INSIDER, CONT. One person who knows at lot about uncertainty at this writing is Jeremy Josephson with Rock City Staging, the company that owns the stage for the event. When we spoke to him Tuesday morning, Rock City’s giant stage was still sitting on a fairway at War Memorial Golf Course. Josephson said the company hadn’t been paid for the stage rental, and he didn’t know when he would be able to move it. He denied that leaving it there was an attempt to pressure promoters to pay up for the stage rental and construction. He said the funds just aren’t there to even begin a teardown. “First you’ve got to find a labor company that’s still willing to work to tear it out,” Josephson said. “You’ve got to find a heavy equipment company that’s still willing to leave the equipment out here that still hasn’t been paid, and you’ve got to find a power company that’s willing to supply power so that we can tear this thing down. That’s going to be hard to come by at this point. It’s not just as simple as me saying, I’m not going to take it out of here until I get paid, it’s everybody involved that’s required to get that done. ... As of right now, we’re talking about thousands of dollars out of our own pocket just to get out of here.”
Friendly transaction A recent mortgage transaction showed that a state agency head has increased substantially the real estate business his department is doing with a friend and fellow supporter of Gov. Mike Beebe. In September, Capitol Place LLC, whose registered agent and at least part owner is Richard Mays, a Little Rock lawyer and former legislator who serves on the state Claims Commission, took out a $6.2 million mortgage with Delta Trust for the former Arkansas Baptist State Convention building at 525 W. Capitol. The LLC bought the building in 2009 for $3.2 million, but now plans the addition of another floor to provide still more rental space to the Arkansas Department of Career Education, headed by Mays’ friend and fellow Beebe supporter, Bill Walker. That lease serves as collateral for the mortgage. Walker wants to combine state Rehabilitation Services into the one building. When completed, the state will pay almost $37,000 a year more for about 2,000 square feet less space than the department has now. Anne Laidlaw, director of the Arkansas Building Authority, which oversees state leasing, raised some questions about the original rental in 2009. She discovered the state was negotiating a lease with an LLC that was soon to sell
the building to the LLC headed by Mays. She consulted with the governor’s office, which said it urged her to go by the book. Laidlaw said Walker favored the building. She said the state studied comparable offers downtown and worked out an acceptable deal, particularly considering inclusion of 100 parking spaces.
Walker’s defense Bill Walker was rankled by Anne Laidlaw’s suggestion that anything had ever been amiss in his agency’s choice of buildings. He insists he didn’t know about Mays’ involvement as a potential landlord until after a state lease was negotiated in November 2009 and said he saw nothing extraordinary in the fact that his agency had negotiated a lease with someone who would later buy a building with the state as a guaranteed tenant or that the parties were political friends. “There are a lot of situations like that out there,” Walker said. He said that, having been in 20 years in politics, it would be hard for his agency to lease space from someone he didn’t know. “It doesn’t mean I rented because they knew me or I knew them.” He defended the consolidation move as necessary from 1) a warehouse space in Riverdale that had long been unsuitable with a landlord unwilling to make improvements and 2) from a building in Corporate Hill in Western Little Rock that had poor access for disabled people. He also said he thought it right for his department to have a building of its own, rather than being several floors in a bank building, as other alternatives contemplated. “I didn’t want to be in a commercial building with bankers and mortgage companies with no real identity,” he said. When completed, he said a centrally located office, at a bus stop, with easy ground-floor access, will serve his agency’s clients better. He said he hopes to further consolidate offices there. He said he was “offended” by how Laidlaw had characterized the transaction. She had told our Arkansas Blog that Walker hadn’t been happy with some of her hard negotiating on terms, including resisting a 10-year, rather than six-year term for the newly expanded lease. He said he believed all rules were followed. He speculated she was unhappy because her husband’s company didn’t have the janitorial contract for the building. That’s an issue that has arisen periodically for Laidlaw. She’s always said his business is kept apart from her agency work. In this case, she said, Colliers International, the leasing agent, invited Laidlaw Inc. to submit a bid on the building and he declined.
43rd Annual Hot Springs Arts & Crafts Fair October 7-9 Friday-Saturday 9am-6pm Sunday Noon-5pm Free Admission & PArking
SpoNSored By Garland COunty ExtEnsiOn HOmEmakErs COunCil
Garland County Fairgrounds 4831 Malvern Road Hot Springs, AR 501.623.6841 • www.hotspringsartsandcraftsfair.com
New Ward Boundary Public Forums Monday, October 10 • 6-7pm Roosevelt Thompson Library 38 Rahling Circle Wednesday, October 12 • 6-7pm Hinton Neighborhood Resource Center 3805 West 12th Street Thursday, October 13 • 6-7pm Southwest Community Center 6401 Baseline Road
www.littlerock.org
eat local support your community
www.arktimes.com OCTOBER 5, 2011 19