WHEELER: State legislators should gain first-hand knowledge of challenges around the state. Brian Chilson

As is annual tradition, the Arkansas Times recently solicited suggestions from readers and a variety of experts on how to make Arkansas a better place to live. We present their ideas here and hope you find them as inspirational as we do. If any especially strike a chord with you, help make them happen. Many are works in progress; those that aren’t only lack the right collection of advocates to be realized. See a table of contents below or read the whole thing straight through.

Establish an intra-state legislator exchange program
By Ellie Wheeler

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Build a planetarium in Little Rock
By Kevin Delaney and Tony Hall (reported by Leslie Peacock)

Create a Regional Food Innovation Center for Central Arkansas
Reported by Leslie Newell Peacock

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Teach minority youth to hunt and fish
By Jonathan Wilkins

Build a real workforce education system
By Sen. Jane English

Use private capital to effect social change
By Eric Wilson

Welcome the future wave of Gulf Coast refugees
By Benjamin Hardy

Unlock the gate on the State Street overpass to connect historic West Ninth with Philander Smith College
By Chris Hancock

Honor local culture through grassroots organizing
By Meredith Martin-Moats

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Create a safe place for Craigslist transactions
By Carlton Saffa

Call out prosecutors for misconduct
By Mara Leveritt

Continue the private option
By Dan Rahn

Designate a state fossil for Arkansas
By Walter Manger (reported by Leslie Peacock)

Embrace community policing
By Special Sanders

Build a wall
By Jack Wagoner

Reform juvenile justice
By Jacob Pesicek

Encourage gay foster parents
By Catherine Crisp and Tara DeJohn

Biodigest pig waste
By Jeff Short

Institute a West Little Rock ‘sprawl tax’ to subsidize downtown housing
By Omaya Jones

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Develop exhibit ‘pods’ for Arkansas
By Stephen Koch

Go native with plants
By Randy Forst

Make health care costs transparent
By Sen. David Sanders

Use battlefields to attract tourists
By Mark Christ

Legislative pay for performance
By Stephanie Spencer

Entice alumni of Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences and the Arts to return to Arkansas
By Mike Steely

Establish a veterinary school
By Tobin Williamson

Host a conference in Little Rock for entrepreneurial Arkansas natives who have left the state
By Max Farrell

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Build a childrens museum
By Alison Hall and Britt Gremillion

Create a nonprofit salvage grocery
By Stephanie Smittle

Prioritize recycling
By Lucy Holifield

Create a community center for low-income women
By Lilyan Kauffman

Build an All-American Sports Hall of Fame in North Little Rock
By Phil Beuth

Hire fewer state workers at higher pay
By Rep. Nate Bell

Erect a Cold War memorial
By David Rose

 

Establish an intra-state legislator exchange program
By Ellie Wheeler

State legislators, by definition, represent the narrow interests of their individual constituents, but they’re also responsible for passing laws that reflect the diverse interests of the state as a whole. There’s a big difference between the ultra-affluent parts of Arkansas and the areas where poverty is prevalent, and those differences are reflected in many of the laws that get passed. But what if we could change that? What if we could show a representative from a rich district what it is like in a poor Delta school? What if a senator from a majority-white district could see the world through the eyes of someone who represented a majority-black one?

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Let’s institute a legislator exchange program. Each legislator would be required to spend a week in another area of the state at least twice each year. They would meet with the people there to learn about their unique needs, resources, strengths and limitations. During the week they would visit coffee shops, hospitals, schools and businesses. They would gain first-hand knowledge of the unique challenges other areas of the state face. They’d run into people who come from different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. It’s one thing to hear about such issues, but it’s another to talk with people and share thoughts about how those challenges change lives.

Our legislature has 135 members — 35 senators and 100 members of the House of Representatives. Each district covers a lot of ground, but because of population differences, more than half of our legislators come from just 9 out of Arkansas’s 75 counties. The needs of the state’s rural and underpopulated areas are not equally represented. If we really want state laws to address statewide issues equitably, let’s expand our horizons a bit. Who knows what might come of it? Here’s hoping for fairer tax policies, education reform aimed at eliminating inequities, or maybe just the knowledge that not everybody’s got it as good as you may have.

Ellie Wheeler is a senior policy analyst with Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families.

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Build a planetarium in Little Rock

The size of Kevin Delaney and Dr. Tony Hall’s idea is astronomical: A planetarium for the River Market district downtown. Delaney, the Museum of Discovery employee who’s appeared on the “Tonight Show” with his feats of science, and Hall, the astronomer at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, would like to do it right, build it from the ground up with state-of-the-art equipment — maybe not in league with the Hayden Planetarium, but something decent. “If you are going to put kids on the path to science and engineering, you’ve got to impress them,” Hall said. The projectors that beam the images on the dome now use computers; “anything you can do on a computer you can do on a dome,” Hall said, including taking the audience undersea or into cell structures. “We feel like, given the amount of STEM education happening all over Arkansas, the absence of [a planetarium] is noticeable,” Delaney said. There’s plenty going on in space right now, with the European Space Agency’s landing of little Philae on a comet and NASA’s Orion flight test, and there is plenty going on in Arkansas’s science museum community, with the Amazeum going up in Northwest Arkansas, the Mid-American Science Museum renovation and the Reynolds Foundation-launched Arkansas Discovery Network. So what’s it going to take? Maybe around $1 million for the building and the projector. There are grants available from the National Science Foundation that could help operate the planetarium. And though Hall wouldn’t mind seeing UALR’s own planetarium refurbished (its projector crashed and burned a while back), he thinks downtown makes more sense. “The more we looked into it, the more we felt it wasn’t really practical [to build on campus]. College campuses aren’t meant to have kids running around … and we love the idea of having it in downtown,” Hall said, especially if it could reach Little Rock’s underprivileged kids. The planetarium could also give meteorite collections of UALR and the museum “a permanent home,” Delaney said. Plus, Delaney said, the Central Arkansas Astronomical Society could use the planetarium “as a hub for space geeks.”

-Leslie Newell Peacock

A Regional Food Innovation Center for Central Arkansas

Tremendous attention has been paid to the potential for a new technology-based economy in Arkansas. There’s a palpable urgency to mentor entrepreneurs and create foundries for biotech and nanotech inventions.

Now, Arkansas’s traditional economy — farming — is being invited to join the revolution, with the creation of what’s being called a Regional Food Innovation Center as a companion to the Argenta Innovation Center maker/mentor/art space in downtown North Little Rock.

The idea came from forward-looking folks at the Arkansas Regional Innovation Hub, the state Agriculture Department, the University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service and the Arkansas Hunger Relief Alliance. Their idea is to create a place for farmers and others to develop new foods, strategies for marketing and packaging, better access to nutritious food in “food deserts” and new agricultural technologies. The idea has already borne fruit: The partnership was one of just 26 in the nation selected by the federal “Local Foods, Local Places” program to win its assistance in improving economic opportunities for farmers and increasing access to healthy food.

WARWICK SABIN

On a trip to business accelerator programs in Chicago last April, Warwick Sabin, executive director of the Hub, met the creator of an electronic device that plugs into a combine harvester and collects data on crop and soil composition. The startup, 640 Labs, has since been acquired by Monsanto. It made Sabin wonder, what could the Hub do to address farmers’ needs? “The more I dug into the idea, the more I learned about these efforts going on around the country,” he said, and not just for farmers, but all involved in the food industry.

Sabin got with Zack Taylor, marketing director at the state Agriculture Department. Taylor brought in Amanda Philyaw Perez of the UA Cooperative Extension Service. The Hunger Relief Alliance, which wants to create a food “gleaning” facility where donated fresh food is collected for redistribution, got on board. The timing was just right: Perez was aware of the “Local Foods” initiative, which put out requests for applications in July.

Modeled on programs at Ohio State University, Oregon State University and the Rutgers Food Innovation Center in New Jersey, Arkansas’s Regional Food Innovation Center, to be built adjacent to or near the Argenta Innovation Center, will have a certified kitchen to develop new food products, a labeling and packaging area, a greenhouse and garden for instruction, and a gleaning center. With access to the Innovation Center’s Launch Pad for inventors and Silver Mine business accelerator, food industry entrepreneurs can explore new business models. “I have a lot of friends who are farmers,” Sabin said, “and they are some of the most technologically adept people I know.”

The North Little Rock location of the center would make access convenient for the state’s food industry community.

The “Local Foods/Local Places” award provides the services of consultants that will work with the Innovation Center over a period of months to produce a plan; expect the first public hearing in February. When the plan is complete, the Food Center project will be eligible for funding from the partner federal agencies; agencies here will raise funding from local sources. Sabin said the partners are now working to expand the group, calling on others in the food industry to join in. “We want to cast a wide net to make sure we don’t leave anybody out. Everybody from restaurant owners to St. Joseph’s Farm,” Sabin said. The group does not want to replicate other programs or compete. “We want to make sure it’s value-added.”

-Leslie Newell Peacock

Teach minority youth to hunt and fish
By Jonathan Wilkins

We live in a state where too many residents of urban, economically depressed neighborhoods don’t have access to the natural world and all of the benefits that exposure to it provides. That’s PC code language for: Poor black and brown folks from the cities don’t ever go in the woods. They don’t hunt, they don’t fish, they don’t forage. They suffer from a lack of meaningful physical activity, poor diets and the medical issues that result from not moving enough and eating crap food.

What would happen if some of the young people in these communities were introduced to hunting and fishing? Not a fishing derby at a stocked pond in Little Rock, but being mentored for the long haul in the woods of Arkansas and on its lakes and bayous.

