Waltons for the Delta
After my aforementioned panel appearance before that Delta group during which I suggested state government, not federal, was the arena for Delta advocacy, an eager-looking fellow walked up and handed me a card and implored me to visit crossroadscoalition.org He was Otto J. Loewer, former UA engineering school dean who now heads the UA's Economic Development Institute, an outgrowth of the Walton Foundation gift to the university. Some people embrace ideas endowed by rich people just because they're rich people's ideas. Some folks resist, even recoil, on the same basis. I, of course, am of an open mind, receptive to those who share my views about state government's vital Delta role and that times are sufficiently desperate in a few East Arkansas areas to try unconventional things transcending political branding. This Crossroads Coalition would best be introduced by your going to crossroadscoalition.org and downloading that 22-page PDF called Legislative Agenda. Suffice to say, for these introductory purposes, that this is a coalition of interested groups in the poorest Delta counties, named for the intersections of Highways 1 and 64 and Interstates 40 and 55, advised by the Walton-funded UA institute, and interested in all kinds of tax credits for businesses, homeowners and medical providers locating in those counties. That includes tax-increment financing districts by which additional property tax revenue from a development is not paid in property taxes, to schools, mainly, but put back into the development, and which, if they belong anywhere in Arkansas, belong in the Delta. The coalition also has some of those alternative public education ideas that people fight about. But it embraces expanded pre-K. And it suggests that legislators representing these direst Delta counties turn over to the coalition at least 10 percent of whatever share of the General Improvement they take home. Worthy discussion. That's all I'm saying right now.