DON FULTS
Don Fults, 65, of Beebe died Dec. 20.
He was a paint contractor and then retired from Falcon Jet as an interior installer.
He is survived by his wife, Carolyn Kirk Fults; two sons, David Hawk of Beebe and Wesley Fults of Sacramento, Calif.; one daughter, Tammy Jackson of Beebe; two brothers, Dan Rey-nolds of California and Bob Fults of Missouri; one sister, RoseAnn Escott of Illinois; eight grandchildren.
Graveside service will be 10 a.m. Friday at Stoney Point Cemetery, Beebe by Westbrook Funeral Home, Beebe.
KENNETH FLOYD
Kenneth Leon Floyd, 67, of Stuttgart passed away Sunday, Dec. 18, at Stuttgart Regional Medical Center.
Floyd was born Oct. 1, 1938, in Hazen. He was a 28-year employee at Producer’s Rice Mill where he was a construction engineer, and was a member of Park Avenue Baptist Church.
His parents, Enos Doris Floyd and Nettie Mae Kee Floyd Dozier; his step-father, James A. Dozier; and brothers-in-law, Charles Daw-son, Raymond Dawson, Elmer Raper and Henry Kee, preceded him in death.
Survivors are his wife, Joyce Ann Dawson Floyd; his son, Dickie L. Floyd and wife Donna of Stuttgart; his daughter, Cindy A. Doss and fiancé Mike Wayman of Little Rock; two brothers, Benny Floyd and wife Marilyn of Cabot and Jerry Floyd and wife Judy of Moro; brother-in law and sisters-in-law, Modean Kee of Hazen, Janie Bell Dawson of Bryant, Marcelle Raper of Stuttgart, Sue Dawson of Lonoke and Gene and Margie Vail of Stuttgart; and six grandchildren, Adam and Kenny Mannis, Jonathan, Tiffany and MaKayla Floyd and Camilla Lewis. He was also survived by several other relatives and many friends and co-workers.
Funeral services were Tuesday at Park Avenue Baptist Church with Bro. Ralph Ruffin officiating.
A graveside service was held Tuesday at Center Point Cemetery near Hazen by Turpin Funeral Home of Stuttgart.
Pallbearers were his nephews, Dudley Raper, Doug Vail, Jeff Floyd, Terry Floyd, Bud Dawson, Greg Hogue, Clay Medford and Billy Kee.
The family requests memorials be made to Park Avenue Baptist Church Building Fund, P.O. Box 983, Stuttgart, or Center Point Cemetery Fund, c/o Gail Wallace, 2826 Hwy. 249 N., Hazen, Ark. 72064.
EVA GARDNER
Eva Dee Gardner, 86, of Beebe, died Sunday, Dec. 18.
She was raised in Enola and Mt. Vernon.
She was preceded in death by her husband of 20 years, Fred Gardner, and her parents, Henry and Lillie Hale Grimes. She is survived by three daughters, Cindy Chapman and Sandra Sloan, both of Beebe, and Anna and husband Harrel Free of Conway; two sons, Charles Gardner and Thurman Gardner, both of Beebe; 16 grandchildren; 28 great-grandchildren; one great-great-grandchild; one brother, Hassell Grimes of Texarkana, Texas; and three sisters, Reva Moore of Rogers, Rachel Linders and Linda May, both of McRae.
Funeral will be at 2 p.m. Wednesday at McRae Pentecostal Church, with burial in Weir Cemetery.
Arrangements are by West-brook Funeral Home.
DANIEL WEST
Daniel O. West, of Beebe, died Dec. 16 at a local hospital after a two-month fight which involved a two-car accident.
He was born in Thomasville, Georgia on August 14, 1938, and moved to Arkansas in 1978.
He loved his evenings of fishing and his special coffee time at Waffle House with his many friends, especially Gary of Beebe and Roger Tilman of Keystone Heights, Florida.
He was preceded in death by his father, Elvin West of Thomas-ville, Ga., and is survived by his wife, Adele West of the home; a son, Robert (Bobby) West of Beebe; a granddaughter, Kaila West of Tennessee; his mother, Edith Barnett of Cairo, Ga.; a sister, Mickie Hall of Tallahassee, Fla.; many nephews and nieces; his mother-in-law, Lillian Her-mans of Denmark, Wisc.; and many brothers and sisters-in law.
Funeral was Tuesday at Westbrook Funeral Home.
ELLA WALTERS
Ella M. Walters, 91, of Ward, went to be with the Lord Monday, Dec. 19.
She was born March 22, 1914, at Des Arc, to James Adam and Allie Alberta Brown Parker. She was a Baptist and a loving, caring, passionate mother.
She was preceded in death by her husband, Lonnie Walters and her parents.
Survivors are a son, Norman “Bud” Walters and his wife Agnes of Bee Branch; daughters, Mary Lester of Jacksonville, Ann Taylor and husband Marty, and Doris Ball of Beebe, Clara Maples and husband C.W. of Austin, and Louise Lucky and husband Bill of Ward; 28 grandchildren and a host of great and great-great grandchildren.
Family will receive friends 5 to 9 p.m. Wednesday at Westbrook Funeral Home, Beebe.
Funeral will be at 10 a.m. Thursday at Westbrook Funeral Home with burial in Sand Hill Cemetery, Des Arc.
Arrangements are by West-brook Funeral Home.
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
EDITORIAL >> High court does it again
For the third time in three years, the Arkansas Supreme Court instructed the legislature and the governor this week to fix the funding of public schools so that the 450,000 children are assured suitable and roughly equal educational opportunities.
While it was extending them a third chance, the court seemed a trifle more impatient with the lawmakers, who this year disregarded the laws they had designed themselves to produce a constitutional school system.
In a little more than 11 months, a constitutional system must be firmly in place. The court stayed its mandate in the old Lake View school case until then.
What happens then if the state has not acted? The court was, as usual, vague but resolute.
The Supreme Court is obliged to see to it that the will of the people when they wrote the Constitution is followed, the court said, and it added: “We will perform that duty.” We can only guess that the court would then order its own remedy.
One concurring justice, Tom Glaze, said the Constitution fully clothed the Supreme Court with the power to enforce the constitutional mandate for an equitable and suitable school system.
But that need not and, we are confident, will not happen. The issues actually are far less complicated than in 2004 and 2005, when the legislature previously addressed the court’s landmark decision, and the state demonstrably now has resources in hand to complete most of the task.
The state budget has some $100 million of play between revenues and expenditures that it could direct to the schools this year and anticipated cash balances of close to $300 million by the end of the current two-year budget cycle that can be committed to school facilities.
Those are the principal shortcomings that the court-appointed masters found in school funding, which the court itself embraced.
After passing legislation in 2004 to make education the state’s No. 1 priority in budgeting, the legislature this year failed to give the public schools even the cost-of-living increase that was allotted to all other public employees and agencies, including the legislators themselves. Another $100 million appropriation from current revenues would do that.
While the legislature’s own study showed that there were $2.2 billion in immediate needs for school construction and repairs, it appropriated only $120 million over the next two years. That sum could be quadrupled without affecting the other urgent needs of the state and without new taxes.
In case anyone thought the issue was not urgent, the court said the issues needed to be dealt with “immediately” and “forthwith” so that children this school year might see the fruits of the labor.
But Gov. Huckabee, who flew back from a governors’ meeting in Arizona to make the same news cycle, said there was no urgency and that he might not call a special legislative session at all because one might not be needed.
Clearly, he had not digested the court’s opinions. Neither ignoring the decision nor waiting until the fall of 2006 is an option unless he and legislators pointedly want to invite a contempt citation by the court for whatever political rewards might flow from standing up to the judiciary.
Huckabee just as clearly had given some thought to the issues in advance because he knew full well what the court would say.
He said he would like to have a current adequacy report on the schools, legislation that would take more regulation of local schools away from school boards and rest it with the state — superintendent and coaching salaries, for example — and an up-to-date survey of the condition of school facilities. He wants further consolidation of small school districts to be part of the remedy, and it ought to be.
But some of the governor’s hedging seemed to be just dilatory. He wants detailed accounting of all school spending in the state before he calls a session to deal with underfunding.
He divided total annual education spending by the number of school classrooms in Arkansas and came up with the figure of $94,150 of spending this year for each classroom.
The average teacher salary is only $39,266. So what happened, he asked, to the other $54,884? The answer, of course, is: retirement and Social Security matching, health insurance, buses, bus drivers, fuel, electricity, gas, water, cafeteria and janitorial workers, school books, supplies, equipment, building repairs and debt repayment.
Someone might ask the same question of his office. The governor’s office this year is spending $5.1 million, but the governor is paid only about $81,000 of that. What happened to the other $5 million?
No, more delay is not the answer. Let’s don’t risk a fourth chance.
While it was extending them a third chance, the court seemed a trifle more impatient with the lawmakers, who this year disregarded the laws they had designed themselves to produce a constitutional school system.
In a little more than 11 months, a constitutional system must be firmly in place. The court stayed its mandate in the old Lake View school case until then.
What happens then if the state has not acted? The court was, as usual, vague but resolute.
The Supreme Court is obliged to see to it that the will of the people when they wrote the Constitution is followed, the court said, and it added: “We will perform that duty.” We can only guess that the court would then order its own remedy.
One concurring justice, Tom Glaze, said the Constitution fully clothed the Supreme Court with the power to enforce the constitutional mandate for an equitable and suitable school system.
But that need not and, we are confident, will not happen. The issues actually are far less complicated than in 2004 and 2005, when the legislature previously addressed the court’s landmark decision, and the state demonstrably now has resources in hand to complete most of the task.
The state budget has some $100 million of play between revenues and expenditures that it could direct to the schools this year and anticipated cash balances of close to $300 million by the end of the current two-year budget cycle that can be committed to school facilities.
Those are the principal shortcomings that the court-appointed masters found in school funding, which the court itself embraced.
After passing legislation in 2004 to make education the state’s No. 1 priority in budgeting, the legislature this year failed to give the public schools even the cost-of-living increase that was allotted to all other public employees and agencies, including the legislators themselves. Another $100 million appropriation from current revenues would do that.
While the legislature’s own study showed that there were $2.2 billion in immediate needs for school construction and repairs, it appropriated only $120 million over the next two years. That sum could be quadrupled without affecting the other urgent needs of the state and without new taxes.
In case anyone thought the issue was not urgent, the court said the issues needed to be dealt with “immediately” and “forthwith” so that children this school year might see the fruits of the labor.
But Gov. Huckabee, who flew back from a governors’ meeting in Arizona to make the same news cycle, said there was no urgency and that he might not call a special legislative session at all because one might not be needed.
Clearly, he had not digested the court’s opinions. Neither ignoring the decision nor waiting until the fall of 2006 is an option unless he and legislators pointedly want to invite a contempt citation by the court for whatever political rewards might flow from standing up to the judiciary.
Huckabee just as clearly had given some thought to the issues in advance because he knew full well what the court would say.
He said he would like to have a current adequacy report on the schools, legislation that would take more regulation of local schools away from school boards and rest it with the state — superintendent and coaching salaries, for example — and an up-to-date survey of the condition of school facilities. He wants further consolidation of small school districts to be part of the remedy, and it ought to be.
But some of the governor’s hedging seemed to be just dilatory. He wants detailed accounting of all school spending in the state before he calls a session to deal with underfunding.
He divided total annual education spending by the number of school classrooms in Arkansas and came up with the figure of $94,150 of spending this year for each classroom.
The average teacher salary is only $39,266. So what happened, he asked, to the other $54,884? The answer, of course, is: retirement and Social Security matching, health insurance, buses, bus drivers, fuel, electricity, gas, water, cafeteria and janitorial workers, school books, supplies, equipment, building repairs and debt repayment.
Someone might ask the same question of his office. The governor’s office this year is spending $5.1 million, but the governor is paid only about $81,000 of that. What happened to the other $5 million?
No, more delay is not the answer. Let’s don’t risk a fourth chance.
EDITORIAL >> Arkansans used again
Pardon our paranoia, but it is hard to escape that old feeling that Arkansas is not a real state but a colony, to be exploited when the need arises. That is indisputably the case whenever we are hauled before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Maybe we asked for it historically by giving big corporations our natural resources — natural gas, bauxite, timber — virtually tax-free for a hundred years until they were about gone. The state’s unofficial motto was, plunder us, please!
Monday, for the second time in 20 years, the regulators at FERC said Arkansas electrical customers of Entergy Corp. should subsidize those in other states. Starting in 2007, customers of Entergy Arkansas will send some $200 million a year to the Entergy subsidiary in Louisiana so that it can lower the light bills of its customers. It has nothing to do with Katrina. Louisiana filed this case years ago.
Arkansas ratepayers already have paid some $3 billion to Louisiana and Mississippi over the past 20 years so that electrical bills in those states will not be so high.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission held that the expense of generating electricity in the states served by the big Entergy holding company should be more or less equalized.
Since Arkansas generates nearly all of its electricity at nuclear and coal-fired plants, which now produce power much less expensively than do gas-burning plants, we are supposed to help Louisiana. Louisiana generates some electricity from nuclear units, but most of its electricity comes from natural gas, the cost of which has risen sharply since 2000.
There is no earthly justification for requiring energy customers in one state to subsidize those in a slightly richer state except for a private agreement among the operating businesses of a holding company. Equalization has not always been a federal policy. It was not when Arkansans were paying much higher costs than neighboring states.
In the 1960s and ’70s, Arkansas Power and Light Co. (now Entergy Arkansas) produced power mainly by burning fuel oil and natural gas. It embarked on a costly strategy of converting to nuclear and coal power. Arkansas homeowners and businesses (except those served by co-ops and municipally owned utilities) had to pay higher bills based on the plant investment and the future cost of decommissioning the nuclear units at Russellville. Louisiana and Mississippi were not required to bear any of the higher costs for Arkansas customers.
But three young regulators for Gov. Bill Clinton in 1979 — Jacksonville’s Wally Nixon, Scott Trotter and Basil Copeland — discovered a new system agreement among the utility companies of the three states to share the cost of building and decommissioning a giant new nuclear plant in Mississippi. Major costs were to be shifted to Arkansas customers because by that time the cost of building nuclear plants had leaped to, in the case of the Grand Gulf plant in Mississippi, about $3.5 billion.
