We begin this Tuesday edition of Ozarks at Large talking once again about the Arkansas Legislature's fiscal session. Andrew DeMillo is editor in chief of the Arkansas Advocate.
Moore: They have said that if everything goes as expected, the session should wrap tomorrow, on Wednesday. Does that seem possible to you?
DeMillo: If you can hear, I'm knocking on wood right now. It seems like they're on their way to doing that. This week we're expecting votes on the Revenue Stabilization Act, which is the large budget bill for the state. And usually action on that signals that they're at the very end of this. I think we're kind of near the finish line, but we've got a whole other session to look at next week too.
Moore: We're going to begin our conversation today talking about something that's not going to be in that bill — funding for the big state prison that Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders has been pushing for for quite some time. The idea is that it would end up in Franklin County, and it sounds like that might not be the case. On Monday, The Advocate published a story talking about other options for a new 3,000-bed prison if it doesn't end up in Franklin County. Let's start there.
DeMillo: We decided to have a story this week basically looking ahead to, if this prison's on hold, what other options are there? The governor has not flat-out said that she's given up on the Franklin County site. She in fact has said that she still thinks it's the best location for a prison, but has also said she's open to other ideas. And we kind of tried to game out what are those other ideas, what are the challenges, what are the possibilities. It's everything from expanding existing facilities to private prisons — and with each of these, there's still going to be some kind of a challenge or debate. This is very much going to be an issue looming over them next year. They may have hit the hold button on this project in particular, but that doesn't solve the problem they're facing in terms of prison overcrowding right now. There's going to have to be a solution. The big question is which of these ideas can gain consensus in the legislature.
Moore: We have heard from Sen. Brian King, who has been opposed to the Franklin County site. One of the ideas he came up with is essentially just expanding other prisons. How realistic does that sound?
DeMillo: The Department of Corrections hasn't revisited any of the options right now. Back in 2022, they had sought land to build two new facilities, including a 300-bed community corrections center and a 1,000-bed prison. They also received land donation offers from Hempstead County for a new prison, as well as offers from Dallas, Nevada and Searcy counties for the community corrections center. It doesn't seem like there's been much movement on that since the focus has been so much on Franklin County. Part of the issue is finding areas where there would be consensus among local officials, as well as finding a place where there would be a skilled workforce. Because one of the things that they talk about when they talk about a prison is you're not just talking about 3,000 beds — you're talking about the number of employees you're going to need, other facilities, infrastructure, which was obviously a big challenge with Franklin County. You're going to have to check off all of those boxes to really be able to find one that works.
Moore: In 2026, it seems hard to believe that there is good news about public television and public media funding, but here we sit. There has been a three-year, $3 million pledge anonymously gifted to public television here in Arkansas, with some stipulations around challenges and that sort of thing. And we're also hearing from the Arkansas Legislature that they are going to put some money towards public television in the budget.
DeMillo: After what we've seen with Arkansas PBS going from potentially being the first state cut off from national PBS to a state where you have these two lifelines basically thrown out — there's an anonymous donor who came forward with a pledge donation of $3 million aimed at keeping PBS programs in the state, as well as legislation moving through the House and Senate right now that would match up to $550,000 from donors who want to keep PBS in the state. Both of those have challenges. With the $3 million, there are still some hoops you're going to have to jump through. With the matching funds from the state, it's still going through the House and Senate. Like with any budget measure, you've got that three-fourths vote you've got to get through. There's still resistance generally to funding public television from some very conservative Republicans. I think Monday is going to be the big test. And if it stumbles in either one of those chambers, they may have to go back to the drawing board or figure out a way to get some of those no votes to yeses.
Moore: I want to touch on your weekly column. People can find that at arkansasadvocate.com. The headline says "Watch your special language — Arkansas lawmakers need to rein in strings attached to budget bills." Let's talk first about what we mean by special language around budget bills. What are some examples we've seen in the past and maybe now?
DeMillo: Special language is a term that people outside the Capitol don't hear that often. Essentially, you're attaching strings to budget measures — you're inserting instructions in there. Sometimes it's how the money is supposed to be spent or when it's supposed to be spent. But another thing that happens is a lot of times some policy decisions will be kind of slipped in there as well. This used to be kind of the dirty little secret of the Arkansas Legislature. It was a way to slip in some major policy decisions, major changes without the public really noticing. Given live streaming of legislative proceedings and people tracking in real time on social media everything the legislature is doing, it's not really a secret that much anymore. But it's still a major problem for the legislature, especially during fiscal sessions. As we know, fiscal sessions are supposed to be focused primarily on the budget. There's a very high bar to get non-budget bills through the session. And what we've seen, ever since Arkansas went to annual sessions, is attempts to slip in some major policy decisions into budget bills. Sometimes they get through, sometimes they don't. We saw an example last week of just how out of hand this could end up getting when you had a marathon meeting of the subcommittee that hears this language. These proposals are kind of all over the place — they included an effort to end a Middle Eastern studies center at the UofA, which was pulled down and wasn't even taken up for a vote, measures dealing with salaries of Little Rock city directors, various other things. Most of those did not go through, but you're still seeing them come up a lot. The concern right now is there's not really a good firm standard of when is special language a good thing and when is it a bad thing. It kind of turns into the eye of the beholder — if a legislator wants to get something done, they like the special language. If they don't want it to happen, they don't like special language. And that's not a tenable standard for the legislature to go by, especially for being transparent about major changes that could end up moving through in a way that the public may not really be able to pay attention to.
Moore: This is not a partisan issue. We're seeing both sides historically have these sorts of issues here in Arkansas.
DeMillo: Ever since this was an issue before fiscal sessions — we even had a corruption scandal in the 1990s where special language played a major role. I think we've seen it ramped up even more with fiscal sessions as kind of an avenue for this. We've heard warnings from Gov. Mike Beebe when this was happening, and Gov. Asa Hutchinson raised concerns about policy matters being slipped in. But there was also kind of an unusual way they had of saving the Medicaid expansion several years ago that used special language — it's way too complicated a procedure to explain, but he kind of on one hand used this procedure while also warning about using it for policy measures. It's definitely a bipartisan tool as well as a bipartisan concern.
Moore: You can keep up with everything happening at the fiscal session at arkansasadvocate.com. Andrew, thank you so much for your time today, and hopefully when we talk next, we will not be in the middle of a fiscal session.
DeMillo: I'll keep my fingers crossed.
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