dunaway’s friend Hattie Caraway was running for reelection in 1932 and seemed headed for defeat, he telephoned Long, by then a populist U.S. senator from Louisiana, and suggested that he come to Arkansas and campaign for her. Dunaway claimed that he organized the weeklong speaking tour of the state, which brought out huge crowds and helped Caraway easily defeat four prominent men in the Democratic primary, although she fell short of a majority, which was not required then.
Although Dunaway frequently passed news tips to the Gazette newsroom from his travels around the state, he rarely, if ever, reported or wrote for the paper. He was a promoter and very rarely a critic of anyone. That was what made his 1925 book, “What a Preacher Saw Through a Key-Hole in Arkansas,” unusual. As he explained in the book, it was intended to be an antidote to the bestselling joke book in American history, “On a Slow Train Through Arkansaw,” written by Thomas W. Jackson, a brakeman for the Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company, and his wife. Dunaway called Jackson “that ill advised and uninformed gentleman” and referred to his jokes as “slanderous.” Jackson’s book was a collection of minstrel jokes and racial and sexual puns that relied on familiar stereotypes about Arkansas “darkies” and women. It would sell 7 million copies by 1950.
“What a Preacher Saw” painted a different picture of the state. It profiled communities, tourist sites and people all over Arkansas, including local and state leaders and politicians. All were characterized as marvelous. Then came the chapter about the slaughter of Black people in Phillips County in October 1919. Outside a union organizing meeting at a rural Black church near Elaine, shots were fired, killing one of the white men sent by the county sheriff to break up the meeting and wounding the other. Although Dunaway’s account at first followed the usual theme of Arkansas newspapers that the white leaders, including Gov. Charles Hillman Brough, were honorably motivated to stop “meddlers” from inciting ignorant Black locals to riot and kill white plantation owners, he concluded — after considerable investigation, he wrote — that what actually happened was far different. He said that local white leaders, including armed vigilantes from surrounding counties deputized by the sheriff, had acted honorably and legally, but that the soldiers sent from Camp Pike ostensibly to preserve the peace, including veterans of World War I, had not acted with honor — rather, they got drunk and committed violent acts.
While he only implied, occasionally, the sources of his information, Dunaway pinpointed what he believed was the exact number of Black men, women and children slain in the fields and canebrakes, along the roads, or in their shanties: 856. Nearly all of them, he said, were innocent of planning to harm anybody. Nearly a century later, historical research has verified Dunaway’s outline of events, although not such specific details as the number of murders. Dunaway identified no sources by name but reported that a teacher from Miller County had witnessed the murder of 28 Black people in one bunch. They were shot, dumped into a pit and set on fire. The same person seemed to have witnessed the hanging of 16 Black people on a bridge 4 miles from Helena (Phillips County).
Dunaway said it was “chivalrous” of whites to want to avenge the death and injury of the two white men who had been sent to the union meeting and of the three or four other white locals and soldiers who died from gunshots in the hunt for Black rioters. It was unforgiveable, however, that “Federal soldiers, aided and abetted by a collection of low-lived creatures who call themselves WHITE MEN, march down among the ramshackle homes of good old innocent, hard-working Darkeys, and then and there unlimber their guns on those poor old servants of the rebellion, finally snuffing out their lives before passing on to the next house, where the same cruel scene was enacted.”
His account did not appear in his own newspaper, the Gazette, whose editorials — and whose coverage of the massacre and trials — adopted the account of the local whites in power. Without identifying certain “news hounds,” Dunaway’s chapter disparaged Arkansas reporters who gave the standard account of Black rioters intent on killing white plantation owners and of professional soldiers and lawmen restoring order. But Dunaway’s story would embolden historians like Grif Stockley 70 years later to search for the evidence. Historians have concluded that hundreds probably died, but no one has a more reliable figure.
Dunaway’s book claimed that Gov. Thomas McRae, who pardoned the last six Black men unfairly sentenced to die for the “rebellion,” had told him that he was the only person who ever gave a full and correct account of the massacre.
Dunaway died on September 3, 1959. He is buried in Oak Grove Cemetery in Conway.
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A man has been arrested in the fatal shooting of 27-year-old Franklin Ramirez, who was killed on a job site on New Year’s Eve.
A husband and father of two, Ramirez died after being shot in rural Saline County. THV11 reported on the shooting earlier this month.
The Saline County Sheriff’s Office and the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission teamed up on the investigation, and they arrested William Bettis for the crime on Tuesday. Details released so far indicate the shooting may have been a hunting accident.
Here’s a press release from Capt. Joseph Shamlin of the Saline County Sheriff’s Office:
On December 31, 2022 deputies with the Saline County Sheriff’s Office responded to 8101 Narrows Road reference a shooting. After an investigation with the assistance of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, a warrant for Manslaughter was sought and signed for William Bettis on January 10th. Bettis was taken into custody January 10th without incident and transported to Saline County Detention Center to await bond hearing. Bettis was also charged with Hunting endangerment prohibited, endangerment resulting in death, resident hunting license requirements and hunter education certificate requirement.All information regarding the case has been forwarded to the Saline County Prosecuting Attorney.
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The Arkansas Times is a mission driven magazine and online news source that is here to shine light on political skullduggery, celebrate our natural beauty and environment and spotlight the many culinary and cultural offerings this wonderful place has to offer. If you join our sales staff, you will be making a good living in addition to helping a magazine grow that is determined to make Arkansas a more just, prosperous and inclusive place to live.
This year marks our 48th year of publishing the Arkansas Times. In addition to the glossy magazine, ArkTimes.com is one of the largest online local news sites in the state with nearly a half million unique visitors a month. We have also recently added ArkansasCannibiz.com which is an online trade magazine for the state’s growing cannabis industry. We sell advertising into all of these various media as well as into special sections targeted to the restaurant, college, legal and medical fields.
If you are fearless, curious about the world, have high energy, like people, and love learning new things from a wide variety of clients, then the Times might be for you.
Sales experience is preferred, but the greatest value is a willingness to work hard, close sales, renew business, etc.
We offer a great work environment, a sales and editorial staff that is the best in the business and a well respected publishing company.
If this sounds like the type of place and the type of work you would like to do, email your resume to Phyllis Britton, Advertising Director at phyllis@arktimes.com.
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Visitors to the Little Rock Zoo should send their goodbye wishes to Zaara the sloth bear. Timeline unspecific, Zaara will leave near the end of January for a journey to California’s Fresno Chafee Zoo. There, she will be paired with a male sloth bear to birth cute little sloth bear babies.
Zaara is the youngest of the city’s four sloth bears, which are protected under a Species Survival Plan. The program has a breeding and transfer component that ensures the species’ population growth with biological factors — things like genetic diversity and demographic variance — considered.
Kind of goofy looking, sloth bears are missing their front teeth and use the gap to suck termites in for a hearty meal. Their long claws are also used to dig into termite mounds and fight off predators. Sloth bears are also myrmecophagous mammals, which means that Zaara will carry her cubs on her back for several months after they’re born.
Zaara was born at the Little Rock Zoo in 2019. A soon-to-be California girl, let’s hope she always remembers her Arkansas roots. Here are some adorable pictures of her as a baby that the zoo shared.
Zoo Director Susan Altrui said that nothing new has been planned in Zaara’s absence.
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Walter Kimbrough is interim executive director of the Black Men’s Research Institute at Morehouse College. He served as president of Philander Smith College from 2004-2012 and Dillard University in New Orleans from 2012-2022.
I spent over seven years in Arkansas as the president of Philander Smith College, so The Natural State is always on my radar. We have lots of friends in the state, and both of my children were born in Little Rock. I forgot that the new governor had been elected, and on the day of her inauguration I saw on social media that the Philander Smith choir performed.
I decided to see if I could find the video, as the choir has always been good and has performed at many major events in the state. Most of the videos I found did not have their performance, and picked up with the drumline from the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, the state’s public HBCU. I saw the opening prayer, the Ouachita Baptist choir and the swearing in. I scrolled ahead but still didn’t see the choir, so I went back about my day.
Later that afternoon, social media caught my eye again. This time there were headlines made by the new governor signing a series of executive orders. Arkansas is a great state, but it consistently ranks low on many key indicators, like health and education. This past October, a study by the FBI indicated that Arkansas has the fourth highest violent crime rate per 100,000 people.
Is that pressing need to tackle violent crime where Governor Sanders began her term? Of course not. Among the urgent priorities were critical race theory, and the variations of the word “Latinx.”
In what appears to be some gamesmanship to out-DeSantis DeSantis, the first major headlines generated by Sanders were to protect kids from a graduate-level theory they aren’t being taught, and in a state that is 8% Latino, ensure that “Latinx” isn’t used in state government. Remember, Sanders is following a two-term Republican governor who did not support a bill that banned the teaching of divisive concepts, saying “the bill does not address any problem that exists, and the paperwork and manpower requirements are unnecessary.”
Out of curiosity I went to the state government website and did a search for the word “Latinx.” One result: Latinx Outreach Coordinator. Someone is going to have a title change soon.
Brian ChilsonBlackness was on display at Sarah Sanders’ inauguration, but something felt off, former Philander Smith President Walter Kimbrough said. He called it “an optical illusion of inclusion.”Clearly, Sanders has embraced her role as Xena the Culture Warrior Princess, and these two executive orders in particular were a strong signal to her base, both in Arkansas and nationally (a move to get on the presidential candidate radar for some future date). But while her bans made all the news, I decided to look again at the inauguration video because I now saw it in a different light. As mentioned, the procession was led by the UAPB band, almost 30 Black students. The opening prayer was by Joseph Wood, a Black man who Sanders appointed as secretary of the Department of Transformation and Shared Services. A selection by four Ouachita Baptist students, three of them Black. About 15 choir members from historically Black Philander Smith participated. Swearing in by a Black judge, U.S. District Court Judge Brian Miller.
This intentionally crafted image of Blackness became the perfect shield for the culture warrior princess to almost immediately attack CRT, a concept of which most politicians repeatedly fail to show any understanding. They simply want to refuse to remember the past, what scholar Justin Klassen says equates “to a refusal to awaken from the present indifference concerning racial injustice in the United States.”
How can she be a racist? She had all of those Black people “performing” at her inauguration?
Don’t fall for this optical illusion of inclusion. Arkansans of good faith need to work together to not let Sanders and others wage these culture wars while ignoring the systemic barriers which keep Arkansas at the bottom of everything good, and at the top of everything bad. Calling almost everything CRT and banning it as a way to avoid difficult conversations about the impact of racism. Forbidding a term that very few people even use is simply about political games. And let’s not ignore the fact that only the system of white privilege makes it possible for the daughter of a former governor who has never held an elected office to be elected the nation’s youngest governor.
I’m sure the governor will quote Martin Luther King Jr. this week. I hope she reads his 1967 speech for the Hungry Club Forum in Atlanta. There, King said, “But we must not allow this progress to cause us to engage in a superficial, dangerous optimism. The plant of freedom has grown only a bud and not yet a flower. And there is no area of our country that can boast of clean hands in the area of brotherhood. Every city confronts a serious problem.”
Sanders’s first day was a nice trick. But I see it for what it was. I hope you do, too.
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The Little Rock Police Department released details Thursday morning about a homicide committed Wednesday around 9:15 p.m. at 1001 Breckenridge Drive, near the Breckenridge Square Apartments.
Officers initially responded to a burglary call, and they found an individual unresponsive in the parking lot at the location. The individual was pronounced dead at the scene. Police have not released details about the victim.
Officers arrested and charged Chelsea McKenzly with first-degree murder, abuse of a corpse and tampering with physical evidence. This is the fourth reported homicide of 2023.
Investigations are still ongoing.
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ARKANSAS TIMES FILM SERIES: ‘JOHNNY GUITAR’
TUESDAY 1/17. Riverdale 10 VIP Cinema. 7 p.m.
At first blush, Nicholas Ray’s “Johnny Guitar” (1954) seems like a traditional Western, rife with steeds, saloons and shootouts. Upon closer inspection, however, much about this film is askew. Take Johnny Guitar himself, played by Sterling Hayden, a visitor from out-of-town who doesn’t carry a gun and broaches conflict via philosophical monologue and a strum on the six-stringed instrument he got his name from. Then dwell on the real main character, Vienna, played by Joan Crawford, Johnny’s confident ex-lover who’s unafraid to threaten with a deadly weapon and is the owner of a soon-to-boom watering hole that’s the subject of much local resentment. Finally, pay attention to Emma (Mercedes McCambridge), the most frightening and fiery figure in the whole movie, and the one who leads the effort to ruin Vienna’s business. In another subversion of genre tropes, “Johnny Guitar”’s greatness stems mostly from its character psychology, explored through dialogue that New Yorker critic Richard Brody compared to “bruising and vulnerable lyric poetry” in his 2022 review of this “cinematic opera.” “How many men have you forgotten?” Johnny asks Vienna in an exposed moment. “As many women as you remember,” she replies, before they embrace after years apart.
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There wasn’t much time to use this as the excuse to not rake your yard as we noted yesterday. Get back to it.
LITTLE ROCK – Yard waste collection will resume today (Thursday, Jan. 12) after a temporary suspension on Wednesday because of a shortage of available trucks.
The missed Wednesday routes will be picked up first today, then crews will collect as much as possible on scheduled Thursday routes. Crews will continue to work through the remainder of the week to complete all routes and return to the regular schedule.
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On her second day in office, Governor Sarah Sanders signed her eighth executive order.
This one covers a number of education issues, calling for more charter schools, more school security guards, expanded (but not universal) access to early childhood education and lots of reviews of spending, curriculum and other things schools are doing already. Sprinkled among the whereases and therefores of the order are tsks for schools with low test scores and calls for more high-speed internet access.
A number of Republican state lawmakers showed up for Wednesday’s executive order signing, a good hint they’ll support Sanders’ ideas with legislation.
The breadth of the order is daunting, capturing everything from American Rescue Plan spending to teacher licensure requirements to literacy strategies. But as journalist and historian Ernie Dumas noted, these executive orders are more suggestions than directives since the Arkansas governor’s authority to act unilaterally is limited. She’ll need buy-in from lawmakers on any substantive changes (and she’s likely to get it from the Republican supermajority). The document clarifies many of Sanders’ education priorities, but doesn’t offer any hints on her plans for expanding school voucher programs.
More notable than the substance of this executive order is the fact that it’s Sanders’ eighth one, delivered about 28 hours after she was sworn in.
As Arkansas legal scholar Connor Thompson notes, executive orders haven’t always been popular among the conservative set. During her tenure as the state attorney general, now-Lt. Gov. Leslie Rutledge signed on to lawsuits challenging Democrats’ executive orders at every opportunity.
The flurry of executive orders from Gov Sanders is interesting from the perspective of conservative ideology (assuming consistency & good faith). Obama and Biden admins were constantly taken to court for their executive orders on the theory that they were bypassing Congress.
— Connor Thompson (@cthompson_ca) January 11, 2023
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Governor Sarah Sanders’ Day One executive order banning the LGBTQ+-friendly term “Latinx” on official state documents was a surprise addition to the anti-woke agenda, Latinx scholars told NBC News.
A number of national media outlets jumped in on this story as an example of the culture war politics that keep the MAGA base revved up.
Sarah Sanders bans use of ‘Latinx’ in Arkansas state documents https://t.co/jrBFptEG1D
— Guardian news (@guardiannews) January 12, 2023
Ed Morales, the author of the book “Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture,” and Tabitha Bonilla, an associate professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University, noted that Sanders’ executive order describes the term “Latinx” as pejorative language universally derided by Hispanic Americans. That is not true, they told NBC’s Nicole Acevedo:
Morales said Sanders appears to have tried to use “the one Pew Hispanic report as evidence that people find it offensive or that they reject it” without considering that there have been subsequent studies that point to a small rise in the use of the term and the emergence of other gender neutral alternatives such as “Latine.”
When citing the Pew report in the executive order, Sanders did not say the study also found that 76% of Hispanics had not even heard of the term “Latinx” before, Bonilla pointed out.
Sanders has signed eight executive orders in her first two days in office. Among them is another culture war tinderbox, a ban on critical race theory and indoctrination in the classroom.
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We’ll get better at this. The line is yours.
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The day after freshly inaugurated Governor Sarah Sanders shared her plans, Arkansas Democratic lawmakers laid out plans of their own.
Democratic state lawmakers said they will prioritize teacher pay raises, better education funding, marijuana decriminalization, health care and criminal justice reform without the new jail beds conservatives seem so keen on.
Rep. Tippi McCullough of Little Rock and Sen. Greg Leding of Fayetteville said health and education should take take precedence over cutting income taxes down to zero, which Sanders has repeatedly pledged to do.
Sounds pretty good, but this small crew doesn’t have a lot of pull this session. Only six of the 35 state senators are Democrats. On the House side, we count 18 Democrats to 82 Republicans.
So Democrats make up about 18% of the legislature. That’s a mismatch considering roughly 35% of Arkansas voters chose Democrats in statewide races. Democrats’ underrepresentation stems partly from gerrymandering egregious enough that a federal appeals court is hearing the case right this minute.
Looks like an uphill climb for the Dems, but there’s always room for good ideas, Leding said.
“We’re clear-eyed about the political landscape, but we’re ready to work across the aisle with honest brokers to build a better Arkansas,” he said.
Here’s a press release from the Democratic Party of Arkansas:
LITTLE ROCK — On Wednesday morning, Senate Minority Leader Greg Leding (State Senate, District 30 – Fayetteville) and House Minority Leader Tippi McCullough (State House, District 74 – Little Rock) announced their policy goals for the 2023 legislative session.
“Arkansas made history with the inauguration of Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the first woman to hold that office. We welcome her calls for a 2023 legislative session that brings necessary focus to our state’s public schools, foster care, criminal justice system, healthcare, and tax rates,” said Senator Greg Leding. “We agree with her that answers to these issues require ‘bigger,’ ‘bolder,’ and ‘better’ ideas than what we have seen in the past. We’re committed to working with her and our Republican colleagues where we can. As Democrats, we’re united in our own bold vision for Arkansas: to create a healthier, safer, fairer, brighter future for all Arkansans.”
“We don’t yet know the details of Governor Sanders’s proposed education reforms. Yesterday, the Governor shared her core approach to improving our public education, and we agree: The road to a brighter future in Arkansas starts with raising our worst-in-the-South teacher pay and expanding access to Pre-K,” said Representative Tippi McCullough. “However, we cannot do these things if we keep pushing the same regressive, failed approach to cutting taxes. Phasing out the income tax isn’t a solution, and it will only keep us from achieving meaningful progress.”
Senate and House Democrats vowed to fight against unproven voucher programs, which Governor Sanders reaffirmed her support for in yesterday’s speech to a joint session of both Senate and House legislators. Democrats—and many Republicans—believe Arkansas can’t improve our public education if it pulls unregulated dollars from our school districts, which is exactly what these voucher programs will do.
Democrats in both chambers are ready to answer other calls for people-focused policies Governor Sanders implored legislators to pass yesterday. In the coming weeks of this 94th General Assembly, Democrats are ready to:
- Raise teacher salaries
- Fully-fund education opportunities
- Decriminalize marijuana and expunge non-violent possession charges to match newly-established federal guidelines
- Expand healthcare for women and all Arkansans
- Pass criminal justice reforms to keep Arkansans safe without committing the state to hundreds of millions in new spending
“During the next several weeks, we as Democrats will be united. We will put the needs of hardworking Arkansans first and not let issues crafted only to distract and divide us get in the way of our work,” said Senator Leding.
“Democrats are ready to work with our Republican colleagues on these issues. But we couldn’t ignore the difference in tone between the Governor’s two speeches yesterday,” said McCullough. “First in her address to the legislature she mentioned reforms to the foster care and adoption system and Pre-K expansion, then she left those out of her public address. She didn’t mention Critical Race Theory in her speech to lawmakers—and, by the way, Critical Race Theory is a college-level course that isn’t taught in any public K-12 school—but she mentioned it a number of times in her remarks on the Capitol steps. We’re ready to work with her—but we want to know which governor will come to the table to talk.
Representative McCullough concluded the press conference, adding: “It’s important that we remember that both the governor and lawmakers are public servants elected to serve Arkansas. We’ve all had enough politics and games, and the campaigns are over. It’s time we get to work.”
Raise teacher salaries
- Fully-fund education opportunities
- Decriminalize marijuana and expunge non-violent possession charges to match newly-established federal guidelines
- Expand healthcare for women and all Arkansans
- Pass criminal justice reforms to keep Arkansans safe without committing the state to hundreds of millions in new spending
The post Arkansas Democrats have their own ‘bigger, bolder and better’ ideas for this legislative session appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Jeremy Hutchinson, the convicted felon, former Republican senator and deadbeat dad who has been in Pulaski County Jail for contempt of court for more than half a million in unpaid child support, has a hearing Jan. 17 to try to reverse the contempt ruling keeping him behind bars.
Hutchinson is also scheduled to be sentenced in federal court Feb. 3 on bribery and tax fraud charges.
The hearing to appeal the contempt will be before Pulaski County Circuit Judge Cara Conners, who has taken over the docket of the now-retired Alice Gray, who ruled Hutchinson in contempt for failure to pay child support late last year.
Hutchinson attorney Clint Lancaster sent a very sad letter to Conners yesterday along with his motion to stay the contempt ruling.
Perhaps emboldened by her setting a hearing date, Lancaster sent a new letter today, offering a pathetic list of used-to-be-rich-guy items he could give to the court to auction, with the idea that proceeds would go toward the money he owes. Among the items he’s offering is the the title to his daughter’s car, which he said is in his name. If the judge lets him out, Hutchinson will go back to being a GrubHub and DoorDash driver, Lancaster says.
Meanwhile, as Max Brantley has reported, Hutchinson lives in a West Little Rock house with his wife (the house is in her name), and the couple recently put in a swimming pool and took vacations. Also, Hutchinson’s father, former U.S. Sen. Tim Hutchinson, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees fighting his son’s federal legal challenges. So there may be some money there.
From the letter:
I know that you have been very gracious. However, I would like to ask for one more thing. Would you please consider releasing my client from jail pending the hearing? I saw Mr. Hutchinson today and his mental health is rapidly deteriorating and he has lost weight since the first time I saw him nearly a week and half ago.
If you do so, he can gather what assets he does have, which is not much, and put them in the registry of the court for the court to auction or hold as a supersedes bond. This property includes: the title to his daughter’s car, which is in his name. He has approximately $60 in a Robinhood trading account made up of a fractional portion of a Bitcoin and some other stock that Robinhood gave him a share of when he opened the account. He has an Apple Watch, golf clubs, earbuds, photos of his time in the senate, and a pair of cuff links.
He will obtain these items and give them to the registry of the court pending the hearing and the appeal. He will also wear an ankle monitor pending the hearing. If you will release him pending the hearing, he will work at Doordash and GrubHub and pay $40 per day, minimum, into the registry of the court toward the arrearage.
Please consider releasing Mr. Hutchinson pending the hearing next week. I am confident he will be there because, if he doesn’t, it will greatly harm his sentencing prospects in federal court on February 3, 2023.
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The second iteration of the Little Rock Anime Festival is coming to the Statehouse Convention Center. 2022’s fest was a single day, but this year’s is two days long — Saturday, Feb. 4-Sunday, Feb. 5.
The biggest draw is the presence of several noteworthy voice actors, including Dante Basco (“Avatar: The Last Airbender,” “The Legend of Korra,” “American Dragon: Jake Long”), Kara Edwards (“Dragonball,” “My Hero Academia,” “One Piece”), Rob Paulsen (“Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” “Animaniacs,” “Pinky and the Brain,” “Jimmy Neutron”) and Todd Haberkorn (“Fairy Tale,” “Dragon Ball Z,” “Sailor Moon”). When not participating in Q&As, celebrities will hang at their booths, where fans can stop by, introduce themselves and purchase signatures. In addition, attendees should expect panels, amateur and professional cosplay, board and video game tournaments and pop culture merch-slinging from vendors and artists.
Advance tickets are $25 per day or $40 for the weekend and can be purchased here. Tickets at the door are $35 per day or $55 for the weekend.
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Organizing and planning ahead, those superpowers all teachers seem to possess, have proven less useful than usual at the outset of this Arkansas legislative session. Teachers know they and their students will likely be affected by new laws and policy targeting traditional public schools during the 94th General Assembly, but they don’t yet have many specifics.
Republican legislators indicate they stand at the ready to send up anything their governor-elect pitches, but so far Sarah Huckabee Sanders hasn’t put out hard documentation beyond the one-page Arkansas LEARNS acronymic and that dramatic first-day executive order to subdue big gay indoctrinators in the classroom.
The fuss over critical race theory gets a lot of fanfare for its culture war panache. But more impactful education issues likely up for debate at the Capitol this spring include teacher raises, expanded pre-K and the big one, “school choice.” Campaign rhetoric and inaugural speeches confirm more students will likely be getting vouchers to private or church schools, or maybe even homeschool. We just don’t know yet what the forthcoming voucher proposal will look like. Advocates for shuffling public dollars to private schools seem pretty pumped, though.
Laurie Lee, a lobbyist and chairman of the board for The Reform Alliance, was bullish about changes she expects to see. The Reform Alliance is a nonprofit that administers Arkansas’s existing school voucher programs and advocates for expanding them.
The vocabulary and delivery devices for such programs morph as the marketing for them evolves. Lee spoke not of vouchers but of individual education savings accounts, filled with public dollars. Lee described education savings accounts as “doing something where the money is more or less attached to the child,” with parents deciding how to spend it.
If students become economically untethered from traditional public schools, Lee said there will be more flexibility to slot students into classes and facilities that best fit them. Freed from having to teach classrooms full of children who are roughly the same age but of vastly different academic abilities, teachers will find their jobs a lot easier, she said.
“A lot of frustrations classroom teachers deal with could be alleviated by letting families seek options beyond the traditional classroom,” Lee said.
Education savings accounts could go toward accredited private and parochial schools, but also things like tutoring, transportation and therapy, she said. Who might be eligible for these accounts is unknown since we haven’t seen any proposals yet, but Lee said she hopes there would be income eligibility standards.
Lee said she expects to see a proposal from Governor Sanders soon that will bust some myths out there, including that parents who homeschool would be able to use their education spending account money on whatever they want, or that teachers will lose their jobs.
Job security aside, teachers have other concerns about a voucher/education savings plan program that would divert money from public schools. How would we make sure students new to private and church schools are getting all the services they need? That’s what Juanita Harris, a first grade teacher at Harmony Leadership Academy in Texarkana and a Teach Plus Arkansas fellow, wants to know. Teach Plus is a teacher-centric education advocacy group headed by 2019 Arkansas Teacher of the Year Stacey McAdoo.
“My biggest concern is equity. The questions I would ask are: ‘What does transportation to and from private school look like? Are breakfast and lunch provided there as well? Is the student population neurodiverse?’”
Arkansas Education Association President Carol Fleming was reluctant to weigh in on any expansion to Arkansas school voucher programs until she had more information in hand. Generally speaking, though, Fleming said the teacher union’s stance is that public funds should remain in public schools.
Fleming had plenty to say about teacher pay, a topic that’s been front and center ever since former Governor Asa Hutchinson pitched a plan to boost all Arkansas starting teacher salaries to a $46,000 minimum.
We all saw how that went. The majority of Republican legislators balked, then stalled any movement on educator raises pending the outcome of a feasibility study. While there was plenty of money this summer to cover tax cuts that will largely benefit Arkansas’s wealthiest people, lawmakers kept purse strings knotted when it came to teacher raises. It looks like the legislature is ready to green light boosting starting teacher salaries in the state to $40,000, up from $36,000.
Count Fleming unimpressed. The proposed raise won’t do what’s needed to attract and retain quality educators, she said. “We are last in the Southern region in regards to paying our educators. Forty-thousand keeps us below Mississippi. Forty thousand keeps us still last in the Southern region.”
Little Rock’s Baseline Academy teacher Perla Andrade, another Teach Plus fellow, said she thinks the $46,000 base salary Hutchinson originally proposed is the lowest we should go. “I would like to see educators being paid like the highly trained, college-educated professionals we are,” she said.
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A Capitol police captain and a woman who worked in then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office were among government witnesses today in the trial of Richard “Bigo” Barnett, the Gravette man charged in the Capitol riots of Jan. 6, 2021.
Online court records say a third witness, Gerald Stutte, also testified today in the trial in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.
Barnett gained notoriety over a viral photograph in which he is seen propping his feet upon a desk in Pelosi’s office.
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s Bill Bowden reported today that Stutte is an employee of the Bass Pro Shop in Rogers where Barnett bought a walking stick with a high-voltage stun gun attached, pepper spray and other items.
You can read the article here but may encounter a paywall. https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2023/jan/11/fayetteville-man-us-capitol-police-captain-among-witnesses-in-barnetts-jan-6-trial/
The Democrat-Gazette reported that the government also played videos in which jurors heard Barnett admit he took an envelope from Pelosi’s desk because he said he cut his hand and got blood on it. In the videos, Barnett said he left a quarter to pay for the envelope, addressed to a congressman from the House speaker, the paper reported.
Emily Berret, an employee in Pelosi’s office at that time, testified Wednesday that she found a blood-stained quarter on her desk and a note that read, “Hey Nancy, Bigo was here, you biotch,” according to the Democrat-Gazette.
Barnett, 62, is charged with eight offenses, including theft of government property, entering the Capitol with a dangerous weapon, a stun gun; and obstruction of an official government proceeding: Congress’s meeting to certify the Electoral College vote count showing Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election.
In an unsuccessful motion filed earlier today, Barnett’s attorneys asked U.S. District Judge Christopher R. Cooper to preclude what they called “irrelevant and highly prejudicial testimony that serves no probative value as to any fact in his case by [U.S. Capitol Police] Captain Carneysha Mendoza.
Court records say Mendoza ended up testifying today.
Defense attorneys unsuccessfully argued that the government had indicated that Mendoza “would be a fact witness to provide context for the entirety of the U.S. Capitol grounds” on that Jan. 6, even though the defense said the prosecution had “admitted that Captain Mendoza had no interaction with Mr. Barnett.”
Defense attorneys argued that Barnett wasn’t “at the entire Capitol grounds” and is instead accused of entering the building “in disregard of the evidence that he was pushed inside.” They said he’s also accused of “an alleged non-violent verbal engagement with a USCP officer in the Rotunda when he wanted to retrieve his flag” from Pelosi’s office.
Barnett’s attorneys have said Mendoza has no “relevant facts directly related to Mr. Barnett.” They also complained that in another Jan. 6 defendant’s trial, “she provided irrelevant and highly prejudicial testimony about an injury she alleges she suffered on January 6, 2021.”
“Any attempt by her to discuss her alleged injury can only be for the purpose of misleading the jury into falsely believing that Mr. Barnett was responsible or nearby when instead it is most likely her own police injured her,” the defense argued.
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KARK photoOUTSPENT BUT VICTORIOUS: Mayor Frank Scott Jr. at swearing-in Sunday.Little Rock municipal candidates filed campaign reports Friday and those by the top contenders for mayor — incumbent Mayor Frank Scott Jr. and defeated challenger Steve Landers — showed the two both went heavily in the hole in spending $1.7 million on the race.
Scott’s report showed expenses of $591,281 and contributions of $466,211 with a deficit fund balance at the report’s filing of $125,069. He reported no loans to his campaign. I believe he can continue to raise money to pay off his campaign debt. Winning incumbents generally enjoy success in post-election fund-raising.
Landers’ report said he spent $1.123 million. He reported $696,858 in contributions and personal loans to his campaign of $428,314, leaving him with a negative fund balance of $382,314.
You can peruse the report links for contributors in the last fund-raising period. I note that Lisenne Rockefeller, widow of the lieutenant governor, and her son William Rockefeller each gave the maximum $2,900 to Landers. The Rockefeller family was a major contributor to Scott in 2018, when he defeated a former Rockefeller employee, Baker Kurrus, in the runoff for mayor. The contributor list for Landers, like the election returns, were tilted toward the western end of town, with many familiar Republican names.
Major contributors to Scott in the last fund-raising period included Harriet Stephens, wife of billionaire Republican Warren Stephens (who’s hoping to get the city to subsidize a parking deck for his investment firm on a block he cleared of office buildings over objections from some city planners). She gave $2,900
Scott won 48.6 percent of the vote in the Nov. 8 election to win re-election (a 40 percent vote is required, not a majority). Landers had 39.7 percent. Greg Henderson had 7.7 percent and Glen Schwarz 1.5 percent
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The Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reports that, beginning today, the city of Fort Smith is banning tents and camping equipment on private property without an owner’s consent.
Said a city news release:
“We wish for all who dwell within the city limits to be safe, have adequate protection from weather and access to the required facilities for hygiene purposes. A tent does not meet the criteria of dwelling unit which is required to be connected to city water and sewer.”
Uh huh. This less about hygiene than rousting the homeless.
Good luck with that. From Monica Brich’s article, quoting Chris Joannides, executive director of the Hope Campus, which serves homeless people:
“I am of the belief that the folks that stay outside will continue to stay outside, regardless of a ‘tent ban’. This select group of folks will just move upstream again, so to speak, and stay out of the visual sights.”
It’s a complicated issue, Joannides said. Indeed.
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Here are updates on the Arkansas Department of Health’s count of COVID-19 cases in the state.
Total cases: 985,747, up 254 from Saturday
Active cases: 6,843, down from 6,855
Deaths: 12,695, same as yesterday
Hospitalized: 373, up from 353
In ICU: 48, down from 53
On ventilators: 15, down from 19
The line is open.
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The final day of greyhound racing is underway at @SouthlandGaming. pic.twitter.com/LBGFrXH5gV
— Daniel McFadin (@danielmcfadin) December 31, 2022
They held the last greyhound race at Southland casino in West Memphis today before what looks like a typically sparse crowd. Good riddance. We’re better than West Virginia, the only other state still offering wagering on dogs.
The greyhound kennel industry pocketed a huge (and secret) windfall in the deal struck to end dog racing at the track. An open question is where the money goes for set-asides for dog purses in the casino gambling tax. (More than $30 million a year in 2019.) Divert it to schools and other public services? Or let Oaklawn keep it all? What do you predict?
Here are updates on the Arkansas Department of Health’s count of COVID-19 cases in the state.
Total cases: 985,493, up 669 from Friday.
Active cases: 6,855, up from 6,451.
Deaths: 12,695 up four
Hospitalized: 353, down from 359
In ICU: 53, same as yesterday
On ventilators: 19, same as yesterday
The line is open.
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With all the announcements about the coming Sanders gubernatorial administration, you could be forgiven for forgetting that Asa Hutchinson remains governor of Arkansas through Jan. 10. And that he is attempting to establish a national position for himself, perhaps in the 2024 presidential race.
Lame though the duck might be, he keeps quacking.
His schedule for the coming week includes yet another national TV appearance on Sunday, an interview with ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos.
His official portrait will be unveiled at the Capitol Tuesday.
And Friday, he promises an as-yet unspecified economic development announcement.
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UPDATE: More legal developments in the case of the jailing Thursday of the governor’s nephew, former Republican Sen. Jeremy Hutchinson, for contempt of court for making little demonstrable effort to cover more than a half-million in unpaid child support.
He apparently had the wherewithal to retain a lawyer — Clint Lancaster of Benton, who is tied into the Republican elite in Saline County and the lawyer who’s grabbed headlines for pursuing Hunter Biden in an Arkansas child support case.
Lancaster has filed an “emergency” petition direct with the Arkansas Supreme Court asking for Hutchinson’s release pending appeal, in part because he has filed for bankruptcy. (You cannot discharge child support obligations in bankruptcy, multiple sources say, though some other costs assessed on Hutchinson might be dischargeable.)
Lancaster claims jailing Hutchinson, who is “destitute,” amounts to unconstitutional debtor’s prison. If this get-out-of-jail-free ploy works, it will end the very effective practice of holding deadbeat dads in contempt and jailing them if they don’t come up with some money. Miraculously, money tends to appear in such cases, if not enough to cover entire obligations.
Under the Hutchinson scheme, you’d merely need to plead poverty and file a bankruptcy petition to avoid penalty for non-payment. Hutchinson’s only financial offer in months of attempts to get him to meet obligations is to offer title on two used vehicles and to volunteer a portion of his earnings from being a Door Dash driver. During that time, he took vacations and paid for a swimming pool for the house he and his wife bought on Bella Rosa Place in West Little Rock (in her name.)
Lancaster asserts that Judge Alice Gray had said if he didn’t have the money his family could pay it. The available record I’ve seen doesn’t reflect that she said that. Hutchinson HAS said during the course of the case that his father, the former U.S. Sen. Tim Hutchinson, spent hundreds of thousands on legal fees while he was fighting multiple federal indictments to which he eventually pleaded guilty. His ex-wife also has said that he’s received payments from his former law firm, payments to help a friend get business selling equipment to public schools and other assistance from friends iand family. Hutchinson said in his last pleading to avoid being held in contempt that he had sought help from family recently but gotten none.
Lancaster disputed the judge’s finding that he had failed to prove he didn’t have the ability to pay. He also argued that a stay of the contempt finding is in order because his appeal of the order will becpme moot if he is sent to federal prison on the unrelated federal charges he faces, beginning with sentencing on two charges Feb. 3.
It will be a sticky business for Supreme Court Justice Barbara Webb to rule on this case. She’s part of the Saline County Republican power clique along with Lancaster, who is a member of the Saline Election Commissioner. What’s more, his wife and former law partner, Jennifer Lancaster, is a law clerk for Justice Webb.
At this moment, 5:20 p.m., Hutchinson remains in jail. The petition was filed at 3:51 p.m. No response from Huchinson’s ex-wife is on record yet. Hard to imagine the Supreme Court would rule on this motion and free a felonious former legislator from jail in an extraordinary ex parte hearing. But Judge Wendell Griffen can attest such things do happen.
Lancaster also got a Chapter 13 voluntary bankruptcy petition filed today. It says he has up to 49 creditors, with liabilities of $100,000 to $500,000 and assets of $0-$50,000. It lists as creditors his ex-wife’s law firm, Discover Financial, Enhanced Recovery Company and First Security Bank. A meeting of creditors was set Feb. 3.
What’s significantly missing here is any offer by Hutchinson to make any sort of good faith payment. He’s under a huge cash bond currently, but in such cases there’s generally a possibility for bargaining to have a contempt finding lifted. Hutchinson, his ex-wife has maintained through more than a year of proceedings, insists he’s paid enough, although has no banking records to back it up.
Here’s what I wrote earlier today about actions in Judge Alice Gray’s court:
When Circuit Judge Alice Gray sent Jeremy Hutchinson to jail Thursday for contempt of court in failing to make child support payments, she didn’t issue a final order on all financial claims by his ex, Stephanie Hutchinson.
He’s jailed now under a cash bond of $524,000 over unpaid child support, plus interest, for his three children. But the judge also indicated Thursday he’d be responsible for other payments owed for education, health insurance and other expenses under an agreement he made with his wife in their 2011 divorce.
The judge issued a supplemental order today setting the former Republican senator’s full obligation at $629,897.78. The sum will accrue interest at a rate of 5.75 percent.
But wait. There’s more.
The judge also awarded attorney fees to Stephanie Hutchinson — $51,000, or about 10 percent of the child support in arrears.
Hutchinson remains jailed in the Pulaski County detention facility on Roosevelt Road.
He’s due in federal court in Little Rock Feb. 3 to be sentenced on tax fraud and bribery charges. Another federal court date, for sentencing on an unrelated bribery charge, awaits him in Springfield, Mo., but it has not been set.
SATURDAY UPDATE: The Democrat-Gazette article Saturday on Hutchinson’s legal maneuvers quoted Lancaster as saying the Supreme Court had taken his action as an emergency with first responses due Wednesday. If so, there’s no order by the Spreme Court to that effect appearing currently on Court Connection, the state court information system. Perhaps he got a message from his wife, the Supreme Court law clerk. UPDATE: a court clerk informed lawyers the petition had been received and asked for responses by Wednesday. Is Jeremy going to pay to put the full record before the court? Given some of Lancaster’s assertions seems like he should. Or maybe come up with the equivalent of the $45,000 swimming pool cost and $20,000 check he wrote to his wife while deadbeating his kids as down payment on support owed as a sign of good faith
Lancaster also declined to say how he came to represent the disgraced former lawmaker, except to say a friend had asked him. Is he working for free? Or being paid by the friend? Could the friend provide a little help to Hutchinson’s family, too?
Lancaster said Hutchinson should be sprung by the end of the week. We shall see. A new judge takes over Judge Gray’s court Sunday because she is retiring. All the courts should be mindful of extending special consideration to a felonious deadbeat Republican.
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From 40/29: The Washington County Quorum has voted to rehired Dr. Robert Karas to provide medical services at the county jail despite the ACLU lawsuit that accuses him of giving inmates with Ivermectin — a dewormer debunked as a COVID-19 therapy — without their informed consent.
The Republican controlling officials naturally say Karas did a great job. What’s a little experimentation on prisoners among authoritarians, after all? And, hey, said the county attorney, no inmates died.
Said ACLU Executive Director Holly Dickson:
It’s a shame Washington County would retain any doctor who so severely violated informed medical consent.
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A bit of news today as 2022 comes to a close. The line is open.
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Here are updates on the Arkansas Department of Health’s count of COVID-19 cases in the state. No update was available yesterday on the case count, only on the hospital numbers.
Total cases: 984,824, up 882 from Thursday.
Active cases: 6,451, up significantly from the last update I received, on Wednesday, of 5,565
Deaths: 12,691, up nine from my last report.
Hospitalized: 359, up from 336
In ICU: 53, up from 49
On ventilators: 19, up from 15
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The Arkansas State Police is investigating the death of a West Fork man after being tased by a West Fork police officer during a struggle following a traffic stop.
The release:
On December 29, 2022, the West Fork Police Department requested the assistance of the Arkansas State Police with the investigation into the death of Michael J. Hanna, 49, of West Fork. The death occurred following a traffic stop as Hanna was being taken into custody by a West Fork police officer.
The traffic stop happened about 4:15 PM at 6210 U.S. Highway 71 in West Fork. During the course of the traffic stop, a fight ensued and the officer deployed his taser on Hanna. While the cause of death is unknown, Hanna’s body has been transported to the Arkansas State Crime Laboratory where it will be determined.
Special Agents with the Arkansas State Police are investigating the incident at the request of authorities within the West Fork Police Department. Upon completion of the investigation, a case file will be delivered to the Washington County prosecuting attorney. All inquiries into the identity and the administrative status of the officer should be directed to West Fork Police Department.
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Joseph Wood, the Washington County judge who finished a distant fourth in the Republican primary race for lieutenant governor, will head the Department of Transformation and Shared Services in the administration of incoming Governor Sanders.
He’ll replace Mitch Rouse, who became head of the agency in July when its first secretary, Amy Fecher, was named director of the Arkansas Public Employees Retirement System. The department was created as part of Governor Hutchinson’s so-called streamlining of state government. It oversees, among others, information systems and state procurement (an area of some interest lately, I’ve heard, over the initiative to establish an integrated e-purchasing system.)
Wood, a Republican who’s in his second term as county judge, has private-sector work experience including as head of international recruiting for Walmart. Sanders’ news release said his experience as administrator of a large county government qualified him for the job and she said he shared her enthusiasm “for shrinking the size and scope of government.”
The full news release, with full Wood biography, is here.
Wood’s tenure as Washington County judge has been marked by several controversies, beginning with a challenge to his firing and hiring of department heads after his first election. He also hired as comptroller a former financial officer for Ecclesia College, where Wood had been a board member. The college had been embroiled in a public corruption scandal over state money sent to the college in return for kickbacks to participants in the scheme, including two state legislators. Multiple convictions resulted.
Wood did cut county jobs, to the detriment of the public, Denele Campbell recounted in this opinion piece, particularly in cutting support for a facility to handle hazardous household waste.
The post Sanders names Washington County Judge Joseph Wood to head Transformation Department appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Emergency town hall called over recent outbreak of violence in Eudora, curfew extended https://t.co/6jSrCOLlhb
— FOX16 News (@FOX16News) December 30, 2022
Our news partners at Fox 16 report on a town meeting last night in Eudora, where Mayor Tomeka Butler declared a civil emergency Tuesday, with people out after 8 p.m. stopped and searched.
Townspeople had divided opinions on the curfew. City officials defended it.
“My decision was not to violate the rights of any people,” Mayor Butler insisted during the meeting.
“We don’t anyone’s life to be taken” she continued. “This is home, and if we can’t be safe home what are we doing…This has to stop. We need a resolution.”
Following the mayor, Eudora Police Chief Mike Pitts explained the curfew was issued because of string of shootings resulting in two murders in 2022. The first occurred early in the year on Pine Street. The latest happened at the Chicot Apartments on Christmas Eve.
“People losing their lives. Innocent kids being hit by bullets and it’s kids that are doing it,” Chief Pitts described. “Until we get Justice for that and until we get Justice for people whose homes have been violated, we are not going to rest.”
Aldermen in the city of 1,700 extended the curfew Thursday through Jan. 3. One arrest has been made of people stopped during the curfew. A stolen gun was recovered.
Here’s the mayor declaring the curfew earlier in the week.
The post Eudora extends curfew mayor declared in response to crime appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The state Education Department said today that the so-called report cards for the 2021-2022 school year are now available online. They cover individual schools, districts and the state as a whole.
The results had been summarized in November, showing 60 percent of schools increased performance over the previous year, but a decline in the number of schools with A and B grades. I expressed then my disagreement with assigning letter grades to schools based on standardized tests. There are outliers, but the grades inevitably reflect the demographic makeup of schools — race, income, English speaking proficiency and other factors.
The department news release views the report this way:
The report cards serve as a communication tool to encourage dialogue and inform decisions within each school community. School-level improvement plans and district support plans may be updated as schools and districts review their data. All stakeholders are encouraged to participate in these discussions.
The reports are available at the Report Card tab on the My School Info website.
The post Arkansas school report cards now available online appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Donald Trump lied about releasing his tax returns, which other presidents have routinely provided, but the House Ways and Means Committee is doing it for him today after a long battle.
Six years worth of returns — 2015-2020 — are available as Attachment E on the committee website. It includes corporate returns and the download is large. The work illustrates the IRS’ failure to perform the mandatory audits of presidents required by law. A statement from the committee chair Richard Neal, a Massachusetts Democrat, said in part:
The Committee expected that these mandatory audits were being conducted promptly and in accordance with IRS policies. However, our review found that under the prior Administration the program was dormant. We know now, the first mandatory audit was opened two years into his presidency. On the same day this Committee requested his returns.
“We anticipated the IRS would expand the mandatory audit program to account for the complex nature of the former president’s financial situation yet found no evidence of that. This is a major failure of the IRS under the prior administration, and certainly not what we had hope to find.
“But the evidence is clear. Congress must step in. I’ve proposed legislation to put the program above reproach. Ensuring IRS conducts yearly, timely examinations while publicly disclosing certain information.
“Our work has always been to ensure our tax laws are administered fairly and without preference, because at times, even the power of a president can loom too large.”
Summary from the Washington Post:
The returns show that Trump paid little, if anything, in income taxes over six years including the four in which he served as president. They have also raised questions over the lengths he took to claim tax deductions on items that may not warrant it to evade paying taxes.
The post The Trump tax returns are public appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Oh, honey pie
Just before catching COVID during that first omicron wave less than three weeks into 2022, I managed to make my first pizza order of the year a good one. It was a spicy honey pie I ordered on a whim with Soppressata, peppadew peppers, chile-infused honey, garlic, mozzarella, arugula and fresh jalapenos. Raduno was so busy on that Friday night that they had to quit taking to-go orders — a familiar part of pandemic takeout life during COVID-19 waves or during labor shortages — so I called up ZAZA and ordered my first pie from there in years.