They persuaded Clinton to protest and the Arkansas company renegotiated a somewhat better deal with the other companies, but Louisiana went to FERC. The federal commission assigned Arkansas 37 percent of the cost of the plant. Arkansas appealed to the federal appellate court in Washington and lost.
But it could have been far worse even then. One of the federal judges, a dilettante named Robert Bork whom President Reagan later tried to put on the U.S. Supreme Court, came up with a cockamamie theory by which Arkansas should bear just about all of the cost of nuclear plants in Arkansas and Mississippi. Arkansas did not have much clout in Congress then and it had been voting consistently Democratic. That was the only justification that seemed plausible.
Now, FERC has embraced something close to Bork’s perverse theory.
We remember the rage of the man who defeated Bill Clinton in 1980, Frank White, when he discovered the ramifications of the deal. White talked about calling a session of the legislature to buy Arkansas Power and Light Co. and operate it as a state utility to protect Arkansans from the depredations of the holding company arrangements. He might have been on the right track.
Entergy Arkansas says it may try to sever itself from the system agreement, but that will take many years, if FERC and the courts even allow it. Our only hope is to get a federal appeals court in Washington, now populated by Borklike extremists, to overturn FERC. Get ready to pay.
Maybe we asked for it historically by giving big corporations our natural resources — natural gas, bauxite, timber — virtually tax-free for a hundred years until they were about gone. The state’s unofficial motto was, plunder us, please!
Monday, for the second time in 20 years, the regulators at FERC said Arkansas electrical customers of Entergy Corp. should subsidize those in other states. Starting in 2007, customers of Entergy Arkansas will send some $200 million a year to the Entergy subsidiary in Louisiana so that it can lower the light bills of its customers. It has nothing to do with Katrina. Louisiana filed this case years ago.
Arkansas ratepayers already have paid some $3 billion to Louisiana and Mississippi over the past 20 years so that electrical bills in those states will not be so high.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission held that the expense of generating electricity in the states served by the big Entergy holding company should be more or less equalized.
Since Arkansas generates nearly all of its electricity at nuclear and coal-fired plants, which now produce power much less expensively than do gas-burning plants, we are supposed to help Louisiana. Louisiana generates some electricity from nuclear units, but most of its electricity comes from natural gas, the cost of which has risen sharply since 2000.
There is no earthly justification for requiring energy customers in one state to subsidize those in a slightly richer state except for a private agreement among the operating businesses of a holding company. Equalization has not always been a federal policy. It was not when Arkansans were paying much higher costs than neighboring states.
In the 1960s and ’70s, Arkansas Power and Light Co. (now Entergy Arkansas) produced power mainly by burning fuel oil and natural gas. It embarked on a costly strategy of converting to nuclear and coal power. Arkansas homeowners and businesses (except those served by co-ops and municipally owned utilities) had to pay higher bills based on the plant investment and the future cost of decommissioning the nuclear units at Russellville. Louisiana and Mississippi were not required to bear any of the higher costs for Arkansas customers.
But three young regulators for Gov. Bill Clinton in 1979 — Jacksonville’s Wally Nixon, Scott Trotter and Basil Copeland — discovered a new system agreement among the utility companies of the three states to share the cost of building and decommissioning a giant new nuclear plant in Mississippi. Major costs were to be shifted to Arkansas customers because by that time the cost of building nuclear plants had leaped to, in the case of the Grand Gulf plant in Mississippi, about $3.5 billion.
They persuaded Clinton to protest and the Arkansas company renegotiated a somewhat better deal with the other companies, but Louisiana went to FERC. The federal commission assigned Arkansas 37 percent of the cost of the plant. Arkansas appealed to the federal appellate court in Washington and lost.
But it could have been far worse even then. One of the federal judges, a dilettante named Robert Bork whom President Reagan later tried to put on the U.S. Supreme Court, came up with a cockamamie theory by which Arkansas should bear just about all of the cost of nuclear plants in Arkansas and Mississippi. Arkansas did not have much clout in Congress then and it had been voting consistently Democratic. That was the only justification that seemed plausible.
Now, FERC has embraced something close to Bork’s perverse theory.
We remember the rage of the man who defeated Bill Clinton in 1980, Frank White, when he discovered the ramifications of the deal. White talked about calling a session of the legislature to buy Arkansas Power and Light Co. and operate it as a state utility to protect Arkansans from the depredations of the holding company arrangements. He might have been on the right track.
Entergy Arkansas says it may try to sever itself from the system agreement, but that will take many years, if FERC and the courts even allow it. Our only hope is to get a federal appeals court in Washington, now populated by Borklike extremists, to overturn FERC. Get ready to pay.
SPORTS >> Cabot tops Jackrabbits to remain undefeated
By JASON KING
Leader sports writer
Cabot managed to keep its unbeaten streak alive Friday night at the Panther gymnasium by beating Lonoke 43-40. But they didn’t do it without a serious fight from the Jackrabbits.
Lonoke controlled the second half of the game up until the very end, when post Chad Glover put the Panthers back in the game with some last-minute heroics that have become the senior’s calling card this year.
“You have to tip your hat to Lonoke,” Cabot boys coach Jerry Bridges said. “They really out-scrapped us. We finally started taking advantage of Chad inside, and it started paying off for us. We did a poor job of rebounding in the first half, but in the second half, we picked it up. Our defense is really what gave us a chance to win this game.”
The game was closely contested right from the start, as the lead changed hands five times in the opening quarter alone. By the end of the first, Lonoke held a narrow 9-7 lead.
Glover tied the game to start the second quarter, but Lonoke began to speed up the game’s pace. The Panthers’ man-to-man pressure began to lose its potency, as the Jackrabbits kept the ball and the Cabot D on the constant move. Stanley Staggers helped Lonoke stay out front with six straight points in the final three minutes of the second period. Lonoke looked like it would carry the lead into the half, but four straight points from Cabot sub Jacob Trammell gave the Panthers a 21-20 lead at halftime.
The opening 3:18 of the third quarter was all defense, as a free throw from Staggers at the 4:42 mark was the first score from either team in the second half. The scoring pace picked up quickly from there, as the Jackrabbits continued to out-hustle the Panthers. Lonoke went on a seven-point run to take a 27-21 advantage by the 3:17 mark.
Cabot refused to let the game slip away, however, as they put themselves back in contention with a three pointer from guard Justin Haas and an inside basket from Glover. At the end of three, Lonoke held a 31-27 lead.
Until the fourth quarter began, Glover had just nine points on the night. By game’s end, he would have 23 total points, including seven of eight from the free-throw line in the final period. A free throw from Matt Shinn was the only non-Glover point for Cabot in the final eight minutes of the game.
The Jackrabbits answered Glover’s sudden inside domination with good all-around shooting, as Kylon Boyd, Eligha Gooden and Walter Ellis all put points up from outside the low block to keep Lonoke out in the lead.
Glover finally got the Panthers back out in front at the 3:09 mark with a pair of free throws to put them ahead 39-38.
Two free throws from Boyd a minute later gave the lead back to Lonoke. After another inside jumper from Glover gave Cabot the lead back at 41-40, the final 1:38 of the game became a back-and-forth battle of turnovers and timeouts.
Two timeouts from Lonoke whittled the clock down to 6.6 seconds, with the Jackrabbits in position to win the game with a last-second shot.
That shot would never be taken, as Glover covered Staggers on the ensuing in-bounds attempt. Staggers could not get the ball past the Cabot senior’s 6’9” frame, and Lonoke was called with the five second violation to give the ball back to the Panthers.
Another pair of free throws from Glover in the final five seconds to put the game away for Cabot, as the Panthers narrowly escaped their first loss of the season.
Eligha Gooden led Lonoke with 14 points, five rebounds and three steals.
Lonoke and Cabot both have this week off for Christmas break, but will return to action Dec. 28 in the opening round of the Harrison tournament.
Leader sports writer
Cabot managed to keep its unbeaten streak alive Friday night at the Panther gymnasium by beating Lonoke 43-40. But they didn’t do it without a serious fight from the Jackrabbits.
Lonoke controlled the second half of the game up until the very end, when post Chad Glover put the Panthers back in the game with some last-minute heroics that have become the senior’s calling card this year.
“You have to tip your hat to Lonoke,” Cabot boys coach Jerry Bridges said. “They really out-scrapped us. We finally started taking advantage of Chad inside, and it started paying off for us. We did a poor job of rebounding in the first half, but in the second half, we picked it up. Our defense is really what gave us a chance to win this game.”
The game was closely contested right from the start, as the lead changed hands five times in the opening quarter alone. By the end of the first, Lonoke held a narrow 9-7 lead.
Glover tied the game to start the second quarter, but Lonoke began to speed up the game’s pace. The Panthers’ man-to-man pressure began to lose its potency, as the Jackrabbits kept the ball and the Cabot D on the constant move. Stanley Staggers helped Lonoke stay out front with six straight points in the final three minutes of the second period. Lonoke looked like it would carry the lead into the half, but four straight points from Cabot sub Jacob Trammell gave the Panthers a 21-20 lead at halftime.
The opening 3:18 of the third quarter was all defense, as a free throw from Staggers at the 4:42 mark was the first score from either team in the second half. The scoring pace picked up quickly from there, as the Jackrabbits continued to out-hustle the Panthers. Lonoke went on a seven-point run to take a 27-21 advantage by the 3:17 mark.
Cabot refused to let the game slip away, however, as they put themselves back in contention with a three pointer from guard Justin Haas and an inside basket from Glover. At the end of three, Lonoke held a 31-27 lead.
Until the fourth quarter began, Glover had just nine points on the night. By game’s end, he would have 23 total points, including seven of eight from the free-throw line in the final period. A free throw from Matt Shinn was the only non-Glover point for Cabot in the final eight minutes of the game.
The Jackrabbits answered Glover’s sudden inside domination with good all-around shooting, as Kylon Boyd, Eligha Gooden and Walter Ellis all put points up from outside the low block to keep Lonoke out in the lead.
Glover finally got the Panthers back out in front at the 3:09 mark with a pair of free throws to put them ahead 39-38.
Two free throws from Boyd a minute later gave the lead back to Lonoke. After another inside jumper from Glover gave Cabot the lead back at 41-40, the final 1:38 of the game became a back-and-forth battle of turnovers and timeouts.
Two timeouts from Lonoke whittled the clock down to 6.6 seconds, with the Jackrabbits in position to win the game with a last-second shot.
That shot would never be taken, as Glover covered Staggers on the ensuing in-bounds attempt. Staggers could not get the ball past the Cabot senior’s 6’9” frame, and Lonoke was called with the five second violation to give the ball back to the Panthers.
Another pair of free throws from Glover in the final five seconds to put the game away for Cabot, as the Panthers narrowly escaped their first loss of the season.
Eligha Gooden led Lonoke with 14 points, five rebounds and three steals.
Lonoke and Cabot both have this week off for Christmas break, but will return to action Dec. 28 in the opening round of the Harrison tournament.
SPORTS >> Lonoke upsets Lady Panthers
By JASON KING
Leader sports writer
Few people expected the Lady Jackrabbits to leave the Cabot gym with their unbeaten record still in- tact, nor did they expect the double-overtime war it took in order for them to actually do it. The Lonoke girls proved all doubters wrong Friday night, edging out the Lady Panthers 52-49 in one of the most exciting games of the early season. The win improves the Lady ‘Rabbits record to 11-0 on the season, and establishes them as a serious force heading into the heart of their 6AAA-conference schedule.
The game did not start out very exciting, as the opening quarter went scoreless for the first 2:11 until a pair of Maddie Helms free throws got Cabot on the board first. Both teams slugged through the first, as the game was tied 7-7 at the 1:50 mark. The score would remain that way until the buzzer, when Kim Sitzmann scored a lay up at the buzzer to put the Lady Panthers ahead by two.
The Lady ‘Rabbits continued to struggle in the second quarter, but Cabot picked things up. The Lady Panthers would extend their lead to six, leading 20-14 at the half.
Despite a slow first half, Lonoke came out swinging in the third quarter, outscoring Cabot 18-3, and taking over the game’s tempo. Calisha Kirk tied things up for the Lady ‘Rabbits at the 5:09 mark with a reverse lay up. Lonoke then went on a 10-point run for the remainder of the period that was only interrupted by a Rachel Glover free throw for Cabot. By the end of the third, the Lady Rabbits had taken a 32-23 lead and looked poised for the easy upset.
Things would not be as easy in the fourth quarter, as the Lady Panthers began to press hard defensively. Lonoke began to turn over the ball, and Cabot took advantage.
Sitzmann put the Lady Panthers back in the lead with two free throws at the 1:26 mark. Kristy Shinn did the same for the Lady ‘Rabbits 15 seconds later Glover hit a three pointer for Cabot to put them ahead 41-39 with 47 seconds remaining, but Meaghan Kellybrew hit two more free throws to tie the score once again.
Cabot had one last chance to claim the win in the final three seconds of regulation, but Helms’ three-point attempt fell short, and the two teams prepared for overtime.
The first overtime was less than thrilling, with each team scoring two points in the extra period.
The second overtime would make up for that and then some, as the shootout began.
Jenny Evans struck first for Lonoke with a jumper and free throw to put them ahead 46-43. Jamie Sterrenberg answered for Cabot with a three-point shot that tied things up once more.
A three pointer from Lindsey Watts put the Lady Panthers ahead by one, but Libby Gay put Lonoke back out front with a jumper in the final minute.
Cabot’s outside shooting had saved them all night, but the long ball finally ran out of air for the Lady Panthers. Two straight three-point attempts fell flat for Cabot, as Kirk extended Lonoke’s lead with more solid free-throw shooting under pressure.
Lauren Walker was Cabot’s last chance in the closing seconds, but her attempt at a three would also miss the mark, and the Lady ‘Rabbits began to celebrate their biggest win of the season.
“That’s a good high school basketball game,” Lonoke girls coach Nathan Morris said. “We got a win on the road in front of a big crowd. This is our first road game besides playing in tournaments and a conference game against Christian. This win is un-measurable in terms of what it will do for us.”
Calisha Kirk led Lonoke with 21 points, including nine of 10 free-throw attempts. Kirk also had 14 rebounds and three blocked shots.
