Scott Bennett, the state highway director, reversed roles and asked me a question.
Did I believe there had been any benefit for Little Rock in having Interstate 30 pass through it?
Why, yes, of course, Little Rock has benefited.
Motorists have been known to pull off I-30, follow signs to the city visitor center at Curran Hall on Sixth Street, learn of the Clinton Presidential Center and the River Market and the Central High historic site, and then stay a while and spend money.
Having declared more than a decade ago that the Clinton Presidential Center would benefit from its visibility from a major cross-country interstate route, I could hardly argue credibly now that I-30 had been purely destructive to the city.
There are mature and large and thriving urban centers around the country that need no interstate highway for visibility or traffic or commerce. But Little Rock is not advanced to that point, though it aspires to be.
So my question back to Bennett: Should the state Highway Department embark on a six-year project to tear up that interstate highway and replace it with a wider one that would harm downtown Little Rock during the project and dash after that any aspirations for a revived, stand-on-its-own downtown section?
Here we face a basic philosophical difference. One view is largely conservative and the other more ... progressive, let us say.
Bennett and highway engineers do not like traffic congestion. They want to apply their skills to conceive of, design and see built new roadways that reduce that congestion.
They believe a highway agency's job is to respond to the human behavior that exists. If the people have moved and created urban sprawl, then the highway agency's responsibility is to take the road-user fees paid by those people and give them the most convenient passages throughout that sprawl.
That's a conservative notion.
Little Rock Mayor Mark Stodola, becoming more visibly active in resistance to the Highway Department's plan (as public pressure rises), told me "some congestion can be good." Heavy traffic suggests vibrancy and can influence people to change their habits--where they choose to live and how they choose to get around--in a constructive way, he said.
That's a progressive notion--that government can engineer things other than highways, such as human behavior.
One philosophy is to follow the people. The other is to lead the people.
Bennett, who lives in Saline County, which is close to his work, says he gets the idea from some people in Little Rock that they "don't care about anything except downtown Little Rock" and that they "want to force people to move back."
Yes, in a way, they do.
And, yes, a highway engineer has every right to live where he wants and think differently about the theories and objectives of public transportation.
But here's another question: Is it the Highway Department's appropriate role to cram a 10-lane downtown freeway down a city's neck if public opinion within that city rises against it?
And another question: Is it still possible the Highway Department would not do this project even though it listed it among those to be undertaken if voters approved the half-cent sales tax for highway bonds in 2012?
"Well, sure, it's possible," Bennett said.
He listed three projects--bypasses at Prairie Grove and Green Forest, and a bridge replacement and highway rerouting near Eureka Springs--that he could recall his department abandoning because of local objection.
But he said the department had found support for parts of the I-30 project in North Little Rock and that, truth be known, Little Rock was not unanimously opposed.
"So we just need to work the process through," he said, adding that there were other areas in the state that would like to receive some of the $600 million in bond proceeds designated for this project.
Stodola subsequently told me he was encouraged by what Bennett had told me.
The mayor's position is that the Highway Department should stop and rethink. He mentioned the possibility of eight freeway lanes, not 10, and a better, more sensible and less destructive concept for a new entrance-exit system.
"But doing nothing also is a possibility," Stodola said.
Somewhere between doing nothing and doing less--that may be where we're headed.
Communities around the state might want to start lining up--just in case--for whatever bond money Little Rock doesn't use.
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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 10/29/2015