Rhett Brinkley
The salty Soppressata with the sweet peppadew peppers and the spicy honey and jalapenos was just a full-blown flavor explosion. It’s the kind of pizza you text your friends about. Most Neapolitan pizza places have a spicy honey option in 2022, but honey on pizza isn’t a new thing for Little Rock. I worked at Pizza Cafe for centuries, and they have honey on the tables as a condiment. Some people use it for the crust, but I met people over the years who would cover their whole slice with honey. One young teenager I used to wait on had a ritual that he performed when he’d come in with his family or when he was on junior high dates. He would eat each slice of his 10” pizza down to the crust and put the crust back in place forming a circle of pizza bones on his empty pan. In the middle of the pan he would empty out every honey packet on the table, forming a mound of honey he would use as a dip for his pizza crust until every last piece was gone. I thought he was a genius, and he’s probably gone on to do great things.
Service industry solidarity
My second pizza of the year was a delivery from Domino’s while I was infected with COVID-19. This pizza was very forgettable but a “get well soon” gesture from the delivery driver in response to my “sick, please leave order outside,” special request gave me a glimmer of hope in humanity after a brutal week and two years.
Rhett Brinkley
Lessons learned
Trust me, if you attend a medical marijuana CBD and wellness expo and your managing editor hands you a cinnamon roll, it’s not a regular cinnamon roll, no matter how many food selfies you take with it.
Austin Bailey
You will not get any work done for the rest of the day. You might sit in your driveway for two hours after arriving home.
Favorite mobile restaurant of 2022
My favorite food truck this year was Tren al Sur (mostly located these days Arkansas Skatium), a Venezuelan truck that offers arepas, empanadas and specials like Pabellon Criollo, a rice bowl with black beans, a fried egg, sweet plantains and your choice of protein.
Jason WoodsTren Al SurFirst meal out of my COVID cave
My favorite dinner post COVID infection that I never wrote about was at The Oyster Bar in February. It was my first time at the restaurant since the renovation/ownership change. I loved the old version of the Oyster Bar with the jukebox, the crisp beer, the creaky wooden floors, the windows full of plants and the cheap red beans and rice, so I almost didn’t want to like the upscale version that feels more Heights than Stifft Station. But dinner was great. My friends and I split smoked fish dip, Rhode Island oysters, oysters Rockefeller, and I ordered a dish of grilled shrimp and catfish. Everything was fantastic, but the side dishes were what really blew my mind. The cucumber salad was fresh, vibrant and delicious and the cheese grits are my favorite grits maybe ever.
More lessons from 2022
Don’t walk to get lunch when there’s construction on your route. Managing editor Austin Bailey, reporter Mary Hennigan and I made that mistake trying to walk to 42 Bar & Table to pick up a to go order when there was heavy construction going on above President Clinton Avenue on the 630 bridge. Our alternate route was through another construction zone and dust filled the air as we completed the half hour walk to the restaurant. We decided to eat on the patio out of to go boxes, and then took Lime scooters back to work. The whole point of the to go order was to have a quick lunch so we could eat at our desks and get our assignments done and our bumbling excursion took over an hour.
Only the enthusiasm of youth (Mary’s) delivered us to 42 that day.
Saddest closure announcement
In case you missed it, read kBird owner’s Richard Glasgow’s letter of gratitude to his loyal customers after shutting down his Thai restaurant located in a residential neighborhood at 600 N. Tyler St.
Best trends
Food trends were warmly embraced this summer, with people lining up down the block for pink pineapples at K. Hall & Sons and for bagels at The Bagel Shop pop-ups. What’s next for 2023? I don’t know, maybe an all butter board restaurant. We’ll see.
The salads I enjoyed the most this year
Three Fold’s Three Fold Salad with tofu became a weekly staple at the Arkansas Times office.
Rhett Brinkley
El Sur’s new Ensalada is one of the most fetching salads in town.
Rhett Brinkley
Capital Bar’s wedge has these marinated tomatoes that I couldn’t stop thinking about after I left.
Rhett BrinkleyLivin’ on the wedge.Favorite apps of 2022
I skipped lunch one day this summer and waited until Raduno opened at 4:30 to order the prosciutto and pesto burrata with local heirloom tomatoes from Armstead Mountain Farms and cherry tomatoes from Barnhill Orchards. It was worth the wait.
Rhett Brinkley
The Mexican street corn appetizer at The Fold Botanas & Bar was a great treat to myself after early voting; it has a surprise underlayer of guacamole and at the very bottom lies a crispy tostada.
Rhett Brinkley
The Oysters Rockefeller from my February dinner at The Oyster Bar are great for more than just food selfies.
Rhett Brinkley
Top three desserts of 2022:
The Baked Hot Chocolate at Oaklawn’s new restaurant The Bugler featured Ouachita chocolate cake in the bottom of a coffee cup topped with piping hot bruleed marshmallow fluff that molded back into its previous shape after taking bites, making your bite disappear like it never happened. Who doesn’t like to be fooled into thinking they’ve barely touched dessert after multiple bites. #guiltfree
Rhett Brinkley
One Eleven’s black forest cake resembling a forest bed with mushrooms has to become a trendy dessert, right? It tastes even better than it looks.
Rhett Brinkley
Get dessert when you go to Raduno. It doesn’t matter which one. The bread pudding with candied walnuts and a seasonal jam à la mode with Loblolly vanilla had ice cream vapor floating around it, which was perfect on a hot summer day.
Rhett Brinkley
Weirdest bite of the year
Rhett BrinkleyA pickle pizza slice with ranch drizzled on top at the Arkansas State Fair was a mind-blowing affair and a mystery I had to try to solve. Read about it here.
Best bite of 2022
My best bite of 2022 came from Red Oak Steakhouse, the fine dining restaurant tucked away at the back of Saracen Casino in Pine Bluff. My dining companion and I didn’t order the fried oyster appetizer and our waiter (a former Capital Bar server) kindly let us know we were making a mistake.
Rhett Brinkley
In the oyster shells rests a layer of delicious pork belly-smoked grits topped with creamed spinach and delicately fried oysters, covered with a flavorful pickled-corn tartar sauce I could eat by the spoonful.
The post 2022 in review: Looking back on a year of eating Arkansas appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A signal on the future of education in Arkansas (ominous) and the jailing of the governor’s nephew as a deadbeat dad are in the news roundup today. The line is open.
The post A couple of big headlines on an otherwise slow day appeared first on Arkansas Times.
I don’t have complete updated numbers from the Arkansas Department of Health on COVID-19 today, but the dashboard does reflect a continuing rise in hospitalizations, perhaps an indication of spread from holiday gatherings.
Hospitalized: 336, up from 312
In ICU: 49, up from 45
On ventilators: 15, up from 13
Arkansas Children’s Hospital also reports eight COVID patients.
The post COVID today: Hospital count rises appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Former Republican state Sen. Jeremy Hutchinson, the governor’s nephew, landed in a jail cell today, a bit more than a month ahead of his scheduled sentencing in federal court on bribery and tax fraud charges.
UPDATE: The contempt finding is now on record. Judge Alice Gray held Hutchinson in contempt for failure to pay child support and ordered him jailed until he paid up. We’ve detailed this case both when the contempt citation was sought and this week, when Hutchinson pleaded poverty and offered other excuses for being in arrears on payments, plus interest, due under a 2011 divorce settlement with his ex-wife Stephanie to support their three children. He has since remarried.
The jail docket note indicates he must come up with $524,000 cash to gain his release. Stephanie Hutchinson has argued that he owes even more than that in $10,500 monthly support payments and interest, plus additional amounts of insurance and education costs that were his obligation under the divorce agreement.
Hutchinson had reopened the divorce case to argue that the property settlement agreement was legally defective and he also said he’d been unable to find work since being accused of multiple crimes and losing his law license. He volunteered to work as a Door Dash driver to make some money for payments and also said he would turn over the title to used vehicles to his ex. Stephanie Hutchinson’s attorney, Jocelyn Stotts, sought the contempt citation. She said Hutchinson had been derelict despite receiving significant income through his former law firm and financial assistance from friends and family. She noted he’d paid for a swimming pool for his house, which is titled in his new wife’s name. Hutchinson said in his latest court filing that family and friends had offered no help in his current situation.
Hutchinson was in court for the ruling this morning. The judge reportedly said the matter had been pending since March 2011 without a significant effort on his part. She also commented that she wasn’t in the habit of accepting property (used cars) for money.
JEREMY HUTCHINSON: In jail mugshot.
The judge ruled from the bench and Hutchinson was immediately taken into custody in a courthouse holding cell, then transferred later to the county jail.
Hutchinson has said he’d appeal the contempt finding and seek release. The capacity of the county jail can also work in favor of people jailed for contempt of court because priority is given to housing criminal offenders. UPDATE: A sheriff’s spokesman said capacity was not an issue and Hutchinson would be held until he paid $524,000 or a judge ordered his release.
UPDATE: The contempt order is a scorcher. It rejects all Hutchinson’s legal arguments and indicates he owes more than the $524,000 in unpaid child support. It says he’s also in contempt for failure to cover his children’s major medical coverage; has not disclosed, as required, any retirement benefits so they may be divided with his ex-wife; has failed to maintain a million-dollar life insurance policy, forcing his ex to pay the premiums; he’s liable for roughly $100,000 in past and future college expenses for his children, and he’d failed to pay for summer camp and mission trips as promised. Despite several hearings over many months, the order said, Hutchinson never offered to pay what he thought he should be paying. The judge found he had the ability to pay considering his lifestyle, the money paid to him and other evidence. It makes clear that $524,000 won’t satisfy his obligations and that he must pay an additional $105,897 immediately. The judge postponed a decision on attorney fees for Stephanie Hutchinson and consideration of a modification of the child support and alimony agreement.
Hutchinson is to be sentenced Feb. 3 for failing to report income for taxes on money he illegally spent from his campaign account and for taking bribes from an orthodontist to help him with legislation useful to his business. He also faces sentencing for taking bribes from Preferred Family Healthcare to help it in the legislature. He’s pleaded guilty but no sentencing date has been set.
The post Jeremy Hutchinson jailed by judge for contempt in child support case UPDATE appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Gov. Hutchinson today announced the appointment of Lt. Col. Forrest Marks as colonel of the Arkansas State Police, effectively the director of the agency.
He will succeed Col. Bill Bryant, who retires Saturday, and will serve until incoming Gov. Sanders’ choice to lead the agency, Capt. Mike Hagar, assumes the position. That likely will occur soon after Sanders is inaugurated Jan. 10.
Marks has been a trooper since 1994 and currently serves as acting lieutenant colonel for field operations. He plans to retire in early 2023 himself, a State Police spokesman said.
The post Hutchinson appoints interim State Police leader appeared first on Arkansas Times.
15 years old.
The Little Rock police are also looking for a suspected 15-year-old killer.
The rate at which teens are shooting or being shot in this city should cause us all to think about more than simply longer sentences for violent offenders. That doesn’t address the root of it.
The post North Little Rock police arrest 15-year-old in November slaying; LRPD also seeking 15-year-old homicide suspect appeared first on Arkansas Times.
BREAKING @SarahHuckabee announces her intention to nominate Jacob Oliva, a key education leader for @GovRonDeSantis in Florida, as the next Secretary of @ArkansasEd. #arpx pic.twitter.com/2Xm43tBqjU
— Judd Deere (@JuddPDeere) December 29, 2022
Yep, the Cabinet appointment today by incoming Governor Sanders was a big one. She’ll be replacing Asa Hutchinson’s Education secretary, Johnny Key, with a veteran of the DeSantis administration in Florida, Jacob Oliva, senior chancellor at the Florida Department of Education, overseeing the Division of Public Schools.
It seems a likely indication of the direction Sanders intends to take education in Arkansas. It’s not pretty.
.
Florida has gone big-time into school vouchers, more than $1 billion a year in payments to both private schools and home schoolers, with limited demonstrations of success.
UPDATE: Here’s a report on the Florida scheme to divert $1.3 billion in state revenue from real public schools to private education. Also, some $1 billion is lost in Florida through the so-called tax credit scheme by which taxpayers can designate state income taxes — normally supportive of all public services — strictly to school vouchers. This scheme is already in place on a somewhat limited, but growing, basis in Arkansas. More good commentary on the Florida vouchers — families making up to $100,000 are eligible — from Diane Ravitch.
A quick search turned up this opinion piece on Oliva, by a writer who said he’d been a generally progressive school administrator in Flagler County but had drunk DeSantis’ “reactionary Kool-Aid.” It notes that, as a high school principal, Oliva initially moved to kill a student production of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” but relented after protests, a positive sign of his willingness to listen.
But, also from that article:
You argued in court that mask mandates made no difference, which was scientifically false. They may have made no significant difference among children, because relatively few got sick. That’s a given. But children were carriers. The masks were intended to keep them from bringing death home to parents and grandparents, which they did: The governor’s happy-faced graffiti on 74,000 graves aside, Florida’s numbers are dismal. You knew that. But you lawyered it in court. If your hands were callused from carrying Corcoran’s water, the Zoom connection didn’t show it.
In Flagler you’d have never put up with anyone sanitizing history books of America’s more sinister past. Now you’re all in with the kind of nationalistic whitewashing Putin is inflicting on Russian students. Your department is endorsing a return to teaching history as selective hero-worship. “Yet what kind of history do you have if you leave out all the bad things?” the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. asked 30 years ago, when he was worried the liberals were pushing too many feel-good tomes. The answer is simple: propaganda.
In your time here you were all about inclusion. Transgender issues were just then beginning to be discussed at school board association seminars, but the local district’s focus was on acceptance by whatever means. Or am I remembering all those pastoral, collegial school board meetings incorrectly? Now your department is pushing purposefully mercenary assaults on LGBTQ students to placate the evangelical wing of your party. You are defending outright harm and second-class status to a suicide-prone segment of the students you should be protecting, and used to. Your department is throwing fuel on any fire it can.
Just last week your department pulled off that Orwellian ploy of throwing out dozens of math books from the list public schools could choose from on claims that they indoctrinated students with critical race theory or so-called social emotional learning. Four measly examples aside, the department never showed how or why the books are a problem. Here was your department, barely a few weeks ago touting transparency with school books–giving parents the right to examine every book, every page, every brochure–now hiding outright censorship behind the preposterous claim that these math books used in thousands of schools have proprietary information.
Claims that the books contain “critical race theory” are too laughable to entertain. But they do contain social-emotional learning, which has been around for years, has been proven to help raise test scores, and resonates with common sense, if not common decency.
That’s one writer’s opinion. And Arkansas already had been moving under Republican control to more vouchers and more sanitizing of school curriculum. Time will tell. But just a couple of weeks ago, Oliva weighed in on LGBT matters, warning Palm Beach schools that Florida law prevented their policies that gave students’ right to use their affirmed name, to participate in sports that align with their gender identity and to use the restroom or locker room that matches their identity. And he drew attention for dropping out of a CDC survey of youth risk behavior.
Oliva is, it’s worth noting, qualified for the job, even under the pre-Key rules. He holds a master’s degree and has more than 20 years of experience as a special education teacher principal and superintendent. The law had to be changed to count Key’s time as a senator so he could qualify for the job, which previously had required a master’s degree and 10 years of experience as a teacher.
I’ll have more biography before long.
Key sent this letter to department employees after the announcement was made:
Dear Colleagues,
This morning Governor-Elect Sanders announced her choice for the new secretary of education. Serving Governor Hutchinson and the State of Arkansas as the commissioner and secretary of education has been the highlight of my nearly 30 years of public service. It has been my honor to work with you all.
I wish the secretary-designate all success, because the success of the new secretary and the continued success of this agency means success for students and parents across Arkansas. I trust that you will strive to make our vision a reality, that every Arkansan is equitably prepared, supported, and inspired to succeed in school, career, community, and life.
Sincerely,
Johnny
UPDATE: The full Sanders news release
Governor-elect Sarah Huckabee Sanders today announced her intention to nominate Jacob Oliva, a key education leader for Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida, as the Secretary of the Department of Education, and that she intends to work in partnership with the State Board of Education to appoint him to serve in a dual role as the Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education.
“Education is the foundation for success, and, with my nominee for Secretary of Education and Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education, Jacob Oliva, we are ready to transform Arkansas education with bold reforms that will empower every kid to succeed,” Sanders said. “Jacob’s proven success increasing student achievement and his experience serving in many educational roles will make him an asset to my administration. Through my Arkansas LEARNS plan, we will expand access to quality education for every kid growing up in our state, empower parents, not government bureaucrats, and prepare students for the workforce, not government dependency, so everyone has a shot at a better life right here in Arkansas.”
“Governor-elect Sanders has the right vision to unleash Arkansas education, and I’m excited to get to work on day one to enact it,” Oliva said. “Education is the key to the future, creating opportunity for all, which is why I’ve spent my career implementing successful early learning programs, empowering parents with choices, and investing in career readiness. I am ready to continue that work here in Arkansas and look forward to working with Governor-elect Sanders to build a bright future for our students.”
Jacob Oliva biography:
Jacob Oliva currently serves as senior chancellor at the Florida Department of Education, where he has been a leader implementing Governor DeSantis’ parental rights policies and bold education reforms.He joined the Florida Department of Education as Executive Vice Chancellor of Public Schools in 2017. He became Chancellor in 2019, where he supported the teaching and learning of Florida’s over 2.8 million students in approximately 3,600 public schools, promoting student achievement and closing achievement gaps. In 2021, he was elevated to the role of Senior Chancellor, and his responsibilities expanded to include early learning, choice programs, school safety, and school accountability. Additionally, he provides statewide leadership and communication between the Florida Department of Education and Florida’s school districts. He was appointed Interim Commissioner in 2022.
After graduating from Miami-Dade County Public Schools and Flagler College, he started his educational career over two decades ago as an elementary teacher for students with special needs in Flagler County. He went on to serve as a principal at both the elementary and high school level, and as an assistant superintendent and superintendent of Flagler County Schools.
Jacob Oliva was born and raised in Miami, is Hispanic as the son of a Cuban-born father, and has lived the American dream and empowered thousands of others to do the same by expanding access to quality education. Jacob and his wife Rebecca are the parents of two children.
The post Johnny Key is out as Education secretary; Sanders taps DeSantis education leader to replace him appeared first on Arkansas Times.
REPUBLICAN TALK: Screenshot from a show in which Sen. Kim Hammer talked with lawyer Clint Lancaster, in the news this week for legal filings targeting Hunter Biden.
I’ve been tracking developments in the Hunter Biden child support case in Independence County, where a hearing is set next week related to a request by Biden to reduce his child support payments.
An article about events in the Democrat-Gazette today prompts some thoughts.
One is that Clint Lancaster, the ultra-right-wing Republican attorney, appears to me to be using a four-year-old child, fathered by Biden, as a political pawn in his representation of the mother, Lunden Alexis Roberts. Not for the first time, by the way.
Yes, they’ve established paternity, which Biden resisted. Yes, he should pay what the law says he should pay, factoring in his ability to pay. And, yes, if the child’s mother wishes to change her name to Biden, why not? It’s still the general custom, certainly in Arkansas, for a child to bear the father’s name.
But read the petition for the name change, with its fulsome description of how wonderful it is to be named Biden. There’s something that rings false in Lancaster’s prose styling. For example, the reasons he listed to support the name change include:
That the Biden name is now synonymous with being well educated, successful, financially acute, and politically powerful.
That this child’s father was a wildly successful businessman, acquiring seats on the board of a foreign corporation making a good salary, fundraising from overseas investors, working for large credit card companies, acting as a powerful lobbyist, and is now, apparently, a famous artist.
This is not exactly how Republicans of Lancaster’s stripe generally describe Biden father and son.
Lancaster argues a child of four is too young to have a preference on names. Really? When he states the Bidens are estranged from the child? When the four-year-olds of my acquaintance are well accustomed to names they’ve carried from birth? And the following statement is almost laughable in Arkansas, where social media attacks on the Biden family are common currency:
That the child will not experience any difficulty, harassment, or embarrassment by carrying the last name of Biden. Instead, it will open opportunities for her just like it has for other members of the Biden family
This sounds more like sarcasm to me than a plea to help a little girl.
Even more political, though, are Lancaster’s responses to the request for a change in child support. Here he digs into all the ongoing Republican wish list of questions likely to be front-and-center in the Republican-controlled House next year when it begins promised investigations of the president’s son. He talks of Biden’s income tax problems, references his “lavish lifestyle” and raises questions about the value of his art; whether he’s been a foreign agent; details of travels; benefits Biden may have received because his father is president, and financial support he may have received from a California lawyer.
Stipulated: Biden plunged into this briar patch by seeking a reduction in child support based on changed financial circumstances (the support agreement is under seal in the case). Lancaster is on some solid ground in objecting to the sweeping secrecy Biden’s attorney seeks on filings in the case. Some matters may be put under seal in domestic cases, but not everything. I’ve argued this in domestic cases myself. Lancaster perhaps should talk to some Republican judges who have extended total secrecy, including to the very existence of a pleading, to domestic cases in Faulkner County. Lancaster is at least getting his filings on the record in this case. And happy to do so.
But this is my bottom line question: Does Lancaster really think he’s acting in a child’s best interest in seeking, more than four years after her birth in August 2018, to give her the name of a man he appears to revile?
The post Politics in the Biden paternity case in Arkansas appeared first on Arkansas Times.
This morning, after a 30-minute drive from the Arkansas Times office, I arrived at the front door of the Cabot Fire Department Central Station, entirely lacking an emergency, with the express purpose of buying one of their calendars of scantily clad first responders. I was a little bashful when I pressed the doorbell, but I’d called in advance, and I really couldn’t imagine ordering online and then having to wait by the mailbox for my copy to be delivered. I needed to see these firemen now.
Apparently, I’m not alone. According to Chief Chad Moore (who is quick to say that the Cabot Firefighter Calendar Association is an entity independent from the department), about half of this year’s calendar sales (approaching 500 copies already!) have been from walk-ins, meaning that these novelty items are either hot or funny enough to justify the embarrassment of just showing up and forking over 25 dollars in exchange for unbridled visual access to Central Arkansan muscles.
Or perhaps it’s the charity cause that has people coming out in droves. Last year’s proceeds of roughly $20,000 funded extra workout equipment for the guys, but this time around, a portion of sales will be donated to Camp Sunshine, a four-day retreat for pediatric burn survivors.
The calendar is the brainchild of Engineer Logan Spry and Firefighter Ethan Evans, Mr. January and Mr. December, respectively. Aside from fundraising, the calendar has had either the intended or unexpected consequence of stirring up rivalry amongst the voluntarily participating firemen (about half the squad) over who can bulk up the most.
Let me be the first to tell you that the friendly competition has paid off. Whether you prefer the object of your salacious desire to be carrying a chainsaw, dangling from a firehose or more wholesomely smiling next to a Dalmatian, the calendar has you covered. Photographer Rebecca Williams does an excellent job of capturing slick veins you didn’t know even existed and isn’t afraid to stretch reality with a dash of oil or fiery photoshop.
Snag your copy here, or stop by the Cabot Fire Department Central Station (1000 S. 2nd St.) and cross your fingers for a hunky run-in.
The post Cabot firefighters issue playfully salacious calendar for a good cause appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Might harmony break out in Little Rock? This and other news of politics and crime. The line is open.
The post The mayor’s ‘reset’ leads today’s news roundup appeared first on Arkansas Times.
We’ve been hoping for a Christmas miracle for Charlie Vaughn, the demonstrably innocent inmate who remains trapped in Tucker Maximum Security Prison.
An intellectually disabled man who’s been behind bars for three decades for a crime someone else has now admitted to, Vaughn is stuck on a nonsensical legal technicality.
DNA evidence is on Vaughn’s side, but the governor, at least so far, is not. Asked about the possibility of setting Vaughn free before he leaves office next month, Governor Hutchinson sent this response by way of his communication director, Shealyn Sowers.
The Governor is required to give 30 days’ notice of his intent to grant clemency. Since there are fewer than 30 days remaining in the Governor’s term, he will not be issuing any further notices of intent. Any applications that are pending will be decided by Governor-elect Sanders according to whatever process she establishes to consider clemency applications.
Arkansas’s Huckabee family political dynasty met with misfortune in the past when it comes to restorative justice (see: Maurice Clemmons, Wayne Dumond), but those guys were actually guilty. With Vaughn, Governor-elect Sarah Huckabee Sanders won’t have to wonder if he’s been reformed, since he was never really a criminal in the first place.
“Despite strong evidence that his confession was coerced, and despite the fact that even the family of the victim wants him released, Vaughn remains in prison,” criminal justice watchdog and journalist Radley Balko wrote in his October 2022 piece, “The maddening irrelevance of Charlie Vaughn’s innocence.”
The Arkansas Times ran a slightly abridged version of the story in our November 2022 print issue. In short, a law that went into effect after Vaughn’s 1991 conviction limits prisoners to only one shot at federal review. And because Vaughn made a handwritten appeal for review in 1995, before the true culprit confessed, he’s doomed to waste away in prison unless laws change or someone powerful intervenes on his behalf.
The post Innocent man gets Scrooged, no Christmas pardon for Charlie Vaughn appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The weekly flu report from the Arkansas Department of Health is in, with another 1,300 influenza cases reported and a light downgrade to the state’s “alert” level, from “very high” to “high.” The report covers the week ending Saturday, Dec. 17. As ever, the reported cases represent only a portion of the actual cases in Arkansas. The school absenteeism rate changed only marginally since last week, as did the percentage of people reporting to emergency rooms with the flu.
For this, the fiftieth week of 2022, ADH reported a cumulative 17,200 positive influenza tests, up from a cumulative 15,900 as of Dec. 10. So far this flu season there have been 86 influenza-related deaths, including one pediatric death. Of these, 77%
were not vaccinated. That’s up from a cumulative 64 flu-related deaths as of last week’s report, and approaching three times the total number of flu-related deaths in 2021, which totaled 30.
“The flu should not be taken lightly,” said Dr. Joel Tumlison, medical director for immunizations at the ADH. “We are encouraging everyone to get a flu shot to protect themselves and their families. It is not too late to get your flu vaccine.”
It’s been incrementally better news on the flu front since a spike in mid-November, but with holiday gatherings in full swing, we’re looking at next week’s report with a wary eye. Stay safe out there. Need a flu shot? Check out some potential locations here.
The post Another 1,300 flu cases in this week’s report, with an additional 22 flu-related deaths appeared first on Arkansas Times.
My nominee for Secretary of @ArkansasEE will be Shane Khoury – an experienced leader in AR energy & environment policy.
Together, we will ensure our energy sector can continue to invest & diversify – creating opportunity, unleashing AR energy, & protecting our clean air & water. pic.twitter.com/nQXXmCRONe— Sarah Huckabee Sanders (@SarahHuckabee) December 21, 2022
Incoming Governor Sanders intends to replace another Hutchinson administration cabinet head.
Out is Becky Keogh (sister-in-law of former Republican Party chair Doyle Webb) as secretary of the Department of Energy and Environment. In is Shane Khoury. The department is one of Asa Hutchinson’s mashups, putting the Division of Environmental Quality, the Oil and Gas Commission, the Geological Survey, and several other small agencies under one umbrella.
Khoury has been chief counsel at the Division of Environmental Quality. A lawyer since 2004, he practiced in a firm in Conway before joining state government. Among other jobs, he’s been deputy director of the Oil and Gas Commission.
The post Sanders names Shane Khoury to lead Department of Energy and Environment appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The daily COVID-19 update from the Arkansas Department of Health.
Total cases: 980,122, up 840 from Tuesday
Active cases: 6,563, up from 6,272
Deaths: 12,672, an increase of five
Hospitalized: 295, down from 296
In ICU: 37, same as yesterday
On ventilators: 17, same as yesterday
The post COVID today: Five more deaths appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Mr. Cajun’s Kitchen celebrated its 3-year anniversary yesterday with an official ribbon cutting ceremony as it joined the North Little Rock Chamber of Commerce. The restaurant is just off the Main Street strip in a purple building at 606 N. Olive St. Les Bracely, aka Mr. Cajun, grew up in North Little Rock and attended culinary school at the Culinary Institute of New Orleans. He offers Cajun specials like blackened salmon, chicken or shrimp served over Cajun pasta, Cajun surf and turf over rice, seafood boils, New Orleans style catfish and a delectable spicy chicken sandwich.
Rhett BrinkleyPIPING HOTMr. Cajun's Kitchen
Mr. Cajun’s is open for lunch 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Tuesday-Friday and noon- 5 p.m. Saturday. It’s open for dinner from 4-7 p.m. Tuesday-Friday.
The post Mr. Cajun’s Kitchen joins North Little Rock Chamber of Commerce appeared first on Arkansas Times.
I’ll have more later, but this is unfortunate. Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott promised police reform. But after his first pick for LRPD chief, a reformer, was hounded out of office by the police union, Scott has appointed a longtime LRPD cop/insider. https://t.co/fjf9bNkm7B
— Radley Balko (@radleybalko) December 21, 2022
Radley Balko, an investigative reporter who’s written extensively about the Little Rock Police Department and other justice topics, including a recent Times cover story, offered a quick negative take on Twitonr of the choice of Heath Helton to be the permanent leader of the LRPD.
Balko defended the controversial former chief, Keith Humphrey, and wrote critically about the predominantly white Fraternal Order of Police union that was the source of great unhappiness with Humphrey.
Balko hasn’t stopped inspecting LRPD. Just today, he posted an article on his substack page (not currently available), in which he writes about depositions being taken by attorney Mike Laux in a lawsuit on behalf of people subjected to no-knock SWAT raids in drug investigations. Laux had recently asserted to me: That detectives have testified under oath in their out-of-court testimony to keeping evidence away from prosecutors and defense lawyers. The substack article also says the depositions indicate officers and confidential informants lied. (And Laux told me of poor vetting of confidential informants, so poor that they were in a position to get money from police and, at least theoretically, then set up innocent targets.)
More to come on that topic in days ahead.
Interesting, too, was where I found the Balko article. It was cited on the LinkedIn page of former chief Humphrey, who says he’s now a law enforcement consultant and co-host of You and the Law Podcast. From LinkedIn, his comment on the Balko article:
To one sympathetic commenter, Humphrey responded:
LR is the hub of segregation and extremism
Humphrey streams his podcast on Facebook at 6 p.m. Thursday.
His LinkedIn page says Humphrey has worked since he retired in May as an executive team leader for Asset Protection for Target stores.
I also asked for a comment today from retired Judge Marion Humphrey, a defender of the chief and the mayor during the FOP’s criticism, on the choice of Helton. I’d seen him and the mayor Friday, it happens, at a retirement event for Circuit Judge Wendell Griffen. The mayor said he was looking forward to a “reset” of his sometimes rocky relationship with the City Board and others now that he’s been re-elected. This maybe one of the first concrete steps in that direction, because Helton is a popular choice among some directors who’ve been at odds with the mayor.
Said Humphrey about the choice:
I think it is excellent because of the unity of the Fraternal Order of Police and the Black Police Officers Association. I believe that it represents Mayor Scott’s twin goals of having a safe city and of having a unified city.
The post Police chief choice draws a dissent. And a related comment from the former chief and one of his leading defenders appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Several years ago, an unassuming Little Rock apartment became the official home of a U.S. senator.
In signed paper filings, U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton and his wife switched their voting residence from a house in Dardanelle to a 905-square-foot unit near the bank of the Arkansas River. By that time, the couple had two sons and Cotton was a national political figure.
But since the address change in June 2019, it remains unclear exactly how much time Cotton spends in the state he represents, with social media posts and Senate financial reports offering an imprecise view of his travel.
Further, it’s unknown how much time the couple, whose two boys are ages 6 and 7, spend at their voting residence in Little Rock.
David Coffman, the senator’s next-door neighbor in Little Rock, told the Arkansas Times that he never sees anyone going in or out of Cotton’s unit.
“You’ll never see him,” Coffman said of Cotton.
Coffman, who bought his own apartment years ago and was able to describe other people on the same floor, said he’s seen Cotton around the complex a few times in the last three years.
The man said he met the senator for an introduction and handshake in the stairwell once. But Coffman said he hasn’t seen Cotton at the complex since the summer of 2021.
Cotton’s apartment is immediately adjacent to Coffman’s guest bedroom. The man said that sometimes he hears noises late at night, but never during the day.
He’s noticed multiple voices coming from the apartment at night as recently as early December, he said.
Cotton’s across-the-hall neighbor asked to remain anonymous because of concerns for her employment. The woman, who moved into her apartment in February 2021, said she has never seen anyone entering or leaving Cotton’s unit and did not think anyone lived there.
One time last year, she heard children in the apartment during a weekend, but thought that maybe the unit was functioning as an Airbnb, she told the Arkansas Times.
Meanwhile this summer, Cotton’s personal financial disclosure report listed a 30-year mortgage through a bank in McLean, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C. The mortgage was taken out last year. The mortgage ranges from $1 million to $5 million, according to the disclosure report. It’s unclear if the mortgage is for property in the D.C. area or elsewhere.
For his part, Cotton has acknowledged having a residence in the Washington, D.C., area.
“I’ve always had the home in Arkansas, obviously — first in Dardanelle, then in Little Rock. But since I was elected, like most members, I also have a residence in the D.C. area as well,” the senator said in an interview earlier this year.
Cotton’s office did not respond to media inquiries for this story and did not make the senator available for an interview.
News broke last month that the Republican senator would pass on a 2024 presidential run. Cotton pointed to family concerns, including that a campaign would pull him away from his sons, according to media reports.
“This is not the right time for our family for me to commit to a six-to-seven-day-a-week campaign for the next two years,” Cotton told Fox News.
Arkansas appearancesIt’s difficult to say precisely how much time Cotton has spent in Arkansas since changing his voting address to Little Rock.
When money from a senator’s office is used to pay for their travel, the trips are outlined in a report posted on the Senate’s website. The reports can offer a view into how often a politician journeys between Washington, D.C., and their home state.
For example, the reports show that U.S. Sen. John Boozman frequently travels to and from The Natural State, with his office paying for several dozen of his trips between Arkansas and Washington, D.C., each year in 2019, 2020 and 2021.
And for travel from January through September of this year, Boozman’s office has paid for at least 30 trips between Arkansas and Washington, D.C., according to available Senate reports.
Unlike his Republican counterpart, the reports from Cotton’s office show a different travel schedule. Cotton’s Senate office paid for zero of his trips between Arkansas and Washington, D.C., in 2021, three trips in 2020 and approximately 30 trips in 2019, according to the Senate reports.
And between January and September of this year, Cotton’s office paid for zero of his trips between Arkansas and Washington, D.C., according to available Senate reports.
His office did not respond to questions regarding if — or to what extent — the senator is using campaign funds to pay for his travel to Arkansas. The office also did not respond to questions regarding how much time the senator spends in Arkansas.
Unlike every other member of Arkansas’s congressional delegation, Cotton did not include his city of residence in the biography on his congressional website as of Dec. 20. No city of residence appears in the biography on his campaign website as well.
All four of Arkansas’s U.S. House members have said they regularly travel back to the state.
In recent history, it’s become the norm for congressional lawmakers to try and spend as little time as possible in Washington, D.C., said Casey Burgat, director of the Legislative Affairs program at the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University
With six-year terms, U.S. senators are more likely to develop stronger roots in Washington, D.C. compared to their counterparts with two-year terms in the lower chamber, Burgat said.
Still, the expectation is that senators live in their home state and travel there as much as possible, he said.
When Congress is not in session, the expectation is that “you’re back in your district or state meeting and working with local constituencies,” he said.
Social media posts provide some insight into how often Cotton is in Arkansas, like when the senator attended a March for Life rally in Little Rock or posed outside a crime lab in Arkansas.
In particular, Cotton’s Twitter and Facebook accounts are used to share pictures of meetings and appearances in Arkansas. But those accounts can go many weeks without posting pictures that confirm his presence in the state.
State Sen. Clarke Tucker (D-Little Rock) said there is speculation about the amount of time the senator spends on the ground in the state. In particular, he pointed to a July post from Cotton’s Twitter account.
“One of the many reasons I’m happy to be back in Iowa — Casey’s pizza!” read the tweet, which featured a picture of Cotton with pizza outside a Casey’s general store.
“To me, anyone who has campaigned in Arkansas ought to know that there are plenty of Casey’s general stores in Arkansas with that pizza available,” said Tucker, who ran for Arkansas’s 2nd Congressional District in 2018. “So you know, when something like that happens, it really fuels the speculation that he may not be spending a whole lot of time here.”
In the past, critics of Cotton have seized on the topic in attacking the junior senator from Arkansas.
But any speculation about his time in the state has not appeared to hurt him at the ballot box. Cotton earned a second Senate term in 2020, winning more than 66% of the vote.
Eddie Arnold, the chairman of the Clark County Republican Committee, said Cotton is a high-profile politician who has two younger children. The senator can’t be expected to be everywhere at once, he argued.
Cotton holds a busy schedule, he said, and should be spending a significant amount of time in Washington, D.C., where he can represent conservative Arkansas values in Congress. Arnold said he’s never heard any Republicans carp about the senator not being available.
“I’ve never heard anyone complain about that,” said Arnold, who also serves as the 4th Congressional District chair for the Republican Party of Arkansas.
Arnold also said he saw Cotton in October when the senator spoke in person in Arkadelphia at a Lincoln Day Dinner.
“I’ve heard a lot of political speeches, and I think the speech that he gave that night was the most powerful,” he said.
Ties to VirginiaThe bank in Virginia is not the only connection the senator and his wife, Anna, have to the Washington, D.C., suburb of McLean, Virginia.
In at least three signed absentee ballot applications, Anna Cotton has requested that her ballot be sent to a U.S. Postal Service office in McLean, according to records obtained through the Pulaski County Circuit and County Clerk’s office.
On those application forms, the Little Rock apartment is listed as Anna Cotton’s voting residence, but she attested that she would be unavoidably absent from her polling site on those Election Days. For at least one election, the senator has requested that an absentee ballot be sent to the same U.S. Postal Service office location in McLean, according to a record obtained through the Pulaski County Circuit and County Clerk’s office.
Anna Cotton has often voted absentee in Arkansas, according to the Arkansas secretary of state’s office.
In Arkansas, Anna Cotton has voted absentee 11 times since 2016, according to a voting history report from the secretary of state’s office.
The last time she voted in person in Arkansas came more than eight years ago in the November 2014 general election, when her husband challenged Democrat Mark Pryor for the U.S. Senate seat, according to the report.
Attempts to reach Anna Cotton for this story were unsuccessful. Media inquiries sent to an email associated with her name were not returned.
Anna Cotton also has professional ties to McLean.
She is listed as a lawyer in at least four different states: New York, Minnesota, Wyoming and Montana. On a Minnesota lawyer database, the listed address for Anna Cotton is a U.S. Postal Service office in McLean — the same location recorded on her absentee ballot applications.
Lawyer databases from the Wyoming State Bar and the State Bar of Montana also associated Anna Cotton with McLean.
Anna Cotton is a former federal prosecutor and is the founder of SLG Solutions, according to an online biography.
The listed principal office address for SLG Solutions, LLC is a U.S. Postal Service office in McLean — the same location listed on Anna Cotton’s absentee ballot applications, according to Virginia’s State Corporation Commission.
Anna Cotton’s biography says she has worked as the deputy general counsel of the National Reconnaissance Office and worked as assistant general counsel at the Central Intelligence Agency.
Anna Cotton is part of the board of directors at ClearForce, according to their website. ClearForce is a “people risk management company,” according to the website, and lists an address in Vienna, Virginia.
Daniel Grear and Mary Hennigan contributed reporting.
The post Tom Cotton doesn’t live here appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Attorneys for Richard “Bigo” Barnett, the Gravette man who goes on trial next month over the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, are objecting to asking jurors about their views on QAnon, a far-right movement known for spreading conspiracy theories.
In a long list of proposed questions to ask prospective jurors, the federal prosecutor’s office in Washington suggested these two: “Do you consider yourself a supporter of QAnon or believe in the theories advanced by its supporters? … Do you have an opinion about QAnon believers or supporters that would make it hard for you to serve as a fair and impartial juror in this case?”
In its response Tuesday, defense attorneys wrote: “Defense strongly objects to Government’s [questions] … that refer to ‘QAnon.’ Questions referencing one type of political belief open the door to infinity inquiries about how potential jurors feel about Donald Trump and/or Joe Biden, etc. If questions about ‘QAnon’ are allowed, Defense requests that the jury also be asked ‘Do you consider yourself a supporter of Black Lives Matter and believe in the theories advanced by its supporters?”
Richard “Bigo” Barnett of Gravette.
The problem is that Black Lives Matter and QAnon are in no way comparable. Black lives do matter. Demonstrably false internet conspiracy theories do not.
Here’s a September 2021 New York Times explainer on QAnon:
QAnon is the umbrella term for a set of internet conspiracy theories that allege, falsely, that the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles.
QAnon followers believe that this cabal includes top Democrats like President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and George Soros, as well as a number of entertainers and Hollywood celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Tom Hanks and Ellen DeGeneres and religious figures including Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama. Many of them also believe that, in addition to molesting children, members of this group kill and eat their victims to extract a life-extending chemical called adrenochrome.
According to QAnon lore, former President Donald J. Trump was recruited by top military generals to run for president in 2016 to break up this criminal conspiracy and bring its members to justice. Many of these cabal members will soon be arrested, the theory goes, and some will be imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay, while others will face military tribunals and be executed.
Barnett’s trial starts Jan. 9 in U.S. District Court in Washington. He’s the man who was photographed with his feet propped up on the furniture in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Capitol office.
Barnett, who is under home detention, is charged with obstruction of an official proceeding; aiding and abetting; entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds with a deadly or dangerous weapon; disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds with a deadly or dangerous weapon; entering and remaining in certain rooms in the Capitol building; disorderly conduct in a Capitol Building; parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol Building; and theft of government property.
The post Defense team for Capitol rioter Bigo Barnett objects to QAnon questions appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A permanent chief at the Little Rock Police Department has been a long time coming, and Mayor Frank Scott Jr. finally announced Wednesday that Heath Helton would serve as the new leader.
With the onset of inclement weather that could cause emergencies, Scott said that the decision to promote Helton from interim chief to permanent chief was made Wednesday morning. Helton said he’s still soaking in the shock of the announcement.
“There’s a lot of complex issues, a lot of things that have to be dealt with and addressed over the course of what we’re doing and as we go forward,” Helton said. “But it’s also an exciting time because where there are challenges, I see opportunity.”
The nationwide search for a police chief attracted nearly four dozen applications. Scott said that he wanted to be deliberate and intentional in the choice, and he acknowledged his past unfulfilled commitments to name a chief earlier. He said the choice for leadership should always be the person who is most qualified, and Helton showed a “quilt of work over the past three decades of excellence, the ability to focus not only on operation excellence, but the ability to build relationships across this entire city.”
Scott said the Fraternal Order of Police and the Black Police Officers Association requested a private meeting last week where they expressed their combined support of Helton’s leadership.
“Anytime that you have the FOP and the BPOA all on one accord, that’s a good thing,” Scott said. “It’s a demonstration of our mission to be truly unified as a city — to truly grow as a city.”
Brian ChilsonDELIBERATE AND INTENTIONAL: The search for a police chief reached nationwide, but ultimately an officer within the LRPD was chosen.Helton said he would tackle the role as chief with a data-driven approach and embrace the pillars of 21st century policing. He noted the Real Time Crime Center and the YourLRPD app as both new developments to combat crime. He thanked God, his parents, and his wife, Carmen Helton, who is a sergeant with the North Little Rock Police Department.
The 2022 homicide count in Little Rock is the highest in history, but Scott said Wednesday that overall violent crime decreased about 8% from last year. He said that the public “still may not feel safe, so we want to be very cognizant of that and demonstrate one, stability and consistency, and two, to show and share what the police department is doing to protect them and keep them safe.”
Helton said recent acts of violence are “senseless, and they’re just cowardly the way they’re being done.” He said his first move as the chief would be to communicate with the rank and file of the police department to hear their ideas.
Helton is the first permanent police chief to follow Keith Humphrey, who left in May. Crystal Young-Haskins, a former assistant chief with the LRPD, stood as interim after Humphrey. Wayne Bewley took over the position after she left.
The city’s Board of Directors approved the 2023 budget at its Tuesday meeting, which increased police salaries up to 12% for some officers. Entry-level positions will start at $50,000 instead of $44,000, according to the budget. Helton will be paid $150,000 a year.
Scott said the board was alerted of the decision to name Helton the police chief at around 9:40 a.m. Wednesday. The press conference was held at 11:15 a.m., and two board members — BJ Wyrick and Virgil Miller — were present. Incoming Ward 6 Director Andrea Lewis was also present.
The post Heath Helton named permanent Little Rock police chief appeared first on Arkansas Times.
BREAKING: WEHCO Media Inc., parent company of the Democrat-Gazette, will remain in the hands of family leadership with the announcement Tuesday that Executive Editor Eliza Hussman Gaines will become the next publisher on Jan. 1. » https://t.co/WhcKVEjm8L
— AR Democrat-Gazette (@ArkansasOnline) December 20, 2022
The post Walter Hussman’s daughter to succeed him as publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Reporter Evie Blad, formerly of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and now writing for Education Week, has a great story out that delves more deeply into a school safety training gone absolutely off the rails.
Blad’s piece examines the recent debacle at Prairie Grove School District, where administrators tried to scare teachers straight about the dangers of school shootings by ambushing them with a mocked-up video of staff members and their families becoming the victims of a Sandy Hook-like massacre. Blad talked to experts who noted that this tactic of scaring the pants off teachers is common but ineffective.
The Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette obtained a copy of the now infamous Prairie Grove video that you can watch below, but names and faces are blurred.
The Prairie Grove teachers were surprised by the video during what they thought would be a run-of-the-mill staff meeting. They reportedly reacted with a broad spectrum of negative emotions, including shock, rage and disbelief. The superintendent announced her retirement that same week amid all the fallout, and the middle school principal is reportedly on administrative leave.
Be sure to read Blad’s story, which is only behind a paywall if you’ve already read your allotted number of free Education Week stories this month. (And if you’ve done that, you should probably pony up for a subscription, anyway.)
Training teachers to respond to school shootings is an insane concept to begin with — don’t they already have enough to do? — and Arkansas has kept it off the chain for years. On top of academics and classroom management, Arkansas teachers are now also expected to be able to barricade their students in bulletproof storm shelters, or teach them how to stay “quiet as a mouse, still as a house” as they practice what to do if they’re attacked by armed intruders.
The mentality that it’s a teacher’s burden and responsibility to safeguard the lives of their students is not unique to Prairie Grove. Governor Hutchinson led the NRA’s post-Sandy Hook efforts in 2013 to advocate for putting more guns on school campuses. He carried that torch throughout his tenure in the governor’s office, during which the state’s gun violence problem only grew worse.
One of the governor’s nephews, former state Sen. Jeremy Hutchinson, also took up the banner for putting more guns in schools, but inadvertently capped a police officer with a rubber bullet during a school shooting simulation. Amazingly, this in no way dissuaded the Hutchinson family or other Arkansas Republicans from pushing for guns on every campus, even as evidence accrued that guns in schools do nothing to stave off shootings and can create a hostile, dangerous, school-to-prison pipeline scenario for students of color.
Hutchinson’s Arkansas School Safety Commission picked up the same reactionary thread when it launched in 2018 after the deadly school shooting in Parkland, Florida. The commission reconvened this year after a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas. The commission’s 2022 report calls for hardening schools’ defenses with things like bulletproof glass, metal detectors and crash bars to protect main entrances from A-Team-style attacks. The commission helped convince the legislature to allocate $50 million this summer to help cover costs for these extra measures.
Beyond the commission’s purview, however, is the cheap and easy access to firearms that makes school shootings in the United States such a scourge.
The post Lesson from Prairie Grove: Terrorizing teachers might not be the best way to stop school shootings appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Tab Townsell announced today that he is resigning as executive director from the regional planning organization Metroplan and plans to pursue another line of work.
