This is the first of a five-part series looking back at 2010. The first four parts will take a quarterly trip through the year, followed by the Leader’s top ten stories of the year.
Snow and ice, along with the base’s response to the Haitian earthquake made the news the first quarter of the year, so did Pulaski County Special School District’s search for a new superintendent, and retrial and appeal news for former Lonoke Police Chief Jay Campbell and his wife.
Here is a month-by-month look at January through March 2010.
January
In early January, Beebe Mayor Mike Robertson told residents displaced by the 2009 Christmas Eve flood in Windwood that he was working with an engineer to mitigate the flooding problem. He was also working with state and federal agencies to get emergency funds to help pay their living expenses while they are out of their homes.
Robertson told the residents that the rain didn’t cause the flooding. The floodwater came from the western part of Beebe and from as far away as Ward and El Paso. The main problem is not construction in their subdivision but construction all around them that changed the flow of water.
Cabot was called the state’s boomtown in 2009 by a Little Rock company that provides marketing information to large retailers nationwide. But in 2010, the city, still growing steadily, fell to No. 6 in the state behind Maumelle, Bryant, Conway, Centerton and Lowell, but ahead of Rogers, Bentonville and Fayetteville.
Cabot Mayor Eddie Joe Williams said he isn’t concerned that his city has moved down in ranking. Cabot is still doing well and building is on the rise since the stock of available houses has been sold down.
A series of arctic fronts moved across the state at a slow pace and drove low temperatures in central Arkansas into the single digits.
In the second week of January, temperatures in central Arkansas were as low as two degrees.
Suspension and expulsion data released by PCSSD officials showed little improvement, especially among black students.
In 2009, 18 out of every 100 students districtwide were suspended and sent home for disciplinary reasons. The rate for black students was 27 percent; for non blacks it was 12 percent.
Home-suspension rates have not improved – and in some categories worsened – since 2001-02, according to PCSSD data. Fourteen out of every 100 students were suspended and sent home in 2001-02. Since then, the rate has steadily climbed. Suspensions range in length from two to 10 days.
Suspension rates gauge not only days of learning lost, but also the number of students who may need extra help or special services in order to stay in school and succeed. Students who are suspended are at greater risk of juvenile incarceration and doing prison time as adults, national studies show.
Dick Jeter community homeowners whose property flooded on Christmas Day learned in January that fixing Bayou Meto was not going to be part of the solution to their woes.
The community is southeast of Jacksonville in an unincorporated area in the vicinity of Valentine and Wooten roads.
Sherman Smith, a county engineer who met with 40 Dick Jeter homeowners to discuss ways to mitigate future flooding, said that cleaning out culverts and trapping beavers were feasible strategies, but that an overhaul of the bayou, a protected wetland, was not.
Two Lonoke County officials caught double-dipping — drawing their salary and state retirement — claim at least three county officials knew when they “retired” in 2009.
Assessor Jerry Adams and Treasurer Karol DePriest — each of whom drew both the salary for their constitutional office and simultaneously state retirement benefits — say they were advised they could step down for three months and then draw two paychecks.
But they’re willing to return their retirement money if they did anything wrong, even though their attorney says everything was done above board.
They were so quiet about their retirements last summer and then resuming their office three months later that the quorum court members were unaware of their retirements. Adams and DePriest continued to attend meetings and apparently attended to business in their official capacities.
They were two of about 10 city or county officials across the state receiving pay and retirement pay, according to Jerry Wills, attorney for the Arkansas Public Employees Retirement System (APERS), which administers the state retirement program.
About 25 Cabot area leaders attended a workshop in mid-January that was the first step toward developing a marketing plan for the city.
Thoma Thoma, a Little Rock firm specializing in brand development and marketing communications, led the discussion that eventually ended where most knew it would. The biggest draw to Cabot is its schools.
Mayor Eddie Joe Williams said that although the perfect words to describe Cabot may not have yet been assigned, Cabot already has a brand.
“We’re branded now – good schools,” the mayor said.
“If people will shop and eat in Cabot, Cabot will have money for roads and parks,” he said.
The city’s advertising and promotion commission set aside $30,000 in 2009 to start professionally promoting the city. The full cost of the project could be as high as $70,000.
The Jacksonville City Council and residents were updated on nine capital-improvement projects with a total cost at $20 million. The projects were in various stages from still on the drawing board to shovel ready to work in progress—but all will be finished as time and weather permits and money becomes available.
