Category Archives: State government

Part of state’s deer population wasting away

Business and economics, State government

By Steve Brawner
© 2016 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

One of the biggest stories in Arkansas this year involves four legs – and I’m not talking about the two apiece used by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

I’m talking about those used by deer, a growing number of whom have a deadly, incurable neurologic disease that spreads easily.

Chronic wasting disease is caused not by viruses or bacteria but by a protein called prions that attack a deer’s brain, sort of like mad cow disease. Prions are spread through contact with an infected deer’s urine, feces, saliva, blood or carcass. They’re not living, so they can’t be killed, and they last a long time on the forest floor.

The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission has been watching this disease for decades as it started in the western United States and then moved closer. When an elk felled by a hunter tested positive last fall, Game and Fish Commission members took notice. Then in February, a seemingly healthy deer that appeared near Ponca and was oddly not afraid of people suddenly grew sick and died.

AGFC initially tested 266 deer in a 125,000-acre area and found 23 percent were infected. No other state has seen that high an initial detection rate. Among the concerns is that 12 of 48 fawns tested were infected. By comparison, Wisconsin sampled more than 14,000 fawns and found only 24 cases, legislators were told Monday.

More samples are being taken. Infected deer have been found in five counties – Newton, Boone, Carroll, Madison, and Pope, with Newton hit the hardest. The rest of the state so far is clean, but deer are mobile. The one case in Pope County was well south of the cluster of cases in Newton County.

Why is this a big deal? Arkansas is home to 500,000 licensed deer hunters, and that’s not including those under 16 who aren’t required to buy a license. The state last year issued 21,515 nonresident big game hunting licenses to out-of-state hunters. Deer hunting not only is big business, but it’s a lot of small businesses. It’s also an important part of the state’s culture – an activity where grandparents, parents and children spend time together in places that often don’t have a good cell phone signal. Many schools close at the beginning of deer season.

The good news is that, currently, you and I probably cannot catch chronic wasting disease. Remember, it’s caused by a protein, not a virus that could mutate and jump from one species to the next. Also, the disease hasn’t spread to livestock in the wild. On the other hand, the prions can withstand 1,000-degree temperatures, so they can’t be cooked out.

Now state officials are trying to respond to a disease that can’t be cured or eradicated. On Friday, the Game and Fish Commission will vote on a set of regulations meant to limit the spread. Among the proposals would be to allow hunters to kill more deer and elk to thin the herd.

That proposal shouldn’t be too controversial. However, another would require landowners who erect high fences to leave openings so deer can move freely in and out. The idea is to reduce the chances that a deer will be stuck in captivity in an enclosed area, where it would be more likely to come in contact with an infected deer’s body fluids or carcass.

The idea is not well fleshed out, and I’m not sure I understand the logic. Wouldn’t it better for a dying deer to be trapped rather than roaming free? More importantly, several otherwise sympathetic legislators who were informed of the proposal in a committee meeting Monday raised objections regarding private property rights. People who want to build fences on their land ought to be able to do so, they said. We’ll see if that particular idea gets scrapped.

So let’s sum it up. There are many sick deer in part of the state. The disease is fatal, incurable, difficult to contain and likely to spread. But it supposedly won’t make us or livestock sick, and, for now, there are still 70 counties in our Arkansas home where the deer play.

Sorry for the discouraging word.

Fixing Arkansas’ life-and-death department

Health care, State government

Cindy Gillespie By Steve Brawner
© 2016 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

The quickest route to saving the state millions of dollars may be the $119,000 extra it’s spending on one of its new employees.

That’s how much more money new Department of Human Services Director Cindy Gillespie is earning than her predecessor. He was making $161,038. Gov. Asa Hutchinson, with the support of the Legislature, bumped her salary to $280,000.

This was done because DHS is an important agency, and Gillespie has an impressive resume. The department spends $8 billion of your money and employs 7,000 people. It serves 1.2 million Arkansans through a variety of programs, many of which provide expensive services literally dealing with life and death: Medicaid, which serves disabled people and senior citizens living in nursing homes; the private option, which provides health insurance to lower income Arkansans; and the state’s foster care system, which serves more than 4,900 children. Gillespie was one of Mitt Romney’s health care advisors when he was governor of Massachusetts and, before that, she helped Romney rescue the financially troubled Salt Lake City Winter Olympics held in 2002.