Kim Sitzmann led Cabot with 12 points and eight rebounds.
The Lady Panthers have this week off for the holiday, but will start back Dec. 28 in the first round of the Harrison invitational basketball tournament.
The Lady Jackrabbits also have the week off, but will join Cabot at the Harrison tourney.
Leader sports writer
Few people expected the Lady Jackrabbits to leave the Cabot gym with their unbeaten record still in- tact, nor did they expect the double-overtime war it took in order for them to actually do it. The Lonoke girls proved all doubters wrong Friday night, edging out the Lady Panthers 52-49 in one of the most exciting games of the early season. The win improves the Lady ‘Rabbits record to 11-0 on the season, and establishes them as a serious force heading into the heart of their 6AAA-conference schedule.
The game did not start out very exciting, as the opening quarter went scoreless for the first 2:11 until a pair of Maddie Helms free throws got Cabot on the board first. Both teams slugged through the first, as the game was tied 7-7 at the 1:50 mark. The score would remain that way until the buzzer, when Kim Sitzmann scored a lay up at the buzzer to put the Lady Panthers ahead by two.
The Lady ‘Rabbits continued to struggle in the second quarter, but Cabot picked things up. The Lady Panthers would extend their lead to six, leading 20-14 at the half.
Despite a slow first half, Lonoke came out swinging in the third quarter, outscoring Cabot 18-3, and taking over the game’s tempo. Calisha Kirk tied things up for the Lady ‘Rabbits at the 5:09 mark with a reverse lay up. Lonoke then went on a 10-point run for the remainder of the period that was only interrupted by a Rachel Glover free throw for Cabot. By the end of the third, the Lady Rabbits had taken a 32-23 lead and looked poised for the easy upset.
Things would not be as easy in the fourth quarter, as the Lady Panthers began to press hard defensively. Lonoke began to turn over the ball, and Cabot took advantage.
Sitzmann put the Lady Panthers back in the lead with two free throws at the 1:26 mark. Kristy Shinn did the same for the Lady ‘Rabbits 15 seconds later Glover hit a three pointer for Cabot to put them ahead 41-39 with 47 seconds remaining, but Meaghan Kellybrew hit two more free throws to tie the score once again.
Cabot had one last chance to claim the win in the final three seconds of regulation, but Helms’ three-point attempt fell short, and the two teams prepared for overtime.
The first overtime was less than thrilling, with each team scoring two points in the extra period.
The second overtime would make up for that and then some, as the shootout began.
Jenny Evans struck first for Lonoke with a jumper and free throw to put them ahead 46-43. Jamie Sterrenberg answered for Cabot with a three-point shot that tied things up once more.
A three pointer from Lindsey Watts put the Lady Panthers ahead by one, but Libby Gay put Lonoke back out front with a jumper in the final minute.
Cabot’s outside shooting had saved them all night, but the long ball finally ran out of air for the Lady Panthers. Two straight three-point attempts fell flat for Cabot, as Kirk extended Lonoke’s lead with more solid free-throw shooting under pressure.
Lauren Walker was Cabot’s last chance in the closing seconds, but her attempt at a three would also miss the mark, and the Lady ‘Rabbits began to celebrate their biggest win of the season.
“That’s a good high school basketball game,” Lonoke girls coach Nathan Morris said. “We got a win on the road in front of a big crowd. This is our first road game besides playing in tournaments and a conference game against Christian. This win is un-measurable in terms of what it will do for us.”
Calisha Kirk led Lonoke with 21 points, including nine of 10 free-throw attempts. Kirk also had 14 rebounds and three blocked shots.
Kim Sitzmann led Cabot with 12 points and eight rebounds.
The Lady Panthers have this week off for the holiday, but will start back Dec. 28 in the first round of the Harrison invitational basketball tournament.
The Lady Jackrabbits also have the week off, but will join Cabot at the Harrison tourney.
NEIGHBORS >> A Coca-Cola Christmas in Lonoke
By SARA GREENE
Leader staff writer
It’s always time for Coca-Cola and Christmas at the home of Don and Wanda Cook at 1381 N. Johnson Road in Lonoke.
“I would go to flea markets looking for jewelry, and 13 years ago I bought a couple of Coca-Cola pieces because they were so cheerful with the red and white,” Wanda Cook said.
“It just grew and grew.”
The massive collection has gained Cook the self-appointed title of “that crazy Coke lady.”
She credits her husband Don, retired from Union Pacific, with helping her with her collection and the giving the tours.
There’s even a chalkboard sign on their front porch proclaiming “One crazy lady and one really nice guy live here.”
In amassing the collection, the Cooks found out that the Coca-Cola Company was battling lagging sales in the winter so in 1931 the company commissioned Chicago illustrator Haddon Sundblom to paint a Santa Claus for advertisements. In recent years, Coca-Cola began including polar bears in their winter advertisements. The bears now appear on nearly as much merchandise as the Sundblom Santas, so the Cooks decided to make the living room a tribute to Coca-Cola at Christmas.
A few years ago, the Cooks decided to leave their Coca-Cola Christmas decorations on display inside and outside all year long even if it means replacing burned-out Christmas light bulbs in the middle of summer.
“I also collect dust bunnies,” Wanda Cook joked, wiping at a display cabinet.
The Cooks have a Coca-Cola themed kitchen with dishes, glasses and silverware bearing the famous logo.
There is also a Coca-Cola bedroom, dining room, bathroom and “fun room” which is reminiscent of a soda-fountain shop.
In the “fun room” the Cooks have Coca-Cola cans and bottles from more than 65 countries on display as well as planes and ships made from Coca-Cola cans.
“People ask me how much the collection is worth and you just can’t put a price on it. So much of the collection has been given to me,” Wanda Cook said.
Ten years ago the Cooks invited her grandson’s second-grade class at Lonoke Primary School to tour the collection. Ever since then, every second grade at Lonoke Primary School takes a December field trip to the Cook’s home to view the Coca-Cola collection.
Wanda Cook dresses in a red-and-white Coca-Cola waitress ensemble that matches a Barbie doll as she guides the second grade tours through her home, explaining the joys of collecting and pointing out a few of her favorite items.
One such item is a miniature Coca-Cola bottle brought to her by one of the second graders from the first tour ten years ago.
This year about 100 students toured the Cook’s home, enjoying the Coca-Cola themed house as well as some of the motorized gadgets Wanda Cook shows them such as Coca-Cola planes, clocks, telephones and a bubble machine.
The tours end in the “fun room” where students get a six-ounce bottle of Coca-Cola to drink, compliments of the Coca-Cola distributor in Little Rock, and two cookies that are shaped like the familiar hourglass curves of a Coca-Cola bottle.
“I call them Cokees. It’s just a simple sugar cookie recipe and I shaped a snowman cookie cutter into a Coke bottle,” Wanda Cook said.
She then dips the cookies into chocolate to represent the cola and a little white chocolate to represent the caps of the Coca-Cola bottles.
“The most fun of collecting is sharing it with others. That’s the blessing of it,” Cook said.
Leader staff writer
It’s always time for Coca-Cola and Christmas at the home of Don and Wanda Cook at 1381 N. Johnson Road in Lonoke.
“I would go to flea markets looking for jewelry, and 13 years ago I bought a couple of Coca-Cola pieces because they were so cheerful with the red and white,” Wanda Cook said.
“It just grew and grew.”
The massive collection has gained Cook the self-appointed title of “that crazy Coke lady.”
She credits her husband Don, retired from Union Pacific, with helping her with her collection and the giving the tours.
There’s even a chalkboard sign on their front porch proclaiming “One crazy lady and one really nice guy live here.”
In amassing the collection, the Cooks found out that the Coca-Cola Company was battling lagging sales in the winter so in 1931 the company commissioned Chicago illustrator Haddon Sundblom to paint a Santa Claus for advertisements. In recent years, Coca-Cola began including polar bears in their winter advertisements. The bears now appear on nearly as much merchandise as the Sundblom Santas, so the Cooks decided to make the living room a tribute to Coca-Cola at Christmas.
A few years ago, the Cooks decided to leave their Coca-Cola Christmas decorations on display inside and outside all year long even if it means replacing burned-out Christmas light bulbs in the middle of summer.
“I also collect dust bunnies,” Wanda Cook joked, wiping at a display cabinet.
The Cooks have a Coca-Cola themed kitchen with dishes, glasses and silverware bearing the famous logo.
There is also a Coca-Cola bedroom, dining room, bathroom and “fun room” which is reminiscent of a soda-fountain shop.
In the “fun room” the Cooks have Coca-Cola cans and bottles from more than 65 countries on display as well as planes and ships made from Coca-Cola cans.
“People ask me how much the collection is worth and you just can’t put a price on it. So much of the collection has been given to me,” Wanda Cook said.
Ten years ago the Cooks invited her grandson’s second-grade class at Lonoke Primary School to tour the collection. Ever since then, every second grade at Lonoke Primary School takes a December field trip to the Cook’s home to view the Coca-Cola collection.
Wanda Cook dresses in a red-and-white Coca-Cola waitress ensemble that matches a Barbie doll as she guides the second grade tours through her home, explaining the joys of collecting and pointing out a few of her favorite items.
One such item is a miniature Coca-Cola bottle brought to her by one of the second graders from the first tour ten years ago.
This year about 100 students toured the Cook’s home, enjoying the Coca-Cola themed house as well as some of the motorized gadgets Wanda Cook shows them such as Coca-Cola planes, clocks, telephones and a bubble machine.
The tours end in the “fun room” where students get a six-ounce bottle of Coca-Cola to drink, compliments of the Coca-Cola distributor in Little Rock, and two cookies that are shaped like the familiar hourglass curves of a Coca-Cola bottle.
“I call them Cokees. It’s just a simple sugar cookie recipe and I shaped a snowman cookie cutter into a Coke bottle,” Wanda Cook said.
She then dips the cookies into chocolate to represent the cola and a little white chocolate to represent the caps of the Coca-Cola bottles.
“The most fun of collecting is sharing it with others. That’s the blessing of it,” Cook said.
TOP STORY >> C-130Js pass tough test in cold Alaskan climate
By SARA GREENE
Leader staff writer
Two C-130J cargo aircraft from Little Rock Air Force Base have been proven ready for war in all types of weather after finishing two weeks of cold-weather evaluations at Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska, that ended Dec. 14.
Operational testing of the C-130J, which began in November, will determine whether the plane will meet full operational requirements. Previous evaluations conducted in 1999 and 2000 looked at the plane’s ability to perform basic tasks.
Before returning to Little Rock Air Force Base, Maj. Dave Flynn, 48th Airlift Squadron operational test and evaluation mission commander, said, “We performed all cold-weather test objectives, and our mission here is complete.”
The 48th Airlift Squadron worked with members of the Air Force Operation Test and Evaluation Center from Ed-wards Air Force Base in California during the rigorous testing. The results of the evaluations will be released in a report in the spring.
When the two C-130J aircraft landed at Eielson Air Force Base Dec. 6, temperatures in interior Alaska were about the same as Arkansas.
“The only real difference is the snow on the ground,” said Senior Airman Jacob Erskin, 314th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron guidance and control craftsman.
Known to many Alaskans as Chinook Winds, the warmer-than-usual weather was courtesy of a front pushing warm air from the Gulf of Alaska into Alaska’s interior, bringing daytime temperatures to above freezing. The temperatures eventually dipped into the minus-30 degree range, which is considered normal temperatures for the Air Force’s farthest-north base.
“We were working on the plane in layers of our winter gear and we would begin sweating and have to take off layers to cool down, but since it is winter in Alaska and we would quickly begin to feel the cold again,” said Tech. Sgt. Terry Ben-son, 314th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron hydraulics technician.
“We were going from hot to cold and then bundle up and get hot again. It seemed like it was never a happy medium,” Benson said. “It was still pretty cold during the evenings.”
Since 2004, testing included formation flying, airdrop events, traffic collision avoidance system tests, computer-based approach testing and the most comprehensive noise and vibration tests ever conducted on the C-130J.
It is not yet known if Little Rock Air Force Base will receive any additional C130Js in 2006. Reports put the cost of each Super Hercules between $45 and $65 million.
Tech. Sgt. William Farrow of the 314th Airlift Wing contributed to this story.
Leader staff writer
Two C-130J cargo aircraft from Little Rock Air Force Base have been proven ready for war in all types of weather after finishing two weeks of cold-weather evaluations at Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska, that ended Dec. 14.
Operational testing of the C-130J, which began in November, will determine whether the plane will meet full operational requirements. Previous evaluations conducted in 1999 and 2000 looked at the plane’s ability to perform basic tasks.
Before returning to Little Rock Air Force Base, Maj. Dave Flynn, 48th Airlift Squadron operational test and evaluation mission commander, said, “We performed all cold-weather test objectives, and our mission here is complete.”
The 48th Airlift Squadron worked with members of the Air Force Operation Test and Evaluation Center from Ed-wards Air Force Base in California during the rigorous testing. The results of the evaluations will be released in a report in the spring.
When the two C-130J aircraft landed at Eielson Air Force Base Dec. 6, temperatures in interior Alaska were about the same as Arkansas.
“The only real difference is the snow on the ground,” said Senior Airman Jacob Erskin, 314th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron guidance and control craftsman.
Known to many Alaskans as Chinook Winds, the warmer-than-usual weather was courtesy of a front pushing warm air from the Gulf of Alaska into Alaska’s interior, bringing daytime temperatures to above freezing. The temperatures eventually dipped into the minus-30 degree range, which is considered normal temperatures for the Air Force’s farthest-north base.
“We were working on the plane in layers of our winter gear and we would begin sweating and have to take off layers to cool down, but since it is winter in Alaska and we would quickly begin to feel the cold again,” said Tech. Sgt. Terry Ben-son, 314th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron hydraulics technician.
“We were going from hot to cold and then bundle up and get hot again. It seemed like it was never a happy medium,” Benson said. “It was still pretty cold during the evenings.”
Since 2004, testing included formation flying, airdrop events, traffic collision avoidance system tests, computer-based approach testing and the most comprehensive noise and vibration tests ever conducted on the C-130J.
It is not yet known if Little Rock Air Force Base will receive any additional C130Js in 2006. Reports put the cost of each Super Hercules between $45 and $65 million.
