Halting the slide

“PB police seeking tips on shooting that injured two,” the headline read on Tuesday of last week. The accompanying story reported that Pine Bluff police were investigating an Easter night shooting that had “sent dozens scrambling for cover at one of the city’s most popular parks.”

Saracen Landing is on Lake Saracen in downtown Pine Bluff. John Worthen wrote in this newspaper’s story about the shooting: “At night it sometimes attracts loiterers en masse. … Parks officials said they have had problems in the past with large crowds causing traffic jams.”

News of the shooting, which was picked up by Little Rock television stations, provided another black eye for a city that too often struggles with its image. A few weeks earlier, I had been several blocks away in the dining room of Simmons First National Corp. to visit with the bank’s new CEO, George Makris Jr., and a young Lufkin, Texas, native named Katie Hicks. Makris, who replaced Tommy May at Simmons early this year, is among those behind an organization known as BETA, which stands for Bare Earth Training & Advancement. Hicks recently was hired to head BETA.

The organization’s goal is to identify, recruit and train people to run for public office and serve on boards in Pine Bluff. Makris, a Pine Bluff native, spent much of his career building his family’s Anheuser-Busch distributorship, M.K. Distributors Inc. His father started the company in 1964. The younger Makris attended public schools in Pine Bluff, where he excelled in football and baseball. He began college at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, which long has had a connection with a number of notable Arkansas families, before transferring to what’s now Rhodes College at Memphis. Makris went on to earn an MBA at the University of Arkansas and was considering entering law school when his father told him, “You’ve been in school long enough.”

Makris has watched the city’s population decline through the years. Several days before the Easter shooting at Saracen Landing, a report was released naming Pine Bluff as America’s fastest-shrinking city based on U.S. Census Bureau estimates. According to those estimates, the Pine Bluff metropolitan area’s population fell 4.4 percent from 2010-13. In other words, more than 1,000 people a year have left the area in each of the past three years. In its analysis, USA Today reported: “County officials remain unsure about what has caused the drop in population, although high crime rates are believed to be one possibility. Another contributing factor may be the lack of good area jobs. Pine Bluff ’s unemployment rate topped 10 percent at the end of last year, among the highest rates of any metro area. … The area’s economy has also been struggling, shrinking 1.7 percent last year, among the largest declines in the country.”

Makris remembers when the Pine Bluff Regional Chamber of Commerce had a political arm that recruited people to run for public office. He decided it was time to bring that concept back.

“The chamber wanted to see what other chambers of commerce in the region were doing,” he said. “When we went to Baton Rouge, La., the leadership there said their priorities were public policy issues, training potential candidates and having a political action committee to support those candidates. So we came back and began collecting resumes and recruiting candidates. The program eventually went away. The chamber is no longer the appropriate entity to lead such an effort, in my opinion, so we set up BETA.”

He described Hicks as “the ideal person to take this and run with it. She’s a breath of fresh air. My main job was to get her to move here. We sat down for about 30 minutes, and she began talking about the ideas she has. I finally stopped her and said, ‘Go do it.’”

Hicks, in turn, described Makris as “a visionary. I’m just trying to implement as much of his vision for Jefferson County as possible.” The first sessions for potential candidates were held earlier this year. Makris said the 17 people who participated “seemed to enjoy it. I believe most of them will become candidates or get involved in campaigns.”

Makris, who has served on numerous boards, said training members of government and nonprofit boards will be just as important as recruiting political candidates. He said it’s “perhaps more important for board members to know what not to do than what to do. We once had a dysfunctional school board here. It would have been nice to have had a pool of people who had gone through Katie’s training.”

There’s a bit of gallows humor among Pine Bluff residents who say, “What’s the most popular neighborhood in Pine Bluff? Lake Hamilton at Hot Springs.” Indeed, for-sale signs are common in the formerly ritzy neighborhoods near the Pine Bluff Country Club.

Makris, though, sees positive developments-new political leadership, a dynamic new chancellor at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, a half-cent economic development sales tax that’s generating about $3.5 million annually. He said, “We ought to be able to design a strategy for Jefferson County that puts us on a path to growth.” BETA is the first part of that emerging strategy.

———◊———

Freelance columnist Rex Nelson is the president of Arkansas’ Independent Colleges and Universities. He’s also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.

Editorial, Pages 19 on 04/30/2014

Upcoming Events