BRUMMETT ONLINE: There’s a better way

State Rep. Michael John Gray of Augusta is one of best and brightest young Democratic state legislators. Actually, he’s one of the very few.

The 39-year-old farmer with a law degree, a first-termer and the recently elected minority leader, sent a text Sunday before last, saying he’d like to chat.

I knew what was coming.

I’d written that morning about the continuing absurdity and outrage of legislators helping themselves to individual shares of the state surplus in the General Improvement Fund to spread around back home basically at their personal discretion via a phony funneling process through the regional planning and development districts.

So we chatted, and indeed Gray made the case that I have heard for more than a decade.

He explained that he represents poor folks in a remote and sparsely populated area encompassing portions of Woodruff, White, Independence and Jackson Counties in eastern Arkansas. People there don’t have a lot of resources. They don’t have the numbers to compete straight-up in the Legislature with Pulaski County and Northwest Arkansas. Absent an equal legislators’ share of GIF, the library in Cotton Plant, for example, would never get a renovation or expansion or, for that matter, many books.

Gray wasn’t saying it was right to operate this guise of funneling legislators’ shares through these planning and development districts or that any of the money ever ought to be dispatched by a single legislators’ choice to a little church college anywhere.

But to do away with a legislator’s direct input into an equal share of that money would neglect rural regions even more than they are neglected already, he said.

There’s got to be a way, he said.

I understand that Gray is a young man new to state government who has been busy farming and so forth. I forgive him for not committing to memory my outline of such a way in this column years ago.

What formerly happened was that legislators would file bills for direct appropriations from this GIF, the surplus account, to their favored projects back home. But that process was a sitting duck for a lawsuit, which was filed and won, because it violated the state constitutional principle that state legislation must be of a state focus, not specifically of local focus.

In response to that, legislators continued to file bills for GIF money for their projects, but they appropriated the money not to the projects directly, but to the various regional planning and development districts for the actual release of the funds.

The recent practice has been for all 135 legislators to get equal shares.

So these planning and development district boards, consisting of locally elected officials largely, and existing supposedly for general economic development on a statewide coordinated basis, would be the formal funding agents. But everyone knew these district boards had no choice but to funnel the money as the local legislator directed.

So here’s my outline of a better way:

1. The Legislature would provide sums through GIF for unspecified local assistance and appropriate the money to various state executive agencies operating under the governor’s direct oversight and having some relevance to local fire protection or local community centers or local water and sewer projects or local libraries, and so forth in regard to local projects and services.
2. Those agencies would promulgate rules and regulations by which local governmental bodies could apply for funds, in grant form, and by which the agencies would score these applications for approval.
3. The disbursing state agencies would apply these rules and regulations to make the decisions on funding within the money appropriated. They would do so as duly responsible administrative bodies performing the governor’s rightful executive function under the state Constitution.
4. Legislators would be free to write letters or testify at hearings as advocates for their communities’ applications. Legislators are welcome advocates. They simply can’t be the policeman, prosecuting attorney, judge and jury. Their job is to make policy — the policy being that the state helps local governments.
5. Applications would require a local match. It could be, oh, let’s say 4-to-1, by which a small poor community could raise $20,000 for its library and seek to have the state turn it into $100,000.
6. Every cent would be pre-audited and post-audited.

So to summarize: The Legislature would set the policy and appropriate general sums as provided in the Constitution. Then the governor and his agencies would execute the process, as provided in the Constitution. Auditors would check the process, as required by the concepts of accountability and efficiency and transparency. Legislators would advocate for their communities, which is their political responsibility, without the inappropriate role now existing to direct the money by their singular unilateral action.

When a grant got awarded in the process by which I outline, I would be fine with the local legislator issuing the news release. He or she could even pose for the official picture passing the check.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.