The projects included Oneida Street work, Main Street realignment, the Emma Street project, improvements at the intersection of Main, James and Dupree, Harris Road, the farmer’s market, the new 911 center, the police and fire training facility and remodeling of fire station No. 4.
Three former cellmates of Jerry Dale Luker – all Lonoke County residents – were charged with second-degree murder in mid-January in his death, which resulted from an incident in the Lonoke County Jail back in October 2009, according to Prosecuting Attorney Will Feland.
Luker, 34, died as the result of a major head injury. Luker, a Lonoke resident, was committed to the state Correction Department to serve a 36-month sentence for fraudulent use of a credit card and felony probation violations, according to the Lonoke County Sheriff’s Office.
Feland charged each of the three — Eddie Thomas Buchy, 29, of Ward; David Chad Lane, 32, of Cabot, and Wesley May Minnie, 22, of Cabot — with engaging in violent criminal-group activity and with being habitual criminals. Both charges are sentence enhancers.
A veteran Jacksonville police officer was fired in January shortly after his arrest in Cabot on drug-related charges.
Charles Wells and his wife, Melissa Wells, both 32, of 19 Red Oak Drive in Cabot, were arrested following the execution of a search warrant after a narcotics investigation, according to a news release from Lt. Jim Kulesa, spokesman for the Lonoke County Sheriff’s Office.
Capt. Kenny Boyd, spokesman for the Jacksonville Police Department, said Charles Wells was placed on paid administrative leave for one day and then fired the next day.
The two were charged with nine misdemeanor counts of possession of prescription medicine without a prescription and one felony count of possession of prescription medicine without a prescription.
The Arkansas Court of Appeals canceled oral arguments that were to be held in Kelly H. Campbell’s appeal of her 2007 conviction in Lonoke County after a motion by her attorney.
She is the wife of Jay Campbell, the former Lonoke police chief. The Arkansas Supreme Court reversed his convictions in November 2009 on public-corruption charges.
Kelly Campbell was handed a 20-year prison sentence after being found guilty in circuit court of more than 20 charges. Her charges included furnishing prohibited materials, providing an instrument of escape and several drug charges.
Jay Campbell was released from custody in December 2009 on $50,000 bail. He had served nearly two years of a 40-year sentence.
In November, the high court found that prosecutors had failed to present substantial evidence to support guilty verdicts on more than 40 counts, such as masterminding a criminal enterprise, obtaining drugs by fraud and hindering prosecution.
Gary Meadows, a former Cabot fire chief, was paid about $19,000 for the 90 days of sick leave he wasn’t paid for in 2005 when he abruptly resigned as part of a settlement reached in his lawsuit against the city of Cabot.
Asked about the settlement, Meadows said he had signed a confidentiality agreement so he couldn’t divulge the amount.
Second District Cong. Vic Snyder, D-Little Rock, announced that he would not seek re-election after seven terms, choosing family over what was expected to be a rough-and-tumble campaign against former U.S. Attorney Tim Griffin.
Although Snyder hadn’t begun campaigning or raising money, Griffin, a former aide to Karl Rove, had a double-digit lead over the incumbent, according to polls at the time.
Snyder, 62, served on the House Armed Services Committee, where he chaired the subcommittee on oversight and investigations, the Committee on Veterans Affairs and the Joint Economic Committee.
He was active in helping to bring programs and construction projects to Little Rock Air Force Base worth millions of dollars.
The Sherwood Advertising and Promotion Commission doubled the amount it was paying toward the golf course expenses to allow the city to float $7 millions, in bonds for the facility.
The commission gives the course $20,000 a month. It had been giving it $10,000 a month.
Alderman Charlie Harmon asked for the increase, saying that if the commission would double its contributions then the city would be able to cover the monthly payment of the bond issue.
The $7 million will allow the city’s public-facilities board, which leases the golf course to the city, to pay off the $5.5 million short-term loan it took out to buy the property and settle lawsuits almost two years ago and leave about $1.3 million for repairs and improvements.
Nearly 300 chamber members and guests enjoyed a local showcase of talent at the annual Cabot Chamber of Commerce banquet.
“We’re a small town with big opportunities,” said incoming chamber president Amy Ross. “It’s no secret that our schools are one of the top reasons people move to Cabot. We have top-notch facilities and want to work to keep it that way,” she said.
The 49th annual dinner was held at the newly opened Cabot Junior High School North.
Kimberly Buchberger, founder of Hope’s Closet, was named the chamber’s person of the year. Hope’s Closet is a nonprofit organization that provides food, clothing, furniture and other items to those in need in northern Lonoke County and the Beebe area.
