By John Brummett

State Sen. Bob Johnson of little Bigelow in little Perry County, who is in the contracting business with his brothers, erupted last week in a wholly unexpected flurry of brutally candid pronouncements.

This long-time inside political operator turned into a public fountain of bold and occasionally impractical ideas.

One of them, a practical one, was that we have too many lawyers and not enough handymen.

He had that right.

I liked the way this newly radical and progressive thinker put it during a session with reporters. He dared us to call a few law firms and outline a potential lawsuit we’d like to file. Then he invited us to call a few handymen to seek a few repairs around the house. He predicted we’d have five lawyers at our door in a day or two, but no handyman for two weeks.

I got run off the road a few years ago. My car flipped, and it was totaled. The letters from lawyers exceeded for days what the postman could cram in the slot. But as for a little problem with the plaster walls, Johnson was precisely on target with his two weeks.

His point was that we mustn’t make these new lottery scholarships exclusively about high academia, liberal arts and meritorious achievement in that arena. The two-year trade schools are just as vital, maybe more in many ways, and we shouldn’t structure our policies to value one form of postsecondary personal advancement over another, he said.

Of Johnson’s many out-of-the-blue outbursts last week, that one — that we must maintain a significant vocational-technical component in awarding these scholarships — was legitimately and appropriately doable in the legislative session beginning this week.

Probably not in the category of doable, but certainly in the category of courageous and compassionate, was Johnson’s lamentation that we passed that three-strikes legislation by which simple repeat drug offenders languish in jail. It would be cheaper and a better investment to put these people in college — or a trade school, he said.

Right again.

But then there was this: There is no way in the world we’re going to shut down the Little Rock Zoo and merge the University of Central Arkansas in Conway with the University of Arkansas at Little Rock into one metropolitan university bigger than the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.

Our institutions of higher education are entirely too petty and provincial for such a thing. People in Little Rock started talking several years ago about “regionalism” and working as one with Conway. Then they lured part of Acxiom out of Conway and down to Little Rock’s River Market.

I don’t know what Johnson has against the zoo. If it’s as pitiful as he says, we ought to make it better.

Nor do I know why he seems married to taking all the land along Interstate 630 from downtown Little Rock westward and making it a high-tech research corridor, ridded of the detritus, like the zoo.

We can have plenty of high-tech research without all the physical elements abutting each other along a single roadway.

As it is, the I-630 strip is a synergistic mix that is appealing already.

You have good hospitals for Medicare care and world-class research, from the Children’s Hospital to the UAMS to the VA Hospital to St. Vincent’s on out to the Baptist Medical Center. Along the way there’s War Memorial Park with a golf course and baseball park and fitness center and football stadium. Then there’s the zoo that Johnson so detests.

So you have medical research. You have medical healing. You have recreation and sports and fitness and education for the kids.

I think Little Rock ought to rename this the Quality of Life Enhancement Corridor.

You even have the state Capitol along there, right before you get to the Children’s Hospital.

And that’s where Bob Johnson will be toiling for the next three months or so as president tem of the state Senate.

——-
John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.