Metroplan, the federally designated Metropolitan Planning Organization for Central Arkansas, decides long-term transportation needs and priorities for federal funding for the region. Metroplan serves Pulaski, Saline, Faulkner, Lonoke and Grant counties.
Townsell, who was executive director for six years and two months, told the Arkansas Times that he plans to seek another line of work but isn’t certain what that will be.
“I’m not retiring,” Townsell, 61. “It’s a good time for me to look at other purposes in life.”
Casey Covington, now deputy director, will serve as interim executive director, effective immediately. Townsell’s resignation doesn’t take effect until Feb. 28, but he said he will be out of the office and taking accumulated leave for most of his remaining time at Metroplan.
Townsell was previously mayor of Conway for 18 years. His wife, Mary Jo Heye-Townsell, was recently elected mayor of Sherwood.
In his letter to the agency’s board, Townsell wrote, “Together, we have done good work, culminating in the approval of the Central Arkansas Regional Greenways system map. Getting this regional greenways network built will be the great work of Metroplan for the next decade and beyond. To that work, it is time for new leadership and new passions.
“However, personally and professionally, it is time for me to seek new opportunities and new endeavors,” he added.
Here is a separate letter Townsell sent to Metroplan’s officers.
The post Townsell leaving Metroplan; interim successor named appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Severe weather panic around the around the office usually ends with one of my editors asking me to phone KATV-Channel 7 meteorologist Todd Yakoubian with their concerns. Yakoubian, who I rudely interrupted while preparing for Christmas, took my call today despite being in his attic doing his best Clark Griswold impression.
I asked him about the significance of Thursday’s forecasted temperature drop.
“It’s very rare that you will see a drastic temperature drop in such a short period of time, Yakoubian said.
Yakoubian expects the temperature in Little Rock on Thursday to drop from the 40s to the teens within three hours. In Fayetteville the temperature is expected to drop from 20 degrees at 9 a.m. to 5 degrees by 2 p.m. Windchill temperatures Thursday evening will be below freezing for most of the state. Friday morning the windchill in in Little Rock is expected to be 10 degrees below zero and in Fayetteville as much as 22 degrees below freezing. Yakoubian gives a detailed analysis here on his Facebook page.
KATVNORMAL weather at 2 p.m. in Central Arkansas. | KATVARCTIC PLUNGE: From the 40s to the teens in a matter of hours.But despite the brutal arctic plunge, Yakoubian said a white Christmas in Central Arkansas is unlikely. Any snow on the ground would be leftover from Thursday afternoon and evening, and if we get any here, he expects it to be a dusting at most. “I think the best chance for accumulating snow will be the northern quarter for one-third of the state,” he said. At the same time, he said it’s unusual for Central Arkansas to get into the single digits without snow cover.
We’ve seen weather events like this before in Central Arkansas, he said, but it’s been a long time.
“There was a more extreme temperature drop Jan. 19 and 20, 1985, when we it was 60 degrees on 2 p.m. on the 19th and early the morning the next day it was two degrees below zero,” Yakoubian said. “This is not as extreme, but this is going to be one of those rare events.”
Yakoubian wants people to remember the four Ps.
Minor to limited winter weather impacts Thursday for northern Arkansas. Biggest weather hazard will be the extreme cold. 4 P’s
People
Pets
Pipes
Ponds (thin layer of ice likely. Tell your kids to stay off of them). #ARWX pic.twitter.com/SLbwhb3C5d— Todd Yakoubian (@KATVToddYak) December 20, 2022
My colleague Mary Hennigan reported today that preparations are being made for people who need shelter from the elements. Starting Thursday at 5 p.m., the East Little Rock Community Center on 6th Street will act as an emergency shelter for those who need it.
Yakoubian said on his Facebook update that he expects the temperature to go above freezing Christmas Day, but it will still be very cold. “A huge change from last year when we were in the upper 70s setting record highs,” he said.
The post Rare arctic plunge: A Christmas week weather report with help from KATV-Channel 7 meteorologist Todd Yakoubian appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The insurrection figures in today’s news roundup in a couple of ways. The line is open.
The post Jan. 6 still making news appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Volume 24 of the Oxford American’s annual music issue — a country-heavy undertaking that closes out the magazine’s 30th anniversary — is officially on newsstands as of last week. Feature stories cover how country music shaped hip hop, the legacy of Tanya Tucker, Buddy Harman’s influence on country drumming, the truthfulness (or lack thereof) of stories orbiting around Hank Williams and a shocking discovery made through late 19th century newspaper articles from East Texas. Some of the most recognizable contributors in Issue 119 are Imani Perry (a National Book Award finalist) and John Jeremiah Sullivan (a National Magazine Award winner).
Other musical subjects scattered throughout the magazine include Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris, Dolly Parton, Tracy Chapman, Patsy Cline, Olivia Newton-John, Orville Peck, Johnny Paycheck, Solange and others. As always, the issue comes with a free bonus CD compilation. It’s available for purchase here.
The post Oxford American’s annual music issue digs up country roots appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The daily COVID-19 update from the Arkansas Department of Health.
Total cases: 979,282, up 781 from Monday
Active cases: 6,272, up from 6,168
Deaths: 12,667, an increase of four
Hospitalized: 295, up from 279
In ICU: 37, down from 43
On ventilators: 17, same as yesterday
The post COVID today: Another jump in hospitalizations appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Governor-elect Sarah Sanders announced a couple more staff members today.
Her communications director will be Alexa Henning, who’s been deputy chief of staff and spokesperson for Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson. She’s also worked for Ted Cruz. And the cherry on top: “She was Director of Media Affairs for the Donald J. Trump for President Campaign in 2020 and the former White House Director of Broadcast Media for President Trump.”
Mary Ashleigh Harper will be the Governor’s Mansion administrator. She’s recently been an education coordinator at UAMS. The Hamburg native also has previous experience as coordinator of the first lady in Governor Hutchinson’s office.
The post Sanders adds a couple more staff members appeared first on Arkansas Times.
It’s about to get seriously cold in Arkansas. The National Weather Service is forecasting temperatures as low as 6 degrees in Little Rock early Friday with a windchill plunging down to -13 degrees. While some will be cozying up near a Christmas tree over the weekend, a vulnerable homelessness population will be searching for warmth.
Aaron Reddin, founder of the homelessness assistance organization The Van, said he’s been working closely with the city of Little Rock to organize a shelter for when the extreme weather hits. Starting Thursday at 5 p.m., the East Little Rock Community Center on 6th Street will act as an emergency shelter for those who need it.
As a true emergency shelter, the bare necessities will be provided to folks, Reddin said. “I’ll take my naps on the floor with everybody else,” he said. “We’ve got sleeping mats, blankets, food and a jolly good time together.”
Reddin and his team prepared all pieces of this puzzle to fit together for a smooth operation. At least two members from The Van will oversee the shelter at all times. In addition, two Little Rock Police Department officers, Parks and Recreation staff and members from the city’s Emergency Management team will be present as well.
“All of us need to make preparations now for bitterly cold weather with below-zero wind chill temperatures,” Mayor Frank Scott Jr. said in a press release Tuesday. “Our shelter at East Little Rock Community Center will be open starting Thursday for residents who are unsheltered or in emergency need of a warm place to stay. I appreciate the work of The Van, City staff and our other community partners who will help us ensure safety and warmth for our residents during this winter weather event.”
City Spokesperson Aaron Sadler said that no other emergency shelters are scheduled to be open in Little Rock this weekend. So The Van has a backup plan.
“We will not turn anyone away, so we do have plans for an overflow if it happens,” Reddin said.
Mary HenniganNIGHTLY DISTRIBUTION: Drivers take supplies out every night to people in need.Transportation to the shelter is free and will be organized through a dispatched caller, a driver with The Van and one from the Park Hill Christian Church in North Little Rock. People in need can call 501-955-344 and a driver will pick them up. Pets are allowed at the shelter, too. The Van’s volunteers will also spread the word over the next few days while on their nightly routes distributing socks, gloves, coats and blankets.
The shelter will be open for as long as the weather stays below 25 degrees with dry weather or 32 degrees for wet weather. Reddin also said the shelter won’t close right away when temperatures climb above these trigger points. Shelter operators will make sure the higher temperatures will be sustained before shutting down. Reddin is also working with the city to organize a plan for what to do if the shelter closes but needs to be opened back up a few days later.
Reddin said working at the shelter at Christmas time is “not so much a [personal] sacrifice because we know so many of these folks — we spend so much time getting to know them. We try to celebrate and make the best of things.”
The Van’s warehouse was well supplied with cold-weather clothing, but Reddin said the stock will get used up pretty quickly. He said one thing they’re hurting for right now are large sizes of thin layering jackets. He also just put a bulk order in for 900 blankets that should arrive next week.
Mary HenniganWAREHOUSE is stocked full, but the cold-weather clothing will go fast.Community members and businesses supply The Van with many donations, though Reddin and his team said they don’t really know the individuals who donate. Most things come clean, and they’re washed before distribution if not. Nearly all of the funding for the organization comes from private donations, Reddin said.
Reddin doesn’t track the exact number of people he and The Van volunteers have served, but he knows it’s a lot.
“It’s just a matter of meeting immediate needs as immediately as possible,” he said.
The post The Van preps an emergency shelter for below-freezing temps appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The fourth arrest: https://t.co/up5lDxI5RT
— Ryan J. Reilly (@ryanjreilly) December 20, 2022
Multiple arrests were announced today as the FBI continues charging participants in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, including that of a Madison County man, Brennen Machacek, 32. Identified by someone with whom he served in the military, he faces four charges:
*Knowingly Entering or Remaining in any Restricted Building or Grounds
Without Lawful Authority
*Disorderly and Disruptive Conduct in a Restricted Building
*Violent Entry and Disorderly Conduct on Capitol Grounds
*Parading, Demonstrating, or Picketing in a Capitol Building.
The charges were filed last week under seal and unsealed today after he was arrested Monday in Fayetteville. It’s not immediately clear if he’s currently in custody.
INSIDE CAPITOL: Brennen Machacek
Here’s the government’s statement of facts against Machacek by a Little Rock FBI agent. It includes photos taken inside the Capitol that identify him among the rioters.
It said a tipster who served with Machacek in the military beginning in 2010 identified him from a public video of the event. He also provided a Facebook post, seemingly by Machacek, that indicated he’d been inside the building. Cell phone records put his phone inside the Capitol on Jan. 6. Those phone records showed him with addresses in Hindsville and also Wesley, 11 miles away.
The tipster said he’d seen a video of police escorting Machacek out of the building. A Facebook post under a corrupted version of his name said this:
Capitol cameras caught Machacek in the crowd surging inside.
He’s the fifth Arkansan named in charges stemming from the Capitol riot. Jon Mott of Flippin pleaded guilty to a single count of parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building. He’s free awaiting sentencing. Robert Snow of Heber Springs was sentenced to probation for a plea bargain to one count of parading in the Capitol. Peter Stager of Conway, accused of striking a police officer, has reached a plea deal with the government. A hearing is set for Feb. 16. Richard Barnett of Gravette, who took a stun gun to the Capitol and preened in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, is to go to trial on Jan. 9.
The post Another Arkansan charged in Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection appeared first on Arkansas Times.
You’ve seen that over-the-top TikTok video where several men playing marching snare drums literally fly over the pews at a megachurch in Texas, right? What if I told you that almost-as-impressive antics are available to you at an Arkansan place of worship? Here are the three most flamboyant options we could find:
Cross Church Christmas service, 2021.
Cross Church in Rogers
There’s no information so far about what’s on deck for this year’s services at the formerly Ronnie Floyd-headed church conglomerate, but the livestream from 2021 clued me into what you might be able to expect. Some of the highlights from last year include a face-melting, tap-heavy solo from a long-haired and bushy-bearded guitarist standing in front of a cluster of mirrored disco balls; huge, wood-barreled drums beaten with thick rod-like sticks to the melody of “Little Drummer Boy”; and five intricately coordinated women dancing behind a rockstar-looking frontman with a tight-fitting red suit and a gold chain singing a fairly swaggery version of “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.” Believe it or not, this isn’t even scratching the surface. Services take place at the Pinnacle Hills campus in Rogers at 7 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 23, and at 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 24.
Cross Church Christmas service, 2021.
Brand New Church
Brand New Church has locations in Harrison, Farmington and Calico Rock, but they’re hosting a free extravaganza called Christmas at Barnhill in the arena of the same name in Fayetteville. Danny Gokey — the third-place finalist from the eighth season of American Idol — is the evening’s special guest. The video preview promises much slow-falling fake snow, many adoring audience members with their smartphones aglow like lighters and a swath of hip musicians on stage, but the biggest selling point is the marketing gimmick aimed at bringing people out — the first 50 kids in line will receive a free Nintendo Switch. Ages 3-18, one per family. If you find yourself reading that line over and over, I’m right there with you. Who’s funding this? Why? Is the evangelical message they’re hawking that important? Find out for yourself at 6:30 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 23.
Pulaski Heights United Methodist Church
Pulaski Heights United Methodist Church in Little Rock offers six Christmas Eve options, but the one you should pay attention to is the 4 p.m. Family Service, which will feature “live animals, glow sticks, costumes, and more!” I have no idea how the glow sticks factor in, but I need to know, especially if the animals are wielding them. According to FOX16, a donkey, camel and “other animals” made an appearance last year. Why they thought it was OK to leave the question of which additional creatures will be present ambiguous is anyone’s guess.
The post Where to go for fantastical Christmas church services (and door prizes!) appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Richard “Bigo” Barnett, the Gravette man who propped his feet up on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi‘s furniture during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, did some serious shopping before the riot, federal court records show.
One week before the riots at the U.S. Capitol, Barnett bought pepper spray, two-way radios and a hiking stick that features a stun gun at Bass Pro Shops in Rogers. Total cost on that stop alone: $189.94.
Barnett didn’t stay in any Motel 6 either when he was in Washington. He spent the night of Jan. 5, 2021, at Hyatt House / Washington, The Wharf. His total bill there, including a few beers and food, came to $289. 77.
This information and more appears in documents filed Monday by the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington as Barnett nears his Jan. 9 trial date in U.S. District Court.
Barnett is charged with obstruction of an official proceeding; aiding and abetting; entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds with a deadly or dangerous weapon; disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds with a deadly or dangerous weapon; entering and remaining in certain rooms in the Capitol building; disorderly conduct in a Capitol Building; parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol Building; and theft of government property.
Barnett is under home detention while he awaits trial.
The post Barnett bought stun gun and more shortly before Capitol insurrection appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Six children at a Jonesboro elementary school ingested marijuana gummies Friday and were taken to local hospitals for evaluation, according to a report from the Jonesboro Police Department.
A 6-year-old took the gummies to school and handed them out to classmates at Math and Science Magnet School before a “panicked” parent called the police, according to the police report.
The report describes the incident as “endangering the welfare of a minor – 1st degree,” which is a felony. The investigation has been assigned to the 2nd Judicial Drug Task Force, according to Sally Smith, spokeswoman for the Jonesboro Police Department.
At about 11:50 a.m. Friday, a school resource officer at International Studies Magnet School responded to a call at Math and Science Magnet School where he said “several first-graders had ingested marijuana gummies,” according to the report.
The responding officer, Gary Jackson, said dispatch had received a call from a “panicked complainant,” listed as Clarissa Lopez, who said she was taking her daughter to the hospital. When Jackson arrived at the Math and Science school, he was advised that the parents of the six children involved had been contacted. He said those parents “had already picked their children up from the school and taken them to local hospitals to be evaluated.”
A photo provided by a parent to KAIT TV in Jonesboro showed packages of “Dank Gummies” and “Stoner Patch Dummies” that say they were produced in California. Each package says it contains 500 mg of THC and one says it contains 50 mg THC doses, which would be above the 10 mg maximum dose in Arkansas. One package also includes graphics of marijuana leaves, which is also not allowed in Arkansas.
“Based on the photos shared by parents, the product that initiated this situation would certainly not be a product offered by an Arkansas dispensary,” said Scott Hardin, spokesman for the state Medical Marijuana Commission and Alcoholic Beverage Control Division. “It clearly resembles candy marketed to children and is not in an appropriate container. Under Amendment 98 and the associated rules, product sold in Arkansas is not mistaken as commercially available candy.”
Mitchell Nail, a spokesman for St. Bernard’s Healthcare in Jonesboro, said “a couple” of the students were taken to his hospital and released the same day. A spokesman for NEA Baptist has not returned a request for information on patients who may have been treated there.
Attempts to reach Jonesboro Superintendent Dr. Kim Wilbanks or a spokesperson for the school district were unsuccessful. The district’s winter break began Monday.
The police report lists three suspects, all females aged 26, 67 and 70. While the report says six children ingested the gummies, it lists eight victims between the ages of three and seven.
The post Jonesboro first-graders ingest marijuana gummies, taken to local hospitals, police report says appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Little Rock officials and staff with the housing revitalization group Gorman and Company hurled sledgehammers through drywall to launch a $26 million reconstruction project at the Sunset Terrace Apartments on Battery Street.
In partnership with the Metropolitan Housing Authority and the Central Arkansas Housing Corporation, the team dreamed up a plan to transform the 74 Sunset Terrace units, which were built in 1942 when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president, Gorman CEO Brian Swanton said.
Mary HenniganGORMAN AND COMPANY CEO Brian Swanton announces construction plans.Swanton said the private public partnership project is a “complete gut rehab that will look like new construction when we’re all done. We’re putting small additions on many of the units, new roofs, new walls. We’re ripping these buildings down to the studs. New plumbing, new flooring, new fixtures, new everything.”
The project has been in the planning stage for the last 11 years, and Swanton said he stepped in as the lead about four years ago. Many in attendance at the sledgehammering event Friday were apartment staff, and they cheered in excitement for the development. Swanton said that though the buildings will be remodeled, the historic integrity will remain, and green space will continue to surround the units.
“This is the launch of a new start to this entire neighborhood,” he said. Details about future rent prices and plans for affordable housing were not presented Friday.
Mayor Frank Scott Jr., Interim Police Chief Heath Helton, Housing Commissioner Leta Anthony and others made remarks.
Mary HenniganNOT A GROUNDBREAKING: Officials ditched the shovels for sledgehammers.“We have the opportunity to continue to transform our neighborhoods here in the city of Little Rock, particularly those — and I’ll be very frank — that have been historically forgotten and neglected,” Scott said.
Scott said the Sunset Terrace revitalization effort is an opportunity to provide quality affordable housing while also dismantling barriers. Knocking down the drywall also acted as a symbol for “more opportunities, ensuring that every resident has the opportunity to participate in the city of Little Rock’s growth. This is a shining example,” Scott said.
Anthony called on Swanton to recruit a diverse group of contractors for the project. All are local, and nearly half are minority led. Anthony called the project “a labor of love” to provide affordable, safe and healthy housing.
Mary HenniganBREAKING BARRIERS: Mayor Frank Scott Jr. and Housing Commissioner Leta Anthony prepare to bust the drywall.Helton recalled his early policing days when he worked downtown and around the Sunset Terrace apartments. “I think this is a great opportunity that obviously produced new life and new hope for the future of this community… . I can tell you the police department is very supportive of this project. We will do everything we can to support it along the way.”
William Towns, Gorman’s national market president, said the work was about more than the bricks and sticks, but how the community would be improved. “Housing is where our future sleeps — where our kids are,” Towns said. “This is really the beginning of a transformational process that will allow individuals to better see their future and reach their full potential.”
A push for affordable housing has been gaining ground at the city level. In the last few months, the Board of Directors approved the purchase of several lots in Little Rock’s Ward 6 for affordable housing developments.
Anthony said a similar renovation project will come soon to Madison Heights Apartments near 12th Street.
The post A smashing start to a Little Rock housing revitalization project appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Art has an oddly paradoxical relationship with constraints. Give yourself something you’re not allowed to do, and suddenly a world of possibilities opens up. Such is the logic behind Small Works on Paper, a touring visual art exhibition by the Arkansas Arts Council that features pieces no larger than 18 inches by 24 inches. All members of the Arkansas Artist Registry — a free service that catalogs contact info, website links and a small portfolio of images for each artist — were invited to submit their work for consideration in the 36th annual show.
The 2023 exhibition will open on Wednesday, Jan. 4, at the South Arkansas Arts Center. The exhibition will travel to eight other Arkansas venues throughout the year.
An opening reception and artist talk will take place from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 21, at the South Arkansas Arts Center in El Dorado. Of the roughly 275 submissions, 40 pieces by 27 artists were selected by out-of-state juror Margaret LeJeune, a photography professor at Bradley University (apologies for the recent basketball loss to the Razorbacks!).
Find the venue schedule here, including stops in El Dorado, Batesville, Fayetteville, Mena, Pine Bluff, Helena, Little Rock, Russelville and Fort Smith.
Artists selected for the exhibit:
- Tony Baker, Little Rock
- Judith Beale, Jacksonville
- Dustyn Bork, Batesville
- Maria Botti Villegas, El Dorado
- Barbara Cade, Hot Springs
- Gary Cawood, Little Rock
- Terra Fondriest, St. Joe
- Diana Harper, Little Rock
- Neal Harrington, Russellville
- Carol Hart, Fayetteville
- Leigh Jacobs, Little Rock
- Ekaterina Kouznetsova, Bentonville
- Rhaelene Lowther, Magnolia
- Mandy Mooneyham, Paragould
- Jennifer O’Brien, Little Rock
- Rashawn Penister, Pine Bluff
- David Rackley, Russellville
- Tom Richard, Monticello
- Sabine Schmidt, Fayetteville
- Suzannah Schreckhise, Fayetteville
- Trevor Segraves, Siloam Springs
- Dominique Simmons, Little Rock
- Gary Simmons, Hot Springs
- Adrienne Thompson, Little Rock
- Marcus Vasquez, North Little Rock
- Jan Waldon, Bentonville
- Anna Zusman, Magnolia
The post Arkansas Arts Council announces 36th annual Small Works on Paper appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The news summary sticks to Arkansas where official news has grown quiet following a burst of violence and two law enforcement deaths in recent days. The line is open.
The Jan. 6 report will provide endless fodder.
The post All’s quiet (except in Washington) as Christmas week begins appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The Jan. 6 committee issued its report today on the many transgressions of Donald Trump — a “road map to justice” that urges the Justice Department to prosecute him on four charges, including encouraging an insurrection.
Expect the usual yammering from the man accused of being the central cause of the insurrection and from his claque of supporters, probably including the Arkansas congressional delegation. Time to move on, see. Jan.6 was just a little free speech by those fine people beating police officers and shitting, literally, on the U.S. Capitol after a Trump pep rally.
The committee replayed some key clips, such as senior adviser Hope Hicks, concerned that Trump’s actions were damaging his legacy. Only winning matters, Trump responded.
Here’s the executive summary of the report.
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We haven’t had the best food week. It happens. Sometimes life gets in the way and we find ourselves eating cereal for dinner at 10:30 p.m. I missed this column last week because I was busy writing about dinner at One Eleven at the Capital, desperate to justify my expense report. The best thing I ate last week was from that dinner and it was a black forest cake disguised as a forest. Check it out:
Rhett BrinkleyEDIBLE FOREST: One Eleven’s Black Forest CakeThis week the best thing I ate was also a dessert. This time it was an afternoon shoofly cookie and oat milk cappuccino from Fidel & Co in East Village. After washing down my first bite of the cookie with a piping hot swig of a perfectly balanced, rich cappuccino, I felt like I really knew what I was doing. I imagined that other people walking in the door to Fidel & Co were probably thinking, “Whoa, that dude did it. He found the best two things to order together at 2 p.m. on a Thursday.” I don’t think I’d ever had a shoofly cookie before. It was texturally perfect, a nice crisp outside with a soft but not too soft gooey molasses center. It has a brown sugary crumb topping that would probably make a great coffee sweetener, if you’re into sweet coffee.
Rhett BrinkleySHOOFLY: The best 2 p.m. meal of the week.Also, have you ever had the yams oshun from Elnora Wesley’s vegan restaurant House of Mental? I highly recommend. They practically melt in your mouth and are perfectly seasoned. Here’s the vegan shrimp special with mac no cheese and yams oshun. RB
Rhett BrinkleyHOUSE OF MENTALCoked up for ChristmasMaintaining the proper caffeination levels to propel oneself energetically (but not frantically) to the 2022 finish line takes balance and timing. Otherwise, December will knock you out. A skipped morning coffee will leave you sluggish, but too much afternoon Diet Dr. Pepper boosts anxiety levels and can make your armpits sweat. Do you really want to be the clammy tweaker at the holiday office party? Of course not.
On Friday I met three friends at Tamalcalli for an early lunch, settling into a table by the TV to watch the devastating PK finale of the Brazil vs. Croatia match. We’d all ordered separately at the register, so it was a surprise celebration when the server bellied up with an armful of Diet Cokes. There we were, four worn-out working parents on parallel stimulant regimens, coming together at 11:15 a.m. to crack a cold one. It was the best Diet Coke of the season. (The mushroom tamales, also good.) AB
Austin Bailey
Sweet potato casserole, deconstructedMy partner and I were recently given an air fryer as an early Christmas gift, and after figuring out which appliance would be sent under the cabinet to make room for the hunk of a machine, we started to throw stuff in there and hope for the best. I haven’t ventured far past different types of fries yet, but I had a great revelation with sweet potato fries this week. The fries themselves were skinny enough that they got a little crispy in the fryer, which is just how I like it. Sorry, but it’s a pass from me on wedge cuts and soft insides. But the real win for my side dish was popping a leftover Thanksgiving marshmallow in the microwave for perfect fry dunkability. After about 10 seconds, the marshmallow ballooned and became a level of gooey that my crispy fries could get through. I reheated what was left of the marshmallow when it was time to get a second helping of fries, and that softened the dip right back up again. Maybe this is a 20-something’s hack to that store-bought marshmallow creme, or maybe it’s just grocery store avoidance. MH
Mary Hennigan
The post The best things we ate this week appeared first on Arkansas Times.
KK Bradshaw, a longtime administrator for the Conway School District, has given notice of her resignation and reached a separation agreement that the school board will consider Tuesday night.
Bradshaw made $143,574.32 annually as deputy superintendent, we learned from one of several requests under the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act.
We’ve also learned that Heather Kendrick, communications specialist, still works for the school district. According to a Dec. 2 email from Joel Linn, an assistant superintendent now handling news media matters, Kendrick makes $86,174.53 annually.
Faced with rampant rumors that Kendrick had been fired, I reached out to her Thursday night to confirm. In a Facebook message well after school hours, Kendrick replied, “I’m no longer the district spokesman so this is just me, the individual answering. I need to be clear that I am not speaking on behalf of the district. ‘All media inquiries should be directed to Jeff Collum at collumj@conwayschools.net’ effective this past Monday.'” (Collum is superintendent.)
“I was not fired, but I’ve been reassigned and relieved of almost all my duties as Communication Specialist,” Kendrick wrote.
Back to Bradshaw. Despite my requests, I’ve yet to be told when Bradshaw submitted her resignation or to get a copy of her notice; Bradshaw’s name is on the list of personnel actions to be considered by the board Tuesday night. Beside her name, the agenda says, “resignation notice and separation agreement.”
The post Conway School Secrecy, Part 2: An administrator quits; rumors go wild appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Secrecy at all costs seems to be the motto of the Conway School District‘s superintendent and board members these days. Never in four decades of journalism have I encountered such secrecy, and I’ve seen plenty.
First off, the school district has decided for the third straight month to ban anyone from the public from making comments during the next Conway School Board meeting at 6 p.m. Tuesday in the administration building on Prince Street. Mind you, even when this board does take comments, those speaking must sign up and be approved earlier. But even that’s too stressful for this thin-skinned administration.
Further, the meeting will again be held in a relatively small room as opposed to any of the large rooms the school district has throughout the city. So, the school district is advising the pubic that the fire code for this small room allows for just 59 people.
And knowing this school board, they’re probably counting themselves, the superintendent and any other administrators and faculty who have to attend the meeting.
Why can the district not do what a federal judge in Little Rock did last year during a high-profile trial and set up a separate room in the same building where people can watch the meeting online there if the main room is full rather than have to go home, get online and likely miss part of the meeting? But that would be too transparent, I guess.
The post Secrecy at Conway School District leads to tightly guarded board meeting, Part 1 appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The week goes out quietly, which is OK by me. (If you don’t count the newly minted instant experts on foreign prisoner exchanges and diplomacy.)
The post TGIF news roundup appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Arkansas Times · The Early Days of Sarah Sanders EditionOn this week’s podcast, Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the early days of Gov.-elect Sarah Huckabee Sanders, donor drama at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts and other odds and ends.
Subscribe via iTunes or listen on Spotify.
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AV Club reported this week that FOX has pulled the plug on “Monarch,” the country music dynasty soap opera starring punk rocker and Judsonia, Arkansas, native Beth Ditto. More on the show here.
It was cool while it lasted, I guess? Thanks mostly to Ditto, who said in an interview she’d acted “for 20 minutes” before being cast. Hey, at least we’ll get some new Gossip music!
The post ‘Monarch’ canceled after one season despite Beth Ditto’s badass portrayal of Gigi appeared first on Arkansas Times.
CALS’ annual Food for Fines program is home for the holidays. For every non-perishable food item donated to any CALS library during Dec. 11-17, they will forgive a dollar’s worth of late fines from your account, up to $25. Even if you’re a goody two-shoes who hasn’t amassed any library debt, bring something anyway – CALS promises to bless randomly selected accounts with forgiveness on your behalf. It’s the gift-giving season, after all.
This year’s donations will go toward stocking the Little Free Pantries at CALS. Recommended contributions include granola bars and individually wrapped snacks; tuna and crackers and pop-top soups; root vegetables; canned meats, fruits and vegetables; boxed meals and pastas; and holiday amenities like canned gravies, mashed potato mix and boxed stuffing. Additionally, non-food items like sanitary products, soaps, deodorants and diapers are encouraged.
The post CALS’ Food for Fines lets library patrons zero out their tabs appeared first on Arkansas Times.
No thanks to Arkansas congressmen, but a bipartisan group of them did good today, extending protection to same-sex and interracial couples in a time when their unions seem challenged by some on the U.S. Supreme Court. The line is open.
The post Today’s news roundup: A cheer for Congress for a change appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Rock City Outfitters“In Muss We Trust” and other t-shirts at Rock City OutfittersIf you’re looking for an appropriate (or slightly inappropriate) gift for the Arkansawyer in your life, take a look at Rock City Outfitters in Conway. Or just check out their website. These guys have a collection of Arkansas-inspired T-shirts that will make you smile and maybe blush in some cases. How about a T-shirt with an astronaut planting an Arkansas flag on the moon? Or maybe one declaring “In Muss We Trust” to support the Razorback men’s basketball team? How about a T-shirt that pokes fun at Conway’s love of roundabouts? There are plenty of Arkansas-centric shirts to choose from (and hats too), although the shirts depicting pigs in the throes of love-making might not be suitable for everyone at your office Christmas party.
-Griffin Coop
Bell Urban Farm
All things Arkansas at Bell Urban Farm
Want to support Arkansas businesses and farms? Shop Bell Urban Farm. There, you’ll find all things Arkansas. Stop by the small shop on Tyler Street across from the Faulkner County Library in Conway, and you’ll find coffee roasted in Arkansas, honey harvested in the Natural State, and calendars created by Arkansas artists. Also on sale are evergreen Christmas wreaths crafted by hand with berries and ribbons in Bell Urban Farm’s backyard. You’ll also find Arkansas-grown sweet potatoes and shelled pecans for that festive vegetable dish, eggs hatched here and plenty of stocking stuffers from jewelry to soaps and skin-care products. Need a calendar for 2023? Bell Urban Farm has some designed by Arkansas artists. Want to read a murder mystery by an Arkansas author or learn about the state’s many hiking trails? Bell Urban Farm has books on both and more. If you just want to sit down and enjoy a cup of hot chocolate with Arkansas marshmallows and a pastry made in a North Little Rock kitchen, Bell Urban Farm offers all that and much more too.
-Debra Hale-Shelton
Feed those fatass birds with seeds and suet from Wild Birds Unlimited
The last time we wandered into Wild Birds Unlimited in the Heights, a little Toto-like dog was oddly perched on a pile of seed sacks. An older woman was chatting with a salesman about the best feed for woodpeckers as a small fountain by the door emanated a soothing burble. My high-strung high school son visibly relaxed. “I like this place,” he said, which is high praise from a teenager dragged along on errands against his will. This was the opposite of the high-intensity retail experiences big box stores are serving up this season. Wild Birds Unlimited is a chain, so normally I wouldn’t include them here. But the newsletter they tucked in our sack, with its coloring page for kids and instructions on how to make your own bird seed ornaments, charmed me into it. The birdwatching hobby my family picked up during the pandemic persists, and we’re especially loving the plump chickadees floofing their feathers against the cold. If you want to get your friends and family in on this wholesome pastime, the Bailey family highly recommends the Bark Butter you smear on trees and the seed cylinders that are like giant Rice Crispy treats for birds.
-Austin Bailey
Robert Bell’s “Ladies of the Holler” compilation
“Ladies of the Holler: 16 Sides of Country 45s Out of Arkansas”
If, as this compilation’s mastermind suggests, you are in dire need of the “perfect stocking stuffer for that person in your life who digs wobbly lo-fi country from a small obscure state from 50-some-odd years ago,” can I suggest you hit up Arkansas Record & CD Exchange for one of these CDs? An audiophile with a trove of knowledge about unsung Arkansas music history (Rimrock Records! Hershel Parker and the Ft. Smith Boys! Music Mountain of Greenland, Arkansas!), Robert Bell is absolutely the archivist you should trust to turn the key on your newfound love for Cathy Collins, Dorothy Price and Frankia Treat. (He’s also a former arts editor for the Arkansas Times, with gems in our own archive worth your attention.) Keepin’ our eyes out for the next collection from Bell, “Bummer Country.”
-Stephanie Smittle
Bang Up Betty
Get your Holiday shit done at Bang-Up Betty
Look no further than Bang-Up Betty’s humorously snarky handmade and hand-stamped jewelry to impress friends and loved ones this holiday season. Bang-Up Betty offers custom stamped jewelry, but she’s amassed such an impressive collection of mantras stamped across necklaces, bracelets, earrings and the like, that you could probably find something that captures the essence of every quirky loved one in your life. Her Argenta storefront gift shop has a wide selection of fun, offbeat gifts to fill your holiday stockings, too. Who couldn’t use a “Get Shit Done” tote bag or a “Stop Being a Snob About Coming To North Little Rock” sweatshirt? Head over to Bang-Up Betty’s blog and check out 25 Awesome Stocking Stuffer Ideas That Are (Mostly) Under $10 for more ideas. Dinosaur hand puppets, donut bath bombs, a “no gaslighting” lighter bottle opener combo and a variety of locally made artisanal gifts could help ease the stress of holiday shopping in these expensive times.
-Rhett Brinkley
Brian ChilsonGreen Corner Store’s local coffee selectionGreen Corner store local coffee section. They have what I think is the best selection of Arkansas roasted coffees for your coffee addicted friends/relatives.
-Brian Chilson
Righteous Remedies
A cup of tea, some hemp and a calming walk-through
Just walking through Righteous Remedies has a calming effect. After all, its specialties are CBD and hemp products. But at the store on Conway’s Front Street, you can also buy a cup of tea and find options unavailable at many other stores. Consider one of my favorite herbal teas, the Mad Hatter. It’s a spicy but caffeine-free blend of sarsaparailla root, cinnamon, orange peel, ginger, licorice root, cloves, and yellowdock root. You can buy from jars of a wide range of dried herbs from nettle leaf to tulsi (better known as holy basil) to make your own teas or other concoctions at home. The shop will add a bit of CBD or honey to you tea if you wish. You just might find a Christmas gift or two here, whether it’s a teapot, essential oil, scented candle, smudge stick or a package of dried morel mushrooms.
-Debra Hale-Shelton
Lexi AdamsWig Dog PressCozy up in small-batch, screen printed clothing by Wig Dog Press
Ever wanted to sport a t-shirt featuring a loving, silkscreen illustration of an elegant feline sneaking some breakfast off the patio table? Me too. What about a tote bag displaying a swamp-bound automobile that the neighborhood strays have turned into the perfect spot for an afternoon snooze? Sign me up. These designs and more are the product of Wig Dog Press, a queer artist collective founded by Lexi Adams, Han Davis and Claire Comeaux, and based out of Little Rock and Lafayette, Louisiana. Their work is hand screen printed on paper and recycled clothing. Buy their wares on Instagram (@wigdogpress), or in person at the Forever Thrifted meetup at The Hall on Saturday, Dec. 18.
-Daniel Grear
Mary HenniganNintendo SwitchPretend there’s no bad news with a Nintendo Switch
Let’s face it — some days just aren’t as good as others. Maybe it was a day full of bad news or there was too much traffic on your drive home. More often than not, those are the days that I break out the Nintendo Switch. The gaming skill needed is pretty low for the Switch — at least the games I have, which are mostly Mario embarking on some weird adventure and battling Bowser. But surprisingly, I’ve found real comfort in a game called “Stardew Valley.” It’s a quiet farming game where I tend to my crops, walk to the virtual beach to go fishing and try to gift the fruits I gathered to the village locals. If you’re a parent, the Switch is a perfect excuse to buy something for your kids that gives you an ounce of nostalgic joy. If you’re a grown-up kid, escaping the sometimes-gloomy world for a chipper digital one can be the best way to battle those sucky days.
-Mary Hennigan
Leiva'sStay caffeinated this holiday season with Leiva’s gift boxesCan you imagine the holiday season without coffee? Nightmare. Geovanni Leiva, owner of Central Arkansas’s Leiva’s Coffee, ends his emails with “Stay caffeinated my friend.” You can help the coffee fanatics in your family do just that with a coffee lovers gift box with a Leiva’s mug and a roast of your choice or a variety gift box with three roasts of your choice. Leiva grew up on a coffee farm in the mountains of eastern Guatemala. He sources his beans from his family’s farm and a portion of the proceeds helps serve Leiva’s village back home.
-Rhett Brinkley
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In the English language, if you want to convey that something usually amicable and of normal proportions has now become gargantuan and destructive, there’s a certain suffix to be used; you add “-zilla” onto it. Bridezilla, Promzilla, etc. This all stems, of course, from the 1954 Toho flick “Gojira,” released in the United States in 1956 as “Godzilla, King of the Monsters!”
There are certain connotations, then, when a band decides to use the suffix and ONLY the suffix Zilla as their moniker. No band has ever gone full Godzilla, although French metal band Gojira has come close. (Does that count? It probably counts.) There’s Blue Öyster Cult’s classic jam “Godzilla,” about humanity’s hubris that seems oddly prescient when everyone is living in a Hell World. Eminem has a “Godzilla” as well, wherein he and Juice WRLD become the famed monster I think? It’s vague. So what, then, was the genesis behind the name Zilla, a four-piece from Little Rock made up of drummer Eric Cleveland, guitarist/vocalist Tanner McDaniel, bassist Tobias Peoples, and guitarist/vocalist Sam Williamson? I’ll let Sam explain.
“Eric wanted to call the band Lzial but we realized that that was against Tobias’s diet, so Tanner rearranged the letters and we ended up with either Azlli or Zilla. Eric, Tanner and I voted on Zilla, but let the record show that Tobias voted for Azlli. There is no meaning behind this, except for the fact that Tanner has had a lot of practice with magnetic alphabet letters.”
Well, shit.
These days it can be hard to tell if rock ‘n’ roll is still alive. In the mainstream, it is all but dead. But in the underground, it’s as vigorous as ever. Little Rock’s always had a thriving underground music scene, and Zilla is currently one of the best bands in it. They were born, like many current bands, in the depths of the coronavirus pandemic. Cleveland, McDaniel and Williamson were some of the only people each of them felt safe being around, so they got into a room and started jamming together. “It was all pretty sick right off the bat,” Williamson says. “Tanner brought in the skeleton for the song ‘Mushroom Kingdom’ that day and all of our parts basically fell in together immediately.”
“Mushroom Kingdom” slaps. It comes at you with a slinky riff that any number of bands in the ‘70s could have written. “So don’t you panic/we’re feelin’ alright tonight” McDaniel yelps before a fitting solo that would be at home on an early Built to Spill song.
Zilla
For the next year Zilla worked out songs at their space, with every member contributing to the writing process. “We do write collaboratively mostly. Sometimes Tanner or I come in with a song that has a more rigid structure that everyone then adds their own parts on top of, but it’s never like, ‘you play this and you play this and you play this,’” Williamson said.
Songs often emerge from jams. As McDaniel said, “Sometimes Sam and I will bring in a song or a riff we had separately been working on, or we’ll all just be jamming and pull it straight out of our bungholes. Depends on the weather and whose diaper is full or not.”
“Everything we write is brought to life with all of us in the room together,” Cleveland added. “Tanner and Sam will occasionally bring a skeleton of a song to practice but it takes a few jams, and sometimes even a few live run throughs on stage, for a Zilla song to really take shape.” After a year they finally played their first show, in October of 2021.
By the time 2022 rolled around, they had enough songs to record their debut full length album, “Mushroom Kingdom.” Released in September, it’s a wonderful knot of jams that melds Replacements-style snottiness with ‘90s noisy guitar solos that make you actively listen to fully absorb what’s going on. As far as what influenced the album, inspiration came from everywhere. As Williamson states, “More obvious influences have to be Green Day, The Replacements, Big Star, Ween. I’m pretty sure we all love The Cars. I know personally I’ve been wanting to write some Zilla stuff that gets way jammy and have been inspired by like live Grateful Dead concerts where there are these huge almost like concertos of rock instrumentation, but pared down and not bombastic or anything.”
Zilla
“We could be jamming bands like Neurosis one minute and then turn around and be inspired by The Meters the next.”
Other influences thrown around: AC/DC, A-ha, The Clash, and King Tuff. Inexplicably, these diverse forebears all make sense on their lean seven-track album. Clocking in at 25 minutes, it’s the perfect soundtrack for a drive. The song “Mushroom Kingdom” opens the collection, followed by “King Cuck’s Ballad,” which it is anything but. “Bella Rosa” is next, where the band shifts from Diarrhea Planet-style bombast and gang vocals to a Smashing Pumpkins-style riff and introspection. “Daffodils” recalls Uncle Tupelo-style cowpunk, while “Long Night” is the most classic rock inspired song on the record. “The Score” brings back the sound of the first couple tunes, with one of the most sing-alongable choruses ever. “Well I don’t need you anymore/So here’s the score/Never miyiyiyiyiyihihind” will be stuck in your head for at least a week or longer. Closer “Mastermindia” starts with crunchy palm-muted guitars that let that Cars influence shine through. It’s the longest track on the album and the ideal song to end your joyride with. All throughout the album are guitar moments that take you by surprise. An acoustic guitar solo here, a delay pedal-drenched noise part there. The rhythm section holds it all down with aplomb and every song is tailor-made for a crowd of sweaty fans to sing along with emphatically.
As for what the future holds, Zilla has just finished recording their follow up album and the list of influences grows ever longer. King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. Thee Oh Sees. Fugazi. It’s due out in December, along with a show at White Water Tavern on Thursday, Dec. 29 that Williamson says is “to commemorate both records that will have dropped by the end of the year — sort of like an album release show for both. The lineup is going to be insane. A freaking legendary group of bands.” They’re already planning a third album early next year, and they aren’t slowing down. “I think goal-wise for Zilla, we just want to see how far and how absurd our songwriting can possibly get until people can’t stand us anymore. I think we all hope we’ll be able to make a living wage off this at some point. But if that’s not the case then we’ll just keep on keepin’ on in the trusty basement,” McDaniel said. “Our main goal for this band is to get an Old Milwaukee endorsement, whatever it takes.”
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Here’s the daily COVID-19 update from the Arkansas Department of Health.
Total cases: 973,146, an increase of 681 since Wednesday
Active cases: 5,794, up from 5,259
Deaths: 12,613, an increase of 10
Hospitalized: 241, up from 226
In ICU: 35, up from 32
On ventilators: 16, up from 15
The post COVID today: 10 more deaths appeared first on Arkansas Times.
AT TODAY’S NEWS CONFERENCE: On advanced mobility.
Outgoing Governor Hutchinson received a report today from a study group he appointed on developing “advanced mobility” business in Arkansas.
This means new forms of transportation — electric vehicles, self-driving vehicles, drones, robotics and even space ports.
It could be a big deal, members of the council, said in making recommendations to provide seed money to attract outside capital, start an advanced mobility institute at the University of Arkansas and tailor community college offerings to provide workers.
There’s plenty of money in Arkansas to put into this, speakers said, mentioning specifically state pension funds. The governor said state reserve funds also could be used. (But not, Hutchinson emphasized, on spending any money in China.) Some legislation would be required to achieve some goals, both Hutchinson and a spokesman for Walmart mentioned. Walmart has already made investments in such things as autonomous delivery trucks, helped by recent state legislation.
You can find the full report at this website.
Here also is the executive summary of recommendations.
And today’s news release.
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One of my favorite moviegoing memories relates not to the film itself but, instead, the reaction of my immediate neighbors—a reaction that continues to inform me about the shape of our politics.
Back in 2017, the wife and I went to see “Elle” (which I reviewed for the Times). As is true for many of the movies we like to see, we were mostly alone in the theater save for two older ladies who sat next to us, both carrying big tubs of popcorn. The lights went down, the name of the movie popped on the screen in big letters—ELLE—and then it opened with main character Michèle Leblanc (Isabelle Huppert) being raped in the middle of her living room floor by a man in a ski mask. The scene went on for multiple agonizing minutes, and the only thing keeping my wife and me in our seats was having read about the movie beforehand and steeling ourselves for this opening.
Once the intruder left, Michèle gathered herself up and, limping around the house, started to clean up all the glasses and whatnot that had been broken during the attack. She took off her clothes and threw them into the trash and then took a bath. While she was soaking, a little stain of red began to show among the white, white bubbles, and she looked at it with disinterest before whisking the blood away. And then she proceeded to get dressed and go to work.
Keep in mind that no one in the film has spoken a word yet. Aside from the cries and grunts during the rape scene, not a single person had yet articulated a recognizable syllable. But when Michèle arrived at her place of work, she began to speak to her coworkers—in French. Because this was a French movie, taking place in France, and the characters were all French, and every word of theirs was subtitled for the rest of us. At this moment in the movie, I could hear one of the two ladies next to me start to get restless, and then she finally, in the midst of all this French, turned to her friend and said:
“Ethel… Ethel, I think we’re in the wrong theater…. I don’t think this is ‘La La Land.’”
Ethel and her friend debated the matter for a few seconds, whispering loudly, before finally getting up and leaving, towing their tubs of untouched popcorn with them.
I think about those two women often, wondering just how they were trying to square the experience of what they were watching with the expectations they had coming in. Maybe Ethel was thinking to herself: “Gosh, I didn’t know it was going to begin like this. That is a lot of raping going on. Who’s that man in the mask? I sure hope it isn’t that handsome Ryan Gosling. I’d feel really bad rooting for him later in the movie if he starts out doing all this raping. When is the first musical number going to start? That’s what I really came to see. Please don’t let it be that sweet, handsome Ryan Gosling in the ski mask.”
I think about those two women every time there is another mass shooting, as certain people try to square the experience of what they are witnessing yet again with the expectations they have for what society should be. A school shooting at a high school in Colorado? “Gosh, those kids must have been bullied to make them react like that.” A shooter butchering elementary school kids in Connecticut? “It’s clear we have a mental health crisis in this country.” Another armed killer at an elementary school in Texas. “Well, that one teacher left a door open, so it’s all her fault.”
And so on….
Some people even say that every mass shooting just proves that we actually need more guns to protect ourselves from all these shooters. And I just imagine myself turning to Ethel and her friend in that darkened theater and saying, “Hey, would some more raping convince you that you are actually watching ‘La La Land’?”