About 10,000 U.S. troops hit the ground in Haiti in late January to provide security for the enormous earthquake relief effort amidst the mounting chaos, and 46 of those deplaned at Port-au-Prince were from Little Rock Air Force Base’s 41st Airlift Squadron.
The 41st, or Black Cat Squadron, is the C-130J squadron in the 19th Airlift Wing.
This was the second of eight Little Rock Air Force Base C-130s committed to the relief effort, according to Tech Sgt. Kati Grabham, a spokeswoman at LRAFB.
“We will support the effort to the fullest,” Grabham said. “Providing airlift is what we do.”
In just a two-week time period, Air Mobility Command flew more than 260 sorties for relief efforts and delivered nearly 1,600 tons of aid and 2,400 passengers. “We have evacuated more than 600 victims,” Grabham said.
The 430-acre site that Jacksonville wants to give away to bring the Arkansas State Fair from Little Rock could double in size if North Little Rock and Sherwood join together to make the move possible.
Jacksonville was willing to donate $1 million worth of land off South Hwy. 161 near Hwy. 67/167 and the North Belt Freeway. But state fair officials may have a more ambitious plan in mind as they consider abandoning the state fairgrounds on Roosevelt Road in Little Rock because it’s seen as outdated and dilapidated.
North Little Rock could provide land in the Rixie Addition near the two highways at the edge of the city limits. Some of the land is unincorporated county land that Sherwood might annex and make the area available for the fair.
After a site is chosen, the new fairgrounds could cost up to $150 million and take three to five years to open.
A decision was made in the latter half of January to retry former Lonoke Police Chief Jay Campbell, whose convictions in April 2007 were remanded back to the Lonoke County Prosecutor’s Office, on 17 of the original 26 charges.
Campbell appeared at the 10-minute hearing with several supporters.
Prosecutor Will Feland said the state Supreme Court had overturned several charges, including running a continuing criminal enterprise, the statute of limitations had expired on others and the time already served satisfied the misdemeanor convictions.
Campbell still faced charges including conspiracy to manufacture methamphetamine, five burglaries, theft of property, six or seven charges of obtaining drugs by fraud, two charges of hindering apprehension and one count of filing a false report.
Sherwood Alderman Keith Rankin resigned after The Leader reported that he did not live in his ward and did not even live in the city.
He gave his letter of resignation to Mayor Virginia Hillman.
In a terse letter to the mayor, Rankin wrote, “Please accept this letter as my formal resignation as Alderman from Ward 4, Position 1 effective immediately. It has been an honor and privilege to serve the great citizens of Sherwood for the last 22 years.”
Up to a week before his resignation, Rankin maintained he lived at 310 E. Woodruff, but that’s not what two people under oath claimed.
In divorce proceedings Jan. 4, both Rankin’s ex-wife and family friend said under oath that Rankin had not lived at that address for at least 30 days.
In late January, Sherwood Alderman Becki Vassar expressed hope that others shared her sentiment about preserving a little bit of local history – the long-vacant filling station that sits in the midst of the intersection of Trammel and Roundtop roads at the eastern edge of town. The spot was once a vital way station for travelers between Little Rock and St. Louis. Now, the quaint building, which in 2008 was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, is badly in need of repair.
“It needs everything – it is about to fall down,” Vassar said. “Some repairs have been done on the roof, but it is in total disrepair.
“There are some people who think it should be torn down, but there are only two, maybe four left in the state, and we need to do what we can to preserve it,” Vassar said.
The latest estimate of cost of construction for the new Sylvan Hills Middle School was $7 million more than $30 million originally expected. But the state-of-the-art school could prove to be a good investment by enticing students back to the district.
That, at least, was the theory of Charley Wood, Sherwood representative on the school board for Pulaski County Special School District.
“Once it is built it will be almost like the old ‘Field of Dreams’ movie,” said Wood, emphasizing that he is no expert on the matter. “In a few years, enrollment will jump up, and the school will pay for itself very quickly.”
What is driving up the cost is a layer of “almost solid rock that will have to be dynamited,” Wood said. “That is millions of dollars we had not counted on.”
The Arkansas Highway Commission opened bids on 17 construction projects, including two that would help ease traffic congestion in and around Sherwood.
Federal stimulus funds would pay for the projects, which are worth nearly $30 million.
The biggest project is the reconstructing and widening to six lanes of 1.6 miles of U.S. Hwy. 67/167 from the east end of Kiehl Avenue north to Arkansas 440. State highway planners had identified it as a priority because of strong local interest voiced by Jacksonville residents and city officials.
