TOP STORY > >State Police probe fatality

By RICK KRON

Leader staff writer

A Sherwood woman was struck and killed by a van Tuesday evening after supposedly following State Police orders.

Vanda Johnson, 62, of 3 Post Oak Loop, was crossing the southbound lanes of Hwy. 67/167 near the I-440 exit when she was struck and killed by a van driven by Phillop Lee, 21, of 305 Stonewall Drive in Jacksonville.

According to family members, who have filed a complaint with the State Police, the department is reviewing the circumstances.

According to Bill Sadler, spokesman for the State Police, the review could take a week or so. “There is no clock. We want to be accurate and fair and respond to the family first,” he explained.

Johnson was killed as she tried to cross the southbound lanes of the highway, supposedly under orders from the state trooper who had arrived on scene to investigate a six-car bumper-tag accident that her grandchildren were involved in.

According to the accident report, the weather was clear at the time of the accident and conditions were dry.

Johnson’s grandson and his wife, Brandon and Megan Vocque were part of the six-car chain-reaction accident in the northbound lanes of Hwy. 67/167.

Shortly after the 6 p.m. accident, Johnson, by chance, called the Vocques. Megan Vocque was crying and said they had been in an accident.

Johnson, according to the grandson, said she was on her way.

Rather than drive up and around to the northbound accident cited, Johnson apparently pulled off on the southbound shoulder across from the accident and made her way across the southbound lanes of traffic.

The accident had most of the northbound lanes stopped or slowed down.

Once Johnson made sure her family members were all right, Brandon Vocque started to escort her back across the lanes to her car.

Apparently when they got to the median, a state trooper told Vocque that he had to get back to his vehicle and move it down the road and that Johnson needed to go on her own.

Vocque followed the trooper’s orders and returned to his vehicle and moved it farther up the road as told.

The last he saw of his grandmother was her climbing over the median barrier.

The Vocques didn’t hear the van hitting their grandmother or any screams as they had followed the trooper’s orders, and along with others in the six-car accident, had driven to the shoulder north toward the Redmond Road exit.

But a volunteer firefighter and family friend was at the scene and approached the Vocques and told them something may have happened to their grandmother.

It took another 30 minutes before the state trooper would let the Vocques go back to the scene of the accident.

When Vocque later asked the trooper why he wasn’t allowed to walk Johnson across to begin with, the trooper supposedly said it was protocol.

The Jacksonville Fire Depart-ment responded to the initial six-car accident and made sure there were no major injuries.

Battalion Chief Joe Bratton said the department was at the initial call, returned and then was called out again when Johnson was hit, but turned the scene over to the county coroner.

Johnson was one of two pedestrians killed Tuesday night trying to cross a controlled-access highway.

The second incident occurred about 11 p.m. in the westbound lane of I-30 near I-630. Herbert Douglas of North Little Rock was walking across I-30 when he was struck and killed by a vehicle driven by a Little Rock man.

EDITORIAL >>Hopson holds on

After hiring and firing a string of good men incapable of turning around a floundering school district and handicapped by bitter divisions, the Pulaski County Special School District Board in July signed a franchise superintendent in Dr. Charles Hopson.

This guy appears to have a game plan, to know how to execute it, and is capable of calling an audible, as he did when he ran into problems implementing a new bell schedule.

A couple of weeks ago, we thought he was blessed with good luck to have had a small degree of unity imposed upon the board by September school elections that replaced two members obsessed with derailing the unions, even at the cost of progress, and also at the cost of several hundred thousand dollars in court and attorney fees.

Since then, it has become apparent that some in the school community—most notably the two school employee unions—are feeling emboldened by their success in replacing those two union opponents with their own candidates.

Hopson has made some missteps in his attempt to move the school district to the end zone late in the fourth quarter. The unions and their supporters, including those they control on the board, seem determined to run off Hopson, the district’s last, best hope.

Teachers’ union president Marty Nix passes notes to one of their “hires” on the board, Tom Stuthard, during the meetings.

Here are some of the reasons they don’t like Hopson: He threatens their control of the district. They fear any change that might upset the teacher apple cart. He wants a longer school day, they don’t. He wants year-round education, they don’t. He wants to close and consolidate some schools, they don’t. He seems to want teacher accountability, they don’t.

