Jerry Don Barrett

Retiring Atkins mayor cites challenges, achievements

Atkins Mayor Jerry Don Barrett, sporting a handlebar mustache, stands at City Hall. He is retiring after five terms in office. Barrett, 74, said he has had a handlebar mustache since 1974. He said he grew a beard and shaved the middle, leaving the long sides, and it takes him about 10 minutes to style the mustache every morning. “People stop me all the time and say, ‘Can we take your picture? We’ve never seen a moustache like that,’” Barrett said.
Atkins Mayor Jerry Don Barrett, sporting a handlebar mustache, stands at City Hall. He is retiring after five terms in office. Barrett, 74, said he has had a handlebar mustache since 1974. He said he grew a beard and shaved the middle, leaving the long sides, and it takes him about 10 minutes to style the mustache every morning. “People stop me all the time and say, ‘Can we take your picture? We’ve never seen a moustache like that,’” Barrett said.

Atkins Mayor Jerry Don Barrett was popular enough to get elected 20 years ago, but he said not all city employees were his biggest fans at first.

“I changed police chiefs the day I went into office,” he said.

But Barrett kept getting re-elected.

“Twenty years is a long time in the mayor’s office or any other office, for that matter,” Barrett said. “It needs to be somebody younger and more energetic.”

He’s getting his wish.

Barrett, who turned 74 on Dec. 6, is retiring with a string of what he deems as successes. Rowdy Sweet, 45, won the election with 81 percent of the vote against an independent candidate for the part-time mayor’s position.

Sweet is a captain with the Pope County Sheriff’s Office. Barrett worked for 45 years for Arkansas Nuclear One in Russellville, including the first 11 years to build it; then he continued to work for Entergy Arkansas, which owns Nuclear One. Barrett was a quality-control supervisor for many years and did well-test administration. Although he retired in 2013, he has continued as a contractor, a test administrator and a field-welding engineer.

When Barrett decided to run for mayor — he’d been a member of the city’s sewer commission for 15 years prior to that — he said he had to write Entergy officials in Jackson, Mississippi, and ask for permission to be a candidate.

Barrett said he was happy that the response was positive, and the top brass with Entergy even wrote a letter to him and sent copies to his bosses, saying employees were encouraged to run for public office.

“I was proud of that,” Barrett said.

Not only that, but Barrett said the letter also stated that he could use anything at the nuclear plant to do his job.

“I used their telephones,” Barrett said. “I used my email through their computer [for city business].

“I could not have been as involved as mayor had I been working a lot of other places.”

He has a list of what he considers his biggest accomplishments while in office.

“We took nine meth labs out of the city limits the first year I was in office and five more in the county,” he said.

Barrett said he has a good relationship with Atkins Police Chief Stephen Pack.

“The chief now, he’s a good young man. He has a criminal-

justice background. He worked with Rowdy in the county [sheriff’s office]. That’s going to make a smooth transition there,” Barrett said.

“Another thing — this is probably one of the biggest [accomplishments] — we got our fire department to a class 3 [insurance rating]. It was a class 7 inside the city limits … and class 9 outside the city limits.

“I encouraged it strongly and put money toward it,” he said of the effort.

He said the city added square footage to the existing Atkins Fire Department and installed 32 new fire hydrants around town.

“A 3 for a community our size is super,” he said. “It lowered everybody’s homeowners insurance by 50 percent. That helped the taxpayers more than any one thing I did. I didn’t do it by myself. The Fire Department did it, and they worked really hard at it for over a year before we got it.

Volunteer Fire Chief Chuck Cheek, a lifelong Atkins resident, said “a lot of legwork was involved” in getting the insurance rating lowered about a dozen years ago.

He said the mayor was integral to the process.

“He’s helped the Fire Department a great deal,” Cheek said. “He was an asset in getting our ISO rating done. It took a lot of legwork on his part, too.

“We added on [to the fire station], and we’ve changed several apparatuses and updated most all the equipment. We’ve come a long way in the past 10 or 12 years.”

The library doubled in size during Barrett’s tenure, too.

“Mary Maxwell, a resident, left $50,000 to the city of Atkins for a library expansion, but she left it with the [Pope County] Quorum Court,” Barrett said.

He said he worked with former Justice of the Peace Nelle Warren to get the money for the city to use.

“She was very instrumental in getting it through the court and getting that $50,000,” he said.

Barrett also enlisted the services of Buddy Goines, a former Atkins classmate of his who was an estimator at a lumber company.

“He did the estimate and the biggest part of the construction work,” Barrett said. “We were able to make that $50,000 go a long way.”

Another project Barrett is proud of is renovating a Works Progress Administration building, which was the home of the American Legion, and turning it into the W.J. Matthews Civic Center. Matthews donated the land on which the building sits.

Barrett said the building was falling down, and the Boy Scouts were meeting there.

He asked the Atkins City Council for $80,000 to renovate the structure.

“They said, ‘Oh, no, we can’t do that,’” he said.

When the story came out in the newspaper, Billy Webster of Texas, a retired pharmacist and the grandson of the man who had donated the land for the building, contacted Barrett.

“[Webster] was very community-minded,” Barrett said. “He said, ‘I’d be willing to give you some Walgreens stock if the council would match what I give you.’”

The mayor went back to the City Council, and the deal was approved. The stock was worth about $50,000, Barrett said.

“I knew the city didn’t have the money to do that on their own, and I didn’t know how I was going to get it done. I was just going to put a floor in [the building] for the Boy Scouts to use. Now we’ve got a real nice building there.”

A half-cent sales tax was passed about 10 years ago, Barrett said, to enlarge the water-treatment plant during his administration, too.

“That did two things — made us have enough water production that we can furnish a bigger industry. We had sewer capacity, but we didn’t have water capacity,” he said.

The tax will sunset, or be rededicated by a vote of the residents, when the $4 million bond issue is paid off.

“We furnish all the water for Atkins and Pottsville and sell it to Tri-County Wholesale, who retails it out to their customers,” Barrett said.

A $1 million bond issue was approved by the City Council at a recent meeting to improve the sewer-treatment plant, which was installed in the late ’60s or early ’70s, Barrett said.

“The ground moves over the years, and you start getting ground water in your system. Excessive rainfall … is overflowing our system on the south side,” he said.

Barrett plans to work on city business until the minute he leaves the office, and he’s including Sweet in many of the meetings, including one last week with engineers on the sewer project. Barrett wants to help Sweet as much as he can.

“I didn’t get anything,” Barrett said. “When I walked in the mayor’s office, the only thing in there was a bag phone — no desk, no pencil, no paper, nothing — I mean nothing, except that bag phone sitting in the middle of the floor.”

Barrett said Sweet told him he may call for help or advice. “I said, ‘Don’t hesitate to call.’”

“There’s a lot for him to learn, but hopefully, we can keep an open line of communication,” Barrett said.

How does Barrett think the city employees feel about him after 20 years?

“Well, I think they’re OK now,” he said.

Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.

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