Tech. Sgt. William Farrow of the 314th Airlift Wing contributed to this story.
TOP STORY >> Residents dispute new development
By JOAN MCCOY
Leader staff writer
Residents of Sun Terrace, across the street from Wal-Mart Supercenter in Cabot, who several years ago successfully fought rezoning on the corner of Rockwood and Hwy. 89 at the entrance to their subdivision, are doing battle with the council again to stop a commercial development just one house down from that corner.
The residents filled every available seat and lined the walls in the council chambers Monday night. They had missed the planning commission meeting earlier this month when the commission approved about 11 acres for rezoning from residential to commercial and they were determined that the council, which has the final say, would know how they feel before it was too late.
For half of the two-hour council meeting, they took the podium one by one to express their objections to the council rezoning the property, but their reasons for objecting were not diverse.
The developer wanted to put an entrance into the subdivision on Rockwood. They don’t want that because they say that traffic from Wal-Mart and other businesses in that commercial development already is so bad that they have difficulty getting on and off Rockwood. And for that matter, they don’t want access to a commercial development off Hwy. 89 either. They don’t want a commercial development on their side of the highway at all.
They said they feared that a commercial development would devalue their property, bring more traffic inside their neighborhood and endanger both their children and their peace.
“I don’t understand why we have to keep complaining about making this commercial,” Virgil Teague told the council.
The city is getting the cart before the horse by allowing commercial development in an area that is already frequently in gridlock.
“If you want commercial development, you should build a highway first,” Teague said.
Jack Sinky, who lives in the first house off Rockwood, reminded the council that the residents of Sun Terrace are voters who helped put them in office.
“Leave residential alone. Don’t chip away at it from the corners,” he said. “Do the right thing.”
Patty Brown, who lives at 19 Sun Valley Road, implored the council, “Please do not do this to us.”
Susan Price, who lives at the end of Rockwood, said, “Leave it residential. That’s why we all bought here. Develop somewhere else.”
Alderman Odis Waymack drew jeers from the crowd when he said there is really no way to stop commercial development along Hwy. 89. He said later that the council opened the door to commercial development when it rezoned a daycare next to the property to allow Steve Blackwood to move his real estate business there. The daycare had been required to keep a residential zoning with a special-use permit that could not be transferred to the new owner.
The residents who attended the meeting also feared that if the 11-plus acres are rezoned to commercial, the house on the corner of Rockwood and Hwy. 89 that they had fought to keep residential would be the next to go commercial.
Ron Craig, planning commission chairman, said after the meeting that the master zoning plan shows Hwy. 89 as commercial on both sides.
Waymack said that since the council has rezoned the Blackwood property commercial, it has little choice except to rezone for the proposed commercial development.
Alderman David Polantz disagrees. He told the council that housing, not commercial development, has to remain the focus in Cabot.
At Waymack’s suggestion, the rezoning was sent back to the planning commission for the developer and the commission to discuss a planned-unit development or PUD which would require the developer to submit complete plans for what he intends to build.
But Waymack said later that he doesn’t think the city can compel the developer to present anything other than what has already been required – a rezoning request.
Adding to the quagmire, City Attorney Clint McGue told the council that in his opinion the council can’t even tell the developer that he can’t build access into the property off Rockwood. To do that would be to invite a lawsuit, he said.
By sending the matter back to the planning commission, the council has postponed making a decision until mid February.
“The deadline for getting on the January commission agenda has passed,” Craig said.
Residents said they have no intention of giving up.
Carl Schmidt, a longtime resident, told the council that a bus stop is now at the location where the developer proposes to make an entrance off Rockwood. A blind spot on the street is dangerous already without adding heavy construction vehicles to the mix, he said.
So when asked if he would attend the planning commission meeting to continue his fight he answered, “You can bet your sweet bippy we’ll be back.”
Leader staff writer
Residents of Sun Terrace, across the street from Wal-Mart Supercenter in Cabot, who several years ago successfully fought rezoning on the corner of Rockwood and Hwy. 89 at the entrance to their subdivision, are doing battle with the council again to stop a commercial development just one house down from that corner.
The residents filled every available seat and lined the walls in the council chambers Monday night. They had missed the planning commission meeting earlier this month when the commission approved about 11 acres for rezoning from residential to commercial and they were determined that the council, which has the final say, would know how they feel before it was too late.
For half of the two-hour council meeting, they took the podium one by one to express their objections to the council rezoning the property, but their reasons for objecting were not diverse.
The developer wanted to put an entrance into the subdivision on Rockwood. They don’t want that because they say that traffic from Wal-Mart and other businesses in that commercial development already is so bad that they have difficulty getting on and off Rockwood. And for that matter, they don’t want access to a commercial development off Hwy. 89 either. They don’t want a commercial development on their side of the highway at all.
They said they feared that a commercial development would devalue their property, bring more traffic inside their neighborhood and endanger both their children and their peace.
“I don’t understand why we have to keep complaining about making this commercial,” Virgil Teague told the council.
The city is getting the cart before the horse by allowing commercial development in an area that is already frequently in gridlock.
“If you want commercial development, you should build a highway first,” Teague said.
Jack Sinky, who lives in the first house off Rockwood, reminded the council that the residents of Sun Terrace are voters who helped put them in office.
“Leave residential alone. Don’t chip away at it from the corners,” he said. “Do the right thing.”
Patty Brown, who lives at 19 Sun Valley Road, implored the council, “Please do not do this to us.”
Susan Price, who lives at the end of Rockwood, said, “Leave it residential. That’s why we all bought here. Develop somewhere else.”
Alderman Odis Waymack drew jeers from the crowd when he said there is really no way to stop commercial development along Hwy. 89. He said later that the council opened the door to commercial development when it rezoned a daycare next to the property to allow Steve Blackwood to move his real estate business there. The daycare had been required to keep a residential zoning with a special-use permit that could not be transferred to the new owner.
The residents who attended the meeting also feared that if the 11-plus acres are rezoned to commercial, the house on the corner of Rockwood and Hwy. 89 that they had fought to keep residential would be the next to go commercial.
Ron Craig, planning commission chairman, said after the meeting that the master zoning plan shows Hwy. 89 as commercial on both sides.
Waymack said that since the council has rezoned the Blackwood property commercial, it has little choice except to rezone for the proposed commercial development.
Alderman David Polantz disagrees. He told the council that housing, not commercial development, has to remain the focus in Cabot.
At Waymack’s suggestion, the rezoning was sent back to the planning commission for the developer and the commission to discuss a planned-unit development or PUD which would require the developer to submit complete plans for what he intends to build.
But Waymack said later that he doesn’t think the city can compel the developer to present anything other than what has already been required – a rezoning request.
Adding to the quagmire, City Attorney Clint McGue told the council that in his opinion the council can’t even tell the developer that he can’t build access into the property off Rockwood. To do that would be to invite a lawsuit, he said.
By sending the matter back to the planning commission, the council has postponed making a decision until mid February.
“The deadline for getting on the January commission agenda has passed,” Craig said.
Residents said they have no intention of giving up.
Carl Schmidt, a longtime resident, told the council that a bus stop is now at the location where the developer proposes to make an entrance off Rockwood. A blind spot on the street is dangerous already without adding heavy construction vehicles to the mix, he said.
So when asked if he would attend the planning commission meeting to continue his fight he answered, “You can bet your sweet bippy we’ll be back.”
TOP STORY >> City council butts heads over budget suggestions
By SARA GREENE
Leader staff writer
Following a firestorm of words with Mayor Donald Ward Monday night, the Beebe City Council tabled a vote on the $2.7 million 2006 city budget until a full council is present.
Alderman Janet Rogers was absent.
Aldermen Janis Petray and Bobby Robinson suggested cuts for the budget including laying off the city’s economic development director, Marjorie Armstrong, and a yet to be determined street department position to supplement the street fund. Armstrong, one of the city’s highest-paid employees with a salary of around $48,000, was hired three years ago to help jumpstart Beebe’s economy.
“I think the council has failed. I think you need to go back and do your job right the second time,” Ward told the council.
“I don’t appreciate you getting belligerent with us,” Robinson said, adding that he could point out instances where the city administration has failed.
“I think you’re out of order,” Ward said banging his gavel. “I don’t care what you think,” Robinson said.
After a five-minute recess, the council voted to table the decision on the budget.
Armstrong attended the meeting but did not address the council regarding the budget.
“The existing citizens that are paying their taxes here is what’s important right now,” Petray said.
“When we cannot offer our own citizens infrastructure, I don’t see how we can attract new residents,” Petray said.
“So what we do now is pave the streets and forget about the future?” Ward asked.
Ward told council members he thought it was a good budget and attributed the city’s economic conditions to inheriting a $400,000 budget when he took office in 1999 followed by costly damage due to tornadoes that cut a swath through the city.
Ward first presented the budget which also includes a 5 percent raise for city employees, to the council Nov. 28. The council met Dec. 12 to review and discuss the budget.
“I believe I’ve been an asset to city government as well as the community and I hope I can continue,” Armstrong told The Leader.
“No one (on the city council) is going to touch the 5 percent pay increase because next year is an election year,” Ward said.
By state law, the budget must be passed by Feb. 1.
In other business, the mayor asked the council to consider changing the administration of the city cemetery. The price for an adult grave is $325 and the price for a child or cremation grave is $175.
“We need to either get out of the business or do something to defray the costs,” Ward said. Robertson agreed, citing the summer maintenance of mowing the graveyard.
The council is also considering a proposal to get streetlights installed along Pecan Street on both the north and south sides of the Hwy. 67/167 overpass.
The streetlights are expected to help light portions of the ballpark as well. Additionally, the council heard from John Sanderson of the Optimist Club of Searcy.
The Optimist Club of Searcy is offering to help establish a club in Beebe.
“The motto of Optimist Clubs is ‘Friend of Youth.’
“We would need an initial participation of about 30 people to get it started. The Beebe Optimists would elect their own officers, and raise their own funds. We just want to help get it started,” Sanderson said.
For those interested in starting an Optimist Club of Beebe, contact the mayor’s office at (501) 882-6295.
Leader staff writer
Following a firestorm of words with Mayor Donald Ward Monday night, the Beebe City Council tabled a vote on the $2.7 million 2006 city budget until a full council is present.
Alderman Janet Rogers was absent.
Aldermen Janis Petray and Bobby Robinson suggested cuts for the budget including laying off the city’s economic development director, Marjorie Armstrong, and a yet to be determined street department position to supplement the street fund. Armstrong, one of the city’s highest-paid employees with a salary of around $48,000, was hired three years ago to help jumpstart Beebe’s economy.
“I think the council has failed. I think you need to go back and do your job right the second time,” Ward told the council.
“I don’t appreciate you getting belligerent with us,” Robinson said, adding that he could point out instances where the city administration has failed.
“I think you’re out of order,” Ward said banging his gavel. “I don’t care what you think,” Robinson said.
After a five-minute recess, the council voted to table the decision on the budget.
Armstrong attended the meeting but did not address the council regarding the budget.
“The existing citizens that are paying their taxes here is what’s important right now,” Petray said.
“When we cannot offer our own citizens infrastructure, I don’t see how we can attract new residents,” Petray said.
“So what we do now is pave the streets and forget about the future?” Ward asked.
Ward told council members he thought it was a good budget and attributed the city’s economic conditions to inheriting a $400,000 budget when he took office in 1999 followed by costly damage due to tornadoes that cut a swath through the city.
Ward first presented the budget which also includes a 5 percent raise for city employees, to the council Nov. 28. The council met Dec. 12 to review and discuss the budget.
“I believe I’ve been an asset to city government as well as the community and I hope I can continue,” Armstrong told The Leader.
“No one (on the city council) is going to touch the 5 percent pay increase because next year is an election year,” Ward said.
By state law, the budget must be passed by Feb. 1.
In other business, the mayor asked the council to consider changing the administration of the city cemetery. The price for an adult grave is $325 and the price for a child or cremation grave is $175.
“We need to either get out of the business or do something to defray the costs,” Ward said. Robertson agreed, citing the summer maintenance of mowing the graveyard.
The council is also considering a proposal to get streetlights installed along Pecan Street on both the north and south sides of the Hwy. 67/167 overpass.
The streetlights are expected to help light portions of the ballpark as well. Additionally, the council heard from John Sanderson of the Optimist Club of Searcy.
The Optimist Club of Searcy is offering to help establish a club in Beebe.
“The motto of Optimist Clubs is ‘Friend of Youth.’
“We would need an initial participation of about 30 people to get it started. The Beebe Optimists would elect their own officers, and raise their own funds. We just want to help get it started,” Sanderson said.
For those interested in starting an Optimist Club of Beebe, contact the mayor’s office at (501) 882-6295.
TOP STORY >> Defense bill gets approval in House
By JOHN HOFHEIMER
Leader staff writer
After a long and heated battle Sunday night, members of the House of Representatives passed 308-106 the 2006 defense spending bill that would also open Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration, but Cong. Vic Snyder, D-Ark., who opposed the drilling, cautions Arkansans that the real vote was much tighter.
He said he and many others voted for the $453 billion defense spending bill, which pays for the wars in Iraq and Af-ghanistan and funds Little Rock Air Force Base, only after failing in a close vote to keep the ANWR drilling provision off the defense bill.
“Don’t get fooled,” Snyder told The Leader Tues-day. “We had the vote on the rule.”
“It basically put everything together — ANWR, money for Katrina relief and for the flu vaccine,” he added.
That vote, which could have stripped the ANWR drilling from the bill, passed by only 214 to 201, he said, with 198 Republicans voting yes, 21 voting no and 12 not voting. Among Democrats, only 16 broke ranks to include the oil drilling provision in the defense spending bill, while 179 opposed and seven didn’t vote.
That vote was taken at 4:10 a.m. Monday.
Senators opposed to drilling in the refuge might attempt to filibuster the defense bill Wednesday.
“I am dismayed that the Repub-lican leadership has made a mockery of the legislative process and placed vital aid to our troops on the ground at risk,” Sen. Blanche Lincoln said.
“Oil drilling in Alaska has been debated and defeated in Congress for almost as long as I’ve been here. It is my hope that this bill not be held hostage to such an unrelated and controversial provision as ANWR.”
