Monticello Live

Last month I had the opportunity to join local history buffs to proclaim March, Archaeology Month. The highlight of Archaeology Month was a weeklong volunteer dig at the Hollywood Plantation near Winchester? the site of the historic pre-civil war log cabin that is currently being restored and developed into a heritage site by UAM. I mention this project because it is such a great example of what is right about our community in 2016.

This seemingly unexciting event, an archaeology dig in Drew County, is so much more. First, it’s part of a project to build partnerships between government, our local university, and community members.
Yes, UAM owns the facility and is managing the grant to restore the site. But, the county has assisted in building a new access road to the historic site, and local Archaeology and Historical Societies have supported through planning and research. And? as a result of the cooperation between the city, the county, the university, and teams of volunteers, a rundown wood building is being restored into a historic site that will feature the only known pre-civil war two story dog-trot long cabin in Arkansas.
Putting Monticello and Drew County on the map in the largest and fasting growing industry in the state – tourism.

Again, I mention the Taylor House project, not as an example of an exception to the rule, but as a common example of how we are getting things done together for a better Monticello.

Take for instance how we worked together with local schools and daycares to pass the Safe Schools/ Safe Communities Initiative. Today, we have empowered our police department to develop a special response team to be fully equipped and prepared to respond to active shooter situations that may arise at our schools. The Initiative also has protected our young preschool children, by declaring every daycare a school zone? protecting our children from violent and aggressive offenders. Or how we partnered with Connect Arkansas, and our schools, to offer the Computer4Kids Initiative. Where we distributed 110 free internet ready computers to our community’s low income residents through programs, including the Hope Place, Options, Boys & Girls Club and Mainline Health. Or how our community came together to renew a sales tax initiative to support a $31 million hospital expansion? which will include doubling its surgical area, larger laboratory, new labor, delivery, & recovery areas, and a new outpatient specialty clinic.

In the near future, Monticello will be home to the most premier and quality healthcare facilities in the region. I could also mention, how last year Monticello became home to the only wheelchair tennis courts south of Little Rock. And? how the cooperation between a local group of tennis players, who wrote a grant themselves, received programing funding, then partnered with the City to apply for project funds through USTA to resurface the courts in McCloy Park and revitalize adult, youth, and soon wheelchair, tennis through a local league. And of course, I could not discuss city projects that are a result of cooperation, without mentioning the Miracle League.

Over a year ago, a group of volunteers approached the City about a monumental project: the construction of a fully handicap accessible baseball field for the region’s children with disabilities. At first the project seemed impossible, especially with the $600,000 price tag, but the volunteers set out to raise $150,000 in private funds to donate to the City for us to match in a $250,000 state grant. As we all know, the league raised over $150,000, the state granted the City the full $250,000 grant, and this fall our hope is to offer our region’s residents with disabilities South Arkansas’ only Miracle League field.

These are all examples of what I love the most about Monticello: when it is important to our community, our children and our future, we take the time, make the effort, and work together to advance our great City forward.

Now, the same momentum and effort, put into making 2015 productive and successful will be needed to keep Monticello moving forward in four key areas? public safety, infrastructure improvements, workforce development, and civic engagement.

Public participation in local government, in my eyes, is the most important focus of any municipality. We cannot begin addressing public safety, city infrastructure, or job training without engaging the public for input, support, and volunteers. My campaign for office was centered around a commitment to make city government more open to the public and providing opportunities for citizens to be engaged in the decision making process. If we are to encourage an atmosphere of cooperation in our community, it is imperative we establish civic engagement as a foundation of city operations.

My passion for community development and civic engagement was the reason, my first act as Mayor was issuing the Open Government Directive. The Directive established new principles to help guide city government’s actions intended to commit to transparency, meaningful public participation, and collaborating with the public and other governments. New open government practices range from requiring agendas for meetings to be published one week in advance to insure the media has enough time to report to the public which city boards and commissions will be considered before decisions are made, not just reading about the meeting after the fact? to requiring all government meetings to include opportunity for public comment period? or the OpenGov campaign which includes a new website, the Mayor’s Weekly Message and a social media presence. All of these work today to provide an opportunity to our citizens to be informed and engaged in their city government.