Weaver Bailey Contractors Inc. of El Paso got the job with a bid of $9.4 million.
The long-awaited final phase of the Brockington Road widening also took a step. Redstone Construction Group of Little Rock came in with the lowest bid of $3.2 million to reconfigure the intersection at Kiehl Avenue and Brockington Road. The bid was $900,000 less than planners had expected.
A turn lane will be added to ease rush-hour bottlenecks.
The Brockington widening will connect to a four-lane project nearing completion that extends from Maryland Avenue to Hwy. 107, Carl Rosenbaum said, highway commisioner.
Eight C-130s and more than 40 airmen from four squadrons at Little Rock Air Force Base have flown 14 missions and delivered 111,000 pounds of relief supplies in a week’s time in late January as part of the massive Air Mobility Command airlift mission to support Haitian earthquake relief as part of Operation Unified Response.
According to air base public affairs, aircrews and C-130s from the 41st, 50th, 53rd and 61st Airlift Squadrons flew missions to Haiti as part of an overall Air Force operation that has delivered approximately 2,250 tons of supplies to the region.
After just five months of operation in Jacksonville, Lighthouse Charter Academy was already looking at building another school.
“We are looking at expanding at a site nearby,” Lighthouse principal Nigena Livingston told the Jacksonville Lions Club in January.
The new building on North First Street is not big enough to add middle school or high school grades. Now, the school is for kindergarten through sixth-grade students. It must add a grade each year, just to meet the demand of its students progressing.
The principal estimated that about a quarter of her school’s students live on the air base.
“Thank God for Mississippi” shouldn’t be in our vocabulary any longer, Gov. Mike Beebe told a packed house at the Jacksonville Chamber of Commerce annual banquet the last week of January.
He admitted there was a time he was guilty of saying that, and knew that most people in the room had said it, too.
“We are lapping so many states in so many categories,” the governor said.
He told the crowd that recently a television station in Fort Smith did a report bragging that Oklahoma was 22nd in education. “As if that was something to brag about,” Beebe quipped. “That same study showed Arkansas was 10th. Not 10th from the bottom, but 10th from the top.
“That’s not my doing,” Beebe added. “I give some of the credit to former Gov. Mike Huckabee, some to the state Supreme Court and a ton of credit to our state legislature for banding together to do what was best for the state.
“So let Alabama worry about Mississippi. We should be irritated that Connecticut still has a higher per capita than us,” the governor said.
Arkansas, which has been mired 49th in per-capita income, has moved past two states in the past two years and is about to pass South Carolina, the governor pointed out. “Most states take 10 years to move up one notch on the per-capita ranking,” Beebe said.
The governor told the audience that Arkansans had the right to be proud of their state.
At its January meeting, the Sherwood City Council tabled an ordinance that would have allowed the city wastewater utility to move ahead on repairs to the city’s crumbling sewer collection lines and two wastewater treatment plants that are under a consent order from the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality. Engineer Ellen Norvell had proposed a 2010 budget for system improvements of $2.68 million that would be drawn from nearly $10 million that remains from revenues collected from a 1 percent, 60-month sewer sales tax that Sherwood voters enacted 10 years ago.
Citing health problems, Cong. Marion Berry (D-Gillett), who had represented the First District since 1997, announced that he would not run for re-election.
Cabot Mayor Eddie Joe Williams said the congressman has been very helpful in obtaining federal funds for the city.
Berry had been instrumental in getting the $10 million to build a National Guard armory in Cabot and in getting a contract post office across the railroad track on Main Street.
In late January, a Jacksonville youth was charged as an adult in connection with the grisly discovery on Dec. 12, 2009, of an adult man and toddler found dead in a burning truck near Sweet Home.
Daniel Chase Gatrell, 16, of 10 Coral Lane in Jacksonville surrendered to authorities, according John Rehrauer, spokesman for the Pulaski County Sheriff’s Office.
Gatrell and his cousin, Robert Todd Gatrell, 21, of 724 Shamburger Road in Little Rock, were charged with two counts each of capital murder and one count of arson.
The two were charged with the murder of Michael Palmer, 28, of Hensley, and Hannah Palmer-Dowdie, 1, of Little Rock.
Just before the end of the month, the area was hit hard with sleet, ice and snow.
The winter storm caused schools to close for the day in the local area from Little Rock to Searcy and that helped take some traffic off the roadways.
Gov. Mike Beebe declared a state of emergency in response to the ice and snow already in Arkansas and what continued to hit the area over the next few days.
