A new family’s merry Christmas

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

As of Dec. 22, there were 621 children across Arkansas whose parents’ rights have been terminated and who have no “forever family” with whom to share this Christmas. Unlike last year, Robert, 17, is not one of them.

Instead, Robert is celebrating the holiday for the first time with Todd and Gwynn Harris, now known to him as Dad and Mom. All three names have been changed for this column.

Robert’s biological parents’ rights were terminated in 2011, when he was 13. During the next three years, he lived in four group homes. He was loved and he made friends, but it was a rootless existence, and the holidays could be a depressing time. Because he had siblings and because he was older, it was unlikely anyone ever would adopt him. Kids like him usually age out of the system.

Meanwhile, Todd, now 32, and Gwynn, now 31, were coming to the conclusion that they were supposed to start a family. Married eight years, they both had good jobs and had built a good life together. They could go out to dinner whenever they wanted. They made memories that they commemorated with Christmas ornaments.

They were capable of having children but decided God had other plans. They became involved in two organizations, The CALL (thecallinarkansas.org) and Project Zero (www.theprojectzero.org), that work with churches to find homes for children in the system. The CALL, as it has done for more than 1,000 families since its founding in 2007, organized training sessions to prepare them to be adoptive parents. Thanks to Project Zero’s Arkansas Heart Gallery, which displays photos of children needing homes, they saw Robert’s picture and began wondering if he was the one they should adopt.

They stopped wondering after they helped organize a Christmas party at Robert’s group home. They tried to talk to him, but, unaware they were considering adopting him, he quickly wandered away. Boys being boys, he was chasing after an ex-girlfriend. But something clicked.

“I came home from that night and told Todd that I would be heartbroken if he didn’t come home to live with us, that he was our son,” Gwynn said.

Things happened quickly from there. Last New Year’s Day, Todd and Gwynn placed their request to be matched with Robert. On Feb. 7, Robert came home to visit. Actually, they picked him up at the group home, but a snowstorm made driving so hazardous that they ended up sleeping at their church.

“Welcome to the family. This is the good, the bad and the ugly,” Gwynn told him.

It’s been going well. He’s a pleasant kid. Within about a week he felt comfortable calling them Mom and Dad. The extended family members have made him feel welcome, he said.

Of course, there have been challenges. Todd and Gwynn learned that Robert is dyslexic – which he didn’t even know – and has significant reading problems. Robert had to adjust to a new home with new expectations. Todd and Gwynn went from being childless to being parents of a teenager. Robert’s sisters have been adopted, but he doesn’t know where his brothers are, and it concerns him.

For 16 years, Todd, Gwynn and Robert missed out on each other, but they’re not worried about that. Parenting is a long-term project no matter what age you start. This is a family now.

“What we’ve told Robert is that adulthood is when you have the skills that you need to be able to be a principled man that lives well and can do all the things that an adult needs to do,” Todd said. “It doesn’t necessarily associate directly with a number. And so we tell him all the time that he stays here … as long as he needs to figure things out and to kind of assemble the tools that he needs for life.”

It’s been a great first Christmas together. They’ve driven around looking at lights and talked a lot about the holiday’s true meaning. Four new Christmas tree ornaments mark Robert’s place in the family. Three stockings hang in their home instead of two.

And will the pitter-patter of more teenage feet be heard in the Harris household?

“If God tells us to do it, we’re always open to more,” Todd said. “But right now we’re just kind of plugging along and working with Robert on raising him. And (we) kind of expect, if it happens again, for it to be just a sudden and abrupt thing where we hear about it and we take off again.”

Congress: Better, sort of

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

You could say that what Congress accomplished this month was a vast improvement. You also could say it wasn’t nearly good enough.

On Tuesday, President Obama signed a 1,600-page, $1.1 trillion “cromnibus” bill passed by Congress. The “cr” is an abbreviation for “continuing resolution,” which is a short-term funding mechanism that will be used for the Department of Homeland Security. “Omnibus” is the mechanism funding the rest of the discretionary budget – in other words, not entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, which are on autopilot. Homeland Security is funded only until February so Republicans can try to undo Obama’s immigration order.

