Board reappointment anything but routine

At a recent Pine Bluff City Council meeting, Council Members Ivan Whitfield and Steven Mays opposed the reappointment of Jimmy Dill to the city’s Urban Renewal Agency board. That is, of course, their right to do. But it was the way they did it that was off-putting.

Both men have questioned how the agency is handling its business. Whitfield said he didn’t think the agency was operating in a way that was in the best interest of the community, while one of Mays’ objections was that the agency was buying property at a much higher price than it was most recently purchased for. On that subject, Dill said yes, that is accurate.

But the explanation for that is something called supply and demand, and in real estate terms: location, location, location.

The mission of the Urban Renewal Agency is to develop and improve areas within the urban renewal zone. An investor, some might call him a speculator, came along at some point in the past and bought some old, downtown buildings at a low price. Now the agency needs those buildings to develop into downtown housing. And the investor asked more for the property than he paid for it. That’s just the way the world works.

Maurice Taggart, director of the Urban Renewal Agency, explained the purchases to reporter Dale Ellis.

“There’s not any other land down there,” Taggart said. “Mr. [Elvin] Moon took a gamble on the property when nobody else had faith in Pine Bluff, and that was the property we needed. I’m a businessman, and that was business.”

Mays also questioned why the agency doesn’t do more work in neighborhoods, specifically in the Fourth Ward, which he represents.

The answer is pretty simple: The agency is confined to operating within the urban renewal zone, which is in the downtown area. Mays said he would work to get that changed. That’s fine, but that doesn’t change the agency’s charter at the time he’s making his complaints.

Mays went so far as to ask Dill, who was at the meeting, to respond to his questions on the spot. At that point, Mayor Shirley Washington brought things back into perspective by reminding Mays that what was on the agenda was a routine reappointment to a board.

The reappointment, however, became far from routine when both Mays and Whitfield voted against putting Dill back on the board for a second term. And Whitfield voted against the reappointment of another member of the agency, Lloyd Franklin Sr.

Whitfield claimed that he was against Dill because reappointing him was denying other members of the community a chance to serve on the board. To which Council Member Glen Brown Jr. pointed out that this was a new board and the members had not had time to serve long on it. Brown also said the city has in place legislation allowing members to serve on city boards for up to 10 years before having to come off.

As we said, it’s the council’s responsibility to question expenditures and even reappointments, but both subjects, particularly the expenditure question, should be considered separately in order that council members get full and complete answers. To suddenly ambush Dill and Franklin with vague reservations about their terms of service or what their agency is doing is unprofessional and of little use to anyone, other than to make the councilmembers look foolish.

So was there more to this than met the eye? Probably.

To paraphrase Dill, he said he thinks the pushback to the Urban Renewal Agency is rooted in the opposition by Whitfield and Mays to the initiatives put forth by Go Forward Pine Bluff.

“It’s frustrating because the two who are making the main gripes are the two who ran against the mayor,” Dill said. “If you look up the percentage that each one got, the mayor had like 73% and that left the two of them to split the other 27%. The citizens of Pine Bluff spoke up very loudly in that election, and they said they loved what Mayor Washington is doing and they want her to continue.”

Oh, and Washington is a hundred percent behind Go Forward. Well, that helps explain it.