It's generational. It's a matter of power and turf. There may be mild personal grudges and pettiness in the mix.
But it's not so much racial. And it is not fatal. It can be worked out.
Mayor Frank Scott and the Little Rock City Board of Directors have not gotten along.
He's 38, filled with energy and vision, fresh from demonstrating a new Little Rock coalition that elected him mayor over two strong and able establishment candidates. He seized office as a self-professed new kind of mayor. He would be a bold, full-time one, acting as a true chief executive officer leading a board that would be about policy rather than the shared administrative duties he believed it had shared in the past.
He confronted a city board made up of people who, in some cases, were twice or nearly twice his age and veterans of a decade or two, or more, of city leadership--of their way of doing things.
Two of the newer and more progressive board members, Kathy Webb and Capi Peck, might seem broadly allied with Scott philosophically, but they openly worked for one of his opponents, Baker Kurrus. And they resisted Scott's hurried moves to change the form of governance, then his wresting from the city manager the hiring of a new police chief, then his refusal when board members wanted him to fire that police chief.
When your constituents demand that the city get rid of the police chief, and when the mayor says I'm in charge now and I hired him and I'm going to keep him ... that can be damaging to work relationships going forward.
So, then Scott came forward with a sales-tax proposal he wanted to refer to the people.
Board members complained the proposal came out of the mayor's office without any input from them. He said he'd been holding public hearings and engaging the community all over town. They thought he and his small brain trust had put it together themselves and were trying to ram it through.
The directors felt that Scott didn't know how to do governing politics. He and his advisers, conversely, thought they'd demonstrated they knew how to do campaign politics and that, if they had to, they could circulate petitions to get the sales tax referred by the people and passed.
So, the other night, when the board was supposed to say yes or no to referral, Director Webb managed during a procedural melee to make and pass a motion to put the whole thing off until July pending further information and discussion.
Scott said he'd compromised and made a couple of downsizing concessions already.
The issue is largely that Scott says Little Rock can become the next great Southern city, and that this tax program "is about investing in our city's potential," while city board members think the plan is too closely held and probably too vast.
It seems that directors are saying maybe Little Rock needs first to get better before then trying to become great.
Getting better--speaking generally--means, to them, mostly more and better-equipped police, more upgrading on infrastructure and perhaps due attention to remaking the War Memorial and Hindman golf courses. But perhaps fancy new exhibits at the zoo and a curious city tax for the usual federal and state responsibility of early childhood education could wait, or at least receive smaller slices.
Scott says he agrees about aiming for better rather than greatness, but that trying to stop the crime-arrest-crime-arrest cycle with early childhood education is precisely about being better, as is trying to keep our stagnant zoo from becoming one that people drive by on the way to Memphis' or Tulsa's.
Webb said in her motion that it was best to wait and see what the city would do with its new covid relief millions before asking the voters to ante up locally. Scott says that's one-time federal money with restrictions and designed to provide relief from previous hardship, not as an investment in the future.
Nonetheless, Scott says he is not inclined to try to end-run the board, but to hammer out something agreeable by July that he and most of the board members could join hands in endorsing.
"This is the way a system works with a chief executive officer and a policy board--I propose and they say wait until July--and the fact is that they [the board members] are going to get something out of it," Scott told me.
Why, I think there's a concession on the table already.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.