Hot Springs, the 10th-largest city in
Arkansas, bills itself as a friendly resort community. Yet meetings of
the Hot Springs Board of Directors are among the most closely guarded
in Arkansas. Everyone attending a city board meeting is required to
pass through a metal detector and submit carried items to a search by a
guard.

That’s a level of caution that is not
practiced for board meetings in even the state’s biggest cities: Little
Rock, Fort Smith, Fayetteville, Springdale and Jonesboro.

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The heightened security in Hot Springs,
instituted this year, illustrates the state of mistrust that has
settled over politics in the spa city. While standing in line before a
city board meeting earlier this month, I heard a man waiting to go
through the metal detector mutter, “It’s a sorry thing when elected
officials are this worried about their constituents.”

In the past few years, members of two
organizations — the Garland Good Government Group and a consortium of
churches called The Watchmen of Garland County — have increasingly
voiced complaints at the board meetings about the way business is being
conducted in Hot Springs. Not all members of the city board appreciate
them.

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“It’s good to have watchdog groups,”
Director Carroll Weatherford said last week during an interview in the
city attorney’s office, “but not to have mad dog groups.”

The GGGG claims about 130 members,
residing in both the county and the city. Bob Driggers, a county
resident and a leader of the GGGG, says that several people have told
him they support the group but fear retaliation, such as harassing
inspections of their businesses, if they join.

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Pastor Doug Jones, a leader of the
Watchmen, says the group represents a coalition of churches concerned
about the “moral, ethical and social” health of the county. His
“conservative” estimate was that the Watchmen represent 10 churches in
the city and seven in the county, with a combined membership of 4,600.

 

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‘If it smells like crap…’

I spoke with members of both groups and
found them, if not “mad,” as Weatherford suggested, certainly irate and
disgusted. As GGGG member Diane Silverman put it, echoing the day’s
international news, “Our ship of state has been hijacked and there’s
nobody to save us from the pirates.”

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The pirates, in these critics’ view,
are developers, investors and real estate dealers who, with crucial
help from the city board, are running roughshod over Hot Springs. Most
directors are seen as putting the developers’ interests ahead of the
needs of the city and its taxpayers — including non-residents of the
city who are taxed for eating, lodging and shopping in Hot Springs.

But not all members of the city board
are blamed equally. Director Peggy Brunner-Maruthur is generally
applauded for her stands in opposition to the majority. And Director
Cynthia Keheley also gets mostly favorable reviews.

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Maruthur and Keheley were the only two
members who voted against what has become the board’s most
controversial action to date: the decision it made in March to fire, in
one meeting, the heads and all members of three important city
commissions — the Planning Commission, the Historic District
Commission, and the Board of Zoning Adjustment — and to begin taking
applications to reconstitute the commissions with new appointees.

Mayor Mike Bush, along with directors
Elaine Jones, Rick Ramick, Tom Daniel, and Carroll Weatherford, who
tend to vote together on most issues, voted for the sweeping action,
which set off a howl of objections from already disgruntled critics.

At a subsequent city board meeting,
Driggers, speaking on behalf of the GGGG, challenged the city board to
tell the public what the fired commissioners had done to warrant being
removed. When no board member responded, he answered sharply, “They
disagreed with the city directors.”

Another speaker, Bill Hunter, warned
the city board that firing the commissioners and replacing them with
appointees more to the board’s liking was “dangerous for you and not
good for the city.” He predicted: “You’re setting yourselves up for a
lot of serious criticism.”

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The fiercest criticism being leveled at
the board is focused on Director Weatherford, a trim, graying builder
in his early 60s, who has been described as the town’s unofficial
mayor. One fired commissioner commented: “You have to keep Weatherford
happy.”

 He has been on the board for six
years. When I requested an interview, he suggested we meet at the city
attorney’s office as casually as if it were his own. In that meeting,
which was not attended by the city attorney, he said he draws a
disproportionate share of critics’ wrath because, “I’m vocal. I speak
my piece at the meetings.”

At one point, as if to illustrate the
clarity of his opinions, he said that the GGGG and the church-based
group of Watchmen are one and the same. “It’s black and white to me,”
he said. “They attend each others’ meetings. Don’t tell me they’re not
the same group. If it smells like crap, it is crap. You know what I
mean?”

 

‘Why would anyone do this?’

Mistrust between the city’s board and
residents of the city and county was not so evident even a few years
ago, if it existed at all. Bob Driggers certainly was not aware of it
in 2002, when he retired from his career as an electrical engineer in
Texas and moved back to Garland County, where he’d grown up.