It’s not mental health or unlocked doors enabling so many mass shootings here in ’Murica. It’s the guns, plain and simple. The ease with which one can acquire a gun here has indelibly transformed the United States into the kind of place where these shootings will happen on a regular basis.
Here’s an analogy. The availability of cars transformed our habits to accept driving yourself places is easier than, say, taking the bus. My wife and I have one car and slightly different work schedules, so I ride the bus quite often, but I’m not immune to the pull of the car. If it’s the weekend and I want to meet some friends downtown, I could certainly take the bus, but that’s a 15-minute walk to the bus stop, followed by a few minutes of waiting depending upon how many people are riding today, and who knows if the ride downtown will be peaceful enough to let me read a book or if I will have a chatty neighbor or that one lady speaking in tongues again. And then, I have to make sure I don’t stay out too late with friends, or I risk missing the last bus home. Far easier it would be to take the car. Sure, it holds the potential of being more dangerous, especially if I’m hitting a bar with my friends, and might be the less responsible choice, but it offers everything at my own pace, designed for my comfort, and the option of listening to podcasts or music there and back. All so easy.
Just having the car makes me consider it as an option, even for those situations in which the bus would honestly suffice. Having a car makes it more likely to use the car to solve my problems. Likewise, having a gun makes using that gun to solve problems all the more likely.
Last February, the “Arkansas Democrat-Gazette” published a review of gun deaths in Arkansas’s neighboring states following the passage of so-called “stand your ground” bills like SB24 then being debated in the Arkansas legislature. Reviewing two decades’ worth of data, the authors found: “In Mississippi, Oklahoma and Missouri, the number of people killed in shootings per capita increased by double-digit percentages in the years after lawmakers approved stand-your-ground laws, which eliminate a person’s ‘duty to retreat’ before firing in self-defense. Louisiana and Tennessee each experienced smaller increases in the rates of gun deaths after such laws were enacted.” Texas was the only exception to the trend.
“Stand your ground” laws encourage people to carry their guns with them into public spaces because they lower the criteria by which one can legally use them. These laws, along with the proliferation of concealed-carry and even open-carry laws, resulted in a doubling of American adults carrying a loaded handgun on a daily basis.
“But,” I hear conservatives say, “the overwhelming majority of those are law-abiding citizens simply seeking to protect themselves, not mass shooters like the kind you were talking about earlier!”
Coming from a military family and growing up with guns—and, yes, owning a pistol myself—I have a knee-jerk sympathy for this argument. I also have to recognize that both “law abiding” folks carrying a glock into TGIFriday’s and someone shooting up a gay nightclub share some level of motivation. Our concealed carrier expresses a desire to protect herself and her family, while our nightclub shooter sees himself as protecting his community from an insidious and satanic influence. They are both trying to solve the same problem, just at a different scale.
A gun is an immensely attractive tool of violence, and it will be used because violence itself is extremely attractive. As philosopher James Dodd noted in his 2019 book, “Violence and Phenomenology,” violence offers us the opportunity to test ourselves “in a radical manner, and in this sense promises to offer us a unique perspective on the essential outlines of who we are.” That is, violence promises something not permitted by everyday social interactions: “If we are drawn to violence, whether violent acts (challenging a sexual competitor to a duel) or situations (volunteering for a dangerous mission), it is because of such a promise; it is the promise that, in stepping beyond the confines of the ‘normal,’ we will discover, at the other end of what is allowed and acceptable, the truth of who we are (I am for sure ‘the one;’ I am brave, honorable, engaged, etc.).”
And the inherent appeal of violence is now paired with a legal infrastructure that makes the instruments of violence not only more available to average people, but also more permissible in our social spaces. We catered to those who loved their automobiles and so reduced our urban landscape to overpasses and parking lots. We depopulated our countryside as towns’ livelihoods grew to depend upon their proximity to a highway.
Likewise, we catered to those who love their guns and so have reduced our schools to “hardened” prisons. We depopulated our public squares as people worry about being in places that are too exposed. As American society became suffused with automotive culture, it became difficult to comprehend alternatives to the problem of transportation that did not entail the car. And as American society has become inundated with firearms, the only solution many of us can imagine to any conflict is a threat or promises of lethal violence.
Any move to limit the number or lethal capacity of firearms in society will meet opposition because both the law-abiding gun owner living in fear of a murderer and rapist who wants to break into his home, and the law-breaking gunowner who targets a supermarket in a majority Black neighborhoods, are driven by the same urges to protect against perceived threats, the same urge to test themselves and be assured that they are brave, honorable and blessed by God.
This is exactly the kind of society conservatives want. For conservatives, this is, in fact, La La Land.
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Little Rock At-Large Director Joan Adcock is back at it again promoting vaccinations among Arkansans. This Friday will be the 16th vaccine clinic she’s organized, and anyone who receives a COVID-19 booster at the Southwest Community Center will receive a $50 Visa gift card.
Adcock is partnering with CHI St. Vincent to administer the COVID-19 bivalent vaccine to residents ages 12 and older from 4-8 p.m. Dec. 9. About 500 booster shots will be available for administration Friday. The Arkansas Department of Health will also provide 300 flu shots to residents, though that vaccine does not warrant a $50 gift card per the outlines of the pandemic stimulus money, Adcock said.
The monetary incentive for the COVID-19 booster is paid for through federal stimulus funds that the city received specifically for this purpose. If multiple members in a family receive a booster, each person will receive a gift card. There is no limit to how many gift cards a family can receive.
Adcock said that while it’s still possible to become infected with the virus after a vaccine, the protection helps to “give yourself a chance to have a lighter case.”
COVID-19 infections in Arkansas have recently increased, and 226 individuals are hospitalized for the virus statewide — 32 patients are in the ICU.
Likewise, the ADH reported an abnormal early seasonal increase in positive flu cases. Since Oct. 2, more than 14,000 positive cases and 45 flu-related deaths have been reported. Health officials said that the high number of cases will likely increase for weeks.
Adcock said that she recently spent two weeks in the hospital for the flu, which turned into pneumonia. As more are being infected with COVID-19 and the flu, she said she wants to offer more people the chance to receive a vaccination. In the past, Adcock’s clinics were held on Saturdays. She said that Friday evening may give a better reach to school-aged children and those who have to work on the weekends.
Both English and Spanish speakers will be available to help Friday. The Southwest Community Center is at 6401 Baseline Road in Little Rock.
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The Arkansas medical marijuana industry has generated more than $29 million in tax collections this year after the state reported Wednesday that last month’s tax collections topped $2.7 million.
Arkansas medical marijuana taxes brought in $2.7 million in November, bringing the total collections this year to $29,461,196, according to data released by the state Department of Finance and Administration.
Medical marijuana patients pay a 6.5% sales tax and 4% privilege tax on purchases made at dispensaries. Dispensaries also pay the 4% privilege tax when they make purchases from cultivators.
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The Little Rock Police Department released additional details about the victim of a Tuesday afternoon shooting at W. Markham Street and Chenal Parkway.
Ja’Markeise Gage, 18, was pronounced dead at the scene on Dec. 6, according to the LRPD incident report. The investigation is ongoing.
Little Rock is experiencing its deadliest year for homicides. This incident is the 76th homicide in 2022.
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Call it D-Day if you will. Sean Spicer did in confusing Dec 7 with June 6. We have another D in mind. The line is open.
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Arkansas ranks among the most dangerous places in the country to give birth, and the dangers are exponentially worse for women of color.
A $1.2 million grant to the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences will fund efforts to improve the quality of care for Arkansas mothers and babies in hopes of boosting their odds.
UAMS announced the grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Wednesday, and said it would be used in partnership with the Arkansas Department of Health to identify weak spots in maternal and postnatal care. The goal is to improve care for new moms and babies in hopes of ratcheting down Arkansas’s tragically high maternal and infant mortality rates.
The money will arrive over five years, with $274,931 incoming in the first year.
Specific goals for the grant include “improving key maternal health outcomes, such as reducing preterm births, reducing severe pregnancy complications associated with high blood pressure and hemorrhage, reducing racial/ethnic and geographic disparities, reducing cesarean births among low-risk pregnant women, and improving screening and treatment for mothers with substance abuse disorder and newborns with neonatal abstinence syndrome,” according to a news release from UAMS.
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Almost four months after the arrest of a South Carolina man turned violent in Mulberry in Crawford County, state and federal authorities are still investigating the officers’ actions.
That word came today from Emily White, the special state prosecutor appointed to review the arrests last August.
Two of the three Crawford County officers involved in the arrest — sheriff’s deputies Levi White and Zachary King — were subsequently fired. The third officer — Mulberry police officer Thell Riddle — remains on leave, the town’s police chief, Shannon Gregory, said today.
The officers were arresting suspect Randal Worcester, 27, of Goose Creek, S.C., over an earlier incident in a Mulberry grocery.
The three officers were caught on a bystander’s cellphone video kicking, hitting and pounding Worcester’s head into the cement.
The FBI, the Justice Department and the special prosecutor have been investigating the arrest, as the Arkansas State Police did earlier.
Worcester was formally charged Tuesday with several offenses, including first-degree terroristic threatening and second-degree battery.
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Here’s the daily COVID-19 update from the Arkansas Department of Health.
Total cases: 972,465, an increase of 589 since Tuesday.
Active cases: 5,259, up from 5,090
Deaths: 12,603, an increase of nine
Hospitalized: 226, down from 240
In ICU: 32, down from 33
On ventilators: 15, down from 18
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The Saline County attorney who filed a federal class action suit earlier this year accusing Arkansas cultivators of conspiring with a Little Rock testing facility to inflate THC content on labels has asked that the suit be dismissed but says he intends to refile it.
Luther Sutter, the Benton lawyer representing three Arkansas medical marijuana cardholders, filed a motion in federal court in October asking judge Kristine Baker to dismiss the case without prejudice. Baker has not issued an order on the filing.
Dismissing the case without prejudice would allow the case to be refiled.
Sutter told Arkansas Cannabiz Wednesday that he intends to refile the case.
“The lawsuit will be refiled,” Sutter said via email. “I dismissed the lawsuit to give Steep Hill and their clients the chance to sell honest weed for a honest price.”
The day after Sutter’s filing, attorneys for the cultivator known as Natural State Medicinals filed a motion in support of the dismissal. Natural State had previously filed a motion to dismiss along with a 21-page supporting brief that argues Sutter failed to meet the standards for the allegations he made under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (or RICO) Act.
In the lawsuit, Sutter claims Natural State Medicinals of White Hall, BOLD Team of Cotton Plant and Osage Creek Cultivation of Berryville conspired with Steep Hill, a marijuana testing company in Little Rock to inflate the amount of THC in the companies’ marijuana flower.
The flower actually contained 25% less THC on average and as much as 52% less THC than Steep Hill claimed it contained, according to the lawsuit. The suit also alleges that Steep Hill allowed testing samples to be chosen by employees of the cultivators.
The lawsuit also claims the defendants were operating in violation of the RICO Act, a 1970 act passed by Congress to fight organized crime. The suit calls for an injunction for the cultivators to stop violating federal drug laws. The suit states that federal law is superior to state law and that it is a felony under the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 “to deal in marijuana.”
The suit states that, although Arkansas claims to have legalized medical marijuana, only Congress can revise federal laws to allow for the commercial trade of marijuana. Natural State’s supporting brief argues that, if the plaintiffs’ argument were taken seriously, the court would also have to consider the plaintiffs to be active participants in the illegal scheme. The plaintiffs, Natural State argues, are medical marijuana cardholders and are admitting to violating federal law by purchasing marijuana.
The Arkansas Department of Health requires that all marijuana intended for use by a cultivation facility or dispensary must be tested in homogenous batches of 10 pounds or less by an accredited lab. The department requires labs to test for pesticides, water activity and moisture content, THC and CBD concentrations and heavy metals, according to a document provided by the Department of Health.
The plaintiffs in the case are Don Plumlee, Jakie Hanan and Pete Edwards. The defendants are Steep Hill and its owners Brandon Thonton and Brent Whittington as well as BOLD, Natural State Medicinals and Osage Creek. The suit also lists “John Does 1-10” as defendants and describes them as the law firms, accountants, financial entities and financial institutions that assisted in operating the alleged criminal enterprise.
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SETH MAYS
Seth Mays has been tapped as executive director of the Republican Party of Arkansas.
He was nominated by Party Chair Cody Hiland and elected by the party executive committee.
He’s been a staffer at both the state party and the Republican National Committee. A Mansfield native and Arkansas Tech graduate, he was the political director of Governor Hutchinson’s 2018 campaign, then worked for the RNC and returned to Arkansas as state party political director in 2020.
His prepared statement echoed the themes of incoming Governor Sarah Sanders — parental choice in education (lots more school vouchers), truth-in-sentencing legislation (longer prison sentences for lots more prisoners) and phasing out the state income tax (a windfall for the wealthy and a potential blow to state services, including education, supported by the tax.)
Mays succeeds Sarah Reynolds, who’d been executive director since 2016. Her departure was announced at a recent state Republican meeting.
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Two bullets, but no weapons, were found in two restrooms at Don R. Roberts Elementary Wednesday morning, Principal Steven Helmick sent in an afternoon release to parents.
The ammo was found in the fourth and fifth grade girls’ restroom, and “as soon as we were made aware, our Safety and Security team confiscated the bullets and began an investigation,” Helmick told parents.
He said that no students or staff were threatened in the incident, and the investigation is ongoing to find out who brought the bullets to school.
Pamela Smith, the spokesperson for the Little Rock School District, said the district security team, school administration and the Little Rock Police Department are conducting the investigation. LRPD Spokesperson Mark Edwards said the incident report is not yet available.
“As soon as the student involved is identified we will discipline them according to the LRSD handbook,” Helmick said. “The safety of your children is my number one priority.”
Roberts Elementary is located on Lamarche Drive in West Little Rock.
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Humorist, essayist and consummate personal life-excavator David Sedaris is coming to Robinson Center at 7 p.m. Monday, April 24.
Though he’s the author of a dozen books, many first encountered David Sedaris’s work on “This American Life,” a podcast and public radio program, which is awfully fitting. He’s uncommonly funny and insightful on the page, but something really transcendent happens when you hear him read his essays aloud. His high-pitched, slightly sarcastic voice, always on the edge of incredulity, gives everything he writes the air of rich, petty gossip that you can’t help but be invested in. It’s not all laughs, though. Let your guard down for a minute and you’ll be bombarded with emotional poignancy when he unveils a heavy family secret.
Tickets go on sale to the public 10 a.m. Monday, Dec. 12, and will be available online at celebrityattractions.com, tcketmaster.com, by phone at 501-244-8800 or in person at the Robinson Center box office.
The post Humorist David Sedaris returns to Little Rock in April appeared first on Arkansas Times.
In its weekly flu report, the Arkansas Department of Health announced a total of 45 flu-related deaths since Oct. 2. At least 14,200 Arkansans tested positive for the flu during the same period, but the actual number of infections is likely higher as not all positive cases are reported.
The report released Wednesday includes flu data from about three months from Oct. 2 to Dec. 3. This is the first report to encompass several days of data after Thanksgiving holiday travel.
Arkansas’s flu activity level stayed in the “very high” level for the fifth consecutive week. All surrounding states have “very high” flu activity as well.
The reported deaths for the 2022-2023 flu season so far include 30 Arkansans aged 65 or older, nine individuals aged 45-64, five aged 25-44 and one adolescent aged 5-17. The ADH does not release other demographic information such as location, sex, race or ethnicity. According to the report, 73% of the deaths were unvaccinated individuals.
Information about the flu vaccine can be found here. A list of local health units can be found here.
Since Oct. 2, a total of 16 nursing homes and other institutions have reported flu outbreaks. The language “other institutions” was added for the first time to this week’s report, and the ADH spokesperson Danyelle McNeill said it encompasses other congregate settings where people are living together such as jails and places that “house the developmentally disabled.” She said that college dorm rooms are not included.
The school absenteeism rate following Thanksgiving break averaged 7.5% statewide, according to the report. Mississippi County reported the highest absentee percentage at 10.5%, followed by Izard County at 10.08%. Pulaski County’s rate was 7.2%.
The COVID-19 numbers are up compared to recent months. The active case count in the state has surpassed 5,000 and statewide hospitalizations were 240 as of Dec. 6.
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The face of Yeyo’s Mexican street tacos was born to migrant farmers in California, raised in Michoacán, Mexico, and is now happy at home in Northwest Arkansas. The 52-year-old father of three is farming with family and wowing people with tastes tied to his deeply held heritage.
Chef Rafael Rios has grown to prominence since moving to the area 16 years ago. He and his family started farming in Northwest Arkansas in 2006. They were selling produce at local farmers markets, but didn’t open their first food truck until 2012. Just a few years down the road, Rios has been nominated for two James Beard Awards for best chef in the south region. Talk about a rising star!
“The yellow food truck in downtown Bentonville is the beginning of our story,” Rios told me during a recent interview. “It’s how the restaurant business started for us. It’s the truck that put us on the map.”
He holds that truck dear, but those first few years were hard. Rios said tears were shed daily. He and his wife weren’t sure the business would survive. “Nobody knew us back then,” he said. “Then people started seeing us at the farmers markets and figured out what we were trying to do with our food. It got better quickly.”
What were they doing with their food? What was the magic behind those delightful tacos and beautiful burritos? It was simple, really. The Rios family was using old world techniques and locally grown produce and meats to create a premium product that their customers found delicious.
From humble beginning a Mexican food empire is emerging
Novo StudioHERE TO STAY: Yeyo’s El Alma De Mexico opened inside the bustling culinary enclave known as 8th Street Market in 2017.The success of the food truck spurred expansion. In 2017, Yeyo’s El Alma de Mexico opened inside the bustling culinary enclave known as 8th Street Market in Bentonville. Next-door neighbors include a brewery, a chocolatier and a culinary school. It’s a bull’s-eye on the region’s culinary map, which has most certainly helped Rios get noticed.
El Alma de Mexico is translated as “the soul of Mexico.” Rios said the name fits the place because it embodies the best of Mexican culture. “It’s the flagship for Mexican food, in my opinion. It’s affordable, approachable and simple, but complex in its preparation.” It’s where Rios spends most of his time.
The specialties are street tacos, burritos and enchiladas. The restaurant makes tortillas by hand every Monday; around 36,000 over the course of 12 hours. An array of meats are available, including carne asada, carnitas, chorizo and cochinita pibil.
Novo StudioRICH MOLE SAUCE AGED OVER TIME: Enmoladas.In 2020, Rios opened a cocktail bar in downtown Rogers. Eerily reminiscent of the yellow food truck, the first year at Yeyo’s Mezcaleria y Taqueria was tough. The place completely shuttered during the height of the coronavirus pandemic. But just like the yellow food truck, it survived. And it’s back in a big way. Rios wants people to think of it as a place to meet friends, sample the many varieties of mezcal, and immerse themselves in the colors and music of Mexican culture. Imagine a place where all five senses are piqued at the same time. Throw in a splash of mezcal and you have yourself a party.
The latest addition to the Yeyo’s family is a blue food truck Rios calls “the blue demon.” It is a 1952 Ford F6 with a barn-style box in the bed that opens wide to greet customers. Unlike the yellow food truck, which sits stationary on the Bentonville square, this one is meant to be on the move. “It’s the future because as we move forward there is demand for mobile catering for large crowds,” Rios said.
The journey to Arkansas
Rios’ parents were seasonal farm workers who shifted between Michoacán, Mexico, and the San Joaquin Valley in California as the seasons changed. Rios was born during one of those trips to California. His childhood was spent mostly in Mexico, so he identifies deeply with his Mexican heritage.
The Rios family relocated to Oxnard, California, in 1989, when Rios was 14. A few years later he joined the U.S. Army and was deployed overseas. He became interested in the foreign food he was exposed to while on assignment. Turkish cuisine was particularly enlightening. Already a veteran of farming and agriculture, he got a bit of an itch for cooking during his service.
Rios returned to California upon exiting the Army. Eventually the fast pace and lack of space in The Golden State started to wear on the entire Rios family. “The cars, the trucks, the people, the music — it was almost like being in a science-fiction movie,” he said.
So, with criteria in mind, they began searching for a new place to call home. “We were looking for happiness,” said Rios. “We were looking for a place where you could get up in the morning and ride your horse.”
The Rios family had connections in Northwest Arkansas. Upon closer inspection they found space, affordability and a chance to be, as Rios put it, “normal people with chickens and cows.” It was the complete package.
“This is my home now,” he said. “I call Arkansas my home.”
Family-based leadership and growing local talent
Spend a few minutes with Rios — or in one of the Yeyo’s restaurants — and you will quickly discover that family is a top priority. The patriarch of the Rios family is Hector Rios. He is known as Don Yeyo, the namesake of the restaurant business. Brothers and sisters are involved in the business. Rios has three kids of his own — ages 21, 17 and 8. Having everyone within arm’s reach is important.
“We come from a family that has really strong ties to simple values,” Rios said. “Character and working hard are important to us. We feel that it is in the best interest of the family to be together, so the nephews and the nieces get to know each other.”
This strong family orientation extends to employees as well.
“I have a leadership style that is linked to family,” Rios said. “Hopefully, our employees see Yeyo’s as their family business, too. If they see it as their own, they will care more about what happens here. They will take better care of our customers.”
Rios has become a mentor to many of his employees. “We have a lot of younger kids working here, especially in the front of the house,” he said. “They probably see me as a father figure.”
Novo StudioDESSERT: Chef Rios prepares Vanilla Dream ice cream and churros.Novo Studio
Rios looks at the younger generation as a key to the success of the local culinary scene. There isn’t enough outside talent — people who are willing to stay in Northwest Arkansas long-term — to make the engine run. Growing local talent for back- and front-of-house operations is important to creating a sustainable industry. He points to one of his neighbors at 8th Street Market — Brightwater: A Center for the Study of Food — as a sign of hope. The school gives local talent a chance to sharpen their skills and prepare for future employment in the food industry.
Quality justifies price
The tacos, burritos and other menu items at Yeyo’s are not the cheapest in the world. Sometimes customers look at the menu, or their final bills, and wonder what is going on with the prices. For Rios, the prices he charges reflect the quality of the food.
“We are here to change the perception that Mexican food is cheap,” he said. “That’s why it’s so important to me to serve great food at a cost that has a great value based on the processes we use to make the product.”
Quality is important, but so too is the way the food is made. Painstaking care is taken to recreate food in the image of Mexico. Handmade tortillas, rich mole sauce aged over time, produce picked at the peak of ripeness — all of it makes a difference in the final product.
Novo StudioPOZOLE: “We pay special attention to our ancestral ways of cooking, and we’ve never let down on the quality of our products,” Rios said.“We pay special attention to our ancestral ways of cooking, and we’ve never let down on the quality of our products,” Rios said. “We source locally as much as we can. Plus, we have our own farms, so mom and dad and other family members are bringing in fresh produce every day.”
As with most consumables in this age of inflation, prices are up for ingredients and supplies used at Yeyo’s. Rios estimates costs have increased between 15-35% in the last year alone. Rios said he has raised menu prices to keep up with inflation, but also to keep paying a living wage to his employees. “It doesn’t help me or our customers if employees go home at night worried about how they’re going to pay their rent.”
Fortunately, Yeyo’s customers see great value in the product despite increasing prices. Not only do they keep coming back for more, but the number of new customers coming through the door continues to swell. They have accepted higher menu prices because their taste buds tell them it’s worth it.
“We are here to value our work,” Rios said. “We don’t just give away things for free.”
A role model for those that follow
The Rios family isn’t the first with Mexican heritage to move to Northwest Arkansas. That trend has been in full swing for over three decades now. Rios said he appreciates the groundwork laid by those that arrived before him.
“My experience has been 99% great here in Northwest Arkansas,” he said. “The work around inclusion was largely done before we got here. The early arrivals were the true pioneers. We are breaking ground in other ways.”
While community acceptance was largely felt upon arrival, there were some obstacles to getting his business up and running. He points to a lengthy permitting process that could have gone much faster. Although the Latinx community was well established by then, a farm-to-table taco truck run by one of its members was a peculiarity. Those in power were skeptical that someone like Rios could find success in downtown Bentonville.
“We are here to change that perception,” Rios said. “That’s why it’s so important to me to serve great food at a cost that has a great value based on what we do and the processes we use to make the product.”
Novo StudioSPICE BAE: Chef Rios garnishes pozole.Skepticism has drained as recognition ramps up. The James Beard Award nominations have certainly raised Rios’ profile, even if he hasn’t yet taken one home.
What would it mean to Rios if he were to eventually win the coveted prize?
“It would be a way to make another groundbreaking step that can empower the Latinx community to do great things,” he said. “To be a role model for them sends a very strong message to those that are here, and those that are moving here, as to the good we can do in this region.”
The post Hey yo, Yeyo’s: Chef Rafael Rios isn’t your average, everyday success story appeared first on Arkansas Times.
At 18 years old, Jaylen Smith has been elected mayor of Earle in northeast Arkansas.
FOX13 in Memphis, about 30 miles from Earle, reported that Smith would be the youngest Black mayor in the United States after defeating Nemi Matthews Sr., the Crittenden County town’s longtime street superintendent, in a runoff election Tuesday.
Smith had 218 votes compared to Matthews’ 139, the station reported.
In a Facebook post, Smith wrote, “Citizens of Earle, Arkansas, it’s official!! I am your newly elected Mayor of Earle, Arkansas… ‘It’s Time to Build a Better Chapter of Earle, Arkansas.’ I would like to thank all my supporters for stepping up getting people to the polls. I am truly grateful for you all.”
In conceding, Matthews said, “I congratulate Mayor elect Jaylen Smith for a [well-run] race. I wish you well.”
Before the election, Smith, who graduated from high school in May, had said, “It’s not about how old you are, it’s about who has this city at heart most.”
In an earlier interview with FOX13, Smith hinted at the persistence that no doubt has helped him succeed: “When somebody tells me ‘no,’ I don’t stop just because someone tells me ‘no.’ There’s always someone waiting to tell you ‘yes.'”
Smith still lives at home with his parents. He has said he wants to improve public safety and transportation in the city of about 1,715 residents, tear down abandoned houses, and bring a grocery to the community.
FOX13 said Matthews also works as a police lieutenant.
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Remember Jeremy Hutchinson, the former Republican senator and gubernatorial nephew?
While awaiting sentencing on guilty pleas to multiple federal charges including participation in bribery schemes and tax evasion, Hutchinson faces legal troubles in civil court.
As I’ve mentioned before, he’s embroiled in a dispute with his former wife, Stephanie, over his failure to live up to a divorce settlement in 2011.
Now disbarred as a lawyer, Hutchinson is representing himself in trying to get released from terms of the property settlement/child support agreement (he is about a half-million in arrears, counting interest, according to his wife’s court filings on promises to provide $10,500 in monthly child support).
The dispute is nearing a decision in Circuit Judge Alice Gray’s court. A recent filing by Stephanie Hutchinson’s attorney, Joycelyn Stotts, asking that Hutchinson be held in contempt of court details the many ways Hutchinson has failed to deliver on promised support for his kids, including payment for mission trips, private school and college. And this, she wrote, is despite his enjoying significant streams of income and additional financial support from friends and his father, former U.S. Sen. Tim Hutchinson. That support helped pay his legal bills and accounting costs in the criminal investigations.
The document responds to Hutchinson’s litany of arguments, including his criminal troubles, of why he should be relieved of his obligations. He relies mostly on a technical argument about the validity of the settlement, not raised until years after he agreed to it and after complying with it for a period of time. He also is unhappy his wife moved to Northwest Arkansas with the children after the divorce, though that’s not a legal argument against enforcement of the agreement. His claims, responds Stotts, “are simply fabrications of his warped imagination.”
We learn that despite his claims of poverty, he’s earned significant sums of money for, among others, helping a friend sell personal protective equipment to Arkansas public schools. He also received $20,000 for his share of the 1836 Club, a private club he helped start that was envisioned as a lobbyist retreat.
None of this money flowed to his children, Stotts’ pleading says. But he was during this time able to help his new wife pay for a West Little Rock home held in her name and to spend $45,000 installing a pool (she testified she “always wanted a house with a pool”) and also pay for cosmetic surgery.
Stotts has asked the judge to hold Hutchinson in contempt of court, jail him and suspend his driver’s license until he satisfies the child support arrearage.
Unless the court steps in, Hutchinson will never be held accountable, Stotts argued.
There’s always enough for his beach vacations. He’s had so much money to do so many things. He cannot be allowed to give away money to his new wife and his best friend and blow the rest up until the final hearing then come with turned out pockets to cry woe is me. If a million dollars, or even a few hundred thousand dollars, shows up just to work out a favorable plea deal in federal court, then certainly some more of those funds will show up to keep him out of county jail. Because if Mr. Hutchinson is not subject to incarceration for his complete disregard for this Court’s order and his child support obligation, then who should ever be incarcerated for failing to support their children as ordered by a Court in the State of Arkansas?
Here’s Hutchinson’s response to the request for a contempt finding. Stotts says exhibits and testimony support none of his claims. She wrote: “Mr. Hutchinson was the adulterer in the midst of criminal conspiracies. He made a lot of commitments in the Agreement and Addendum, and he got so much in return. He reaped tenfold for many years and only felt a pang of discomfort when the federal indictments against him started coming down.”
Stotts commented in her conclusion:
There are rules of law, and there is the rule of law. Without our judiciary enforcing laws, we really have no valid system of government. In this case, Mr. Hutchinson has been able to do what he wants, when he wants, with little to no repercussions. He knows the law; he was a licensed attorney and a state legislator for years. He just does not care about the law.”
Given his multiple federal convictions, Stotts also commented that Hutchinson’s credibility is questionable. His ex-wife, on the other hand, has an “impeccable” reputation.
So, one has to question why she has been yoked with raising their three children on what she can muster herself over the last four years while he still sits in the lap of luxury in his West Little Rock home with his newly finished swimming pool while he waits for his next all-expense-paid vacation gifted to him by a friend or family member. He has no sympathy or remorse for what Ms. Hutchinson and their children have been through over the last four years after he cut them off financially. By his own testimony, he himself has never been cut off financially by his family despite his criminal activities and depravity. Ms. Hutchinson and their children lost their home. She works seven days a week between two jobs. The children struggle to qualify to compete in school athletics due to non-payment of their tuition. The older two children each work two jobs themselves and have taken out loans themselves to cover for what he has failed to pay for them. They live on debt, charity and the State, while he lives on state funds from being a middle-man on PPE transactions with public schools in the midst of a pandemic and a middle-man to a dental practice sale transaction.
The judge has scheduled another conference with attorneys today.
The post The travails of Jeremy Hutchinson: A civil case seeks jailing of the felonious former senator for contempt of court over child support failings appeared first on Arkansas Times.
North Little Rock indie pop duo Turquoise Tiger (Kyle R. Goff and Tristan Bethea) has a new song out today called “The Sun Burns The Horizon.” The tune is slow and wistful, but still blithe with open hi-hats that stay rattling much of the time, as if to simulate an open window. “I’m just happy that the morning sun has decided to shine on me,” the chorus goes. Something about the low, deadpan vocal delivery recalls Kurt Cobain and his other grungy contemporaries, but if they’d been able to let go of some of their angst.
Listen on Bandcamp here.
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Two items brought forward by directors were added to the Little Rock Board of Directors’ agenda at the last minute through a supermajority vote Tuesday. Both were approved. One called for increased transparency in city contracts, and the other will implement a downtown ambassador program. The board also talked about a business development near River Mountain Park and plans for the remaining federal pandemic relief funds.
Vice Mayor Lance Hines sponsored an ordinance that called for more board involvement on professional service contracts — agreements with companies that complete services like consulting and studies for the city. According to the ordinance, a list of the professional service contracts will be delivered to the mayor and the members of the board every Monday, or the next day of business if City Hall is closed. If any member has questions about a contract, they can request to have a discussion at the next public board meeting within 14 days of being notified.
The board approved the ordinance and its emergency clause, which means the ordinance will be effective immediately. Hines said he wanted to approach the ordinance with “more of a scalpel than a sledgehammer.”
The board also approved At-large Director Joan Adcock’s last-minute resolution that would set aside $500,000 in the 2023 budget for a downtown ambassador program. The ambassadors would be tasked with greeting and assisting tourists to improve their Little Rock experience. Only Director Ken Richardson voted no, but Director Antwan Phillips expressed dissatisfaction that the resolution bypassed the regular procedural steps that cut out valuable input it could have provided.
“I’m concerned that as a board, we could allocate $500,000 without a presentation [and] some of our colleagues having questions unanswered,” Phillips said. “When there are other things in different parts of town, there are a lot of questions, a lot of studying, a lot of ‘Let’s wait.’ I just want to express publicly that as a board, sometimes everything happens very fast, but when there’s other parts of town or other projects, we’re ready to push the brakes. … I’m bothered by that.”
Mayor Frank Scott Jr. said that he supports the ambassador program, but with the 2023 budget not yet presented to city leaders, the final dollar amount for the program could come from multiple resources. The city’s Advertising and Promoting Commission will discuss funds for an ambassador program Wednesday, Phillips said.
Westward developmentMore than an hour of Tuesday’s meeting was spent discussing a potential development near Pleasant Valley on Cantrell in Ward 4, which ultimately led to a vote to approve rezoning. Representatives from the developer Colliers spoke in favor of “The Middle” development, which would rezone the land from office space to mixed commercial businesses. Development plans include three restaurants with the ability to have drive-thru services, one restaurant with designated outdoor seating, a possible seven-story hotel and five-story office building.
City of Little RockPLANNED DEVELOPMENT near the Walton Heights neighborhood.Sketches of the potential development also include greenery, a landscaped water feature and a walkable mall-like area.
Director Capi Peck requested that her colleagues vote no on the proposed ordinance based on input from her constituents. Three members of the public spoke in opposition to the development plans Tuesday with concerns about the traffic it would bring to the Walton Heights area, safety for pedestrians traveling to River Mountain Park and if the developer’s traffic study was done well.
City of Little Rock‘THE MIDDLE’ looks to include a walkable mall-like area.The traffic study surveyed three times of day; from 7-9 a.m., noon-1 p.m. and 4-6 p.m. Citizen Jamie Norton expressed her concerns about the schools in the surrounding area and how the traffic study didn’t analyze the school pick-up time. The construction in the area also likely skewed the traffic results, as many have avoided the area, the residents said. Citizen Pete Marvin went as far as to say that the development site was set to produce a “very disastrous stifling of traffic.”
The residents who spoke against the development said that they weren’t opposed to any development on the site, but they were weary of this specific plan. They asked that the board move to defer the vote to a later meeting after a more comprehensive traffic study was completed.
In a 6-4 vote, the ordinance for the development passed. Directors Capi Peck, BJ Wyrick, Joan Adcock and Kathy Webb voted no.
Permits, pandemic funds and struggles at the fire departmentIn a 7-3 vote, the board also approved to increase the threshold required for building permits in the city from $500 to $5,000. An emergency clause on the item did not pass, which means that the ordinance will be put in place in 30 days. Under this ordinance, any construction up to $5,000 can be completed without a building permit. In addition, fences less than 7 feet tall, storage buildings, residential roofs and any type of shed less than 200 square feet will also not require a building permit.
Talk for the allocation of the remaining $5.5 million in the city’s American Rescue Funds allotment centered mostly around the Little Rock Fire Department. Chief Delphone Hubbard said on Tuesday that the $19.5 in millage bond money allocated to the fire department will cover a lot of what his department needs. A majority of the fleet is made up of “unrepairable fire trucks,” Hubbard said. “We’re at bare minimum as far as the ability to operate on safe equipment.”
The new fire equipment from the bond funds will take over a year to be received. In the meantime, some fire stations have already started working out of pick-up trucks. Director Virgil Miller spoke out about his dissatisfaction that the fleet got to this level.
“As a citizen, I am outraged and frustrated that I am hearing about the poor condition of our fleet and how it got here,” Miller said. “Maybe I am going to call out some people that have been on this board forever. How could this happen?”
He continued, “To the citizens of Little Rock, I just want to apologize for the condition of our fire equipment at this point. I think it is outrageous. I think it is inexcusable. I don’t know how it happened, but I want to make sure that going forward we don’t find ourselves in this position again.”
Fire Services Director Willie Hinton said that in order to resolve the department’s issue, and keep it resolved, about $6.5 million will need to be budgeted for police and fire every year. He compared Little Rock to Knoxville, Tennessee, which has a yearly replacement plan.
“I think we all believe in public safety — police and fire,” Director BJ Wyrick said. “I think you’re exactly right. We need to start putting our money where our mouth is and start making sure that we keep replacements going.”
The budget conversation was not extensive as the board was well into four hours of discussion. City Attorney Tom Carpenter did propose an allocation for a personal secretary, “which I’ve never had,” he said. “It’s getting kind of hard to keep up with everything.” Carpenter also said that the chief deputy and one other deputy at the city attorney’s office recently resigned for jobs with the federal government.
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HAS PLANNING APPROVAL: The Maly Group’s plan for an entertainment complext in North Little Rock cleared a planning hurdle last week.
Not one but two golf entertainment venues are under development along Interstate 430 — one for a Topgolf near the Col. Glenn exit in Little Rock and another on the site of the former Wild River Country along Interstate 430 near the Maumelle exit in North Little Rock.
The North Little Rock development appears to be in the lead in the development race at the moment, based on government reviews.
The Maly Entertainment Center, a complex including a T-time Outdoor Driving range (electronically enhanced as Topgolf facilities are), restaurant, bowling alley, shops and arcade won approval of a conditional use permit last week from the North Little Rock Planning Commission.
Here’s a copy of the conditional use approved for the site. It calls for an 89,000-square-foot large-scale recreational facility, plus an outdoor driving range surrounded by 150-foot fences, and a parking lot for more than 500 cars on a site of more than 30 acres.
Jamie Collins, Little Rock’s planning director, told me Topgolf has submitted a plan for a grading permit for its 18 acres in the Village at Brodie Creek along with preliminary site development plans, but has not yet applied for a building permit.
The North Little Rock complex when announced was said to be opening late in 2023. No estimated opening date was given when the Topgolf installation was announced. But construction likely would take a year or so.
Fore!
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REMOTE VISIT: Bill Clinton speaks at dinner Tuesday.
Former President Bill Clinton appeared by remote video tonight to speak to the annual dinner for volunteers at the Clinton Presidential Center and said he’d tested negative today for COVID-19, which prevented him from traveling to the event.
He said he felt fine and thought he might have picked up the virus in a trip to a funeral in England or a stop in Canada. He said he’d have been a hypocrite to make the trip after testing positive and having encouraged others to be careful.
He said he was hopeful about politics, despite the deep divisions in the country. He encouraged people to build bonds across political aisles on issues on which there is 70 percent agreement.
Potential news: He and other speakers talked of coming expansion of the Clinton Library to add papers of Hillary Rodham Clinton and an expansion of the student body of the Clinton School for Public Service next door. No details given.
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A cyberattack that made vulnerable the personal data of the district’s students and staff sent the Little Rock School District board into panic mode late in November.
On Tuesday, LRSD board President Greg Adams acknowledged a secret meeting the board held Nov. 21 to figure their way out of a virtual hostage situation that went sideways of the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act. Adams said the board was in an impossible spot and did their best, with hackers having accessed the private data of students, staff and vendors. Security consultants recommended that they keep quiet as they worked toward a resolution, Adams said.
“We needed to keep as much of this private — discussions on the plans and the pros and cons about different ways of responding — in order to not increase our vulnerability, or perhaps for more information to be taken, or for other threats to be made,” Adams said. “And so we were in a terrible bind to know how to respond, but we went ahead and met in private because of the concern. We did not want to make a bad situation worse, particularly to what didn’t affect just the district. That could affect thousands of individuals and families.”
Board members met secretly over Zoom to discuss the security breach, reportedly looking to a state law passed in 2017 that allows public entities to shield from the public any information about security.
But that law does not free public entities from public meeting requirements. In fact, board members Ali Noland and Vicki Hatter reportedly logged out of the Nov. 21 Zoom because of this very concern, then lobbied to hold another meeting, not secret this time, to make sure the board was on the right side of the public meetings law.
Brian ChilsonLRSD Board President Greg Adams said the board has struggled with how to deal with the cyberattack that put private information at risk.But on Tuesday, Adams said he would make the same decision again, and that he still believes meeting secretly was the right decision.
“Erring on the side of protecting vulnerable stakeholders was the most important concern,” he said. “The idea was never that the meeting would never come to light or that we wouldn’t tell people about it, but that it was an emergency. And we needed to do what we can to minimize the damage and risk to people.”
The conventional wisdom about not negotiating with terrorists doesn’t always hold in these kinds of jams, according to industry experts.
On Monday, the board met publicly and in person to vote on a resolution authorizing district administration to negotiate with the hackers. (It’s the same thing they voted on in the secret meeting, but this time they did it publicly.)
Beyond that, the district remains tight-lipped about the situation, at least for now. Adams said he expects it to be resolved within the week, and said he will have more to share then. He said the FBI is involved, security experts are on the case, and the district is already making plans to shore up security to try to stave off any repeat attacks.
Arkansas Times contributor and LRSD watchdog Jim Ross classified Monday’s meeting as damage control, and noted in social media accounts that two issues were at play: Board members and administration had to figure out how to protect private data, and they also had to continue following the law. It appears they succeeded on the first count and fumbled on the second.
Here is Ross’s account of Monday’s meeting, which he posted to Facebook:
Ross and other critics say the board could and should have figured out a way to deal with the cyberattack without violating public meeting laws. And they’re right. Letting elected officials decide what should be public information and what shouldn’t, when to follow laws and when to ignore them, is a recipe for authoritarianism.
Adams said he does not foresee this conundrum presenting itself again. “This truly has been a horrible thing for everybody involved. It’s been horrible to have to consider that people would do something like this and that we’d be put in this terrible position,” he said.
Dealing with faceless criminals was a novel challenge, and they didn’t have any experience to draw from. “We had to decide how to handle the responsibility, and do we we pay people money who have broken the law and are in our putting our people at risk? Those are just terrible decisions and there’s really, in my mind, these are no-win decisions. There’s no good option, it’s just trying to figure out what the least bad option is.”
What is the least bad option? That’s grounds for debate. The board voted 6-3 Monday 6-3 to negotiate with the hackers in hopes of protecting students’ and staff’s personal information. Noland, Hatter and Norma Johnson voted against negotiating.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified the names of the board members who declined to participate in the November meeting.
The post LRSD board president defends secret meeting over cybersecurity breach appeared first on Arkansas Times.
As much a eulogy as it was a PR moment, the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra’s announcement of the E. Lee Ronnel Music Academy this morning was an exceptionally moving event. Held in the Jo Luck Global Impact Room on the Heifer International campus in downtown Little Rock, the occasion was preceded by two short performances, a trio (Donna Barry, Randal Hundley and Amber Manney) plucked from the community orchestra and a quartet (Kalinda Loomis, Laine Farrar, Katherine Williamson and Jack Liu) of students from the youth orchestra. Light refreshments in the form of orange juice, champagne, and muffins were laid out on a table towards the back of the room, but were mostly ignored in favor of fellowship and conversation.
First to the podium was Christina Littlejohn, CEO of the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra. While recalling memories of E. Lee Ronnel, one of the “most dedicated volunteer leaders” in the history of the ASO, Littlejohn held back tears. An ASO supporter whose contributions ranged from leading multiple conductor search committees to helping balance the budget to hosting visiting performers in his own home, Ronnel had an energy that Littlejohn described as “inspirational and transformational.”
When he passed away in early 2022, he left behind the largest individual gift in the nonprofit’s 56-year history. In addition to expanding educational efforts like Arkansas Youth Orchestras, Strings Class, Summer Strings Camp and ASO Community Orchestra, his donation will also go towards the construction of the Stella Boyle Smith Music Center, which will serve as the home for all of ASO’s community programming.
Following Littlejohn, Ronnel’s youngest son took the stage. In another stroke of affecting sentiment, Steve Ronnel offered us windows into his father’s past. Though E. Lee Ronnel was born in Shanghai, his parents were both professional musicians who fled the Soviet Union during the Bolshevik Revolution. Given their Jewish heritage, Lee’s father’s musical opportunities in China – the ones that allowed he and his wife to leave Russia – may have saved their lives from the eventual threat of Nazis.
Though his father, a virtuosic pianist and guest conductor of the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra, died when Lee was only 6 years old, his mother sustained the family through World War II with her work as a piano teacher and a music store manager. “Music was woven into the lifestyle of my father,” Steve said. After immigrating to the United States with his mother and attending high school and college in New York, E. Lee Ronnel moved to Little Rock in 1964, the same year that the ASO was founded. Soon after, he became a devoted patron for more than 50 years.
The third speaker was Geoff Robson, Artistic Director at ASO. His speech was far more brief than Steve’s, but he made a compelling case for the importance of ASO’s educational outreach. “Music is passed down through direct contact from one individual to the next,” he said, while also pointing out that all four kids from the youth orchestra quartet we heard just 30 minutes prior take private lessons from members of the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra.
Christina Littlejohn returned to the stage one more time for some final remarks. “Lee knew so much more about me than I knew about him,” she said in reaction to all she learned from Steve’s tender telling of the family history. After reminding attendees that the fundraising campaign for the Stella Boyle Smith Music Center is only 1.9 million dollars away from completion, Littlejohn shared digital renderings of the new building, a nine-million dollar facility that will be located on the grounds of Heifer International.
The post ASO announces the E. Lee Ronnel Music Academy in a moving tribute to a lifelong volunteer appeared first on Arkansas Times.
THE REVEREND HORTON HEAT
FRIDAY 12/9. The Hall. 8 p.m. $20-$25.
When The Reverend Horton Heat got their start in Deep Ellum in the late 1980s, lead singer James Heath would take on the persona of a drunk preacher, spouting off crude cautions about eternal damnation. Though this parodic shtick was eventually abandoned, the urgency of their psychobilly anthems remains. Throughout a three-decade tenure, they’ve pumped out albums that are known for their speed, conviction and rebellious spirit, as if still animated by something perversely divine. Come out to The Hall to hear Heath’s spooky baritone float above guitar riffs that glide chromatically and drums that shuffle to the time of their own manic whims.
The post The Reverend Horton Heat to haunt The Hall on Friday appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Good question from Sen. Jim Hendren.
What am I missing? They served. Some have died. @rep_stevewomack @RepFrenchHill @RepRickCrawford @WestermanAR https://t.co/euuz2QGza7
— Jim Hendren (@JimHendren1) December 6, 2022
The post Republicans oppose pathway to citizenship for non-citizen U.S. military appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Stacy Hurst’s replacement by Mike Mills in the Sanders administration as state parks and tourism boss tops today’s news roundup, recorded before I heard the headline of conviction of the Trump organization on tax fraud charges in New York. Can an orange jumpsuit for the boss be far behind? The line is open.
The post The news roundup: An Asa department head is out appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Here’s the daily COVID-19 update from the Arkansas Department of Health.
Total cases: 971,876, up 686.
Active cases: 5,090, up from 4,775
Deaths: 12,594, an increase of nine
Hospitalized: 240, up from 223
In ICU: 33, up from 31
On ventilators: 18, down from 20
The post COVID today: Nine more deaths appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Black Friday thoughts?
The post Y’all out there? An open line appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The shooting happened near the intersection of Charles Bussey and Elm.
The post A Little Rock city employee shot on the job Friday appeared first on Arkansas Times.
John Tull, a lawyer who received the Freedom of Information Award from the Arkansas Press Association, told the newspaper, "In my 38 years of working with the FOIA, [this policy] is the most egregious thumbing of the nose at transparency and FOIA I have ever seen."
The post Attorney calls Conway School District’s email policy egregious appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The former president might be history, but the hoaxes he promoted won’t die easily.
The post Trump conspiracies appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Was the turkey too dry?
