City Director Doris Wright sends a plea for the Little Rock City Board to reconsider its refusal to continue funding for a park program for mostly minority kids in her ward while continuing to funnel money to a golf course. Her pitch is on the jump.

Wright injected a strong note of racial tension toward the end of the board meeting last week in talking about how cuts in the budget were being made. She’s not one-dimensional, however. She also raised some useful questions about continued funding of a number of programs aimed at reaching at-risk minority youth. She wonders how many kids are being served by the many coordinators hired for these programs at comfortable salaries. At her park, you can see the kids at play.

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I’d also like to see Wright go after the City Board’s continued $200,000 subsidy of the Chamber of Commerce, as Robert Johnston suggested here last week. This type of subsidy has become fashionable all over Arkansas and it’s just as wrong here as it is everywhere else. There’s no accountability for money shipped off to these private organizations, which are sufficiently fixed without municipal assistance to do economic development work. It’s work in which taxpayers already invest heavily at the state level. What’s worse about these socialized development outlays are the political agendas of the chambers, frequently at variance with larger public interests. (The LR chamber’s ham-handed intervention in the Little Rock School District a few years back produced a political disaster.) They’ve never met a taxpayer giveaway they couldn’t support. There’s never been a clawback provision for busted promises that they’d advocate.

Give the money to Wright’s park. Fat chance, given establishment dominance now and always of the LR Board.

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UPDATE: But by all means, make Wright answer questions, too. She’s pushed this money through apart from the normal grant process for youth programs. And she tried to push it up to $75,000 this year while other summer programs and the whole youth program are taking hits. Does she need to hire more people? Does she need, indeed, to supervise the program herself?

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