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From Arkansas Online,
by Associate Editor Meredith Oakley, Voices Editor, published Wednesday,
December 20, 2006
The concise headline on yesterday's editorial captured the essence of the
situation so brilliantly that you knew immediately its subject matter.
"Ethical vacuum," it stated simply. Given the excellent investigative
reportage of our gal C.S. Murphy in a recent series of news stories, what
else could this refer to but the tourism arm of Little Rock government?
For the uninformed, Murphy has done something that no one in city
government, either elected or appointed, has had enough regard for what it
means to serve the public interest to do. By scrutinizing the inflow of
some $12 million a year in local tax money and the largely unconstrained
outflow of same, she has been able to cite chapter and verse of how that
tax money has been grossly misused by public officials and city employees
without regard for state laws, local ordinances or even the rudiments of
public accountability or fiduciary responsibility. Ethical:
adjective 1. Relating to moral principles or the branch of knowledge
concerned with these; 2. Morally correct. Vacuum: noun (pl.vacuums
or vacua ) 1. a space entirely devoid of matter; 2. a space from which the
air has been completely or partly removed; 3. a gap left by the loss or
departure of someone or something important. Yes, ethical
vacuum would seem to sum it up nicely, for it is painfully obvious, given
the comments by various city officials to Murphy's revelations, that none
of them appreciates the gravity of those revelations. On
the other hand, maybe they do, considering how hard some of them have
worked to persuade the Arkansas Legislature to exempt any and all
information relating to local tourism taxes from public disclosure under
the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act. For all we know, the dread of
revelations such as Murphy's is precisely why they did so.
Members of the Little Rock Advertising and Promotion Commission, Murphy
reported on Sunday, "must follow the city's Code of Ethics and the city's
competitive bidding rules. And commissioners are subject to the Local
Fiscal Management Responsibility Act, which bars municipal officials from
directly or indirectly profiting from city business unless given express
permission from the city Board of Directors." That's all very interesting,
but the facts clearly show that these laws and tenets have not been
adhered to. Dan O'Byrne, who heads the convention bureau, says that a
bidding process for catering and banquet service was instituted in the
wake of Murphy's initial reports about the bureau's purchasing
infractions, but that doesn't begin to address the problem.
What I want to know is what those in positions of authority are going to
do about other questionable practices. For example, are the restaurants
owned by Mary Beth Ringgold, the A&P chairman, going to continue to be
used as banquet halls and watering holes for A&P members and convention
bureau staff? Are the companies in which another commissioner, Blair
Allen, has a financial interest going to continue to profit from doing
business with the bureau? Is the bureau going to be made to weigh, track
and account for its expenditures? Look, I'm not going to
rehash the entire list of profligate, wrongheaded decisions that have been
handed down individually or collectively from the Little Rock Convention
and Visitors Bureau, the A&P commission that is supposed to oversee it or
other city officials. Not today, anyway. However, I sincerely hope that
when the next attempt is made to prevent you as a citizen from knowing how
local "hamburger" taxes, or any taxes anywhere, are being spent, you'll
remember this scandal to your legislative representatives, because you
have a right to know how you're being served-or not served-by the
so-called public servants who control the purse strings. It
all boils down to accountability. There hasn't been any. Outgoing Mayor
Jim "What, Me Worry?" Dailey, a longtime member of the Little Rock Board
of Directors, would have us chalk this up to ignorance. "We
need to make sure we know what our policies are and that we either like
them or change them," he told Murphy a few days ago. "It doesn't
necessarily mean there's anything wrong there." I leave it to others to
decide whether ignorance is an acceptable excuse-and indeed whether
ignorance was of such epidemic proportions that nobody in city government
knew, until a reporter put them wise, what had been going on. However, I
have to agree with the author of the "Ethical vacuum" editorial, who
responded to Dailey's lily-livered defense in the following manner.
"Mr. Mayor," the editorialist wrote, "the problem isn't any shortage of
rules and regulations. The city has plenty of policies when it comes to
purchasing goods and services, and they're good policies. The problem is
that the commission has ignored them. And gotten away with it. Mr. Mayor,
there is something wrong there. How can you not see it?" The answer to
that one is simple enough. The mayor cannot see it because he's too close
to the problem. So close to the problem that he's part of it. By virtue of
his position in government, he's not only a member of the city Board of
Directors, which is supposed to ride herd over the Advertising and
Promotion Commission, he's a member of the very Advertising and Promotion
Commission that is supposed to ride herd over the Little Rock Convention
and Visitors Bureau. ~~~ |