The district is in danger of being placed back in fiscal distress in January, as it was between 2005 and 2007.

Hopson and Chief Financial Officer Anita Farver, with board approval, have rectified many of the problems that the state legislative audit have discovered. Most recently, the way Hopson spent his $25,000 relocation stipend—which was part of his contract—concerned the auditors, but that has been resolved when Hopson explained the stipend would be included as part of his pay when he files his tax returns.

Hopson has worked to make the district more efficient, managing on the corporate model and even bringing in non-educator experts to oversee complex and important aspects of the school district, such as information technology and facilities.

Hopson arranged for seven district personnel to accompany him to China—with the Chinese government indirectly picking up most of the tab—an initial step toward bringing a Chinese Mandarin language teacher to the school district.

That’s a good thing, commendable and in line with his goal of providing PCSSD students with the tools for a world-class education.

EDITORIAL >>Huckabee vs. Barbour

Hoping to fortify his credentials as the next Southern hope for the Republican Party, our neighboring governor, Haley Barbour of Mississippi, gave an extensive interview this month to the Weekly Standard, the conservative Washington journal that catapulted Sarah Palin into the national limelight and did so much for Texas Governor George W. Bush.

The story was to set the table for Haley’s announcement early in the new year that he would be a candidate for president in 2012. He has been everywhere across the South this year helping Republicans and burnishing his name.

Arkansans will remember his coming to Little Rock in June to embrace Jim Keet at Keet’s kickoff fundraiser for governor. Keet praised Barbour’s leadership and Barbour touted Keet as the state’s next governor. You may remember how that turned out.

After the glowing Weekly Standard article about the rich Mississippian, we can say this about his presidential prospects: Haley Barbour is no Mike Huckabee.

Huckabee has been stricken with foot-in-mouth disease more than almost any major politician around, but it usually came about when he tried to be funny or clever. He would never have committed the faux pas that Barbour did in his Weekly Standard interview.

Huckabee grew up in the South in the same era as Barbour, when the walls of segregation were crumbling under judicial and congressional mandates. Hope, Ark., by all accounts, was not as bad as Yazoo City, Miss., but Huckabee has never defended white supremacy or the political leadership of that era.

He has, actually, often been quite eloquent and we think earnest in condemning the efforts by political leaders and the social order to prevent equal justice for African-Americans. We remember his well-spoken words at the 40th anniversary of the desegregation of Central High School at Little Rock.

Not Haley Barbour. He told his interviewer that things were not nearly as bleak for blacks in Mississippi back in the ‘50s and ‘60s as people made it seem, and he had special praise for the White Citizens Councils, the white-supremacy organization that sprang up in Mississippi in the 1950s to resist the integration of schools, business and other institutions. He said the business leaders of his community came together as the Citizens Council and headed off a revival of the Ku Klux Klan.

That much was true. The White Citizens Councils were to be a country club KKK. They would eschew violence by using economic and political reprisals to save segregation. They didn’t wear robes and identified themselves openly. But the Citizens Council’s organizing manifesto stated its aims rather clearly: The Southern institution of segregation was to be protected at all costs short of violence, and if that did not work the Council could not be blamed if people then had to resort to violence.

Many will remember the Citizens Councils in Arkansas, led by Jim Johnson, Amis Guthridge, Rev. Wesley Pruden and Dr. Malcolm Taylor.

We remember the halcyon moments of the Capital Citizens Council, which was the Pulaski County branch headed by Guthridge, a Little Rock lawyer. When the “freedom riders” from eastern colleges were arriving in Mississippi in the summer of 1962 to conduct freedom schools and to get blacks registered to vote, the Citizens Council started its “Reverse Freedom Rides.”

Guthridge and Rev. Pruden would call a news conference at the Trailways Bus Station in Little Rock, where one of them would give bus tokens and a ten-dollar bill to a black mother and her eight or ten children and put them on a bus to Hyannis Port, Mass., which was the home of President John F. Kennedy.

A grinning Guthridge then would make a flowery tongue-in-cheek speech about how the Citizens Council was sending this wonderful family to the Kennedy compound, where they would be accepted, taken to the country club and given a glorious future. The media stopped coming after two such events.

