Part II: Neglected Park on the River falling into disrepair. Parks and Recreation is responsible for POTR; Mayor Caleb Norris is responsible for Parks and Rec. Someone needs to take responsibility.
Unless the city steps up and takes care of this million-dollar event center, Maumellians will lose a lot more money than the $38,000 Hizzoner gave away to Gloria Timmons when he cut her debt.
Part III (tomorrow): An obvious idea to improve Park on the River.
By Jay C. Grelen, Moniteur de l’Arkansas
Park on the River is bigger than the million-dollar house and 11 acres that Maumelle bought in 2005 and has mismanaged ever since.
Through the lens of Park on the River, we have seen in a small way what leaders will do when no one holds their feet to the fire of transparency and accountably.
Without a peep from the public (that would be all of us), the city has allowed the house to fall into disrepair. The roof, original to the house when it was built circa 1995, is long past the need for replacement. Moniteur de l’Arkansas paid a roofer for a visual inspection and an estimate to replace the roof. The money the city gave to Gloria Timmons when it cut her debt for unpaid rent by more than half would have covered the cost with nearly $10,000 left over.
The air conditioning system is leaking coolant, evident by the ice that’s formed on the system’s pipes; if that’s not fixed soon, the city probably is looking at an expensive repair.
The sidewalk rails at the house are dirty and moldy. Rodents of some sort have left calling cards next to the outside walls of the house.
The fence that surrounds the property is as moldy and green as it once was white. In several places, fence rails are broken.
In 2022, newly elected council member Christine Gronwald discovered that Team Summit had quit paying its rent in 2019. (Ms. Gronwald represents the Country Club district and, according to her LinkedIn page, earned an MBA from Capella University. That’s a great skill in a council member.)
Under the contract that Team Summit breached, it owed the city nearly $70,000. To this day, we don’t know how that happened.
Mayor Caleb Norris has offered a litany of excuses, even pretending to blame himself. During most of the nearly two decades that Mrs. Timmons was leasing the event center (without ever having to bid against anyone for the privilege), Hizzoner was a city councilman, the city attorney, and then mayor.
When Mrs. Timmons addressed the lapse in payment publicly, she blamed COVID, which was 10 months away when she stopped paying. Tina Timmons, the elected city clerk and city treasurer, didn’t catch the failure to pay; she is Gloria Timmons’ daughter-in-law. At least a couple of finance directors over those four years didn’t catch the breach of contract.
From the first day, Mayor Norris made it clear without saying it in so many words that the city wasn’t going to require Mrs. Timmons to pay the entire debt. By the time he was done, he had cut $38,000 from the $68,000 debt. A majority of city council members, five of whom are Hizzoner’s Reliable Rubber Stampers, rubber stamped the deal without a peep.
Poverty isn’t an issue for Mrs. Timmons, who apparently can pay her other bills. Even as Team Summit was beating Maumelle out of tens of thousands of dollars, Southern Bancorp lent Mrs. Timmons $3.8 million to buy the former Oasis Church, which she turned into an event center she calls the Venue at Westwind. She pays all her tens of thousands of dollars in taxes on the property. There is no indication that Pulaski County has offered to cut her tax bill by more than half. She has owned at least one other large property in Little Rock.
Which brings us to this: Without someone to guard the henhouse, a few elected officials and other employees of government are tempted to treat the millions in taxes they collect from us as their personal nest egg.
In Maumelle, we haven’t been watching. I’ll take my share of the blame. I have lived in Maumelle for 21 years, and until Hizzoner hired me to sharpen pencils and fix faucets in city hall (I was his chief of staff), I had attended exactly two council meetings. Even then, I attended out of self-interest: I was concerned about a neighborhood that a developer was about to build.
I knew a few of the elected folks, liked them as much as you can like a casual acquaintance, and assumed they would always do the right things for Maumelle. Usually most of them do. But sometimes they don’t. That’s why we need to watch. When we don’t attend council meetings and voice our opinions about what we like and what we don’t like, often we will get something we don’t like. By then, it’s too late to complain.
When you work on the inside, you see things. In my year as chief of staff, for instance, I learned directly from the contractor that the cost to build the Club Manor Roundabout in 2023 would be a million dollars more than in 2019, when the city was supposed to build it. That’s a million bucks up in smoke. If the city ever builds it. (I think it’s a terrible idea.)
I am as tired of writing about Park on the River as you are of hearing about it. But if we simply move on, the wolves wearing public-servant costumes think we don’t care, and they will continue to hang out around the henhouse.
For 99.9 percent of council meetings, the chamber is empty. City employees usually outnumber civilians. The best-attended council meeting during my time was the night that a passel of angry residents from Crystal Hill Road showed up to complain about the never-ending improvement project of their road. They were irritated with the contractor and with the mayor.
After that show of interest, the project picked up speed and was completed pretty quickly. The wolves in public-servant clothing heard the message.
If a similar number of motivated and emotional Maumellians had attended council meetings to hear and discuss Park on the River, maybe Hizzoner wouldn’t have so casually and nonchalantly stuck Maumellians in the eye with that sweet thousands-of-dollars deal for Team Summit.
That’s me, Jay Grelen, founder and editor of Moniteur de l'Arkansas, shaking hands with former Alabama Governor George Wallace during my six years as a columnist in Mobile, Alabama. In September 1994, I spent a day in Montgomery, Alabama, with Governor Wallace, who by the time I knew him, had forsworn the racism of his early political career. He also was totally deaf; I still have the yellow legal pad on which I wrote my questions for him.
I’m a refugee of the daily newspaper business, clutching at my manual Royal typewriter and trying to stay afloat. For now, I’m afloat on the U.S.S. Moniteur de l'Arkansas.
The need for Moniteur de l'Arkansas is urgent because newspapers and TV news teams are cutting back on coverage, or going belly up altogether. So Moniteur de l'Arkansas is taking flight to write ~ the good, the bad, and the beautiful. With its valiant white horse well-fed, well-rested, and not-quite-well-groomed (disheveled would be apt, much like its rider), Moniteur de l'Arkansas will mount up and take up its lance to tilt against windmills, windbags ~ elected or otherwise ~ foxes at the henhouses, and whatever else needs a good tilting. But Moniteur de l'Arkansas also will ever be on the lookout for stories that strum the heartstrings with optimism, hope, and happy endings, because those lift us up, and that’s how I’d rather spend my time at the typewriter.
I worked in the daily newspaper racket for 35 years, including stints at the Denver Post, the Lexington Herald-Leader, the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, and the Mobile Register. My last stop was a 10-year stay at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. In 2017, Governor Asa Hutchinson hired me as his senior writer; after nearly six years with Governor Hutchinson, I was chief of staff to Hizzoner Caleb Norris, mayor of Maumelle. Since Hizzoner promoted me to Chief of Staff Emeritus in August 2023, I now have time to write stories and rake muck as I ride the crest of the wave of the much-balleyhooed rebirth of local journalism. You can subscribe for free or you may pay to subscribe. I’ll write just as hard for everyone. By the end of the year, we will have launched the Birdsong County Whistler, which will pursue the more literary and refined stories of life. However you choose to participate, thank you for reading.
~ Jay Grelen, Moniteur de l'Arkansas
Keep going in this. There is a group of these cronies that intend to sell this property. Never to have a city park and property on the main Chanel of the River again. The potential is in the land so if the house is too expensive to keep up bull d dozer will t down. The land is NOT expensive to keep . That would fix her wagon is my daddy the farmer would say !! Few will ever realize what the city has in this property !