Take an average 10-year-old with no exposure to guns except in media, and perhaps instances of human-on-human violence. (We’ll use a boy for this example, but a girl would work just as well.) Bring him to an Arkansas Game and Fish Commission gun range and teach him how to safely and responsibly shoot a .22 rifle, under strict supervision. Transform the idea of a gun from a status symbol into a tool to hone a meditative skill. Find the target, steady your aim, let out half a breath, hold it, and slowly squeeze the trigger. Let the bullet going off surprise you.

WILKINS: Hunting and fishing provide all sorts of benefits to young people.

Upon mastering the rifle range, take that child on a squirrel hunt at Wattensaw Wildlife Management Area. Let him hear the woods wake up in the morning and see the palette of colors that a sunrise produces in an oak grove. Show him how to walk with intentional, methodical, carefully placed steps, punctuated with long pauses of stillness and silence and breathing and listening. On a hunt, there is no bravado, only competency. Maybe he gets a squirrel, and maybe he doesn’t. Teach him that there is always value in listening and learning from the woods.

Let these lessons build on themselves year after year. How to fish, how to swim and how to work with dogs. How to find food in wild places, how to process it and how to cook it. Link the privilege of participating in such a program to academic performance. Make kids earn every bit of it.

I hazard to guess that the result will be a child who absorbs skills that will help him succeed in living anywhere, whether in the city or in the country. There will be personal triumphs of harvesting deer and putting food on his family’s table, but there will also be lessons derived from failure. And, the health benefits of walking and climbing and running will become evident.

You’ll end up with a 16-year-old who has learned valuable skills and developed relationships with people he might not otherwise have ever met. Maybe the older gentleman who taught him how to gut a deer needs help this summer at the warehouse he owns. Perhaps the skeet instructor from last year is on the board of a local college. Or maybe none of that happens, and you just end up with a person who is able to live a healthier lifestyle, provide organic, free-range protein for his family, and pass on these skills to his own children.

Setting up such a program would require an investment of time and money from volunteers, schools, the AGFC, local chefs, business owners, land owners and others in the statewide community. But, it would be worth it to create an environment where people are more responsible for others and the world around them, a world that is a little bit more like the one most of us say we want to live in. Let’s put our money and our time where our mouth is.

Jonathan Wilkins is an avid outdoorsman who lives in rural Pulaski County. He is a sales manager for Arkansas Fresh Bakery in Bryant.

ENGLISH: State should teach real world job skills.

Build a real workforce education system
By Sen. Jane English

My goal for a very long time has been to find a way to build a system for workforce development. Right now we have a lot of silos: K-12 education, two-year colleges, higher education and business all live in their own world. For me, though, education is “K through career.” Even when you’re in a career, there ought to be education and skills training that helps people move up in their jobs.

For the past 20 years, we’ve said the only way to be successful is to go to college, and there’s only one path to go to college. But fewer than 40 percent of Arkansas students seeking a bachelor’s degree graduate within six years of starting school. What good does it do for someone to go off to college and flunk out? Where do they go with the rest of their lives? We’ve got to have things in place to make sure folks can have a career.

There are not a whole lot of 18-year-olds who know what they want to do with the rest of their life when they get out of high school. We must get the business community to help us begin introducing different types of job opportunities to kids in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. We should create technical programs where kids in the ninth through 12th grades can take classes that teach them applied skills, whether it’s in information technology or manufacturing. They can earn a certification along with their high school diploma and are able to get a job right out of high school.

In Lonoke, the school district has had a problem with students dropping out in ninth grade. The superintendent asked some kids why, and they told her, “Because there’s nothing here for us.” They said they wanted to learn how to weld. So, she set up a welding program in the high school. Now kids are learning math and science and English — all the things they’re supposed to be learning — but they’ve also got something that catches them and holds on to them. It’s a reason for staying in school, like football or basketball. Ninety-six percent of the kids who are in career and technical education programs graduate from high school, which is far higher than the average. They have something that has enticed them to stay.

We also have to get companies to help us understand what jobs are out there and what the skill requirements are. Other states have figured this out long before we have. We’ve had an Arkansas employer tell us that they can’t hire computer science majors because some of the things the students learn at the university aren’t relevant. We have a manufacturing company on Interstate 40 that’s been without two or three management positions for years. We’ve got a data company that can’t find the data people to come and work.

There are good things going on as well. For example, the University of Arkansas Community College at Morrilton has formed a partnership with local businesses to teach people the skills they need for one high-demand field: heating and air conditioning. In Paris, Cloyes Gear is working with the local Chamber of Commerce, the school superintendent and Arkansas Tech University to train workers.

We also need to do more to help workers learn new skills and earn certifications. We have many people here in the state who dropped out of school to work; they’re good people but they don’t have basic skills, and employers recognize that. We have a program right now where employers can utilize state-funded adult education teachers to help employees learn basic skills — say, reading, or math — because the employers want to keep them.

This is why talk about the minimum wage is misguided. Who in the world wants their child to end up in a minimum wage job? Nobody! It’s a good start, but only a stepping stone. There has to be a career pathway for that person to advance.

We’ve got to make sure that K-12, the colleges and the business community — this whole line of education and training — is hooked together. Education is a product, and we have to make sure that the product we’re delivering to students is a good one.

Jane English is a Republican state senator who represents District 34. She lives in North Little Rock.

Use private capital to effect social change
By Eric Wilson

Innovation always carries risk, but the complexity and scale of challenges facing society require us to take that risk. Eighty-five percent of the economic growth in the United States comes from private-sector innovation. How do we direct that innovation toward society’s most pressing problems?

Arkansas should join an increasing number of states in employing Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) — also known as “Pay for Success” — to mitigate the public’s financial risk of innovation and access untapped private capital to invest in performance-based programming in social sectors.

First implemented in Great Britain, the first SIB in the U.S. was announced in August 2012 with the goal of reducing recidivism among 16- to 18-year-old males at New York City’s Rikers Island prison. Here’s how it works:

Goldman Sachs loans $9.6 million to the nonprofit MDRC, which manages the intervention program.

To offset the risk, Bloomberg Philanthropies guarantees $7.2 million of Goldman Sachs’ investment.

An independent evaluator monitors and determines the results of the program. New York pays MDRC based on the associated cost savings from the reduced number of reincarcerations.

For Goldman Sachs to break even on its investment, the program needs to produce a 10 percent reduction in recidivism. If the program fails, the taxpayers pay nothing.

This model provides a platform for the public, private and nonprofit sectors to come together, leveraging their different strengths to solve a social problem.

With only five SIB projects underway in the U.S., both advocates and critics are anxiously awaiting the results of this new financial instrument. However, the U.K. is already reporting progress on its first SIB. While the national average of reconvictions for adult males serving sentences less than 12 months rose 10 percent, the SIB pilot intervention program at a prison in Peterborough, England, saw an 11 percent decline over that same period, putting investors on track to recoup their loan and possibly make a return.

The Social Impact Technical Assistance Lab at the Harvard Kennedy School works with governments to foster social innovation, and played an important role in designing the first SIB projects in the U.S. Based on its experience, successfully implementing an SIB starts with “enthusiasm and commitment among leadership.”

We saw an indication of this during the 2013 legislative session when Rep. Warwick Sabin (D-Little Rock) presented his public-private partnerships bill (HB 1251) to support major infrastructure projects. While the legislation ultimately failed to pass the Senate, it started the conversation about how the private sector can invest in public sector projects and share in the risks and rewards.

Cost-saving preventive services in government-funded sectors like prisons and early childhood education offer investment vehicles for the private sector to participate and offset the risk of innovation for taxpayers. SIBs have the potential to create a new social services marketplace in Arkansas to pilot and scale solutions that have a clear and measured impact. Pursuing this innovative model now is an opportunity to showcase our state’s strong entrepreneurial heritage.

Eric Wilson is CEO of Noble Impact, a new high school education venture in partnership with the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service. You can follow him at twitter.com/eric_wilson.

BENJAMIN HARDY

Welcome the future wave of Gulf Coast refugees
By Benjamin Hardy

Let’s develop a 50-year plan for the Little Rock metropolitan area to deal with the very real possibility of a massive influx of displaced humanity from New Orleans and south Louisiana as ocean levels rise.

The truth about climate change is that nobody knows exactly what’s going to happen in the coming decades, not me or you or James Inhofe. Maybe catastrophe will be avoided — or maybe, as indicated by the geological record and our best predictive modeling systems, higher concentrations of atmospheric carbon will incrementally dial up global temperatures, triggering feedback effects that accelerate the melt of polar ice caps and imperil coastal cities from Mumbai to Miami.

Obviously, what we most urgently need right now is prevention. We must implement global, national and state-level strategies to drastically scale back our use of fossil fuels (as Arkansas is contemplating doing). But we also need a state and local plan for what to do if business as usual continues and catastrophe comes to pass. Because they know the threat is real, coastal cities like New York, Chicago, and London have crafted long-term plans for dealing with rising seas and extreme weather events.

Inland states like Arkansas face a different challenge: migration. About 14 million people live in coastal counties along the Gulf of Mexico, and if the ocean threatens to overwhelm their homes in a generation, they’ll have to go somewhere. Look at a map. Austin, San Antonio and Dallas would likely absorb refugees from Houston. Florida’s huddled masses would stream toward Southeastern cities like Atlanta. And the residents of Greater New Orleans and south Louisiana will head north, to Shreveport and Jackson and points beyond.

