The 54-foot steel-framed Christmas tree they’ve erected on a downtown plaza in boomtown Conway is like Obamacare.
It’s big, audacious and ambitious. It’s bigger than anything of its kind anybody has seen. It stands conspicuously in the professed interest of making life better for all.
Health care and a giant white bulbed Christmas tree rising as a community beacon-who could oppose either?
A lot of people, it turns out.
The section of the tree that failed to illuminate when the switch was flipped last Saturday night after the crowd counted down “three, two, one” in Times Square style-and the three sections that were intermittently dark days after . . . that’s like the Obamacare website.
And the report from the Conway blogger that his cursory Internet search turned up three 54-foot artificial Christmas trees costing only $62,000 to $75,000-much less than the $133,000 the city paid without competitive bidding for this one with lights out … that’s Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, Fox News and all those others who say either that government has no business doing this kind of thing or can’t do anything right or efficiently, or both.
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The Conway area has an active Tea Party, also known as the Order of Scrooge, and a broader conservatism that can infest the state Legislature with Jason Rapert.
Predictably, many of those people are aghast that Mayor Tab Townsell and the city council contracted for this tree by unanimous vote in late August without competitive bidding-while, in fact, expressly waiving a bid requirement for an expenditure of that size.
They are equally aghast that the mayor and unified city council justified the action by citing time constraints, with the urgency based on the limited period between a late August contract and a late November lighting ceremony. A 54-foot steel framed Christmas tree apparently doesn’t go up overnight.
And they are aghast yet more that the city paid a price exceeding cheaper alternatives that a local blogger turned up in a couple of mouse clicks from Google.
The mayor tells me there was no bidding because he wanted to favor a local company, to the extent that Get Lit LLC from Springdale is local to Conway, and go with a firm that had previously performed well for the city installing garland lights downtown.
So you can guess what the local Tea Party and other complainers say about all of that: If Conway taxed enough to raise $133,000 to spend this way, then it taxed too much. If merchants are the ones to benefit, then maybe merchants should be the ones to buy the tree. Most people are going to shop in the major shopping centers, not in specialized downtown boutiques, no matter how bright and tall a steel-framed Christmas tree. Anyway, what’s wrong with a real tree, like at the courthouse? And if merchants bought the tree, they’d surely bargain-hunt in a deliberate way, unlike the haphazard way of city government, and pay less than city government paid. And the merchants would surely produce a tree on which all the lights would come on when plugged in the first time.
I can see both sides, as usual, and wish to share the pro-tree view.
One: This money comes from a hamburger tax, or restaurant tax, that was not forced on anybody. If you don’t want to pay it, then dine at home or drive to Maumelle or Little Rock to eat. Visitors pay a lot of it.
Two: A giant Christmas tree downtown presumably promotes the city, a requirement of the hamburger-tax program. An expenditure of $133,000 that gets your downtown area mentioned on the TV news and written up in the statewide newspaper-even this way-is arguably a successful investment.
Three: Stuff happens. I’ve never strung lights on a Christmas tree without confronting unlit sections the first go-round. And stuff especially happens when a project is rushed. Presumably, a late-August contract for a late-November completion of the state’s largest fake Christmas tree indeed qualifies as a rush job. They were throwing on branches right up till flip-switching time. With the greenery unfluffed, there is a bit of a conehead look to the tree.
Four: It is not necessarily cronyism or an impropriety for the mayor to prefer an in-state firm with which he has worked successfully, and to waive an ordinance in order to secure that company’s services.
Five: This isn’t any onetime deal. This tree will be disassembled in sections and re-erected each Christmas, presumably to shine throughout next time and thereafter-although, as it happens, the artificial tree that I will retrieve from the attic in a day or two-for an annual exercise in profane tidings of the season-tends to have an unlit gap every year.
Perhaps Conway could leave the tree up year-round. It could call the structure the Obamacare tree.
It could make the surrounding plaza a kind of speakers’ corner, like in Hyde Park in London. And it could invite people to come from all over to behold the mighty symbol and debate the role and efficiency of government.
For a mere $133,000, Conway would be ablaze in Americana, a mecca for the three raging schools of thought in this country-those for, those against and those who just like to stir stuff up.
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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial, Pages 77 on 12/01/2013