Attorney Joey McCutchen (front) and Adam Watson, a member of the Franklin County and River Valley Coalition, leave the Arkansas Department of Corrections headquarters in North Little Rock on Jan. 7, 2025, after being escorted out of a meeting. (Mary Hennigan/Arkansas Advocate)
On Jan. 7, Arkansas Department of Corrections officials met with representatives of the firm hired to oversee the design and construction of a proposed 3,000-bed prison.
The meeting, the first of two days of discussions between the state agency and the construction manager, wasn’t unusual in the ordinary course of state business. In any given week, employees of state agencies routinely meet with employees of consultants and contractors hired to perform some task the agency isn’t equipped to handle on its own.
But the context surrounding this meeting made it anything but usual — and of intense public interest.
And what happened when prison opponents and an Advocate reporter tried to witness the meeting was definitely not routine.
The state’s Freedom of Information Act requires meetings of governing bodies, including sub-bodies, to be public. A meeting of public employees who are not policymakers with a contractor’s representatives likely doesn’t meet the definition of a governing body. But if members of the state Board of Corrections attended the meeting, that would and should be an open meeting, even if the board took no action. The public deserves to see how the sausage is made.
As it happened, only one member of the corrections board showed up. She was one of about 50 people in the large room at DOC’s North Little Rock headquarters where the meeting was held.
Our reporter asked to be allowed into the meeting and was told it wasn’t open. When she sat in the building lobby and tried to take photos, she was told photography wasn’t allowed and that she’d have to wait outside in freezing weather.
A member of the Franklin County and River Valley Coalition prison opposition group and a Fort Smith transparency advocate and lawyer managed to get inside the meeting room but were soon escorted out.
“Citizens aren’t welcome,” the lawyer, Joey McCutchen, said after getting kicked out. “…if you’re going to discuss goals of this project, they should do them openly with the citizens invited. It’s contradictory to everything this state stands for.”
And it’s obvious from what happened that citizens not only weren’t welcomed in that meeting, they weren’t even welcome in a public building to wait on public officials – the corrections secretary and director of corrections – to come out of a meeting to be asked questions about a highly controversial issue.
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It’s been obvious that the public is an afterthought since Oct. 31, when Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders surprised nearly everyone by announcing the state was buying 815 acres of cattle land for about $3 million as the site for the prison.
The shock of the announcement spurred Franklin County residents to civic activism in opposition and led to the unearthing of documents that showed administration officials deliberately worked to keep details of the site search secret.
A model of transparency, the process was not.
In November, Joe Profiri, the former corrections secretary and now special adviser to Sanders, and current Corrections Secretary Lindsay Wallace promised more transparency going forward at a town hall in Franklin County.
Not taking them at their word, prison opponents kept pressing the state to cough up more emails and other documents through the state Freedom of Information Act. Which is how members of the Franklin County and River Valley Coalition learned that the corrections department and Vanir Construction Management were planning to meet.
New corrections department spokesperson Rand Champion said last week’s meeting “was an internal staff meeting for department employees.” Because McCutchen and coalition member Adam Watson weren’t employees, “they were asked to leave the meeting, which they ultimately did following some conversations. There will be future meetings that will be open to the public where it will be appropriate to have them in attendance.”
Let’s hope the future brings more transparency.
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