Arkansas Reporter
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Taco travails City Director Ken Richardson broached a hot culinary topic toward the end of last week’s City Board meeting. He said he’d received complaints from Latino mobile food vendors (AKA taco trucks) that they’d been subjected to repeat city inspections despite being in compliance with permit requirements. He said the vendors had begun to feel “some form of discrimination” was at work. City Manager Bruce Moore produced for the Times a list of violations dating back three years that showed only a handful of citations of Latino food vendors and none this year. But he never did produce a requested list of inspections that did NOT result in a citation. Richardson said he was reluctant to identify those who’d complained because they feared retaliation. And he declined to say who he believed might be responsible for attention to the vendors, except to say that he believed the complaints arose from another member of the city board. He said city board members should stick to policy, not burden city staff with special requests for inspections. For a variety of reasons, suspicion focused on City Director Joan Adcock, elected at-large but originally a power in Southwest Little Rock, once a working class white neighborhood but now heavily minority, home to many taco trucks and represented by Richardson. She told the Times she was not responsible for the recent inspections. But she said she had raised concerns in the past. “Last summer it was a big concern of SWLR United for Progress and there was discussion in several of the meetings in SWLR. One member who works for the State Health Dept. was concerned and I think she talked to them about it. I talked with Mr. Moore and Mr. [Bryan] Day and I think even the Mayor. The discussions were not only on Mexican Vendors but also people selling shoes, purses, pictures and other things on the corners and vacant lots in SWLR. This was a big concern of the businesses in the area as well as the trash that was CONTINUED ON PAGE 13 12
MARCH 28, 2013
ARKANSAS TIMES
SMITH ABROAD: But still thinks of Arkansas politics.
Long way from home Republican politico Princella Smith gains policy chops in Israel. BY DAVID RAMSEY
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hat follows is your typical story of a 6-foot-tall black female Republican who starts off in Wynne, Arkansas, and ends up in Israel, writing for a Zionist newspaper and studying counter-terrorism. Princella Smith has always been a wild card. A high school and college basketball star who interned for thenLt. Gov. Win Rockefeller and in John Boozman’s congressional office, she first drew major attention on the political scene in 2004. As a 20-year-old Ouachita Baptist University student, she won MTV’s “Stand up and Holla” essay contest, earning her a prime-time speech at the Republican National Convention. Her speech was fiery and fun, and led many to proclaim her as a rising political star. After college, she bounced around a few political gigs, working for Maryland Republican Michael Steele’s unsuccessful Senate campaign and as a communications flack for Newt Gingrich and his PAC. In 2010, she ran for Arkansas’s 1st District congressional seat after the retirement of Blue Dog Democrat
Marion Berry. Despite the endorsements of her former mentor Gingrich and the Democrat-Gazette, the run was a dud — she fell to Rick Crawford in the Republican primary by a 78-22 margin. This fall, Smith decided that she wanted to take a break from politics and focus on policy. She had always been interested in the Middle East and Israel, and started searching for programs with a focus in issues surrounding terrorism. Turns out, it’s possible to get a graduate degree in counter-terrorism (they really need to get the word out — surely they’d have been overloaded with applicants with a little product placement on “Homeland”). Smith found one of the few schools in the world offering such a program, and was accepted into the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy in Herzliya, Israel, where she is now pursuing a master’s degree in counter-terrorism and homeland security studies. Smith grew up a minister’s kid and had always been interested in Israel, but she was also drawn to the program by an earnest desire to gain some seri-
ous foreign-policy chops. “Most people when they think of me, they’re thinking of campaigns and stuff,” she says. “I know that at some point in my life I want to be able to make a serious impact on the world and make some kind of imprint on the globe. I’m not a person that can sit back and watch things happen in the world and not try to make it better. I think you have to equip yourself. A large part of equipping yourself is educating yourself and in this particular instance, you go to a place like Israel — going to a place like this is the best place to learn. If you’re going to learn counter-terrorism, go learn it in a place where they’re doing it.” What does a master’s in counterterrorism entail? In addition to general poli-sci courses, Smith has been taking classes and writing policy papers on various aspects of terrorism, from the role of the media to the roots of Islamic ideology. Packed into one year, the master’s program covers the “essence of counter-terrorism,” Smith says. “Knowing how to combat terrorism, knowing CONTINUED ON PAGE 70