This is a step forward because Congress finished this task without a government shutdown, though the deadline for one came pretty close again. Next year will be a circus like always, but at least Congress won’t be playing Russian roulette with the economy for a while.

Unfortunately, important provisions were slipped into this spending bill that weren’t related to the budget. One, written by the big bank Citigroup, amends the Dodd-Frank law passed after the bank bailout and will let banks engage in riskier behavior backed by your tax dollars. If they make money, they’ll keep it. If they lose money, you’ll bail them out. Another provision increases the amounts that big donors can give to the Democratic and Republican National Committees tenfold, from $32,400 to $324,000.

Moreover, Congress relied on a few gimmicks to make the numbers work. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, in fact, has found $30 billion it says violate the spirit of the sequester and the 2013 Murray-Ryan agreement. Without going into too much history, the sequester is a series of automatic spending cuts affecting non-entitlement programs. Murray-Ryan set spending caps for two years and raised spending levels above the sequester.

Google it if you need more. It’s hard to write about this stuff.

Thirty billion dollars is less than 3 percent of $1.1 trillion, so again, it’s not too bad. Still, it’s not great. One provision shifted $7 billion from regular defense spending, which is capped under the sequester and Murray-Ryan, to war spending in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is not.

This is one of many reasons why we should be reluctant to fight all these wars.

In addition to the cromnibus, Congress also passed a one-year bill extending 55 tax breaks retroactive to the beginning of 2014. These were deductions for wind energy production, big business foreign profits, schoolteacher supplies, college tuition, etc.

Some of those may be worthy policies, but there are several problems with doing it this way. First, the tax extenders bill reduces revenues to the federal government by $41.6 billion over 10 years – money future taxpayers will have to cover because Congress didn’t also cut $41.6 billon in spending. Next year, the tax breaks probably will be extended again, further adding to the debt. Also, by extending the tax breaks year after year instead of just cutting taxes permanently, Congress can hide how much these actions actually increase the national debt over time.

“It really is no more complicated than me going home and saying to my kids, ‘I’m going to ask you to pay for this $42 billion because we didn’t want to,’” Maya MacGuineas, CRFB president, said in an interview.

Finally, the whole point of a deduction is to encourage behavior. All of these tax breaks expired at the end of 2013. Waiting until the end of the year and then re-enacting them retroactively created uncertainty and made it harder for businesses to make the investments Congress is trying to encourage. If the credits are a win for the economy, then Congress should have extended them through 2015 so beneficiaries could include them in their plans moving forward. Congress did not do that.

Being a member of Congress often means choosing between two options that are less than ideal. For the record, here’s how Arkansas’ members voted on the two bills. On cromnibus, the yeses were Sen. John Boozman, Sen. Mark Pryor, Rep. Tim Griffin, and Rep. Steve Womack. The no votes were Rep. Rick Crawford and Rep. Tom Cotton. On tax extenders, everybody voted yes except Cotton.

K through job education

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

The elected official in the state Capitol making the biggest impact next year will be Gov.-elect Asa Hutchinson. The second most impactful elected official may be a 74-year-old grandmother with an agenda.

That would be Sen. Jane English, R-North Little Rock.

English spent her career in economic development and will use her chairmanship of the Senate Education Committee to try to change how Arkansas educates and develops its workers. She says the education system is composed of too many disconnected silos – K-12 public schools over here, colleges and universities over there, career education in a third spot, etc. – that don’t always prepare students for the workforce.

“We typically think of education as K through 12, but for me, education is K through job,” she said after selecting the chairmanship.

She wants to reform a system that did not serve the state well enough during her career in economic development. There’s also this motivation: “I have a 17-year-old granddaughter, straight A student, takes AP (Advanced Placement) courses,” she said in an interview Dec. 12. “She’s going to play softball with the Lady Razorbacks. Well, she’s fine with this whole pattern. But then I have a grandson, that may not work for him. I had a grandson, and it didn’t work for him at all. He was not an AP person. He was never going to college, but he has a good career now.”

English is not the first or the only one making this point. Lt. Gov. Win Rockefeller would say the education system is like a string of water pipes laid end to end but not fastened together. Hutchinson talked a lot about workforce development in the gubernatorial campaign. In September, the State Chamber of Commerce hosted a summit highlighting the need for Arkansas’ education system to be more responsive to the job market.

