LITTLE ROCK — Mark Darr wandered up to the gallery overlooking the state Senate to watch the chamber’s organizational session less than 24 hours after a well-liked senator conceded the lieutenant governor’s race to him.
State Sen. Gilbert Baker, R-Conway, noticed Darr in the gallery and at the suggestion of Senate President Pro Tempore Paul Bookout, D-Jonesboro, invited Darr to come down into the chamber, where he was introduced.
Simply and briefly, Darr told senators he wants towork with all of them and is honored to be among them.
Unlike state Sen. Shane Broadway, D-Bryant, whom Darr beat, Darr is largely unknown in legislative circles.
And the 37-year-old Springdale businessman wasn’t Gov. Mike Beebe’s choice for the four-year term in the No. 2 elected position in the executive branch of state government. Broadway and Beebe have been close for a decade.
Lieutenant governor is often regarded as a part-time job. The salary is $41,896 a year, about half the gover-nor’s $86,890.
The job has only two primary duties. One is to preside over the Senate when it’s in session (generally a few months each year). The lieutenant governor isn’t allowed to vote except to break ties, which rarely happen.
The other main duty is to act as governor on the few days when the governor is out of state or is unable to serve.
What’s unusual about the Beebe-Darr situation is they are of different political parties. Darr is Republican, Beebe Democrat.
“I have no idea how it is going to work,” said state Sen. Sue Madison, a Democrat from Fayetteville.
Beebe “might be extra cautious about leaving the state,” Madison said. “At least I would.”
Darr is one of the Republicans who will be taking over three of the state’s seven constitutional offices, the most the GOP has held in ages. The GOP will have 15 of the Senate’s seats. Democrats will hold 20. And Republicans will have just under half of the House and two-thirds of the congressional delegation come January.
Beebe said his relationship with Darr will be up to Darr, but that he won’t be afraid to let Darr be acting governor. (Most things an acting governor can do can be undone by the elected governor upon his return.)
Beebe “has been very polite to me,” Darr said.
They’ve had only a little contact, which was on the campaign trail. “I took a picture with his little girl [Madison], and we all slapped backs and had a good time,” the governor said.
Darr said that occurred after he introduced himself to Beebe at the Pink Tomato Festival in Warren. His daughter wanted to meet the governor.
They haven’t spoken since the election.
“I don’t think he gave me much of a chance [of winning],” Darr said.
“There are areas where I disagree [with Beebe], but I think there is a whole lot more areas where I do agree,” Darr said. “Honestly, I don’tlook to butt heads. What I really want to do is work well with him. ... I would be glad to meet with him and to do anything that he requires.”
IN THE BEGINNING
Who is Mark Darr?
Born in Fort Smith in 1973, he attended kindergarten through second grade there, later moving with his family to Mansfield, where he graduated from high school. His father was a Baptist minister. His mother was a housewife and substitute teacher.
He’s the youngest of four children. A brother, Philip Darr, lives in Greenwood, and sisters Karen Morris in Hamburg and Carol Buchanan in Maumelle.
Darr played football at Mansfield High School, and was All District at right guard, his “claim to fame, at least up until now.”
He made A’s, B’s and C’s, he said, admitting he “could have applied myself more.”
In 1991-1992, Darr attended part time at Westark Community College - now the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith. He also stocked shelves and pulled in carts for Food 4 Less. After Wal-Mart bought the store, he met Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton there as Walton helped him pull in carts.
Then he enrolled at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, following his father, brother and sisters. At first he studied history, then focused on becoming a counselor and social worker. He received a sociology degree in 1997. He worked as a serverat Applebee’s in Hot Springs and worked with troubled youth at Rivendell Behavioral Youth Services in Benton.
Darr met his wife, Kim, “an Air Force brat,” when she was in a singing group called Praise at OBU in 1994. The group traveled to churches in Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas. The couple married in 1997.
He was president of a men’s social club called Kappa Chi for a year in the mid-1990s. His campaign website said he was president of a fraternity at OBU.
“There are no fraternities at Ouachita,” Darr explained. “We really were known as the singers. We weren’t the partiers.”
As it turned out, the club members included a cadre of rising young conservative politicians. His pledge brothers included state Rep.-elect David Sanders, R-Little Rock, who is a former aide to Gov. Mike Huckabee. Also a member was Chad Gallagher, who heads Darr’s transition team as a volunteer and is a government relations and community development consultant. Gallagher also is a former Huckabee aide and former De Queen mayor.
Huckabee’s son, John Mark Huckabee of Los Angeles; conservative blogger Jason Tolbert of Benton; and former Huckabee aide Aaron Black of Little Rock, who is executive director of the Arkansas Tobacco Settlement Commission, also belonged to the club.
Former Huckabee aide Beth Anne Rankin of Magnolia, who lost to Democratic U.S. Rep. Mike Ross of Magnolia, was “a little sister” to the club, Darr said.
Darr was president of the sophomore class at OBU but said “there wasn’t a whole lot of governing. I think they wanted either a purple or gold shirt. That was the big controversy. I think we went with purple.”
When he was in college he was too busy working to be active in politics, Darr said.
LIFE IN BUSINESS
He realized he wasn’t cut out to be a social worker while he was working at Rivendell, he said.
So he took a job supervising about a dozen stores in Arkansas, Georgia, South Carolina and Texas for Baker Car and Truck Rental from 1997-2001. Darr said he learned a lot from Drew Baker, a partner in the company who Huckabee appointed to the state Board of Corrections, about how to treat employees and run a good business.
