By John Brummett

Back when then-Gov. Mike Huckabee was trying to consolidate high schools for better educational opportunities, I was among dozens openly agreeing with him.

People in small towns cried out that losing their high schools would mean losing their towns. Only once did I work up the nerve to write that a town had no inalienable right to exist and that it wasn’t much of a town if all it had was a school.

This comment was not well-received in some quarters. I was called an elitist enemy of the wholesome rural life.

But that wasn’t so. I wasn’t an enemy of the blissful advantages of a bucolic eden; I was only against inefficiently small schools getting propped up illogically in little incorporated spots on the road, anachronistic remnants of an olden time.

So imagine my reaction last week when I read Rex Nelson’s idea. It is to abandon, more or less, whole towns in the Delta and consolidate people from those towns in other towns that Nelson termed “worth saving” on account of having “critical mass.”

Presumably you’d go into Gould and Marianna and Marvell and Elaine and Clarendon and Holly Grove and say something like this: “Y’all need to get out; come on, get packed; get to Pine Bluff or Helena or Forrest City, because that’s where the government money for schools and hospitals and infrastructure and such is going to go from now on. We can’t afford to keep messing with this dead little town that doesn’t have any remote hope of getting better. We don’t have enough money to send a doctor around to your little health clinic once a week. We’ve got to get you over to the town where he lives and where they have a hospital that can provide him equipment and a living. This is for your own good.”

Nelson, former press aide to Tommy Robinson and Huckabee but a decent sort anyway, has just left a Republican-rewarded patronage job with the Delta Regional Authority. That’s an eight-state compact spending federal grants in the fast-dying Delta region along both sides of the Mississippi River.

Newly relocated to an advertising agency in Little Rock, Nelson gave an interview to a friendly newspaper columnist and, after some discussion of his liking Southern food and culture, shared his valedictory thoughts on what in the wide world we might do for the Delta.

So here’s the idea: You pick out communities with hospitals and schools and decent masses of population and give them more federal grants than you give all these proliferating and tiny dead communities. You try to correct all this chronic dissipation of effort and resources.

It’s school consolidation writ large. It’s an attempt at redistribution of the population. It’s eminent domain on steroids.

It’s cold. It’s difficult. And it’s absolutely right.

What we call the Delta region of eastern Arkansas is a mechanized farm region, vast acreage of soybeans and rice, with pointless towns dotted at every crossroad. These one-time commerce centers thrived before farming was mechanized. Jobs for humans were to be had through the first half of the last century. Now they’re home to boarded windows and people trapped in tragic cycles of poverty without hope of jobs because none is left and none is coming.

The Delta Regional Authority recently received a consultant’s study advocating this very “critical mass” re-emphasis. The study, by a firm from Austin, Tex., called for ditching the old emphasis on “quality of life” and replacing it with an emphasis on “quality of place.”

The difference? Some guy might actually have a good enough quality of life, speaking personally, in a town that, in fact, offered no future for its young people or attractiveness to sustainable economic opportunity. It would have no quality of place, in other words.

Consultants get paid entirely too much to come up with concepts and phrases like that and bandy them amid colorful charts and graphs in what gets called a strategic plan. But this one in fact offers a sound point.

All of this is easier written about than done, of course, else we’d have done it 15 years ago.

The political establishment can’t afford to embrace this. Imagine Congressman Marion Berry’s going into a Delta town where he typically gets 90 percent of the vote and saying, “Hey, vote for me again, please. Then I’m going to airlift all of you over to Helena.”

You do know — don’t you? — that the political problem with change is that the reigning political establishment depends on the status quo.

The human problem with de-emhasizing aid to a dying town and designing a more logical and better quality of place somewhere else is that there are still a few actual people living in the dying town. They need protection from flooding. They need water and sewer services. They need medical help.

We can’t herd people like cattle. We must help them wherever they are. But we can and should start trying to turn their ships at sea.
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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.