More shoes to drop

Public corruption trial delayed to December

Arkansans already know that one former state representative, Micah Neal of Springdale, has acknowledged his guilt in receiving kickbacks to direct large amounts of taxpayer dollars to projects at a small Christian college in his hometown.

That was and is a shock. But there’s more.

Neal figures to play a prominent role in the prosecution’s case against former state Sen. Jon Woods, Ecclesia College President Oren Paris III and consultant Randall G. Shelton, all of whom have been indicted in connection with their alleged roles in said kickback scheme. Neal’s plea bargain in the case early this year includes a requirement that he assist prosecutors in pursuit of their search for the truth of just how deep and wide illicit activities may have gone.

This week, we learned that the trial will be delayed until December, which isn’t all that unusual. It seems trial dates are almost always bumped back at least once. But the real news this week came in a U.S. District Court hearing before Judge Timothy L. Brooks. Attorneys for the defense told the judge more indictments against other defendants are expected.

A lot of the records in the case remain sealed, but U.S. Attorney Kenneth Elser did not dispute the defense’s comments about the indictments.

Regular readers will remember Neal’s transgressions and the accusations against the other men stem from allocation of tax dollars known as General Improvement Fund money. In basic terms, Wood and Neal are accused of accepting payments for arranging the assignment of several hundred thousand dollars to the college. Shelton, prosecutors allege, was a go-between in the arrangement benefiting the college.

Wood, Paris and Shelton are scheduled to stand trial together.

We’re glad to hear the news that the investigation into allocation of General Improvement Fund money is continuing. The so-called GIF money represents state tax revenue unallocated at the end of each fiscal year and interest earned on state deposits. Each legislator is given a share and can direct it where he wants it to go as long as it goes to a nonprofit group or government entity.

The arrangement is a petri dish for public official corruption.

How disappointing it is to learn that such a scheme exists, but anytime one person is given authority over large sums of public money, there is a great potential for abuse. In the wake of this case, the spreading of taxpayer dollars to pet projects of lawmakers has come to a halt, although only informally. It is our hope we’ve seen the end of such allocations.

With plenty of sealed records, it’s certainly hard to know how far the investigation will go, but the nature of the accusations leaves us ready to encourage investigators to push ahead, to drill down as deep as they can go to examine whether similar arrangements have existed with other GIF money and other lawmakers.

Such abuses deserve to be rooted out and exposed.

As investigators pull on the thread to see what else is revealed in the unraveling, we want the indictments to go as far as they possibly can. To ask voters for authority only to abuse it for self-enrichment once in office is an affront to the public trust. Any lawmaker involved in that deserves to be prosecuted.

Were the men scheduled for December trial involved in such a scheme? That’s impossible to know now, but come December, the evidence against them will be laid out. It will be worth the wait to find out.