When Gillespie started leading DHS about three months ago, her first act was to determine how big a mess the department was. She found during a 60-day review that its 10 divisions operate independently. Because of that, in many areas the department has had no central vision, while the director hasn’t been able to manage things properly or even to easily find out what’s going on. Because 10 divisions are buying things, the department hasn’t coordinated purchases or taken advantage of its economies of scale to get better deals with vendors. Each division is in charge of its own technology, meaning the department has hundreds of systems, with most tech duties outsourced to vendors.

Gillespie told legislators this week that the department is canceling contracts worth $174 million over the next seven years. Some of those may serve legitimate needs, and DHS may return to those vendors. But a change has to occur because in many cases, the state has been renewing contracts year after year without really determining if they were still needed and if they were written to serve the state’s best interest.

The reason it hasn’t changed before? “The easy path is just to keep it going,” she said.

Moreover, Gillespie has taken over an agency where morale is not great. The department’s turnover rate is 22 percent, which means, at any given time, more than one in five positions is in the process of being filled or is being staffed by someone new. That’s especially bad because half of the department’s employees are directly involved in patient care. Because each division manages its own human resources, there’s no department-wide strategy for hiring people and advancing them along career pathways. Sometimes there are problems with the job duties, such as the foster care caseworker who spends 30 hours a month making copies instead of helping children. Pay is lower than it should be – though, let’s be honest, state employees have benefits such as retirement that few others enjoy these days.

So now Gillespie is trying to fix the problems. As of July 1, about four months after she started the job, DHS will be reorganized. Instead of the divisions each doing their own thing, seven shared offices will each handle a major responsibility for the entire department – one to hire, one to buy things, one to handle technology, etc. A new finance office has already committed to find $25 million in savings this first year. When it’s done, she expects DHS to hire fewer people but make them better at their jobs and pay them more.

When the state hired Gillespie, it invested a little money in someone who’s going to run government more efficiently, like a business. Some people are really good at doing really consequential things, and sometimes, you get what you pay for.

That reality doesn’t always make sense, like when the state’s highest paid employee is a college football coach who makes $4 million a year. But it is the world we live in, which is why someone who can reorganize the state’s life-and-death department in four months should make at least 7 percent of that amount.

Related: What exactly is the private option?

Casinos among best bets to make the ballot

Elections, Politics, State government

By Steve Brawner
© 2016 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Where Arkansans practice pure democracy – we make the laws rather than elected officials doing it – is in the ballot issues. This year, those led by citizens could be a lot more interesting than those referred by the Legislature.

Here are some of the issues being proposed by citizens: casinos, medical marijuana, gay/transgender rights, term limits, limiting damages in medical lawsuits, campaign finance reform.

Here’s what you’ll be voting on courtesy of lawmakers: letting the governor retain his or her powers when out of state; increasing the terms of county officials to four years; and expanding the ability of local governments to fund economic development projects. Those are important, but no one ever got into a fight over the governor’s out-of-state powers. Well, maybe they did on Facebook.

When citizens try to place a measure on the ballot, the important first hurdle they must overcome isn’t gaining popular support. It’s having enough money to collect signatures and fight potential lawsuits. A proposed constitutional amendment requires 84,859 signatures. An initiated act, which creates a law, requires 67,887. To reach those kinds of numbers, it really helps if you can pay people to walk the streets with clipboards. So if you want to know which of those issues actually will make the ballot, look at the ones where backers who already have money are trying to make more of it.

At first glance, that would include the casino initiative. A group of investors wants to build three casinos, one each in Washington County (Fayetteville-Springdale); Miller County (Texarkana); and Boone County (next door to Branson). Attorney General Leslie Rutledge has certified the amendment’s popular name and title, so now it’s in the signature-collecting phase.

This will be the latest of many efforts to bring casinos to Arkansas. Most if not all of the backers of this amendment have been involved in one or more of those previous efforts. So far, those have always failed, either by not gathering enough signatures or not withstanding a legal challenge of some sort. Asa Hutchinson, then a private attorney representing the secretary of state’s office, helped keep one such effort off the ballot in 2012.

The arguments have been the same since Mississippi rolled the dice with its first casino in Tunica in 1992. Opponents point to the human and societal costs that casinos cause – the lost money, the addiction, the broken marriages. They call it “gambling.” Supporters say casinos already exist across the state border, so Arkansas may as well have some fun and create the jobs and tax revenue. They call it “gaming.”

