Editorial

Go forward, Pine Bluff

How to rebuild a city from its ruins

Who will rebuild Pine Bluff if its own people won't? That's the essential question posed by three ordinances to be put before the town's voters this spring, the season of renewal.

The first proposition would levy a 5/8ths percent sales tax, the next would refer the tax to the voters, and the last would specify how all these funds are to be spent. Sounds like a plan, however complicated.

The whole shebang is expected to raise some $40 million over the seven-year duration of the tax. It's not as if Pine Bluff's people hadn't been consulted while this plan was being drawn up. Listen to the indefatigable Thomas May, who continues to serve his city tirelessly, just as he did when he was chief executive officer and guiding light of Simmons First Bank of Pine Bluff. If anybody has earned the trust and confidence of the city's voters and, before that, its depositors and borrowers, it is Mr. May, and once again his advice should be followed. He gave one of the aginners on the city council a glossy publication that went into detail about the whole plan.

It's not as if anybody was keeping the city council in the dark or, for that matter, all the city's voters. Quite the contrary, every effort seems to have been made to keep everybody in the loop. About a year's worth of planning involving 100 people went into drawing up this plan on the premise that the more that was known about it, the more support it would garner. And support it deserves. Lots of it.

But the aginners we will always have with us, and Pine Bluff's seem to have multiplied since the city fell on hard times. But the mayor--it's Shirley Washington now--and city council will get the last word just as they got the first. "The decision is made right here at the city council," to quote Mr. May, tapping a couple of fingers on the table in the council's chambers. After all, the mayor and other city officials will serve on the nonprofit outfit spearheading this drive to give Pine Bluff a better future than its recent and all too lamentable past.

Nah, opines Alderman Glen Brown Jr., who's opposed to the whole idea of moving Pine Bluff forward this way. He was backed by Alderman Steven Mays, who complains that a lot of the projects approved by voters years ago still aren't shovel-ready, though he doesn't explain how denying local government the wherewithall to complete them will speed them up. Instead, he claims the city's people are already over-taxed, as if taxes weren't the price all of us pay for civilization and its many services.

Another alderman, Bruce Lockett, had no policy to suggest except more delay. "It's very disingenuous," he argued, "to think we're going to have one meeting and put it on the agenda. My people elected me to serve them and to do very much what this plan does." So what's the problem? Well, Alderman Lockett says he would "like us to take a step back, get input from our department heads and from our citizens." As if that's what those pushing this plan hadn't been doing all along.

Mayor Shirley Washington understands that united we stand, divided we fall--whether it comes to the country's future or just Pine Bluff's, and her words are worth repeating: "The one thing we do not want to have happen is to drive a wall between us," she says. "The purpose of this plan and any plan should be designed to pull Pine Bluff together. It should be designed to push Pine Bluff forward." Not back into a past littered with petty jealousies and unending gripes--just as Pine Bluff's main drag was littered with rubble for so long. Please, let's not go back to those sad old days, but forward to new and brighter ones. Together.

Yes, united we stand, divided we fall. It's a motto as old as Aesop, as new as today. And now is the time for all good men--and women--to take it to heart. And head.

Editorial on 02/15/2017

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