“Sen. Mark Pryor is undecided on the filibuster and conflicted on the bill,” said spokesman Lisa Ackerman, who said Pryor had steadfastly opposed the drilling but staunchly supported the military.
social programs cut
About 90 minutes later, the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 authorized huge cuts in social programs important to Arkansans passed 211 to 206, Snyder said. It’s not clear that the bill will pass the Senate, he said, but if it does, it will cut student loans by $12.8 billion, and cut child-support enforcement by a billion, bringing total cuts to $39.7 billion over five years.
“This is the wrong bill for Arkansans,” said Snyder. “It makes it easier for deadbeat dads to get away and harder to get a student loan. What’s driving the bill was to find money for a Republican tax-cut bill to benefit the wealthy. It’s bad public policy.”
BUSH’S WIRE TAPS
Snyder said he also was concerned about revelations that President Bush ordered warrant-less wiretaps and spying on Amer-ican citizens. “I think you’ll see Congress look into this in a deliberative manner,” he said.
At least one U.S. senator, Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., has asked for an investigation into whether or not the president had committed an impeachable crime. Snyder said that in a free society, you have to balance security with civil liberties, but that it had to be done through laws. “The allegation in the New York Times story is that the president didn’t follow the law,” Snyder said. “He says he did.”
Bush says that when Congress authorized him to go after the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks just after Sept. 11, 2001, they authorized him to take such measures.
“I never hear anyone discussing that we were giving authority to do our intelligence gathering differently,” Snyder said.
“I believe there should be a full investigation into exactly who the President authorized the NSA to spy on. If his motive is purely to deter terrorist attacks on Americans and our allies, then an investigation will confirm that. The President has said he welcomes an investigation, and both Republican and Democratic leaders have promised to investigate the matter. I will withhold any further judgment about this program until I have more information.”
Leader staff writer
After a long and heated battle Sunday night, members of the House of Representatives passed 308-106 the 2006 defense spending bill that would also open Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration, but Cong. Vic Snyder, D-Ark., who opposed the drilling, cautions Arkansans that the real vote was much tighter.
He said he and many others voted for the $453 billion defense spending bill, which pays for the wars in Iraq and Af-ghanistan and funds Little Rock Air Force Base, only after failing in a close vote to keep the ANWR drilling provision off the defense bill.
“Don’t get fooled,” Snyder told The Leader Tues-day. “We had the vote on the rule.”
“It basically put everything together — ANWR, money for Katrina relief and for the flu vaccine,” he added.
That vote, which could have stripped the ANWR drilling from the bill, passed by only 214 to 201, he said, with 198 Republicans voting yes, 21 voting no and 12 not voting. Among Democrats, only 16 broke ranks to include the oil drilling provision in the defense spending bill, while 179 opposed and seven didn’t vote.
That vote was taken at 4:10 a.m. Monday.
Senators opposed to drilling in the refuge might attempt to filibuster the defense bill Wednesday.
“I am dismayed that the Repub-lican leadership has made a mockery of the legislative process and placed vital aid to our troops on the ground at risk,” Sen. Blanche Lincoln said.
“Oil drilling in Alaska has been debated and defeated in Congress for almost as long as I’ve been here. It is my hope that this bill not be held hostage to such an unrelated and controversial provision as ANWR.”
“Sen. Mark Pryor is undecided on the filibuster and conflicted on the bill,” said spokesman Lisa Ackerman, who said Pryor had steadfastly opposed the drilling but staunchly supported the military.
social programs cut
About 90 minutes later, the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 authorized huge cuts in social programs important to Arkansans passed 211 to 206, Snyder said. It’s not clear that the bill will pass the Senate, he said, but if it does, it will cut student loans by $12.8 billion, and cut child-support enforcement by a billion, bringing total cuts to $39.7 billion over five years.
“This is the wrong bill for Arkansans,” said Snyder. “It makes it easier for deadbeat dads to get away and harder to get a student loan. What’s driving the bill was to find money for a Republican tax-cut bill to benefit the wealthy. It’s bad public policy.”
BUSH’S WIRE TAPS
Snyder said he also was concerned about revelations that President Bush ordered warrant-less wiretaps and spying on Amer-ican citizens. “I think you’ll see Congress look into this in a deliberative manner,” he said.
At least one U.S. senator, Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., has asked for an investigation into whether or not the president had committed an impeachable crime. Snyder said that in a free society, you have to balance security with civil liberties, but that it had to be done through laws. “The allegation in the New York Times story is that the president didn’t follow the law,” Snyder said. “He says he did.”
Bush says that when Congress authorized him to go after the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks just after Sept. 11, 2001, they authorized him to take such measures.
“I never hear anyone discussing that we were giving authority to do our intelligence gathering differently,” Snyder said.
“I believe there should be a full investigation into exactly who the President authorized the NSA to spy on. If his motive is purely to deter terrorist attacks on Americans and our allies, then an investigation will confirm that. The President has said he welcomes an investigation, and both Republican and Democratic leaders have promised to investigate the matter. I will withhold any further judgment about this program until I have more information.”
TOP STORY >> Legislators frustrated by Lake View
By JOHN HOFHEIMER AND ROB MORITZ
Leader staff writer and Arkansas News Bureau
A special session on education may well be necessary but doesn’t have to be hurried, Gov. Mike Huckabee said Tuesday.
After the state Supreme Court declared school funding unconstitutional a week ago, Huckabee initially said a special session might not be needed to address concerns raised in the decision.
Since then, Attorney General Mike Beebe and others have said funding remedies would require legislative action. Only the governor can call the legislature into an extraordinary session.
Huckabee said Tuesday that he would not call a special session until a plan is in place to address issues raised by court.
Local legislators agree that there is a lot of homework to be done first and no need to rush.
No Lonoke, White or Pulaski County legislators were surprised by the ruling taking them to task, they said, but they were disappointed.
Sen. Bobby Glover, D-Carlisle, said last week he found a couple of positive things in the mix.
Glover has said all along that the legislature’s decision not to raise the state minimum foundation aid for the first year of the biennium was a bad idea, but he was pleased that the court acknowledged separation of powers, limited its intervention and did not concern itself with issues of further school consolidation.
“I was well pleased that while the court adopts most of the masters’ report, they don’t adopt it as a whole, particularly regarding the issue of district consolidation,” Glover said. He also said he felt confident that there was sufficient surplus revenue to cover any needed changes without resorting to any new taxes.
State Rep. Will Bond, D-Jacksonville, expressed disappointment that the court interjected itself into the Lake View/school adequacy question at all.
“It’s my belief that the court’s overstepping their authority, but it gives us an opportunity to examine again what we’ve done,” Bond said. “We’ll go back into districts, talk to principals, see what’s working and what’s not.”
Bond said the legislators could evaluate whether or not they needed to provide more money, and if so, in which areas. Bond said the new adequacy study would also show whether the general assembly required unfunded mandates.
Bond also said he thought there could be savings already in place to help offset the cost of mandates — for instance, technology that cost the districts less than the state provided.
“I took issue with their statement that we didn’t make education our first priority,” said state Rep. Jeff Wood, D-Sherwood. “Nobody wants new taxes, everyone wants more accountability. No one wants to take up consolidation again. We did the best we could with what we had to work with.”
“I’m still concerned about the separation of powers between the branches,” said state Rep. Sandra Prater, D-Jacksonville. “ I still want to make the districts as accountable as possible for their money. It’s come out in audit lately about one district paying for country club dues.
“We have $1 billion in school district reserves around the state. Why is that not going to the schools? I want to make sure that the money going there is going to the kids.”
“What we have to do first is begin to gather information on what’s needed for adequate funding,” said state Sen. John Paul Capps, D-Searcy. “The House and Senate Education Committees can hold hearings to adequately fund the schools. We need to know how the money is being spent. We need to meet with superintendents on reserve funds and how they intend to spend.
“We need to look at the athletic spending, transportation spending, all the spending. We need to monitor construction and real-time cost,” Capps said. “There is a real possibility of the judicial branch usurping the legislative branch. Do they want the judiciary running the school districts and the state?”
Leader staff writer and Arkansas News Bureau
A special session on education may well be necessary but doesn’t have to be hurried, Gov. Mike Huckabee said Tuesday.
After the state Supreme Court declared school funding unconstitutional a week ago, Huckabee initially said a special session might not be needed to address concerns raised in the decision.
Since then, Attorney General Mike Beebe and others have said funding remedies would require legislative action. Only the governor can call the legislature into an extraordinary session.
Huckabee said Tuesday that he would not call a special session until a plan is in place to address issues raised by court.
Local legislators agree that there is a lot of homework to be done first and no need to rush.
No Lonoke, White or Pulaski County legislators were surprised by the ruling taking them to task, they said, but they were disappointed.
Sen. Bobby Glover, D-Carlisle, said last week he found a couple of positive things in the mix.
Glover has said all along that the legislature’s decision not to raise the state minimum foundation aid for the first year of the biennium was a bad idea, but he was pleased that the court acknowledged separation of powers, limited its intervention and did not concern itself with issues of further school consolidation.
“I was well pleased that while the court adopts most of the masters’ report, they don’t adopt it as a whole, particularly regarding the issue of district consolidation,” Glover said. He also said he felt confident that there was sufficient surplus revenue to cover any needed changes without resorting to any new taxes.
State Rep. Will Bond, D-Jacksonville, expressed disappointment that the court interjected itself into the Lake View/school adequacy question at all.
“It’s my belief that the court’s overstepping their authority, but it gives us an opportunity to examine again what we’ve done,” Bond said. “We’ll go back into districts, talk to principals, see what’s working and what’s not.”
Bond said the legislators could evaluate whether or not they needed to provide more money, and if so, in which areas. Bond said the new adequacy study would also show whether the general assembly required unfunded mandates.
Bond also said he thought there could be savings already in place to help offset the cost of mandates — for instance, technology that cost the districts less than the state provided.
“I took issue with their statement that we didn’t make education our first priority,” said state Rep. Jeff Wood, D-Sherwood. “Nobody wants new taxes, everyone wants more accountability. No one wants to take up consolidation again. We did the best we could with what we had to work with.”
“I’m still concerned about the separation of powers between the branches,” said state Rep. Sandra Prater, D-Jacksonville. “ I still want to make the districts as accountable as possible for their money. It’s come out in audit lately about one district paying for country club dues.
“We have $1 billion in school district reserves around the state. Why is that not going to the schools? I want to make sure that the money going there is going to the kids.”
“What we have to do first is begin to gather information on what’s needed for adequate funding,” said state Sen. John Paul Capps, D-Searcy. “The House and Senate Education Committees can hold hearings to adequately fund the schools. We need to know how the money is being spent. We need to meet with superintendents on reserve funds and how they intend to spend.
“We need to look at the athletic spending, transportation spending, all the spending. We need to monitor construction and real-time cost,” Capps said. “There is a real possibility of the judicial branch usurping the legislative branch. Do they want the judiciary running the school districts and the state?”
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
OBITUARIES
ALLEN SCHMIDT
Allen Keith Schmidt, 47, of Cabot, went to be with the Lord Monday, Dec. 12 at Cooks Lake Lodge at Casscoe.
He was there deer hunting with his friends on a special deer hunt for the disabled. Allen suffered from Lou Gehrig’s Disease, but loved to spend time in the outdoors, hunting and fishing. He was a 1976 graduate of Cabot High School and a Baptist.
He is survived by his wife of 26 years, Debbie; two sons, Keith and Christopher Schmidt of Cabot; his parents, LeRoy and Patsy Schmidt of Austin; one sister, Carol McCabe of Austin; and a special niece, Lauren McCabe.
The family wishes to express their appreciation to Allen’s nurse and friend, Peggy Johnson.
Family will receive friends from 6 to 8 p.m. today at Westbrook Funeral Home, Beebe. Funeral will be at 2 p.m. Thursday, at Cabot First Baptist Church, with burial in Oak Grove Cemetery.
JAMES MAGNESS
James R. Magness, 77, of Cabot, passed away Monday, December 12. He was born Aug. 20, 1928, in Beebe. He was a member of Mt. Zion United Methodist Church in Lonoke.
He was preceded in death by his parents, Emmett and Cleo Magness; a son, Jerry Magness; two brothers and one sister.
Survivors are his wife of 60 years, Betty Jean Magness; two daughters and sons-in-law, Pam and Ken Murphy of Cabot and Shirl and Ken Welch of Little Rock; five grandchildren, Jeremy and April Murphy, Tonya and Jayson Hefley, Heather and Todd Graves, Thomas Murphy and Nicholas Welch; three great-grandchildren; and one sister, Doris Robbins of Cabot.
Visitation begins at 10 a.m. Thursday at Westbrook Funeral Home, Beebe, with family receiving friends from 6 to 8 p.m. Funeral will be at 2 p.m. Friday, Dec. 16 at Mt. Zion United Methodist Church, with burial at Hicks Cemetery.
Arrangements are by West-brook Funeral Home.
PAULINE THOMPSON
Pauline Pickard Thompson, 91, of Beebe died Dec. 13. She was born in the Antioch community near Beebe on Oct. 24, 1914, to the late Maynard and Ethel Pickard. Pauline was a member of Beebe First Church of the Nazarene.
She was preceded in death by her husband, Orville Thompson; three brothers, Murray Pickard, Alton G. Pickard and Harry Lee Pickard.
She is survived by two daughters, Willie Mae Nemec of Fayette-ville, and Mary Margaret Phillips, of Beebe; two sons, Bobby Ray Thompson of Upland, Calif., and Hays Thompson of Cabot; nine grandchildren; one step-grandson; 14 great-grandchildren; two great-great-grandchildren; and one sister, Martha Gasaway of Jonesboro.
Family will receive friends from 6 to 8 p.m. Thursday, at West-brook Funeral Home, Beebe. Funeral will be at 10 a.m. Friday, at Westbrook Funeral Home, with burial at Antioch Cemetery.
Memorials can be made to the Beebe First Church of the Naza-rene Building Fund, 104 Camp-ground Road, Beebe, Ark., 72012.
Arrangements are by West-brook Funeral Home.
PAUL DEAN
Paul William Dean, 76, of Searcy, died Dec. 13, at White County Medical Center in Searcy under Hospice Care.
He was born July 27, 1929 in Hamilton County, Ohio. He was preceded in death by his parents, John and Velma Wright Dean.