To his evident surprise, Gov. Barbour’s praise of the white supremacists in his hometown was the part of the article that got attention. Seeing his presidential hopes vanishing, he issued a statement this week saying he did not mean to praise the citizens councils.

They were wrong and segregation was wrong, he said. Actually, what he said was that the Yazoo Citizens Council members were not “saints.” But he did say that it was a “painful” era, particularly for blacks who were “persecuted.” He might have added, “and murdered.”

It was not far from Yazoo City and during Barbour’s formative years that Medgar Evers, James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael H. Schwerner and Emmett Till met their deaths at the hands of community leaders. In every instance, community leaders rallied around the murderers.

Till, a 14-year-old Chicago boy visiting his grandmother, was tortured, murdered and thrown into the Pearl River for being rumored to have whistled at a white woman.

Whatever his faults, Mike Huckabee was never an apologist for apartheid. He is still the GOP’s Southern hope for 2012—if it has one.

EDITORIAL >>Bureaucrats flying high

Is it the parlous economic times, a sudden zeal by the media to expose misconduct, or something else? We have had an epidemic of chutzpah in public agencies of central Arkansas this year. Self-serving bureaucrats and, in a couple of cases, their boards fed themselves riotously at the trough of the public treasury and got caught at it, either by a newspaper or state auditors.

First it was the state lottery and its gold-plated director, Ernie Passailaigue. The lottery czar and the coterie of friends he brought with him from South Carolina and elsewhere were flying high, literally sometimes, giving themselves perks and months of time off for their hard work and pretty much ignoring the bookkeeping rules that the tens of thousands of other government employees had to follow.

The state legislative auditor laid out all the accounting regulations that the lottery officials had flouted. It was so bad that Governor Beebe suggested that Passailaigue ought to be fired. The governor, of course, cannot fire him because the constitutional amendment that authorized the lottery made it an independent agency that was free of the governor. He is a bystander like the rest of us, although he got to appoint three of the nine commissioners for whom Passailaigue works.

In the lottery’s case, no one should have expected anything else. Independent agencies tend to assume Olympian status (e.g., the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission and the state Highway Commission). They are above mortal government agencies. When the lottery commission set out to hire a director they went to Passailaigue, who had set up the South Carolina lottery, and he said that for a mere $324,000 a year and perks they could jar him loose from South Carolina, where he made $226,000 a year, one of the highest lottery salaries in the world. The lottery commission had no hesitancy in closing the deal. He brought along his top aides from South Carolina at approximately what he had been paid there. They were coming to work in the land of milk and honey and they acted like it.

Passailaigue said they had made a few mistakes in their zeal to get the lottery running in record time so that needy Arkansas youngsters could go to college this fall. It needs to be said for the record that not one child is going to college this fall who would not have attended if the lottery had started nine weeks or even nine months later. But Passailaigue and the lottery commissioners said they were going to start obeying the bookkeeping rules, and all was readily forgiven.

Then the Arkansas Times began to detail the audacious spending habits of the executive director of the Little Rock National Airport, a public agency that also operates as an independent entity with a board of big shots from the corporate world. Ron Mathieu came to the airport from Florida. His salary is $180,793 plus an annual bonus ($8,200 last year).

The Times first reported that he had given $40,000 of the airport’s funds to the Little Rock Christian Academy, a private school that his son attends, to help pay for a new artificial turf for its football field. They painted the airport’s website logo on the sideline turf near one of the benches. Then he lied to the commission about what the expenditure was for.

The Times next dived into the airport’s travel and expense records. In the last year alone, Mathieu and his assistants rang up more than $272,000 in credit-card expenses traveling to Paris, Prague, Brussels, Montreal, Hawaiian resorts and many cities across the continent. They travel business class. Sometimes they travel with one or two of their bosses, the corporate executives who serve on the airport commission. The airport always picks up the tab. In Paris, Mathieu had the airport cover the tab for meals at fancy Parisian restaurants for himself, Little Rock Mayor Mark Stodola, and the head of the Little Rock Regional Chamber of Commerce. Important business, you understand. There were lavish meals with commissioners and their wives on the public tab. In the two years after he went to work at the airport, Mathieu charged the airport $12,650.70 for monogrammed shirts for himself and other officials bought from Land’s End. He enhanced his standing in the community with large charitable gifts from the airport to organizations in his own name, which seems to be illegal. The list goes on.

