Less than 13 months after taking office, Fulton County Judge Jim Kendrick resigned his office on Friday, one week after being found guilty of theft of property.
The theft charge arose from work done on the judge's private roadway on June 11 and 12 of last year, according to a news release from the prosecuting attorney for the 16th Judicial District, which covers Fulton County. The release said that three county employees -- operating a county-owned road grader and two county-owned dump trucks -- delivered and spread 18 loads of hill dirt on property owned by the judge, his wife and son.
The release said the dirt was obtained from a landowner who testified during the two-day trial that he only allows the county road crew, not individuals or businesses, to extract dirt from his property. A county employee used a county-owned excavator to load the dirt into the dump trucks.
Work stopped on the judge's property when Anthony Weston, an auditor with the Arkansas Legislative Joint Auditing Committee, went to the judge's property on Pleasant Valley Road in Fulton County to investigate. An investigation was launched by Arkansas State Police on June 24.
According to a probable cause affidavit, Kendrick told the investigator that he had intended all along to reimburse the county for the work, and the affidavit said Kendrick did write a check to the county for $1,812 from his personal checking account. However, the affidavit said, three estimates obtained by the investigator from three locally owned and operated private contracting companies ranged between $4,800 and $6,500 for 18 loads of dirt and 20 hours of work.
"Oddly enough, the night before all of this took place, there was a Fulton County Quorum Court meeting," said Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Eric Hance. "The thrust of the meeting was how bad the county roads were, the shortage of manpower, equipment, and materials to do all of the work that needed to be done to all of these county roads, and they were doing the best they could with what they had to work with."
Hance said heavy rains during May and June in Fulton County, which borders Missouri, had left the county roads in poor condition and county officials struggling to deal with the needed repairs.
"Fulton County has a lot of county roads that are still unpaved," he said. "So the very night before, there was a quorum court meeting to discuss the poor state of roads in the county and the very next morning, they started to work on the county judge's road."
Hance said that Weston traveled to Kendrick's property, discovered the work being performed, interviewed a county employee operating a road grader on the property, and took photos that were entered into evidence during the trial.
Kendrick, 72, was found guilty Jan. 23 and was fined $10,000. Hance said he could have faced up to six years in prison.
"The jury did not give him any time in the Arkansas Department of Corrections but it did impose the maximum fine," Hance said. "What I told the jury is that this is their county, this is their county judge, this is their money that got stolen from them, and they are the ones who had to decide what the appropriate punishment was."
Hance said that Kendrick's wife, Connie Kendrick, made an emotional plea for leniency during the sentencing phase of the trial, noting her husband's advanced age and poor health.
"I think that effectively kept him from going to the Arkansas Department of Corrections," he said.
Calls to a number listed for Kendrick went straight to voicemail for a company named Waste Connections of Arkansas and a message left there was not returned Monday night.
According to a report by KAIT-TV in Jonesboro, the Quorum Court on Friday appointed Jim Bicker, a former county judge and justice of the peace, to fill Kendrick's unexpired term, which runs until Dec. 31, 2022.
State Desk on 02/04/2020