He was retired from the Air Force.
He is survived by his wife of 46 years, Mildred; a son, Kenneth of Kingsman, Ariz.; eight brothers and sisters, Ralph, Rosa, John, Leonard, Betty, James, Mary and Linda.
Thanks go to the wonderful doctors and nurses for their excellent care, with special thanks to the staff of Arkansas Hospice of White County.
Paul will be laid to rest in Liberty, Ky., at a later date.
Cremation arrangements un-der the direction of Moore’s Jacksonville Funeral Home.
Allen Keith Schmidt, 47, of Cabot, went to be with the Lord Monday, Dec. 12 at Cooks Lake Lodge at Casscoe.
He was there deer hunting with his friends on a special deer hunt for the disabled. Allen suffered from Lou Gehrig’s Disease, but loved to spend time in the outdoors, hunting and fishing. He was a 1976 graduate of Cabot High School and a Baptist.
He is survived by his wife of 26 years, Debbie; two sons, Keith and Christopher Schmidt of Cabot; his parents, LeRoy and Patsy Schmidt of Austin; one sister, Carol McCabe of Austin; and a special niece, Lauren McCabe.
The family wishes to express their appreciation to Allen’s nurse and friend, Peggy Johnson.
Family will receive friends from 6 to 8 p.m. today at Westbrook Funeral Home, Beebe. Funeral will be at 2 p.m. Thursday, at Cabot First Baptist Church, with burial in Oak Grove Cemetery.
JAMES MAGNESS
James R. Magness, 77, of Cabot, passed away Monday, December 12. He was born Aug. 20, 1928, in Beebe. He was a member of Mt. Zion United Methodist Church in Lonoke.
He was preceded in death by his parents, Emmett and Cleo Magness; a son, Jerry Magness; two brothers and one sister.
Survivors are his wife of 60 years, Betty Jean Magness; two daughters and sons-in-law, Pam and Ken Murphy of Cabot and Shirl and Ken Welch of Little Rock; five grandchildren, Jeremy and April Murphy, Tonya and Jayson Hefley, Heather and Todd Graves, Thomas Murphy and Nicholas Welch; three great-grandchildren; and one sister, Doris Robbins of Cabot.
Visitation begins at 10 a.m. Thursday at Westbrook Funeral Home, Beebe, with family receiving friends from 6 to 8 p.m. Funeral will be at 2 p.m. Friday, Dec. 16 at Mt. Zion United Methodist Church, with burial at Hicks Cemetery.
Arrangements are by West-brook Funeral Home.
PAULINE THOMPSON
Pauline Pickard Thompson, 91, of Beebe died Dec. 13. She was born in the Antioch community near Beebe on Oct. 24, 1914, to the late Maynard and Ethel Pickard. Pauline was a member of Beebe First Church of the Nazarene.
She was preceded in death by her husband, Orville Thompson; three brothers, Murray Pickard, Alton G. Pickard and Harry Lee Pickard.
She is survived by two daughters, Willie Mae Nemec of Fayette-ville, and Mary Margaret Phillips, of Beebe; two sons, Bobby Ray Thompson of Upland, Calif., and Hays Thompson of Cabot; nine grandchildren; one step-grandson; 14 great-grandchildren; two great-great-grandchildren; and one sister, Martha Gasaway of Jonesboro.
Family will receive friends from 6 to 8 p.m. Thursday, at West-brook Funeral Home, Beebe. Funeral will be at 10 a.m. Friday, at Westbrook Funeral Home, with burial at Antioch Cemetery.
Memorials can be made to the Beebe First Church of the Naza-rene Building Fund, 104 Camp-ground Road, Beebe, Ark., 72012.
Arrangements are by West-brook Funeral Home.
PAUL DEAN
Paul William Dean, 76, of Searcy, died Dec. 13, at White County Medical Center in Searcy under Hospice Care.
He was born July 27, 1929 in Hamilton County, Ohio. He was preceded in death by his parents, John and Velma Wright Dean.
He was retired from the Air Force.
He is survived by his wife of 46 years, Mildred; a son, Kenneth of Kingsman, Ariz.; eight brothers and sisters, Ralph, Rosa, John, Leonard, Betty, James, Mary and Linda.
Thanks go to the wonderful doctors and nurses for their excellent care, with special thanks to the staff of Arkansas Hospice of White County.
Paul will be laid to rest in Liberty, Ky., at a later date.
Cremation arrangements un-der the direction of Moore’s Jacksonville Funeral Home.
EDITORIAL >> Vote no Tuesday on more debt
Forget about all the legal questions surrounding the two bond proposals that will appear on the ballot Tuesday and consider only the sheer wisdom of the propositions, or the lack of it.
Sure, there are mind-boggling legal questions about both the interstate highway bond issue and the higher education bonds. The highway bond law that authorized this election seeks in the distant future to bypass the constitutional prohibition against state borrowing without first having a popular vote, and the higher education proposal seems to do the same, although the authors and sponsors of it have been equivocal on whether that was a purpose.
There are other legal riddles, but voters need not concern themselves with those, even though opponents urge you to. Defeat or passage of the propositions Tuesday will not affect those questions. They are part of the statutes passed by the legislature this year and those questions will remain after the election because Gov. Huckabee and his successor can call special elections on these questions until doomsday under the law. If the propositions pass, there will be lawsuits, perhaps friendly ones, to settle the questions before bonds can actually be sold. So they are almost immaterial to any voter’s consideration.
No, evaluate them on two premises: Do you agree with the purposes of the money that they will cause to be spent and their priority — repair of interstate mileage starting five to seven years from now and construction of new buildings on college campuses and tying all the Arkansas campuses to an interstate research network?
Second, is more or less permanent state indebtedness the best way to pay for the improvements?
You have to ignore the pitches of Gov. Huckabee and the other proponents of both issues. Like most campaign pitches, they are simple, appealing and wrong.
Paying for highway improvements as you go just does not work, said Gov. Huckabee, who 10 years ago said it did work and that bonded debt was wrong. (That was when Gov. Jim Guy Tucker was proposing highway bonds.) If you remember what the interstate highways were like six or seven years ago, the governor says, you know that paying as you go does not work. If you like all the improvements the past six years he says, you will vote to authorize the Highway Commission to do it again, and again, whenever it wants.
That assumes that nothing happened except the issuance of $575 million of highway bonds in 2000 and 2001. But that is wrong. When the legislature authorized the bond election in 1999, it also raised taxes, three cents a gallon on gasoline and four cents a gallon on diesel. Those taxes gave a big boost to highway building and would have done that even without bonds.
The gasoline taxes went largely to non-interstate construction but they freed money for the interstates, too. All the diesel taxes were dedicated to the interstates. They were obligated to pay off the bonds, but they could just as easily have been dedicated to an ongoing maintenance program. And the Federal Highway Administration pumped hundreds of millions more into interstate maintenance because the interstates were in bad shape everywhere, not just in Arkansas.
Without the highway bonds, there would have been a huge interstate highway program the past six years. In fact, there already was. It already had been under way a couple of years before the bonds were issued in 2000 and it seemed that those pesky orange barrels were everywhere.
Here is what the highway bond proposal is all about: With or without bonds, the diesel tax and the federal interstate aid will be used every year to repair interstates. If the bond proposal passes, from now on about one third of the road-use taxes dedicated to interstates both from Washing-ton and Little Rock will go to investors for their interest on the bonds. Without the bonds, that money would be spent on the highways.
You decide which is the wiser course.
In the case of the college bonds, the proposal contemplates two or more bond issues — one to raise the money to pay investors in one lump sum the $100 million that they would earn from now until 2017 on the current college bonds and then another issue of $150 million or more to get the cash for new buildings and equipment on the campuses — a nice little pot for every one of them.
Gov. Huckabee and his higher education chief say that enrollments have risen rapidly the past decade or so and that building on the campuses have not kept pace.
The implication is that there aren’t enough classrooms for the youngsters anymore. But a check with state treasury report shows that the state has spent nearly $1 billion on buildings and capital equipment in the 10 years ending in 2004. Private fortunes spent another $250 million or so on university buildings. It has been the biggest building boom in the state’s history. Visit your favorite school and see the transformation.
If the college bond issues are approved, the governor says he will call a special session the week before Christmas to appropriate the $150 million for the campuses. But he could save the state millions of dollars if instead he simply asked the legislature to appropriate $150 million of surplus state funds for the buildings, if they are urgent. They could be built instantly and the taxpayers could be spared tens of millions of dollars of interest and 20 years of debt.
Again, your choice.
Sure, there are mind-boggling legal questions about both the interstate highway bond issue and the higher education bonds. The highway bond law that authorized this election seeks in the distant future to bypass the constitutional prohibition against state borrowing without first having a popular vote, and the higher education proposal seems to do the same, although the authors and sponsors of it have been equivocal on whether that was a purpose.
There are other legal riddles, but voters need not concern themselves with those, even though opponents urge you to. Defeat or passage of the propositions Tuesday will not affect those questions. They are part of the statutes passed by the legislature this year and those questions will remain after the election because Gov. Huckabee and his successor can call special elections on these questions until doomsday under the law. If the propositions pass, there will be lawsuits, perhaps friendly ones, to settle the questions before bonds can actually be sold. So they are almost immaterial to any voter’s consideration.
No, evaluate them on two premises: Do you agree with the purposes of the money that they will cause to be spent and their priority — repair of interstate mileage starting five to seven years from now and construction of new buildings on college campuses and tying all the Arkansas campuses to an interstate research network?
Second, is more or less permanent state indebtedness the best way to pay for the improvements?
You have to ignore the pitches of Gov. Huckabee and the other proponents of both issues. Like most campaign pitches, they are simple, appealing and wrong.
Paying for highway improvements as you go just does not work, said Gov. Huckabee, who 10 years ago said it did work and that bonded debt was wrong. (That was when Gov. Jim Guy Tucker was proposing highway bonds.) If you remember what the interstate highways were like six or seven years ago, the governor says, you know that paying as you go does not work. If you like all the improvements the past six years he says, you will vote to authorize the Highway Commission to do it again, and again, whenever it wants.
That assumes that nothing happened except the issuance of $575 million of highway bonds in 2000 and 2001. But that is wrong. When the legislature authorized the bond election in 1999, it also raised taxes, three cents a gallon on gasoline and four cents a gallon on diesel. Those taxes gave a big boost to highway building and would have done that even without bonds.
The gasoline taxes went largely to non-interstate construction but they freed money for the interstates, too. All the diesel taxes were dedicated to the interstates. They were obligated to pay off the bonds, but they could just as easily have been dedicated to an ongoing maintenance program. And the Federal Highway Administration pumped hundreds of millions more into interstate maintenance because the interstates were in bad shape everywhere, not just in Arkansas.
Without the highway bonds, there would have been a huge interstate highway program the past six years. In fact, there already was. It already had been under way a couple of years before the bonds were issued in 2000 and it seemed that those pesky orange barrels were everywhere.
Here is what the highway bond proposal is all about: With or without bonds, the diesel tax and the federal interstate aid will be used every year to repair interstates. If the bond proposal passes, from now on about one third of the road-use taxes dedicated to interstates both from Washing-ton and Little Rock will go to investors for their interest on the bonds. Without the bonds, that money would be spent on the highways.
You decide which is the wiser course.
In the case of the college bonds, the proposal contemplates two or more bond issues — one to raise the money to pay investors in one lump sum the $100 million that they would earn from now until 2017 on the current college bonds and then another issue of $150 million or more to get the cash for new buildings and equipment on the campuses — a nice little pot for every one of them.
Gov. Huckabee and his higher education chief say that enrollments have risen rapidly the past decade or so and that building on the campuses have not kept pace.
The implication is that there aren’t enough classrooms for the youngsters anymore. But a check with state treasury report shows that the state has spent nearly $1 billion on buildings and capital equipment in the 10 years ending in 2004. Private fortunes spent another $250 million or so on university buildings. It has been the biggest building boom in the state’s history. Visit your favorite school and see the transformation.
If the college bond issues are approved, the governor says he will call a special session the week before Christmas to appropriate the $150 million for the campuses. But he could save the state millions of dollars if instead he simply asked the legislature to appropriate $150 million of surplus state funds for the buildings, if they are urgent. They could be built instantly and the taxpayers could be spared tens of millions of dollars of interest and 20 years of debt.
Again, your choice.
EDITORIAL >> Time to raise minimum pay
Talk about the Spirit of Christmas and family values. A coalition of church, union and community leaders calling itself Give Arkansans a Raise Now announced Monday that it would try to offer voters a chance to amend the state Consti-tution to guarantee the poorest Arkansas workers a halfway-livable income.
It is long overdue, and the perfect time to begin such a labor is Christmas, the one period of our sinful years in which we strive to live by the injunctions of the Prince of Peace. Blessed are the poor in spirit, the meek, the merciful, the peacemakers ...
The amendment would raise the minimum wage in Arkansas from $5.15 to $6.15 an hour and thereafter raise it automatically in consonance with the Consumer Price Index. The group will have to get the signatures of more than 80,000 Arkansas voters to get the proposition on the 2006 general-election ballot. That is a physically daunting task, but it should be no political problem. A poll shows that roughly 87 percent of Arkansans support the idea. That will change, no doubt, when the opposition ads pose the ruin of the state’s economy if voters ratify it but Arkansas voters have nearly always embraced proposals that undergird the economic security of workers and their families, starting with child labor laws and workers compensation. It will be no different this time.
Even at $6.15 an hour, the neediest workers will be far off the pace of previous generations. American hourly wages adjusted for inflation have been falling for 30 years, most dramatically since 2000. The minimum wage has been flat at $5.15 an hour since 1997. Congress and the Bush administration seem adamant that it never be raised again at the federal level. Raising the lowest wages could affect profit margins, executive bonuses and shareholder values. The Arkan-sas Legislature early this year emasculated a bill that would have raised the floor for Arkan-sas workers. Arkansas voters, we suspect, will not be so flinthearted.
The president of the Ark-ansas State Chamber of Commerce implied that the organization would not oppose the proposal if it gets on the ballot, but we have a hunch that will change. He said it would not affect many Arkansans because the vast majority of businesses pay more than $6.15 to all their employees.