The airport has steadily jacked up car-rental fees, parking fees and other charges. Now we know why.

Mathieu apologized and reimbursed the airport for a few of the obviously personal expenditures. So did a couple of commissioners. The private school gave the $40,000 back. The commission cut his no-questions-asked expense allowance of $50,000 in half and said they would start monitoring the staff’s expenses more closely. Businessmen went to the commission meeting Monday to praise Mathieu for his stewardship. He will get a bonus and a raise next month.

Then there is our own beloved Pulaski County Special School District. The legislative auditors found rampant illegality and waste in the school district’s operations, both by the superintendent and his top aides (and his predecessor) and the school board members, much of it in travel and expenses. The auditors found so much wrong that the state Education Department may take charge of the school district and dismiss the superintendent and board until it can get its affairs in order again. Some of the questionable spending was in the $25,000 allowance the board gave the new superintendent for moving. He didn’t have to document $5,000 of it. It also provided a Cadillac insurance policy that none of the other teachers and workers in the district received, in violation of state law. When you settle a lavish salary and contract on an administrator, you should not be surprised when he takes advantage of it.

Monday, both the airport commission and the county school board met and took a few steps to reassure the public that they are mindful that their officials are not in corporate executive suites but on the public payroll, where a little bit of care is supposed to be exercised in spending the public’s money.

Something tells us it won’t be nearly enough.

TOP STORY > >Cabot passes budget with a new member

By JOAN McCOY

Leader staff writer

Cabot’s $9.7 million budget for 2011 passed 8-0 with no discussion Monday night. That full-council vote was possible because Angie Armstrong Hoschouer, elected last month to her deceased father’s seat on the council, was sworn in to complete the last month of his term.

The one-month appointment was unnecessary because a 7-0 vote would have been more than sufficient to approve the budget. But on an evening that was mostly about recognitions, it was a way to acknowledge Ward 3, Position 1 Alderman Tom Armstrong, who died in mid November after a two-year battle with cancer.

Mayor Eddie Joe Williams presented Hoschouer with her father’s name plate and then put hers in place in front of her seat.

“I’ve got a problem with a pothole (in Hoschouer’s ward),” he joked. “And I’m sure there is a barking dog.”

Cabot Clerk-Treasurer Marva Verkler, who is retiring at the end of the year and is currently on medical leave, was honored at a reception before the council meeting.

Mayor Eddie Joe Williams thanked Verkler during the council meeting for serving the city for 25 years during the administrations of five mayors.

Alderman Lisa Brickell, who completed a degree in education and got married while serving four years on the city council, did not run for a third term.

Alderman Eddie Cook, who came in third in November in a three-way race for mayor, served eight years on the city council. During the last four years, he was chairman of the budget and personnel committee. Williams thanked him for his service and pointed out that because of his hard work, the budget was never delayed.

“Probably one of the most difficult things to do is put a budget together,” the mayor said.

Williams has become known for his plaques such as the ones he presented most months during the past four years to residents who performed a “random act of kindness.”

On Monday he presented plaques to Cook and Brickell, who will not return in January. Then Brickell, almost too emotional to speak, gave one to Williams.

“You came in and it wasn’t such a great deal but you made it a good deal,” Brickell said, referring to the turmoil the city was in when Williams took office.

The city was in debt and barely able to make payroll and morale at city hall was not good. Verkler had been stripped of most of her duties during the previous administration and communication among employees was poor.

Her duties were restored under Williams. He also laid off employees that he deemed unnecessary which cut payroll enough to save about $100,000 most months.

“It’s been the shortest four years and probably the greatest four years of my life,” the mayor said, adding that in that time, he had never even threatened a veto and that most council votes were unanimous.

Williams did not run for a second term as mayor. Instead, he ran as a Republican for state senator in Dist. 28, easily defeating Lenville Evans more than two to one.

Mayor-elect Bill Cypert signed off on the 2011 budget before it was passed. And in deference to him, Williams tabled an appointment to the planning commission so Cypert could have input into the choice.