Why not encourage the future New Orleanian diaspora to resettle here in Little Rock en masse?

We’ll need a massive, rapid development of new housing and civic infrastructure. I suggest building along the banks of the Arkansas River, east of present-day downtown (the Arkansas is a lesser echo of the Mississippi, to be sure, but it’s also a more manageable companion for a city). Since Little Rock so badly wants its own streetcars, development can center on a public transit system designed to mimic the look (if not the efficiency) of the St. Charles and Canal lines.

We’ll need huge investments in social services and public education. We’ll need to craft a workforce and economic development plan in collaboration with every major business interest in the region. I have high hopes that the Walton Family Foundation will feel some responsibility to pitch in a few billion dollars for resettlement costs, since they’ve invested so heavily in the charterization of New Orleans public schools in the past.

Pulaski County should welcome displaced New Orleanians with open arms partly because they’re our neighbors and partly because every American bears the collective guilt of all those tons of atmospheric carbon. But we also stand to reap great benefits from their arrival, since (as was often said post-Katrina) the essence of New Orleans is contained in its people, not in a few particular square miles of Louisiana. The second lines and Carnival, the roast beef po’ boys and the drive-through daiquiris, the brass and the bounce and all the more ineffable things that comprise the most beautiful and culturally complex city in America — that’s what we’ll welcome. What we’re really talking about here is trying our best to move what will remain of New Orleans itself, salvaging whatever we’re able in the face of unthinkable loss and transporting it to Arkansas.

Little Rock as we know it would be transformed, even subsumed — but hey, that’s history for you. Like it or not, we’ll probably inherit NOLA’s climate as well. At least we’ll have live oaks.

I know what some of you are thinking: Yes, there’s a lot to love about New Orleans, but what about its unsavory elements? I hear you. Along with all the working and creative classes of the city, we’ll also inevitably have to deal with a number of troublemakers and freeloaders. I’m talking about New Orleans’ oil industry executives, financiers and old money scions — the people, in short, whose wealth and moral inertia will enable the climate crisis in the first place. I have my qualms too, but listen: We have to be charitable. If they reform their ways, they’ll be welcome here in the new Little Rock as well. We believe in second chances.

Benjamin Hardy is an associate editor at the Arkansas Times.

CHRIS HANCOCK

Unlock the gate on the State Street overpass to connect historic West Ninth with Philander Smith College
By Chris Hancock

Some call it a bridge to nowhere: the State Street overpass that leads from historic West Ninth Street to the campus of Philander Smith College, or at least it would, if not for the gate that closes the street to all vehicular traffic, making bicycle and pedestrian traffic impossible.

As a former employee of the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center, I heard several complaints from visitors, students and professionals after thwarted attempts to walk the short distance between historic West Ninth and Philander Smith.

There are often lectures, screenings, exhibit openings and other events along West Ninth at MTCC and Dreamland Ballroom and in various locations on the campus of Philander Smith College. It would be mutually beneficial for each of these cultural venues to allow visitors to walk or ride between Philander Smith and West Ninth.

Wesley Chapel, a historic church founded by the father of Charlotte Stephens, is located just inside the gate. Wesley Chapel would surely benefit from being more accessible to its congregation as well as visitors interested in its history. A closed gate isn’t welcoming to the visitors — families, reunions, tour groups, researchers, jazz aficionados — who visit West Ninth and Philander to explore the rich history of the area.

Once known as “The Line,” Ninth Street was a bustling east-west thoroughfare with a trolley line. It was a vital community with a thriving urban fabric of mixed-use development that was largely black-owned.

Booker T. Washington spoke at Ninth and Broadway in 1913. Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong and others performed at the Dreamland Ballroom and other jazz clubs along Ninth. Daisy and L.C. Bates ran their Arkansas State Press there, and, from the present location of MTCC, the Mosaic Templars operated a politically and financially influential headquarters.

The campus of Philander Smith once spanned north to West Ninth before Interstate 630 tore through the social and economic fabric of the district. As Philander Smith welcomes a new president and continues to attract competitive faculty as well as prospective students by hosting dynamic programming, this is an opportunity to envision the entrance at the State Street bridge as a gateway rather than a barrier.

Bicycle and pedestrian traffic are among the most vital signs of a thriving community. While we attempt to make other areas of our city walkable, why prevent it here?

It is pragmatic to allow pedestrian and bicycle traffic between Philander Smith and the burgeoning cultural corridor of Historic West Ninth Street, and it’s poetic to bridge the divider that dismantled the district: I-630.

There are many potential compromises that will prevent unwanted vehicular traffic while allowing bicycle and pedestrian traffic, such as a side-gate, removable traffic poles or simply opening the gate and using a temporary traffic barrier.

A bridge is a terribly expensive thing to waste. One of the goals of the 2015 Pop Up in the Rock project, Pop Up West Ninth, is to use the bridge for community development in the burgeoning cultural district. Pop Up in the Rock, a joint volunteer project of studioMAIN and Create Little Rock, is a community development organization that creates temporary demonstrations (pop ups) of what is possible on a block with under-developed potential. These short-term demonstrations have lasting impact by illustrating what is possible when businesses, cultural institutions and communities come together.

A Pop Up West Ninth in the fall of 2015 is proposed to span from the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center at Ninth and Broadway to Dreamland Ballroom at Ninth and State and across the State Street bridge to the campus of Philander Smith.

Chris Hancock is co-chair of Pop Up in the Rock 2015 and a City Beautiful commissioner.

Honor local culture through grassroots organizing
By Meredith Martin-Moats

When most people think of community centers, they imagine a large, modern building with glass double doors and an indoor basketball court. Such recreational facilities are an important part of any town, but we also need other shared spaces in our communities that nourish local culture and civic life.

In early 2015, the McElroy House: Organization for Cultural Resources is slated to open a small community center in Dardanelle that will serve as an idea hub for Pope and Yell counties. It will be a home for small skill-sharing workshops led by community members, a living room for socializing, and a place for parents, elders and children (in both English and Spanish-speaking communities) to gather, share concerns and ideas, and learn from one another.

Back in 2006, I had the opportunity to work with Michael Morrow, the man behind the West Kentucky African American Heritage and Research Center in Russellville, Ky. Morrow and other members of his community researched the area’s history and genealogies dating back to slavery and worked collectively to renovate and preserve structures dating from the 1700s. (White people often take for granted how easy it is to research our own histories. At the same time, we often forget the importance of knowing the everyday stories of our community’s deep past.) As I watched Morrow turn near-dilapidated houses into places of fearless learning, I began dreaming of returning to my hometown of Dardanelle and exploring what it can mean to dig into the past with the goal of working toward a new kind of future. Together with Marie Williams, a Dover native who recently received her MA in history from Arkansas Tech University, we’re working to create a community idea hub for our section of the River Valley.

The McElroy House is built on valuing our landscape and cultural resources, exploring how the past informs the present, and creating partnerships across generations, races and cultures. We work to find commonalities between working class communities in urban and rural areas across Central Arkansas. We believe in exploring the past for the sake of the future and the importance of deep listening and collective action.

So far, our work has focused on researching and documenting local oral histories and creating community-based media pieces for print and radio. Soon, though, we will open a community center in the house from which our organization gets its name. Built in the 1940s, this home once belonged to Lloyd and Golda McElroy, former tenant farmers and chicken plant workers who raised their family in Yell County. They were everyday people, living in a simple house, and their histories are similar to many others’ in the community.

We’ve worked with the University of Arkansas Community Design Center to create a low-impact parking lot that will reduce water runoff, and we’ll explore ways everyday people can rethink our relationship to this most important of resources. We’ll cover the grounds in perennials donated from area gardens and native plants that attract bees and butterflies. We’ll cultivate vegetables in partnership with a local heirloom seed saving group that is working to ensure our regional vegetable varieties are around for generations to come. We believe that even small amounts of food production can reduce food insecurity in low-income communities; in a largely low-income state, people in both rural and urban areas have been engaging in resource conservation and so-called “green living” for generations.

We plan to hold workshops on everything from understanding the local election process to making herb tinctures, from anti-racist dialogue to knitting classes to developing initiatives for creating locally based incomes. Community members will suggest topics, and our offerings will grow to reflect a diversity of needs and voices. We want to bring people together to explore history, even the difficult stories we all need to learn in order to work across divisions of race, class and culture. We don’t know exactly where this will lead us, but that’s the point. We want to create a space, both conceptually and literally, to bring people together so we all listen deeply to one another and find ways to learn from our past in such a way that plans for our collective future.

Our center isn’t about acquiring big grants for sustainability initiatives or complicated programming. It’s about starting where we’re at, rethinking our approaches to living and working spaces, and honing the skills of our grandparents for our current needs. We want our center to be a working example of how even the simplest structure can be a place to harness rain, grow a little food and rethink local resources for the benefit of all.

Meredith Martin-Moats is a mother, organizer, folklorist, gardener, oral historian, freelancer writer and Arkansas native. She writes at boileddownjuice.com.

Create a safe place for Craigslist transactions
By Carlton Saffa

At first glance, this Big Idea might not seem so big at all. That is, of course, unless you were one of the two Little Rock men shot on a Tuesday evening last month while trying to kick the tires of a used car spotted on Craigslist.

The Little Rock Police Department ought to dedicate a few of the 44,000 square feet in its new 12th Street Station as an Internet transaction space. It would be a safe room (as well as a spot or two in the parking lot) from which a Craigslist seller and a Craigslist buyer could meet without shooting at one another.