The storm divided the state into a snowy north, dropping up to 12 inches of snow, and an icy south, with accumulations of ice up to about a half an inch in spots.
The 430 acres of land that Jacksonville officials offered to give to the state fair could be acquired through eminent domain if any of the owners hesitate to sell to the city, officials said in late January.
The property was one of three parcels along State Hwy. 440 between Jacksonville and I-40 in North Little Rock that could be the new site for the Arkansas State Fair complex.
Entergy is one of several landowners in the Jacksonville area that the city is offering to the fair. The electric utility has told Jacksonville officials it is not interested in selling, but the city could offer Entergy other land in a swap. Jacksonville could also claim eminent domain and acquire the property in the area, the way Little Rock condemned land for the Clinton Presidential Library.
February
A select group of Arkansas National Guardsmen went to Afghanistan to help grow peace and relative prosperity by helping farmers re-establish agriculture on once-fruitful lands now as barren as the moon.
They’ll be bolstering the primitive farming techniques employed “since biblical times” with better informed methods — appropriate technology, according to Lt. Col. Keith Moore of the Guard. Probably nothing as fancy as a tractor, he said.
Moore, a Jacksonville resident, led a team of about 14 ag-minded guardsmen and a security force of about 50 into an area near Qalat, not far from Kandahar in the southeast quadrant of Afghanistan. Pakistan is the neighbor to the east.
About a dozen other Agri-business Development Teams from other states have undertaken similar missions further north, but this was the first such mission in this area.
When a 15-year-old boy collapsed, but survived, in Little Rock on almost the same spot where a teen basketball player died two years earlier, Larry Tarrant, director of the Cabot Parks Department, said he knew it was time he got the defibrillators even though he is not required by law to do so.
“We might be the first. I don’t know,” he said. “They cost a lot of money and I pray we never have to use them. But I’m sure glad we’ve got them.”
The seven defibrillators he bought for the concession stands at park facilities across the city cost $11,200.
Congressman Vic Snyder was honored in early February with the Jack Evans Regional Leadership Award.
The award, named after the late Sherwood mayor, is presented annually for “outstanding public service in advancing sound planning and intergovernmental cooperation in central Arkansas.”
A February ice and snow storm was much milder than expected, but still had city and county road crews working long hours dumping sand and chemicals on bridges, intersections and hills to try to minimize traffic accidents.
Hal Toney, Jacksonville’s street department superintendent, said his department put in 219 man-hours and dumped about 80 tons of sand and seven tons of salt throughout the city during the four-day weather event.
In Sherwood, crews also put in about 200 man-hours.
The Lonoke County Sheriff’s Office received new officer-safety equipment, thanks to a $19,000 federal grant from Homeland Security.
The funds were used to purchase three ballistic shields, two full ballistic body suits, two ballistic helmets and an additional radio.
Former Lonoke Police Chief Ronald Jay Campbell entered a negotiated plea of no contest to four felonies before Lonoke Circuit Judge Barbara Elmore and was sentenced to 15 years in prison with credit for about 36 months already served.
Campbell faced 17 charges, according to Lonoke County Prosecutor Will Feland. His pleas were to two burglaries, one theft of property and one count of obtaining drugs by fraud.
The other 13 charges were nolle prossed.
The Jacksonville City Council agreed to spend up to $22,500 for a computerized system that would call residents in cases of emergencies, alerts and even more mundane news like a change in the garbage schedule
.
Cabot had been using the rapid emergency-communication system known as CodeRED for about six months and Major Eddie Joe Williams was very pleased with it.
Jacksonville has purchased two tiers of the warning system — the weather-alert programming and the one for city announcements.
The tier for city announcements is restricted to 50,000 minutes of use per year – 100,000 30-second calls – but the city can buy more time if needed.
County officials ceremonially turned the first shovels of dirt for a new $6 million, 134-bed Lonoke County Detention Center in early February.
The long-overdue lockup is located at the end of Dee Dee Lane in the Lonoke Industrial Park behind the McDonald’s restaurant.
Lonoke County residents, notoriously resistant to any tax increases, nonetheless approved a one-year, penny sales tax dedicated to jail construction.
An early February snowstorm dumped more flakes on the area than central Arkansas had seen in 22 years. Depending upon who was doing the measuring, totals ran from 5 inches in Sherwood to 8 inches of snow in Beebe.
The snowfall cancelled most area schools for two or more days.
So much snow fell that the weight collapsed part of the overhang at the Citgo on Warden Road, off U .S. Hwy. 67/167, and the Smokey’s Pub sign and canopy about a mile further south down the road were destroyed.