TOP STORY > >Thompson is looking at life term

By STEPHEN STEED

Special to The Leader

George Wylie Thompson of Cabot will remain in federal custody and Sam Baggett resigned his seat on the North Little Rock City Council in the wake of their convictions Friday on federal firearms charges.

A jury deliberated about five hours before returning at 8:40 p.m. Friday with guilty verdicts on all eight charges against Thompson and on three of the six counts against Baggett.

The trial opened Dec. 7 in the courtroom of U.S. District Judge Bill Wilson.

Thompson and Baggett will be sentenced May 17 after prosecutors complete pre-sentencing reports. Thompson is set for sentencing at 10 a.m., with Baggett to follow at 1:30 p.m.

Thompson, 65, has been in federal custody since his arrest in 2009 in Bangkok, Thailand. Deemed a flight risk by the government, he will remain in federal custody. Among the charges he was convicted of last week: being a felon in possession of firearms and ammunition, possession of unregistered silencers, operating an illegal gambling business, and aiding and abetting marriage fraud.

The total maximum penalty for those convictions normally is 45 years in prison and fines of up to $1.5 million, but Thompson – because of three prior felony convictions -- faces life in prison.

Baggett, 58, was convicted of conspiracy to dispose of ammunition to a felon, making false statements to federal agents and aiding and abetting a felon in the possession of a firearm. He faces total maximum penalties of 20 years in prison and $750,000 in fines. Baggett, who was elected to the council in 2008, is free on bond.

Both will be sentenced after prosecutors complete probation reports.

John Wesley Hall of Little Rock, Baggett’s attorney, said he had encouraged Baggett to resign from the North Little Rock City Council. Hall also said he will appeal the verdict.

If Baggett had not resigned, the council could have voted him off and set a date for a special election to fill the vacancy. Or, a North Little Rock resident could have signed to petition a judge for Baggett’s removal.

The council’s next meeting is Dec. 27.

Thompson was convicted in 1989 and 2003 on drug charges and has served time for those convictions.

Last October, he was convicted in federal court in Little Rock on another drug charge. He faces another federal trial in Little Rock sometime next year on charges that he conspired with former North Little Rock Alderman Cary Gaines to rig bids on city contracts. Gaines pleaded guilty to that scheme two weeks ago and testified against Thompson and Baggett last week. He has yet to be sentenced.

Federal agents began investigating Thompson in 2007 for illegal bookmaking operations. That investigation spread to drug trafficking, federal firearms violations, and public corruption after agents obtained a court order to tap Thompson’s cell phone and record those calls.

Federal authorities in Boston, Mass., contend that Thompson has ties with the Columbo crime syndicate in New York, and charges against Thompson are pending there.

TOP STORY > >Groups spreading cheer

By JEFFREY SMITH

Leader staff writer

Cabot Christmas Alliance and Cabot Christmas for Kids teamed up on Saturday, turning the old Alford’s furniture store on West Main Street into a factory of giving.

The two charities assisted over 650 families living in the Cabot School District for Christmas. Cars snaked around the Alford’s parking lot in orderly lines as volunteers loaded boxes of food and toys into the vehicles of people on a list who were in need.

Pick-up locations were also at Austin City Hall and at the Ward First Baptist Church.

“I knew this existed but I was not aware of the scope and the magnitude of the program itself. I’m super impressed with the community effort. I’ll support it all I can. I think this is great. It’s well organized and running well,” Mayor-elect Bill Cypert said.

Ed Caldwell, chairman of the Cabot Christmas Alliance committee has been with the organization for the past 35 years.

Cabot Christmas Alliance had over 200 volunteers last week sorting foods and canned goods donated by the community, Knight’s Super Foods and Kroger. Many of the volunteers returned for Saturday’s distribution.

“I’m extremely proud to see the younger kids come out and help. I see teenagers have grown up and are still helping,” Caldwell said.

Ed Caldwell said the Christmas Alliance is 100 percent volunteers, with help from area churches, schools, businesses and restaurants.

“It is truly a community effort. Everybody just pitches in,” Caldwell said.

Shelley Montoya, vice president of Cabot Christmas for Kids, was with her daughter Oriana, 11, helping the organization and teaching a lesson in life.

“No matter how little we have, there are others with even less. You always pay it forward,” Shelley Montoya said.

