Arkansas Reporter
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On May 17, UALR Chancellor Joel Anderson awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree to Mara Leveritt, who graduated from UALR 40 years ago. Anderson taught her then. Mara Leveritt is the co-founder, godmother, senior editor, awardwinner and, still, conscience of the Arkansas Times, which itself came to life as a scrappy newsprint magazine 40 years ago this fall. Would we still be here today without her immense contributions? Doubtful. Thanks and congratulations, Dr. Leveritt. Mara continues her work on a trilogy of books on the West Memphis 3, her passion and obsession and a key part of the lifeline that saved three wrongly convicted East Arkansas youths. If that story is her fame and glory, be assured that it was really a small part of her legacy of advocacy, compassion and courage here. UALR put the commencement on YouTube; you can watch it at arktimes. com/mara.
Bethune pens ‘Gay Panic’ Former 2nd District Republican Rep. Ed Bethune has just published a novel, “Gay Panic in the Ozarks.” No, it’s not a quickie roman a clef about same-sex marriage in Eureka Springs. From the online description at Amazon: “Wounds and prejudices stemming from the Civil War, the Great Depression and other conflicts run deep in the Ozark hill country. These frailties, like the scab of a putrid wound, will from time to time reopen and ooze pus. In the tumultuous year of 1968, a farmer stumbles onto the gruesome scene of a hate crime: the lynching of a young gay man whose mangled body has been left hanging from a tree. Clues abound, but the investigation withers and dies. Thirty-eight years later, Aubrey Hatfield and the citizens of Campbell County get a second chance to grapple with man’s greatest vice — the refusal to see wrong and do something about it. The life journey of protagonist Aubrey Hatfield contrasts the culture of the turbulent Sixties with today’s culture, and ponders how we should adapt to or resist the ever-changing notions of right and wrong. Thus, Gay Panic in CONTINUED ON PAGE 11 10
MAY 22, 2014
ARKANSAS TIMES
BRIAN CHILSON
Dr. Leveritt
IN DEEP: Koy Butler at 4404 Arlington Road in North Little Rock.
House of woe State investigating North Little Rock over rejection of adult care home. BY RICH SHUMATE
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he stately gray brick house with black plantation shutters sits alongside a quiet, curved street in Little Rock’s upscale Leawood neighborhood, indistinguishable from the homes around it. Inside, two of the women who live there sit around the kitchen table, family style, with their caretaker and two visitors, enjoying a lunch of roast beef and potatoes, washed down with iced tea. A partially finished jigsaw puzzle rests on a table in the adjacent dining room. Meanwhile, a dozen miles away on Arlington Road in North Little Rock, a more modest red brick ranch house in the Lakewood neighborhood that was in the remodeling process sits half finished and abandoned. Weeds poke up through the concrete in the driveway, and a giant dumpster outside overflows with construction waste. Koy Butler owns both of these houses.
He intended the second to be like the first — a place where up to three elderly disabled people receive around-theclock care in a home setting, surrounded by their own furniture and prized possessions, rather than the sterile environment of a nursing home. But Butler’s House of Three, as he calls it, ran into a bureaucratic buzzsaw in North Little Rock, fueled by neighborhood politics, leaving him marooned with an unfinished project. Frustrated, Butler filed a complaint with the Arkansas Fair Housing Commission, which is now investigating whether the city violated state and federal fair housing laws by requiring Butler to seek rezoning of the property for his adult care home, which both the Planning Commission and the City Council rejected. Butler and his attorney, Dana McClain, contend the federal Fair
Housing Act prohibits cities from using zoning rules to treat housing for the disabled differently from housing for anyone else. Butler now wants the city to pay $553,000 to make him whole financially. “I just don’t see why the city is dragging their feet,” he said. “I’ve got so much invested in that house that I can’t move forward until that’s off my balance sheet.” To add insult to injury, on one of his many trips to City Hall to untangle the mess, he was hit by a car on Main Street, leaving him with a cast on his foot. In an interview, North Little Rock City Attorney C. Jason Carter conceded “absolutely” the city could have done a better job of dealing with Butler’s request. But he said the root of the problem was that the city had never previously been faced with a project of this type in a residential neighborhood. “I’d call this a case of first impression in North Little Rock,” Carter said. “And we were stumbling our way through it.” Butler, who has worked in the nursing home industry and is also an alderman in Lonoke, opened his first House of Three in Leawood in 2013. It’s a for-profit business, but he said it’s also something of a mission. CONTINUED ON PAGE 12