In Cabot, part of the Whit Davis Lumber Plus roof collapsed.
More than a dozen Lonoke County rice producers who filed suit in 2006 against Bayer CropScience and Riceland Foods got some encouraging news in February, when a St. Louis district-court jury ruled against Bayer in a similar case, awarding other growers about $1.5 million in actual losses.
While no punitive damages were awarded, the compensation was for losses Clay County and Missouri farmers sustained when seed from an experimental, genetically modified rice variety contaminated their fields.
The Lonoke County rice growers suit against Bayer and against Riceland Co-op was set to go to trial March 22.
Lonoke County Judge Charlie Troutman hired an explosives expert to blow up a beaver dam off state Hwy. 294 between Jacksonville and Furlow.
“This is just one (dam) out of many,” Troutman said. “How much good it will do is the $64 question.”
Little Rock Air Force Base C-130s and crews were still flying missions to support aid efforts after the Haitian earthquake.
By mid-February, base planes and crews had flown more than 140 sorties in support of Haiti earthquake relief and delivered more than 324 tons of supplies and 838 people, many of them soldiers going in to provide security for relief efforts, according to base spokesman John Taylor.
Most students were looking forward to having Presidents’ Day off, but the heavy snow storms earlier in the month canceled the off day and students were expected in school.
Cabot, Beebe, Searcy and Pulaski County Special School District students were in session on what was originally a holiday for the students.
Besides making up snow days, Searcy was also dealing with the loss of a $1.25-million gym building that collapsed under the weight of the snow on its high school campus.
The operators of Bunker’s Bistro, an eatery and drinking establishment located on Sherwood’s new golf course, applied for and received a restaurant mixed-alcohol permit.
The eatery, located in the downstairs section of the old North Hills golf course clubhouse, had already received a conditional permit to serve on-premise beer.
To be eligible for a restaurant mixed-drink permit, a facility must have an on-site kitchen, serve at least one meal a day, have at least 50 seats and not be located in a dry area.
There are 40 businesses between Sherwood and Cabot that are now allowed, through one of the four permits, to sell alcohol.
The Cabot School Board decided in February that when Mountain Springs Elementary School opened in the fall, there would be no textbooks.
Harold Jeffcoat, director of curriculum for the district’s elementary schools, said that instead of paying $250,000 for math and social studies books, the district will pay $1,000 for software that will let teachers choose and share instructional material tailored to the state standards to which they must teach.
Textbooks are written to a national standard and don’t necessarily contain the lessons that Arkansas says students must be taught.
The Cabot man who was fired in March 2009 as CEO of Affiliated Foods, four months before the wholesale food distribution company went out of business, pleaded guilty to kiting $11.5 million in checks and faced up to 30 years in federal prison and a fine of up to $1 million.
A spokesman for U.S. Attor-ney Jane Duke said John Mills, 59, was free on his own recognizance until his sentencing in March or April.
Construction on the $7.5 million career and technical training center at Beebe High School was set to start soon after the Beebe School Board held a special meeting in late February to discuss funding the new building construction.
According to Superintendent Belinda Shook, the district has approximately $2 million in funding, including $900,000 in federal stimulus money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The state will be providing $2.2 million.
A recycling center opened in an unused fire station at 203 Elm St. in Cabot in February. The center accepts recyclable items from residents inside the city as well as from area Lonoke County residents.
Operating hours are from noon to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. Alderman Eddie Cook said all it cost the city was new carpet and paint for the old fire station.
The Sherwood City Council unanimously elected Rev. Timothy McMinn at its February after aldermen went into closed session for 35 minutes to discuss the eight candidates who had applied for the seat vacated by the earlier resignation of Keith Rankin who no longer lived in the ward or the city.
The quaint and crumbling former filling station that sits in the middle of the intersection of Round Top and Trammel roads in Sherwood was reclaimed to a former glory when it was used as a backdrop for a few days during the filming of a movie about the last days in the life of singer-songwriter Hank Williams Sr.
The 1930s-vintage gas station with the red-turret roof, though badly in need of repair, seemed the perfect location for a few night scenes in the movie, which is tentatively titled “The Last Ride” and was being directed by Arkansas native Harry Thomason. It stars Henry Thomas (who as a boy starred in “E.T.”) as Williams.
The restoration was so realistic, with an antique gas pump placed there for the shooting, that several motorists stopped to get gasoline. They were told they had wandered into a movie set.
At about the same time, Sherwood code-enforcement officer placed a red citation on the building and called it “dilapidated” and threatened a lien in county circuit court if repairs weren’t made.