But, meaningful civic engagement has to include more than newspaper columns and a website. Meaningful civic engagement means encouraging and providing public participation. Since taking office, I have worked hard to use boards, commissions, committees, and taskforces to allow the opportunities for everyday residents to participate in city government. This also includes, an open application process for appointments to city boards, commissions, and committees available on our city website. Anytime a resident can go online and apply to be considered to service on any of the city’s ten plus board and commissions.

Last year, I asked the Drew County WAGE Board to reorganize and meet the challenge of addressing job readiness in Monticello. WAGE (or the Workforce Alliance for Growth in the Economy) is a local taskforce built of local industry and government, missioned to define workforce challenges and develop localized solutions to address them. In the past WAGE has developed specialized industry specific training to local employers to hire local workers. As a ready community we must work to prepare ourselves for the future, while embracing lessons learned from the past. We must identify the major issues that face our community, engage the community to find innovative solutions, and meet our challenges head on in open and honest approaches.

In the last decade Monticello saw growth in population, jobs, retail, and sales revenue in the midst of the greatest recession since the Great Depression. Last year, Monticello saw the second largest decrease in unemployment in the state. A luxury many cities throughout our state and region have not had the opportunity to enjoy. But, over all unemployment in the state is still higher than the start of the recession. Hard economic times for manufacturing caused local factories to close. At the same time, technology in manufacturing increased and advanced. Today, as the economy rebounds, and as local manufacturing shifts and expands, we are left with a workforce lacking the quality labor and professional skills to fill new positions in today’s manufacturing. If we are building a ready community, we must build a Monticello ready to work.

Building a ready workforce does not happen overnight, and can’t be done by government or industry alone. In order for us, as a community, to truly assess the issues facing a skilled sustainable workforce, all the players (industry, small business, staffing, economic development, government, and the struggling employed) must come together to develop strategies at the ground level. Since the WAGE Board reorganized, several Monticello industries and employers have joined the effort. And? together with an $84,000 grant from the Governor, UAM has empowered the WAGE Board to develop a sustainable plan for workforce development.

Monticello is now on the path to be a nationally recognized “ACT Work Ready Community.” A process that will, for the first time in our city’s history, develop a comprehensive plan that will involve the schools, the university, city & county governments, employers and service industry, to implement a sustainable plan to better prepare our workforce to be career (or work) ready.

Public participation and input on hiring and retaining local employees will be invaluable to developing career readiness strategies to meet the needs of our local employers your businesses. Working together to find localized solutions for local problems in workforce is something the Northwest corner of our state picked up on a decade ago. I encourage any employer not involved in WAGE to get involved. The board will be shaping the workforce training and career preparedness effort of our
community? your experiences are earnestly needed.

Another great resource many employers have missed out on and can benefit from WAGE and current workforce services today, is getting involved in our community’s Career Readiness Program. Local WAGE partners will come and audit your business’ skill needs and develop a skills assessment for your applicants to take pre-employment during the application process. As a result, applicants will have
nationally recognized certificate verifying their skill compatibility with your business.

Because this program is completely free to both the employer and the applicant, it is an invaluable program industry and businesses can benefit from immediately. To show my belief in this valuable program, today I am committing the city government to become an employer participate in the National Career Readiness Certificate (CRC) program? and encourage Monticello’s other employers to follow.

Over the next months, the City will participate in a workplace audit with the Department of Workforce Services. After the audit, any new skilled based position that the city is hiring for will require the applicants to take a free Career Readiness Assessment and submit a Career Readiness Certificate with his or her application.