Like most good ideas, this one is borrowed, inspired by a similar bazaar in Pennsylvania, but that in no way diminishes its potential impact on our city. Interestingly, Little Rock is perfectly poised to implement this plan, with 6,300 square feet of that new substation reserved for retail currently sitting vacant, and likely to be for years to come. It appears that the bond financing that made the station possible now makes, for the time being, that portion of the building unavailable for outside retail lease.

So there it is. It could be up and running by week’s end. I’m no tech wizard; I’ve never bought anything off Craigslist. But here’s one big idea that may save your life or at least give you some peace of mind while buying or selling your stuff.

Carlton Saffa is the Arkansas manager of Washington National insurance company. In January he’ll begin work as senior advisor to Gov.-elect Asa Hutchinson.

MARA LEVERITT

Call out prosecutors for misconduct
By Mara Leveritt

Do what the Arkansas Supreme Court won’t: Call out prosecutors who don’t play by the rules.

Though the state Supreme Court continually reprimands private attorneys for missteps — it disbarred President Clinton — the court has not sanctioned a prosecuting attorney in at least the past 25 years. This bias protects state’s attorney’s political aspirations, while concealing information about violations that may have caused grave injustice.

The nonprofit Center for Prosecutor Integrity is addressing this nationwide transparency problem. Using state and federal court records that cite prosecutor misconduct, the nonprofit has created a multifunctional public database: prosecutorintegrity.org/registry/database.

It costs about $50 to research a case for inclusion on the Registry of Prosecutor Misconduct, which partly explains why only two cases from Arkansas have been added so far. But tax-deductible donations could change that. Send checks (and the names of cases in which courts have found misconduct, if you know of any) to: CPI, P.O. Box 1221, Rockville, MD 20849. Mark your checks “for Arkansas” — and help lift that thumb off our scales.

Mara Leveritt is contributing editor to Arkansas Times and the author of the books “Dark Spell,” “Devil’s Knot” and “The Boys on the Tracks.”

Continue the private option
By Dan Rahn

Nothing is more important to the future of our city and state than the health of the population. The best idea I can think of to make Little Rock and Arkansas better places to live, work and raise a family is the continuation of funding for insurance expansion. As a society we must all work together to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to have access to high quality health care. Positive change in our health system rests on this issue of access.

Dan Rahn is chancellor of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.

Arkansas needs a state fossil

Anne Orsi, a Little Rock lawyer and “dinosaur geek,” and paleontologist Walter Manger, professor emeritus in the department of geosciences at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, are among those who would like to see Arkansas name a state fossil. Arkansas is one of only 10 states that have not designated a state fossil. In fact, Orsi thinks we could use both a state fossil, to honor the giant nautiloids found in Northwest Arkansas, and a state dinosaur, Arkansaurus, the only dino uncovered in Arkansas (since the state was largely underwater during the Cretaceous). Orsi hopes to get teachers and elementary students involved, for both a science and government lesson: The children could learn about Arkansas’s ancient past as well as how the legislature works by following the passage of a bill naming the fossils through the committees to the floor. Manger wrote the following for the Times:

Sea monsters in Fayetteville? It’s true! In 2003, the longest straight-shelled nautiloid cephalopod ever found, bearing the imposing name Rayonnoceras solidiforme, was excavated from a culvert near Interstate 540 (now Interstate 49) in the Fayetteville city limits by three geology students from the University of Arkansas.

HONOR THE FOSSIL: Dr. Walter Manger (left) and students at the 2003 discovery of the record-sized Rayonnoceras solidiforme in Fayetteville.

The shell of this specimen measured 8 feet. Amazingly, it was the second such find of a giant Rayonnoceras: The previous record for this species, measuring a mere 7 feet, 2 inches, had been found in Fayetteville 40 years earlier. Both individuals lived and died about 325 million years ago in shallow seas that covered the southern Ozark region during what geologists call the Mississippian Subsystem of the Carboniferous System. The nautiloids are distant cousins of the smaller modern chambered cephalopod Nautilus, which is coiled and lives in deep-water environments of the Indo-Pacific region.

In addition to its straight shell, composed of calcium carbonate, Rayonnoceras would have had several feet of tentacles extending from the aperture of the shell. Like Nautilus, it also likely had eyes, a jaw-like beak and a siphon called a hyponome. The nautiloids, and other cephalopods, swim by jet propulsion. Water is drawn in beside the head and forced out through the hyponome. The hyponome can be moved by muscles that allow the cephalopod to swim either forward or backward.

After death, these individuals would have floated in the ancient sea for some period of time. Other marine organisms, big and small, would have fed on the soft parts of these dead animals. The chambers would slowly fill with seawater, causing the shells to sink to the sea floor, to be covered by the barely oxygenated black mud that became the Fayetteville Shale.

A typical Rayonnoceras from the Fayetteville Shale might reach 3 feet: Hundreds of these individuals have been found in the Fayetteville Shale. Many other fossil cephalopods exhibit the same pattern of a few giant individuals, perhaps three or four times the average diameter of the typical specimen. So how did these individuals become giants? A number of modern cephalopods, and other living organisms, exhibit what is called mass semelparity, meaning they reproduce once and die — like Pacific salmon — in a single area. This explains the many “hot spot” fossil localities recorded in northern Arkansas by the UA’s department of geosciences, and why these students were out collecting on that January day in 2003. These individuals are all about the same size. Giants, such as our 8-foot specimen, have a pathological condition that prevented them from reaching sexual maturity; hence they continue to grow to sizes far greater than a typical mature adult.

Arkansas has achieved worldwide recognition for its Carboniferous fossil cephalopod occurrences. Faculty and students in the UA geosciences department have produced nearly 60 years of world class research on these fossils, involving literally hundreds of papers and presentations. Type specimens from the southern Ozarks are housed at many of the major American museums and universities, including the University of Arkansas Museum. Most of the world’s researchers on Carboniferous cephalopods have visited the university and northern Arkansas. The quadrennial International Symposium on Cephalopods — Past and Present was held in Fayetteville in 2004, the only time it has been held in the United States. It would be fitting to acknowledge these contributions by designating Rayonnoceras solidiforme, particularly its two pathologic giants, as the state fossil of Arkansas.

-Leslie Newell Peacock

Embrace community policing
By Special Sanders

As I have watched the tragic events unfold recently in Ferguson, Mo.; Staten Island, N.Y.; and Cleveland, I can’t help but ponder where we go from here as a nation and as a state. It seems that we conveniently run away from our past instead of completing an honest assessment of our present.

The unrest in Ferguson demonstrates that even small cities aren’t immune to the disconnect that exists between minorities and the police departments that serve them. I live in a town in Southeast Arkansas with a population of fewer than 5,000, yet I feel there is nothing to prevent the place I call home from becoming the next Ferguson. Many young minority residents (myself included) do not trust the local police due to past misbehavior and a sustained lack of professionalism from former officers. Even with new staffing, it’s hard to trust those would-be leaders when we still encounter disrespect and suspicion from law enforcement. If citizens lose hope in the justice system, people do not cooperate with local police even in instances where working together would produce mutually beneficial outcomes.

I don’t have all the answers, but it’s time for a statewide initiative to encourage all Arkansas police departments to embrace community policing. Officers need to get out of their cars and speak to the citizens in the neighborhoods they patrol. They should connect with folks via social media. Cops should work with local nonprofits and reach out to youth — not just small children, but teenagers and beyond. If officers feel that they cannot relate to the people they serve, then their department should make an investment in diversity training and community outreach efforts so that these groups of individuals are at least vaguely familiar with each other.

For this to succeed, it can’t just be the work of the police, however. Members of the community need to do their part by talking with law enforcement and letting them know how they feel — positively and negatively.

None of this can happen without trust. In order for people to gain the trust of others, they must first feel that they will be taken seriously and that their viewpoints and perceptions matter.

Special Sanders is a community organizer who lives in McGehee.

Build a wall
By Jack Wagoner

My initial starting point for my “Take Back Little Rock” initiative would be to build a Berlin Wall-type structure immediately on the west side of Interstate 430 where the city demographic changes from blue to red. People on the west side of the wall would not be allowed to cross over to the east side. People on the east side would be allowed to move to the west side, but once they left the east they would never be allowed back. Anyone on the east side caught voting Republican would be ejected from the east side, required to live on the west side, and be required to immediately join the Chenal Country Club and Fellowship Bible Church. This would make those of us who have lived 50 years in Little Rock more comfortable, since to us Little Rock ends at I-430. We generally refer to everything west of that as “East Perryville.”

Jack Wagoner is a Little Rock lawyer.

Reform juvenile justice
By Jacob Pesicek

The Arkansas juvenile justice system needs major reforms. To reduce incarceration and recidivism among our youth, we need proven approach that includes a highly responsive probation program for juveniles, evening reporting centers, notification caller programs for upcoming juvenile court dates, and improved statewide data collection.

A model already exists for the first item for the probation program. Hawaii’s Opportunity Probation with Enforcement (HOPE) imposes predictable and immediate sanctions for probation violations, such as detected drug use or missed probation appointments. These swift, incremental sanctions are more effective at modifying behavior than traditional probation. An independent 2009 study conducted for the U.S. Department of Justice found that HOPE probationers were 55 percent less likely to be arrested for a new crime than probationers not in the program, 72 percent less likely to use drugs, 61 percent less likely to skip appointments with their probation officer and 53 percent less likely to have their probation revoked. Overall, they were sentenced to 48 percent fewer days of incarceration.