The post The Thanksgiving open line appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Author and baker Kelli Marks says cake is the best wingman. "Long ago I learned that people care less about what I have to say if I'm offering a cupcake when I say it."
The post To cure your social anxiety, try cake appeared first on Arkansas Times.
This month, the Tony Award-winning story of Tevye the milkman’s struggle to maintain his family’s traditional Jewish religious and cultural lifestyle in the wake of encroaching modern influences comes to the Robinson Center stage.
The post ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ opens Friday at Robinson appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Some tenants are facing the early cold weather without working heaters; others were living in mold-and-roach-infested apartments. With many surviving off of limited income, tenants are stuck in unsafe living environments managed by Knight Development Properties.
The post A living ‘nightmare’ for North Little Rock tenants appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A federal judge today denied Richard "Bigo" Barnett's motions to strike all of the charges resulting from his participation in the Jan 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. In a separate ruling, the judge withheld an immediate decision on whether to postpone Barnett's trial now set for Dec. 12.
The post Judge refuses to dismiss charges against Jan. 6 defendant from Arkansas appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The University of Arkansas at Little Rock has announced the largest fundraising effort in university history with the goal of raising $250 million ahead of its 100-year anniversary in 2027.
The post UA Little Rock launches Centennial Campaign to commemorate 100-year legacy of excellence in education appeared first on Arkansas Times.
LITFest went up in smoke days before its scheduled start, and the Think Rubix Principal Tristan Wilkerson shared how his firm was negatively impacted by the loss. “We were asked to perform a miracle,” Wilkerson said. “That’s a lot to ask.”
The post Think Rubix hands over LITFest performance contracts, sponsorship details appeared first on Arkansas Times.
25-year-old woman shot to death in Conway.
The post Homicide victim in Conway identified appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The flu hit early this year, and health experts aren’t sure when the high numbers could end.
The post First pediatric flu death reported in Arkansas this season, intensity is ‘very high’ appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The Conway residents really wanting to take politics out of the schools are planning to get organized.
The post Meeting planned, public invited in effort to get Conway School District back on track appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Ring in the holiday season early by attending the Candlelight Carol Service at Hendrix College’s Greene Chapel, a 225-person sanctuary so peaceful and picturesque that it is often reserved far in advance for the weddings of couples who met at the cozy liberal arts school in Conway.
The post Kick off the holiday season early with Hendrix College’s Candlelight Carol Service appeared first on Arkansas Times.
If you don't want to eat a big Thanksgiving meal, you can always try drinking it as a soda. But you should be warned: The reviews aren't good.
The post There’s a turkey & gravy soda and we tried it appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Richard "Bigo" Barnett, the Gravette man who propped his feet upon House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's desk during the January 6, 2021 insurrection, wants his Dec. 12 delayed until March.
The post Remember the Jan. 6 guy who propped his feet on Pelosi’s desk? He wants more time at home before his trial appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Tickets are free, but reservations are required.
The post Former child actor Jennette McCurdy, author of “I’m Glad My Mom Died,” to speak in Fayetteville appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Sarah Sanders' new chief of staff comes from Arizona, where she worked as deputy chief of staff for Gov. Doug Ducey while also lobbying for a tax break that would deliver $10 million to her dad's company. Grifting with dad is something Sanders knows plenty about, so they'll make a fine pair.
The post Sanders’ newly announced chief of staff comes from Arizona in wake of scandal appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The kitchen will be open, but Four Quarter is encouraging guests to bring a dish or any leftovers that will be set up potluck-style for people to eat free of charge.
The post Four Quarter opening up at 6 p.m. on Thanksgiving for Friendsgiving appeared first on Arkansas Times.
“Is there going to be a long line? Yes, but we will be out there actively managing it," Brian Malinowski, executive director of the airport commission said.
The post Sunday planes will be stuffed full of holiday travelers at Little Rock airport appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A supercharged rightwing political climate in the Conway School District could make recruiting new teachers a challenge.
The post Conway School board, beware of the teacher shortage appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Michael Hibblen, the news director for KUAR, 89.1 FM, the Little Rock affiliate of NPR, is leaving the station to work for Arkansas PBS, he announced today on Twitter.
The post KUAR program director heading to Arkansas PBS appeared first on Arkansas Times.
North Little Rock Police are busy investigating two murders.
The post Two homicides reported in North Little Rock Monday appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the election results and the latest on the showdown over who will be the next University of Arkansas chancellor.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the upcoming elections and the mess at Little Rock City Hall.
Release possible for inmate convicted in 49-year-old murder.
The post Governor proposes parole eligibility for inmate sentenced to life for murder in 1973 appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Director Capi Peck took charge at the Tuesday Board of Directors meeting to outline her experience with helping one of her constituents get an FOI request fulfilled where she claimed that Mayor Frank Scott Jr. instructed city staff not to turn over public records.
The post ‘I’m not on trial.’ Little Rock mayor refuses to address wrongdoings in public record requests appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Contributions to the Scott and Landers campaign are roughly similar, until you consider the amount Landers has put into the race of his own money.
The post At last, the first reports on spending for the Little Rock mayor’s race appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A peek at the money behind some of the TV ads now flooding the airways.
The post Dark money watch: New reports, but it’s not the whole story on Issue 2, marijuana and more appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Blue Hog thinks mayor has run afoul of state law by using police vehicle while campaigning.
The post Blue Hog files ethics complaint over mayor’s use of city vehicle and police during campaign appeared first on Arkansas Times.
He'd gone hiking Oct. 27. Rescuers found him five days later.
The post Lost Buffalo River hiker found in “good spirits” appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A huge arsenal was found after police shot a Sherwood an in standoff that turned into a gun battle.
The post Today’s news: A police gun battle and local politics appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Although Abdurraqib sincerely embodies a passion for popular culture, the guiding theme underneath all of his work is an unflinching curiosity toward what it means to be Black in America.
The post Writer Hanif Abdurraqib to speak at Hendrix College appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Thirteen deaths added to state's toll.
The post COVID today appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The document plot thickens with interest from the prosecutor.
The post The prosecutor enters the FOI fray at Little Rock City Hall appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The Hot Springs Documentary Film Institute announced today that film festival programmer Ken Jacobson will be the its new executive director.
The post New executive director for Hot Springs Documentary Film Institute appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Eat barbecue. Get a grill.
The post Arkansas Times launches second edition of the Arkansas Barbecue Passport appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Public school faithful are invited to knock doors for Democrat Chris Jones this weekend.
The post Faith leaders and educators to crusade for Chris Jones Sunday appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Yes, we know he was talking about Halloween. We know he was joking. But the problem is gun violence in America, especially our schools, is no joking matter anymore.
The post UPDATE: New Conway School Board member jokes about shooting trick-or-treaters appeared first on Arkansas Times.
FOI requests begin producing information, including the catering requirements for what was to be the headline LITFest concert.
The post Information begins trickling out of Little Rock City Hall, down to rental cost and catering details on scrapped concert appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Appeals court may have opened door to challenge of Arkansas law on petition canvassers.
The post 8th Circuit may offer hope to ease ballot petition restrictions appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Standoff lasted more than 18 hours.
The post UPDATE: Police end overnight standoff in Sherwood by killing man heavily armed with automatic weapons appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Feds OK Medicaid outreach to rural areas
The post Feds OK Arkansas changes in expanded Medicaid program appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Nonpartisan elections are heading to the scrapheap in Arkansas thanks to Republican takeover of government.
The post The end of non-partisan judicial races in Arkansas appeared first on Arkansas Times.
$500 million investment promised.
The post More growth in Arkansas steel industry appeared first on Arkansas Times.
If the feds take us off the National Register, real money, and with it, the chances of reviving this treasure of a neighborhood, would almost certainly disappear.
The post Central High Historic District could soon be history appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The mud is hitting the fan in the final days of election 2022, with Republicans doing most of the slinging.
The post Today’s news and the open line appeared first on Arkansas Times.
What are your top 5?
The post Trick or Treat: Arkansas Times Halloween candy rankings appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Reverend Wheeler Parker, Emmett Till’s cousin and best friend, and last living witness to Till’s abduction will speak at 3 p.m. at 604 President Street in Arkansas City. The event marks John H. Johnson Day, an annual holiday honoring Arkansas City native Johnson's life and legacy as the founder of Ebony and Jet magazines.
The post Emmitt Till family member speaks in Arkansas City at John H. Johnson Day Observance appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the search for the next University of Arkansas chancellor, the latest on Arkansas public officials' transphobia and Mike Huckabee meddling in the Little Rock mayor's race.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk teachers salaries, campaigns around ballot issues and the Little Rock mayoral election and LITFest.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the state Supreme Court clearing the recreational marijuana amendment for the November ballot, Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott Jr.'s very bad week and other odds and ends.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about Governor Hutchinson and Attorney General Leslie Rutledge endorsing discrimination of LGBTQ people, similar demagoguing happening at the Conway School Board, the death of Ken Starr, the latest on the ethics scandal involving Sen. Alan Clark and the health of Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Arkansas Times editors Austin Bailey and Lindsey Millar talk about Alan Clark and ethics violations, an important coming U.S. Supreme Court case that has AG Leslie Rutledge and Chief Justice Dan Kemp on opposing sides and Governor Hutchinson's campaign against the legalization of marijuana.
Arkansas Times editors Austin Bailey and Lindsey Millar talk about law enforcement officers brutally beating a man during an arrest in Crawford County, the latest on a lawsuit challenging Arkansas's ban on gender-affirming care for minors and the Little Rock mayor's race.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the special legislative session, a paltry slate of maternal health care initiatives Governor Hutchinson announced this week, the Republican reaction to the FBI investing President Trump for violating the Espionage Act and more.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the state Board of Election Commissioners rejecting ballot titles for a recreational marijuana amendment and a prohibition on casinos in Pope County, the release of a school safety report, the coming special legislative session and the Little Rock millage vote.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about state lawmakers' refusal to give teachers raises, the continue fallout from Arkansas's trigger law to ban nearly all abortions, new revelations about a fatal Little Rock Police Department car chase and more.
Arkansas law has numerous ways to punish women, doctors and those who support abortion rights. Wait for them to start happening.
The post More horrors for Arkansas women post-Roe appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Funny omission in Democrat-Gazette account of settlement of a dispute with Nikole Hannah-Jones over her hiring at the University of North Carolina. In short: "Where's Walter?"
The post 1619 Project creator settles with UNC over tenure controversy Arkansas publisher helped foment. And speaking of incomplete reporting… appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The Arkansas abortion ban threatens women's health. Period.
The post Women in peril: Arkansas in the post-Roe world appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Prosecutor clears former chief's firing on an armed parking lot confrontation.
The post Prosecutor clears former Chief Keith Humphrey’s use of force on New Year’s Eve appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Another week done.
The post Today’s news roundup and open line appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A dangerous trend continues. Get a shot. Wear a mask.
The post COVID today: Active cases top 16,000, hospital count tops 400 appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Arkansas Republicans prefer to punish women and doctors should they seek abortions, even in a state where it is legal.
The post Arkansas House Republicans vote to punish women and doctors for legal abortion access appeared first on Arkansas Times.
On Sunday Loblolly will be celebrating National Ice Cream Day/Loblolly Day with a limited-edition merchandise drop, free swag bags for the first 50 purchases and social media giveaways. They’ll also be scooping a Loblolly Day exclusive flavor, GALAXY.
The post National Ice Cream Day coincides with unofficial official Loblolly Day this Sunday appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A required reappraisal finds a 30 percent increase in the market value of property in Pulaski County
The post Warning to Pulaski taxpayers: Notices of the countywide reppraisal are in the mail and values are up, way up appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Both Mayor Frank Scott Jr. and candidate Steve Landers hosted public events Thursday to publicize their campaign efforts.
The post Little Rock mayoral campaigns are on the tracks, Landers and Scott met with the public appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Merch fair at Vino's tomorrow.
The post Merch fair for local bands at noon at Vino’s Saturday appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Attorney General Leslie Rutledge announced Friday that she had appointed Miguel Lopez of Little Rock, chief community outreach officer at Encore Bank, to complete a term on the Arkansas Ethics Commission. He takes a seat from which Denese Fletcher resigned in April because she’d taken a job as a state public defender. By law, the […]
The post Rutledge names Miguel Lopez to Ethics Commission vacancy appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Mark Barr, the little Rock-based author of the acclaimed novel "Watershed," is the recipient of this year's Porter Fund Literary Prize, a $5,000 prize awarded annually to a writer of distinction with an Arkansas connection. Past winners of the Porter Prize include Mara Leveritt, Morris Arnold, Kevin Brockmeier and Jo McDougall, the former Poet Laureate of Arkansas.
The post Little Rock author Mark Barr awarded 2022 Porter Fund Prize appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Winner quits job, plans move out of Pine Bluff.
The post Million-dollar lottery winner in Jefferson County appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Study concludes ShotSpotter doesn't work and that there are more effective ways of addressing gun violence.
The post About ShotSpotter. More criticism of one of LRPD’s touted gadgets appeared first on Arkansas Times.
For once, Leslie Rutledge isn't partnering with Texas on a states rights lawsuit, this one over abortion. And the Arkansas law is even more draconian.
The post Texas sues over Biden abortion directives; Leslie Rutledge missing in the action appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Griffin Coop
7:09pm
A Little Rock dispensary is getting new owners after the state Medical Marijuana Commission approved an ownership change on Thursday.
The post Little Rock dispensary gets new owners appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The Main Street Food Truck Festival is back for its 11th season and rolling into downtown on Sunday, September 11 from 11 a.m-6 p.m. Trucks will be located between the 300 and 800 blocks of Main Street.
The post Main Street Food Truck Festival returns in September appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Arkansas reported its first and only case so far on July 5.
The post Monkeypox in Arkansas: 101 appeared first on Arkansas Times.
With "physicality and aggressiveness." That's how artist Dominique Simmons describes her pastel technique. Feels about right for the times we're livin' in. Simmons' new exhibit opens at the ACANSA Gallery in conjunction with Third Friday Argenta Art Walk. Grab a snack from Brood & Barley or a drink from Flyway and check out work from Sherry J. Williamson at Bang Up Betty while you're down there; Williamson is donating 20% of her sales to the vital work that Arkansas Abortion Support Network does.
The post Dominique Simmons’ ‘Material Evidence II’ opens in Argenta Friday night appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The news roundup is a hot one.
The post Today’s news: Might we have a presidential candidate running while out on bail? appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The surge continues.
The post COVID today: 1,907 new cases and hospital count continues to rise appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Rare approval from Republicans for a high judicial nominee .
The post Hope native Doris Pryor gets Republican OK for appellate court seat appeared first on Arkansas Times.
One of the most compelling and heart-wrenching voices in country music circa 2022 is wailing at the White Water Tavern tonight. Tickets are sold out, but should any open up last-minute, grab them with the quickness.
The post Joshua Ray Walker at White Water Tavern tonight appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s Dale Ellis got the rest of the story on the abrupt resignation of Dallas County Sheriff Stan McGahee for taking a federal prisoner out of the jail without authorization. McGahee told Ellis he’d taken the prisoner, Clay Trimble, 29, out of the jail earlier this year to visit his grandparents, who […]
The post Dallas County sheriff: Compassionate visit for inmate led to his resignation appeared first on Arkansas Times.
What will Leslie Rutledge do? Will she challenge executive order overriding state law on abortion?
The post Biden’s order to protect women doesn’t instantly resolve the problem of Arkansas’s abortion ban appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Get a shot. Wear a mask indoors.
The post Re COVID: It ain’t over yet appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A daily reminder of just how unfair a coming income tax scheme is for the average Arkansan.
The post ‘Blessed Are the Rich’ — Book of Arkansas 1:1 appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Consensus on truth doesn't emerge in accounts of Arkansas publisher's intervention in a University of North Carolina hiring decision.
The post One year after 1619 Project controversy: Accounts of UNC officials and Democrat-Gazette publisher Hussman differ appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar preview the coming legislative special session, discuss President Biden's executive order on abortion and how it impacts Arkansas, talk about the latest on the state Senate ethics scandal, consider the latest trend of the coronavirus, talk about the marijuana amendment and more.
Tom Cotton really doesn't spend much time in Arkansas does he?
The post In which Sen. Tom Cotton gets schooled on his alleged home state appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Library of America, the much revered nonprofit publisher of essential works of American literature, will publish a Charles Portis volume in May 2023.
The post Library of America to publish Portis volume appeared first on Arkansas Times.
"The First Step," a new documentary about TV personality, author and lawyer Van Jones' efforts to convince lawmakers to pass criminal justice reform, will screen at the Central Arkansas Library System's Ron Robinson Theater in Little Rock on Friday.
The post Criminal justice reform doc ‘The First Step’ screens in Little Rock Friday appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Once more with feeling: The legislature is about to screw low-income taxpayers and COVID demands attention from people who think it's over.
The post Today’s news roundup: Taxes and COVID still top the discussion appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Eat My Catfish, Waldo's Chicken & Beer and Deluca's Pizzeria are in, but the fate of Mt. Fuji is uncertain.
The post More plans, restaurants announced for Breckenridge Village redevelopment appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The news continues to be bad. If you haven't been vaccinated, get a shot. And you might rethink your resistance to masks.
The post COVID today: 1,794 new cases and hospital count almost hits 300 appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Police investigating threat of bomb at Shorter College.
The post North Little Rock police investigate potential bomb, find nothing appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Little Rock Parks and Recreation and the Arkansas Boathouse Club have wet their paddles for a multi-million dollar community boathouse at Two Rivers Park. At an estimated 11,000 square feet, the proposed structure would provide ample storage and gathering space for local organizations and the public.
The post New boathouse at Two Rivers Park could launch ‘out-of-the-box’ park programming appeared first on Arkansas Times.
If anything, the news conference at the state Capitol seemed aimed at reassuring prospective students who may be shying away from enrolling at the former liberal-arts college.
The post Governor praises Henderson’s survival but offers no help from budget surplus appeared first on Arkansas Times.
If your internet goes out, as The Observer’s did recently, it’s likely the cyberattack comes not from the Russians, but from forces much closer to home. That was the case in the Kingwood neighborhood in early June, when a cluster of five houses suffered the extremely First World problem of a temporary lack of access to Netflix.
The post Squirrel! appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A remorseful Capitol trespasser persuades judge to give him probation.
The post Heber Springs’ Bob Snow, 78, gets probation for entering U.S. Capitol Jan. 6 appeared first on Arkansas Times.
On Saturday, I made my semi-weekly stop at the Hillcrest Farmers Market, and several days later, I had the best lunch of the summer. Then I had it again the next day. And you can, too!
The post The best summer lunch appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The majority of Arkansans, more than 1 million taxpayers, will get no permanent tax cuts from the plan about to be jammed through the legislature.
The post Tax cut by the numbers: The rich get richer. More than a million Arkansas taxpayers get almost nothing. appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Of course Arkansas figures in a national article on attacks on librarians over book content.
The post National exposure for threats on librarians includes Arkansas appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Lord God, they haven't given up yet.
The post In search — still — of the ivory-billed woodpecker appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Four sisters pleads to working with lawyer to defraud a program meant to repay discrimination against minority farmers.
The post Four plead guity in $11 million scam of federal program to aid minority farmers appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Memphis barbecue is heading to Fayetteville.
The post Fayetteville Flyer reports Memphis-based Central BBQ to open in Fayetteville appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Taxes, COVID, abortion and more in the news today.
The post Today’s news roundup and the open line appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Because at-home COVID-19 tests have become prevalent and most people do not report positive results to the Arkansas Department of Health, the high case numbers recently reported by the health department represent a significant undercount.
The post Thanks to at-home COVID tests, the high case reports in Arkansas are ‘just the tip of the iceberg,’ health official says appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The news is not good.
The post COVID today: 2,395 cases and 18 children hospitalized appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Widowpaw, Emily Fenton, Sam Williamson and Alex Cash this Friday night at the Old State House Museum.
The post Punk rock (plus) show at the Old State House museum Friday night appeared first on Arkansas Times.
I had decided we should start at the furthest location and work our way back to Little Rock. On a stretch of road that houses factories for Nestlé, Unilever, Butterball and others sits Ray’s Rump Shack in Lake City. Their sign reads “Worst BBQ in Arkansas,” which turns out to be miles from the truth.
The post Eat Arkansas BBQ road trip diary: Sammy Williams treks 300 miles to eat at six restaurants in one day appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Governor Hutchinson and Arkansas Education Secretary Johnny Key plan a news conference Thursday to address restructuring at the beleaguered Henderson State University.
The post Governor, education secretary plan news conference with struggling Henderson leaders appeared first on Arkansas Times.
It's growing season at the Jefferson County medical marijuana cultivator.
The post A tour of Natural State Medicinals appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Pine Bluff businessman lands the spot.
The post Hutchinson names Bill Jones to Game and Fish Commission appeared first on Arkansas Times.
I meant to mention a telling passage in the Michael Wickline article in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on a coming special session to accelerate a state income tax that will primarily benefit the wealthiest people in Arkansas. The governor proposes to scrap a three-year phase-in of a cut in the top income tax rate and put […]
The post Arkansas priorities: The rich remain at the head of the line appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A jump in hospitalizations noted in Monday report.
The post COVID catchup: The Monday numbers appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Cases climb, but hospital rate shows slight change.
The post COVID catchup: The Sunday numbers a day late appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Another big rise in new cases.
The post COVID yesterday: Active cases top 10,000 appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Leslie Rutledge said what?
The post Do not rehire: A vote for Leslie Rutledge is a vote for … appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Which deeply moral decision will Tom Cotton want to take away next from millions of Americans?
The post Tom Cotton, Clarence Thomas and today’s Roe decision’s implication for birth control and same-sex marriage appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Arkansas votes remain captive to the NRA, even for this modest step forward.
The post House sends gun bill to President Biden; Arkansans oppose new gun safety measures appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Scenes from the abortion clinic this morning, Rally tonight at the state Capitol. AG Leslie Rutledge certifying at 2 p.m. today the end of legal (key word here) abortion in Arkansas.
The post Rally tonight at the Capitol; plus, today’s scenes from the abortion clinic appeared first on Arkansas Times.
No word today from the Senate on a review of what is believed to be allegations of cheating on expense accounts.
The post No smoke yet from Arkansas Senate appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Federal damage suit filed over shooting death in Lonoke County.
The post Lawsuit filed in shooting death of Hunter Brittain in Lonoke County appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The bottom line of the news roundup remains the same: Frogmarch Donald Trump!
The post Today’s news — COVID and corruption — and the open line appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Frogmarch them all.
The post Jan. 6 committee quote of the day appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The numbers today are not good.
The post COVID today: 1,434 new cases, a big jump in active cases and seven more deaths appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Jeremiah Story was killed while booking a drug suspect.
The post UPDATE: Slain Perry County jail officer identified appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Court strips meaningful remedy for criminal suspects who haven't been informed of their rights.
The post The activist Supreme Court delivers another victory for bad policing appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The decision will be appealed.
The post Damien Echols loses bid for DNA testing of evidence from West Memphis murder investigation. He’ll appeal. appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The New York ruling likely means little in Arkansas, already effectively open to guns in almost all settings.
The post Conservative Supreme Court continues its wreckage of precedent, here in killing a New York gun law appeared first on Arkansas Times.
No one is talking as members of a state Senate committee go into their second day of a secret meeting about ethics complaints.
The post Speculation around secret Senate Ethics Committee meeting suggests per diem abuse appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Justices send a message to judge about allowing only vaccinated jurors.
The post COVID and the courts: Supreme Court weighs a judge’s order for vaccinated jurors in UAMS case appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Enhanced concealed carry permit holder blocked for now from taking a gun into Little Rock City Hall.
The post Supreme Court rejects suit seeking armed access to Little Rock City Hall by concealed weapon permit holder appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Fashioned after the museum’s popular December eggnog competition (the Nog-Off), the Hop-Off will invite guests to sample the brews and be the judge for the title of People’s Choice Award.
The post Historic Arkansas Museum hosting first ever ‘Hop-Off’ historic home brew competition appeared first on Arkansas Times.
How NRA pointman Jay Dickey came to change his mind about the value of research into gun safety.
The post Video: How Jay Dickey changed his mind about gun research appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Suspect apparently shot jailer.
The post Perry County jail officer fatally shot appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Owners of Rocco's Pizza in Omaha, sight of the "CWS Jello Shot Challenge," are donating $2 per shot purchase to food pantries at UA and Ole Miss.
The post ‘CWS Jello Shot Challenge’ restaurant to donate a big part of the proceeds to campus food pantries appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A busy news day, mostly of the not-so-good variety.
The post The news roundup and open line appeared first on Arkansas Times.
This show at Hibernia Irish Tavern marks a reemergence to the stage for the duo, and the music’s tendency to gravitate to themes of lightness/heaviness couldn’t feel more timely in 2022. If you can manage to make it to the end of their set without becoming a die-hard fan, you may want to have your pulse checked by a licensed physician.
The post A Rowdy Faith at Hibernia Friday night appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A documentary filmmaker lays bare the dangerous and sweeping implications of a court ruling protecting Arkansas's law to punish people who won't pledge not to boycott Israel.
The post The 8th Circuit’s attack on free speech in the Arkansas Times ruling today appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Today's trend is up.
The post COVID today: 812 new cases, two more deaths and a rise in hospitalizations appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Robert Baysinger, who’d already managed to live down that murder case enough to serve as a justice of the peace, lost to Tony Horton.
The post Man once convicted of murder but later acquitted loses race for county judge appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The police report says school district Superintendent Tony Thurman “stated that Melissa Bosch has been very outspoken at school board meetings. Due to her conduct, he was concerned about the comment on the recording.”
The post Moms for Liberty member avoids criminal charges over comment about gunning down a school librarian appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A secret meeting of Arkansas state senators is probably juicy stuff, but they kicked the public out so we can't say for sure. Rumor has it that lawmakers have been accused of collecting per diems on meetings they never attended.
The post Tomfoolery at the Capitol, as the Senate Ethics Committee hides behind closed doors appeared first on Arkansas Times.
He'll be the only UA Board member without a degree from a UA campus.
The post Hutchinson names Nate Todd to the University of Arkansas Board of Trustees appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The new summer specials now available at Raduno incorporate a wide range of local ingredients.
The post Summer specials now available at Raduno highlight local ingredients appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Trump's phone call to Raffensperger is continuously vivid and telling every time: Trump, in his own voice, trying to muscle a state official into helping him stage a coup. https://t.co/MAzZVYa7l2 — Tim O'Brien (@TimOBrien) June 21, 2022 There are too many highlights to count as still more Republicans hammer nails in what should be Donald […]
The post On to the Trump frogmarch! Another devastating round of Jan. 6 hearings appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A pilot program will finance some time off for people caring for those with dementia and Alzheimer's.
The post State begins grant program for families caring for those with Alzheimer’s and dementia appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Violent crime is down slightly in Little Rock for the first six months of the year, but overall crime is on the rise.
The post Little Rock crime levels off in recent weeks, but for the year, the trend is up appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Supreme Court puts another hole in the wall separating church and state.
The post Rutledge cheers Supreme Court ruling sending public dollars to discriminatory religious schools appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Hubcap Burger Company will not reopen after a truck crashed into the building in March.
The post Hubcap Burger Co. on Cantrell closed permanently appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A quiet partial holiday.
The post A news roundup and the open line appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Governor Hutchinson announced today that he’d appointed Mitch Rouse as secretary of the Department of Transformation and Shared Services. He succeeds Amy Fecher, who with the votes of Hutchinson appointees recently slid into the job as director of the Arkansas Public Employees Retirement System despite a scant background in finance. Rouse, a lawyer, has been […]
The post Governor names new transformation chief for final months of his administration appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A dip reported in cases today
The post COVID today: A drop in active cases after a run of increases appeared first on Arkansas Times.
One death and two hospitalized, according to Sheridan fire officials.
The post One dies in Sheridan apartment fire appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Oil country Texas going in big on electric vehicle charging stations.
The post Texas is cooking with electricity appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Many counties reduced polling places in the primary election this year.
The post Polling places decline in Arkansas appeared first on Arkansas Times.
As Henderson State University grapples with faculty layoffs and other budget cuts, the Arkadelphia-based college is now looking for someone to head its alumni office.
The post Already struggling Henderson losing its alumni head appeared first on Arkansas Times.
One huge win, 3,416 Jello shots taken.
The post Hog fans break Jello shot record at Rocco’s Pizza in Omaha appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Luther and Cody et al. in Argenta Friday.
The post North Mississippi Allstars give free show at Argenta Plaza Friday night appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Cases, deaths and hospitalizations all show increases.
The post COVID today and the open line appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The U.S. might be better off without Texas and a few other similarly inclined locales.
The post You want abnormal? See Texas Republican Party platform appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Death on Jefferson Street.
The post LRPD reports homicide this morning appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Don't forget Tom Cotton's role in the attack on the electoral process, campaign consultant says.
The post Tom Cotton gets a shoutout for aiding insurrection appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Can you imagine being the reason a family mourns and endures pain, all because of carelessness and physics? We can’t do anything about the physics … but we can be more cognizant, connected and cautious.
The post Hey, Arkansas: Be safe – be seen appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Three hours, 21 hits, 17 runs later ...
The post Razorback baseball fans pounded nearly 1,000 Jello shots in 3 hours at Rocco’s Pizza in Omaha today appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The active case count continues to mount.
The post COVID and the open line appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Will anybody hold Trent Garner responsible for his unconstitutional double dip.
The post Group urges prosecutors to investigate Sen. Trent Garner appeared first on Arkansas Times.
This memo distributed to the Little Rock City Board Friday provides some clues about the causes of a deterioration in city parks. Of course, there’s also the closure of a couple of golf courses since 2017. But that’s a whopping reduction in staffing. I favor more spending on parks and less on, among others, […]
The post Little Rock reports shrinking parks staff over last five years appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Two dead in wreck on Janis.
The post UPDATE: Two dead in crash on Kanis Road appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Sculpture park hit by theft.
The post Sculpture stolen from Riverfront Park appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Loblolly is churning up the first of its new tiny batch series with a smoked old fashioned flavor made with its Rock Town Distillery bourbon ice cream base, bourbon-soaked cherries, orange zest and bitters.
The post Loblolly Creamery debuting new tiny batch series with Smoked Old Fashioned ice cream appeared first on Arkansas Times.
COVID and Trump craziness are in the news today.
The post TGIF: A roundup of assorted weirdness and the open line appeared first on Arkansas Times.
But no new deaths and a drop in hospitalizations.
The post COVID today: Active cases top 8,000 appeared first on Arkansas Times.
On this week's podcast, Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the rise in coronavirus numbers, an Arkansas man arrested in Idaho as part of a white supremacist group, the latest from the Jan. 6 committee, missed opportunities by Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, the Arkansas school safety commission, Moms for Liberty in Cabot and another high profile LRPD departure.
The post The Heatwave Edition appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Gun-toting teachers, legal threats and a Karen meltdown for the ages.
The post Add armed teachers and unhinged legal threats to the bizarre tale of Cabot’s Moms for Liberty group appeared first on Arkansas Times.
New questions raised about payments made to Sen. Trent Ganeer while he was improperly on the state public defender payroll.
The post More Blue Hog sleuthing on Trent Garner delves into new questions on pay issues. Again asking Attorney General Rutledge to investigate appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Will the stealth candidate surface to answer key questions about her former boss and rainmaker?
The post A question for Sarah Huckabee Sanders appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A crane lift appearing to house a security camera has been placed at the parking lot across from Little Rock Family Planning Services, the state's only spot dedicated to providing surgical abortions.
The post LRPD crane lift camera installed near abortion clinic appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Of course Arkansas's senators aren't on board with modest, bipartisan gun-related legislation
The post Guns, Tom Cotton, COVID and the open line appeared first on Arkansas Times.
COVID and interest in gun safety on the rise in Arkansas today.
The post Guns, COVID and the open line appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the prime time Jan. 6 committee hearing, Governor Hutchinson floating a significant raise for teachers and the latest on Trent Garner's double dip.
From Humans of New York comes a touching read with some "Zola"-esque twists and turns about a woman carving out her post-marriage identity — looking for a sense of belonging, a sense of family and a place she and her 14-foot sectional couch can call home.
The post Meet Detra, the former Arkansas pastor’s wife charming the hardened hearts of New York City appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Caked up Cupcakes & Ice Cream, located at 5621 Kavanaugh Blvd. in the former Poke Hula, is hosting a grand opening party this Saturday from 9 a.m.-2 p.m.
The post Grand opening of Caked up Cupcakes & Ice Cream in the Heights this Saturday appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Asa wants to talk about mental health in stead of gun control. A constituent responds.
The post Asa comes poorly armed to a battle of wits with constituent over mental health and the gun debate appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The UA doesn't think the public has a right to know how much it has or will receive for selling exclusive soft drink rights on campus.
The post Soft drink secrecy at the University of Arkansas appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Oklahoma-based tribe expands its gambling footprint to Mississippi.
The post Cherokee Nation makes a $450 million bet on Tunica, Miss., gambling appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The blockbuster opening of the Jan. 6 hearings should have Arkansas Republican politicans squiriming with shame for their support of Donald Trump's lies.
The post Jan. 6 hearing takeaway: Impeach him. Charge him. Convict him. Frogmarch him to prison. And put the mark of shame on every Arkansas Republican who defends him still. appeared first on Arkansas Times.
“We welcome everyone to join in this fight against gun violence. Each and every one of us has a role to play in putting an end to this public health crisis,” new Moms Demand Action leader Anna Morshedi said.
The post New leader Anna Morshedi steps up to demand action for gun safety appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Asa, Trent and Tom are among the political figures in the news today.
The post The news roundup: Politics and the insurrection hearing appeared first on Arkansas Times.
663 new cases and a slight dip in the number hospitalized.
The post COVID today: A slight improvement in the number seriously ill appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A woman known to some as a QAnon influencer and to others as Utsava the psychic goes on trial Friday in Sheridan on a felony charge of terroristic threatening.
The post Self-proclaimed psychic linked to QAnon due in Arkansas court Friday. Can she predict the outcome? appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The long-running food- and music-fueled Fayetteville Roots Festival is back August 25-27, and some of our faves are on the lineup.
The post Fayetteville Roots looks awesome this year: Taj Mahal, Molly Tuttle, Samantha Crain, The Wood Brothers plus appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Pull up a patch of Camp Taco astroturf (and a tequila flight if you can be late to work tomorrow.)
The post Creators’ Village hosts ‘The Talent Show’ at Camp Taco tonight appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The museum is highlighting the art form with "Basket Cases," an exhibit featuring a portion of owner Anita Davis' collection.
The post America’s love affair with wicker will never die; ESSE Purse Museum’s exhibit ‘Basket Cases’ is on board appeared first on Arkansas Times.
If you're looking for a chance to get outside and hear something a little different this weekend, there's a free outdoor concert from the Little Rock Winds ensemble 7 p.m. Sunday evening in MacArthur Park.
The post Little Rock Winds concert at MacArthur Park Sunday appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Arkansas hasn't gone quite as far as Texas in persecution of the tiny population of transgender children, but give our politicians time. Denial of treatment, which Arkansas has legislated, set this Texas nightmare in motion
The post Persecution of transgender children has consequences appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The board talked financial woes, solar energy and state requirements.
The post Tax revenue below projections, possibly jeopardizing planned teacher raises, LRSD board told appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Momentary in Bentonville have big summer plans for all of us. From internationally known musicians performing live concerts to displaying an original print of the U.S. Constitution alongside influential works of art, this season is not one to be missed.
The post How to make the most of your summer weekends with Crystal Bridges and the Momentary appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Supreme Court allows sun to shine on records of how state handled claims for unemployment benefits.
The post Supreme Court upholds access to information about unemployment benefit applications appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Owners Robert Couser and Grant Hall have shaken up the Arkansas barbecue scene of late with their brisket, ribs, pulled pork and house-made sausage. All their offerings are smoked on an offset pit with post-oak wood, lending itself to a traditional Texas-style of barbecue.
The post Ridgewood Brothers announces plans for brick-and-mortar in Russellville appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Arkansas PBS says it was a programming decision not to carry the insurrection hearing on its main on-air channel.
The post Arkansas PBS explains its decision not to carry the Jan. 6 hearings on its main on-air channel appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Asa is begging for money to build a national profile as a presidential candidate.
The post The shape of Asa’s run for president: He’ll whip inflation and China and be another Ronald Reagan appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Three dead and continued traffic issues from a multi-vehicle wreck during bad weather Wednesday on Interstate 30 in Southwest Arkansas.
The post Three dead in Interstate 30 crashes appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Col. Leland Tony Shepherd will be promoted to brigadier general and assume command of the Arkansas Army National Guard in ceremonies Sunday at Camp Robinson. He will be the first Black officer to command the 6,500 troops and is only the second Black general officer in the Arkansas Army Guard. The first, Brig. Gen. William […]
The post Arkansas National Guard to be led by Black officer, Leland Tony Shepherd appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Senator Trent Garner breaks law, loses double-dip job. But that shouldn't be the end of it.
The post Blue Hog Report nails law-breaking Sen. Trent Garner on double-dip; more fallout to come appeared first on Arkansas Times.
It's official. The Arkansas Republican Party has abandoned the notion that judicial races should be non-partisan.
The post Republican Party openly endorses a partisan for Arkansas Supreme Court appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Two minutes of sheer fire from Second Life, featuring Terminal Nation vocalist Stan Liszewski.
The post Little Rock hardcore outfit Second Life addresses police brutality on new single appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Ban assault weapons. That is all.
The post Speak out against assault weapons this Saturday in Little Rock appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Can Arkansas voters be gulled by the legislature again on constitutional amendments? South Dakota voters weren't fooled.
The post Can Arkansas match South Dakota in protecting the people’s access to ballot? appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Crime and guns and COVID are in the news today.
The post The news roundup returns and the open line appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Cases and hospitalizations continue to rise.
The post COVID today: 805 new cases and another jump in the number hospitalized appeared first on Arkansas Times.
‘Many children were left not only dead, but hollow’ — Matthew McConaughey at White House remarks on Uvalde slaughter.
The post Ban assault weapons appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Two more dead and still the Little Rock police are stingy with information
The post Add two to Little Rock homicide count; and no improvement in police transparency appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Ever go to a restaurant and say, “What do you recommend?” Well, here’s your chance to see what some of your favorite restaurants’ chefs and owners love to eat from their own menu! CACHE RESTAURANT PAYNE HARDING | CHEF Chef Payne Harding, a Little Rock native, owns and operates Cache with his father. A […]
The post The Foodie Guide 2022 appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Cushman & Wakefield | Sage Partners announced on Monday that it brokered the sale of the Riverdale Shopping Center, home of Riverdale 10, Whole Hog Cafe and Ace Hardware, for just over $16 million on May 20. Eat My Catfish is coming to the center.
The post Riverdale Shopping Center sold to group of Arkansas partners for $16 million, redevelopment project announced appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Some high points from last night's awards ceremony.
The post Nods to Bob Robbins, Lefty Frizzell, Floyd Cramer at Arkansas Country Music Awards appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Reports say a van with passengers from a school for developmentally disabled collied with a truck.
The post Five dead, five injured in crash of van carrying disabled people in Southeast Arkansas appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Black voters in Louisiana got better treatment from a Louisiana federal judge than they received from a Trup appointee in Arkansas.
The post Score a win for voting rights in Louisiana. Arkansas? Sorry. appeared first on Arkansas Times.
City Director Doris Wright has been a persistent advocate for improvements to the ball fields at the West Central Sports Complex on John Barrow Road, which is in her ward. She now has a price tag for desired improvements
The post City Hall puts a cost estimate on West Central Sports Complex improvements — $500,000 to $3.5 million appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Brian Nichol, MD Medical Marijuana 101. Dr. Nichol, CannabisExpertMD, introduces us to the Cannabis plant and its many uses.
The post Medical Marijuana 101 with Brian Nichol, MD appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A Conversation with Joe Thompson, MD, President & CEO, Arkansas Center for Health Improvement. Dr. Thompson and Alan Leveritt have a conversation in regards to the research being done on the clinical and therapeutic impact of medical marijuana.
The post Clinical & therapeutic impact of medical marijuana with Joe Thompson, MD appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Eddie Armstrong, Responsible Growth Arkansas and Erika Gee of Wright Lindsey Jennings discuss Arkansas Adult Use Cannabis Amendment to legalize recreational marijuana in Arkansas.
The post Discussion on Arkansas Adult Use Cannabis Amendment to legalize recreational marijuana in Arkansas appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Arkansas lawmakers could be considering a monumental and well-deserved teacher pay raise within weeks. It's a bit of a Hail Mary move to try to retain teachers, who are seemingly fleeing the profession in droves. And we hope it works.
The post Governor Hutchinson proposes sweetening the pot for teachers with big raises, $46k minimum salary appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Arkansas's count of COVID-19 patients increased by 116 today. Seven more deaths were reported to the Arkansas Department of Health.
The post The Monday line and coronavirus report appeared first on Arkansas Times.
State lawmakers and other public officials who gathered Monday to discuss school safety in light of deadly mass shootings across the nation praised each other for past legislation and managed to avoid using the word “gun” for almost exactly one hour.
The post Arkansas lawmakers pat each other on back about school safety but take no action appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Juneteenth programming from Mosaic Templars Cultural Center extends beyond the day itself, beginning with "The State of Black Arkansas: Our Health," tomorrow's virtual talk from the Arkansas Medical, Dental and Pharmaceutical Association and culminating in a concert, celebration and community 5K fun run/walk on Saturday, June 18.
The post Lots of Juneteenth programming to check out starting tomorrow with ‘The State of Black Arkansas: Our Health’ appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Rob Walton, the eldest son of Sam Walton, is expected to buy the Denver Broncos for around $4.5 billion, Forbes reports. That would be the most expensive sports franchise sale in history.
The post Report: Rob Walton to purchase Denver Broncos for a record-setting price appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The $250k will be donated to World Central Kitchen, a nonprofit organization founded by chef José Andrés that sends cooks to the front lines of humanitarian crises. World Central Kitchen has had chefs in Ukraine and neighboring countries for more than 100 days.
The post Shannon Wynne’s Flying Saucer and Flying Fish locations meet fundraiser goal of 250k for Ukrainian refugees appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Check out "Open Sails," an ambient track from a Central Arkansas-based sound therapist.
The post Meditation music straight outta Arkansas appeared first on Arkansas Times.
If you've made your share of trips up to Northwest Arkansas from Little Rock, you know a good road lunch spot is worth its weight in gold.
The post Kasper’s in Clarksville is raising the bar on the River Valley road lunch appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Hinky numbers are far from the worst problem with the School Shield program. Putting adults with guns in schools is not only ineffective; it imposes a punishing, prison-like atmosphere on our children for a problem they did not create.
The post NRA School Shield program once headed by Asa Hutchinson called a ‘fundraising front,’ also misguided appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Lost Forty Brewing is hosting a patio party this Saturday from noon-3 p.m. celebrating its new Punchy Snow Cone hard seltzer collection.
The post Lost Forty hosting hard seltzer snow cone tiki patio party Saturday appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Simply join the free Saracen Casino Resort Player’s Club in the month of June and play to win your share of up to $125,000 in prizes, including a brand new Ford Mustang GT! As a Saracen Player’s Club member, the more you play, the more chances you have to win. Join in every Saturday night for […]
The post Win a new Ford Mustang GT at Saracen Casino Resort appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Block party in Argenta this weekend, with an outdoor show from the Gravel Yard Band.
The post Dogtown Throwdown in Argenta this weekend appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Talk amongst yourselves.
The post Early Sunday open line appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Arkansas Times editors Austin Bailey and Lindsey Millar talk about guns and the governor, Trent Garner's unlikely career move and Searcy County political intrigue.
More change is coming to the marijuana scene in Fayetteville after state regulators gave their blessing Thursday for one of the city’s dispensaries to move to a newly constructed space in the city.
The post Marijuana commission approves Fayetteville dispensary move appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The Arkansas Department of Health reporter 635 new COVID-19 cases in the last 24 hours, the largest one-day jump in some time. Be safe out there.
The post Big jump in coronavirus cases and an open line appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The governor said he wants to harden Arkansas schools with armed security and stronger doors, but said a better background check system, safe storage laws and most other gun-focused legislative fixes are off the table.
The post Arkansas governor parks the burden of gun violence with teachers and schoolchildren appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The University of Arkansas at Fayetteville graduate ships out to law school this fall with a mission to secure equity, understanding and justice in her native Arkansas. One of 10 recipients of this year’s NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund’s Marshall-Motley scholarships, Yuille earned a full law school scholarship in exchange for her commitment to devoting the first eight years of her career to practicing civil rights law in service to Black communities in the South.
The post Justyce Yuille meets her destiny appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Bootlegging. Murder for hire. Political intrigue and justice gone wrong. This story out of Searcy County has it all.
The post Searcy County man once convicted of murder, later acquitted, is on the ballot appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Real Images director Michelle Barnes on empowerment, diversity and connection.
The post Five Questions with Michelle B. Barnes, leader of local nonprofit Real Images appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Back by popular demand, The Root Cafe announced that it will be serving brunch exclusively all day on Sundays from 9 a.m.-2 p.m. starting this Sunday.
The post All day Sunday brunch is back at The Root appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Stone's Throw Brewing and the Downtown Little Rock Partnership have partnered with Central Arkansas Fermenters to bring a new home-brew competition to downtown Little Rock.
The post Main Street Mash-Off home-brew competition this Saturday appeared first on Arkansas Times.
One mile down, 74 to go for Democratic candidate for governor Chris Jones.
The post Arkansas governor hopeful Chris Jones tackles his first mile in Little Rock appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The Bentonville Film Festival announced the lineup for its annual program, happening this year June 22-26. "Boycott," a film partially about the Arkansas Times legal challenge to a law that requires people who do business with the state to sign a pledge promising not to boycott Israel, didn't make the cut despite getting accepted to internationally prominent fests including SXSW and Hot Docs.
The post Bentonville Film Fest announces lineup; ‘Boycott,’ doc on Arkansas Times refusal to sign anti-boycott law, doesn’t make cut appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The parking garage on the northeast corner of Eighth and Main Streets downtown is getting a fresh splash of paint, thanks to an effort coordinated by Downtown Little Rock Partnership, Arkansas Arts Council and arts organization Cutwell 4 Kids.
The post More public art downtown, this time from Cutwell 4 Kids appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Four hundred-and-two works from Arkansas art students were submitted to the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts' young artist competition this year, "which has grown from drawing, painting and sculpture to include photography, animation and digital work," director of community engagement Chris Revelle said.
The post Check out the 61st Young Arkansas Artists Exhibition up online appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Your Jif peanut butter could be under recall.
The post Check your Jif: The peanut butter I bought for sentimental reasons has been recalled appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Jonathan Martin, long time political reporter for The New York Times and the co-author (with fellow Times political reporter Alexander Burns) of the new book "This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future," will speak at 6 p.m. June 6 at the Central Arkansas Library System's Ron Robinson Theater in an event sponsored by CALS and the Political Animals Club.
The post New York Times reporter to speak at free Political Animals event appeared first on Arkansas Times.
As the clock ticks down on abortion access in Arkansas, a new battle for reproductive rights begins.
The post Arkansas preps for the end of abortion rights appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Rural Searcy County in Northwest Arkansas led the state in voter turnout in last week's primary elections.
The post Rural Searcy County leads state in voter turnout; county judge who had legal troubles loses appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The Regions Building, the 30-story, 547,000-square-foot tower at the corner of Capitol Avenue and Broadway, has a new owner.
The post Regions Building sold by bankruptcy trustee appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Petit & Keet announced last week that Bonner Cameron has taken over the role of executive chef. Cameron previously served as executive chef at Allsopp & Chapple since its opening in 2018.
The post Bonner Cameron takes over as executive chef at Petit & Keet appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Metroplan, the Central Arkansas metropolitan planning organization, has released an interactive map of its proposed Regional Greenways plan for public comment.