True, it is not a large share of the workforce, but raising the incomes of the 127,000 workers who are at the floor now is not an insignificant step for the state and certainly not for them. They are the workers who almost certainly have no employer health insurance and no pension plan, and those most vulnerable to retail price hikes, big leaps in fuel costs and economic dislocation. They have some of the most dangerous and degrading day-to-day jobs. They are less likely to get paid vacations, paid holidays and sick and family leave.
“We live in a great nation,” said Rev. Stephen Copley, senior pastor of North Little Rock First United Methodist Church and chair of Give Arkansans a Raise Now. “Folks should not work hard, play by the rules and live in poverty.”
They would still live in poverty if the proposal is ratified, but not quite so deeply as now.
Next year, the campaign against the amendment will say that the beneficiaries would merely be youngsters in part-time jobs, mainly fast-food restaurants, who are on their way up the economic ladder anyway. That has been the battle cry in every minimum-wage effort in Congress for 50 years but it does not fly.
It is a myth. Economics professors Sheldon Danziger of the University of Michigan and Peter Gottschalk of Boston College found that most low-wage workers no longer move up to the middle class. About half of people whose family income ranked them in the bottom fifth of the country in 1968 were still there in 1991. Of those who did move up, 75 percent were still well below the median income. The U.S. economy no longer provides much mobility for low-income workers.
They are not only restaurant workers but childcare-givers, security guards, nursing-home and hospital orderlies, teachers’ assistants, retail clerks, poultry line workers and call-center employees.
We will hear the familiar argument that raising the minimum wage is bad for the poor because employers will just make up the difference by reducing the number of jobs. But minimum-wage increases have nearly always led to greater job creation, not less. Wasn’t that a message of the Sermon on the Mount? There are rewards for doing for the least of those among us.
Sign a petition if you find one.
It is long overdue, and the perfect time to begin such a labor is Christmas, the one period of our sinful years in which we strive to live by the injunctions of the Prince of Peace. Blessed are the poor in spirit, the meek, the merciful, the peacemakers ...
The amendment would raise the minimum wage in Arkansas from $5.15 to $6.15 an hour and thereafter raise it automatically in consonance with the Consumer Price Index. The group will have to get the signatures of more than 80,000 Arkansas voters to get the proposition on the 2006 general-election ballot. That is a physically daunting task, but it should be no political problem. A poll shows that roughly 87 percent of Arkansans support the idea. That will change, no doubt, when the opposition ads pose the ruin of the state’s economy if voters ratify it but Arkansas voters have nearly always embraced proposals that undergird the economic security of workers and their families, starting with child labor laws and workers compensation. It will be no different this time.
Even at $6.15 an hour, the neediest workers will be far off the pace of previous generations. American hourly wages adjusted for inflation have been falling for 30 years, most dramatically since 2000. The minimum wage has been flat at $5.15 an hour since 1997. Congress and the Bush administration seem adamant that it never be raised again at the federal level. Raising the lowest wages could affect profit margins, executive bonuses and shareholder values. The Arkan-sas Legislature early this year emasculated a bill that would have raised the floor for Arkan-sas workers. Arkansas voters, we suspect, will not be so flinthearted.
The president of the Ark-ansas State Chamber of Commerce implied that the organization would not oppose the proposal if it gets on the ballot, but we have a hunch that will change. He said it would not affect many Arkansans because the vast majority of businesses pay more than $6.15 to all their employees.
True, it is not a large share of the workforce, but raising the incomes of the 127,000 workers who are at the floor now is not an insignificant step for the state and certainly not for them. They are the workers who almost certainly have no employer health insurance and no pension plan, and those most vulnerable to retail price hikes, big leaps in fuel costs and economic dislocation. They have some of the most dangerous and degrading day-to-day jobs. They are less likely to get paid vacations, paid holidays and sick and family leave.
“We live in a great nation,” said Rev. Stephen Copley, senior pastor of North Little Rock First United Methodist Church and chair of Give Arkansans a Raise Now. “Folks should not work hard, play by the rules and live in poverty.”
They would still live in poverty if the proposal is ratified, but not quite so deeply as now.
Next year, the campaign against the amendment will say that the beneficiaries would merely be youngsters in part-time jobs, mainly fast-food restaurants, who are on their way up the economic ladder anyway. That has been the battle cry in every minimum-wage effort in Congress for 50 years but it does not fly.
It is a myth. Economics professors Sheldon Danziger of the University of Michigan and Peter Gottschalk of Boston College found that most low-wage workers no longer move up to the middle class. About half of people whose family income ranked them in the bottom fifth of the country in 1968 were still there in 1991. Of those who did move up, 75 percent were still well below the median income. The U.S. economy no longer provides much mobility for low-income workers.
They are not only restaurant workers but childcare-givers, security guards, nursing-home and hospital orderlies, teachers’ assistants, retail clerks, poultry line workers and call-center employees.
We will hear the familiar argument that raising the minimum wage is bad for the poor because employers will just make up the difference by reducing the number of jobs. But minimum-wage increases have nearly always led to greater job creation, not less. Wasn’t that a message of the Sermon on the Mount? There are rewards for doing for the least of those among us.
Sign a petition if you find one.
EDITORIAL >> Governor is biggest loser
Arkansans went to the polls Tuesday to vote on several local issues. Sherwood residents decided to extend the terms of city council members from two years to four years, and voters in Lonoke passed a 2-cent hamburger tax.
But yesterday’s big story was Gov. Huckabee’s ambitious proposal to give the state Highway Commission a permanent, $570 million slush fund for interstate im-provements. The voters said they wouldn’t trust the Huck-ster or the commission with that kind of revolving credit. They said let’s just keep paying for highway improvements as we go and save all that interest on the bonds.
The highway proposal has gone down in flames, like Huckabee’s presidential ambitions. If he can’t pass a bond issue in Arkansas, how will he fight global terrorism? Definitely not ready for prime time.
The governor and his highway pals had hoped to sneak the issue past most voters during the holiday season — no one was supposed to be paying attention, you see — but the people were not fooled.
Huckabee also lost the support of conservative Republicans, along with the state’s truckers, who did not want the state to take on more debt.
Another bond issue on the ballot to help state colleges would have passed easily if the highway bonds hadn’t been on the ballot. With friends like Mike, who needs enemies?
The people have acted wisely, as they usually do.
But yesterday’s big story was Gov. Huckabee’s ambitious proposal to give the state Highway Commission a permanent, $570 million slush fund for interstate im-provements. The voters said they wouldn’t trust the Huck-ster or the commission with that kind of revolving credit. They said let’s just keep paying for highway improvements as we go and save all that interest on the bonds.
The highway proposal has gone down in flames, like Huckabee’s presidential ambitions. If he can’t pass a bond issue in Arkansas, how will he fight global terrorism? Definitely not ready for prime time.
The governor and his highway pals had hoped to sneak the issue past most voters during the holiday season — no one was supposed to be paying attention, you see — but the people were not fooled.
Huckabee also lost the support of conservative Republicans, along with the state’s truckers, who did not want the state to take on more debt.
Another bond issue on the ballot to help state colleges would have passed easily if the highway bonds hadn’t been on the ballot. With friends like Mike, who needs enemies?
The people have acted wisely, as they usually do.
SPORTS >> Red Devils fall short in Cyclone title game
By RAY BENTON
Leader sports editor
The Jacksonville Red Devils won the second-place trophy Saturday at the Russellville tournament, but if it were up to head coach Vic Joyner, they wouldn’t have accepted it.
Joyner was unhappy with the officiating in the championship game against the host team, and left the second-place trophy sitting at midcourt during post-tournament ceremonies, shortly after his team lost 61-60 to the Cyclones.
Assistant coach Jerry Wilson went back minutes later and picked the trophy up.
“I wouldn’t accept that trophy for anybody’s money,” Joyner said Monday. “There wasn’t anyway we were going to win. There was one official that I don’t think called any other game in the whole tournament, and he called us for everything in that fourth quarter.
They had us in a catch 22 and they knew it. We couldn’t go zone because they can shoot well, but we couldn’t play man because they’d just go to the line for every little thing. Their coach kept yelling drive, drive. And I don’t blame the coach. I commend him. He knew he was getting that call every time, so he was calling for that call every time, so he was calling for it. But there was nothing we could do with that one official.”
The line score seems to indicate a sudden burst of fouls by Jacksonville and a definite burst of scoring for the Cyclones.
Russellville’s score-by quarter was 10-10-11-30. The Cyclones shot 31 free throws in the game, 17 in the fourth quarter. They hit 25 of those, including 13 in the fourth.
Jacksonville shot 15 free throws, and made four of six in the final period. The two misses in the fourth were the only two the whole game.
Jacksonville led by 31-20 at halftime and 44-31 at the end of three.
Joyner admitted his players lost their composure amidst the controversial fourth-quarter.
“Did they lose their heads? Yes,” Joyner said. “Should they have lost their heads? Maybe not, but I’m telling you I can’t blame ‘em too much. We did have some plays in the fourth quarter where we went down there and threw the ball away. We still could have won that game, maybe. I don’t know. Maybe the only reason they didn’t call something is because they didn’t have to.”
Joyner says he’ll never return to a Russellville tournament again, but admits he probably won’t be invited.
Russellville guard Marcus Pillow led all scorers with 27 points. He was 13 for 15 from the line. Lavar Neely led Jacksonville with 17, while K.C. Credit added 11 for the Devils, who are now 6-2 on the season.
Jacksonville is off until Friday when it hosts the rematch with North Pulaski.
Leader sports editor
The Jacksonville Red Devils won the second-place trophy Saturday at the Russellville tournament, but if it were up to head coach Vic Joyner, they wouldn’t have accepted it.
Joyner was unhappy with the officiating in the championship game against the host team, and left the second-place trophy sitting at midcourt during post-tournament ceremonies, shortly after his team lost 61-60 to the Cyclones.
Assistant coach Jerry Wilson went back minutes later and picked the trophy up.
“I wouldn’t accept that trophy for anybody’s money,” Joyner said Monday. “There wasn’t anyway we were going to win. There was one official that I don’t think called any other game in the whole tournament, and he called us for everything in that fourth quarter.
They had us in a catch 22 and they knew it. We couldn’t go zone because they can shoot well, but we couldn’t play man because they’d just go to the line for every little thing. Their coach kept yelling drive, drive. And I don’t blame the coach. I commend him. He knew he was getting that call every time, so he was calling for that call every time, so he was calling for it. But there was nothing we could do with that one official.”
The line score seems to indicate a sudden burst of fouls by Jacksonville and a definite burst of scoring for the Cyclones.
Russellville’s score-by quarter was 10-10-11-30. The Cyclones shot 31 free throws in the game, 17 in the fourth quarter. They hit 25 of those, including 13 in the fourth.
Jacksonville shot 15 free throws, and made four of six in the final period. The two misses in the fourth were the only two the whole game.
Jacksonville led by 31-20 at halftime and 44-31 at the end of three.
Joyner admitted his players lost their composure amidst the controversial fourth-quarter.
“Did they lose their heads? Yes,” Joyner said. “Should they have lost their heads? Maybe not, but I’m telling you I can’t blame ‘em too much. We did have some plays in the fourth quarter where we went down there and threw the ball away. We still could have won that game, maybe. I don’t know. Maybe the only reason they didn’t call something is because they didn’t have to.”
Joyner says he’ll never return to a Russellville tournament again, but admits he probably won’t be invited.
Russellville guard Marcus Pillow led all scorers with 27 points. He was 13 for 15 from the line. Lavar Neely led Jacksonville with 17, while K.C. Credit added 11 for the Devils, who are now 6-2 on the season.
Jacksonville is off until Friday when it hosts the rematch with North Pulaski.
SPORTS >> Cabot handles Wampus Cats
By RAY BENTON
Leader sports editor
The Cabot Panthers controlled every aspect of its their game Friday night against Conway but one, and one wasn’t enough for the Wampus Cats as Cabot cruised to a 52-37 victory and kept its record un-blemished after eight games.
Conway guard Quincy Maxfield was the only going for the Wampus Cats, while the Panthers controlled the tempo, the boards and most any other action in the game.
Cabot didn’t shoot from the outside very well, but didn’t have to with a dominant inside game and a tenacious defensive effort.
Cabot coach Jerry Bridges was very pleased his team.
“We played very good defensively,” Bridges said. “They really got after ’em and gave ’em very few open looks. No. 20 (Maxfield), you just have to take your hat off to him.
“We were in his face for most of those shots. He was just hitting ‘em anyway. Overall though I thought it was a really good effort. The kids played really hard.”
The first quarter was tightly contested, but guard Justin Haas hit a three pointer at the buzzer to end the first that gave the Panthers a 12-8 lead and momentum.
They carried that momentum throughout the game. Cabot extended its lead to 27-16 by halftime, and all but had the game wrapped up with a 41-21 lead by the end of the third quarter.
Cabot center Chad Glover led his team in scoring, despite spending much of the game on the bench in foul trouble.
Michael Lowry scored all six of his points in the third quarter to spark the run that gave the Panthers their 20-plus-point lead.
In the midst of Lowry’s scoring burst, Haas hit his second three and Glover added an and-one that effectively sealed the game, although the Panthers didn’t play like it in the fourth.
Cabot’s defense stayed intense throughout the fourth quarter, even when both teams went to the benches with about two minutes left in the game.
Maxfield was Conway’s only bright spot. The 5-foot-9 guard hit three of four three-point attempts, and was even more deadly with his mid-range jumpers. He finished with 20 points to lead all scorers.
Glover led the Panthers with 14 points. Point guard Matt Shinn added nine while Shawn Tramel came off the bench to score seven for the Panthers. Three players scored six for Cabot.
The Panthers also dominated the boards and were outstanding at the free-throw line.
Cabot grabbed 21 rebounds to Conway’s 14, with Lowry leading the way with seven.
The Panthers made 16 of 19 free throws, 84 percent.
The Panthers are off until Friday when they will host Lonoke in a quadruple header.
Junior Varsity boys and girls will precede varsity boys and girls for a full night of action at the Cabot gymnasium Friday night. Activities begin at 5 p.m.
Leader sports editor
The Cabot Panthers controlled every aspect of its their game Friday night against Conway but one, and one wasn’t enough for the Wampus Cats as Cabot cruised to a 52-37 victory and kept its record un-blemished after eight games.