Darr became a licensed insurance agent and started his insurance agency in 2001 as an independent agent for Farmers Insurance, continuing until March 2009. He said he’s now an independent agent for Wealthbridge Financial Services in west Little Rock.
He got into the pizza business because he liked pizza. He often ate at a Larry’s Pizza in southwest Little Rock and finally got permission to open Larry’s Pizza West in west Little Rock in 2005. He and his father-in-law, Dwight Cole, and Black were partners in Larry’s Pizza West.
“It went gangbusters,” Darr said.
He said he and Cole sold their interest in the business to Black and Black’s father-inlaw this year.
Darr moved to Northwest Arkansas in July 2007, opened MAD Pizza Co. in Rogers in October 2007 and opened a second store there several weeks ago. He and Cole are partners.
He attends First Baptist Church in Springdale and sings in the choir. He said he doesn’t smoke or drink alcohol.
He occasionally camps and hikes, enjoys watching football, considers his business his hobby.
He and his wife, a teacher at Shiloh Christian School, have a daughter, Madison, 9, and a son, Cooper, 6.
‘SOME PEOPLE LAUGHED’
Darr has rarely contributed to candidates. A search of databases shows he gave $100 to state House candidate Charles “Chee Chee” Tamburo of Heber Springs in 2004. Black is Tamburo’s nephew. Darr also contributed $2,260 to Huckabee’s 2008 bid for the Republican presidential nomination.
In 2008, it bothered him that many candidates were unopposed.
“I just thought we had Democrats and Republicans who were kind of self-serving. I thought business owners and moms, dads and church holders and nonchurch holders need to be represented, and that’s kind of what got me involved,” Darr said.
He thought about running for lieutenant governor.
“I thought I am just going to bed, and this will wear off in a day or two,” Darr recalled. “Well, it never wore off.”
Darr took his wife to Branson, and told her he believed he should run for lieutenant governor, expecting her to call it “a stupid idea.” But she told him it was “a great idea,” he said.
“Some people laughed” when he told them, he said, but he “felt like the way Arkansas voted in 2008 there is going to be an anti-Washington sentiment, which there was. But ... I didn’t seen the whole tsunami of it all.”
He reported lending more than $150,000 to his campaign.
“I do plan on fulfilling my campaign promises, and from day one it has been about the online checkbook [a searchable database for state spending]. And it has been representing Arkansas against the nationalized health care.”
“I really think that the online checkbook may pass without me having to do a ballot initiative at all,” he said. He said he’s been advised by one state legislator that the creation of an online checkbook could cost about $300,000.
Beebe said he hasn’t included the cost of creating an online checkbook in his proposed state budget for the next fiscal year. He said he doesn’t oppose “anything we can do to enhance transparency” if it is inexpensive, convenient and appropriate.
“If it is going to cost a lot more money, I have got a problem with it, because I am a fiscal conservative,” he said.
HEALTH-CARE LAW
Darr said he hopes that he doesn’t have to file a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the federal health-care law.
“I am going to worry about the session first and do my job, and when the session is over I have full faith that the people of Arkansas will ask their attorney general to do it,” he said.
Attorney General Dustin McDaniel, a Democrat, has said any suit challenging the health-care law is unlikely to prevail and he won’t join any such frivolous suits, which he said have more to do “with politics than the law.”
If McDaniel refuses to file the suit, Darr said he’ll then petition Beebe to do it, and will do it himself if Beebe refuses to.
McDaniel said he called Darr to congratulate him on his election and he “seemed very gracious and reasonable.”
He said he hopes his lawyers get an opportunity to brief Darr about his office’s monitoring of other states’ suits challenging the federal health-care law. He said he hasn’t ruled out other options such as filing a brief in those suits if he later concludes the state needs to do that.
Darr said he doesn’t consider his possible suit to be a campaign gimmick, and he’ll see whether it would have any effect.
“I am not worried about getting re-elected,” he said. “I am going to keep every word that I said, and I don’t care who it offends, because I didn’t get into this to please the people in that [state Capitol] building at all, no matter what office they hold. I got into it to work for the people of Arkansas.”
Beebe said Darr could have filed a lawsuit as a private citizen six months ago, and McDaniel has indicated that it would be a waste of money to sue the federal government.
“The other side of that coin is, if it is illegal ... whatever the courts do with the pending litigation will be applicable to all states,” he said. About 20 other states already have filed suit challenging the federal law.
Darr signed the Americans for Tax Reform’s pledge to oppose any tax increases.
“I will be outspoken on taxes until we know 100 percent that there is no wasteful spending,” he said. “I just think there is tremendous waste in government.”
As examples, he cited a grant to, among other things, pay cover charges for people to go into gay bars to hand out condoms to homosexuals, and state legislators not being required to use the most economical means of traveling to out-of-state conferences.
Legislative auditors last month cited numerous problems with a $50,000 grant to Brotha’s and Sistah’s to help educate homosexual black men about HIV and AIDS. At the urging of Beebe, the Health Department suspended grant activities by Brotha’s and Sistah’s Inc.
Darr said his office will have four employees. He’ll cut the part-time help in the lieutenant governor’s budget.He said he’ll get interns if the office needs part-time help. “Once we get in there, we’ll see where else we can cut.”
As to whether Darr and Beebe will have a relationship similar to that of Huckabee, then lieutenant governor, and Jim Guy Tucker, then governor, when Huckabee sometimes publicly opposed Tucker’s proposals, Beebe said, “I don’t have any expectations one way or the other.
“Huckabee spoke a lot on a lot of issues,” Beebe said. “Still does.”
Front Section, Pages 1 on 11/14/2010