The Bottom Line: Credit for a job well done goes to the victors, but don't expect an unconditional surrender from the vanquished
walked out of Courtroom 202 Tuesday night with the rare satisfaction of having backed the winning side on virtually everything that mattered. That is not usually how these evenings go. Most years the returns arrive like a reminder that common sense is still a minority position in Sebastian County.
This year the electorate, for once, declined to play along.
Under the city administrator system, Fort Smith’s mayor has long been little more than the magician’s assistant, waving the wand on stage right while the real act happens off in the wings. The handful of people who actually keep the rabbits in the hat have preferred it that way.
They supplied the materials, wrote the contracts, staffed the boards, and, when necessary, arranged the lighting so the public never quite saw the strings. A two-year lame-duck period before the new form of government takes effect is their last, best chance to nail the curtains back in place. Expect them to spend it insisting that nothing has ever leaked and that anyone who noticed the wet floor was simply confused about the weather.
The vote itself was not subtle. Residents decided, by a decisive margin, that the city should answer to an elected mayor rather than to an unelected administrator and the informal partnership that has long surrounded him. That partnership (call it the Band of Brothers, the star chamber, or simply the people who have always known which phone numbers to dial) has treated open government as an inconvenience rather than a requirement.
Transparency, in their view, is what you practice when the cameras are already on and the questions have been pre-cleared. The rest of the time it is optional.
One candidate I supported failed to advance. The loss was unsurprising. I reached out to the person who defeated them a number of times and offered to go Facebook Live so they could air their views directly.
They could have simply said no. I’m not the kind of guy you just ghost without there being some sort of retribution. If you can’t gauge someone’s trustworthiness before the battle starts, it’s kind of hard to share a foxhole with them. When a public official treats the only independent true local newsroom as an enemy to be managed rather than a public that must be answered, the electorate eventually notices.
Self-awareness is not a statutory duty, but its absence is expensive at the ballot box. Even at that, the candidate I did not support is still a better option than most of the other people in that race.
The larger result still leaves work. Three of the four remaining directors whose seats are up in two years have treated the current arrangement as a permanent condition rather than a temporary one. The fourth remains a question mark.
We're obligated for two years to continue to pay the salary of a yes-man who knows his lane and stays in it. Rest assured, the campaign to make him the next mayor started last night when the polls closed.
Maintaining the energy that produced Tuesday’s outcome will require more than a single night of good returns. It will require people who are no longer willing to be told that the important decisions have already been made elsewhere and that their role is simply to ratify them.
For years I felt like the lone wolf crying in the wilderness. People like Shayne McKinney, Joey McCutchen, Chris Cadelli, Casey Milspaugh and others who have decided they are just not going to take it anymore are a welcome sign that phase may finally be ending.
I have watched this city from a newsroom since 1984. For most of that time the pattern has been consistent: a small circle sets the agenda, a larger circle of contractors and allies executes it, and the public is invited to applaud the ribbon-cutting. The water that has gone missing over the years, literal and figurative, has rarely been explained in real time.
Some of it has simply pooled in quiet places where pond scum and mosquitoes discovered they could build a stable ecosystem so long as no one stirred the surface.
Change of this kind is never clean. Some longtime employees will leave; some of them should. A few will carry useful institutional knowledge into the new structure. Most of the people who have treated the administrator’s office as a private club will not. That is not a tragedy. It is the point.
I will not be around to see whether the next generation finishes the job. My children and grandchildren will. For the moment, it is enough that a majority of voters looked at the same set of facts I have been writing about for years and reached the same conclusion: the assistant has been running the show long enough.
The magician can take a bow and leave stage right.
