COMMENTARY

JOHN BRUMMETT: A look at the issues

With early voting started, we should turn our attention to matters of actual consequence that will appear on the Arkansas ballot.

Those do not include the presidential race, which is a pointless voting exercise in Arkansas.

We've become such a hardened right-wing wasteland that our six electoral votes were predetermined from the get-go. They are certain to go to the grotesquely non-serious likely loser, Donald Trump.

Fortunately, the presidential race will be decided elsewhere in places with higher concentrations of reasonable people not so reckless as to turn the nation over to a monstrous cartoon character.

The ballot will present five matters of state-specific and varying importance. Three are proposed constitutional amendments referred by the Legislature. The others are publicly initiated proposals to legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes with a doctor's authority.

Let's examine today the three legislatively referred proposed constitutional amendments. Let's leave the marijuana issue for the subsequent full-column treatment it deserves.

Two of the legislative referrals are easy, and one is hard.

Proposed Issue 1 would provide four-year terms for elected officials in the county courthouse--judge, sheriff, clerk, collector and treasurer and so forth.

It suits me. The fewer elections around here the better.

Proposed Issue 2 would provide that the governor, upon leaving the state, remains governor and does not relinquish his power to the lieutenant governor until he crosses back over the state line.

This is a worthy proposal, updating our horseback-era mess of a state constitution. While it does not go far enough by abolishing the silly office of lieutenant governor, we should not make the perfect the enemy of the good.

We should impair the lieutenant governor whenever we get a chance.

Proposed Issue 3, the hard one, would allow the Legislature to take your tax money and give it to entrepreneurs for an incrementally socialized appropriation of public money to start a business operation, employ a big bunch of our citizens, and make themselves some profit.

It's an outrage, this corporate welfare, but perhaps an inevitable and advisable one.

Several years ago, we authorized a restricted version of this very thing. We granted the Legislature the authority to pledge up to 5 percent of the state general revenue fund to repayment of bonds to provide money to lure a so-called super project to the state, defined at that time by a $500 million investment or more and employment of at least 500 people. Later we dropped the threshold so that smaller projects could qualify.

The premise was that other states were jumping off the bridge and Arkansas needed to jump also.

I opposed the first go-round in concept, but then I supported $125 million in bonds for infrastructural improvements and a loan for the Big River Steel project in Northeast Arkansas.

That was the project in which the state joined the Teacher Retirement System as a co-investor with an array of private investors including the Koch brothers.

Absent the taxpayer money, the plant might have gone to Mississippi.

This amendment would remove any cap on the bonding authority. The overall amount of the general fund pledged to long-term debt could blow past the 5 percent cap. The Legislature could take as much of our tax money as it thought was needed to seed a big project.

The governor's people would design an eligible transaction, presumably complete with "clawback" provisions to recover state money if the project failed to meet goals and requirements. Then legislators would stand accountable to their constituents for voting to authorize it.

Others have started big home-grown enterprises in Arkansas without taking taxpayers as partners and helping themselves to the state treasury. Still, I tend to recommend squeezing one's nose and voting in favor.

I'll be squeezing my nose anyway from the raging stench of Trump's mere appearance on the ballot. I may as well go ahead and give the state this rope with which to enrich or hang itself.

The proposal also expands local indebtedness authority, redefining currently authorized "industrial development bonds" as "economic development bonds." It also permits local jurisdictions to form compacts to attract and subsidize projects.

One other thing: There is a pending court case that says local governments may no longer send public money to local chambers of commerce, a common practice.

Issue 3 makes clear that such traditional funnels may stay open--on the argument that chambers of commerce operate in the clear general economic development interest.

That's not necessarily so. Yes, chambers of commerce exist to promote the community. But they do so through the prism of, and in the narrow interest of, management and often-failed supply-side economics. Their lobbyists at the Legislature may not necessarily be working for your preferences.

But since you're squeezing your nose tight anyway ...

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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 10/25/2016

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