Cassie Whitt and her family of Cabot received assistance from the two organizations.

“This helped me a whole lot. I’m a single mother with two kids, an autistic son and a newborn,” she said.

“They are very nice people; they are a blessing,” Whitt said.

After picking up food and toys, those needing clothing or coats were directed to the Cabot Public School’s custodial warehouse at 310 G.P. Murrell Drive.

By noon the warehouse was bare with racks of coat hangers and empty tables that were full earlier in the morning.

Melody Battles, a volunteer, said there were over 170 people who signed in for Coats for Christmas. The program collected coats for two months. Clothing was donated or came from the lost and found boxes at the schools. Volunteers spent several weeks washing hundreds of coats.

“It went fast. A lot of people were satisfied with the items they were needing. We appreciate Bill Holden (Cabot Christmas for Kids chairman) for helping and letting us use the custodial warehouse,” volunteer Bonnie Bennett said.

TOP STORY > >Housing on track at Air Force base

By JOHN HOFHEIMER
Leader senior staff writer

Senior Little Rock Air Force Base officers and their families are moved into 166 new houses where two years ago, a failed builder left only Tyvek-wrapped husks, abandoned on wind-blown streets.

Long-since bulldozed, all that remains of Carabetta Inc.’s failed American Eagle housing-privatization effort is the 25 homes completed over three years before the Air Force locked them out and the banks cut them off.

But in November 2008, Hunt-Pinnacle bought out American Eagle’s multi-million-dollar contract and set conscientiously about building 141 new stand-alone homes and renovating an additional 834 housing units. Of those, 570 are completed.

The contractors agreed to build the housing in return for rental income.

“All of the new construction is complete,” said Mary Holliday-Sopko, the Cabot native who manages the properties for Pinnacle. “We just received back (from the builders) the last 10 senior-leadership four-bedroom, beautiful homes,” she said. “Lakeside homes.”

“We are projected to be completed by the end of March. We’ve just turned over the 12th and last phase to be renovated.”

The final part will be the completion of the grading and drainage, she said.

“By the end of June, everything should be complete. (Hunt Construction) is still ahead of schedule,” she said.

Occupancy for the available units is 93 percent, she said. “When we got here it was 79 percent.

“Everything we’re renting is renovated or new. Everyone is much happier. I wish we had new homes for everyone. We just did our annual survey and it looks like we’re much higher in satisfaction with the quality of the homes—10 percent higher than last year.”

Holliday-Sopko said a dog park would be opening in January, acrosss from the welcome center.

At the time it took over the project, now dubbed The Landings at Little Rock, the Hunt-Pinnacle partnership had built 67,000 military housing units.

Pinnacle also managed 175,000 units nationwide, including 15,000 military units on 20 different bases.

The Little Rock Landings was part of a package deal that also included failed Carabetta projects at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia, Hanscomb in Maryland and Patrick in Florida.

In 2003, American Eagle Communities won an Air Force privatization contract to demolish about 500 homes, build 468 new housing units and remodel 732.

But by May 2007, when the bankers pulled the plug on American Eagle for nonperformance, only the 25 homes had been completed, another 25 started and perhaps 50 concrete slabs poured.

Subcontractors and suppliers were owed millions of dollars at Little Rock AFB and the other three air Force bases where American Eagle had won privatization contracts.

TOP STORY > >PCSSD turmoil continues

By JOHN HOFHEIMER

Leader senior staff writer

Despite loud, unintelligible voices leaking from an executive session discussing Pulaski County Special School District Superintendent Charles Hopson’s contract at the end of Monday night’s special board meeting, the board emerged, taking no action. His job apparently is safe for now.

New school board member Gloria Lawrence had sent harsh e-mails to the superintendent and at least some board members, questioning Hopson’s morals and making remarks some construed as having racial overtones.

She said later she had overreacted to the recent legislative-audit findings that included concerns over the superintendent’s moving expenses.

She said she made her comments before reading the audit or the superintendent’s contract.

“His job is not in jeopardy,” she said after the board meeting. “I have confidence in his leadership. He’s taking the district in the right direction.”

She said a conversation with former school board member Danny Gililland had assuaged her worries and helped her understand the situation more fully.