Saline County is now home to a pilot program for adult offenders that’s modeled on HOPE; why not extend that program to juveniles?

Second, in many rural, low-income areas of Arkansas, judges have limited alternatives to incarceration. Even when alternatives exist, juveniles frequently are not matched with appropriate existing programs. In more urban areas, evening reporting centers are popular and relatively low-cost alternatives to incarceration for youths charged with non-violent offenses, often in cooperation with local churches and schools. Youth crime tends to increase during the times of day when kids are idle or unsupervised, so providing them with recreational, educational and other structured activities on weekday evenings and on weekends makes a big impact.

Evening reporting centers should be expanded and provided with more resources. Hiring staff members from the local community and providing free transportation to and from the ERC are essential to their success.

Third, as simple as it sounds, placing a call to remind defendants of an upcoming court date has been shown to significantly reduce the likelihood of a “failure to appear” in court. This conserves court and law enforcement resources. A Jefferson City, Mo., a pilot program showed a 43 percent reduction in failures to appear if live callers contacted the defendant one week before his or her court date. (Automated calls, on the other hand, were determined to be less effective.) We could do something similar for Arkansas juvenile defendants, perhaps with court-vetted volunteers.

Finally, data collection on juvenile justice in Arkansas must be improved. Juvenile detention centers in Arkansas are locally operated and have limited uniform or centralized reporting requirements, according to a 2014 report by Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families (“Why Detention is Not Always the Answer”). Forms are left incomplete in many cases, which means there is often no record of whether a youth was placed in detention awaiting a hearing or if he or she was detained upon being judged delinquent. Effective and lasting change will require broad-based community support and participation; in order to make the case for reform, we must have good data and measurable results.

Jacob Pesicek is a pro bono lawyer at Janus Institute For Justice, a nonprofit organization committed to the advancement of environmental and social justice through education, advocacy and activism, social media, volunteerism, community outreach and other forms of non-violent, civic engagement.

Encourage gay foster parents
By Catherine Crisp and Tara DeJohn

Imagine a state where you are a child and you have been removed from your parents because of neglect or abuse. Imagine that you are placed in group homes, residential treatment centers and numerous foster homes and have been moved from place to place to place. The primary reason behind these moves is driven by a lack of placements: There just aren’t enough foster/adoptive parents to meet the demands of children lingering in care.

Imagine that you are an adult with a stable job, a loving spouse, a home to share, and you want to be a parent to a child who needs loving parents. Imagine that despite being identified as a parent anyone would want to have, you continue to be denied the opportunity to parent a child because you are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. You are denied this right because people in Arkansas continue to believe that LGBT people are still unfit to parent and you and your spouse are consistently overlooked as potential parents.

Now imagine that all this has changed. Imagine that child welfare workers throughout the state of Arkansas have been adequately provided with placement resources and are supportive of LGBT adults who want to be foster and adoptive parents. This change in people’s attitudes has led to more than enough foster and adoptive parents for all the children in Arkansas who need care. This is the vision we have for Arkansas.

We envision Arkansas as a state where LGBT adults are actively recruited and encouraged to become adoptive and foster parents, thus increasing the number of children placed in loving homes and reducing the number of out-of-home placements. We also envision a state where child welfare workers in both public and private agencies throughout Arkansas are trained to be sensitive and responsive to the needs of all youth in care, including LGBT youth. We envision a state where child welfare workers understand LGBT youth’s unique needs and support them in being placed in loving and caring homes.

Catherine Crisp and Tara DeJohn are associate* and assistant professors in the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s School of Social Work, respectively.

Biodigest pig waste
By Jeff Short

Feeling down every time you eat a BLT?

That’s how I feel, knowing I am encouraging the Cargill piggery at Mt. Judea to go about its business, raising animals that create tons of manure each day, a byproduct Cargill must deal with in a way that preserves profitability of the operation. Concentrated Area Feeding Operations, or CAFOs, are nasty affairs, and are the source of much of the meat we consume in this nation. To keep the piggies safe and healthy as they grow, Cargill washes the solids they excrete into large holding ponds. Once the ponds get full, the manure-water is sprayed periodically on the surrounding landscape.

All the data — anecdotal and empirical — suggests that various forms of nasty waste will work its way into local watersheds and groundwater and end up in the Buffalo National River. If that is not enough, the accompanying smells wafting from the spraying will surely sting your nose and eyes — and no doubt, disturb your concentration if you are at the nearby school or church.

The latest mitigation proposal is to treat the filthy pond water with pyrolysis, an energy-intensive technique used in a wide variety of industrial processes in cooking (as in making confections), the chemical industry and the energy industry. In this case, the pyrolysis would be used to vaporize the hazardous components in the pig water, which would range from bacteria, pass-through medicines and other drugs to keep the pigs healthy, and the feces with all its attendant, volatile organics. There are several ways to “pyrolyze” stuff, but apparently the Mt. Judea system will go the high-temperature route — burning — leaving a nice crusty carbon. This “char” may actually improve soil quality if the soil has a high clay content, since the minerals are concentrated and released slowly.

All of this will raise the cost of my BLT.

My big idea is to use biodigesters instead. They will not only treat the waste and smell, but also generate methane that can be used to offset energy costs for the operation. The technology is not new and is “scalable” to big or small operations. Biodigesters are currently being used to treat pig effluent in the United States, Australia, China, Philippines and many other locations. The process is fairly simple: Put some of the piggery water into a vessel or other device for a couple of weeks, manage the process to maintain temperature, residence-time and control off-gassing, and you are left with a fairly innocuous product and energy in the form of biogas.

The paybacks are abundant. The biodigester reduces the volume of the pig water and destroys pathogens while reducing the presence of odors. Application of the residue (digestate) is beneficial to the soil — generally, without noxious smells from ammonia. Since the farmer is making — and, it is hoped, using — the biogas for the piggery operation, there is an offset to the carbon dioxide emissions from other energy sources.

An agricultural engineering study in Thailand shows the extent of the return-on-investment of a pig-poo biodigester system. Basically, for every 8.3 Thai pigs, the system derives one cubic meter of biogas (methane). This is equivalent to about 23 ounces of gasoline or from 1.2 to 1.4 kilowatt-hours. Multiplied by thousands of pigs that will reside at the Mt. Judea CAFO during their growth, biogas systems could equate to more profitability with less environmental or social impact.

Air Force (Ret.) Col. Jeff Short was an engineer for the U.S. Department of Energy and a commissioner on the Governor’s Commission on Global Warming.

JONES: Encourage investment in downtown Little Rock by charging West Little Rock property owners a “sprawl tax.”

Institute a West Little Rock ‘sprawl tax’ to subsidize downtown housing
By Omaya Jones

Although the renewed focus on economic development in downtown Little Rock is positive, it also raises serious concerns about gentrification: Over the long term, will current residents be displaced as housing values rise? Will the new crop of people flocking to the downtown and South Main areas inadvertently price out their lower-income neighbors?

It’s not inevitable. If we were to focus on building affordable housing, lower-income people wouldn’t necessarily have to leave the neighborhood, which would be a boon to everyone. This could be accomplished with a new property tax on sprawl in West Little Rock.

John Roman, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, argues that there’s actually nothing wrong with gentrification in itself, but only if the poor people stay. The key to reducing crime and violence and building a better city, he argues, is having a healthy mix of people of various backgrounds and incomes living side by side. If the problem with gentrification is the displacement of people who are already living in a community, then what we need to do is implement policies that allow them to stay in the homes and neighborhoods that they helped to shape. Our focus should be on increasing the housing supply in these areas, by creating incentives for developers to build for low- and middle-income families. A “sprawl tax” — an additional property tax — on property between, say, Shackleford Road and the town of Roland would help pay for incentives. This would hopefully slow the pace of development on the western fringes of the city and encourage investment in downtown Little Rock.

“Density matters because we’re a social species geared to learn from people around us,” writes Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, author of “Triumph of the City.” Cities are hubs of innovation and creativity, especially when they are home to diverse populations living side by side. We should be implementing policies to promote that, not encouraging continued outward expansion.

Omaya Jones is a Little Rock native with a B.A. in comic books. He enjoys public policy as a hobby and knows just enough to be dangerous.

Develop exhibit ‘pods’ for Arkansas
By Stephen Koch

This idea isn’t so big, so it must be eminently doable, right? In fact, its essence is travel-sized.

While on a book tour this year, I stopped by the Simply Jazz and Blues Festival in Beckley, W.Va., and discovered a travel trailer that the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame has outfitted into a tribute to its native heroes. Exhibits are mounted behind Plexiglas on either side, and a rubber-matted path runs through the middle.

Something similar could be done with Arkansas music, which is so often overlooked. (Beloved, heavily featured Mountain State performers Little Jimmy Dickens and Bill Withers would likely be crowded out of the musical conversation if they were Arkansawyers.) But music is only one possibility. The concept could be expanded to create other educational pods on practically any Arkansas subject, which would be nearly as viscerally cool as the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission’s mobile aquarium.

Speaking of travel, commuters could ponder these pods on platforms while waiting for the electric tram running through the center strip of Wilbur D. Mills Freeway (I-630), or while aboard the noiseless commuter boats ferrying folks from west Pulaski and outlying counties to and from downtown Little Rock along the Arkansas River.

Stephen Koch is the author of “Louis Jordan: Son of Arkansas, Father of R&B” and the host of “Arkansongs,” a public radio program syndicated throughout Arkansas.

