The City Wire says don’t forget, as time rolls on in the slow-moving Whirlpool clean-up plan for its former Fort Smith plant site and surrounding residential neighborhood, to ask the state – yes, the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality – to hold public hearings.
When famed jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. noted that taxes are the price we pay for civilization, he likely had in mind taxes like Sebastian County’s 1% sales tax.
It seemed like a good time and place for Democratic candidate Bill Halter, the “sparkplug promoter” behind the Arkansas Lottery for Scholarships, to inform this local crowd of his gubernatorial campaign plank, the “Arkansas Promise.”
What began as a Session with historical implications ended as a lesson in real world governance and bi-partisanship with major agenda items being completed.
Folks sometimes wonder about the intelligence of us media folks. I was laid off by one of them big newspaper companies, so my IQ must have been below the bar. Or maybe it was that I was too often near a bar.
I was in one of the first classes of Leadership Fort Smith. Leadership Fort Smith is now in its 26th year. More than 650 folks have completed the program and the Fort Smith area has benefitted greatly.
Spring marks the start of a new tourism season for many travelers who come to Arkansas for our great outdoors. But recently, more and more visitors are drawn indoors to our state's arts venues, as well.
No one expects a quick outcome to a hazardous chemical spill, made decades ago by Whirlpool Inc., that has leached its way into the working class neighborhood of Fort Smith next to the now idle and empty manufacturing plant.
The optimist says the HMA deal bringing around 400 new and good-paying jobs to the Fort Smith area is a sign the region can recover from the more than 12,000 jobs lost in the past eight years.