School Board president Bill Vasquez was quoted in a published report saying that Hopson’s job wasn’t in jeopardy. Some of the board members, particularly those elected with union help, seem antagonistic toward the superintendent and his cabinet.

Of Lawrence’s e-mails and the perceived antagonism by some, Hopson said, “I lead based on my conviction and desire for systemic equity.” He refused to speculate or comment on actions of those who some believe are trying to drive him off or fire him.

For three hours, Monday night, Vasquez led the board through many of the critical legislative audit findings, either allowing the board to satisfy itself that remedies had been taken or were being taken or else making and accepting motions and board action ordering corrective measures, sometimes requiring cabinet members to gather information and report back to the board.

Both Vasquez and Hopson said they had talked with state Education Department and Legislative Audit officials to determine what needed to be done to avoid the district being placed on fiscal distress, which would put it under the control of the Education Department. If the district were in fiscal distress again—like it was between 2005 and 2007--the Education Department could replace the superintendent, dismiss the board, or both. Many of the concerns of the auditors and the Education Department stemmed from lack of proper management, safeguards and controls, Vasquez told board members.

Of the matters of concern to the auditor concerning Hopson’s relocation expenses, “Most are IRS or Department of Revenue issues,” Vasquez summed up, “and whether or not his contract violated Arkansas code. That’s the overall context.”

Vasquez said letters from the Education Department regarding policy changes and financial oversight were complimentary of the job being done by Chief Financial Officer Anita Farver.

“We were cited for continuing deficiencies, but headed in the right direction,” Vasquez said. “The tone was we’re still not doing stuff great and (the joint legislative audit committee) is less and less tolerant of our actions as a board. We need to show that we will do the right thing to educate the children and stop wasting resources.”

Vasquez kept the meeting moving forward, wielding his authority and calling variously on Hopson, Farver, information technology director Derek Brown and others to answer or explain as necessary.

At the end of the meeting, Vasquez asked for the minutes to be transcribed and sent to the legislative auditors in an effort to show that the board was taking their concerns seriously.

Among the identified problems already rectified were elimination of blanket purchase orders and prosecution, conviction and imprisonment of a man who stole hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of school property.

The board has approved new policy regarding travel by school employees and board members.

Yet to be resolved: the district apparently paid some new employees before they started the job. In at least one instance, the employee worked over the Internet from another state, stopping the district from making a bad $1.1 million purchase. A problem was identified with the way human resources put new hires on the books between pay periods, and Paul Brewer was ordered to fix that.

The board also discussed other issues of concern to the auditors, including:

DREAM, an after-school program vendor, still owes the county $21,000, auditors pointed out. PCSSD attorney Jay Bequette testified that DREAM is current on the monthly repayment schedule worked out mutually.

The district left $4 million in desegregation funds unspent. Farver explained that the district budgeted the $16 million in desegregation funds it was appropriated, but the district was sent another $4 million. She said new state ABSCAM coding would help the district keep track of that money—and all the rest—in the future.

“If we get that money again, will we be able to track it?” asked Vasquez.

“To the penny, yes,” Farver said.

Hopson and his staff bought $760,000 worth of used school buses without competitive bidding or even informing the board. “It was an emergency,” said Hopson, and the buses were bought legally through state procurement at a very good price.

The board set a $25,000 limit to the superintendent’s authority to make an emergency purchase without board approval.

Vasquez said the emergency could have been prevented if the superintendent hadn’t changed the school day so that high school and elementary school started at about the same time.

The board also asked that transportation manager Brad Montgomery make a full report on the condition and use of the district’s buses at the January meeting.

District property, including computers, sometimes “walks out of the warehouse.” Vasquez asked that an automated method of monthly inventory be implemented. Brown said it would be a large and involved task, requiring millions in expenditures, but that he would begin by inventorying the warehouse.

“We are building that capacity for the future,” said Hopson.

Auditors pointed out that board members acquire much more than the minimum annual training state requirement, at some cost to the district. The board implemented a new policy to cancel all out-of-district travel.

Vasquez pointed out the dilemma of board members being praised by the Association of School Boards for getting extra training hours and criticized by the legislative audit for accruing those same hours.

Auditors raised concerns about possible duplication of professional-development contracts, but Hopson explained that all three such contracts address different areas of development.