Pulaski County Circuit Judge Barry Sims sentenced Nicole Lloyd of Jacksonville to 27 years in prison following her guilty plea, part of a negotiated settlement in which she admitted beating and shaking her boyfriend’s 2-year-old son, Joseph Clyde “Jo-Jo” Roberts, to death.
Lloyd, 22, was sentenced under the 70 percent rule, so she would not be eligible for parole until she serves nearly 19 years, according to Pulaski County deputy prosecutor Terry Ball.
The board of directors of North Metro Medical Center selected Mike Schimming as the new chief executive officer. He came on board as the hospital’s chief financial officer when Allegiance Health Management took over hospital operations last January.
Under Schimming’s leadership, the financial picture for North Metro has brightened significantly. Since the beginning of the 2009-10 fiscal year, the hospital’s bottom line is showing a net gain of $3.5 million, even with bad debt and charity write-offs of $5 million, as of the end of January.
While payments from Medicaid, Medicare, commercial insurers and patients have declined by almost $1 million. The hospital has reduced its operating expenses by $3 million.
March
Several political candidates started filing for state and local offices in early March.
Cabot Mayor Eddie Joe Williams, a Republican, and former state Rep. Lenville Evans of Lonoke, a Democrat, filed for Senate Dist. 28 to succeed Sen. Bobby Glover (D-Carlisle), who was term limited.
Rep. Jonathan Dismang (R-Beebe) and former Rep. Sandra Prater of Jacksonville, a Democrat, filed for Senate Dist. 29 to succeed Sen. John Paul Capps (D-Searcy), who was term limited.
Jesse Boyce, a Democrat, and Jeremy Gillam, a Republican, filed for Dismang’s House seat in Dist. 49.
Rep. Walls McCrary (D-Lonoke) filed for re-election in Dist. 15, as did Rep. Jane English (R-North Little Rock) in Dist. 42 and Jim Nickels (D-Sherwood) in Dist. 43.
Tim Blair, a Democrat, filed for Lonoke County prosecuting attorney in Lonoke County to succeed interim Prosecuting Attorney Will Feland, who is completing the unexpired term of Lona McCastlain, who resigned.
Justice of the Peace Bob Johnson of Jacksonville filed for re-election to the Pulaski County Quorum Court in Dist. 11.
The only remaining candidate for the Pulaski County Special School District superintendent job, Rob McGill, who was serving as the interim superintendent, was shunned by the board in early March when the board decided to renew its search for candidates.
McGill and Vashta Washing-ton were the two finalists for the job and Washington withdrew her name to take another job. But instead of offering McGill the job, the board voted 6-1 to restart the search and interview as many as four candidates.
It came to light in early March that police broke up a morning prayer meeting at Cabot High School on Feb. 26.
An e-mail circulated in the Cabot area about a prayer meeting gone wrong on the high school campus. It accussed police profiling and religious persecution. But the police, the school superintendent and even the author of the e-mail say it was just a misunderstanding.
The mother of a high school senior said in her original e-mail that her son just happened to be in the area when a janitor called the police to report a prayer meeting early on the morning of Feb. 26.
Her son wasn’t praying, but the mother said he was “a skinny teenage boy who has long hair wearing a military-style jacket with holes in (his) jeans” and was profiled as a “thug” and patted down by police.
“It’s not a dog pound,” Ward Mayor Art Brooke told a crowd at the ground-breaking ceremony. “It’s not a jail house. It’s an animal shelter.
“We started this project in 1999,” the mayor said. “Different things that have happened, the current economic state, have slowed it down.”
Over the past few years, many special events and fund-raisers, such as chili suppers, as well as private donations, have helped the city cover the cost of building the $90,000 shelter.
The debate of the so-called double dipping of elected officials, including two from Lonoke County, who retired by getting off the payroll for three months and then went back on the payroll while simultaneously drawing retirement from the Arkansas Public Employees Retirement System ,spilled into March.
“Facilities are very, very important” to the Joshua Intervenors’ case that Pulaski County Special School District had not made a good-faith effort to desegregate its schools and thus should not be released from the desegregation agreement and court oversight, John Walker said in March during the district’s desegregation hearing.
“The district has reconstituted, with the state’s help, separate-but-equal facilities prohibited by law,” said Walker, lead attorney for the Joshua Intervenors for about 30 years.
PCSSD petitioned for unitary status and U.S. District Judge Brian Miller was hearing the case.