And on the third side are Oaklawn and Southland, which race horses and dogs on the side while operating their own casinos. Thanks to a 2005 law, these feature “electronic games of skill” with digital versions of playing cards and dice. They don’t want competition and will spend their own money to fight it – on lawyers to try to keep it off the ballot, and on a political campaign if they can’t. In a good example of “politics makes strange bedfellows,” they work in parallel with family values groups to defeat the casino initiatives. So far, they’re all undefeated.

As usual, this year’s casino proposal would bestow on its backers a permanent monopoly enshrined in the Arkansas Constitution, which is a pretty good deal if you can get it. They and only they, or their designees, could operate these three casinos forever, with no one allowed to compete with them unless they also pass a constitutional amendment.

What else? A proposal limiting medical lawsuit damages has a good chance of making the ballot for the same reason that the casino gambling measure does: People with money would be able to make more money. Under that standard, the term limits measure – it would tighten legislative terms to 10 years – faces an uphill climb, but it does have a passionate group of supporters who’ve been working for a while. Medical marijuana has some momentum as a concept but not the financial muscle, and supporters are divided into competing camps.

What ultimately will make the ballot? The three referred by the Legislature are the only sure bet, but you could roll the dice on the casinos and a couple of others.

Maybe we should just turn it into a museum

Politics, State government

By Steve Brawner
© 2016 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Some things in government are hard, such as providing health care to 250,000 poor Arkansans, maintaining the state’s highways without raising taxes, or taking care of 4,900 foster kids. What should not be hard is maintaining a house.

Yet here we are again, spending more than a million dollars on that old place where the state’s chief executive lives – the Governor’s “Mansion.”

The house is once again making headlines after a law passed in the recent special session turned the Mansion Commission from a governing body that makes decisions into merely a consultant, and gave the governor the ability to dismiss any commission member. He already appoints them.

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette began asking questions and was given a tour of the Mansion. It leaks, there are plumbing and wiring issues, and the reporter could smell the remains of rat urine in the governor’s private office. There’s been some disagreement between the first lady and the Mansion Commission about the condition of the house, about the decor, and about the number of public events in the adjoining Great Hall, by far the nicest structure on the grounds.

So now the state will spend $1.1 million next year for maintenance and remodeling as well as expenses that are less than necessary. The original grant application of $1.4 million included a sculpture on the grounds that first lady Susan Hutchinson wants to hang at a cost of $128,000, as well as a 72-inch television and a private washer and dryer for the first family. They currently use the same ones the staff use. Because the grant was for less than what was requested, the list will be pared.

Does all this sound familiar? You might recall that, in 2000, then-Gov. Mike Huckabee and wife Janet moved a triple-wide onto the grounds while $1.4 million in upgrades were done to the house. That triple-wide produced a lot of jokes as well as an invitation for the Huckabees to appear on “The Tonight Show” with Jay Leno.

There’s some he-said, she-said to this latest story, and I’m leaving out a lot of details that you can find elsewhere. Reasonable people can disagree, especially when they don’t have all the information.

What’s pretty clear is that, over less than two decades, the state is spending $2.5 million on a house that has been a problem since it was built – in 1950, which makes it not much older than many houses in Arkansas. It looks big from the outside, but the actual upstairs living quarters are not, and there’s not much privacy when events are occurring in the Great Hall. Other governors before the Hutchinsons have complained about problems with basic maintenance such as wiring and water leakage. My wife worked there in 1998 and recalls her downstairs computer flickering followed by a frustrated Janet Huckabee exclaiming from upstairs that she was just tying to blow-dry her hair.

So if this were a car, we’d call it a lemon.

Maybe we should challenge the assumption that the first family should live in a house funded by the taxpayers, maintained by the government, beset with politics, and shared with everyone. Until 1950, governors were responsible for their own dwellings. The state doesn’t provide free living quarters for other officials; some congressmen have slept in their offices in Washington, D.C. Some states don’t even have a governor’s mansion.

It’s tempting to write that perhaps the state should knock down the house and keep the Great Hall. The Governor’s Mansion isn’t the White House. It’s not that old, it’s not an office building, and it’s not the center of Arkansas politics. That would be the Capitol, which despite being twice as old, works just fine.

Two other solutions are probably better options: Gut the thing and fix it up right, or turn it into a museum like another public building that outlived its original purpose, the Old State House. Maybe the governor should work hard during the day and then come home to, well, a home.

It’s proving unnecessarily challenging to maintain a public building of which the occupants are temporary while respecting those occupants’ privacy and well-being. This is a problem that can be solved without a special legislative session. Arkansas is not wealthy, but also not destitute. The governor and his/her family should not live like royalty, but they should have a nice house – if necessary, their own.