The post Metroplan seeking public input on Regional Greenways plan appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The city of Little Rock is expected this week to receive the second tranche of the $38 million in federal coronavirus relief dollars it's been allocated as part of the American Rescue Plan.
The post Little Rock board discusses allocations for $12.4 million in American Rescue Plan funding appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Little Rock native and Parkview grad holds a book signing for her debut novel tonight at WordsWorth Books.
The post ‘Queerly Beloved’ book signing at WordsWorth Books tonight appeared first on Arkansas Times.
This Saturday at 2718 South Arch Street.
The post Free performances from Joshua Asante, Akeem Kemp, Bri Ailene, Jose Holloway and more at The Backyard Music Festival appeared first on Arkansas Times.
"Gypsy" goes up at The Studio Theatre June 17.
The post Sondheim’s “Gypsy” goes up at The Studio Theatre June 17 appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Arkansas's count of new coronavirus cases rose by 179 in the last 24 hours. The number of hospitalized rose by five to 76. There were no new deaths reported.
The post The coronavirus report and Tuesday open line appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Little Rock Police are looking for an 18-year-old suspect in connection with the shooting death of Chloe Alexander.
The post Little Rock Police offer $25,000 reward for information on 7-year-old’s murder appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The city board will talk about funds from a potential millage extension and a new high-tech, crime-fighting nerve center.
The post Little Rock board to discuss Real Time Crime Center, millage spending formula appeared first on Arkansas Times.
In conjunction with “The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse” — a visual exhibit displaying “100 years of visual art, material objects, sound and music to explore how Black culture, across time and geography, has shaped and influenced the South and U.S. contemporary culture at large” — Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is bringing hip-hop royalty to the stage on the Momentary Green, with a July 16 show from Big Boi (OutKast) and Run the Jewels.
The post ‘The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse’ up at Crystal Bridges, with July 16 show from Big Boi and Run the Jewels appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Lawsuit challenges legislature’s ability to amend constitutional amendment.
The post A potential earthquake for the Arkansas marijuana industry appeared first on Arkansas Times.
CT on fatherhood, building the ever-broadening Mutants of the Monster Festival, and what Pentecostal preachers have to do with heavy metal.
The post Down the Wormhole: A Q&A with CT appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The Little Rock Board of Directors has called an Aug. 9 special election to ask voters to extend the city's 3-mill personal property tax to fund capital improvements, and now the city has set six community meetings to get public input on how the tax money should be spent if approved by voters.
The post City of Little Rock sets community meetings on millage extension vote appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Cindy Jennings of Mabelvale is in the Pulaski County Jail, charged with manslaughter in the death of her son, Joshua Jennings.
The post Pulaski Sheriff arrests mom on charges of fatally running over son appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Cockrell takes the helm after longtime museum director Bill Gatewood's retirement in December.
The post New director at Old State House Museum appeared first on Arkansas Times.
An update on the deadly shooting by the zoo.
The post Little Rock Police have a warrant in connection with Saturday’s murder near the zoo appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Arkansas Times editors Austin Bailey and Lindsey Millar talk about the Uvalde school massacre and the midterm elections
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the massive state surplus and likely tax cuts to come, Arkansas's college funding formula, Lyon College's plans for the Heifer campus, Arkansas Supreme Court intrigue and election odds and ends.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about a range of stories related to election season, including campaign contributions, vote suppression and other odds and ends.
Early voting's partisan divide is also among the topics discussed today.
The post The daily news roundup from chicken nuggets in the time of COVID to Tom Cotton’s disdain for the 1st Amendment appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Case count climbs.
The post COVID today: 258 cases and five more deaths appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Concerts are returning to the First Security Amphitheater this summer after a limited number of shows in 2021 and no performances in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic. But the line-up thus far has inspired criticism from At-Large Little Rock Director Antwan Phillips.
The post City director criticizes summer concert slate at First Security Amphitheater appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Looks like Little Rock Central High students aren't going to give up their reproductive rights without a fight.
The post Little Rock Central students know what’s up, walk out of class to protest attacks on abortion rights appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The industry-backed proposal is more than halfway to the ballot, but rivals pledge opposition.
The post More than 50,000 Arkansans sign on for recreational marijuana appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The acclaimed two-day bluegrass and progressive roots festival FreshGrass | Bentonville returns for round two on May 20-21 at the multidisciplinary art and music hub, the Momentary. From nationally acclaimed artists and homegrown musicians to family-friendly activities and great local food and drink, this all-ages festival is one not to skip. Here are five reasons […]
The post FreshGrass | Bentonville Prepares for second annual festival May 20-21 appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Government report says the supply chain was not in danger, but meat packers got pandemic favors from the government to keep operating, despite risks to workers.
The post Report: Meat processors, led by Tyson Foods, hyped ‘shortage’ during worst of pandemic to keep plants open appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The government wants the maximum. Duggar asks for five years
The post Government seeks 20-year sentence for Josh Duggar; he seeks mercy appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Primary voting skews heavily toward Republican voters. Might that have fallout in non-partisan races?
The post The partisan divide in early voting could mean trouble in non-partisan races appeared first on Arkansas Times.
There's political squabbling up in the hills between two Republican candidates for state Senate.
The post Bryan King going after Bob Ballinger for failure to pay bills and living high on the state’s tab appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Max Brantley and Austin Bailey commiserate on the end of reproductive freedom. Also this week, a gut punch at Henderson State and a shakeup at the LRPD.
QUAPAW QUARTER ASSOCIATION 57TH SPRING TOUR OF HOMES
SATURDAY 5/7-SUNDAY 5/8. Governor’s Mansion District. Noon-4 p.m. Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun. $15-$150.
Calling all admirers of historic and/or quirky homes: The Quapaw Quarter Association’s annual Spring Tour of Homes is back, giving ticketholders a peek into six homes in Little Rock’s Governor’s Mansion District — seven if you spring for the special candlelight tour. Up this year: the Rogers House at 400 W. 18th St., the Old Methodist Parsonage at 401 W. 18th St., the Cochran House at 320 W. 18th St., the Max Mayer Cottage at 317 W. 17th St., the Pierce House at 1704 Center St., the Farrell House #2 at 2111 S. Louisiana St., the Reyburn-Lasker House at 2200 S. Arch St. and, for the top-tier Saturday night tickets, the Kirby House at 1221 Louisiana St.
Mark WagnerKirby House Trolleys run between homes during the tour’s timeframes, or get a bike tour ticket and power your own tour, either with your own bike or one from QQA partner Rock Town River Outfitters. A Sunday brunch ticket gets you food, mimosas and Bloody Marys at Curran Hall, and a preview party ticket for Friday evening gets you food, drink and live music from LLC. See quapaw.com for details on all tour times and options.
The post Quapaw Quarter Association Spring Tour of Homes appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Topgolf Entertainment Group announced today that it has plans to build one of its golf/restaurant/bar facilities in the city of Little Rock.
It does not identify the location.
The news release quotes Mayor Frank Scott Jr. as saying he’d long hoped to attract Topgolf to the city. Indeed. His administration worked secretly to put a Topgolf (or similar) on land available after Scott closed the War Memorial Park golf course. A hue and cry about using prime parkland for a facility with giant fences and lights catering to a bar crowd into the late hours killed the idea.
I’m seeking information from the city on its dealings with Topgolf as to location and potential incentives to locate here. If the Scott administration follows its usual custom this will be another immaculate conception, a deal for which no records in the form of texts, emails, documents, notes or other record exist. It just appeared as if by magic.
North Little Rock recently announced that a similar type of entertainment venue, with other added features such as bowling, was going to be built on the former site of Wild River Country, near the Maumelle exit from Interstate 430.
Topgolf has an installation with its digitally-enhanced driving range features in Rogers.
Pure speculation here: But there’s some 50 undeveloped acres bounded roughly by Col. Glenn, I-430 and Bowman Road that might fit the bill. The War Memorial location was to take 18 acres.
The post Topgolf announces plans for facility in Little Rock appeared first on Arkansas Times.
pic.twitter.com/k9cOCC9fWO
— Little Rock Police (@LRpolice) May 4, 2022
Greenway is on the west side of South University in the Meadowcliff area.
A smattering of additional information may come sometime from LRPD.
The post Another Little Rock day begins with a homicide appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Fewer than 24 hours after news broke that the Supreme Court will almost certainly overturn Roe v. Wade, hundreds of pissed off Arkansans showed up with hastily crafted protest signs and resolve for the battle ahead.
Arkansas Times photographer Brian Chilson captured these images.
The post Arkansans fill the Capitol steps to let lawmakers know they won’t go back on reproductive rights appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The Little Rock Board of Directors approved on Tuesday a resolution that sets out the allocation of money that would be generated if voters approve the renewal of a capital improvement millage.
The board has spent weeks inching toward calling for a special election Aug. 9 to ask voters to extend the 3 mills, which are scheduled to roll off a the end of the year. At its last regular meeting, the board agreed to do two issuances of 20-year bonds, likely in 2022 and 2026, to be paid off by the city in 16 years. The bonds would generate an estimated $154 million.
Director Capi Peck successfully made a motion Tuesday to amend the resolution outlining the allocations, shifting 5% of what City Manager Bruce Moore had proposed to be devoted to streets and drainage, and adding that 10% to the parks allocation.
The amended resolution lays out the following allocations, which would be referred to voters as separate ballot questions:
*Streets: $38.5 million (25%)
*Drainage: $38.5 million (25%)
*Fire apparatus: $18.6 (12%)
*District court building: $8 million (5%)
*Parks and zoo: $28.4 million for parks and $7 million for the zoo (23%)
*Port expansion: $15 million (10%)
Peck’s motion drew an unlikely group of supporters: Vice Mayor Lance Hines, At-Large Director Dean Kumpuris, At-Large Director Antwan Phillips, Virgil Miller and Ken Richardson, who initially voted present, but changed his vote after it was 4-5-1.
Kathy Webb, who tried to make a comment before the vote on the amendment, said after the vote that she’d consistently heard from constituents that they most wanted to see improvements to streets and drainage. The parks department regularly gets grants for improvement projects; streets and drainage projects not so much, she noted.
The city isn’t maintaining all of its parks. “Cities around the country that are rated for the best parks, they’re not the ones with the most acreage,” she said.
Doris Wright, a frequent critic of the parks department’s lack of programming, continued on the theme: “Right now, I feel like we have a poorly run parks system.” She said she also feared that much of the money generated by the millage extension would go to the new park the city is slated to get from the 30 Crossing highway project, while her West Central Community Center grounds continue to be ignored.
At-Large Director Joan Adcock followed. “I know parks are more important, but I think infrastructure is more important,” she said.
Kumpuris, who recently tried and failed to get the board to go along with proposing a companion 3/8ths sales tax, echoed what he said then: The city’s needs are immense — $1 billion for infrastructure improvements, he said — and this bond money isn’t going to come close to covering it all. “We need to be a bigger city, growing more,” to increase the tax base. He said adding money to parks could help with that and public safety. But he also echoed Webb and Wright, saying the city had too many parks and needs to take a hard look at them.
Hines said he was sorry the board was in such disagreement. “We’re not all going to get what we want on this as far as fixing everything,” he said. Likely directed at Adcock, he said that saying parks aren’t part of infrastructure was short-sighted.
Peck said in her Ward 4, streets and drainage weren’t as much of a problem as they were in other parts of the city. Her constituents have repeatedly told her they want quality of life improvements, such as park improvements. But she agreed that the board needed to take a hard look at the parks system. “I completely support selling of some parks and taking care of the ones we have,” she said.
The board is slated to consider an ordinance that would call the special election at its next regular meeting, May 17.
The post Little Rock Board sets allocations for millage extension vote, talks slimming parks acreage appeared first on Arkansas Times.
We haven’t seen him since before pandemic times, but the season of the Asher Avenue preacher ran from spring through fall.
For years now on Fridays, we’ve observed him in his unnatural habitat: A narrow concrete median of a narthex that’s 6 inches high, several car lengths long and located in the middle of four lanes of traffic on the east Asher side of Asher and University avenues. You could hear his call echoing across the busy intersection, his voice crackling through his handheld PA system, sweating through his white robe.
Early on, we hit a choice Observing spot in the inside lane of the four lines of cars waiting at the traffic light. So we turned down the car radio and cracked the back passenger side window to catch any knowledge he might be dropping. Observing is listening, and we were ready to accept some good news. Who doesn’t find a cooling dose of Jesus Christ’s message of love and acceptance refreshing on a hot summer day?
Instead, the sour scent of brimstone invaded the car window, making the oppressive heat that was also permeating seem even more stifling. It didn’t take long to catch his OG OT drift. The topic of that day’s remarks was homosexuality. He wasn’t a fan. But we doubt he’s even tried it.
In subsequent years, we’ve found it’s a topic he returns to often. Or maybe he never leaves it. Perhaps he’s preached against — or even for — other things while out there under the Friday sun, but not that we’ve ever been able to Observe. We’ve given him several opportunities, too; cracking our car window just long enough to confirm the week’s lesson was again homophobia, and subsequently cranking up some nasty blues from KABF’s “Blues House Party” to both drown him out and cleanse the palate. The salacious sounds of Pine Bluff’s rump-shaking Bobby Rush have proven the worthiest counterpoint.
One season, we Observed the preacher attempt to expand his house of worship. He moved from his narrow concrete riser to greener grasses — the big grassy median across University, just west of where his accidental congregation originally gathered by stoplight. More chiggers in the tall grass maybe, but surely easier on the feet than the median. By nature, the delivery of wild-eyed sermons requires a lot of pacing. A lady in her Sunday best, presumably the preacher’s wife, had optimistically set out a half-dozen or so metal folding chairs. She sat in one, listening attentively to his lecture as cars whizzed past at every border.
He’ll have a tent out there next, we mused. After that, perhaps a small clapboard structure —nothing fancy, just a short steeple and an upright piano. But his makeshift place of worship was a bridge too far even for the Little Rock Police Department. The next Friday, we saw a couple of squad cars shut the preacher down, mid-preach. As we turned north on University, we saw him explaining his side of things to stony faces in blue. They were not moved. (But he was.)
After years of dedicated service, we thought that may be the end of the Asher preacher. He’d flown too close to the sun on wings of folding chairs. Holy Ghost power had faced off with the long arm of the law and gotten the bum’s rush. No matter the urgency of the message, no matter its necessity to be heard by the people, the Man had spoken: Medians in major intersections are not the place for them to be delivered.
But for the hubristically named Observer, we’d underestimated the tenacity of a man willing to stand in a major city intersection in the blistering heat, wearing a robe and yelling about God through a CB radio.
Defeated in his campaign to win the west, the Asher preacher simply returned to his lower-profile thin-strip median on the east side of University Avenue, but with more branding: “JESUS CHURCH ON FRIDAY” a sign on the median warned.
He’d kept other trappings from his failed foray onto bigger acreage, including the wooden pulpit with a trumpet atop. Its brass would gleam in the afternoon sun. We never Observed it being played. With no walls nearby, who could say if they’d come tumbling down or not?
Affixed to the front of his pulpit was another sign: “PASTORS YOU HAVE LET JESUS DOWN.” On this point, we may actually agree. But maybe for different reasons.
The post Street corner preacher appeared first on Arkansas Times.
I did the news summary too early yesterday, before abortion, the Little Rock police chief and Henderson State made for some big headlines. Catching up today. The line is open.
The post Big stuff in the news roundup today, much of it from Monday night appeared first on Arkansas Times.
From Arkansas Times’ own circulation director Jackson Gladden and his outfit MoonMane comes this rager, with words that are indecipherable to me but whose energy accurately describes my mood re: the SCOTUS machinations of the hour. Pair with Bikini Kill’s “Suck My Left One” and turn it up loud.
Party On The Veranda by MoonMane
The post Track of Today: MoonMane’s “MoonMane” appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The Remolinos Group announced today that a second Fidel & Co location will open this summer in partnership with a new co-working space occupying the first floor of 610 President Clinton Ave., the space formerly occupied by Zetêo Coffee.
Fidel Samour, owner of Fidel & Co, is partnering with Stōko owner Taylor Stokes on the project. Both are part of Remolinos Group, a concept group “formed to create new experiences in Little Rock.”
The new co-working space will feature conference rooms, storage space, private phone booths, printing services, private offices, desk spaces and a fully equipped podcast room. Fidel & Co will be located in the front of the building and open to the public. Behind Fidel & Co will be the co-working space, which will operate on a membership program that offers day passes and monthly rates. For more information on memberships and pricing visit its website here.
The Remolinos Group announced last November that it would be opening food hall Sterling Market across from Fidel & Co in East Village in the former Cathead’s Diner. Stokes said Sterling Market is slated to open later this summer. More from the press release:
“I fully believe that we aren’t meant to do life alone – especially in our work space,” says owner Taylor Stokes. “If the recent pandemic has taught us anything it’s that surrounding yourself with community and local support changes everything. It makes an 8-5 brighter, dreams feel more realistic and life a whole lot less lonely.”
Partnering with Fidel Samour, Stōko will host a second location of Fidel & Co and will also provide its members with conference rooms, a fully equipped podcast room, phone booths, printing and mailing services, covered parking spots, a stocked kitchen and much more.
“We have loved serving our neighbors at our East Village location and are excited to venture into Downtown as we open our second location,” says Fidel Samour, owner of Fidel & Co. “Being nestled inside a coworking space is a unique opportunity to connect with our customers on a deeper level and to
build long-lasting relationships.”
Outside of office amenities, Stoko will offer its members exclusive programming with networking opportunities, guest speakers from industry leaders and other events to allow its members to connect and collaborate with other professionals across the city. Stōko’s primary goal is to make its members feel directly supported and connected to the community around them.
The post New co-working space Stōko coming to River Market district, with second location of Fidel & Co appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Here are the numbers on COVID-19 in Arkansas from the state Health Department, comparing the latest figures with those reported on Monday.
Total cases: 836,117, an increase of 134 from Monday
Active cases: 1,511, up from 1,506
Deaths: 11,398, an increase of four
Hospitalized: 41, down from 48
In ICU: 17, same as yesterday.
On ventilator: 13, down from 14
Vaccinations to date: 4,057,658, or an increase of about 1,600.
The post COVID today: 134 new cases and four more deaths appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Governor Hutchinson issued the following statement today on the record-breaking monthly tax take and developments at the U.S. Supreme Court on abortion law.
First, the state’s economy is booming, and the higher prices of consumer goods have increased the states revenue more than expected.
Second, the national economic outlook has significant uncertainty, and there is a need for caution as we look at options for the end of the year surplus.
Third, the taxpayers need and deserve at least a portion of the surplus to be returned to them because the state should not be generating this large of a surplus.
As to the likelihood of a special session, the revenue report increases the possibility of one, but it is too early to make that decision. I do not anticipate calling a special session before June 30, 2022.
As to the need for a session because of the anticipated Supreme Court ruling on the Mississippi abortion case, it will be necessary to wait for the final ruling to know whether additional legislation will be needed. The draft decision leaked to the media would not require new laws to be passed since Arkansas has a ‘trigger’ law that would ban abortions except to save the life of the mother if Roe v. Wade is reversed.
To which I’d respond:
Point One smells of baloney. We had higher sales tax revenue last year when prices were lower. The economy IS booming. Income taxes drove the big revenue number. Is that because corporations raised pay so their lowly workers could cope with rising costs? Or did their taxes increase because of windfall profits? What do you think?
Point Two: Well, OK.
Point Three: No, the state should not be generating this size surplus. It also shouldn’t be beggaring teachers, failing to provide pre-K, operating a dysfunctional prison and parole system, making the disabled sit on a waiting list for home services, and so on.
Point 4: No we don’t need further abortion laws with what’s already on the book (except repeals). The legislature isn’t through punishing women, however.
The post The governor speaks on the surplus, abortion appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Described as “about the size of a pinto bean, with a coffee brown color,” the diamond Adam Hardin plucked from his screen during a visit to Arkansas’s Crater of Diamonds State Park last month isn’t winning any beauty contests quite yet.
An experienced treasure hunter and regular visitor to the park, Hardin doesn’t seem to mind a bit. He named his diamond Frankenstone to celebrate its oddness.
“I thought of the name because it has a pretty and kind of not-so-pretty look to it,” Hardin explained. “Us diamond miners call that ‘character!'”
Arkansas State ParksTreasure hunter Adam Hardin at Crater of Diamonds State Park, where he claimed the largest diamond found so far this year. Frankenstone is the largest diamond found in the park so far in 2022. Arkansas State Parks sent out this release about Hardin’s big find:
(MURFREESBORO, Ark.) — A regular visitor found a 2.38-carat brown diamond on April 10 at Arkansas’s Crater of Diamonds State Park. It is the largest diamond found at the park this year.
After more than a decade of searching and hundreds of diamond finds at the park, Adam Hardin found his first diamond weighing more than two carats. Hardin was wet-sifting soil from the East Drain of the park’s 37.5-acre search area when he found the gem.
“It was right in the middle when I flipped my screen over,” Hardin said. “When I saw it, I said, ‘Wow, that’s a big diamond!’”
Park Interpreter Waymon Cox said many visitors wet sift using a screen set to wash away soil and separate the gravel by size. Smaller gravel is then sorted by weight, sending heavier material to the bottom of the screen.
“When it’s flipped upside-down, the heavier gravel—and sometimes a diamond—can be found on top of the pile,” Cox said.
Hardin carried his gem in a pill bottle to the park’s Diamond Discovery Center, where staff registered it as a 2.38-carat brown diamond.
“Mr. Hardin’s diamond is about the size of a pinto bean, with a coffee brown color and a rounded shape,” Cox said. “It has a metallic shine typical of all diamonds found at the park, with a few inclusions and crevices running all along the surface.”
Hardin, who first learned of Crater of Diamonds State Park more than a decade ago, said competition builds camaraderie among the park’s regular visitors.
“One of the other guys and I have been going back and forth, seeing who can find the biggest diamond,” Hardin said. “I found a big one, then he got a 1.79-carat, and we were joking about who would find the next big diamond and be ‘king of the mountain.’ As soon as I found this one, I had a feeling I had him beat. Now he’s trying to find a bigger one, but I’m planning on staying on top!”
Hardin’s diamond is the largest found at the park since last September, when a visitor from Granite Bay, Calif., discovered a 4.38-carat yellow gem on the surface of the diamond search area. Hardin’s is the largest brown diamond since the 9.07-carat Kinard Friendship Diamond was discovered on Labor Day 2020.
Finders of large Crater diamonds often choose to name their gems. Hardin named his diamond Frankenstone.
“I thought of the name because it has a pretty and kind of not-so-pretty look to it,” Hardin explained. “Us diamond miners call that ‘character!'”
Hardin typically sells his diamonds locally and said he also plans to sell this one.
As of this publication, 260 diamonds have been registered at Crater of Diamonds State Park in 2022, weighing a total of more than 44 carats. An average of one to two diamonds are found by park visitors each day.
The release included a section at the bottom about the park itself, and it might be enough to tempt you into heading over there yourself to try your luck.
Quick Facts about Crater of Diamonds State Park
Diamonds come in all colors of the rainbow. The three most common colors found at Crater of Diamonds State Park are white, brown, and yellow, in that order.
In total, over 75,000 diamonds have been unearthed at the Crater of Diamonds since the first diamonds were discovered in 1906 by John Huddleston, a farmer who owned the land long before it became an Arkansas State Park in 1972.
The largest diamond ever discovered in the United States was unearthed here in 1924 during an early mining operation. Named the Uncle Sam, this white diamond with a pink cast weighed 40.23 carats. It was later cut into a 12.42-carat emerald shape and purchased by a private collector for $150,000 in 1971.
Another well-known diamond from the park is the Strawn-Wagner. Found in 1990 by Murfreesboro resident Shirley Strawn, this 3.03-carat white gem was cut into a round brilliant shape weighing 1.09 carats. It graded as ideal cut, D-colorless, and flawless and was set in a platinum and 24-carat gold ring. In 1998 the State of Arkansas purchased this diamond for $34,700 in donations and placed it on permanent display at the park visitor center.
On Labor Day 2020, Kevin Kinard, of Maumelle, Ark., found a large, brown gem weighing 9.07 carats. It is the second-largest diamond found at Crater of Diamonds State Park.
Crater of Diamonds State Park is located on Arkansas Highway 301 in Murfreesboro. It is one of 52 state parks administered by Arkansas State Parks, a division of the Arkansas Department of Parks, Heritage, and Tourism.
The post 2.38-carat “Frankenstone” brown diamond found in Arkansas appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Get ready to rally. Get ready to organize. Get ready to fight for our freedoms.
Get ready to elect progressive women. pic.twitter.com/0q0Dngr7sj
— ProgressiveARWomen (@PAWPAC4AR) May 3, 2022
Meanwhile, Attorney General Leslie Rutledge has invited the press to hear her demagogue the coming further erosion of individual rights and try to turn attention to the leak rather than the damage.
The post Resist! appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Whether its a table of 12 of or a two-top, a $1 charge is being added to guest checks at all of Shannon Wynne’s 30-plus restaurants, including Little Rock’s Flying Fish and Flying Saucer and Bentonville’s Flying Fish.
Flying Saucer Bentonville Each dollar will be donated to World Central Kitchen, a nonprofit organization founded by chef José Andrés that sends cooks to the front lines of humanitarian crises. According to its website, World Central Kitchens has served more than 16 million meals and 8 million pounds of food to families across Ukraine. Founded in 2010 after an earthquake in Haiti, World Central Kitchen has teams active in 110 cities and towns in Ukraine. In April a restaurant operating as a relief kitchen with support from World Central Kitchen was hit by a missile in a civilian area of Kharkiv.
An update I hoped I’d never have to make. I’m at a @WCKitchen restaurant in Kharkiv, where less than 24 hours ago I was meeting with their amazing team. Today, a missile stuck. 4 staff were wounded. This is the reality here—cooking is a heroic act of bravery. #ChefsForUkraine pic.twitter.com/AyU4fUnA61
— Nate Mook (@natemook) April 16, 2022
Wynne told us his restaurants started the fundraiser just over a week ago and have already raised $65,000. The goal is to raise $250,000 in under two months. The plan did not originally involved charging a dollar to each guest check, Wynne said. The day before the fundraiser was supposed to launch and after his company had purchased table tents, banners and several thousand t-shirts emblazoned with Ukraine’s flag for staff, he found out the software for the register couldn’t be updated to include donation amounts of $5 or $10. “We were stuck and I just had to make a decision,” Wynne said. “I realized there would be a little grumbling, but you know what, these people need money now. This war is waging and these people had to leave their homes with a suitcase, and it’s a gigantic humanitarian effort. If anybody has a negative reaction, I’ll weather the storm,” he said.
Brian Chilson
Brian ChilsonLittle Rock Flying Saucer employees Julianna Ward (left) and Kristen Burrows. If people don’t wish to donate, the restaurants will refund their dollar, and while there has been a little pushback from customers, it’s been a vocal group of about half of 1%, Wynne said.
“Somebody said, ‘That’s just a publicity stunt.’ I don’t care if you don’t come to our restaurant, go to wck.org and put your money in there. I don’t care how they get the money. … We’re doing this because it needs to be done, and we appreciate the incredible feedback that we’ve gotten from our people both online and in person,” he said.
The post Arkansas’s Flying Fish and Flying Saucer locations adding $1 per bill for Ukrainian refugees appeared first on Arkansas Times.
If you ever took a photo of a live performance at the bygone jazz-centric bistro The Afterthought, chances are it had a telltale sign indicating its location. That panoramic mural, a signature of the bar and bistro at the corner of Kavanaugh Blvd. and Beechwood St., has a new home at Dave’s Place, a family-owned restaurant at 210 Center St. in downtown Little Rock.
Commence with the selfies! And maybe more importantly, commence with making and hearing jazz in one of the many places it’s popping up these days, Friday nights at Dave’s Place included.
The post That mural from The Afterthought? It’s up at Dave’s Place appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The state report on tax revenue in April was a whopper:
Gross revenue in April came in $387 million above last year and $570 million more than the artificially pinched forecast. Bottom line after mandated distributions: Net for the month was $531 million or 89 percent more than forecast.
Reason from the report:
So here’s the bottom line for the year to date, with two months to go in the state fiscal year.
The net available revenue shows a surplus of $987 million more than budget. Governor Hutchinson said recently he expected a billion-dollar surplus but it now seems likely to be far more.
The governor will call a special session later this year to do something with the cash. Income tax cut for the rich is at the top of the list, of course.
Here’s the full report.
The post A billion-dollar state surplus? Think again, it could be more appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A few thoughts on the news that the U.S. Supreme Court may be prepared to drive a stake through the heart of women’s medical rights in the United States. But first an UPDATE: Chief Justice John Roberts, in an unprecedented leak, confirms the draft opinion is real, but not necessarily final and orders an investigation.
1) Despite the Republican caterwauling, this is not the first leak of internal Supreme Court business. The outcome of the first Roe decision more than a half-century ago was leaked and reported before it was issued, though not the full text of the opinion. And there are many other examples. Good thread in this tweet
It’s remarkable, the leak of what appears to be an initial draft majority opinion. SCOTUS generally has kept its secrets and has kept confidential its internal processes and deliberations. But the Court does occasionally leak, and it has leaked before about Roe v. Wade. 1/x
— Jonathan Peters (@jonathanwpeters) May 3, 2022
The GOP talking point factory has ginned up an “insurrection” meme for leak of news they otherwise cheer, while saying not much happened at the Capitol Jan. 6. Rolling Stone calls out the Huckster and the rest of the faux chorus.
2) The leak is not the news, the decision on the end of abortion rights is the news. Don’t let Fox News and the GOP faux outrage chamber deflect attention.
2a) The leak may not be, as widely supposed, from opponents of the decision but from Chief Justice John Roberts or his camp who think the decision might go too far.
Rick is absolutely right here. It’s not at all obvious that the leak is coming from those looking to generate pushback against the five Justices supposedly in the majority, rather than from those looking to soften the ground for the result #SCOTUS now seems likely to reach. https://t.co/0Gw3PORbB9
— Steve Vladeck (@steve_vladeck) May 3, 2022
3) Alito’s draft opinion is wrong about history in claiming an unbroken record in support of illegal abortion until Roe. It was legal when the Constitution was ratified and wasn’t outlawed in any state until the 19th century.
Quick summation of the history of abortion here:https://t.co/GhPTOxRpiF
— Karl Jacoby (@karl_jacoby) May 3, 2022
4) He is also dead wrong in airily dismissing forced pregnancy as an economic burden, claiming all birth costs are either covered by insurance or government medical programs. What world does he live in?
5) Polling, including in Arkansas, consistently shows a majority in favor of retaining Roe as a protector of access to abortion, if limited.
US public opinion on abortion has remained remarkably consistent since 1973. According to Gallup, fewer Americans support a total ban on abortion now than did back in 1975. Eighty percent of Americans oppose a blanket ban, & yet two dozen states may soon have one pic.twitter.com/FkXjwYKu70
— Nicholas Guyatt (@NicholasGuyatt) May 3, 2022
6) Those bemoaning the rupture of decorum in the leak had no problem cheating to gain Supreme Court seats. Whether by blocking Merrick Garland, confirmation of an accused rapist who lied (again) along with Neil Gorsuch when they told Susan Collins that Roe was settled law, or rushing through an anti-abortion justice in record time during the final days of the soon-to-be lame-duck president.
7) Whether Alito’s snide excesses are tempered or not, abortion will soon be illegal in Arkansas. Existing law and Constitution dictate that without further work needed by the Arkansas legislature.
8) The Arkansas legislature will do more. It will attempt to prevent support with money (protected speech, remember) for those seeking abortions in other states. It will legalize vigilantes to enforce the law. It will do all it can, interstate commerce law notwithstanding, to prevent access to abortion by mail, through an easy and safe drug regimen.
9) The decision, if filed as written, puts much more than abortion on the line. An attack on same-sex marriage will come next, perhaps from Arkansas, where the ban remains on the books but is enjoined by a federal court ruling that could be attacked on the same theory Alito has applied.
10) There’s more. Contraception. Interracial marriage, De jure school segregation. Minority voting rights. Union rights. All these are ripe for attack under Alito’s perversion of the law.
11) Politics. Unclear. In some quarters, the Alito decision will be a motivating factor, particularly for women, to go to the polls and vote Democratic. Perhaps not in the South. The motivation might be to happily re-elect the people that brought this day. UA prof Angela Maxwell reminds me on Twitter that Hillary Clinton lost white women in the South by 30 points in 2016.
12) Republicans will push for a federal anti-abortion law, thus putting a certain brand of religion in charge of the law in all the states. It took years, but that finally worked out poorly in Ireland, thanks to horror story after horror story. We are now at the beginning of that book in America.
Recommended analysis:
From Empty Wheel.
And also from Ian Milhiser, on the big remaining question: Does Alito’s opinion hold all the conservative justices? Answer: Probably.
Consider learning about the Arkansas Abortion Support Network, already at work helping women blocked from easy access in Arkansas thanks to all the barriers erected by the legislature. And Planned Parenthood will continue to fight as long as it is legally able. And the ACLU. of Arkansas.
Most of all, vote for people who represent your interests. And run in 2024 if there’s nobody on your ballot who does.
UPDATE: The Arkansas Democratic Party weighs in:
“The leaked United States Supreme Court opinion, if true, constitutes a shocking descent into precedent-defying judicial activism. If this draft becomes official in June, a newly passed Arkansas law will immediately outlaw access to abortions for Arkansas women and children who are victims of rape or incest,” said state Rep. Ashley Hudson.
“The opinion will also open the door to more extreme measures, from putting bounties on the heads of those who dare assist a woman who seeks abortion, to efforts to bully and fine private corporations who speak against the depravity of forcing children and rape victims to carry pregnancies to term. Worse still, the written opinion puts other 14th Amendment rights in jeopardy, like the right to procure birth control without seeking consent, and the right to marriage equality.”
Arkansas Democrats trust women to make their own healthcare decisions and are committed to the fight to preserve the protections afforded in Roe v. Wade.
The post A morning-after pill on the abortion news. It won’t make you feel better appeared first on Arkansas Times.
One of my grandmother’s favorite things in the world was her police scanner. She had it situated on the floor next to her recliner so that she could listen while crocheting. When the scanner crackled to life, she would shift her weight to the right to listen more closely, so often that the chair developed a decided tilt. The great thing about this particular brand of police scanner was that it picked up cordless phone conversations within a large enough radius to give my grandmother the scoop about all her neighbors in Parkin, a tiny town on the eastern side of the state. After listening to a few cops coasting around trying in vain to triangulate the location of a meth lab, there would crackle over the speaker an impassioned conversation between a man and woman, and Grandma would catch me up: “He always calls up that colored gal whenever his wife is out of town.”
But actually, she probably didn’t need that police scanner — it just made things easier. Small towns are their own kind of panopticon. Grandma once told me a story about when she was working as a nurse there in Parkin. She was never officially educated as a nurse, something she always regretted to her dying day, but she served every role assisting the local doctor and so became a de facto nurse. One particular doctor she served had a habit of going away during many of his weekends, and although he said he had a cabin on the lake he liked to visit, everyone in town knew that he had a special male “friend” he went to see. It happened one weekend that a patient had a bad reaction to a certain medication, and at a loss for what to do, my grandmother broke the unwritten code and called up the special “friend.”
“I’m afraid he’s not here,” said the man in response to her question.
“I know he’s there,” my grandmother insisted. “I have a patient of his right here. She has some bad hives and her throat is swelling shut. I need to know what I should do because I am worried she might die here.”
She told me that she could hear some muffled conversation going on in the background, and then finally the doctor took the phone and talked her through what to do. She thanked him and hung up. And they never talked about that particular breach ever.
“I’m a great believer in hypocrisy,” says the character Rawley Bradfield in John Le Carré’s 1968 novel “A Small Town in Germany.” “It’s the nearest we ever get to virtue. It’s a statement of what we ought to be. Like religion, like art, like the law, like marriage. I serve the appearance of things. It’s the worst of systems; it is better than the others.” And small-town life constitutes a great canvas of hypocrisy. Everybody knows everybody else’s business but they pretend not to, all to preserve the appearance of things.
We carry this practice of gentlemanly ignorance into our institutions. In his book “Inside the Arkansas Legislature,” Bill “Scoop” Lancaster (no relation that I know of) tells the story of “one young House member” who was “a Pentecostal preacher, married, and a father” who “ranted against politicians like Clinton and against issues like abortion.” However, this particular representative of family values spent much of the legislative session “a John Travolta wannabe who openly walked into bars with women to boogie down and dance the night away” and was once seen leaving the Capital Hotel with three prostitutes on arm. Little Rock, after all, is a small town itself. He only cleaned up his act after being told that a TV reporter had witnessed everything and was on the cusp of putting the whole story on the six o’clock news.
But the TV reporter never did. And Bill Lancaster similarly does not reveal the name of this particular preacher/legislator.
This may have been acceptable, and even perhaps noble, once upon a time. But no more. With the U.S. Supreme Court ready to strike down Americans’ right to privacy in its attack upon female bodily autonomy, discretion is no longer the better part of valor. Discretion is what keeps us from understanding the true nature of the corruption at the heart of American politics. Because that corruption does not take the form of hypocrisy. As Le Carré wrote, hypocrisy might well be the nearest we get to virtue. But our conservative elites are not even concerned about preserving the appearance of virtue. That is why they so easily flocked to Donald Trump. They feel their claim upon absolute power solidifying so completely they are now free to abandon the moralizing they employed in the past. They are just as happy with “Grab ‘em by the pussy” as they are with the red-letter words of Jesus.
Ambrose Bierce defined “Christian” thusly: “One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.” And soon enough, our conservative elites will force their religious laws upon us lower orders, while they remain free enough and wealthy enough to fly their daughters to clinics in France should any little “mistake” happen with a boy. This is what they have always done. They are not hypocrites. They do not care one damn about the appearance of things. They simply believe that the rules they make do not apply to themselves. Or as Frank Wilhoit, in a quotation receiving renewed popularity on social media, once wrote: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
And that is why gentlemanly discretion about the sordid lives of our rulers has long outlived its honorable utility. If privacy ends for us down here at the bottom, so, too, should it end for those at the top issuing these rulings or cheering them on. Arkansas, no matter how much it has grown, remains a whole patchwork of small towns, all of them populated by people pretending not to know each other’s business. But they do. You do. Your cousin knows all about that preacher and his Grindr account, even if he claimed he only ever used it to try to bring those gays to Jesus. Your sister was the one having an affair with two Republican politicians at the same time, and them brothers to boot. Your brother saw that one prominent reactionary at a gay nightclub in Washington, D.C. Your son was best friends with that one legislator when he was a wild youth and told you dude has at least two abortions under his belt.
All of you have heard certain stories. And some of you have proof. It’s time to bring all of this out into the light of day. It is time we have the truth, and not just the convenient appearance of things, so that we may more capably judge the systems and the people who rule over us.
Growing up in the flat land of eastern Arkansas, I became, at an early age, fascinated with hills and mountains, with any landform that exceeded the two dimensions that surrounded me. I once asked my grandmother, as we sat on her porch in Parkin, if maybe she ever found her landscape to be just a trifle dull. “Not me,” she said. “I like the flatness. I like being able to see what my neighbors are doing.”
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Yes, yes, we know. We progressive ladies have always been so annoying and hysterical about reproductive rights. But that doesn’t mean we were wrong.
Politico published an end-of-days type of story this evening that indicates time is ticking on the right to access abortion care. And while anyone who doesn’t trust Sen. Susan Collins one whit knew this day would likely come, you can’t blame us for holding out hope.
The Supreme Court has voted to strike down Roe v. Wade, according to an initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito and obtained by POLITICO.
“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” Alito writes. https://t.co/nl3JFLx9xg
— POLITICO (@politico) May 3, 2022
The draft decision that came out Monday marks the first time a full U.S. Supreme Court opinion has ever gotten leaked ahead of time. (There have been other leaks, including the first Roe decision more than 50 years ago.) And while the draft Politico got hold of is not the final, official decision of the court, it seems legit.
The importance of this leaked decision, should it hold true, can hardly be overstated. While the well-to-do and well-connected will always be able to safely end a dangerous or unwanted pregnancy, that right will be denied to the rest of us.
Arkansas is one of 13 states with a trigger law in effect, which means the second the Supreme Court overturns a woman’s right to access abortion care, abortions will no longer be legal here. The law, which Governor Hutchinson signed in March of 2021, includes no exceptions for victims of rape or incest. Abortion care would be legal only to save the life of the mother. The Arkansas Constitution includes an amendment making abortion illegal to the extent allowed by federal law. With this decision, it means total ban.
Women needing abortions will have to travel to other states or countries where the procedure is legal, or risk their health and lives with off-the-books providers.
Your governor had this to say about it.
I have advocated for the reversal of Roe v. Wade all my political career. The leak from someone within the court is reprehensible and should lead to an investigation but I do hope the court returns authority to the states.
— Gov. Asa Hutchinson (@AsaHutchinson) May 3, 2022
Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, who just last week signed Arkansas on to a lawsuit seeking to overturn the ban on bump stocks like the one the Las Vegas shooter used to kill and injure more than 800 people in mere minutes, took to Twitter to say something about praying and protecting life.
Join me in praying that the Supreme Court has in fact voted to overturn the egregious decision of Roe, follow the Constitution and return the power to states to protect life—which we will in Arkansas!
— Leslie Rutledge (@AGRutledge) May 3, 2022
Elections have consequences, forced birth being a really big one.
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The dreaded cuts the Henderson State University community has been bracing for were announced Monday, and they’re deep.
Chancellor Chuck Ambrose revealed a plan that would do away with undergraduate degree programs in geography, history, political science, public administration, social science, criminal justice, early childhood development, consumer sciences, human services, biology, radiography, chemistry, mathematics, nuclear medicine technology, medical lab science, studio art, art education, communication, mass media communication, theatre arts, English and Spanish. Students currently enrolled in these degree programs, or who are set to enroll in the fall of 2022, will be able to finish their chosen degrees at Henderson State.
These cuts aren’t final until they go to the Arkansas State University System Board of Trustees for a vote on Thursday at 10 a.m., Henderson State spokeswoman Tina Hall said.
The cuts, while drastic, were not unexpected. Hall told the Arkansas Nonprofit News Network’s Debra Hale-Shelton earlier this year that academic programs were expected to shrink 30-40%.
The plan revealed Tuesday would cut 88 jobs, only 21 of which are currently unfilled. This means 67 people will lose their jobs. Of those 67, 44 are tenured professors. These cuts are expected to save more than $5 million.
The programs that will continue to be offered under the plan being voted on Thursday are included in the chart below.
The plan announced Tuesday comes after years of financial turmoil at the Arkadelphia school that at one point necessitated a state bailout. The school’s increasingly desperate financial situation stayed largely under wraps until 2019, when Chancellor Glendell Jones Jr. resigned under pressure.
Ambrose released a statement acknowledging the stress and anxiety that comes with painful cuts and such a drastic shift in the university’s scope of offerings.
Here’s the full press release:
ARKADELPHIA, Ark. – Henderson State University Chancellor Chuck Ambrose today announced an academic reorganization recommendation designed to enhance student success, address community-based workforce needs and produce critical financial savings for the institution’s future.
Both the chancellor’s recommendation and a plan submitted by the Financial Exigency Committee will be presented to the Arkansas State University System Board of Trustees for consideration at a special meeting Thursday at 10 a.m. at the System Office in Little Rock. Details about the recommendations, communication from the chancellor and questions and answers about the plan can be found at hsu.edu/futureofhenderson.
The Henderson leadership team established an initial financial savings target of $5 million from academic salaries. Elimination or reduction in non-instruction unit salaries and restructuring of administration positions have already resulted in $1.8 million of savings.
The chancellor’s academic restructuring recommendation reduces total instructional positions by 88 – including 21 currently unfilled positions – or 37 percent of the 237 total positions in spring 2022. Of the remaining 67 positions being cut, 44 are tenured faculty members who may remain employed through the 2022-2023 academic year. The changes will result in annual salary savings of $2.55 million in Fiscal Year 2023 and an additional $2.79 million in Fiscal Year 2024.
The committee’s plan would result in salary savings of $3.74 million. It would eliminate all part-time and adjunct positions, all faculty lines for faculty no longer with the university, and 33 additional positions. Its recommendation would discontinue 12 academic programs.
Ambrose said faculty members who would be impacted under his recommendation, if approved by the Board of Trustees, were notified by phone earlier in the day.
“I’m deeply saddened for these faculty members and understand how difficult this process will be,” Ambrose said. “We did not take these decisions lightly, and it is impossible to minimize the impact this has on members of our community. Henderson is a tight-knit family and community, so we understand this is difficult. We will do everything possible to help these individuals during their transitioning.
“We simply cannot grow our way out of Henderson’s financial challenges without implementing significant restructuring,” he added. “Our low degree completion and retention rates have negatively impacted our tuition revenue while our instructional costs have escalated. Student success through degree completion and meeting workforce needs will be our top priority.”
Ambrose said the reimagining of academic degree programs is organized into four meta-majors that align with the competencies, skills, and talents that design community-based workforce needs: Health, Education, and Social Sustainability; Applied Professional Science and Technology; Business Innovation and Entrepreneurship; and Arts and Humanities.
Academic degrees are designated as either “Future Degree Programs,” which will continue to be offered, or as “Teach-Out Degree Programs.” Currently enrolled Henderson students and freshmen in Fall 2022 will be supported to complete Teach-Out Degrees. Academic disciplines included in Teach-Out Degrees will continue to be incorporated through the general education and interdisciplinary studies curriculum to enhance outcomes for all students.
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BREAKING: Little Rock Police Chief Keith Humphrey to retire effective May 20th. #ARNews pic.twitter.com/EPmRYSioYW
— Mitchell McCoy (@MitchellMcCoy) May 2, 2022
If it’s police news you want, you have to follow Mitch McCloy at KARK/Fox 16.
He’s just broken the news that controversial Little Rock Police Chief Keith Humphrey is “retiring.” At age 58. After roughly three years in the job.
A rash of homicides; a still pending investigation of his opening fire on a gas station dispute (without wearing a body camera on a night he’d ordered all others to wear them), and his poisonous relationship with the Little Rock Fraternal Order of Police (plus a losing lawsuit against FOP over their complaints about him) are just coincidental.
As is the well-funded campaign for mayor by Steve Landers to unseat Mayor Frank Scott Jr. Landers’ campaign has been all about the police department problem and crime all the time.
Some of the usual overegged verbiage will be issuing forth from the mayor’s office or one of his PR minions before long.
Humphrey brought some useful changes to the department, on no-knock raids, body cameras (which he didn’t use), stronger work on use of force. But he was a poor communicator. He had a temper. And he lost support even in some neighborhoods that could have been expected to appreciate him.
Here’s the boilerplate from the usual suspects:
Mayor Frank Scott, Jr. announced today that Little Rock Police Chief Keith Humphrey has submitted a letter stating his intention to retire from law enforcement. Humphrey’s last day as LRPD chief will be Friday, May 20.
“Chief Humphrey brought meaningful reform to our police department and a renewed focus on community policing during his tenure as chief,” Mayor Scott said. “He remained loyal to his officers and to this city in the midst of adversity and challenging times. I appreciate his service to Little Rock, and I wish him and his family the best as he transitions to a new chapter.”
Mayor Scott will launch a national search for Humphrey’s replacement. Meanwhile, Assistant Chief Crystal Young-Haskins will serve as interim chief beginning May 21st and serve in that role until further notice.
“Violent crime has increased in cities across the country in the past months, and I appreciate Chief Humphrey as an effective, innovative leader who has worked hard to develop community relationships and reduce crime in Little Rock,” Mayor Scott said. “Our next police chief will be expected to build on those efforts, while recognizing the immediate need to make our streets safer for residents. At the same time, the new chief will be an integral part of our holistic and collaborative approach to reducing violence.”