Changes already are occurring, particularly at the local level, to make the system more connected and responsive. Many high schools offer students opportunities to earn significant college credit. Bearden High School students are bussed to Southern Arkansas University Tech each day for academic and career classes. At Maumelle High, students basically select a major and take classes that are tailored to their interests and that prepare them for a job. Colleges and universities are becoming more responsive to workforce needs. The University of Arkansas – Fort Smith, for example, created a robotics program after surveying local industries and discovering a surprising number needed training in that area.

Despite these individual successes, Arkansas needs a more comprehensive overall strategy, a reallocation of resources, and a different mindset. And that’s where English has become a pivotal figure. In February, she switched her vote on the private option – until then, one vote short of passage in the Senate – from no to yes in exchange for a commitment from Gov. Mike Beebe to focus on the issue. As a result, for much of the year she chaired weekly meetings each Monday with various state education and economic development officials. Shane Broadway, director of the Department of Higher Education, says one of his staff members jokingly referred to the meetings as “English class.”

English said the meetings have produced no concrete proposals, though she has some ideas. She said many of the needed changes don’t require legislation.

Whatever the Legislature passes will be the result of collaboration and compromise. English’s main role will be to continue doing what she has already done: serve as a catalyst. Broadway said state agency heads were already discussing the need for changes, but English’s switched vote was the spark. As she explained it, “Sometimes you have to have something wild that starts things in motion and gets people to start talking. Otherwise, you’re just churning around forever and ever.”

The private option, prisons, and other issues will get the most attention this session. But, quietly, significant workforce development changes could occur. The facts are clear, the need is obvious, and the agreement is broad. Too many students aren’t being prepared for actual jobs, while too many jobs are unfilled because workers with the right skills aren’t available.

Now the Senate Education Committee is headed by someone whose top priority is doing something about it. We’ll see if the other legislators speak English’s language.

Should legislators get a raise?

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Let’s start by emphasizing that I was the one who brought up the subject with Rep.-elect Ron McNair, R-Alpena. He did not approach me to complain in print.

The subject is pay for state legislators.

McNair owns an auto shop in Alpena in north Arkansas. He is his only employee. He’s been an unpaid school board member almost 30 years. He narrowly won the Republican primary in May and didn’t face a Democratic opponent, so he’s been driving back and forth to Little Rock at his own expense to get his feet wet before his term actually starts. He will close his shop’s doors at least three months next year while the Legislature is in session. He says he has loyal customers, and he’s worked out arrangements, but that can’t be good for business. He did not know what his legislative salary would be before the election, and he’s still not sure.

That’s because the pay varies member to member. The base pay for House members is $15,869, but legislators also can take advantage of up to $14,000 per year for office expenses they are required to itemize. Some pay themselves rent or pay family members a salary. They also are reimbursed for per diem expenses (lodging and meals) each day they are in Little Rock – $150 per day if they live 50 miles outside the Capitol and $61 if they are closer. They also are reimbursed 56 cents per mile driven. They can be vested in the state’s retirement system if they serve long enough, and they can purchase health insurance like other state employees.

Sounds like a good deal, right? Well, being a legislator is a pretty demanding part-time job involving regular sessions, fiscal sessions, special sessions, interim committee meetings, constituent phone calls and interrupted grocery trips. Many legislators actually do have legitimate office expenses, such as phones. Mileage reimbursements feel like an extra paycheck until you have to replace your worn out tires. Legislators also must stay somewhere when they are in Little Rock. Some pay about $400 a month for rent at the Capitol Hill apartments beside the Capitol.

Sen. Jon Woods, R-Springdale, isn’t sure how much money he makes, either, and he’s been in the Legislature since 2007. During a phone interview, he figured up that his actual take-home pay after expenses is roughly $1,900 a month, but that was kind of a back-of-the-envelope estimate. Being a legislator is his only job; he decided couldn’t serve an employer effectively while also driving back and forth to Little Rock.

