Randy Horton

Incoming Russellville mayor calls vote ‘humbling’

Randy Horton stands outside the Russellville City Hall. An alderman for four years, Horton was elected mayor by almost  77 percent of the vote in a runoff. Mayor Bill Eaton was elected to fill Horton’s seat on the City Council. Eaton supported Horton in the election. “I feel very confident that he is a very honest, straightforward person,” Eaton said, “and I have never found him in the years that I have known him and dealt with him to ever tell me a lie, and he has been very, very open and straightforward in how he deals with things.”
Randy Horton stands outside the Russellville City Hall. An alderman for four years, Horton was elected mayor by almost 77 percent of the vote in a runoff. Mayor Bill Eaton was elected to fill Horton’s seat on the City Council. Eaton supported Horton in the election. “I feel very confident that he is a very honest, straightforward person,” Eaton said, “and I have never found him in the years that I have known him and dealt with him to ever tell me a lie, and he has been very, very open and straightforward in how he deals with things.”

When Randy Horton was fresh out of high school, he decided not to go to law school after taking the advice of a cool, confident, slightly older guy who told Horton electronics was the future.

Russellville’s mayor-elect figured out for himself much later what he likes, and it’s this — serving the public.

He said people often ask him why he wanted to run for mayor. “If you have to explain it to them, you can’t explain it to them,” Horton said. “I don’t want to say it’s a calling, because that’s reserved for noble causes. It’s your way to give back, your way to serve. It’s pretty humbling. It’s an honor to be the leader of a group that all are trying to do the same thing and give back.

“It’s kind of crazy — I really wanted to be a lawyer. I’ve been told I have the mouth for it, the gift of gab.”

Horton took a year off after graduating from high school in Pine Bluff, and a guy he knew from California said, “Oh, no. Electronics is the way to go. You should get an electronics degree.”

Horton, 54, was born in Hot Springs and grew up mostly in Little Rock. His father worked for Otasco, and because of his job, he moved the family to El Dorado and Greenville, back to Little Rock, then to Pine Bluff when Horton was in the 10th grade. Horton said he lobbied for that move because his grandparents had property there, and he had a couple of horses.

Horton got an associate degree from the Arkansas School of Technology, but it didn’t take him long to figure out that electronics was not what gave him a charge. He spent eight years selling insurance, then started working for a computer and equipment dealer in Dallas.

“All this has been in sales, so — the gift of gab thing, it does transfer a little bit,” he said. “Actually, I’m really an introvert. When my wife tells people that, they think she’s pulling their leg.”

Horton said he doesn’t enjoy speaking in front of crowds, and he would describe himself as shy.

“To accomplish what I want to accomplish, I have to overcome it, and that’s what I do,” he said.

Horton and his family were living in Dallas, but his mother had moved to Russellville, where she had relatives. Trips back and forth from Texas to Arkansas were getting more and more frequent, he said.

He and his wife, Vickie, finally realized at one point when they got back to Dallas, “This isn’t home; Russellville, Arkansas, is home,” he said. “That’s where we’re happy; that’s where we want to move our family.”

Horton moved to Russellville in 1991. He started working for Burris Inc. Office Products, where he was employed for 14 years.

A couple of years into that job, Horton said his boss called him and another salesman in and gave them a list of every civic club in Russellville and told them to pick one. Horton picked the Lions Club. “That’s what set my feet on the public servant path,” he said.

Horton said he’s an all-or-nothing kind of guy.

“It takes the same kind of servant’s heart to be active in one of those organizations, and it’s kind of a natural spillover to get involved in your city government or anything else where you can serve your fellow citizens or neighbors,” he said.

Horton was an alderman for four years and was chairman of the city’s finance committee for three of those years. He was a liaison for several groups.

“Once I got into it, I found out it’s just my thing. It’s what I like doing,” he said.

The issue he dealt with as an alderman that really sticks with him, he said, was a rezoning request a couple of years ago for a Walmart Neighborhood Market on the west end of town. The north end of the 22-acre site borders Main Street, “and that’s everybody’s buzz word for business,” he said.