Conway guard Quincy Maxfield was the only going for the Wampus Cats, while the Panthers controlled the tempo, the boards and most any other action in the game.
Cabot didn’t shoot from the outside very well, but didn’t have to with a dominant inside game and a tenacious defensive effort.
Cabot coach Jerry Bridges was very pleased his team.
“We played very good defensively,” Bridges said. “They really got after ’em and gave ’em very few open looks. No. 20 (Maxfield), you just have to take your hat off to him.
“We were in his face for most of those shots. He was just hitting ‘em anyway. Overall though I thought it was a really good effort. The kids played really hard.”
The first quarter was tightly contested, but guard Justin Haas hit a three pointer at the buzzer to end the first that gave the Panthers a 12-8 lead and momentum.
They carried that momentum throughout the game. Cabot extended its lead to 27-16 by halftime, and all but had the game wrapped up with a 41-21 lead by the end of the third quarter.
Cabot center Chad Glover led his team in scoring, despite spending much of the game on the bench in foul trouble.
Michael Lowry scored all six of his points in the third quarter to spark the run that gave the Panthers their 20-plus-point lead.
In the midst of Lowry’s scoring burst, Haas hit his second three and Glover added an and-one that effectively sealed the game, although the Panthers didn’t play like it in the fourth.
Cabot’s defense stayed intense throughout the fourth quarter, even when both teams went to the benches with about two minutes left in the game.
Maxfield was Conway’s only bright spot. The 5-foot-9 guard hit three of four three-point attempts, and was even more deadly with his mid-range jumpers. He finished with 20 points to lead all scorers.
Glover led the Panthers with 14 points. Point guard Matt Shinn added nine while Shawn Tramel came off the bench to score seven for the Panthers. Three players scored six for Cabot.
The Panthers also dominated the boards and were outstanding at the free-throw line.
Cabot grabbed 21 rebounds to Conway’s 14, with Lowry leading the way with seven.
The Panthers made 16 of 19 free throws, 84 percent.
The Panthers are off until Friday when they will host Lonoke in a quadruple header.
Junior Varsity boys and girls will precede varsity boys and girls for a full night of action at the Cabot gymnasium Friday night. Activities begin at 5 p.m.
NEIGHBORS >> Video with class
By SARA GREENE
Leader staff writer
Cabot High School students learn the art of broadcasting
Cabot High School recently premiered the television program CHTV (Cabot High School Television) created by the school’s radio and television-broadcasting students.
The 15-minute-long program airs on Cebridge Cable Channel 15 at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday nights. It features segments such as athlete of the week and senior spotlight as well as news about the school and community.
“I enjoy being on camera and interviewing people,” said Shannon O’Nale, 16. “It’s fun and you get to experience new things.”
The radio and television broadcasting program at Cabot High School was created in August when the school got a 12 foot-by-12 foot video screen with the scoreboard at the new fieldhouse at Panther Stadium.
“The biggest challenge was such a short time span to get everything together for the class,” says Chuck Massey, the radio and television-broadcasting instructor. Massey also teaches choir.
Since the school did not know exactly when the video scoreboard would be installed, the radio and television broadcasting class was not offered to students last spring.
“In August, when we decided to offer the class, we contacted students in the mass communication courses to see if they wanted to take it,” Massey said.
Currently the class, which is part of the workforce education curriculum at Cabot High School, has 25 students enrolled in it.
Massey said he anticipates the class growing to 100 students next year when the classroom and studio is moved into the new high school building.
“This is what I want my career to be,” said Sarah Shelton, 16.
When school started, the first step for students was learning television-broadcasting terminology before getting hands-on experience with the cameras and editing equipment by filming high school football games.
As some students operated the cameras filming all the action on the field, other students in the field house’s studio broadcasted the instant replays, advertisements and announcements that appeared on the video screen. Additionally, the class formatted footage of two of the games that were broadcast on Cebridge Cable.
Now that football season is over, students have been putting together footage for the CHTV program.
Upcoming projects for the class include doing a MTV Crib’s style program showing off the new field- house.
Later this spring, Massey says the television broadcast class will work with the drama and theater department on a student film festival.
“I enjoy the editing process,” said Josh Lee, 18.
“It’s a challenge making group decisions sometimes, we all have different ideas but we’re all on the same team.”
Leader staff writer
Cabot High School students learn the art of broadcasting
Cabot High School recently premiered the television program CHTV (Cabot High School Television) created by the school’s radio and television-broadcasting students.
The 15-minute-long program airs on Cebridge Cable Channel 15 at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday nights. It features segments such as athlete of the week and senior spotlight as well as news about the school and community.
“I enjoy being on camera and interviewing people,” said Shannon O’Nale, 16. “It’s fun and you get to experience new things.”
The radio and television broadcasting program at Cabot High School was created in August when the school got a 12 foot-by-12 foot video screen with the scoreboard at the new fieldhouse at Panther Stadium.
“The biggest challenge was such a short time span to get everything together for the class,” says Chuck Massey, the radio and television-broadcasting instructor. Massey also teaches choir.
Since the school did not know exactly when the video scoreboard would be installed, the radio and television broadcasting class was not offered to students last spring.
“In August, when we decided to offer the class, we contacted students in the mass communication courses to see if they wanted to take it,” Massey said.
Currently the class, which is part of the workforce education curriculum at Cabot High School, has 25 students enrolled in it.
Massey said he anticipates the class growing to 100 students next year when the classroom and studio is moved into the new high school building.
“This is what I want my career to be,” said Sarah Shelton, 16.
When school started, the first step for students was learning television-broadcasting terminology before getting hands-on experience with the cameras and editing equipment by filming high school football games.
As some students operated the cameras filming all the action on the field, other students in the field house’s studio broadcasted the instant replays, advertisements and announcements that appeared on the video screen. Additionally, the class formatted footage of two of the games that were broadcast on Cebridge Cable.
Now that football season is over, students have been putting together footage for the CHTV program.
Upcoming projects for the class include doing a MTV Crib’s style program showing off the new field- house.
Later this spring, Massey says the television broadcast class will work with the drama and theater department on a student film festival.
“I enjoy the editing process,” said Josh Lee, 18.
“It’s a challenge making group decisions sometimes, we all have different ideas but we’re all on the same team.”
TOP STORY >> Cabot police kick off new alert program
By JOAN MCCOY
Leader staff writer
A program created almost 10 years ago in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to help find missing Alzheimer’s patients and children is now available to law- enforcement agencies all over the country, and the Cabot Police Department is one of the first in the area to use it.
It’s called “A Child is Missing” or “ACIM.” It doesn’t cost anything and it is capable of notifying 1,000 residents within one minute that a child cannot be found.
Cabot Police Chief Jackie Davis first heard about the program three months ago during a police chief’s convention.
“He heard about it and we just had to get it,” said Sgt. Dwayne Roper, department spokesman.
Its use is limited to notifying neighbors by phone that a child, disabled person or Alzheimer’s patient is missing or that a sex offender has moved into an area.
So far, Cabot Police Department has used it twice, first to notify neighbors that a sex offender had moved in and more recently to alert residents in the southern part of Cabot that a 2-year-old boy was missing.
The child was recovered safely since he had really never left his home. He was found peacefully asleep under a pile of pillows in a bedroom, Roper said. His family and the first officer to respond to the call had not seen him.
But the test showed that the system worked, he said, because several residents called to say they had received the message and to ask how the search was going.
On the negative side, the service does not include calls to the same 1,000 people to tell them the child has been found, so Davis told city council members recently that his dispatchers were overworked when the calls from concerned residents started coming in.
But on the positive side, it offers an opportunity to get more people involved in the search early on when FBI statistics show a child is the most likely to be killed.
It works like this: When a child or other person allowed by the program is missing, the police agency contacts ACIM and gives all the pertinent information, such as description, what the person was wearing, area where last seen and home address. A technician tapes a telephone message with that information and makes the call to homes and businesses in the area where the subject was last seen. If an answering machine picks up, the call goes to the machine instead.
According to FBI statistics, 3,000 children and elderly go missing every day, Roper said, and if that isn’t food for thought, he added, “There’s a one-in-42 chance that your child is going missing.”
Leader staff writer
A program created almost 10 years ago in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to help find missing Alzheimer’s patients and children is now available to law- enforcement agencies all over the country, and the Cabot Police Department is one of the first in the area to use it.
It’s called “A Child is Missing” or “ACIM.” It doesn’t cost anything and it is capable of notifying 1,000 residents within one minute that a child cannot be found.
Cabot Police Chief Jackie Davis first heard about the program three months ago during a police chief’s convention.
“He heard about it and we just had to get it,” said Sgt. Dwayne Roper, department spokesman.
Its use is limited to notifying neighbors by phone that a child, disabled person or Alzheimer’s patient is missing or that a sex offender has moved into an area.
So far, Cabot Police Department has used it twice, first to notify neighbors that a sex offender had moved in and more recently to alert residents in the southern part of Cabot that a 2-year-old boy was missing.
The child was recovered safely since he had really never left his home. He was found peacefully asleep under a pile of pillows in a bedroom, Roper said. His family and the first officer to respond to the call had not seen him.
But the test showed that the system worked, he said, because several residents called to say they had received the message and to ask how the search was going.
On the negative side, the service does not include calls to the same 1,000 people to tell them the child has been found, so Davis told city council members recently that his dispatchers were overworked when the calls from concerned residents started coming in.
But on the positive side, it offers an opportunity to get more people involved in the search early on when FBI statistics show a child is the most likely to be killed.
It works like this: When a child or other person allowed by the program is missing, the police agency contacts ACIM and gives all the pertinent information, such as description, what the person was wearing, area where last seen and home address. A technician tapes a telephone message with that information and makes the call to homes and businesses in the area where the subject was last seen. If an answering machine picks up, the call goes to the machine instead.
According to FBI statistics, 3,000 children and elderly go missing every day, Roper said, and if that isn’t food for thought, he added, “There’s a one-in-42 chance that your child is going missing.”
TOP STORY >> 463rd: Inside look at war on terror
By SARA GREENE
Leader staff writer
Besides being a schoolhouse for all things related to the C-130 cargo plane, Little Rock Air Force Base houses the 463rd Airlift Group, which transports “beans and bullets” as well as troops, all over the world.
“Airlift is one of the most vital part of the war on terror,” said Col. Scott Lockard, deputy commander of the 463rd, which was established at Little Rock Air Force Base in 1997.
“We’re using it to get over some of those areas that are hazardous to military convoys,” Lockard said, adding that this year the 463rd helped train the first all-Iraqi C-130 Hercules crew.
The 463rd has about 1,200 airmen under its command divided up among an aircraft maintenance squadron, maintenance operations squadron and an operations support squadron, as well as two airlift squadrons, the 50th and the 61st.
The 61st Airlift Squadron flies 12 of the older C-130E aircraft and the 50th Airlift Squadron flies 14 of the C-130H3 aircraft.
Currently about 20 percent of the 463rd is constantly leaving or arriving on rotating de-ployments that typically last 180 days.
“They’re ours in our hearts, but while they’re in the theater (of war) they belong to the commander over there. As a commander, you have to trust them to take care of your troops,” Lockard said.
“It’s tough on a commander to not have that day-to-day involvement with your airmen.”
“The personnel are performing magnificently across the board in the AOR (Area of Responsibility). The personnel are coming back feeling fulfilled because they understand the importance of what they’re doing over there. They’re fired up when they get back,” Lockard said.
Currently, there are five C-130s from the 463rd in South-east Asia which includes Iraq and Afghanistan.
Like personnel, the aircraft are rotated back to Little Rock Air Force Base regularly.
“We fly the aircraft hard and we land in austere conditions. It’s hard on the tires and brakes,” Lockard said. “We bring them back for the maintenance we can’t perform in the desert.”
Originally stationed at Ard-more Air Force Base in Okla-homa as the 463rd Troop Carrier Wing, the Wing received the first C-130A from Lockheed Aircraft Corpo-ration on Dec. 9, 1956.
To celebrate the 50th anni-versary of the first C-130, Lockard said the 463rd is planning a variety of events to make 2006 “The Year of the Herk,” referring to the Hercules.
Leader staff writer
Besides being a schoolhouse for all things related to the C-130 cargo plane, Little Rock Air Force Base houses the 463rd Airlift Group, which transports “beans and bullets” as well as troops, all over the world.
“Airlift is one of the most vital part of the war on terror,” said Col. Scott Lockard, deputy commander of the 463rd, which was established at Little Rock Air Force Base in 1997.
“We’re using it to get over some of those areas that are hazardous to military convoys,” Lockard said, adding that this year the 463rd helped train the first all-Iraqi C-130 Hercules crew.
The 463rd has about 1,200 airmen under its command divided up among an aircraft maintenance squadron, maintenance operations squadron and an operations support squadron, as well as two airlift squadrons, the 50th and the 61st.
The 61st Airlift Squadron flies 12 of the older C-130E aircraft and the 50th Airlift Squadron flies 14 of the C-130H3 aircraft.
Currently about 20 percent of the 463rd is constantly leaving or arriving on rotating de-ployments that typically last 180 days.
“They’re ours in our hearts, but while they’re in the theater (of war) they belong to the commander over there. As a commander, you have to trust them to take care of your troops,” Lockard said.
“It’s tough on a commander to not have that day-to-day involvement with your airmen.”
“The personnel are performing magnificently across the board in the AOR (Area of Responsibility). The personnel are coming back feeling fulfilled because they understand the importance of what they’re doing over there. They’re fired up when they get back,” Lockard said.
Currently, there are five C-130s from the 463rd in South-east Asia which includes Iraq and Afghanistan.
Like personnel, the aircraft are rotated back to Little Rock Air Force Base regularly.
“We fly the aircraft hard and we land in austere conditions. It’s hard on the tires and brakes,” Lockard said. “We bring them back for the maintenance we can’t perform in the desert.”
Originally stationed at Ard-more Air Force Base in Okla-homa as the 463rd Troop Carrier Wing, the Wing received the first C-130A from Lockheed Aircraft Corpo-ration on Dec. 9, 1956.
To celebrate the 50th anni-versary of the first C-130, Lockard said the 463rd is planning a variety of events to make 2006 “The Year of the Herk,” referring to the Hercules.
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