Cleaning up their mess
Cutting-edge high-tech innovation tends to spring up homegrown after a long investment in elite higher education systems emphasizing mathematics and science and seeding research and development.
You can’t really prostitute yourself into being Silicon Valley. You must study your way into research and development.
Arkansas is hardly the only state— but certainly prominent among those—to fall for, and bend over for, some fancy-sounding thing breezing through and calling itself digital or ultramodern and just so happening, for some reason, to want to favor you with a shortcut to prosperity.
The reason sometimes turns out to be that other locales had more sense or had already learned the hard lesson.
Our provincial failing is not Republican or Democrat, but both. And it’s not new.
Decades ago, then-Gov. Bill Clinton and every chamber of commerce executive in the state gathered to announce with great excitement that something calling itself BioPlex International was going to bless our state as soon as we passed a generous package of incentives.
Two months later, predictably, the whole scheme had been discredited by the reporting of Arkansas Business, a then-fledgling business weekly. Clinton and the state’s business boosters tucked tail. BioPlex vaporized.
That was 1984. This is 2024. Same thing.
Now the state Legislature will look to suspend the rules during its biennial off-year budget session beginning Wednesday. It will do so to take up legislation to try to clean up some of the prostitute’s mess it has made.
It will try to repair at least part of the damage it caused at the end of the regular session. In the frenzy to adjourn, it passed with tactical recklessness a bill authorizing crypto mining to come here and do whatever crypto mining does, and do so without any local regulation.
It made sense in a way. When you don’t know what something is, how are your cities and counties supposed to regulate it?
So, you take a leap of ignorance. You authorize companies of vague ownership and even vague national origin to come into your rural fields and install computers to run all night and calculate the values of new digital currencies. A whole new unregulated form of currency … what poor state wouldn’t want to get in on the ground floor, or even the second or third floor, of that?
If your state has historically not done great with government dollars, what do you have to lose by helping some folks count their alternative money?
Other than quality of life and self-respect, that is. So, our new law forbidding local regulation of these facilities—of location, noise level, anything—led to the opening of a few of them around the state. They don’t employ many people; they run computers roundthe-clock, generating so much heat that roof fans run at decibel levels that residents nearby say are ruining their property values and frightening their children. These football field-size plants use so much electricity and water that they threaten the sufficiency of generating capacity for human needs. You can’t easily complain to anybody because you don’t always know who these noisemakers and power-hogs really are, and you excused them from regulation anyway.
It’s a little like fracking except landowners don’t get royalties, but shafts.
Sen. Josh Bryant of Rogers ran this bill through in the waning hours last year. He says he merely looked to protect the industry from unfair local regulation so that it could succeed in the state. He also now says it turned out there were “bad actors” in the business and that the noise is a problem for people.
So, he, with the blessing of the Senate leadership, intends to try to get rules suspended over the next few days to run through another little bill to allow regulation of noise levels and authorize the state to identify and turn away any foreign-adversary interests in these facilities.
Legislating tends to be a collegial activity, a brotherhood, and a brother lathered in a bad bill tends to get the courtesy if he wants first dibs at fixes.
Bryant also has asked an interim legislative committee to work with him on a study of the issue to design broader regulations in the long term.
I guess that outright repeal, or at least a law authorizing a regulatory moratorium, is out of the question.
Sen. Bryan King of Green Forest, a genuine populist conservative who often pesters the ruling legislative class, has emailed to me five attached draft bills that design regulatory roles for the Public Service Commission and other state agencies. Since he is not popular with the insiders, he may not be well-positioned to get his bills passed, or even considered.
Anyway, some legislators are saying they need only to fix the worst of the problems now and not act recklessly beyond that.
We wouldn’t want any legislative recklessness around here, now, would we?