Launder and squander

In case you missed the front-page article by investigative reporter Lisa Hammersly on Sunday, I’ll recap as best I can amid laughter.

You, too, can revel in the humor and irony—if you can look past the waste and fraud, which, at this point, you may as well.

Your taxes have been paid already for 2013-2014. Some small portion of what you paid has been laundered and squandered already. All that’s left is to take your amusement where you can and wait for the FBI to drop a few shoes.

It’s true that we probably need to make petty looting of the state treasury a little less easy and more imaginative.

The General Improvement Fund is the pot of state surplus collections that has been used in part in recent years—though not the current one— for equal sums of money distributed to the 135 state legislators and laundered through passive and pliant regional planning and development districts. (To be precise: Senators got 35 equal shares of half and House members got 100 equal shares of half.)

These regional groups released the money as legislators dictated, since it was “their money,” you see.

One former legislator has pleaded guilty to a kickback scheme involving GIF, and another faces an indictment that also lists the president of some sort of putative religious college in Washington County and a fellow putatively a consultant to the supposed religious college.

The Sunday article was about another recipient of money that was passed through mainly, but not totally, by the maker of the guilty plea, former state Rep. Micah Neal of Springdale, and the indicted one, also of Springdale, former state Sen. Jon Woods.

The money, about $40,000, got distributed in late 2013 and early 2014 to a nonprofit entity that had just been incorporated days before as Arkansas Health and Economic Research Inc. Lawyer David Couch of Little Rock says a friend of the subsequently indicted Woods—that’d be the subsequently named consultant, Randell Shelton—asked him to do the papers.

Couch was active in pushing ethics reform and had worked with Woods when the then-senator got involved in a legislative ethics-reform amendment, mainly, it turned out, to subvert it by adding a section lengthening the number of terms legislators could serve.

One thing this startup nonprofit was going to do, supposedly, was advance alternative medicine practices such as ozone therapy, which medical professionals say is not a real thing. The money was passed through a planning district in Northwest Arkansas although the nonprofit was incorporated in Benton in Central Arkansas and another planning district.

Board members of the Northwest Arkansas planning district said they didn’t know what this outfit was, but knew only that the expenditure came from that legislator-controlled money that they were supposed to rubber-stamp.

Apparently, Arkansas Health and Economic Research is no longer active lo these three years later. What happened to the $40,000? Maybe the FBI can figure it out.

A few additional thousands of dollars were passed through to this ozone scheme from the GIF pots of state Rep. Jana Della Rosa of Rogers and state Sen. Bart Hester of Cave Springs.

Della Rosa’s response to the reporter—basically—was … I done whut?

She said it’s hard for a legislator to keep up with where GIF money goes. (I mean, for goodness sakes, they tell you that you have charge of these thousands of dollars, so what are you supposed to do?)

It’s not like the money was going to the KKK, she said, although, by her reckoning, it well could have been if you couldn’t possibly keep up with it. (All a KKK chapter would have to do would be incorporate as a voodoo medicine nonprofit and know a friendly legislator, apparently.)

“Put yourself in our shoes,” she implored the reporter.

All right, then. I’m in your shoes. And I’m saying, “Don’t give me any of that blankety-blank GIF money because it ain’t right. Just because 134 of y’all jump off the Arkansas River bridge doesn’t mean I have to.”

Hester said—basically—that he was a danged fool by going along with Woods and that he thought the money was going to umbilical cord storage and helping parents with sick children.

If only we had legitimate organizations in Arkansas to help parents with sick children. A Children’s Hospital would be nice. Pediatricians are something we could use in Arkansas, if only we had any.

Hester is one of the staunchest conservatives in the Legislature—a Koch brothers’ puppet—except when a fellow legislator asks him to ship a few thousand to some outfit he doesn’t know anything about.

So, yes, I mentioned irony. Alas, I will prove incapable of resisting pointing out that it’s conservative-claiming Republicans caught up exclusively in this launder-and-squander affair … so far.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.