Go native with plants
By Randy Forst

Here’s an idea for healthier plants and less fertilizer and water use in our gardens: Go native. Using natives is ideal: The plants that are native to where you live have spent hundreds of years adapting to growing conditions. That means they don’t need much help from you to grow — less fertilizer, moisture and mulch. Once they are established, they are usually as tough as nails. Have you ever been driving along the highways in the month of August and noticed the red/orange blooming plants in the ditches? This plant is butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa), and the Highway Department doesn’t have to tend it: Its tap root keeps it going even during dry conditions.

Native plants tend to have better manners in the garden. By this, I mean that they are rarely invasive. Nature has a way of keeping them in line with natural predators.

Native plants are a great way of introducing birds and butterflies to the garden. They rely on it for food, shelter and nesting habitats. Nothing makes a garden come alive more than seeing colorful butterflies and birds darting around in the landscape.

Native plants can be quite beautiful. They come in a wide array of colors, from the white bloom of Queen Anne’s Lace (Daucus carota), the yellow of goldenrod (Solidago nemoralis), the orange of Blackberry Lily (Belamcanda chinensis), the red of cardinal flower (Lobelia cardinalis), the pink of spotted knapweed (Centaurea stoebe), the blue of Carolina larkspur (Delphinium carolinianum) to the rosy hue of purple coneflower (Echinacea pallida).

No sun in your garden? There are native plants for the shade as well. If you are fortunate enough to have both growing conditions in your landscape, try planting a few of each. In a few years you could have a whole garden planted in the oldies but goodies, and you will have done the environment a favor, too.

For more information, call or email the Pulaski County Extension Office at 340-6650 or rforst@uaex.edu.

Randy Forst is with the Pulaski County Cooperative Extension Service of the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture.

Make health care costs transparent
By Sen. David Sanders

The rise of high deductible insurance plans paired with tax-free health savings accounts (HSAs) has created more engaged health care consumers. But there is a problem: A bedrock principle of consumerism is that end users should be able to make informed decisions based on price and quality. Consumers need access to better information if they are to choose the best insurance policy, primary-care doctor or hospital to meet their needs. Currently, the burden often rests on the individual, who, when something goes wrong, just wants the system to work correctly.

How exactly is the average consumer supposed to navigate our complex structure of doctors, specialists, surgeons, hospitals, outpatient clinics and ambulatory surgical centers — not to mention the multiple payers involved (insurance companies, self-insured plans, Medicaid and Medicare)? This is all made more complicated by outdated and overlapping regulatory and legal structures that vary according to jurisdiction and who is paying. Transparency is sorely lacking.

In the past, insurers, pharmacy benefit managers, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals and doctors have been barriers to creating objective health care transparency measures. Their fear: A more transparent system would financially advantage some players in the health care system at the expense of others. As a result, quantitative and qualitative measures — how much care costs and how good that care is — remain largely invisible to the patient.

So, it’s no surprise that costs inflate, insurance rates increase, waste and abuse rise, and misdiagnoses fuel unnecessary treatments and procedures. Meanwhile, the end users (and taxpayers) increasingly feel disconnected from their health care and helpless to do anything about it.

Arkansas has consistently received failing grades from organizations that rate states’ health care transparency laws. That needs to change. Here are three substantive statewide initiatives that will get the ball rolling:

a scorecard that rates health care providers based on validated, regularly updated information about price and quality, including diagnoses, medical procedures and outcomes.

disclosure and reporting of all ownership arrangements, grants, studies, awards and clinical trials made to the institutions and/or individuals we entrust with our health care.

a tax incentive for individuals, families or businesses that use an independent, nongovernmental decision-support system staffed by medical professionals to assist with health care choices based on patients’ medical information and the latest peer-reviewed data.

Retreating to a single national health policy might appear to be the only way to gain certainty over a system that has evolved into a model of dysfunction and inefficiency. Yet the monumental disruption caused by President Obama’s signature law demonstrates that a comprehensive, one-size-fits-all approach is flawed in concept. Instead, we need a truly consumer-driven system. That will require some additional demand-side reforms (the creation of incentives to promote consumer engagement) but the most significant changes are now needed on health care’s supply side.

Arkansas has already taken significant steps to increase private health coverage and advance systemwide payment reform. Our progress will be all for naught unless we can also transform health care into a transparent system driven by informed consumers.

David Sanders is a Republican state senator who represents District 15. He lives in Little Rock.

LIVING HISTORY: Reenactors charge at the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Prairie Grove image

Use battlefields to attract tourists
By Mark Christ

As we enter the final year of the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War, it is a good time to recognize the potential of Arkansas’s battlefields as economic development engines.

There were more than 770 offensive operations in Arkansas during the war (only Virginia, Tennessee and Missouri saw more action), ranging from full-scale battles like Pea Ridge or Arkansas Post to scouting expeditions and bushwhacker-hunting raids. Many of those battles took place in remote parts of the state and their locations remain almost pristine today, providing landscapes where modern-day visitors can see the fields of conflict in virtually the same condition as did the soldiers who fought there in the 1860s. And those visitors spend money. A lot of money.

“Blue, Gray & Green: Economic & Tourism Benefits of Battlefield Preservation,” a 2013 study by the Civil War Trust, found that Civil War tourists are wealthier and better educated than other tourists, and that they stay longer and spend more — an average of $1,000 for a visit by a family of four. That’s money that is spent at local restaurants, hotels and small businesses, creating jobs and putting tax money into the coffers of state and local governments. The study found that in five states — Missouri, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia — Civil War sites annually attracted 15.8 million visitors who spent $442 million and helped support 5,150 local jobs.

We could see those results in Arkansas, but more effort needs to go toward the acquisition and development of the state’s battlefields through private-public partnerships. While Pea Ridge National Military Park and Prairie Grove Battlefield Historic State Park have excellent visitor centers and interpretive exhibits, places like Marks’ Mills, Devil’s Backbone and Hill’s Plantation have little if anything to show that anything of note happened there. That’s money lost.

In the current economic environment, battlefield preservation can be a tough effort. Currently, for instance, the Nevada County Depot and Museum in Prescott is working with state government and national nonprofit groups to acquire 448 acres of the Elkins’ Ferry battlefield, the site of an April 1864 engagement during the Red River Campaign that the National Park Service describes as “among the most pristine Civil War battlefields in Arkansas. This rural area has only seen slight changes since the Civil War. Like other battlefields associated with the Camden Expedition of 1864, it offers a tremendous opportunity for preservation and interpretation of the entire historical landscape.” Around $625,000 has been pledged for the acquisition of the site, but the effort to raise the remaining $325,000 needed to close the deal is struggling. (Times readers, by the way, can make a contribution to the cause at fundly.com/elkin-s-ferry-battlefield-preservation-effort.)

If developed as a heritage tourism site, the Elkins’ Ferry battlefield has the potential to become a tremendous economic development asset for Prescott and Nevada County. The Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department estimates that 27,000 vehicles pass near the battlefield on Interstate 30 every day. If even 1 percent of those cars and trucks pulled off to visit Elkins’ Ferry, restaurants, stores and gas stations would see a marked uptick in business.

As the Civil War sesquicentennial fades into the sunset, I urge an increase in investment in Civil War battlefield preservation by public entities, nonprofits and business groups, not only to protect land that is hallowed by the blood of American soldiers who fought and died there, but to bring prosperity to their descendants.

Mark Christ is the author of several books on the Civil War and is community outreach director for the Department of Arkansas Heritage.

Legislative pay for performance
By Stephanie Spencer

The passage of Issue 3 in November provides for the development of a new citizens’ commission to set the salaries of legislators and constitutional officers in Arkansas.

Since most of us in the real world must meet financial and quality metrics in our annual performance review to get a raise, why not apply this same merit-based standard to determining pay for our state government?

The following three metrics give an objective measurement of the general health, well being and prosperity (or lack thereof) of Arkansas citizens that should be measured every year during the Citizens’ Commission annual review. These metrics are responsive to actions and priorities taken by the General Assembly and the governor. If these metrics have improved, they will get a raise. If these metrics decline, they get a pay cut.

1) Decrease in Arkansas mortality rate age 45-65. Death rates in Arkansas from stroke and heart disease in ages 45-65 (an age group in which 25 percent of Arkansans did not have health insurance prior to the private option enacted last year) were respectively 54 to 62 percent higher than national averages 2005-2010. But Arkansas death rates from stroke and heart disease begin to approach national averages after age 65 when Arkansans have access to universal health care through the Medicare program. In Arkansas, this metric of health has the greatest need for improvement and is the most susceptible to state legislation improving access to health care. The period preceding death is commonly accompanied by severe illness, frequent hospitalizations and the need for disability assistance, costs which are frequently absorbed by hospitals and taxpayers for individuals without insurance. Taking deliberate steps to decrease the mortality rate for this age group would save taxpayers money by addressing the root cause of these expenses.

2) Decrease in the poverty rate. We have a relatively low rate of unemployment (22nd in the nation) but the fourth highest poverty rate in the nation at 19.8 percent. Widespread poverty ends up costing the taxpayers a great deal of money in SNAP and WIC benefits, Medicaid expenses, higher rates of incarceration, Section 8 housing, etc. Instead of slashing stop-gap public assistance to the most vulnerable, wouldn’t it be better to make decreasing the poverty rate with jobs a legislative priority?

3) Increases in percentage of Arkansans with a college or technical school degree. Arkansas again trails the national average (38 percent) with only 28 percent of its population with a college degree. Any legislative action that could increase this percentage again would address root causes of poverty and lead to a lessened need for public assistance.

