Requiem for Bruce Moore
For as long as he was city manager of Little Rock—a long time, 21 years—Bruce Moore heard with the rest of us that the city manager form of government was passé and needed revision if not replacing with traditionally elected mayoral political power.
Do you see what I did there? More to the point, do you see what he did there?
Moore stayed in a job for 21 years while people all around were finding fault with the nature of the job, but seldom if ever with the man doing it.
He was the one with his head down, soft-spoken and grinning ever so slightly when a columnist tried to draw him out on a matter personal or political.
This is important:
The city manager in Little Rock works for the city Board of Directors.
Thus, Moore’s primary constituency was that board. Happy board members—with him, if not so much with each other—meant job security for a city manager.
If there is one thing an elected city director needs, it is a go-to source either to get things done or to be told how to get a thing done. That is what Bruce Moore was for.
Year after year, from the most conservative director to the most liberal, from Lance Hines to Kathy Webb, through Joan Adcock and Dean Kumpuris, Moore was the reliable goto guy.
Board members were not going to fire Bruce. What would they do without him?
Now they must figure that out. A mere 57, Moore died in his sleep last Friday night. Now those directors and this city will learn the depth of the void when you lose the services of the employee who knew how to do everything except seek public credit.
There is a school of thought that Mayor Frank Scott will miss him most. A reliable veteran manager valued by the board can be both rival and friend of an activist chief executive seeking to expand his power.
“He was the Mike Beebe of city government,” Skip Rutherford said. He meant that Moore drew his job security and power from a command of process and function. One need not unveil a policy agenda to affect policy.
Moore, the personal aide to then-Mayor Jim Dailey before he became city manager, was co-chairperson of the Clinton Presidential Center location committee in the early 2000s. While others got quoted in the newspaper on high-profile matters, Moore took care of water lines, sewer lines and street-route changes.
He asked only for one thing: Of those two new streets opening at the Clinton site, one of course would be named for Dean Kumpuris. As for the other, Moore wanted it named for his role model, Mahlon Martin, who also had been a low-key Black city manager of Little Rock. And it was.
Now something ought to be named for Bruce Moore.
There was a basic difference between Beebe and Moore. Beebe ran for governor, and he could, to plagiarize what he once said of a local columnist, “strut while seated.” Moore never strutted.
Instead, he walked inconspicuously into a local coffee shop, any of the several, and ordered his morning fuel.
Once this happened at a coffee shop: A citizen who knew who Moore was mentioned to him—not seriously, but to tease Bruce below his pay grade—that his large green trash bin was old and ragged, with a wheel off, and that he could not seem to get anyone in City Hall to get it replaced for him.
The guy got a new one the next day.
Icould only speculate on Moore’s political leanings. I would guess a Democrat in moderation. But speculation and guessing are all one has. He would not give anything away.
Only once did I manage to draw him out into an exception to that studied reserve—to unguarded expression.
It was during the Clinton Library location study. I told him that Little Rock and North Little Rock ought to be one city, and that, failing that, we ought to put the library on the downtown riverside, the north side, as a high-rise on the vacant property that eventually would be the site of the Dickey-Stephens baseball park. I said it would join the cities across that river more assuredly than a bridge.
Oh, come on, he said. North Little Rock already got the new multipurpose arena. Moore said that Little Rock should not give everything away, especially something its psyche so needed and deserved.
He asked that I not quote him, which I did not until now. I do so only because it serves on this sad occasion to reveal that city manager of Little Rock was not merely his job.
It was a quiet purpose not without passion and vision.