He says he found the quiet life he
expected, and, like many a retired man, enjoyed meeting friends for
coffee in some of the local restaurants. However, it was there, over
coffee, he says, that he began to hear tales about the city board that
sounded to him, not just like cronyism, but cronyism run amok. He heard
the owner of one cafe, a woman in her 70s, recall the days in the
mid-20th century when Mayor Leo P. McLaughlin and Judge Verne
Ledgerwood ruled Hot Springs as classic bosses.

“Bob,” the woman told Driggers, “when you were growing up, there were two people that ran this town. Now there’s five or six.”

Driggers, who had headed a
good-government group in Texas, says he had no intention of organizing
one in his retirement. It was while driving on downtown’s Central
Avenue, in the section that has become known as “the bottleneck,” where
the street squeezes for a few blocks from four lanes to two, that
Driggers became convinced that city officials must have had something
more compelling than safety in mind when they approved the constriction.

“If you take one of the most congested
areas of the city, and take it from four lanes down to two, you kind of
rack your brain and try to figure out why would anyone do this,” he
said. “I started making noise about it, and people started calling me
and supporting me.”

Driggers presented the city board with
a petition signed by 400 people who favored changing the street back to
four lanes. But, although Maruthur sided with him, noting that, in
emergencies, the constriction posed problems for responding police,
fire trucks and ambulances, the board’s majority, including
Weatherford, voted instead to make the bottleneck permanent.

Weatherford stands by his vote. “There
are 33 business owners in that area,” he told me. “They wanted to leave
Central as a single lane [in each direction] to slow traffic down. So
we approved it. And, by the way, so did the state highway department.”

After that, Driggers said, people began
calling him with other complaints about the way Hot Springs was being
run. And the calls did not stop. Finally, about three years ago, he
called everyone back who’d contacted him, invited them to a meeting,
and formed the GGGG, “to promote transparent, ethical and
representative government” in Garland County.

Later, ministers at several of the
area’s conservative churches formed the Watchmen of Garland County.
While they say their mission is generally to look after the area’s
moral, rather than civic, climate, they too have joined in objections
to what they regard as the “unethical” conduct of certain board
members, Weatherford, in particular.

 

‘Because we didn’t have to…’

In May 2007, the city board voted,
without citizen input, to issue bonds worth $14 million to build a new
city hall. Now organized, the GGGG collected 3,300 certified signatures
in two weeks to put the matter to a vote. The following October, when
the referendum was held, Hot Springs voted against the bonds.

Weatherford shrugs off the incident. He
says the board did not put the question to taxpayers in the first
place, “Because we didn’t have to.” It was legal, he said, for the
board to issue bonds “without going to the taxpayers.”

The GGGG’s next successful battle was
against construction of a new jail that the city board had wanted to
fund with a half-cent sales tax. “But that was a very hollow victory,”
Driggers says, “because we need a new jail so bad.”

The GGGG opposed the jail initiative
because the sales tax the city board wanted was never to expire. “It
was to continue in perpetuity,” Driggers says, “and we didn’t think
that was right.”

As Driggers and other members of the
GGGG became more familiar with the board, they began to regard
Weatherford as both more powerful and less distinguished a civic leader
than he appeared. They learned, for example, though he is a builder, he
has been fined on three occasions for contracting without a license.

Weatherford acknowledges as much,
though he offers the excuse that, when he began building more houses
than he had been, he did not receive the notice from the state
contractors board advising him that one was needed.

He acknowledges that he has gone
through bankruptcy twice. Both times, he says, were brought on by
divorce. He has been on the losing end of a number of lawsuits brought
by dissatisfied customers and by material suppliers who claimed they
were not paid.

And, according to city records that he
brought to the interview, he was cited four times by police for
careless driving, expired tags or not having proof of insurance. Each
instance is shown as having been nolle prossed, or not pursued, by the city attorney, Brian Albright.

But Weatherford defends that record
too, claiming that there was a reasonable explanation for why the city
attorney let him off. For instance, he says, he produced proof he had
insurance shortly after being cited. But Driggers and others look at
that record and doubt they’d get the same breaks.

The most serious — and least
substantiated — charge that has circulated about Weatherford concerns a
kidnapping that occurred in June 2004. Hot Springs police, responding
to a report that a man had been abducted, stopped a car in which they
found three men, and a fourth man who was bloody and bound — hands,
knees and feet — with duct tape. Police also found in the car a hatchet
that they said “appeared to have been freshly sharpened.”

Hot Springs Chief of Police Gary
Ashcraft told reporters that the duct-taped man was believed to have
stolen property from some people, and that the men found in the car
with him, “apparently decided they were going to kidnap [him] and make
him tell where the items were.”