‘The trick was to try to negotiate something that was as fair as possible to both sides,” he said. “If the city is going to grow and thrive, we have to embrace responsible commercial development. If quality of life is affected, some people feel, ‘What’s the point?’

“Both sides had a very legitimate argument.” The project ended up being a planned unit development with certain stipulations attached to make it more palatable to both sides.

“It took 18 months. There were times when it got kind of heated, but it ended up being a good development for the city, and although there were some heated discussions, the market was built,” Horton said. “It’s a very nice addition to this part of town and, hopefully, will spur more development in that part of town. I think it’s the best example of us doing what we’re there to do, to work out something that recognizes all the different interests in town.”

He and Mayor Bill Eaton have a good relationship, Horton said.

“He endorsed me and supported me in my campaign. It wasn’t anything personal [to the other candidates]. The reason was, it’s not that we don’t disagree, but that we disagree respectfully.”

Horton just barely missed winning the mayoral election without a runoff against former mayor Tyrone Williamson. Horton got almost 77 percent of the vote.

“When they announced that number, it was pretty shocking,” Horton said.

After the election, he retired from his job as a salesman for Wight Office Supplies, where he had worked for nine years.

“I loved it, did well at it. It did a lot of good for our family,” Horton said. “After 30 something years of being in our industry, it’s going to be fun doing something else.”

Since the runoff, he said, he has spent two to three hours a day at City Hall, working on the transition.

“Lucky for me, it’s a good time to go in for being mayor,” he said. “It’s exciting, because we’ve got a lot of projects — we haven’t actually broken ground, but we’ve got a lot on the drawing board that people have worked on for years. There are going to be a lot of power cranes operating in Russellville the next couple of years.”

One of those is a Russellville Parks and Recreation Department project.

“We’re constantly adding on to our trail system, and I think it’s a movement that’s getting more and more support,” he said.

Final plans for the new aquatic center should be ready in January with a groundbreaking planned for spring, he said, and the center should be operational in 2016.

Voters extended the city’s 1-cent sales tax for seven years, and $6.5 million is earmarked for a new central fire station to replace one that is about 80 years old, Horton said.

“People of Russellville are committed to making it the best small city it can be,” he said.

A convention center is a separate project, funded by a sales tax in the late 2000s, Horton said. The city has the property and is leasing to a Tennessee developer.

“The reason — convention centers don’t make money, so the city of Russellville, our goal all along was not to be the operator of the Convention Center. He can have the hotel part and can use retail and restaurant to fill in the rest,” Horton said, “to make profits to offset the Convention Center. “I thought for a long time that once we get that first project going, that it’s going to spur a lot of other stuff that’s been in the rumor mill for years and years. We need to get something like a Rue 21 or a Justice,” he said.

Horton said he heard lots of opinions from voters when he was campaigning for mayor.

“During the campaign, you pretty much hear everything, including people who say we need to quit wasting our time and money downtown. I would submit they haven’t gotten out of their cars and walked around. People are putting money into the buildings, opening restaurants and shops,” he said. “There are other projects where people have redeveloped upstairs property into living spaces. … It’s a little more urban idea than what you’d expect to see in a rural town. A lot of that has to do with Arkansas Tech.”

Horton said a street project on El Paso, just completed, is a corridor between Arkansas Tech University and the city.

“We realized a long time ago that our fortunes are tied together, and our future,” he said. “I think that’s going to be good.”

Horton is in a unique position in that he will be mayor, and Eaton will take Horton’s spot as an alderman. He said he doesn’t anticipate that causing any power struggles.

“We’re all pretty independent on the council. I think we’ll work well together. To get stuff done, the important stuff done, we’ve always had to improvise or respect each other’s position,” Horton said. “Politicians try to avoid that word compromise, but that’s really the only way to get things done. It would be foolish for me to think everybody is always going to agree with me and, if they did, some of us are unnecessary. You need to have those different perspectives.”

Horton said it’s all about working together respectfully to find middle ground.

“At the end of the day, we all have the same goal. … It’s moving Russellville forward,” he said.

That’s from a man who knows he’s where he belongs.

Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.

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