About a week after being spurned by the Pulaski County Special School District School Board as the person to head the district, acting Superintendent Rob McGill took another job.
McGill accepted an offer to become the executive director of Academics Plus Charter School in Maumelle.
The Academics Plus board of trustees has decided to pay its current executive director, Jake Honea, $86,700 to not return for the third year of his three-year contract so that McGill could take the job. “He really wasn’t given the option,” said Jess Sweere, Academics Plus board president.
By a 5-1 vote, the Pulaski County Special School District Board chose board member Danny Gilliland to join teachers’ union president Marty Nix, lawyers for both sides and a mediator to comply with Circuit Judge Tim Fox’s order to settle their differences.
In January, the board withdrew recognition of the Pulaski Association of Classroom Teachers and the Pulaski Association of Support Staff as bargaining agents for their membership and they sued the district in Pulaski County Circuit Court.
The boarded-up Manor House Apartments, which disgraced the entrance to Jacksonville’s Dupree Park for years, was demolished.
Mayor Gary Fletcher called the three-building, 48-unit apartment complex a traffic and a safety hazard as well as an eyesore.
The city bought the property for $272,000 after it went into receivership.
The Joshua Intervenors, advocates for black students in the Pulaski County Special School District, rested their case in federal court that the district has failed to achieve unity status in the delivery of education to blacks compared to non-blacks.
The case opened in the court of U.S. Judge Brian Miller on March 1. Miller was expected to make a ruling on the PCSSD desegregation case, as well as that for the North Little Rock School District, later in the year.
To conclude his case that PCSSD has repeatedly dropped the ball over the years in regard to Plan 2000, attorney John Walker called a host of witnesses, including Mike Nellums, the former principal of the Jacksonville Middle School for Boys, two PCSSD parents, an education expert and two desegregation monitors.
Former principal and boys’ basketball coach of Abundant Life School, Tim Ballard, pleaded not guilty to first-degree sexual assault in Sherwood district court.
According to the Sherwood Police Department reports, Ballard allegedly had inappropriate relationships with at least two female students, and that his bosses were aware of sexual complaints as far back as 11 years ago.
Ballard has worked at the school for 18 years.
Former governor and presidential candidate Mike Huckabee spoke at the annual Sherwood Chamber of Commerce banquet. He told the crowd about bobsledding in Utah.
“My trainer was a 16-year-old teenager. I’ll be truthful, I don’t want to learn to drive anything from a 16-year-old,” he quipped.
The governor said that as he and the teen walked up the course and stopped by each curve and the youngster explained what would happen if the governor steered too high or too low, that he just became more nervous.
“By the time we trekked to the top, I was terrified and exhausted,” Huckabee said.
A dozen Sherwood residents and businesses were honored by the city’s chamber of commerce at its annual banquet held at Sherwood Forest.
The Sherwood chamber’s man of the tear, Joey Parker, was also the emcee for the event and the chamber’s president-elect.
The woman of the year was Carolyn Chalmers, a retired assistant principal for Mount St. Mary Academy in Little Rock.
Two firefighters were honored, one from the Sherwood department and one from the Gravel Ridge department. The firefighter of the year was Capt. Philip Flynn.
Lane Goff was the firefighter of the year from Gravel Ridge. Goff was honored for his lifesaving efforts in pulling a woman from a car nearly submerged in floodwater on Jacksonville Cut-Off.
The chamber’s law enforcement officer of the year, Richard Harper, was also honored for his heroic effort in saving that same woman from the floodwater.
The educator of the year was Donna Humphries, the assistant principal of Crystal Hills Elementary, who was the longtime counselor at Sherwood Elementary.
A Jacksonville police officer, who won his worker’s-compensation case even though he was not physically injured, will also collect disability retirement benefits.
In what appeared to be the first ruling of its kind in Arkansas, Administrative Judge Barbara Webb ruled that John Forte, 44, had suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder after participating in a five-hour-long shootout in the Foxwood subdivision of Jacksonville in August 2008. He was the only one of the officers involved in the shootout to suffer the disorder.
An effort to mediate the problems between the PCSSD school board and the teacher’s union failed.
Pulaski County Circuit Court Judge Tim Fox ordered the two sides to resolve their differences so that the lawsuit would become a non-issue, but mediation efforts on March 8 failed.
Marty Nix, president of Pulaski Association of Classroom Teachers, and school board member Danny Gililland met the entire day, with discussions facilitated by ADR Inc., a Little Rock mediation service.
“I believe there was an honest effort on both sides to come up with an agreement, but we were not able to do that,” Gililland said.