As Mayor, and as an economic developer, I have full faith that this commitment will improve the city’s skilled laborforce while leading to cuts in cost for training new employees. The city’s skilled workforce is crucial as we manage our community utilities and infrastructure. Both become more and more important as we build a ready community. And? to build that ready community, we must build a Monticello ready to grow.

Cities are much like koi ponds. The size and number of fish can be controlled by the size you build the pond. If you build a small pond, the fish population and strength with remain small. But if you build a pond for a larger population and move the same fish from the small pond to larger, the fish will grow larger in size and population. In order for Monticello to prepare for growth and further economic strength, we must improve our city’s infrastructure to meet the demands of a growing community.

We have world class water here in Monticello, and I believe it deserves, that our residents deserve, a world class water system to deliver it to them safely. In 2013, the City Council set out to do just that. Replace the worst corners of our water system with something that is deserving of our citizens that drink its water. Sadly, due to a lack to leadership through the most of 2014, the project had been derailed and public trust was all but lost in the project.

I strongly believe that although the project has had a rocky start, it is imperative for future growth. I am glad to report that much progress has been made on working to resolve the city’s issues with our current contractor. City Attorney Barton, Special Counsel Gibson, and I all agree we are positively moving forward to resolving the disputes within the upcoming months. By fall, I expect to be asking Council to allow the city to get back on track with the project? with a more open approach than the last go around. Which will include community meetings.

Laying underground water lines will not be an easy or attractive process, but I assure the public that the need to move active water lines away from beneath streets will be a great improvement for our city. For years, the city has been unable to repave or resurface city streets where water lines are placed under the street. The heavy equipment used in street repair damages the underground water lines? creating leaks which in turn, cause damage to the newly paved streets. By moving the active
underground water lines to beside streets as opposed to under the street, the city can begin to repave or resurface streets in great need of repair.

In the meantime, I would ask Council to work with me to find a solution to another major transportation issue in our community: sidewalks. Walkablity in our community is horrible. Currently, sidewalks are left to the responsibility of the property owners not the city. Although I do understand the liability and accountability it would leave on the city if we were to accept maintaining all sidewalks as our responsibility.

Last year, we took up the issue of stormwater drainage, which similarity had been left to the responsibility of the property owners? not the city. After advice from professional engineers, and lengthy discussions, we agreed to make drainage a city responsibility. Today, we are working on four major drainage projects, and will soon review a long term maintenance plan. Not an all or nothing plan, but a strategy that allows the city to deal with the major citywide drainage issues, and allows residents to deal will smaller home issues. I have full faith that we can work together to find a solution for sidewalks, similar to our strategy on drainage.

To help jump start the planning process and community conversation about a citywide pedestrian network, today I am announcing the launch of Student CIDI (or Student Community Idea Development Internship). A summer internship open to five currently enrolled UAM students or Monticello & Drew Central graduated seniors. Over the course of June & July, the unpaid interns will work together as a team to research what other cities are doing, host community meetings, collect community input, and
ultimately develop and propose to the city’s engineering staff a recommendation for a master pedestrian network plan.

There is walkablity and stormwater drainage grant money out there, we should be utilizing our local talent to insure we can access it before the money runs out. A greenspace based pedestrian network is a perfect way to make improvements to stormwater drainage issues with greenspace, bioswales etc, while improving the walkablity of our community. If Little Rock and Northwest Arkansas can do it, there no
reason Monticello can’t make it happen either.

Finally, we must find a community approach to further improve public safety. As Monticello benefits from the positive aspects of regionalism (like sales & business), we also reap the negative aspects of being the “Hub of Southeast Arkansas?” crime. Last year, noting the social tensions in Ferguson, I met with community and church leaders in January with the goal of developing strategies to address perceptions of law enforcement in minority neighborhoods. The meeting opened new lines of communication between our local law enforcement departments and Monticello’s neighborhoods through faithbased organizations.

