If you are REALLY a follower of the Little Rock government, you’ll want to read the latest installment from Blue Hog Report (lawyer Matt Campbell) on his effort to get to the bottom of the implosion of Mayor Frank Scott’s LITfest.
It’s long. It’s complicated. It is based heavily on documents the city of Little Rock would not/could not/or did not provide to Campbell despite Freedom of Information requests. It depicts a mayoral administration — aided by an ally on the City Board, Director Antwan Phillips — working with a private firm, Think Rubix, to which the mayor’s former chief of staff went to work (and was also a client of Phillips) outside the terms of a contract. Blue Hog raises political, ethical and legal questions.
If Frank Scott really did learn anything from the cancellation of LITfest, as he said repeatedly during a recent debate, he’d be moving heaven and earth to speedily release information long buried at City Hall and telling chapter and verse of who did what, when and why. He might consider consequences for staffers who helped his people while cutting the City Board of Directors and the public out of the loop.
City government is a disaster. There are conflicts between the mayor and the city manager and city attorney. The mayor, whatever you think of things he has achieved or wanted to achieve, has not forged a working relationship with the 10-member City Board. Blame them, too. But the math is simple. Six votes are necessary to pass most important city initiatives. The mayor can’t govern by decree or attempt to do things unilaterally through secret machinations.
Rather than find a way forward, the mayor and his staff worsened the divide with a bunker mentality.
Agreed: Race is an important element in the opposition to the city’s first elected Black mayor. Crime has become a proxy for that.
I don’t blame the mayor for a homicide rate that is a byproduct of poverty, systemic discrimination and too many guns. It takes more than cops to fix, as Scott has rightly said.
But I do think the solution for a united Little Rock must be something better than an election based on Us v. Them.