Delta Grassroots Caucus – May 2007

What we’re here about today is, very simply put, a good quality of life for our people. A respectable quality of life shouldn’t just be accessible to residents of the East and West coasts. It shouldn’t just be attainable for people from the Northeast, the Southeast or the Midwest. A good quality of life should be available to all Americans, equally, whether they are the good people of Appalachia or the good people of the Mississippi River Delta.

When we get caught up in discussions of economic development, transportation infrastructure enhancement, workforce development, education improvement and other important matters, it sustains and reinvigorates me to remember that you and I, the Delta Regional Authority and other partners in this effort aren’t really after new highways, school computer labs, or auto manufacturing plants. Those are tools with which we can accomplish our ultimate goal: lives that have value to the proud people we represent in the Delta.
One such tool we’ll be very excited to add to our tool box in Southeast Arkansas and other parts of the Delta is I-69. One way Delta communities will achieve a better quality of life is through direct access to the global market. Pine Bluff is already fortunate enough to have a fairly comprehensive transportation infrastructure that includes interstate, rail, river port and airport components. I-69 and the I-69 Connector at Pine Bluff, however, will give Pine Bluff and other Delta communities unprecedented direct access to the market.

Transportation infrastructure improvements, such as I-69, play an important role in developing economies locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. Aside from increased industrial recruiting power, they provide beneficiary communities short and long term jobs, improved earnings, better prices on goods…a whole list of benefits. Obviously, these are all important stops on the highway to our ultimate destination, a better quality of life.

Without losing sight of all that, though, I think we need to become much more anticipatory and much less reactive than we have been in the past. I-69 will be a great opportunity, a fresh start, for many Delta communities, but we need to be prepared to make something more of that opportunity. The benefits of highway construction to nearby communities are undoubtedly great, but they diminish over time.

Pine Bluff is served by a number of highways, the construction of which benefited Pine Bluff greatly. They made Pine Bluff what it was thirty and forty years ago. We became complacent, though; we didn’t look to the future and understand that as the world changes Pine Bluff needs to change with it. So, while those highways represented great opportunity, we didn’t turn that opportunity into a sustainable benefit and we, like other Delta communities, are paying the price today.

We can’t wait for I-69 to promote our communities to site selection firms working for manufacturers. We can’t wait for I-69 to provide us the resources to reduce crime, improve our schools and develop our workforce pools. Though that interstate will give us tremendous advantages in those endeavors, were we to exert ourselves in those areas continuously, and as passionately as we have promoted I-69, it would only make the positive impact of that interstate all the greater. At the same time it would better prepare us for the gradual decline in positive benefits that invariably come some years after a highway’s completion.

Rather than wait on economic benefits to come from I-69, we need to prepare for the time when I-69 and the connector are fully operational to squeeze every advantage from the great opportunity they will provide. We must supplement that opportunity, then, with other tools to achieve the sustainable quality of life we’re after for our people.

Those other tools need not be on the same massive scale as an interstate highway of international consequence to have positive and far reaching consequences of their own.

In Pine Bluff this year, we initiated a campaign to promote the United States Federal Earned Income Tax Credit, or EITC, to our citizens. Because Pine Bluffians just weren’t aware of the EITC program in 2002, our low-income residents missed out on almost $3million in tax credits to which they were entitled. An introduction of $3 million additional dollars into Pine Bluff’s economy would be significant and I’m guessing it would be for your community, too.

Recognizing that, we partnered with the Internal Revenue Service, local churches, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), Weed and Seed, Pine Bluff Interested Citizens for Voter Registration, Southern Good Faith Fund, Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families and other organizations to make our people aware of the EITC.

We placed op-eds in local papers, EITC information on the city’s cable access channel, flyers in conspicuous locations and engaged Pine Bluffians with a variety of other outreach methods. It’s too early to tell at this point, but I’m positive our efforts will have paid off when the data comes in. We will have made a difference that will benefit residents as individuals and Pine Bluff as a community. And we did it all with a lot of hard work, but relatively little money.

That’s just one example of what Delta communities can do right now to advance us toward our goal of a better quality of life for our people.

The opportunity to share these practices is what makes the Delta Grassroots Caucus and the Delta Regional Authority so valuable. The partnerships and relationships established through these organizations may in fact be the most important tool in our tool box as we seek to foster the quality of life our people in the Delta deserve.

I hope you find the rest of the day’s activities as fruitful as I’m sure I will. Thank you very much for you time and attention.