Perhaps the legislature could even get a Christmas bonus for improvements in state rankings in the above metrics. They’ve already proven they can do this — by decreasing the rate of uninsured Arkansans from 49th in the country (topped only by Texas) to tying with New Hampshire at 22nd thanks to the private option.

Legislative “Pay for Performance” would keep legislators continually aware of the priorities that matter in Arkansas.

To steal James Carville’s phrase: It’s the PEOPLE, stupid.

Stephanie Spencer is an RN and directs the Congestive Heart Failure Clinic at Arkansas Heart Hospital in Little Rock. She worked with her husband, Paul, on the original ethics ballot measure introduced by the group Regnat Populus in 2012.

Entice alumni of Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences and the Arts to return to Arkansas
By Mike Steely

Our state has some very talented people in it. In regards to growing our economy, prosperity for citizens, and overall economic health we are following a formula that most other Southern states have as well: Bringing in advanced manufacturing for traditional job growth (a.k.a. the mythical automotive plant) and focusing much effort on increasing technology companies that will lead to higher-than-average-wage job growth. In other words, become the next Silicon Valley or Austin. This is focused around increasing the “startup scene” across the state.

I’ve been involved deeply in the startup scene in Arkansas for several years and serve in a national startup scene capacity as well. We have made some progress. Northwest Arkansas and to some extent Little Rock have seen a few minor successes, fueled by Innovate Arkansas, the ARK Challenge and more recently the Arkansas Venture Center and Argenta Innovation Hub — all worthwhile endeavors, among others, that support entrepreneurial growth. What is missing are the people!

We are a state of roughly 3 million people, which is not enough mass to fuel the growth for Bentonville, Fayetteville or Little Rock to become the next Austin.

What we have to achieve in order to grow our economy is an influx of talent to both bring new ideas and skills as well as lift up the capabilities of those who are already here. We have one asset that can accomplish this feat of a human resources influx. That is the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences and the Arts in Hot Springs. The ASMSA is an often under-heralded crown jewel of high school education in the state, a school often ranked among the top 10 in the country. But most graduates leave the state for college never to return. Yet all of them have ties to our state. This creates a unique opportunity for us.

Many of these ASMSA graduates are now creating families of their own. They are also leaders in their respective scientific, business, management and technical fields across the country and globe. We have an opportunity to call them back home. Maybe more so than any other school in the country, ASMSA has done a tremendous job outputting quality graduates. While not all graduates may be interested in returning, there will certainly be a lot who would be interested in understanding what our fair state has to offer for them (and maybe also getting those grandkids back closer to home).

The plan is this: Analyze the current graduate list of the ASMSA and determine where they came from and where they might be interested in coming back to. Match this to what the capabilities are to support them in areas across the state and provide whatever economic incentives are necessary to make a transition happen. This is a simple exercise to analyze, define and promote new economic growth. It won’t cost millions to pull off, but the return of even 5 percent of 2,000 graduates to build new companies or become employees of growing ones here will be exponential in the short term and long term. Once this program proves itself out with the low hanging fruit of the ASMSA it can be carried forward to other schools as well.

Mike Steely heads the Sparkible Idea Co., an innovation development firm focused on helping others grow new inventions, products and services across the state. This idea is the brainchild of Dr. Ron Hart, who is a founding contributor to the ASMSA.

Establish a veterinary school
By Tobin Williamson

One of the state’s universities should establish a veterinary school. As it stands, in-state students who wish to become veterinarians are forced to go out-of-state to continue their education. What a shame, considering Arkansas’s large agricultural and rural nature.

Tobin Williamson works for the Consulate-General of Japan in Seattle. He is an Arkansas native.

Host a conference in Little Rock for entrepreneurial Arkansas natives who have left the state
By Max Farrell

Someone should create an expat conference to be hosted in Little Rock in mid-2015. The conference would target expats who are focused on entrepreneurial endeavors. There are many Arkansans who are spread across the United States (and the world) who are building exciting companies, working with existing companies in exciting roles and have a wealth of insights and networks that aren’t necessarily being connected back to Arkansas. They may have a different driver’s license, but you can’t shake Arkansas roots.

The conference would focus on learning what expats are working on, share what the state of Arkansas’s entrepreneurial scene is and how each side can support one another.

There’s a wealth of talented Arkansans that have left this state for one reason or another and the state is steadily shifting in the right directions. By connecting all of these good people together, we’ll be able to showcase where the state is and how we can take it to the next level with all of our combined resources and talents.

Max Farrell is a Little Rock native and co-founder of Create Reason, a firm that works with companies to engages employees through innovation.

CHILDREN’S MUSEUM: Just as the Carnegie Foundation is known for libraries (2,509 of them), other wealthy family foundations could be known for creating children’s museums. That’s the idea of museum planner Alison Hall and architect Britt Gremillion’s, who are seeking philanthropic support to build a “Worlds to Explore” children’s museum. Their motto is, “Everywhere there are children, there should be children’s museums.” Gremillion has created a design for a sustainable building that is a metaphor for the “Giant Turtle” that supports the earth in Native American mythology. It will take children on an imaginative journey from Past World (prehistory and history) to Pretend World (literature) to Present World (community) to Possible World (future). They’ve done their work. Now it’s the philanthropists’ turn.

Create a nonprofit salvage grocery
By Stephanie Smittle

Someone should establish a Little Rock salvage market for food, a sort of organized dumpster dive in a tent or storefront. Since big boxes like Kroger and Whole Foods must follow strict quality/beauty standards for the goods on their shelves, there’s a great deal of food that’s perfectly edible but deemed unsellable for one reason or another. According to a U.S. Department of Agriculture study published earlier this year, about 21.5 million tons of food are discarded annually at the retail level. That represents some 142.3 billion calories, at a cost of $46.7 billion. If even a fraction of that waste was mobilized and sold at a discount or donated, we could feed a lot of our neighbors.

Stephanie Smittle is a writer of songs, haiku and prose. Her vocal forays include two full-length albums by her eponymous band, performing the role of Fiordiligi in Mozart’s “Cosi fan tutte,” and interpretations of Ashkenazic Jewish folk song with the Meshugga Klezmer Band.

Prioritize recycling
By Lucy Holifield

Every day, I see people toss their aluminum cans in the garbage despite the fact that they could walk only a few feet further to a recycle bin. People simply are not going to take responsibility for their trash as long as the cheapest and easiest method of disposal is throwing it all in the dumpster. Cities like Little Rock need to incentivize recycling by imposing a tax on the amount of landfill-bound trash produced by a household, or giving tax rebates for the amount of waste that is recycled.

We feel better when we buy a package of water bottles with caps that use 10 percent less plastic or a ream of recycled paper, but recycling needs to be scaled upwards dramatically if it is to be effective. Critics of recycling operations often say that it wastes energy. That’s true if only a small fraction of our trash is being recycled and only a fraction of our population participates. For recycling to be economically feasible and environmentally sound, our entire waste stream needs to be overhauled into a recycling stream.

All trash should have a protocol. Plastics make more plastics, paper makes more paper, and biodegradable material can be turned into compost. If an item is no longer fit to be recycled again, it can be used to make a composite material. Even items made from mixed materials, such as furniture or cars, can be separated into their constituent parts and reused or recycled. In a system like this, research and development would be devoted toward finding new uses for recycled materials.

Monetary incentives are only part of the picture. Cities would have to provide ways for households to separate their trash; perhaps every neighborhood should have a depositing station for recyclables. The city would also need to educate its citizens about recycling protocols, including how tax incentives operate and how to properly recycle that peanut buttery plastic jar that I’m always wondering about.

Of course, this isn’t just an idea that applies to Arkansas. The entire nation would benefit from transforming its trash collection systems, but change can start at the state or municipal level. I hope citizens of the Natural State effect this change sooner rather than later to protect our most valuable resources — our trees, air, water, soil, and wildlife.

Lucy Holifield is a student at the Bowen School of Law

Create a community center for low-income women
By Lilyan Kauffman

It’s one of my dreams to organize a community center to assist underprivileged women in Central Arkansas.

Poverty is particularly a women’s issue. Around 42 million American women live in poverty or at its brink, and the majority of minimum wage workers are female. Women, on average, still earn 77 cents to every dollar a man makes.

Because women face an unequal economic playing field, I want to create a center that offers them relief and support. It would be a one-stop, all-inclusive experience with a variety of targeted services: health care, child care, workforce support, and so on. It would include physicians and nurses on hand to provide free exams for women who lack access to medical resources. Social workers would also be on staff to help women suffering from emotional and mental health problems created by poverty and abuse. We would partner with local colleges, nonprofits and workforce agencies to provide job training and financial counseling. It is low-income women who are most affected by the harsh realities of a gender-biased society. We need to create community resources that empower them.

Lilyan Kauffman lives in Little Rock with her husband and daughter. She works for the Central Arkansas Library System and hosts a monthly feminist group, ‘Calling All Feminists.’

Build an All-American Sports Hall of Fame in North Little Rock
By Phil Beuth

Imagine yourself stepping into the batter’s box at Fenway Park to face a sweeping Roger Clemens curveball on a giant IMAX screen.

Or, imagine your daughter settling into the starting blocks to race 100 meters against Jackie Joyner Kersee. You’ll always remember the priceless look on her face when Jackie blazes ahead of her at the speed of light!

Or, try your best to recreate Tiger Woods’ incredible 2005 Master’s chip-in on a full size replica of Augusta National’s 16th green.

Or, have your picture taken with hosts like Roger Staubach, Joe Montana, or Brett Favre, as an NFL exhibit displays “The Greatest Quarterbacks” of a time.