Humphrey became Little Rock’s 38th police chief in April 2019. Previously, he was police chief in Norman, Oklahoma, for eight years. He started his law enforcement career with the Fort Worth Police Department in 1988.
PS: Putting Young-Haskins in charge will not sit well in some quarters.
PPS: A city spokesman claimed the mayor hadn’t suggested that Humphrey move along. Uh huh. And I’m sure this is another one of those immaculate conceptions — major decision announced at suspiciously inconvenient times that — surprise! — FOI requests will produce no advance emails, documents, phone texts about the topic. Think Top Golf, the Charles Blake consulting contract and lots more.
Humphrey, who arrived here in 2019, has not been in Little Rock long enough to qualify for retirement perks, but his experience in Oklahoma and Texas will accrue to his benefit. He can get a return of contributions to the state retirement system for police and fire that have been made for him.
I’ve asked if there are any financial details related to his “retirement.” The city says there is no financial arrangement for Humphrey’s departure but eferred my request for specifics to the rabbit hole where Little Rock FOI requests are traditionally shuffled. A letter from Humphrey was released. And I did learn his current pay is about $158,000 and that he has 341.8 hours of accrued vacation time, or better than eight weeks, worth more than $24,000 in traveling money.
Mike Laux, a lawyer who has represented Humphrey also issued a release:
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Another one. Details coming in a day or two of three.
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This captivating headline on a press release from the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission grabbed our attention straight away Monday morning: Western chicken turtle information wanted.
Agreed! Aren’t we all eager to know everything about what’s happening here?
While we were bummed to discover the turtle in question looks nothing like a chicken, our disappointment was offset when we caught Game and Fish herpetologist Kelly Irwin on the phone. He was driving south toward Felsenthal National Wildlife Refuge near the Arkansas-Louisiana border for a week of sploshing about in swamps, ponds and ditches in search of the turtle of the hour.
First things first: Why is it called a western chicken turtle?
The answer: It’s a mystery!
“I have not seen an explanation in the literature,” Irwin said, but he has his own theory. These aquatic turtles have remarkably long, bendy necks.
Western chicken turtles are the rarest aquatic turtle in Arkansas (if they’re even in Arkansas at all). Irwin’s foray to south Arkansas Monday marked the start of his fifth week on the lookout for western chicken turtles. So far, no luck.
“I’ve been catching lots of turtles, just not the ones I’m looking for,” he said.
The species is quite uncommon, which is precisely why the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission wants us all to keep our eyes peeled. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is hoping to establish whether western chicken turtles are threatened or endangered. If so, Arkansas Game and Fish might need to put some proactive management plans into place to protect them, Irwin explained.
Here’s the information you need from the Game and Fish Commission on how to identify western chicken turtles and who to alert when you do.
The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission is looking for help from outdoors enthusiasts and the growing segment of watchable wildlife dedicated to reptiles and amphibians to report western chicken turtles they may find while enjoying the outdoors in The Natural State.
The AGFC is interested in locations where anyone in the public sees a western chicken turtle to help develop a conservation management plan for the species that includes all portions of the state where they are known to exist. The public can contribute by submitting photos with location information to Kelly Irwin, AGFC herpetologist, at kelly.irwin@agfc.ar.gov or by texting 501-539-0431.
Arkansas is home to 14 species of aquatic turtles, most of which are common, wide-ranging species. The western chicken turtle is the most uncommon of all Arkansas’s turtle species. It is active March through July and lives in shallow wetlands with aquatic vegetation. Sometimes confused with the more abundant red-eared slider, western chicken turtles are identified by having only one solid yellow bar across their front legs and vertical stripes along their rumps (under the shell). Red-eared sliders have multiple pinstripes down their front legs and oval-shaped blotches along their rear quarters.
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Some rare harmony at a legislative committee meeting on COVID-19 leads the news roundup today. The line is open.
The post Today’s news includes a dose of legislative harmony and a big idea for Little Rock appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Here are the numbers on COVID-19 in Arkansas from the state Health Department, comparing the latest figures with those reported on Sunday.
Total cases: 835,983, an increase of 67 from Sunday
Active cases: 1,506, down from 1,567
Deaths: 11,394, an increase of two.
Hospitalized: 48, down from 49
In ICU: 17, up from 15
On ventilator: 14, up from 13
Vaccinations to date: 4,056,050, or an increase of about 170.
The post COVID today: Nothing unusual appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about Asa Hutchinson pre-presidential race appearance in New Hampshire, the latest on the mystery of the missing Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts sculpture and the Little Rock School District's new superintendent.
GrowingForwardLR—Today @KathyLWebb and I joined @AudubonAR’s Drive Electric for Earth Day to share updates about the @CityLittleRock’s 2030 plan to achieve 100 percent renewable energy usage within city facilities, and continued investments into Electric Vehicle infrastructure. pic.twitter.com/UlwmQDM5vq
— Frank Scott, Jr. (@FrankScottJr) April 23, 2022
Here’s the open line, but let’s begin with some pleasant news on a pleasant spring day.
I cruised by the Zoo this morning. In addition to a recycling station (including for electronic gear), there was a good turnout for the Drive Electric for Earth Day event. People brought their EVs, dealers were on hand, Mayor Frank Scott Jr. “filled up” a car with one of the charging stations that have been installed at the Zoo.
Good for all of them. Electricity is coming, no matter how hard the hold-outs insist that it’s fake news. (This seems to have become, sadly, another in the long list of issues broken down by political affiliation.) Despite what the letters to the editor say, there are inexpensive electric cars. (And I wonder how many of the letter writers are driving honking Yukons.) And electricity is cheaper than gas. And let’s talk maintenance. I’ve said it before. Three-plus years with our EV and the cumulative maintenance bill to date is ZERO.
Also, here are today’s numbers on COVID-19 in Arkansas. I compared numbers on the Health Department dashboard today with those yesterday, but note that sometimes all categories are not always updated simultaneously:
Total cases: 834,946, or an increase of 82 from Friday
Active cases: 1,255 up from 1,220
Deaths: 11,369, no change from Friday.
Hospitalized: Currently showing 50, same as yesterday
In ICU: Currently showing 22, same as yesterday,
On ventilator: Currently showing 13, same as yesterday.
Vaccinations to date: 4,040,778, up about 3,500 from Friday.
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I’ve always been a sucker for mashups.
Crossovers. Multiverse stories. You name it. They make me feel like the first guy who ever viewed a cell under a microscope, seeing how new worlds unexpectedly intertwine and interact. I still remember my joy at coming across a hilarious crossover comic issue wherein The Punisher from Marvel Comics showed up at Riverdale High to invade the world of Archie, Jughead and Veronica. Twenty-eight years later, and I’m still in stitches about it.
Eight years before that monumental 1994 issue, though, one Mr. Stephen Sondheim executed the ultimate Broadway mashup — fairytale style — with the now-classic “Into The Woods” musical. This epic offering has now existed long enough to have won Tony awards both for the original production and also for its 2002 revival. Think you know your Brothers Grimm catalogue inside and out? A peek inside their characters’ secret lives reveals hilarious and hidden motivations that surprise and enthrall.
“Into The Woods” follows the ins and outs of several familiar characters: the noted glass slipper-losing Cinderella; Jack, of beanstalk climbing fame; the golden-tressed tower prisoner Rapunzel; and renowned hiker/wolf skeptic Little Red Riding Hood. Overlaying these tales is the plight of a Baker and his wife who are saddened by their inability to have children. A Witch informs the couple that their infertility is the result of a vengeful spell she cast on the Baker’s father long ago — she agrees to lift the spell only if they can bring her several items in three days: a cow as white as milk, a cape as red as blood, hair as yellow as corn, and a slipper as pure as gold. When all each of these characters simultaneously venture into the woods, the interlacing fun and competing quests begin.
Miranda Jane as The Witch in The Rep’s Into the Woods (Stephen B. Thornton)
A friend and I ventured out to the Arkansas Repertory Theatre for the official opening night production, grateful for a return to live theatre and eager to view The Rep’s take. Happily, the show was a solid effort with just the right amount of campiness, plot twists, and standout performances from an excellent cast.
Essentially, “Into The Woods” is a chronological tale in two parts: Act I, in which the various leads get their wishes and their desired “happily ever after,” and an Act II that explores the darker side of “what happens next.” Life doesn’t neatly end when you find your true love — neither in real life nor in fairy tales, apparently. Previously-besotted princes eventually philander, maidens rescued from towers find themselves incapable of functioning in the real world, and — terrifyingly — sometimes the spouse of a slain Giant shows up with revenge on her mind. Anything can happen in the woods.
Among a quite talented cast, a few performances are worth special mention. Erica Durham (Cinderella) shone brightly, serving up a nifty mix of stellar songcraft and physical comedy. Jacob Keith Watson (The Baker) ably carried the load at the center of the story with a performance both comic and touching. Finally, the hilarious over-the-top arrogance and choral interplay between Cinderella’s Prince (Cooper Grodin) and Rapunzel’s Prince (Augustine Nguyen) had the audience roaring at every opportunity.
I tend to notice good stagecraft, so it’s worth mentioning that this production’s set was an enchanting piece of work. Books and bookcases are featured prominently and offer subtle and less-subtle hints about what’s to come. As the play takes place on multiple levels and often with quick or even overlapping song stories, my eyes were constantly and happily moving around the stage trying to take it all in.
Arkansas Repertory TheatreWilliam Romain as Jack in The Rep’s “Into the Woods” (Stephen B. Thornton) Fans who have seen previous productions of “Into The Woods” are aware that, traditionally, The Giant is not seen but only heard (generally in pre-recorded dialogue). For a nice Natural State touch, The Rep’s Giant character is voiced by none other than former Arkansas First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton (you might also remember her as a U.S. Secretary of State and U.S. Senator, among other things). Watch closely at the curtain call, and you might catch a special glimpse of sorts, as our audience did.
A note: with a 15-minute intermission, this funny and very entertaining production had a run time that approached three hours. Parents of younger children may factor this into their decisions about whether to bring the entire family, along with the fact that several familiar characters meet their demise along the way — and not just the bad guys. It gets a little dark.
In short, if you’re a fan of multiple intertwining storylines and a sometimes grim (Grimm?) look at what sometimes lies beyond a traditional fairytale ending, The Rep’s strong effort is well worth your attention. Strap on your red hood, grab your magic beans, and get “Into The Woods” before The End.
“Into the Woods” runs April 19-May 15, 7 p.m. Tue.-Thu., 8 p.m. Fri., 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Sat., 2 p.m. Sun., $25-$65.
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Details are scarce, as is customary.
The 5200 block of F Street is a residential block west of Van Buren in lower Hillcrest.
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Arkansas yesterday joined Nebraska in refusing federal rental assistance, $146 million in the case of Arkansas.
Governor Hutchinson’s explanation is a cookie-cutter version of what Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts said in refusing the money. Everybody’s working. Economy is great. We don’t need the money. Pandemic assistance generally was bad. Funny thing. The Republican-dominated Nebraska legislature wanted the money enough to pass legislation to require the state to apply. Ricketts vetoed the bill. I should have mentioned initially that Ricketts is an extremist Republican billionaire, a Trumper, anti-vax, anti-civil rights, you name it.
Another funny thing. People who actually work among the struggling masses and don’t live in a taxpayer-financed mansion told the Nebraska newspaper that Ricketts’ decision will cause people to lose their homes. Advocates in Arkansas say the same.
Asa just doesn’t care, with the same ferocity as a honey badger ripping up those it encounters in the famous “don’t care” video.
Another funny thing. There are people working multiple jobs in Arkansas who are struggling, thanks to low pay, inflation and cruel landlords. Some sample comments from a torrent of social media feedback to Hutchinson’s cold refusal of federal money (an act in keeping with the state’s mishandling of the first round of the rental assistance money and its cruel and botched handling of of pandemic unemployment assistance.):
My grandson who is almost 24 and works full time at Sam’s Club for starvation wages, his lovely wife, and 3 children under 8, including a toddler, have trouble making rent if anything goes wrong. Betting they aren’t alone. Take the housing assistance money and use it!
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He’s totally glossing over dumpster fire DHS Arkansas Rent Relief program was. People waited months for applications to be processed, if not “lost.” Many were evicted while waiting. AR received $173m; spent only small portion. Contractor Deloitte hired to run pgm was awful.
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He’s grossly out of touch with the realities of most folks in need and our large population of working class poor. He assumes they aren’t working if they need rental assistance.
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Arkansas is refusing the federal $ that prevents families from becoming HOMELESS. Saying he might use it for foster care/homeless-implies that if a family loses their home or a parent loses their child/children to foster care as a result of poverty/being evicted—it’s acceptable.
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Today Asa closes another door on the homeless/poor (most working). In the morning he will post his usual Bible verse and eat Porterhouse steak for supper. Is this the strategy all Republicans are using to get to Heaven?
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Oh. Since the money is going to just tenants and not tenants AND Landlords, he’s refusing it. It’s against the state laws. SMDH. Those rich landlords need their money.
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He obviously has not walked into a public housing office and been told that there is a year wait to even apply.
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So my governor @AsaHutchinson is refusing federal housing assistance to the 4th poorest state in the country.
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This is a keeper for all those who have told me that Asa is is a moderate, not one of those crazy Republicans, just a common sense guy trying to keep the outer fringes in line.
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There are teenagers who have aged out of foster care who need housing assistance
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As high as gas, food, and rent is and you turning down money that could help the very folks that put you in office. Make it make sense.
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In nearly the poorest state in America, this is a disgusting decision made by a weak man. 24% of children in Arkansas live in poverty and this man takes it upon himself to rob the poorest Arkansans of $146million in FEDERAL, not state, assistance.
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This is most likely related to ASA!’s plans to run for president. No government handouts for you!! We all know how repubs hate to help hungry and/or homeless families and children.
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Does he hate low-income Arkansans so much that he would refuse $146M in federal housing assistance? In one of the poorest states in the country? Where there are no minimum rental housing standards & it is a felony not to pay rent?
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You mean to tell me a man living in a fancy mansion on the taxpayers’ dime while also owning a home in the gated Pinnacle Country Club subdivision doesn’t understand the plight of the unemployed, the underemployed and those facing eviction due to skyrocketing housing costs?
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“He said the money wasn’t needed in Arkansas because people were back to work at pre-pandemic levels.” Governor, spend a day with the churches/orgs getting daily calls from people facing eviction. Get out of the Governor’s mansion and see what’s really happening in Arkansas.
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Hutchinson has no idea just how hard it is to rent, and how few places there are that people can afford.
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13 states are sending checks averaging $600 apiece to their citizens to help offset gas & grocery prices. But not Republican states. The Republican mantra is, “Keep ‘em sick, keep ‘em hungry, & keep ‘em poor.” That way the people will be begging to be your corporate slaves.
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Gee another rich guy decides what poor people need. Why do they vote for these monsters?
There’s more, but iCYMI this comment was posted on the Arkansas Blog last night.
I live in lonoke county. I’m in school working towards my RN, I’m already a LPN, I work 2 jobs on top of that, and the Arkansas Rental Assistance Program helped me out a ton in the hardest time of my life paying for 3 months rent at once, all for my slumlords to accept & deposit the money the last time I applied for additional months which was a month ago, the check went out to them a week ago, I wasn’t behind on rent or anything, the check was $4100, my rent is/was $1000.00, they tried to have me evicted, the judge denied their order for writ of possession, but they still cut the power off, took my door off the henges, and gave away nearly all my furniture and belongings away for free on Facebook, forcing me to have to start over. How is this fair to people in situations like myself?! Had the check gone to me I would have just moved before they could literally go insane and go against judges orders.
A ton of people don’t want to work, you’re right about that, but for people like me, it really helped and could be of major help now that I have to find a new place, since I was scared for my safety and my child’s. They harassed me out of the home which is illegal…. But it is people who won’t work ruining it for hardworking individuals like myself.
I’d apply again with just my name not the landlords, but the program is now closed, so his statement saying rental assistance was already available in Arkansas but it’s not, it’s been unavailable for weeks now, so he’s either misinformed or just trying to sound good. I used to support Asa, but the last year or so I’ve begun to question a ton of his decisions.
I’ve put Asa’s run for president in the search engine tag category in hopes some inquiring reporters will see it when he begins his run for the White House as a compassionate conservative.
UPDATE: This just arrived from a renters’ advocacy group:
Governor Hutchinson used a late Friday afternoon to announce that Arkansas would be just one of two states to turn away federal funds for helping renters struggling with pandemic recovery. The Governor claimed that the “economy has returned,” and that “There are jobs aplenty.” But the economy that the Governor describes is not the pre-pandemic economy; it’s a different economy today that most low-income and moderate income families are experiencing.
Rising inflation driven by economic recovery has meant rising grocery bills, rising gas prices, and rising rents; Little Rock alone has seen sharp increases of 9% in rent prices in just the past year alone, according to a report from ApartmentList.com.
“Arkansas Renters United hears from renters all over the state who are having a difficult time with their rent payments because of this pandemic and recent rent increases. One homeless family is one too many. These funds would greatly assist in meeting the needs of Arkansas citizens and their children,” said Joyce Jones, a leader of Arkansas Renters United.
Inflation costs hit the pocketbooks of rural and working Arkansas families harder than anyone in the Governor’s mansion. The Governor shows he is out-of-touch with regular Arkansans when he talks about “jobs aplenty.” While there may be many jobs, these low-paying jobs in today’s economy do not cover an average family’s food, utility, and housing costs.
Federal funds are part of our nation’s resources for leveraging more investment in our communities. Wealthy Arkansans have been protected from the worst of the pandemic’s economic impacts. To turn away $146 million in federal funds is a political statement by the Governor, and not in the best interests of Arkansans who rent who make up roughly one-third of our state’s population.
UPDATE II: The governor has released a copy of his letter refusing the money to the White House. Yes, he says he’ll take some of it and tries to pretend it’s in the context of perhaps spending some small amount of money on short-term rental assistance, but not in the way contemplated by the federal program. And it explains that the money remaining for rental assistance that he touted is already ONLY available through non-profit assistance programs, not as straight rental assistance.
The post Sticking it to the poor: Asa copies Nebraska governor appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Giving money to Arkansans struggling to pay their rent is not something we’re going to do anymore, despite the federal government’s gifting us $146 million for this specific purpose, Governor Hutchinson said Friday.
The plan is for Arkansas, one of the poorest states in the country, to send the money back. We don’t need it, Hutchinson said. His reasoning: Arkansas’s economy is humming along at pre-pandemic speed, so we don’t need pandemic-related assistance. Nevermind that plenty of Arkansans suffered economically before COVID-19 and will continue to do so, regardless of the virus’ trajectory.
Hutchinson announced this plan at a pen-and-pad session, where he also talked about broadband expansion and plans for the state’s swelling surplus.
Hutchinson explained that the state wants to hold on to 39 percent of the pledged $146 million that was supposed to make up the second installment of federal rent money coming our way as part of a pandemic relief package. While the first batch was earmarked to cover rent and utility bills left unpaid because of COVID-19, the second round comes with no such strings. That 39 percent Hutchinson wants to hold on to won’t go to landlords or tenants directly, but could pay for job training, addiction rehabilitation programs and other up-by-your-bootstraps paths to make Arkansas renters financially self-sufficient.
Turning away money meant for your most vulnerable constituents is an odd choice for the governor of one of the poorest states in the country. Nebraska is so far the only other state to turn its nose up at this second round of federal rent money.
Rich Huddleston, director of Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, was quick to criticize the governor’s decision.
We are deeply disappointed in the governor’s announcement today that Arkansas is rejecting $146 million in housing assistance funds from the federal government. The state government has the ability and the obligation to help make Arkansas a better place to be and raise a child, and turning down this investment goes against that commitment.
Tens of thousands of Arkansas households are either behind on rent or aren’t confident in their ability to make next month’s payment. Thousands that have applied for assistance have been denied. Instead of refusing to put money in the pockets of Arkansan families in need, we should be making it easier for families to stay in their homes and make ends meet.
Although the unemployment rate is low, we know many Arkansans are still struggling to get and maintain gainful employment because of the high costs of child care, housing, transportation and other expenses. We should be making it easier for families to keep a roof over their heads. We only have a state surplus because we underspend when it comes to investing in our own people. We should use the surplus to address critical needs, in addition to making sure rental assistance is available and easily attainable to every family that needs it. In a state where 22% of the children live in poverty, we cannot afford to dismiss federal dollars that could help provide safety and security for families in need.
The post Governor Hutchinson turns back millions in federal rent assistance, tells Arkansans to get a job appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Enough with the moderate Asa talk, OK? That and other outrages in the daily news roundup. The line is open.
The post The week ends with the governor kissing off millions in federal rent help appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Arkansas Times · The Asa Wants To Be President Edition
On this week’s podcast, Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about Arkansas refusing rental aid, the state’s massive surplus, and Gov. Hutchinson flirting with a presidential run. They also talk about delta-8 and Warren Stephens getting whatever he wants in Little Rock.
Subscribe via iTunes or listen on Spotify.
The post The Asa Wants To Be President Edition appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Prosecuting Attorney Matt Durrett’s decision to bring no charges against Huntsville school officials for failing to report sexual abuse of basketball players in has drawn a blast from his opponent in a run for re-election this year.
My opponent on Monday stated that he is not going to charge the Huntsville School superintendent, principal, head coach and athletic director for any crime. It was said that our current law is insufficient to bring charges. This is just plain wrong.
— Stephen Coger (@stephen4ar) April 21, 2022
Durrett said the abuse reported by students didn’t fall into the categories under which reports to a child abuse hotline were required. I
In what was apparently a long-practiced hazing ritual in Huntsville, basketball players held down a player while another player attempted to put his genitals in the face of the player being held down. Durrett said this didn’t fit the definition of abuse or sexual abuse under the statute. Sexual abuse must involve gratification, the report said, and abuse requires a report if the act was done by a parent, guardian, or certain others. But Durrett said this case didn’t apply because it involved students.
Lawsuits continue over the school district’s response to parents’ complaints. District school board members and others have been roundly criticized in media over the handling of the case.
Coger is the director of the agency we mentioned earlier today that has struck an agreement with Tyson Foods to provide legal aid to immigrant workers.
It’s a good issue, though most likely hottest in Huntsville. The major part of the population of the district is in Washington County, where the prosecutor is based.
Update: Story gets a national angle today
The post Opponent blasts prosecutors refusal to file charges in Huntsville sex abuse case appeared first on Arkansas Times.
There is perhaps no industry more regulated in Arkansas than medical marijuana. State laws and rules restrict who can buy it, how much and what types of products qualified customers can buy, how and where it can be sold — even how it can be advertised. So you might be surprised to learn that a similar psychoactive product, also derived from the cannabis plant, is widely available in Arkansas convenience stores, tobacco and vape shops and elsewhere, and is produced and sold entirely free of regulation.
Most commonly known as delta-8 THC, but also sold in a seemingly ever-expanding array of other varieties — THC-0, delta-10, HHC — the products come in a range of forms: vape cartridges, gummies, tinctures, cookies. How delta-8 compares to marijuana depends on whom you ask, but the unscientific consensus is that they’re at least intoxicating cousins.
The crucial distinction between the two is a legal one. Marijuana is another name for the flowers of the Cannabis sativa and Cannabis indica plants that are rich in THC, technically known as delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol. Delta-9 THC remains federally illegal and legal in Arkansas only to certified medical marijuana patients. Hemp, at least defined by the 2018 federal Farm Bill, is any cannabis plant or its byproducts that contain less than 0.3% delta-9 THC. Because delta-8 THC products meet that definition, they’re legal, goes the argument. Many state legislatures, including Arkansas’s in the 2021 legislative session, passed legislation to align local hemp laws with the Farm Bill.
Rep. David Hillman (R-Almyra) sponsored the bill that updated Arkansas’s hemp program. Delta-8 wasn’t on his radar at the time, he said. He’s not ready to concede that the law, passed overwhelmingly by his colleagues, legalized hemp-based THC products, but he acknowledged that the statute is at least ambiguous. “It’s something that’s going to have to be addressed” in a future legislative session, he said.
At least 17 states have banned delta-8 and similar products, but several of those are being challenged in court. The federal government hasn’t provided clear guidance. The Food and Drug Administration has warned that delta-8 hasn’t been evaluated or approved by the agency and may not be safe to use. The Drug Enforcement Agency, in an interim rule, said that delta-8 is not a controlled substance as long as the product is derived from hemp rather than synthetically or chemically synthesized THC. But the DEA did not define what “synthetic” means.
The typical way to make delta-8 is by extracting cannabidiol, aka CBD, from hemp, refining that into an isolate and then synthesizing that with heat and solvents into delta-8. In other words, chemistry! (HHC is created by adding hydrogen molecules to delta-9 or CBD; the hydrogenation process is similar to how vegetable oil is converted into margarine, the popular cannabis website Leafly helpfully explains). Whether that process runs afoul of the DEA’s stipulations depends on whom you ask. In any case, the federal enforcement agency has not aggressively targeted delta-8 manufacturers across the country.
In Arkansas, the state government’s novel strategy to deal with the new intoxicant appears to entail sowing confusion in hopes of tamping down its availability. The only rule the Arkansas Alcoholic Beverage Control, the agency that oversees the state’s medical marijuana program, has in place regarding delta-8 is one that prohibits its sales in medical marijuana dispensaries. Otherwise, the state regulatory bodies that oversee all products similar to delta-8 have decided to sit this one out. “The Arkansas Alcoholic Beverage Control Division and the Division of Tobacco Control have not taken a position at this time on the legality of possessing Delta-8 in a permitted premise,” spokesman Scott Hardin said in a statement. “The Divisions believe this is a matter better left to the discretion of local law enforcement and prosecutors. ABC and ATC remain committed to enforcing the existing rules governing their respective permit holders across the state.”
If the goal is to constrain the market, it’s working, at least to some degree. Mark Roberts, owner of Little Rock’s Heights Apothecary & Hemp Co., said he’s not selling delta-8 or related products until the law is more defined.
In February, the Camden Police Department charged the owners of two smoke shops with multiple felonies for selling delta-8 products. The cases haven’t gone to trial. Otherwise, the issue doesn’t appear to have gained much traction among local law enforcement. Bob McMahan, the state prosecutor coordinator who supervises a staff of lawyers who research legal issues for local prosecutors, said the legality of delta-8 hadn’t bubbled up to his staff. Sgt. Eric Barnes, a spokesman for the Little Rock Police Department, said to his knowledge no citations related to delta-8 had been issued in Arkansas’s largest city.
Producers
In a market flooded with hemp, the barrier to entry in the delta-8 business is low. If a fly-by-night operator wanted to set up shop, delta-8 distillate in bulk is widely available on the internet. But there are big, legitimate players as well, including at least two with Arkansas connections that are using their influence and reputation to gain a toehold in the market.
Blonc CBD, a Little Rock-based brand, produces gummies and tinctures, which it sells at blonccbd.com and in a growing number of retail locations in the state, according to co-owner Keith Emis, a longtime Republican lobbyist.
“We’re a brand-new product in the market,” Emis said. “Every month, we see growth in sales from the previous month. We comply with all state and federal laws and regulations, and we’re committed to being a responsible corporate citizen.”
Among Emis’ partners is Jason Polk of Lake Liquor in Maumelle. Polk previously co-owned Rebel Kettle Brewery, and his family by marriage contributed nearly $500,000 toward the successful effort to pass Arkansas’s medical marijuana amendment. Emis declined to name other partners, but circumstantial evidence suggests that they include Jackson Stephens III, grandson of famed Little Rock financier Jack T. Stephens. Blonc shares a mailing address with another business associated with Stephens and was also associated with Naturalis Health LLC, Stephens’ unsuccessful bid to get one of the state’s medical marijuana cultivation permits.
Ouachita Farms, until recently based in Garland County, was one the first companies in the state licensed to grow and process hemp. It relocated to Texarkana, Texas, last June and has expanded operations into Texas, where it operates a sister brand called Brazos Farm, and New Mexico, where it owns Enchanted Farms, a marjiuana cultivation operation. Marijuana became legal for adult use in New Mexico April 1.
Sarah Owen, CEO of Ouachita Farms, said her company focuses on solventless extraction with its delta-8 products. “We rely on trusted suppliers who have a proprietary process that they produce delta-8 distillate with. We bring that distillate in-house. Then we’re going to a DEA-certified lab to test for heavy metals, for solvents, for pesticide and potency.”
Ouachita Farms’ delta-8 products, which it sells as brownies, cookies, dab sauces, gummies and in tinctures, are among its top sellers, Owen said. They’re available at ouachitafarms.com or in retail locations throughout the country. Last year, Ouachita Farms sold its products in 40 states, Owen said.
Competition
“We want our cousins in the cannabis industry, the hemp folks, to do fine, but we need some standards to ensure safety and policy that’s clear,” said Bill Paschall, spokesman for the Arkansas Cannabis Industry Association. “There’s no clarity of policy at the state level or the federal level. A lot of folks out there are wandering around the woods in a state of confusion.” Many delta-8 products carry a 21+ label, and Emis with Blonc and Owen with Ouachita Farms both said they would cease supplying any retailer who they learned sold their products to anyone younger, but there’s no law preventing a teenager from buying delta-8 THC gummies at a convenience store. There also aren’t any requirements for labeling or testing, Paschall noted.
“I think it’s going to have to be resolved in the legislature,” Paschall said. It appears to be entering lawmakers’ radar. At an April 20 meeting of the Arkansas Legislative Council’s Administrative Rules Subcommittee, Sen. Missy Irvin (R-Mountain View) told Department of Health representatives she had concerns about a “substance.” The health department official told her that the department could make an emergency rule to add a drug to the state’s schedule of controlled substances. Meanwhile, there’s talk of Governor Hutchinson calling a special session this summer to provide a one-time tax cut, rebate or credit to ease the burden of inflation. If that comes to pass, lobbyists and legislators would likely jockey to get a delta-8 ban on the call — or leave it off.
The post The straight dope on delta-8 THC in Arkansas appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Today’s numbers on COVID-19 in Arkansas:
Total cases: 834,864, or an increase of 165 from Thursday
Active cases: 1,220, up from 1,147
Deaths: 11,369, an increase of three.
Hospitalized: 50, down from 51
In ICU: 22, down from 26
On ventilator: 13, down from 16
Vaccinations to date: 4,037,150, up by about 2,600 from Thursday.
The post COVID today: 165 new cases and three more deaths appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about Arkansas refusing rental aid, the state's massive surplus, and Gov. Hutchinson flirting with a presidential run. They also talk about delta-8 and Warren Stephens getting whatever he wants in Little Rock.
Governor Hutchinson announced today that he’d written the Biden administration to say Arkansas wouldn’t accept $146 million slated for Arkansas to provide housing assistance payments in the second round of assistance intended as pandemic relief.
He said the money wasn’t needed in Arkansas because people were back to work at pre-pandemic levels. “The economy has returned. There are jobs aplenty. We have existing programs for rental assistance. People are working. We have the same opportunity for moving up the economic ladder.”
Hutchinson said he’d be talking to the White House today and would propose an alternative: Letting the state use about 39 percent of the money, or nearly $60 million, to provide to nonprofit agencies who’d work on helping people with “housing stability.” He named two agencies — Our House and Restore Hope, a program he started in 2015 to address foster care and released prisoners — that could work, for example, with people coping with drug addiction or vocational preparation that could help them obtain jobs (and presumably pay for their housing themselves.)
Under questioning, he also said federal rules for the new money were objectionable to the state because the money would go directly to tenants not to tenants and landlords, as the state currently requires. “It makes no sense to taxpayers,” he said.
Hutchinson said the state still has about $6.7 million available for rental assistance. This is after the federal government took back $9 million unspent in Arkansas to send to other states using it more efficiently. After that happened, U.S. Rep. French Hill introduced legislation to get the money back saying the move punished rural areas. Hutchinson said the state’s available programs would be available throughout the state.
Arkansas and Nebraska are the only two states refusing the money, Hutchinson said.
Hutchinson also discussed the broadband consultants report released earlier this week and he repeated what he said then: The state will be focusing on about 100,000 households not already covered by federal grant programs and an estimated $500 million will be needed to reach those homes.
He observed today that the state has a big surplus, confirming for the first time the expectation that it will hit $1 billion. He said a portion could be used to accelerate broadband expansion in the state if the legislature is willing. But school facility needs, stressed by inflation, are another possibility as are more tax cuts. He said a decision on a special session likely won’t be reached until mid- to late-summer, unless other developments intervene, such as a U.S. Supreme Court ruling further eroding or overturning Roe v. Wade.
Hutchinson closed by saying he’d be traveling frequently out of state in the final eight months of his administration, often with multiple purposes but nearly always including economic development efforts. He’s going to New Hampshire next week, for example. He didn’t say it but it’s a popular stop for would-be presidential candidates. He said he’d be visiting an industry that operates in Arkansas, but he said he’d be using a PAC he’s created to pay for the trip. He termed it a “conservative” approach. He said every trip he takes will be evaluated individually on whether it would be a state or PAC expense. He didn’t specifically mention political plans, but you get the drift.
PS: Cold-hearted Asa’s proclamation that Arkansas needs none of those filthy federal dollars is not getting a good review on my Twitter feed. Perhaps the cheers are being heard elsewhere.
While refusing alms for the poor, Asa and other Republicans ARE happy to get federal dollars for socialized broadband all over Arkansas.
Hutchinson announces Arkansas will refuse $146 million in federal housing assistance money https://t.co/ROoliUvZDS via @arktimes
— Arkansas Blog (@ArkansasBlog) April 22, 2022
The post Hutchinson announces Arkansas will refuse $146 million in federal housing assistance money appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The 2020 Census and resulting redistricting of political lines means voting locations for some voters are changing. And for the rest of us, a reminder never hurts.
Pulaski County Clerk Terri Hollingsworth sent out 237,000 voter registration cards to make sure all Pulaski voters are up to date.
“There have been some changes made from the redistricting process and our office is required to notify Pulaski County citizens of these changes that impact where they vote,” Hollingsworth explained in a press release. “Please be on the lookout for a plain white postcard from our office detailing your new voter information. You do not need your voter information card with you in order to vote. The voter information cards are provided for informational purposes only. They provide useful information including your precinct and voting district information like justice of peace, school district zone, and more.”
If you’re not registered to vote but want to be, you have until April 24 to get signed up in time to vote in the May primary.
The post Hey Pulaski County voters, check your mailboxes for new registration cards appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Brian Chilson
Kelley Bass, writer, foodie and host of the Ben E. Keith-sponsored podcast “Heaping Spoonful” told us this week that Mexico Chiquito is bottling and selling its signature fruit punch. He told me he had an extra 4-pack and offered to bring it by the Arkansas Times office, but when he arrived I wasn’t there. I was on my way to the lone remaining Mexico Chiquito location, the double drive-thru+to-go restaurant at 1406 W Markham St., and I was there for the cheese dip because I’ve never once had the fruit punch without it, and I’m not starting now. I can’t remember the last time I had Mexico Chiquito’s signature chile con queso or fruit punch, but it had been a minute. I remember the first time I tried the cheese dip in the ’80s when my babysitter gave me a bite and blew my 7-year-old mind. It was my first experience really identifying the flavor of cumin without knowing what cumin was. When my parents returned that night I gave them fair criticism for not introducing me to it sooner. Little did I know at the time the restaurant would later be credited as the inventor of cheese dip. Who knows how I would’ve reacted if the babysitter had filled me in on that detail? “The inventor of cheese dip is down the street, and you didn’t even think to tell me!”
I’m sure the waiters didn’t like it, but when I was in junior high my friends and I would go into Mexico Chiquito’s Lakewood Village location in North Little Rock on our skateboards and just order cheese dip and fruit punch. Those two items are largely what the restaurant is known for, and that it introduced Arkansas to Tex-Mex when it opened in 1935. I texted a friend yesterday, an Arkansas native and foodie who lives in Tennessee now, that I was listening to a Mexico Chiquito podcast and he responded “Cheese dip and punch” with a fire emoji.
Bass interviewed Kim Lester, Patti Jones and Lisa Glidewell — sisters who, along
with other members of their families, own and operate Mexico Chiquito, on his podcast last year. They cover the history of the restaurant, the origin of the elusive cheese dip (which many have tried and failed to pinpoint over the years) and the punch, which is made in 55-gallon batches. Now the sought-after punch is being sold at the restaurant in 16.9 ounce bottles of 4-packs and 8-packs.
My memories of the punch were not as accurate as the cheese dip, which I can taste by just thinking about it. I remember the punch being sweet enough to take typical teenage energy and amplify it to embarrassing heights. But it’s not as sweet as I remember it. It’s actually pretty refreshing and doesn’t taste artificial. In other words, it’s a great fruit punch!
From the press release:
The pre-packaged bottles of punch have a four-month shelf life and don’t have to be refrigerated, unlike the punch to go that historically has been sold by the glass at Mexico Chiquito. Mexico Chiquito’s fruit punch is available in 4-packs ($8.99) and 8-packs ($17.99) and is sold through the double drive-thru windows from 10:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. seven days a week.
“Our fruit punch is one of the signature items that has kept our faithful fans coming back since Mexico Chiquito was founded in 1935,” says Lisa Glidewell, one of the five sisters who are carrying on the legacy of their father, Jerry Haynie, who purchased the iconic restaurant in 1979. “We are happy to be able to now offer it for people to take home and enjoy.”
The post Mexico Chiquito bottling and selling its signature fruit punch appeared first on Arkansas Times.
If you’re getting out these days, options for live music abound for the weekend:
String band Chucky Waggs and his Company of Raggs get rowdy at Four Quarter Bar, 9 p.m., $8. Bring your dancing shoes.
Vocal folk and blues powerhouse Ruthie Foster is performing tonight at Ron Robinson for the Celebrate Maya! Project. Details here.
Wildwood Park for the Arts is throwing its biggest festival/fundraiser of the year, known for its stunning light displays around the park’s acreage and bordering Swan Lake. I took my nieces to this several years back and the photos made for some pretty magical momentos. Find details and tickets here.
Little Rock native and country entertainer Zac Dunlap’s performing at Stickyz, with Bree Ogden and Dylan Gray, 8 p.m., $12:
Luna Luna is going to turn the White Water Tavern into the best couples skate ever; More on that here. Plus, The Gravel Yard Band tomorrow night and Dikku Du & The Zydeco Krewe Sunday. Check out Gravel Yard’s Chris Denny’s living room croon:
Katrice Newbill, stage name Butterfly, performs her NOLA-incubated blend of reggae and old school R&B at Charlee’s for a Birthday Bash/Taurus Party, 9 p.m., $20.
The Arkansas Choral Society performs Beethoven’s Mass in C major to honor the composer’s birthday, 7:30 p.m., Little Rock’s Calvary Baptist Church, 5700 Cantrell Road. The concert features Society singers, the University of Arkansas at Monticello Concert Choir and soloists Mary Sandell, soprano; Aubrey Odle, alto; John Darst, tenor; and David Farwig, bass, members of the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra and conductor Kent Skinner.
The post Weekend To-Do List: Chucky Waggs at Four Quarter, Arkansas Choral Society does Beethoven, Katrice Butterfly Newbill at Charlee’s, “Lanterns” at Wildwood appeared first on Arkansas Times.
LUNA LUNA, DREAMGIRL
FRIDAY 4/22. ~~Vino’s.~~ White Water Tavern. 7 p.m. $15.
This Dallas-based pop outfit — vocalist Kevin González, drummer Kaylin Martínez, bassist Ryan Gordon and vocalist Danny Bonilla — is taking its bilingual slow burns to ~~Vino’s~~ White Water Tavern after turning its buzzed-about Texas house party tour into a tour of clubs across the country, and if we’d all had couple-skate anthems like “Don’t Forget” as adolescents, our romantic pursuits might have been less perplexing. Expect any whiff of toxic machismo in the room to be single-handedly banished with the tune “Feelings in Me,” and bring your best dancing partner. They’re joined by fellow dream pop rockers Dreamgirl, out of Kansas City, Missouri.
The post Luna Luna at White Water Tavern tonight appeared first on Arkansas Times.
PARTNERSHIP: Tyson and Arkansas Immigration Defense work together on helping immigrants with legal services.
Tyson Foods has committed $1 million to a partnership with Arkansas Immigrant Defense to provide legal services to smooth the way for immigrants and refugees into the workforce.
A release said the money will go to help with employment authorization and green card renewals and petitions for citizenship. Stephen Coger, executive director of AID, said the program could help hundreds in Arkansas with a path to legal status. That’s good for the company as well as workers, he said.
AID will send three full-time staff members to 40 Tyson plants in 14 states to meet with workers. Those who eventually are naturalized citizens will be reimbursed by Tyson for the naturalization fee of about $700.
Said the release:
TIP addresses team member needs in a holistic way. A lack of stable, lawful permanent status results in issues beyond just immigration. It can impact transportation, education, access to childcare, housing, and other benefits. Ultimately, this program improves the overall well-being of our clients and Tyson team members. Because of TIP, hundreds of immigrants will live more secure lives with permanent access to employment authorization, a driver’s license, and lawful status that affords protection from concerns about deportation and family unity.
Typically, these services would cost a client hundreds of dollars, if not thousands. AID has already served over 263 clients through in-plant consultations. The American Immigration Lawyers Association published a Marketplace Study in 2016 that showed the average hourly rate of an immigration attorney in the Mid-South is $250. Thanks to Tyson, their team members have saved hundreds of dollars by working with Arkansas Immigrant Defense.
The post Tyson joins with immigrant defense group to help immigrant workers appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Politico checks in today on the Jake Bequette challenge of incumbent Republican Sen. John Boozman with the financial backing of conservative billionaire Richard Uihlein.
We’ve covered most of the ground before. Boozman is supported by all the establishment Arkansas Republicans and Donald Trump. Uihlein can flood TV with ads in a relatively inexpensive state claiming Boozman is some sort of Biden stooge. Uihlein’s fascination with Beqette? Hard to say. He has a record of supporting young conservatives with military backgrounds but has little in the way of wins to show for it.
This was interesting: Boozman kissing up to Trump after he got punked by a clandestine video.
Earlier this month, the far-right website Gateway Pundit published a surreptitiously taken recording of Republican Sen. John Boozman saying the 2020 election results were legitimate.
The Arkansas senator immediately reached out to former President Donald Trump — who told allies he was angry about the remarks, which cut against his false claim that the election was stolen from him — to try to contain the damage. During the call, according to two people with knowledge of the conversation, Boozman attempted to mollify the former president by reassuring Trump he supported him and by reiterating his gratitude for Trump’s endorsement in his upcoming primary.
I’m still disinclined to believe Bequette or Jan Morgan or Heath Loftis can beat Boozman in the primary or even force him into a runoff. The Trump seal of approval appears powerful in Arkansas, still. Which is the saddest commentary of the political season.
The post The billionaire and Bequette and their challenge of Sen. John Boozman appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Four people have been found dead in two locations in rural Stone County and it has left those in the area nervous, judging by comments on the sheriff’s Facebook page.
Cleburne County Sheriff Chris Brown chimed in:
In response to the incident that occurred in the Ben Community in Stone County yesterday, the Cleburne County Sheriff’s Office will be providing extra patrol in the area on the Cleburne County side as much as possible over the coming days. We will also be conducting extra patrol in the Concord and Drasco areas as much as possible, and supporting the Stone County Sheriff’s Office in any way they may need during their investigation. If you have any information regarding the incident, you are encouraged to contact the Stone County Sheriff’s Office immediately. And if you witness any suspicious activity, please contact the Stone County Sheriff’s Office or the Cleburne County Sheriff’s Office.
The Stone sheriff said the deaths occurred in two homes about a mile apart.
From KAIT:
Sheriff Bonds said that one victim is in their early 50′s and the other three victims are believed to be in their early 70′s.
Deputies said that they are interviewing a person of interest but they are not considered a suspect at this point.
The sheriff’s department said there is not an active shooter, but they are urging people to remain in their homes and lock their doors.
UPDATE from the State Police:
Stone County authorities have requested the Arkansas State Police Criminal Investigation Division to investigate the deaths of four people who appear to have died as the result of gunshot wounds. The homicides occurred at two homes located about one-quarter mile apart. State police special agents are investigating the cases independently and have not, at this juncture, found conclusive evidence to confirm whether the cases might be related. The Stone County Sheriff’s Office contacted state police late yesterday (*Thursday, April 21st) requesting CID special agents be sent to 646 Northcutt Road, located off Arkansas Highway 5. About 2 PM, a woman and her son, both residents of the home located south of Mountain View, had been found dead by a family member. The deceased have been identified as Shirley Watters, 77, and James Watters, 55. Agents investigating the case have found evidence indicating both had been wounded by gunfire. About 8 hours later while continuing their work at the first crime scene, agents were called to a second crime scene located at 5474 Arkansas Highway 5, north of the Watters residence. William Clinton Trammell, 75, and his wife, Sharon, 72, had been discovered dead inside their home. Both, the apparent victims, of gunshot wounds. The bodies in each case have been transported to the Arkansas State Crime Laboratory where the medical examiner will confirm the cause and manner of death and provide agents with an approximate time of death. Special agents assigned to the independent cases are continuing their investigative work today and will keep the Stone County Sheriff’s Department and prosecuting attorney updated on their findings.
The post Four dead in Stone County UPDATE appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The biggest debate news was who didn’t show up. The line is open.
The post Politics at the top of the news roundup today appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Hurry it up, because we all know this is the sweet spot on the calendar. Ice storms behind us, heatstroke weather in front of us. Now’s the time to get out and about in Arkansas.
We’ve taken the liberty of serving as your travel agents, executing dry runs of a few trip options so you’ll have a good idea what you’re in for. Difficulty levels range from tenderfoot (How hard is it to feast on a $150 steak and lose your shirt at the Saracen Casino craps table? Not very hard, writer Rhett Brinkley admits) to hardcore (Solo backpacking the Lake Ouachita Vista Trail was no big deal for Stephanie Smittle, but that’s only because she’s a professional).
If you’re a good Arkansan who floats the Buffalo at least once a year, you’ll be interested to learn about all the work that goes into keeping our favorite canoe routes clean, open and welcoming. March 1 marked the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the Buffalo River as the United States’ first National River. Lindsey Millar wades into the history, looks to see what’s around the next bend, and gives some ideas on how to celebrate this important milestone.
We’re reluctant to throw too much fanfare at Historic Cane Hill, an undersung community in Northwest Arkansas that’s now a temporary home for a Smithsonian traveling exhibit. But that’s only because we’re tempted to keep the secret to ourselves. Contributor Caroline Millar and her son scoped out the Smithsonian “Habitat” experience, which opened April 16 and ushers visitors through the forest to take in oversized fungus sculptures, a human-sized nest and other thoughtfully curated extras to help us think about and understand nature in a fuller way.
Clearly, there’s lots to do in Arkansas. So get going.
The post Time for an Arkansas road trip appeared first on Arkansas Times.
The state law legalizing medical marijuana in Arkansas has allowed some individuals to own stakes in both a cultivator where marijuana is grown and a dispensary where cannabis products are sold, giving them control over both production and some retail sales in the state’s booming market.
But some competing dispensaries have called foul, saying the cultivators are creating an unfair marketplace where the cultivators allow their own retail outlets to sell cheaper and newer products.
Hot Springs dispensary owner Dragan Vicentic, who has tangled with cultivators on a variety of issues, minced no words in a 2019 letter to the state Alcoholic Beverage Control Division. Vicentic said a potential sale of another Hot Springs dispensary to an owner of the BOLD Team cultivation facility would “place a monopoly and an unjust hold on the market by a cultivator that could tilt competition unfairly.” Vicentic argued the cultivator could offer cheaper prices to the affiliated dispensary than to nonaffiliated dispensaries and could offer their outlet superior products and newer products.
Today, Vicentic says his fears have been proven true.
“I think my letter to the ABC backs up my fears that have been brought to fruition!” Vicentic said in an email.
