Let the locals speak

The gap between conservative rhetoric and pseudo-conservative practice looms wide. I’m thinking about Russellville and Pope County. You have a red town in a red county in what ostensibly is a red state.

Fine conservative folks in that community want to practice “local control,” a long-held conservative notion holding that folks should decide their own business. But state government in Little Rock, in league with big business and the voters of the state, may be in the process of cramming a casino down the locals’ throats.

Like most things, it’s more complicated than that. That’s because a compounding indignity for local-control adherents in Pope County and Russellville is that the outgoing county judge and mayor, in odd and even odorous behavior, undercut local control in actions taken on their end-of-year departures from office.

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It begins here: In the recent election, voters of the state approved an amendment to the state Constitution to authorize casinos in Jefferson and Pope Counties.

Jefferson County, in dire economic need, has been receptive, and matters proceed apace, probably to result in the Racing Commission’s granting a license to the Quapaw Nation to build and operate a rather substantial casino and hotel there.

But in Pope County, people looked up one day last year and wondered … What the heck? Why us?

The state’s voters, in all 75 counties, were going to decide whether Pope County would be invaded by a casino for which Pope County seemed to have been arbitrarily targeted, and, it turned out, didn’t want.

The constitutional amendment provided that applications for casinos in Jefferson and Pope counties could proceed to the deciding Racing Commission upon the writing of endorsement letters by the county judge and, if the facility was to be inside city limits, the mayor.

So, in tactical response, the quorum court in Pope County referred to the county’s voters an ordinance by which the county judge would not be permitted to write such an approval letter without first a county-wide authorizing vote in a referendum of the people.

On election day, Pope County voters opposed the state constitutional amendment 60-40 percent and approved by 70-30 percent the ordinance requiring a local referendum on the specific casino question when it arose.

That’s about as clear a political verdict as you’re going to get. The people of Pope County didn’t want a casino, probably at all, but assuredly without getting to vote on it themselves, separately.

But then, a few days before leaving office, the outgoing county judge, Jim Ed Gibson, gave his written approval to Gulfside Casino Partnership, a Mississippi concern, to operate a casino outside the Russellville city limits. A couple of days later, on his way out of office, outgoing Russellville Mayor Randy Horton gave his written endorsement as well.

The Cherokee Nation, which is interested in Pope County’s possible casino, had indicated a willingness to work with local residents. But this Mississippi outfit came in from the blind side with the lame-duck county judge and mayor running interference.

Already there is a lawsuit calling into question both the legitimacy of the local ordinance as well as the legality of the stunt the lame-duck county judge pulled in defiance of the county ordinance that local voters approved. The state senator from the area, Breanne Davis, has asked the attorney general for a merely advisory opinion.

There are so many questions, starting with this one: In a pseudo-conservative state that grants no local control other than that expressly delegated by state law, and where the state constitution is supreme law in all its forms, including its amendments approved by the voters, does it make a darn that local voters in Pope County passed a local ordinance asserting a right to decide on their own whether they would accept slot machines in their backyards as dictated by statewide voters?

After you get past that question, you can take up whether the outgoing county judge and mayor could legally take binding actions on the way out of office under the unilateral authority granted them by the state constitutional amendment but denied them by the local ordinance.

It seems to me—as I search in vain for my law license—that, since the state amendment delegates approval to a local political official without defining how the local political official could come to his decision, then the local voters may properly assert the right to restrict or dictate that decision.

After all, the local voters are his bosses, presumably, or at least they were until he sucker-punched them while he was going out the door.

Legal fights aside, the right and wrong of the matter, which won’t much count for anything, seems simple.

The voters of the state can speak on whether to permit a casino in Pope County. But local people ought to get to say whether they want it.

But that’s just me and I must be the real conservative here.