My big idea is to build an ultra-modern “All-American Sports Hall of Fame” theme park, which celebrates the heroes, exhilaration and drama that sports weave into our American culture.

For the first time, under one roof, this year-round Mecca for sports fans will display exhibits celebrating the highlights of every level and type of sport, from high school, college, the Olympics, pro sports, and more. Baseball, football, NBA, tennis, NASCAR, boxing, MMA, golf, track and field, and many more, each section sponsored by that sport’s own Hall of Fame. Other Halls of Fame will be eager to participate, as they receive a no-cost satellite outlet to display their excess memorabilia, in a place that whets the visitor’s appetite to visit their hall.

I’m not talking about a “bronze busts and framed jerseys” type of hall. I’m talking about a high-tech, futuristic attraction that is equal parts museum and Disney theme park. Jumbo TV screens, IMAX theaters, and interactive holographic sports replays that put you in the middle of the action! A place to relive the sometimes inspiring, sometimes heart-wrenching human dramas that unfolded before us. A place where we can proudly celebrate the American spirit these heroes represent. A place we can show our children what the American ideals of competition, sportsmanship, fair play, tolerance and teamwork can produce. One place, where the entire family can experience the history and drama of their favorite sports, meet their heroes, buy memorabilia, and have the time of their lives, in an unforgettable interactive experience.

Knowing your favorite star will be on hand to say hello or hold a clinic will draw people from all over America. Because the displays would rotate every few months, the range of people who will host can be replenished over and over again, providing a fresh reason for families to revisit the hall.

I got this idea several years ago, when I read an interview with one of the curators of a major league Hall of Fame. He said they had a warehouse full of memorabilia they didn’t have room to display. I realized if we could gather all these sports in one place, and give each sport he opportunity to rotate displays throughout the year, it would be a one-stop family tourist destination that gives fans a “taste” of the full hall experience.

In my opinion, the best location for the hall would be on the North Little Rock side of the river, in the six blocks between Dickey-Stephens Ballpark and Verizon Arena. This is a prime location, because the Hall can host sporting events from nearly all the major sports in those two venues, without having to construct new facilities.

One way we can afford to build this hall is to bring in iconic American brand sponsors from the beginning. They all have major sports funding in their budgets, and they can apportion part of that budget to build and support the hall, and receive exclusive rights to present their products to the guests.

For example, Microsoft, Google, or Apple could receive the technology license to build the software to run the hall’s exhibits and infrastructure; McDonalds/PepsiCo to bring their concessions, restaurants and other food brands into the hall; Ford/GM to build the transportation, shuttles and other “people movers”; and Disney to design and build the themes and open up their ABC/ESPN film library.

This idea hits all the “high points” of a big idea; with many advantages for Arkansas:

One of a kind, high-tech modern sports and entertainment theme park

Family-oriented tourist draw, with something for everyone

Honors Arkansas’s deep sports history

Creates a thousand or more jobs of every type.

Draws iconic American companies to Arkansas

Generates tax revenues

Strengthens the economy, boosting business by depositing visitor’s disposable income into Arkansas cash registers.

National TV coverage of events, including our annual induction, where current members of every sports hall are granted lifetime membership, and newly elected members gather for induction into the “American Sports Hall of Fame.”

Arkansas is already home to many of America’s top brands, like Wal-Mart, Tyson Foods and Stephens Inc. If major Arkansas-based companies decided to get involved in this project, we would be well on our way to making this once-in-a- lifetime dream project a reality!

Phil Beuth is a Little Rock attorney.

Hire fewer state workers at higher pay
By Rep. Nate Bell

Politicos and media outlets regularly highlight the deep differences between the policy positions of liberals and conservatives in Arkansas and elsewhere in the country. Those disagreements certainly do exist, but there are also opportunities for those on both sides to simultaneously achieve their objectives.

Conservatives (such as myself) have long campaigned for more efficient and accountable state government. Liberals have historically led the push for higher state employee pay and benefits. Policymakers from both points of view have an opportunity to come together and facilitate the achievement of both goals by hiring a smaller number of employees at a higher salary. A look at the public payrolls of similarly sized states shows that there is a way for Arkansas to reduce its overall number of state workers over time — via attrition, not layoffs — while also increasing the pay of the average employee substantially.

Several years ago, using data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, I began comparing public employment statistics in Arkansas with those of Kansas, Utah and Iowa, all of which have populations between 2.7 million and 3 million. Due to space limitations, I’ll focus on the Kansas comparison. Kansas is home to 2.85 million people and Arkansas is home to 2.91 million people. Kansas is a larger state in terms of land area: It has 82,278 square miles of land compared to 53,178 square miles in Arkansas. Yet 2010 census data shows that Kansas has about 39,000 full-time state employees while Arkansas has about 57,000. However, the average state employee in Arkansans earns about $45,500 while the average state employee in Kansans earns $50,000 — a 10 percent difference.

Overall, based on the most recent data available, the annual Kansas state payroll is nearly $660 million less than Arkansas’s. The costs associated with providing office space, computers, vehicles, etc. are not included in these payroll numbers. These costs add approximately another 25 percent to the total cost, which results in a total cost differential near $825 million.

The bottom line is that Arkansas has far more people on payroll than Kansas, pays them less, and spends substantially more tax dollars in the process. Iowa has 15,000 fewer state employees than Arkansas, but the average Iowan state employee makes 40 percent more than his or her Arkansan counterpart. Utah employs 14,000 fewer state workers than Arkansas but pays them 16 percent more.

Arkansas has many dedicated state employees who work very hard and who strive for excellence and efficiency. I believe these people should be well paid, and I believe we can accomplish this by paying fewer employees more money. This will result in a more stable and satisfied workforce and a more efficient use of taxpayer funds.

I don’t believe there’s any “magic bullet” piece of legislation that can make this happen, but with a consistent, cooperative effort it could be done over an eight to ten year period, without layoffs. Achieving higher compensation, a more efficient workforce and savings for Arkansas taxpayer will require cooperation between the governor’s office, state employees and the legislature.

Let’s work together to make Arkansas state government the model of efficiency and performance that other states will seek to replicate. We can do it!

Nate Bell represents Arkansas House District 20. He lives in Mena.

Erect a Cold War memorial
By David Rose

The Civil War has thousands of monuments although only about 10 percent of our population at the time actually fought in that war. Everybody fought in the Cold War and there is not a single monument to that effort that I know of. Since it was fought by everybody and everywhere, no one place has a better claim to it than another. Little Rock could draw national attention by being the first to erect a Cold War Memorial.

Throughout the Cold War there was no stronger force at work than American popular culture, and rock ‘n’ roll took the point. The H-bombs, nuclear subs and SAC bombers only served to hold the line until our real force, American popular culture in general, and rock ‘n’ roll, in particular, could be brought into play.

In the 1960s and early ’70s we sent thousands upon thousands of young kids to Vietnam to help that country secure a base for capitalism. They were armed with M-16s, B-52s and napalm, but also took along Levis, Marlboros and, most importantly, rock ‘n’ roll music. Today Vietnam is a hotbed of capitalistic activity. I’ll be damned if those young boys didn’t win after all. How much easier the victory would have been if the kids had left the guns, planes and napalm at home?

The power of rock ‘n’ roll was recognized early in the 1950s, and, like the power of the atom, there were people who wanted to put the genie back in the bottle. Preachers and politicians railed against the new music but there was little they could do. The force was too great. It took over America and eventually, the world. The development of the electric guitar ensured that we would have an insurmountable advantage over the Soviet Union in the battle of the bands. We had rock ‘n’ roll while the Russians had ballet, a tough sell even to the youth of Eastern Europe let alone young adults in the night clubs of the Pacific Rim.

For the Cold War Memorial I suggest a 25-foot electric guitar. Make it a Stratocaster — doesn’t that sound like a Cold War weapon? — and Fender might even finance the project.

Of course we should follow up the unveiling of the monument with the first annual Cold War Reenactment to include, among other events: John and Jackie Kennedy, Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev look-a-like contests. A good old-fashioned McCarthy-era book burning and wienie roast along with a fallout shelter cook off (everything must be made from year-old canned goods). Musical desks (like musical chairs but with children ducking under old school desks when the air-raid siren sounds instead of sitting in chairs when the music stops). A Bay of Pigs barbecue cook-off. A guided tour of the missile silo in Damascus. Fallout shelter sports competitions, including a solitaire marathon, recreational sleeping and competitive hair loss. A Whittaker Chambers pumpkin-carving contest. There would be a film festival paying such titles as “Dr. Strangelove,” “Fail Safe,” “From Russia With Love” and “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.” A late-night edition of the film festival might feature those 1950s sci-fi movies that were thinly veiled allegories for Communist takeover of our minds and country. “The Blob,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” The Thing” and movies of that nature. The celebration will end with the Berlin Wall Ball. Half the hall will be brightly decorated and abundantly supplied with food and drink while the other half will be in black and white and serve only vodka and cabbage. On the black and white side, careful notations will be taken of who talks to whom and who does not eat the cabbage. Entertainment will be supplied by the steel drum Nikita Khrushchev Shoe Band, U2 and a Vaughn Meader impersonator.

War reenactments are big business and a boon to local economies. Do this three years in a row, and the event will be drawing thousands and featured on the national news.

David Rose is an artist, father and creative thinker who lives in Hot Springs.

*A previous version mistakenly called Catherine Crisp an assistant professor at UALR. She is an associate editor.

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