The name of the firm sounded so respectable, as so many dubious deals do. This time the misnomer chosen was Arkansas Health and Economic Research Inc., but the health and economic advance it promoted most of all was its own. And it did so in record time, too.
On the very day this outfit registered with Arkansas' secretary of state as a legitimate operation, just as the law requires, it sent out its first mailing seeking thousands of dollars in what are called General Improvement Funds but that in effect improve only its own balance sheet. While not at all improving the reputations of too many big-time operators connected with what essentially was a slush fund.
The application for state funds should have made it clear from the start that there was something fishy about this grandly entitled enterprise. The company's specialty was supposed to be the practice of alternative medicine, which can cover a multitude of panaceas, including ozone therapy, whatever that is. What, not levitation and prestidigitation, too? The executive director of this non-profit company, which means it can be highly profitable for those running it, was no scientist at all but an insurance agent who at last report was working in Saline County's juvenile justice system.
Despite its checkered past or maybe because of it, Arkansas Health and Research was promptly given $20,000 in the state's General Improvement Funds.
That was just the start of this raid on the state's treasury, according to this paper's excellent investigative reporters. Between 2013 and 2015, this outfit would collect five checks totaling $41,698 in We the People's tax money. By now, with a federal investigation under way, it's not easy to find anybody ready to talk about why those grants should have been made or what good they did, if any. All that money just seems to have vanished into thin air. Now you, Gentle Reader and generous taxpayer, may find out because the feds are hot on its trail, locking barn doors left and right after all the horses have been let out.
Mayor Tim McKinney of Berryville has been a member of the Northwest Arkansas Economic Development District Board for 27 years. That agency is supposed to keep up with such grants but the mayor has made it clear that this whole process boiled down to the board's just rubber-stamping any proposal put before it. That board would probably have signed its own breakfast if that were the next item on its pro forma agenda.
To quote Mayor McKinney: "We were given a list of projects, and we were told to 'vote yes here, vote yes here. Good job, guys, let's eat.' It was clear the Legislature still controlled the money." But after learning more about Arkansas Health and Economic Research, the light dawned on Mayor McKinney. "It sounds very shaky to me," he now has concluded with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight.
Multiply this slapdash process some 4,200 times, spread the gravy far and wide throughout the state, and an idea of the scope of this scandal emerges. Because 4,200 is approximately the number of grants that legislators have approved in General Improvement Funds. And at last count, the total of such awards topped out at about $50 million. A million here, a million there, and soon you're talking real money. Not a bad haul. Oh, what a tangled--and profitable--web we weave when first we practice to deceive. It must all have seemed so easy at first, and like so many ill-gotten gains, it went in a hurry.
So what's to be done about this mess now? Here's a simple and wholly justified suggestion: Don't mend it, end it.
Get rid of all these handouts from the General Improvement Fund. Wipe the slate clean. Demonstrate that this state has learned its lesson the hard way. And resolve never to repeat it. Because in clear retrospect, it's hard to discern any difference between how these General Improvement Funds were dished out and any other money-laundering scheme cooked up by too-clever-by-three-quarters hotshots. So let's kill this sucker dead, dead, dead. Root, branch and leaves. And spread salt over its grave.
Editorial on 10/04/2017