Weatherford calmly dismisses rumors
that the kidnappers acted on his orders. “I get mentioned in connection
with that,” he said, “because the guy that did it worked for me. And he
worked for me after he got out of prison.”

 

‘You’ve made these

guys untouchable…’

For a while, members of the GGGG and
the Watchmen thought that Weatherford could be forced off the city
board, after a records search at the courthouse turned up a case in
which Brian Albright, the city attorney, had performed private legal
work for Weatherford. Unlike in many smaller towns, the position of
city attorney in Hot Springs is full-time, and the person who fills it
is not supposed to have a private practice.

It appeared to Dr. Blake Robertson, a
vice president at Ouachita Technical College and a member of the GGGG,
that Weatherford had used his position to secure a special privilege
from a city employee — something not allowed under Arkansas law.
Robertson filed a complaint against Weatherford with the Arkansas
Ethics Commission.

When the ethics commission
investigated, Weatherford acknowledged that he had sought Albright’s
assistance and had not paid him for the work. Consequently, in April
2008, the commission found Weatherford guilty of violating the
special-favors law, issued him a public letter of caution, and fined
him $150.

With that victory in hand, Robertson
and others believed that Weatherford could be removed from office, due
to another Arkansas statute which stipulated that punishment for any
city officials or employees who have illegally received “water, gas,
electric current or other article or service … without paying for it
at the same rate and in the same manner that the general public …
pay.”

 They filed a complaint with Garland
County Prosecuting Attorney Steve Oliver, asking him to enforce that
law. After months of inaction, Oliver notified the group in March that
he would not file criminal charges against Weatherford.

He offered two reasons. First, Oliver
said, the statute of limitations on the offense had expired, and,
second, that the statute the petitioners quoted concerned utilities.
Oliver wrote in his opinion that it “was never intended to prohibit …
municipal officials … from using their position to obtain free legal
services.”

Ken Carney, one of the Watchmen
pastors, said he was appalled. “I told Steve Oliver, ‘What you’ve done
here is, you’ve made these guys untouchable.’ The statute said
‘services,’ and that’s what Weatherford took — free, private services
from the city attorney that aren’t available to the rest of us.”

To Robertson, Oliver’s decision came as
a disappointment, but no surprise. “I think what you’ve got here is a
scenario of a few good ol’ boys running the system,” Robertson said,
“and up until now, there’s been no one to go up against them.”

Bob Messerschmidt, a former city
director who sat listening to the conversation, shook his head. “It’s a
heck of a mess,” he said quietly.

Oliver’s announcement that he would not
prosecute Weatherford came just a few weeks after the board of
directors voted to abolish the three city commissions. With it, what
had been an undercurrent of civic dissent began to erupt in public — in
Internet discussions, letters to the local paper and complaints
expressed in person at meetings of the city board.

 

‘Ethics 101…’

When the board set a deadline for
applications for new members to fill the revised commissions, then
extended the deadline, although several qualified applicants had
applied, citizens whose suspicions were already aroused saw in the move
an attempt to allow board members more time to recruit applicants who
would do their bidding.

At a subsequent board meeting, several
people rose to demand that all applicants be required to disclose their
business and financial interests, so that citizens could know if and
where they might intersect with interests of board members.

By late March, allegations of conflicts
of interest had reached such a pitch that Albright, the city attorney,
decided to present what he called an “Ethics 101” class for the board
of directors. The presentation included information about what
constitutes a conflict of interest, the conditions under which a
director should recuse from a vote, and a code of ethics form once used
by the city of Little Rock.

Afterwards, all the directors except
Weatherford described the session as helpful. Weatherford said that, as
a result of his experience with the Arkansas Ethics Commission, he was
already well versed in what constituted a conflict of interest.

“I can’t stop from voting on an issue
just because I know somebody,” he told me. “That would be ridiculous. I
know a lot of people. But if it involves monetary gain for me, yes,
ma’am. I would recuse.”

To the contrary, Weatherford’s
opponents claim, he has not recused on votes that concerned properties
being developed by Rodney D. Myers, whom Weatherford describes as a
friend and employer.

Myers pleaded guilty in 2005 to charges
of concealing assets, laundering money, and perjury, and was sentenced
to 15 months in a federal penitentiary. Loyd “Rick” Ramick, a Hot
Springs real estate agent, drove him to prison.

Upon his release, Myers returned to Hot
Springs and to the real estate development business. He put together
several LLCs — limited liability companies — and began work on a number
of relatively high-profile projects. Weatherford worked on most of
those projects as his job superintendent. He stiffens when asked about
his opponents’ charge that he is “in business with an ex-con.”

