NAACP holds town hall for citizen input
Elected leaders, community activists and citizens worried about the next generation took part in the first town hall meeting of the NAACP as it puts together a “people’s plan” for what comes next in the wake of the failed renewal of the Go Forward Pine Bluff-sponsored sales tax.
The 90-minute meeting was held Thursday at Pine Hill Missionary Baptist Church on the edge of the UAPB campus and was attended by close to 70 people.
Ivan Whitfield, former Pine Bluff council member and now president of the NAACP’s local chapter, said he had been asked numerous times “What’s your plan?” He said he had always declined to answer because the details of the plan need to come from citizens.
“It’s not my responsibility or the NAACP’s to come up with a plan,” he told the crowd. “The plan should come from the people. It would be unfair for me to tell you, ‘here’s the plan.’”
Whitfield said another part of putting together a road map forward is to get precise details on what tax dollars are coming in and where they are going.
“We don’t know where the money is being spent,” he said. “For the NAACP to come up with a plan without knowing that is a failed strategy. I’m not going to lead us down that path.”
Whitfield, who has voiced his opposition to Go Forward and its projects, took another swipe at the organization saying when it was being formulated years ago, the scores of individuals who took part had to sign nondisclosure agreements – something the NAACP would not ask for.
“Anyone asked to sign a nondisclosure statement ought to shake their head and say ‘they can’t represent me,’” Whitfield said.
One of the speakers at the meeting was Jimmy Cunningham, who pitched his idea for increasing tourism through a downtown cultural district. Cunningham is the director of the Delta Rhythm
and Bayous Cultural District and said the creation of such an area would tie Pine Bluff to other towns and cities along U.S. 65 and generate more than $18 million a year in local revenue and create some 250 jobs, according to an outside entity that analyzed the plan.
Pine Bluff, he said, has numerous areas of cultural and historical interest and that because of the many stories Pine Bluff can tell a visitor, there might be genuine interest from the National Park Service.
Mary Ann Lee, chair of the Pine Bluff Historic Commission and owner of Indigo Blue Coffeehouse, said the city also needs to capitalize on its historically significant downtown structures.
“People have asked, ‘Why don’t you just tear them down?’” Lee said. “But historic preservation creates space for viable businesses – I own one – and helps revitalize downtown areas. That’s important in terms of contributing to the local economy. Historic preservation attracts tourists.”
Getting adequate financing to renovate an old building can be difficult, Lee said, noting that when she went to the bank for a loan, they told her that her building was not one they wanted to invest in.
“I had to use my own personal money,” she said, adding that eventually she found a program that helped her with the work.
An invitation for comments and questions saw many hands fly into the air. One man said Pine Bluff used to be a beautiful town “but now everywhere you go there are potholes and trash all over. Why is the trash not picked up? Why are the roads so messed up?”
He said he supported efforts to make progress in the city but wondered why more hasn’t been done. “My thing is, where has the money gone? he said. “I don’t see it has done us any good.”
A woman said that whatever plan was formulated, the people in charge have to be held accountable.
“You don’t just let one person say ‘this is what we’re going to do with this money,’” she said. “We need someone to represent the people and not themselves.”
Another woman echoed those remarks, saying a new plan needed “checks and balances.”
“We need transparency. That’s important to me,” she said. “We need accountability for where the money goes. Whatever is decided, they must be accountable and transparent.”
One of the negative remarks about Go Forward is that it lacks transparency and accountability. The organization is a nonprofit and operates in secrecy while at the same time holding sway over millions of dollars in tax proceeds that it directs through the cooperation of a city council that is populated with Go Forward-friendly members.
And the Pine Bluff Urban Renewal Agency, a public subsidiary agency to Go Forward, was operated by Maurice Taggart, who has now been charged with dozens of felonies in connection with the theft of close to $700,000 from the agency when he ran it. City officials have said there needed to have been more oversight on Taggart’s activities.
Other issues that came from audience members concerned Pine Bluff’s poor public school system – now under state control – a lack of activities for the young, a lack of mental health care, an increase in homelessness and the need for more street lights — and street lights that work.
“We need an intervention for our youth,” one woman said. “We are losing them at an alarming rate. We need to give them something to look forward to. We don’t have mentoring men like we used to. We don’t have men in church like we used to. And we can’t keep putting this off on our police department.”
NAACP communications director Michael McCray took notes as people spoke and handed out a community needs assessment survey to gather more specific information on what the community’s needs are.
Another presenter, Lori Walker Guelache, director of the Economic and Community Development Department, broke down the needs of a community into several areas, saying that most of the comments that had been offered concerned “human infrastructure” issues. She said that no matter how much or little a Pine Bluff resident had to offer, each person could contribute to what makes the city better.
Guelache said that a snapshot of available jobs in Pine Bluff showed that there were 444 positions that needed to be filled. Even at minimum wage, if those jobs were filled, there would be millions of dollars of additional money circulating in Pine Bluff, she said.
Likewise, many people work in Pine Bluff but then leave the city and live elsewhere. That “leakage,” Guelache said, costs the city a half-billion dollars a year.
“People come here to work and don’t live here,” she said. “There’s something there that doesn’t match with their quality of life.”
State Rep. Vivian Flowers, who came out against the renewal of the Go Forward-sponsored tax because of what she said was a lack of transparency and accountability, suggested that a plan for the future include a “Pine Bluff Promise,” which, like the El Dorado Promise, would encourage and financially support post high school training and education.
“We have an industrial park full of large-scale corporations and we have banks and credit unions that can help us put this together,” she said.