Vicentic isn’t the only one with concerns. Matthew Wilbers, who manages a Pine Bluff dispensary a few miles from a cultivator-affiliated dispensary, said his store is at a disadvantage when it comes to pricing and the availability of new products.
“There does seem to be a distinct line of competitive advantage whenever you have such a close affiliation between a dispensary storefront and a cultivation facility,” Wilbers said.
Ownership
The individuals who have ownership stakes in both a cultivation facility and a dispensary have violated no laws.
The amendment voters passed in 2016 to legalize medical marijuana allows for eligible individuals to have an ownership stake in one cultivation facility and one dispensary. Even a fraction of a percentage of ownership would be enough to disqualify someone from purchasing an interest in another similar facility, according to state Medical Marijuana Commission spokesman Scott Hardin.
The amendment also allows for licenses awarded by the commission to be transferred to other eligible individuals.
The Medical Marijuana Commission frequently grants these transfers at its regular monthly meetings. Sometimes, the changes are minimal and mostly amount to changing the percentage of ownership the current owners have in the company to allow for new owners to come aboard.
In other cases, the ownership changes are significant. In March, the commission approved a change of ownership for Good Day Farm’s dispensary in Little Rock (now known as Berner’s by Good Day Farm). Before the change, four individuals — attorneys Alex Gray and Nate Steel, who also have an ownership stake in Good Day Farm Arkansas cultivation, and their wives, owned 100% of the dispensary. After the change, those four individuals own less than 2% of the dispensary and 15 other individuals own the remaining amount. Louisiana Republican donor Boysie Bollinger became the biggest stakeholder in the dispensary, with a 25.51% ownership stake.
While the individuals who own both a cultivator and a dispensary have not violated the Medical Marijuana Commission rules or the state amendment, Vicentic has asked the office of Attorney General Leslie Rutledge to look into what he calls a monopoly that creates an unfair marketplace. Rutledge’s office declined to pursue the matter, Vicentic said, leaving him few options.
“You would think, because it’s a monopoly, that the state attorney general would jump on that thing because it’s against the people,” Vicentic said, noting that he would likely need to file a civil lawsuit to pursue the matter further.
Along with Good Day Farm Arkansas, individuals who have a stake in ownership of the BOLD Team and Osage Creek also own four dispensaries in Hot Springs, Pine Bluff, Fayetteville and Little Rock. (A soon-to-open dispensary in Van Buren will be known as Good Day Farm Van Buren but the dispensary will not be owned by any of the owners of Good Day Farm Cultivation, according to Hardin).
Dispensary Differences
Online cannabis menus show dispensaries affiliated with cultivators do have some cheaper products than nearby nonaffiliated dispensaries.
According to Weedmaps, Suite 443 in Hot Springs is selling edible gummies from BOLD for as little as $7 a package, while nearby Green Springs Medical Dispensary’s least expensive gummies are $25. The Green Springs menu does not list any products made by BOLD.
According to Vicentic, the retail prices for some items at Suite 443 are even lower than he can obtain at wholesale prices.
Suite 443 is wholly owned by Mark Drennan who also owns a 24.5% stake in BOLD cultivation. Green Springs is 100% owned by Vicentic.
Vicentic’s dispensary isn’t the only one that has found itself across town from a dispensary affiliated with a cultivator. In Pine Bluff, Hash and Co. is less than 5 miles from High Bank dispensary, which is wholly owned by Kyndall Lercher, who also owns a 25.5% stake in BOLD.
According to Weedmaps, High Bank has gummies from BOLD available for $7.60 and, on St. Patrick’s Day, offered a special deal of $5 for some gummies.
Wilbers said his store simply can’t match some of those prices.
“You notice that you can’t sell some of your products for the prices that you see, the products being offered at some of these other locations,” Wilbers said.
Price isn’t the only issue, Wilbers said. High Bank tends to receive new products earlier, although Wilbers’ dispensary eventually receives them as well. But, as long as High Bank receives products first, it creates an impression in customers’ minds that one dispensary is the place to find new products, according to Wilbers.
“You’re already kind of setting it into the subconscious of the customer base that [the affiliated dispensary] is the location to come for for these products because you know, if we had it first this time, then we’ll have something new first next time, and so it goes,” Wilbers said.
In Little Rock, online menus showed Good Day Farm had less expensive flower from its homegrown strains than nearby Curaleaf, while in Fayetteville, Osage Creek Dispensary did not have much difference in price from other Fayetteville dispensaries.
Wilbers said what the affiliated dispensaries are doing is a slap in the face to patients who must drive greater distances to get these deals if they don’t have such a dispensary near them. He also thinks it creates an unfair marketplace.
“Trying to create more of a distinction based strictly on exclusivity or pricing that can’t be outcompeted really is a bit too monopolistic for my tastes,” Wilbers said.
The post Arkansas marijuana monopolies? appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Today’s numbers:
Total cases: 834,699, or an increase of 146 from Wednesday.
Active cases: 1,147, up from 1,096
Deaths: 11,366, an increase of six.
Hospitalized: 51, same as Wednesday.
In ICU: 26, up from 25
On ventilator: 16, up from 15
Vaccinations to date: 4,034,545, about 2,100 additional since Wednesday.
The post COVID today: 146 new cases and six more deaths appeared first on Arkansas Times.
COUGH@SenTomCotton and most Senate Republicans voted AGAINST $13.6 billion in military aid for Ukraine LAST MONTH.
COUGH pic.twitter.com/vbYERvkrEP
— Nick Knudsen (@NickKnudsenUS) April 21, 2022
The post Your daily dose of Tom Cotton hypocrisy appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Little Rock police today identified Keisha Utsey, 49, as the woman found shot to death Wednesday afternoon at 2408 Alicia Court in the John Barrow neighborhood. Jeremy Bass, 35, who was at the home when officers arrived, has been charged with first-degree murder.
The police report listed the Alicia Court address as home for both.
The post Arrest made in Wednesday homicide appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Alexandra Davis, who filed a lawsuit saying Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones is her father, has dropped the lawsuit but says she still will pursue DNA testing to confirm the claim.
“Alexandra has just decided that she wants to go ahead and proceed with parentage and DNA testing,” said Jay Gray, one of Davis’ lawyers. “She wants to remove any doubts that Jerry’s her father.”
Jones’ lawyers had a motion of dismissal pending. They argued that a claim of paternity belonged in a different court. Her argument was that the case was about an agreement entered when she was one year old and about her fear of losing future promised payments should she disclose her father. Jones’ lawyer said that issue wasn’t ripe for lawsuit because it was speculative.
Davis said she’s the 1996 child of a relationship Jones had with a Little Rock airlines ticket agent. She and her mother were provided for in a settlement by Jones that included a condition that she not identify him as her father. The settlement, which has provided more than $2 million to the two women, did not admit paternity.
The post Suit against Jerry Jones dropped, but parentage claim continues appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Arkansas Times talk editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about how the rich in Arkansas get richer, racist remarks from the Prairie County sheriff, a lawsuit targeting the Little Rock School District and a sweetheart deal for a former city of Little Rock insider to put on a new, city sponsored Little Rock festival.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk talk about the confirmation of new Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and Tom Cotton's poor showing, the latest in several federal court hearings, the departure of Health Secretary Jose Romero and more.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the Hogs, Tom Cotton being a jerk during the Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmation hearing, the latest on lawsuits related to voting, the Dumas mass shooting and a COVID resurgence on the horizon.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the verdict in the case of a Lonoke County sheriff's deputy who fatally shot a teenager in a traffic stop, the legacy of Brent Renaud, an expensive tweak to the 30 Crossing plan and the controversy surrounding a potential downtown Little Rock parking deck..
Here are the daily numbers.
Total cases: 828,166 or 457 new cases since Wednesday.
Active cases: 1,610, down from 1,701. (An argument can be made that this number is virtually meaningless, with arbitrary removal after a set number of days.)
Deaths: 11,030, or an additional 31.
Hospitalized: 204, down from 213
In ICU: 70, up from 67
On ventilators: 40, up from 37
Total vaccinations to date: 3,971,969, or 1,737 more.
The post COVID today: 457 new cases and 31 more deaths appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Homicide is the cause of death for a 30-year-old Black man who became unresponsive during his arrest at a Little Rock movie theater, and family and friends of Terence Caffey are pushing to learn more.
The family held a lively press conference Tuesday in the parking lot of the Allison Memorial Presbyterian Church, where they demanded the Pulaski County Sheriff’s Office release bodycam and surveillance footage. They say there’s still a lot the public doesn’t know about Caffey’s Dec. 10 death.
Brian ChilsonFamily and friends want more information about the arrest of Terence Caffey, a 30-year-old Black man whose death in police custody was ruled a homicide. “The road to justice starts with transparency,” attorney Ben Crump said. “The video has to be released because once it’s out, the court of public opinion won’t let them sweep this under the rug.” Crump likened Caffey’s death to that of George Floyd, whose murder in police custody launched protests nationwide and led to convictions of multiple officers.
The half-hour press conference was punctuated with Crump leading the crowd with chants, including “Don’t say no more! Just release the video!”
Some of Caffey’s family members and their attorneys have watched video from that night. But the footage hasn’t been released to the public, and attorneys for the family said there’s more to the story than what was included in the incident reports.
Caffey was out on a date at Movie Tavern in Southwest Little Rock, and was trying to buy popcorn when he apparently got into a fight with movie theater employees, attorney Crump said. An off-duty deputy who was working security at the theater intervened. Caffey was restrained, handcuffed and held on the floor.
Here’s the Pulaski County Sheriff’s Office’s account of what happened:
On December 10, 2021 at approximately 10pm, a Deputy working off duty at the Movie Tavern in Little Rock had completed his shift and left the premises. The Deputy was contacted on the telephone by management of the movie theater advising that a subject was attacking employees. When the deputy returned, he located several employees and a subject fighting. The deputy attempted to place the subject into custody and a struggle ensued. The subject was placed into custody. Medical personnel were called to the scene to check on the subject and the deputy. While medical personnel were evaluating the subject, he went into medical distress and was transported to Baptist Hospital in Little Rock. While at the hospital, the subject was pronounced dead.
Attorneys for Caffey’s family say this official account leaves too much out.
Caffey was on the small side, weighing about 150 pounds, Crump said. And he was hindered with a colostomy bag.
Brian ChilsonAttorney Kenneth Abbarno reads from the autopsy report for Terence Caffey, who died in police custody. Law enforcement murdered Caffey by treating him with far more force than was warranted, attorney Kenneth Abbarno said. “They had a man in distress, handcuffed and face down. He becomes unresponsive while people are holding him down and restraining him.”
Attorneys and family members who watched bodycam footage from that night said Caffey can be heard telling officers he can’t breathe.
“He told them, ‘I’m dying,’ ” attorney Marion Humphrey Jr. said.
Brian ChilsonMarion Humphrey Jr. said video of Caffey’s last moments of consciousness show him telling law enforcement officers he was dying. Terence Caffey’s uncle Nigel was able to watch the bodycam and surveillance footage the family now wants released to the public. He said Caffey can be seen scuffling with five or six movie theater employees before a sheriff’s deputy knocks Caffey down and restrains him with his knee. While being walked outside, Caffey tells officers he can’t breathe, then becomes unresponsive, his uncle said.
Brian ChilsonTerence Caffey’s mother holds up a certificate from the U.S. Postal Service. Her son finished his training to become a mail carrier on the day he died, she said. The Arkansas State Crime Lab autopsy lists “sickle cell trait-related sickling crisis during exertion, struggle, and restraint” as the cause of Caffey’s death. Caffey appeared to be in respiratory distress after an altercation with employees of the movie theater, and CPR did not revive him, the crime lab report said.
Pulaski County deputies involved in his arrest went on administrative leave while the sheriff’s office did an internal investigation, which is now complete. The deputies involved in Caffey’s arrest have returned to their duties, Pulaski County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Lt. Cody Burk said.
The term “homicide” might not always mean what you assume it means, Burk said. “Medical examiners use the term homicide based on a medical determination,” he said.
Four Little Rock Police officers also came in to assist the sheriff’s deputies that night, LRPD spokesman Mark Edwards said. Those officers went on administrative leave briefly. They’re back at work, but an investigation into Caffey’s arrest and death remains open at the LRPD, Edwards said.
Brian ChilsonSharita Hillard and her daughter, Brielle Lanes, stayed up all night making posters for the press conference. Some in the crowd of about 100 people at the press conference held homemade posters and wore T-shirts and sweatshirts decorated with Caffey’s name and photo. His cousin, Sharita Hillard, said she stayed up all night printing, cutting and pasting to get the posters ready.
“I just want the people involved to be held accountable,” she said.
Retired circuit Judge Marion Humphrey Sr. joined his attorney son Marion Humphrey Jr. and Caffey’s family in calling for more information and action from law enforcement involved in Caffey’s arrest and death.
“Justice I don’t know we can even get, because we can’t bring him back. But we can get accountability,” he said.
Brian ChilsonRetired Judge Marion Humphrey Sr. joined the call for more information and accountability in the death of Terence Caffey. The post Death of man in police custody ruled a homicide, family demands more information appeared first on Arkansas Times.
A jury has been seated and the trial has begun of Michael Davis, the former Lonoke County deputy, who fatally shot Hunter Brittain, 17, during a traffic stop June 23.
The big news today was the first public release of video taken at the scene that night. KARK reports on jury selection.
The Democrat-Gazette reports on playing of body camera footage. From its account:
“The guy jumped out of the f** truck,” Michael Davis can be heard saying in the video. “Grabbed a f**** oil can.”
He also yelled at a 16-year-old passenger and images of Brittain’s body were shown, which caused family members to leave the courtroom and some jurors to pat their eyes, the D-G’s Teresa Moss reported.
Davis was fired after the fatal shooting, in part because he had not activated his body camera before the stop, but after the shooting. Brittain was test-driving a truck on which he’d been working. He was shot after grabbing something from the bed of the truck after the stop, reportedly a container of anti-freeze that he wanted to use to put behind a wheel to prevent the truck from rolling.
The post Trial begins of former Lonoke deputy in fatal shooting of Hunter Brittain in traffic stop appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about a range of topics, including Tom Cotton's speech at the Reagan Presidential Library, a new federal lawsuit on racial gerrymandering, Jerry Jones, Thug Nasty and more.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the Arkansas legislature and other odds and ends.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk more about the Arkansas racial gerrymander case, the fiscal session and the big swill, Leslie Rutledge's trip to the border, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and more.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about a ruling in the gerrymander case, the fiscal session and highway department spending on the I-30 bridge expansion.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about Governor Hutchinson's push to expand the prison system, the Arkansas gerrymander trial in federal court and the GOP National Committee vote to declare the events of Jan. 6 "legitimate political discourse" and Arkansans reactions.
Little Rock police say Paul Oliver, 55, was found dead in the living room of his home in the 1900 block of W. 2nd Street Wednesday evening after his daughter filed a missing person’s report.
The police report said Oliver had injuries from a blunt object. The death is being called a homicide.
The post Homicide reported on W. 2nd Street appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Federal Judge Timothy Brooks today dismissed the federal lawsuit in which members of the Duggar family were suing Springdale and Washington County over the release of police reports that revealed Josh Duggar had molested some of his sisters and another girl.
The plaintiffs were four sisters, Jill Dillard, Jessa Seewald, Jinger Vuolo and Joy Duggar. They claimed the release of police records publicized their trauma and caused them distress.
The remaining defendants were former Maj. Rick Hoyt of the Washington County sheriff’s office; Ernest Cate, Springdale city attorney; and former Springdale Police Chief Kathy O’Kelley. They’d already been given immunity by a federal appeals court on federal claims, but the sisters continued to press claims under Arkansas tort law.
Defendants asked that the remaining claims be dismissed and Brooks granted that motion today.
Brooks recited the case’s long history before ruling, among others, that the plaintiffs had not met the tort standard of showing the defendants knew they were violating their authority in releasing information. He said they were wrong to release the reports, but believed erroneously that they were legally obligated to do so.
As for invasion of privacy, the judge said the law in Arkansas is that these defendants enjoyed statutory immunity for negligent acts, but not intentional ones.
He also said a claim of outrage couldn’t stand even if the defendants should have known the release would cause harm to the sisters, they enjoyed statutory immunity for official actions.
He dismissed the suit with prejudice.
Here’s the full ruling.
The post Judge dismisses Duggar sisters’ lawsuit over release of police records about brother’s molestation appeared first on Arkansas Times.
I noted an unexplained item on city board agenda today. Without explanation, it says: “Presentation: Renewal of 2012 Millage/Special election.)
Now I’m told what’s up by a well-placed source. The City Board just learned about this about a half-hour ago.
Mayor Frank Scott Jr., is apparently seeking to look like he’s doing something in an election year. He wants a major bond issue. A bond issue floated in 2012 is about to be paid off and existing property tax millage, 3 mills for capital projects, could finance new bonds if voters extend it.
A three-eighth-of-a-cent sales tax paid for a previous bond issue, but that tax expired Dec. 31.
Were there discussions with board and community about specific city needs? Not so far.
The city needs capital improvements, no doubt. A bond issue will require a vote, perhaps multiple votes depending on how it is structured. Traditionally campaigns for such are built bottom up not top down.
I’m guessing the City Board, which has bridled before at Scott’s top-down style, might have questions. The meeting begins at 4 p.m.
Could be livelier than I expected.
UPDATE: It wasn’t. City Manager Bruce Moore presented the proposal, not the mayor.
This is what Moore presented.
It discusses the dates a special election could be held this year, but contains no information about how much funding would be sought or for what.
So the concern I heard about the mayor having specific ideas on the front end might have been misplaced.
Moore emphasized Board input was important but he believed it was important an election be held this year. He said he wanted a “buy-in and consensus.”
The Board asked no questions and moved to other topics. Some questions did arise from directors on whether their ideas could make a list. Ultimately the board will call the election.
The post Surprise: a city bond proposal appeared first on Arkansas Times.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the coronavirus, Little Rock politics and crime and Leslie Rutledge's trip to the border.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the latest coronavirus news, two health care developments, mobile sports betting in Arkansas and Vino's Brew Pub.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the coronavirus and a range of odds and ends, including Tom Cotton and Greenland, a friend of court brief in the anti-trans legal case and Max's 50th year reporting in Little Rock.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the latest coronavirus news and Governor Hutchinson's leadership or lack thereof at this stage of the pandemic. They also talk about former Gov. Mike Huckabee's controversial upcoming speech at Arkansas Martin Luther King commission MLK Day event on Monday and an ethics complaint filed against state Supreme Court Justice Rhonda Wood.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk all about the omicron variant and all that its upending. They also discuss the Little Rock Police chief and the anniversary of Jan. 6.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the special session of the Arkansas legislature, Republican gerrymandering and Little Rock Superintendent Mike Poore's impending retirement.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the latest political news, including Attorney General Leslie Rutledge bowing out of the governor's race and the state's congressional delegation opposing the bipartisan infrastructure bill. They also talk about recently released reports that confirm that the Arkansas Department of Transportation failed in all sorts of way in relation to the cracked I-40 bridge and a likely final decision on the Pope County casino.
Refreshed after a hop across the pond, Max Brantley gets back into the Arkansas swing with his takes on legislative redistricting, a victory for LRSD and a list of must-read banned books.
Arkansas Times editors Austin Bailey and Lindsey Millar talk about the latest election news, the various city of Little Rock controversy and Little Rock School District and Central Arkansas Library System millage elections.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the Arkansas legislature, including the anti-vax legislation it passed and didn't, a redistricting effort that splits Pulaski County in three and what's coming in a special session to cut taxes.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the legislature's disastrous return, the latest coronavirus news, the fallout at KATV over a racial incident and more.
Arkansas Times Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the big vote against a city sales tax increase and the political considerations surrounding that result, the decision of a special prosecutor to try a former deputy in the shooting death of Hunter Brittain in Lonoke County and the latest in COVID news.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about local reaction to a coming federal vaccine mandate, rent relief and renters rights, the death of Little Rock City Director Erma Hendrix and various Republican politicians saying and doing awful things.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the latest coronavirus news, the new abortion ban in Texas and what it might mean for Arkansas and the Little Rock sales tax election.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the latest coronavirus news, the downfall of Lyon College President Joey King and more
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the latest COVID-19 news and the politics of critical race theory.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about all things coronavirus in Arkansas and the trial of lobbyist and former Arkansas Republican Party chairman Gilbert Baker.
Arkansas Times editors Austin Bailey and Lindsey Millar discuss a judge's ruling against a state law that prohibited public mask mandates and the terrible special legislative session.
Come kvetch with us about Arkansas's legislative ban on protecting kids from COVID-19. Also on tap, the Little Rock sales tax, sleazebaggery inside Arkansas's nursing home empire and a silver medal Olympian from Wooster.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about COVID-19 and the prohibition on mask mandates, a legal victory for transgender kids and teens and a new report that suggests a deeper reckoning is needed in the Arkansas Department of Transportation in the wake of the discovery of a crack in the Hernando DeSoto Bridge over Memphis.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk again about this third surge of the coronavirus in Arkansas; political news in Arkansas, including Jake Bequette's campaign to unseat U.S. Sen. John Boozman; and the continuing fallout related to Walter Hussman's relationship with the University of North Carolina Journalism School.
Arkansas Timed editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the Delta variant of the coronavirus raging in Arkansas, the release of the LRSD from state control, the Republican Party's obsession with race-baiting politics and the funeral of Hunter Brittain
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the Delta variant of the coronavirus taking hold in Arkansas, Governor Hutchinson's deployment of National Guard troops to the border, the police killing of a Lonoke County teen, the LRSD poised to be released from state control and the Little Rock sales tax election.
While Editor Lindsey Millar lounges seaside, Max Brantley and Austin Bailey chew on the news of the week: racism, justice, the delta variant and those perfect churros from Mercado San Jose.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the resignation of University of Arkansas Chancellor Joe Steinmetz, the candidacy of Chris Jones, running to be the Democratic nominee for the Arkansas governor's race; and the Little Rock sales tax election.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about Arkansas Democrat-Gazette publisher Walter Hussman and the controversy surrounding journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and the University of North Carolina Journalism Department, the state of Arkansas's massive revenue surplus and a federal lawsuit filed by a lawyer who alleges his contract with the state was terminated after he criticized a lawmaker for supporting anti-transgender legislation.
The federal courthouse in Little Rock is hopping with challenges to Arkansas’s worst new laws. Plus: the West Little Rock chopper and new old blood at the Pulaski County Election Commission.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the expiration of the COVID-19 emergency order in Arkansas, the continuing fallout related to damaged I-40 Mississippi River Bridge and other odds and ends.
This week, Max and Austin talk about nightmares of plummeting off the I-40 bridge and into the Mississippi, unemployment misery, Little Rock sales tax drama and a surprise visit from 50 Cent.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the Little Rock sales tax proposal; the Arkansas Supreme Court, the state Plant Board and dicamba; new candidates for state office; and more.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the end of the legislative session, vaccine hesitancy and COVID worries and Josh Duggar.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the final days of the Arkansas legislature and wrangling over the Little Rock sales tax.
On this week's podcast, Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the Arkansas legislature's terrible final days.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about this legislative session that just keeps getting worse, the latest on the vaccine front and the Little Rock tax plan.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the no good very bad Arkansas General Assembly and a big development in COVID-19 vaccine deployment.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about COVID-19, one year later, and the status of Arkansas's vaccination effort; they also talk about the worst legislative session ever.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar discuss the latest from the legislature, a vaccine showdown between Governor Hutchinson and the Arkansas Supreme Court and Alice Walton's coming med school in Northwest Arkansas.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about Governor Hutchinson's announcement that he's easing COVID-19 restrictions. They also talk about the the legislature and state testing and major looming decisions for the Little Rock School District.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the historic snowfall, Sen. Jim Hendren's decision to leave the Republican Party, an elusive gun factory at the Little Rock Port and more.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the big news of the week from the state legislature, the future of Medicaid in Arkansas, Tim Griffin switching races and the latest on the COVID and vaccine front.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the latest legislative happenings, including the defeat of a stand your ground bill in committee. They also talk about the latest in the Pope County casino saga, Arkansas's troubled pandemic unemployment assistance program and the state's commitment to standardized testing this spring.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about Sarah Huckabee Sanders's candidacy for Arkansas governor, the latest legislative happenings and COVID-19 and vaccine news.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the inauguration Joe Biden, Arkansas political odds and ends and the latest COVID-19 news.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the continued fallout from the Jan. 6 insurrection attempt at the U.S. Capitol, including impeachment and Arkansas connections. They also talk about the legislature getting underway and immediately advancing a stand your ground bill out of committee; and they talk about COVID and vaccination efforts.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the coup attempt at the U.S. Capitol, ominous coronavirus developments and the upcoming Arkansas General Assembly.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the latest COVID-19-releated news, new Little Rock Police Department intrigue and the brand new Little Rock School District Board, which met Thursday night for the first time.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the Arkansas politicians joining in the ridiculous coup attempt to overturn the presidential election and Governor Hutchinson's prime time nothing burger. Full version
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the Arkansas politicians joining in the ridiculous coup attempt to overturn the presidential election and Governor Hutchinson's prime time nothing burger.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about COVID-19 in Arkansas, the continued lunacy of President Trump and his enablers in Arkansas and the Little Rock School Board and North Little Rock run-off elections.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about rising COVID-19 numbers, the aftermath of the presidential election, the latest on state highway spending and the 30 Crossing project and the Pulaski County Election Commission and final vote tallying.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar discuss the election and what it means for the state and country.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the latest coronavirus news; the Arkansas Supreme Court's ruling on highway funding and what it might mean for the 30 Crossing Project; and next week's election, including another gloomy Arkansas Poll.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the latest coronavirus news, including an outbreak in state government. They also cover various election odds and ends, including the Democrat-Gazette's endorsement of Donald Trump, a Republican senate candidate who once dressed up in a KKK robe, racist comments by French Hill and more.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the latest COVID-19 news, the race for Arkansas's 2nd Congressional District and more Little Rock elections.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the latest COVID-19 news, including President Trump's positive diagnosis and the latest on the coronavirus and schools. They also talk about Little Rock Police Chief Keith Humphrey filing a federal lawsuit against his critics, including a number of subordinates.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the latest coronavirus news and more signs of our imminent doom, including the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and President Trump's unwillingness to say that he'll honor the results of the election. They also talk protest and the police in Conway. [The previous version of this edition cut off early. Here's the full version.]
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the latest coronavirus news and more signs of our imminent doom, including the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and President Trump's unwillingness to say that he'll honor the results of the election. They also talk protest and the police in Conway.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the latest COVID-19 news, including how Arkansas is likely to come up short in additional pandemic unemployment payments. They also talk about the race for Arkansas's 2nd congressional district and the latest on LRPD infighting.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the latest COVID-19-related news and several issues related to voting.
Thanks to our sponsor Dr. Sedrick Charles Rice, author of the new book "StepDads Showing Up & Showing Out! Tips for Navigating the Complex World of Blended Families."
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the latest coronavirus spin from Governor Hutchinson, proposed constitutional amendments on the ballot this year and the Democratic National Convention.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the COVID-19 pandemic and schools, a recent ruling on abortion and new details about the Linda Collins murder.
Special thanks to our sponsor Dr. Sederick Charles Rice, who has a new book out called "StepDads, Showing Up & Showing Out: Tips to Navigating the Complex World of Blended Families."
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar discuss reopening schools amid the pandemic, fraud and holds on unemployment claims, a plea deal in the Linda Collins case, Rusty Cranford and Top Golf.
Thanks to sponsor Dr. Sederick Charles Rice, who plans an August 2020 release of his next book "StepDads, Showing Up & Showing Out: Tips to Navigating the Complex World of Blended Families."
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the latest COVID-19 news, the Pope County casino saga and candidates for public office in Little Rock.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the latest COVID-19 news, terrible Tom Cotton and Topgolf and Little Rock.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about Governor Hutchinson finally issuing a mask mandate, the secretary of state invalidating three ballot proposals and a new class action filed over a private contractor's handling of Arkansas pandemic unemployment assistance program.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about talk about the plan (or lack thereof) to reopen schools in the fall, Attorney General William Barr's appearance in Little Rock and the city of Little Rock and Top Golf.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about a spike in COVID-19 cases, voting in the fall, plans for a return to school and college and Leslie Rutledge's official announcement that she's running for governor.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the big news of the week.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about Governor Hutchinson's announcement that the state will move into Phase 2 of reopening amid a dramatic spike in cases and hospitalization. They also talk about the end of Diane Zook's time on the State Board of Education, Commerce Secretary Mike Preston and more.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about demonstrations and protests in Little Rock and in cities across Arkansas, terrible Tom Cotton and a COVID-19 spike in the state.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about a rise in COVID-19 cases in Arkansas, the push from Republicans and business groups for tort reform, President Trump's mendacity and racism and the silence of Republicans and new talk of a so-called "exit plan" for the Little Rock School District to escape state control.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about rising COVID numbers in Arkansas, the PUA website debacle, a showdown between Governor Hutchinson's executive branch and legislators and the latest on the LRPD.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the latest on the coronavirus, including the state's response to the pandemic, and discuss the pressure on Little Rock Police Chief Keith Humphrey.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the latest COVID-19 news, including the state's plans to being reopening businesses and the botched rollout of a new business grant program.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the latest COVID-19 news and more.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the big news of the week, including an explosion of new coronavirus cases in state lock-up facilities, Governor Hutchinson's plan to begin re-opening parts of the state by May 4, judicial intervention in the state's bid to halt surgical abortions in Arkansas and legislative intrigue.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the latest coronavirus-related news, including the state's bid to force Arkansas's only surgical abortion provider from providing services, Governor Hutchinson declining Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott Jr.'s request to impose a shelter-in-place order in Little Rock and more.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about Governor Hutchinson's resistance to issue a shelter-in-place order for the state and more.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk mostly coronavirus, but also touch on other news, including the postponement of a sales tax increase in Little Rock, a new lawsuit over the state's treatment of the Little Rock School District and legal wranglings over a potential Pope County casino.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk mostly about the coronavirus in Arkansas, but also touch on Joe Biden taking control in the race for the Democratic nomination for president, the detailed Little Rock sales tax plan and the end of the Hunter Biden paternity case in Arkansas.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar Tuesday’s elections, Governor Hutchinson’s budget and the Little Rock tax plan.
Arkansas Times editors Lindsey Millar and Max Brantley talk about Super Tuesday, the coronavirus and a big economic development project in Little Rock that’s yet to materialize.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar discuss Little Rock politics, the District 34 run-off, the state Supreme Court race, another federal court defeat for Arkansas's Medicaid work requirement, presidential politics and more.
Arkansas Times editors Lindsey Millar and Stephanie Smittle talk about Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott’s sales tax increase plan, the fifth year anniversary of the takeover of the LRSD, a change of leadership at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and more.
Arkansas Times editor Lindsey Millar and contributor Ali Noland discuss the Trump administration's rollback of Clean Water Act protections, protests around Washington County's participation in an agreement with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Mike Bloomberg's second campaign stop in Little Rock and the latest LRSD happenings.
Guest host Ali Noland and special guest Sen. Joyce Elliott discuss Elliott's official kick-off to her campaign, Governor Hutchinson's defense of his decision to allow refugee resettlement and Virginia ratifying the ERA.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about a the closure of the infamous hog farm in the Buffalo River watershed, another blow to the Arkansas whistleblower law from the Arkansas Supreme Court and the future of parks and the zoo in Little Rock.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about a ruling in the case of a fired Little Rock police officer, the latest in the Hunter Biden and Pope County casino sagas and maybe more.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk impeachment, another potential blow to the Affordable Care Act, the legislative council’s approval of an education study and a brazen campaign pitch from the state business lobby.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the latest State Board of Education assault on the Little Rock School District, a new Razorback football coach and impeachment.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar discuss an eventful week for the Little Rock School District, the latest in Linda Collins murder case and the latest in the Hunter Biden adoption case.
Arkansas Times editor Lindsey Millar and special guest Jay Barth talk about the latest doings in the LRSD, the state adequacy funding fight, impeachment hearings and the Democratic presidential field.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the Little Rock School District teachers strike and the latest from the State Board of Education, all the news from the final day of candidate filing and the firing of Chad Morris.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about Governor Hutchinson and his son Asa III in Asia; a new indictment involving the governor’s nephew, former state Sen. Jeremy Hutchinson; the mostly depressing results from the Arkansas Poll; and takeaways from the first days of candidate filing.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the legacy of John Walker, the latest on the uncertain future of the Little Rock School District and the recommendations for a governance study group for the city of Little Rock.
Arkansas Times editors Lindsey Millar and Max Brantley discuss possible bribery in a state House race, the return of Steven Jones, LR Director Ken Richardson and the police and LRSD's plans for a teachers strike.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk judges, dog racing, schools and feral hogs.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar discuss the latest on the future of Little Rock schools and the impeachment inquiry into President Trump.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about talk impeachment, the latest on the LRSD, a summary judgment ruling against state Sen. Jim Hendren and the state House's coming vote to expel Rep. Mickey Gates after his plea deal on nonpayment of income tax.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about impeachment and the Arkansas congressional delegation, the state’s plan for the Little Rock School District and the coming return of private prisons in Arkansas.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's appearance in North Little Rock, the latest on the future of Little Rock schools and the Civil Service Commission upholding the firing of former LRPD officer Charles Starks.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about meetings on the future of the Little Rock School District, the resignation of UA Little Rock chancellor Andrew Rogerson and U.S. Rep. Steve Womack’s recent town hall meeting.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about Pope County casino drama, Tom Cotton and Greenland, the future of the Little Rock School District and more.
Arkansas Times editor Lindsey Millar and special guest Jay Barth talk about Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott and the police, state Rep. Mickey Gates’ tax troubles, Sen. Jason Rapert's political future and President Trump’s pardon of Ted Suhl.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about former Sen. Jeremy Hutchinson pleading guilty to federal tax and bribery charges, a NLR police officer being charged with misdemeanor battery for breaking the arms of a suspect while handcuffing him and other odds and ends, including a new layer of government for oversight of “sin” agencies and Tom Cotton talking crazy.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about Sarah Huckabee Sanders returning to Arkansas and likely running for governor, the arrest of a suspect in the murder of former state senator Linda Collins and the latest in federal corruption case of former state Sen. Jeremy Hutchinson.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the death of a former state senator, Bernie Sanders and Walmart and the approval of a Little Rock budget amendment.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the continued impasse on cutting the city budget in Little Rock, drinking at SEC games and more.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar discuss the ongoing city of Little Rock budget fight, the Arkansas Arts Center's fundraising announcement and Pulaski County Courthouse power plays.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar discuss city of Little Rock budget woes and drama, the firing of LRPD officer Charles Starks and the future of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about a major Arkansas football development, a Democratic challenger to Tom Cotton, the future of city golf in Little Rock and cuts at the LRSD.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about a big new public corruption indictment and the legislature going home.
Max and Lindsey talk about the latest from the legislature, including good news. But also bad news.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about a federal judge striking down Arkansas’s first-in-the-nation Medicaid work reporting requirement, the latest from the legislature, the hiring of a new Little Rock police chief, Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott’s state of the city address, the firing of Mike Anderson and more.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the latest from the legislature, including a surprise tax cut proposal, various sneaky moves and the return of vouchers.
Benji Hardy and Lindsey Millar discuss the latest from the legislature and the release of a lengthy video of the shooting death of Bradley Blackshire by a Little Rock Police officer.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar discuss the latest from the legislature, a new proposal for redistricting and Little Rock Police matters.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the latest from the legislature, paying off former LR Mayor Mark Stodola for accrued time off and the state’s new impossible exit criteria for the Little Rock School District.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about legislative craziness, Governor Hutchinson pushing back against medical marijuana, the revocation of a troubled school’s charter and maybe more.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the latest from the legislature, former Sen. Jeremy Hutchinson’s legal case and football at UA Little Rock.
This week, Max and Benji discuss the governor’s income tax cut for the rich, a state Supreme Court ruling against Fayetteville’s civil rights ordinance, friction between a charter school and its hosts on the UA Little Rock campus, and new legislation (sponsored by Republicans!) to reform the juvenile justice system.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar discuss a federal court defeat for the Arkansas Times, Jason Rapert’s trigger bill to make abortion illegal if Roe v. Wade were overturned, big expansion for the dog track and more.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the indictment of Gilbert Baker, signs of a delay in the return to local control in the LRSD and more.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about drama in Pope County, new Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott, medical marijuana and more.
On this week’s episode, Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the state’s new plan for its controversial Medicaid work reporting rule and shady and consequential doings in the Little Rock School District.
The Arkansas Times' Lindsey Millar and Benji Hardy discuss the election of Frank Scott Jr. as Little Rock mayor, a shake up at the state Division of Youth Services and an ominous item on the agenda of the State Board of Education concerning the LRSD.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the news of the week.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk election results, including Republicans continued ballot dominance in Arkansas, ballot issues and the runoff for Little Rock mayor. Also, a new lawsuit that challenges the I-30 expansion corridor.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about a range of election topics, the departure of LR Police Chief Kenton Buckner and more on the attack on the Little Rock School District.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the latest attack on public education, French Hill’s increasingly grimy campaign against Clarke Tucker and Arkansas Supreme Court Justice Courtney Goodson trying to block campaign attacks against her in court again.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the nixing of Issue 1 from ballots, the removal of another 4,000 from Medicaid rolls because of a new work requirement rule and new reporting on Little Rock police abuse and bad behavior.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the week of political debates, the state Supreme Court’s ruling on key ballot initiatives, Mark Stodola’s impending big payday and judicial matters.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about Jason Rapert getting sued, John Thurston’s Big Bass Boat bonanza and Governor Hutchinson’s government restructuring plan.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the Kavanaugh hearing and local reaction, the status of ballot issues and legislative corruption.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the Arkansas Judicial and Disability Commission charging six members of the Arkansas Supreme Court with ethics violations, the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality recommending the denial of a new permit for C&H Hog Farm and other odds and ends.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the latest court hearings in the sprawling public corruption case that’s rocked Arkansas politics; various educational dealings, including a change in Arkansas Governor's School and discussion on the return of local control for the Little Rock School District; and government transformation.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about all the latest big developments on the public corruption front, including the sentencing of Jon Woods to 18 years in prison; also a circuit judge ruling Issue 1, the so-called tort reform amendment referred by the legislature; and the first cut of Medicaid recipients because of work requirement rules.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about state Republicans' tax cut plans, the latest in the legal battle over abortion rights in Arkansas and Leslie Rutledge’s past work record.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the long-anticipated filing of a federal lawsuit challenging Arkansas’s work requirement rules for Medicaid recipients, a First Amendment showdown on the Capitol grounds and gun violence in Arkansas.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar discuss the potential coming conflict between the Hutchinson administration and the Little Rock Education Association, a federal court ruling on student transfers and allegations of another debtor’s prison.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the term limit ballot measure, which qualified for the ballot today; differences emerging among Little Rock mayoral candidates and the unflattering Little Rock connection in Brett Kavanaugh’s past.
This week, Max and Benji talk about the medical marijuana commission's decision to use a consultant to score dispensary applications, the unsettling proliferation of algae on the Buffalo River and the unsettling proliferation of armed personnel in schools. Also: the state tries to spin low college-going rates and two freeway widening projects in Little Rock speed happily along.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar discuss a new guilty plea in the seemingly ever expanding public corruption scandal, the state Board of Corrections voting to fire the direct of the parole and probations division and a lawsuit aimed at halting I-630 expansion.
This week's topics include the downfall of one of the state's largest behavioral health providers, a preview of ballot initiatives facing voters this November, and another twist in the state's absurdist medical marijuana drama. Lindsey is MIA this week, so Max and Benji get to know each other better.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar talk about the arrest of a former Medicaid integrity director, the suspension of a major health care provider from Medicaid, the arrest of a state representative for failure to pay taxes and more.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar discuss the guilty plea of Rusty Cranford, the latest in the medical marijuana application debacle and Judge Wendell Griffen and ethics.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar discuss the court decision that led Arkansas to be the first state in the country where women can’t get medication abortions, Max’s annual trip to Boys State and a federal court hearing that could determine whether Arkansas can legally resegregate public schools.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar discuss midterm election results, ballot initiatives and the emergence of Baker Kurrus in the Little Rock mayoral race.
Arkansas Times editors Max Brantley and Lindsey Millar discuss the coming primary and judicial elections, especially the dark money flowing into a race for an Arkansas Supreme Court position; also Leslie Rutledge and the ballot initiative process and the Razorbacks and War Memorial.
Arkansas Times editor Lindsey Millar and contributor Benji Hardy discuss the Democratic primary for the 2nd Congressional District, sovereign immunity and Leslie Rutledge and the Little Rock mayoral race.
The Jon Woods corruption trial, the guilty plea of another former state senator, Hank Wilkins, and the Supreme Court allowing voter ID to stand during the primary — all covered on this week's podcast.
The new Ten Commandments Monument and coming legal challenges, the abrupt closure of the Arkansas Repertory Theatre and Lakeview and the Arkansas Supreme Court's recent ruling on sovereign immunity — all covered on this week's podcast.
Arkansas Times editor Lindsey Millar and contributor Benji Hardy discuss embattled Pulaski County Circuit Judge Wendell Griffen, a group of UA Little Rock students repeatedly shouting the n-word while singing along to a popular song, the federal corruption trial of former Sen. Jon Woods and more.
Arkansas Times editor Lindsey Millar and special guest Jay Barth talk about the latest from the Arkansas Supreme Court, the much-anticipated corruption trial involving former state Sen. Jon Woods, primary season and national politics.
Arkansas Times editor Lindsey Millar and special guest Antwan Phillips discuss the debate among Democrats vying to be the party's nominee for Arkansas’s Second Congressional district, the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. 50 years after his assassination and the McClellan High School coach who was put on paid leave after KARK revealed he’d made bigoted tweets.
Arkansas Times Editor Lindsey Millar and contributor Benji Hardy talk about primary season, especially gubernatorial candidate Jan Morgan; gun protests and policies; a new opioid lawsuit; and Mark Stodola on the state of the city address.
The resignation of Jefferson County Judge Henry Wilkins, the legal battle over the cultivation of medical marijuana and more.
The challenges to the state medical marijuana commission’s grading of cultivation applications, the just concluded special session of the legislature, Governor Hutchinson’s politicking, students protesting gun violence and another civil rights lawsuit from Mike Laux targeting the Little Rock Police Department and the city of Little Rock -- all covered on this week's podcast.
The coming special session, a sneaky voucher bill, a big drug arrest and LR mayoral challengers answer the city's suit — all covered on this week's podcast. Download Subscribe via iTunes.
We're pleased to introduce the pilot episode of a new Arkansas Times interview podcast, "The Conversation" with host Matt Price talking to local folks of interest. Download. Here's Price's bio: Matt Price is a recovering politico now working in technology, business, and marketing searching for the meritocracy. "The Conversation" was borne out of the desire to talk to people who really care about what they are doing and are focused on making things better. In what he hopes will be a series of interviews with mayoral candidates, Price's first episode is a conversation with Frank Scott Jr., the Little Rock banker who is exploring a run for mayor. In a wide-ranging talk, Scott talks about growing up in Southwest Little Rock and his impressions of Little Rock beyond that area (he didn't venture into Hillcrest or the Heights until he was an adult, he says); his time at Parkview High School, where he spent time studying dance; his support for the controversial 30 Crossing proposal at a highwa
Governor Hutchinson’s tax cut promises, guns, Medicaid and pharmacists and the Babe Bracket — all covered on this week's podcast. Subscribe via iTunes. Download.
A new lawsuit challenging the state’s photo ID law, Bart Hester vs. the humanities, signs of a threat to governors school, big bills for the state Supreme Court and Clarke Tucker making a run for Congress — all covered on this week's podcast. Subscribe via iTunes. Download.
State Sen. Jake Files' guilty plea in federal court; state Sen. Jason Rapert, social media and the Conway Police Department; and a proposed gag order for the University of Arkansas Board of Trustees — all covered on this week's podcast. Subscribe via iTunes. Download.
The Little Rock Police Department's decision to fire a black recruit for using a racial slur in an old social media post, the state of UAMS, a constitutional initiative and Tom Cotton — all covered on this week's podcast. Subscribe via iTunes. Download.
Tough talkin’ Tom Cotton, a major state Supreme Court decision and a pivotal lawsuit for Little Rock politics — on this week's podcast. Subscribe via iTunes. Download.
Trump, Cotton and immigration; Governor Hutchinson navigating a primary challenger and the fiscal session; the hog farm in Newton County; and UAMS layoffs — all covered on this week's podcast. Subscribe via iTunes. Download.
The justice department and marijuana, a new Republican gubernatorial candidate and Medicaid and Arkansas — all covered on this week's podcast. Subscribe via iTunes. Download.
The tax bill that just cleared Congress, a Democratic candidate for governor, sexual harassment and state politics, transparency and the Razorback Foundation and turmoil at Arkansas Baptist — all covered on this week's podcast. Subscribe via iTunes. Download.
What Doug Jones win in Alabama means for Democrats in Arkansas, the hiring of Chad Morris at the University of Arkansas and the future of health care policy in Arkansas — all covered on this week's podcast. Subscribe via iTunes. Download.
Tom Cotton headed to the CIA, Razorbackland in turmoil and more — covered on this week's podcast. Subscribe via iTunes. Download.
The legacy of Bill and Hillary Clinton and answers to readers' questions on politics, ancient canoes and more — on this week's podcast. Subscribe via iTunes. Download.
The downfall of Jeff Long, Tom Cotton’s terrible contribution to the Republican tax plan, a no-bid consulting contract in state government and #metoo in Arkansas — all covered on this week's podcast. Subscribe via iTunes. Download.
Jeff Long's future at the University of Arkansas, UAMS' grim outlook, the Highway Department vs. Metroplan, the state Supreme Court's decision to stay the execution of Jack Gordon Green and whether Democrats' big wins on Tuesday are a harbinger of things to come — all discussed on this week's podcast. Subscribe via iTunes. Download.
Sen. Jim Hendren and the drug court rehab program scandal, the planned execution of Jack Greene and the big national political stories this week — all covered on this week's podcast. Subscribe. Download.
Taxes and budgets; Little Rock, crime and music; the newspaper industry; and #metoo in Arkansas — all on this week's podcast. Subscribe via iTunes. Download.
Little Rock’s Amazon PR stunt, the Tom Cotton to the CIA rumor, French Hill and Puerto Rico and UA-Little Rock's football future — all covered on this week's podcast. Subscribe via iTunes. Download.
The latest in the legal fight to stop a law that would prevent Planned Parenthood from performing abortions in Arkansas, the cancellation of a rap show in Little Rock and its First Amendment implications, a stunning investigative report on drug court defendants being forced to work for free for Arkansas poultry companies and bellicose Tom Cotton — all covered on this week's podcast. Subscribe via iTunes. Download.
The Las Vegas mass shooting, the Arkansas Supreme Court decision on GIF money, Judge Wendell Griffen's lawsuit against the state Supreme Court and more — on this week's podcast. Subscribe via iTunes. Download.
The events celebrating the 60th anniversary of the desegregation of Central High, the future of abortion in Arkansas a new ruling on a law to restrict panhandling and more — covered on this week's podcast. Subscribe via iTunes. Download.
The 60th anniversary of the desegregation of Central High School, the Republicans’ last-gasp attempt to replace Obamacare, and a few odds and ends — all covered on this week's podcast. Subscribe via iTunes. Download.
The Little Rock School District settling a racial bias lawsuit, the state board of education approving three new charter schools in Little Rock and the latest news on DACA — all covered on this week's podcast. Subscribe iTunes. Download.
DACA and related fallout, the GIF lawsuit before the Arkansas Supreme Court and various political topics — all covered this week on the podcast with special guest Jay Barth. Subscribe via iTunes. Download.
Arkansas’s new concealed carry law, a threat to DACA and juvenile justice in Arkansas — all covered on this week's podcast. Subscribe via iTunes. Download.