“If Mr. Myers has been to prison,”
Weatherford asks, “does he not deserve a second chance?” Then he adds
congenially, “I’m not going to condemn anybody just because he’s been
to prison.”

 

‘Strictly a go-between’

But the fact that Myers went to prison
is not what most disturbs members of the GGGG and Watchmen. They focus
more on the lawsuits that have been filed against Myers since he’s been
out, and on actions by the city board that bring it, as one member
observed, “too close to Myers for comfort.”

They cite the board’s decision, last
year, when a longtime director suddenly died, to appoint in his place
Rick Ramick, the real estate agent who’d escorted Myers to prison.

And they note with particular concern,
that after that, when Myers was facing difficulties with some financial
partners on a subdivision called Away, Ramick moved and the board voted
to table a resolution to extend water and wastewater lines to the
project.

Ramick never explained why he moved to
delay approval of the services, but some in the real estate business
believe it was to provide Myers with leverage in dealing with his
partners. As one critic put it, Ramick and Weatherford were “holding
those services hostage,” until Myers got what he wanted. They note that
Weatherford participated in the vote without mentioning that he was
Myers’s superintendent on the project.

At a subsequent meeting, the issue was
put forth again, and the board approved services for the site. All
Ramick ever said about the turn-around was that certain unnamed “issues
had been resolved.”

Critics also complain that Weatherford
attempts to “run interference” for Myers in problems with city
agencies. They point to a situation early this year, when the Hot
Springs Public Works Department notified Myers that a stalled project
of his, known locally as Shady Grove, was in violation of storm water
controls.

Weatherford said Myers simply asked him
to meet with the city inspector, and later, the department manager, to
discuss what needed to be done. “I was never hired on that project,” he
says. “I was strictly there as a go-between between the city and Mr.
Myers.”

When asked if he saw any conflict in a
city director representing a developer who’d been cited by a city
agency, Weatherford answered: “No, ma’am. Why would I?”

He continued, “In the first place, I’m
going to tell you that none of our city employees would do anything
special because of me — and I wouldn’t want them to. And in the second
place, everything has been way above-board that Mr. Myers has ever
done.”

Not everyone agrees with that last
assertion, particularly some residents of Garland County who are
currently suing Myers. Two of those parties allege that Myers
personally guaranteed the charge accounts for building materials on his
projects, and that has reportedly prompted officials with the U.S.
Probation Office in Fort Smith to investigate whether Myers has
violated a condition of his probation that barred him from establishing
“any bank or credit accounts” without prior approval from his probation
officer.

In a brief telephone interview, Myers
said, “I have no concerns.” Asked about the probation issue, he said
that his lawyer, Q. Byrum Hurst Jr., was “looking into it.”

Myers also dismissed concerns about his
relationship with directors Ramick and Weatherford. “It’s Hot Springs
politics,” he said breezily. “I think they are taking into account a
mistake I made over 10 years ago, and they won’t let it go.”

 

‘You’ve got regulations…’

All of this, however, darkens the
shadow cast over the board’s unusual decision to “reorganize” the
planning and historic preservation commissions and the Board of Zoning
Adjustment — entities that play an important role in many development
issues.

Weatherford says the board voted to
abolish the commissions because it had received so many complaints
about the way they were operating, “and it was the consensus that we
were going to disband them and start over.”

Furthermore, he said, “Several of us
had always wanted the planning commission to be represented by
district, and that’s what we’re going to have now.”

David Campbell, former vice chairman of
the Planning and Zoning Commission, said the board did not like being
reminded that it could not act with impunity. “We had shown them,” he
said, “that, ‘Hey, you’ve got a set of regulations in the city that
you’re supposed to go by, and you need to go by your programs.’ ”

Campbell cited, as an example, a
rezoning request for an area known as Hi-Lo Terrace that he said was
“deep in a residential area, where they wanted to rezone to commercial.
Planning recommended to the board not to rezone, but then, if I’m not
mistaken, our recommendation was overturned by the board.

“That was a project, I believe, that
Rodney Myers was involved with. And that appears to me to be a conflict
of interest, when you get people who are that involved with each other
voting on their projects.”

Again, Weatherford sees no problem. He
said, “My impulses favor commercial development, if it doesn’t get in
the way of residential areas — and that didn’t.” He insists, “I’ve
never used my position on the board to help developers.”

With regard to his employment by Myers,
he said, “A man’s got to be able to make a living. I’d work for the
devil himself, as long as he paid me on Friday and the check was good.”

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