Legislators likely are about to get a raise thanks to Amendment 3, passed by voters in November, which included a number of ethics-related provisions. In the past, legislators were responsible for voting for their own pay raises, so they didn’t do it very often. That duty now falls to a citizens commission appointed by legislators, the governor, and the chief justice of the Supreme Court. It will be easier for the commission to raise salaries than it was for the legislators to do so.

Woods, one of Amendment 3’s sponsors, says the current salary structure creates an unnecessary strain on legislators and encourages bad behavior. One behavior, having individual legislators’ meals bought by lobbyists, has been ended by another provision of Amendment 3. Now that legislators are buying their own meals – and they eat out a lot – they’ve effectively received a pay cut.

If legislators were getting rich, there’d be a lot more candidates for office. If they were going broke, they wouldn’t run for re-election. We have in Arkansas a citizen Legislature composed of people who have to pay the bills. It would be best if the salary commission raised base pay while reducing the perks that make it hard to tell who’s making how much. And yeah, legislators should make more money than they do now.

There is the argument that they should be paid nothing, that serving in the Legislature should be just that – a service.

That argument makes sense if all we want in the Legislature are the independently wealthy, the retired, and the dishonest. Which would mean no more laws would be passed by people who own small businesses and fix cars for a living.

Water, water everywhere, but not enough below

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

It makes up about 71 percent of the earth’s surface and about 60 percent of the adult human body. All our lives, it’s been available in abundance, particularly in Arkansas, and it still is, but we’ll have to change the way we obtain it. And it won’t be cheap to make that change.

I’m talking, of course, about water. Arkansas consumes about 11 billion gallons a day – enough, over a year’s time, to cover every inch of the state 4.2 inches deep.

Eighty percent of that amount is used for agricultural irrigation, according to a draft of the Arkansas Water Plan 2014 Update. Updates are completed every couple of decades by the Arkansas Natural Resources Commission.

The report ranks thermoelectric power second in water use, at 11 percent. Drinking water makes up only 3.5 percent. According to Ed Swaim, the commission’s water resources division manager, almost as much water is used for flooding fields for duck hunting (a yearly average of 259.2 million gallons a day) as is used in all manufacturing (291 million gallons a day, and dropping).

About 71 percent of Arkansas’ water comes from underground, and that’s a problem, because we’re using up groundwater far faster than the water cycle can replenish it. Currently, about 8.7 million acre-feet per year are being pumped, but the water can only be replenished at a rate of 1.9 million acre-feet a year, Swaim says.

That means water tables are falling, fast, and have been for a long time. Farmers are drilling their wells deeper and deeper to get the same water.

Unlike some states, Arkansas can solve this problem fairly easily. Conservation measures will help some. More importantly, the state is covered with rivers, lakes and streams. We have so much surface water that, according to the Water Plan, the state can meet its needs by simply diverting surface water for crop irrigation. The Water Plan says we have enough to do this without detracting from water-bound transportation or harming fish and wildlife – an assertion with which not everyone will agree. Arkansas can meet its needs without even touching the mighty Mississippi River, which would be a headache because that river borders other states.

The Water Plan estimates it would cost between $3.4 billion and $7.8 billion to do this, which would come from a variety of government funding sources and user fees. In other words, the farmers would pay for part of it, and then pass on the costs to consumers. Arkansas’ annual agricultural production is valued at $9.7 billion, according to the plan. Without water, it would be a lot less.

In his book “The Seven Lamps of Architecture,” the English critic John Ruskin wrote, “Therefore, when we build, let us think that we build for ever. Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone; let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for, and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say as they look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, ‘See! this our fathers did for us.’”

The quote is displayed on a placard on the second floor of the Arkansas State Capitol – a building still as sturdy as when it was completed a century ago.

Not to be too negative here, but we don’t talk much about building for forever these days. Today’s thinking is more about making the monthly payment on the 15-year and 30-year bank note. On a larger scale, problems aren’t solved so much as patched temporarily. Much of our political system, and indeed our economy, is based on buying time – until the next election or the next harvest or the next quarterly report.

In this case, Arkansas has a growing threat to its economy and way of life – current and especially future. For a while, farmers can keep just drilling deeper. But at some point, the wells will go dry.

So we’ve got a problem, and we’ve got a solution – an expensive one. But what choice is there? There’s plenty of water around us, and not enough beneath us.