Scott’s year in review
Those who long advocated a “strong mayor” for Little Rock have had occasion the last year to behold their advocacy in practice.
Frank Scott came in a year ago as the first popularly elected black mayor in race-famous Little Rock’s history. At 36, he represented both racial advancement and generational change.
On Thursday, he will deliver his second “State of the City” address. The anniversary has led to reviews of his first year. This essay is another of those.
Scott is a glib Baptist preacher born of disadvantage in southwest Little Rock but instilled with confidence at Memphis University, as a policy aide on former
Gov. Mike Beebe’s staff, and as a banker.
He presumed from nearly the day he took office to help himself to most of the high-profile executive functions formerly handled mostly by the city manager. He did so by long-ignored permissions in the city’s governing ordinance—which created a mayor-city manager hybrid—as well as the audacity stemming from his strong voter mandate.
He tended to talk in grandiose fashion reliant on alliteration and catch-phrases. It landed somewhere between inspiring and off-putting.
For the most part, he backed up the talk.
He cut the unsustainable city budget and closed a midtown golf course for intended long-term conversion to a more broadly used park. He went to a conservative religious group to talk of equality and inclusion for blacks and the LGBT community.
He told me, “I was elected to lead,” and, for that reason, jumped into the deep end of the local school fight, which is not part of his actual job definition, but an essential part of trying to fix Little Rock.
He advocated the city’s partnership in full-service community schools that would be restored by the state to local control. He brought in Jay Barth, the former Hendrix professor and state Board of Education chairman, to lead that effort.
Scott was appreciated by local school advocates for his leadership. He also was distrusted by some for his friendliness with a state government that seemed to them a little too anxious to embrace his middle-ground idea.
Such is sometimes the lot of political pragmatism.
In a one-year retrospective beginning on the front page of this newspaper Sunday, city directors in their 70s and with city board tenures spanning four decades said Scott’s style was different from the way they’d always done it.
I believe that to be Scott’s very point.
For more than a half-century, the city’s government had operated by acquiescent corporate board-styled consensus that seemed to apologize for any unintended newsmaking or political activity.
City board membership was a place for city establishment boosters to go for decades of non-threatening policy talk. Little Rock seemed to go to sleep along with its city board, while Austin, Nashville, San Antonio and Charlotte were wide awake.
Scott’s agenda is an alarm clock. It is grounded in an assertion that Little Rock can be the South’s next great city.
What all that means, as a UALR political science assistant professor put it in the Sunday article, is that people will be inclined to blame him for things they don’t like. That’s simple political accountability, which is fair as long as authority goes with it.
Speaking of blame, there is the matter of Charles Starks, the police officer who fatally shot a black man early in the year.
What I believe happened is that Scott, sensitive to the historical neglect of the neighborhoods he came from, became concerned about heightened racial tension, and, for that reason, influenced, tacitly or otherwise, his hand-picked police chief’s decision to fire the officer. I believe he knew the appeals process could well restore the officer to work, but was willing to serve what he saw as the greater community interest in the meantime.
The Sunday article reported that he’d managed to keep lines of communication open with the police.
You can deplore the injection of race politics to smear an innocent police officer. You can deplore a mayor seeming to take sides against the police. Or you can understand the world’s imperfection and commend Scott’s attention to the broader community concern. I am in the latter camp. If the officer is back at work and race tensions are eased, then I’m clinging to the cliché that all’s well that ends tolerably.
Likewise, we might look up in a few years to find throngs vibrantly inhabiting that former golf course and engaged in an abundance of healthy activities. If so, good. If not, then we may as well have let those golfers keep playing golf.
And we’ll know where to put the blame.
We probably will be able to take a tally on credit and blame pretty soon, when Scott asks the voters for a tax increase vital to his lofty agenda.