Determined to head off trouble before it can start, the City of Monticello devised the Community Oriented Policing Strategies for the 21st Century (COPS21), a program aimed to be one of the positive examples of policecommunity interaction. The COPS21 Initiative, which focuses to implement primary tenets of development and unity through community outreach, engagement and orientation strategies has already been a great asset to our neighborhoods and officers. For instance, three of the program’s nine strategies include: new more casual uniforms, making officers more approachable? body camera for better evidence based accountability? and reestablishing the bike patrol. These changes, while seemingly small, have had significant impact in the quality of life in our community. I think the initiative serves as a fine example of our ability to effect positive change when we bring all voices to the table and move forward together.

At the December 2, 2015 kickoff banquet of the Arkansas Municipal League Fall Conference in Springdale, 16 of the 501 cities in Arkansas were recognized with the 2015 City of Distinction status. For the second year, Monticello was recognized in the program’s quality of life category. This year, for positive police/community interaction as a result of implementing the city’s new COPS21 Initiative. Since its implementation, COPS21 has helped contribute to a 23 percent decrease in policeresident confrontations and a 16 percent decrease in arrests.

Although successful at improving the relations of the police with Monticello residents, our city is still faced with nonMonticellonians causing some of the most dangerous havoc. Criminals from Dermott, Crossett, Rison, or Pine Bluff have taken the lives of family, socalled friends, and Monticellonians. Unfortunately, these criminals have chosen to commit their crimes inside our city limits. The response is not to live in fear, or to ramp up police force, but to come together as a community. For too long we have allowed apathy to police our streets.

There was a day when neighbors cared about neighbors, looked out for them, and as a community, we had each other’s back. Today, due to several factors, including a societal change to a more independent lifestyle, we have become more isolated from one another and divided from our neighbors. We have developed into a society that is okay with leaving people to “do their own thing, while I worry about mine.” We have chosen to allow our neighbors, family, and friends to live their life without interference or accountability to the community.

If we are to become a safer community, a caring community, and unified community, we must return to our core values that made Monticello a great place to live. We must take care of our own and look after our neighbors. This means taking care of them in their time of need, supporting them in their successes, and calling them out when their actions become dangerous for themselves or others around them.

Taking COPS21 one step forward, over the next months I will be working with the police department and interested community members to begin to launching a program we are calling “ONE Monticello.” ONE Monticello will be a community driven neighborhood based network of residents working with our police department to ORGANIZE into to watch groups, NAME known offenders, and ENHANCE our
community.

ONE Monticello will not be your grandfather’s neighborhood watch program, but will be technology based and will empower residents to empower our police to be community driven while cracking down on violent crime. One tool that will set ONE Monticello apart, will be a free public app that allow residents to report crime anonymously? including sending pictures, even live video footage through a thirdparty
evidence server. The new technology will allow the department to track crime and types of crime/ reports in data driven formats that will help improve our department’s investigating, and increase accountability of our officers? all while empowering our residents.

This program is endorsed by the National Neighborhood Watch Association and the National Sheriffs Association. I believe it will be the next set to improving our community and fighting crime? as we empower neighbors to care about their fellow neighbors. One hundred sixtysix years ago, our community’s founders made a decision to set out on a course to build a town that would be the center of commerce and trade for the area. That town was Monticello. Records show that our community founders worked together to build a community with a purpose. That purpose was to be a vibrant city leading the region in development.

Now as we celebrate the 166 years since our town’s founders drove a survey marker in the center of the town square, just outside here, we are tasked to continue to be the leaders for growth and development for our region.

Today, I am proud to report the state of our city is strong. Monticello is still poised for progress, positioned for growth. And? we will fulfill our purpose as the heartbeat of Southeast Arkansas, by working forward the same way our founders did. We work together to build a community ready for growth, and ready for the positive future that awaits us.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 29th, 2016 at 7:54 am and is filed under City, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.