Panel’s economic focus ruffles caucus

Members of the Arkansas Legislative Black Caucus told the state’s economic development director last week that his agency needs to step up its game in south Arkansas.

Mike Preston, executive director of the Arkansas Economic Development Commission, defended the state’s efforts to create more jobs in the region over the past three years, citing projects already announced and the agency’s continuing work to bolster economic development in that area of the state.

Preston also directed the lawmakers to an online interactive map that his agency created to visually communicate the effect of approximately 16,000 jobs that companies have promised to create in Arkansas in the past three years. The map is available at https://tinyurl.com/y7u65qvu.

He touted the 322 companies that have agreed to invest nearly $7 billion in Arkansas through incentive agreements and pay an average hourly wage of $20.84.

But Rep. John Walker, D-Little Rock, told Preston that his citations and talk of more marketing of south Arkansas’ timber assets were “cosmetic.”

He told Preston that he believed job growth had lagged south of a line created by Interstate 30 from Little Rock to Texarkana and east of Interstate 40 from Little Rock to West Memphis.

“I don’t know what the explanation can be when 90-plus percent of the jobs” are in an area that has no more natural resources than south Arkansas, Walker said.

“Either the people over here are not worthy or not well-educated or not trained and in order, you’re saying, for them to get jobs … that are still pretty largely low-income jobs, you want them to move from south Arkansas to north Arkansas, where the natural resources are no greater except for the investment that we make into higher education on the other side of the line,” he said. “It’s the investment that comes from either philanthropy or private industry into that portion of the state.

“Our people have not prospered or progressed at all. It all has gotten worse since [Sen.] Joyce Elliott began her effort to try to enhance opportunity in south Arkansas in 2003,” Walker said, referring to a fellow Little Rock Democrat.

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