Mayor-elect Frank Scott says he promised change and that one thing he learned working for Mike Beebe was that you keep your promises or go down trying.
My thought had been that the new Little Rock mayor would proceed slowly on seeking to turn city government upside down. But that would be incorrect, he told me in a phone conversation Thursday night.
Maybe within his first 30 days as mayor--and surely no later than 90 days--he will present the city board with an ordinance that would end at-large board membership--a Chamber of Commerce-driven system dating to 1957. His proposal would impose instead a full mayor-council system with all council members elected to represent wards, meaning districts.
If the board won't oblige, Scott said, then he'll lead a campaign to get the proposal referred to the voters who just elected him by 58 percent.
As for particulars, such as when and how the new system would take effect ... he said all that would be worked out in time.
Some members of the city board are likely to prefer punting such a major change to a vote of the people.
As for how his friend Bruce Moore, the city manager, might fit into a new system, Scott said it's true that he and Moore are friends--"there's no need not to be fully transparent about that"--but that his obligation is to the voters and the change he promised.
The question I got most on Wednesday was, "What kind of a guy is Scott, really?"
My first word was likeable. My second was preacher.
My next observation was that he's a decent, forgiving man who will not punish the police for the incendiary and arguably racist Facebook post against him by the Fraternal Order of Police.
Indeed, in our conversation Thursday evening, Scott said he had been "blessed with grace and mercy" throughout his life and intended to show a little to the police.
Scott, 35, will now take the presiding seat over a city board of 80-year-olds, 70-year-olds, 60-year-olds and a couple of babies in their 50s. The sparkling Southern cities of Little Rock's aspiration have a younger essence.
Warwick Sabin ran to capture generational change, but Scott ended up the more compelling agent, perhaps because he was younger and the combination of race and generation--and a unity message--simply was too powerful.
Speaking of unity, that newspaper map Wednesday morning--showing all Little Rock precincts east and south favoring Scott and all those west and north favoring Baker Kurrus--was stark, if hardly news.
But the campaign may have been more about what was happening within the division.
Some of Scott's touted unity could be seen marbling through the city. That marbling was exclusively a matter of white people in the north and west voting for the African American candidate, giving Scott nearly a third of their votes while the white candidate struggled to get 10 percent in the black sections.
The traditionally defined city dividing line--Interstate 630--was not quite the real divide Tuesday. The line inched northward.
The Capitol Hill/Stifft's Station precinct, a midtown section west of the Capitol, north of 630 and south of Markham (and Sabin's precinct), gave a commanding margin, 316-177, to Scott.
Then, moving north of Markham through midtown into Hillcrest, which is the city's quintessential white liberal precinct, voting at Pulaski Heights Presbyterian gave 647 votes to Kurrus, the moderate public-school hero, but a healthy 550 (46 percent) to Scott.
Then, moving to north of Cantrell into the rarefied and establishment Heights, left-leaning in a broad Democratic-Republican sense but not so much in city politics, Kurrus outpolled Scott by a percentage of 69 to 31.
That was a rout in one sense, but a remarkable outcome in this way: The black candidate from southwest Little Rock got nearly a third of the votes in an affluent white establishment neighborhood in the shadow of the country club, a section of town into which he never ventured as a youth growing up distantly in the same city, but a far different world.
Beyond that, for all the unavoidable talk of black and white, the prevailing story may have been generational.
A 40-something at Scott's party Tuesday night at Cajun's Wharf texted that he was one of the oldest people there.
Yet the cautionary tale remains: Political change comes last, after a people's movement, and after a transitional period.
The key is what state Sen. Joyce Elliott, a liberal lion and Scott supporter, put on Twitter on Wednesday: "The most important outcome of this election is not allowing the establishment to prevail. That era has to be over, which is why folks must remain actively engaged. It's a long haul, not just words."
As the new preacher-mayor could tell you, faith without works is dead.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 12/09/2018