Rodrick Morris, the man who was convicted of being in cahoots with Maurice Taggart in stealing $667,000 from the Pine Bluff Urban Renewal Agency when Taggart was its director, appealed his guilty verdict to the state Appeals Court. The court did not buy his argument, pretty much saying that if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, etc. But there was a passage in the court’s written decision that did draw attention to the city’s spurious claims about the missing money.
As you may recall, the state Legislative Audit folks dragged city officials onto the carpet to explain what happened to the money. Because the state didn’t take extreme measures, then-Mayor Shirley Washington left the meeting and went on to say that the city had done nothing wrong. That was decidedly not the case, a point that was made clear by state Rep. Vivian Flowers, who is now Mayor Flowers.
Then it was the Urban Renewal Agency’s board member Kirby Mouser, who, following the audit meeting, said “we did everything right,” which provided a huge laugh line around town, given that letting $667,000 in public money slip away could hardly be considered standard operating procedure.
That point was zeroed in on by the Appeals Court’s review of the trial, with one of the appellate judges writing that Jordan Saunders, a staff auditor with the Arkansas Legislative Audit, testified at trial that she oversaw an investigative audit of the Urban Renewal Agency in 2022 and that she made a spreadsheet listing all 38 checks issued to Morris’s company, the RM Group, by Urban Renewal.
“She said that all the invoices for the checks issued to RM Group were entered into the accounting system by Taggart and were secondarily approved by (Urban Renewal Treasurer) Lloyd Franklin (Sr.),” wrote the judge. “Franklin said that he … reviews the invoices over $1,000 that are submitted for approval,” and that “He said that he approved all of Taggart’s checks by simply looking at the invoice, recipient, and amount. He said that he trusted Taggart, whom he knew to be an attorney, and did not verify that the invoices were supported by the required documentation.”
If anyone needed a smoking gun of evidence that the city, indeed, erred in its handling of the $667,000, it was in those few lines written by the Appeals Court judge. Had Franklin done his job more thoroughly, more conscientiously and more consistently, this grand loss of tax dollars could likely have been avoided as Taggart would have known that he couldn’t possibly have gotten anything of this nature past Franklin. And yet, Franklin continued to be treasurer for the agency after the loss came to light and was even reinstalled as treasurer, as if to reaffirm to the public the false narrative that “we did everything right.”
Say stuff enough times and people believe you, even if it’s blatantly false. Just one of the many examples of gaslighting the public that occurred under the Washington administration.