What she said!
Mayor Vivian Flowers has been known to use 100 words when five or 10 would suffice. But she sharpened her pencil and tongue recently in her remarks about wanting to do away with the funding for the Pine Bluff Urban Renewal Agency. We couldn’t agree more with that desire.
Her laundry list of reasons was a biggest hits — or in the case of Urban Renewal, biggest flops — recital of what’s not to like about the agency. The overall failing grade it gets has its foundation in the fact that, as she put it, despite receiving $17.6 million in funding from the Go Forward Pine Bluff-pushed sales tax, Urban Renewal has not made significant progress in rehabilitating condemned properties or addressing blighted areas.
What Urban Renewal did do, as you may recall, is buy blighted downtown properties for way too much, thereby putting money in the pockets of property owners — they laughed all the way to the bank — and saddling the city with the ownership of said dead properties until kingdom come.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
As for getting rid of condemned properties, Flowers noted the city still has 500 with another 300 about to be added to the list. That work, even when Urban Renewal was doing it, could have been done cheaper by the city if the city had been given the same tax dollars Urban Renewal got.
And that go-kart track — if that isn’t emblematic of Urban Renewal, we don’t know what is. As Flowers said, the project needs another $1.4 million to complete, bringing the cost overrun to $1.7 million. Urban Renewal’s real boss, Go Forward Pine Bluff’s Ryan Watley, said many seasons ago the project was nearing completion, and yet, there it sits, far from complete, with workers threatening to walk off the job. Perhaps they got smart and left.
An article by Pine Bluff Commercial reporter Eplunus Colvin characterized the situation well: Flowers noted “that neither the City Council, mayor, finance director nor the public had received official documentation detailing private partnership funds or agreements related to the go-kart track project.”
Flowers even brought up that a City Council resolution falsely gave credit to Urban Renewal for getting a $500,000 EPA grant. No doubt, that false impression came from Urban Renewal, reminding us that Go Forward was also bad about taking credit for projects that were not of its own making.
And finally, the questions of accountability and transparency. At the same time Urban Renewal is saying it has no money to complete projects and needs $860,000 to do so, Flowers points out that the agency has $700,000 in a reserve account, which Urban Renewal claims it did not know about. No real surprise there. This is the same outfit that didn’t exercise due diligence when $670,000 was being embezzled and the same outfit that kept the same treasurer in place after it was clear he had failed to watch over the agency’s funds.
For as much as many City Council members seem to love Urban Renewal, the agency doesn’t deserve to exist any longer. And while the mayor is trying to pull the plug on the agency, perhaps she could turn the clock back and have Urban Renewal never exist in the first place. Pine Bluff would be better for it.
Get a grip, council members. Follow your mayor’s lead on this one.