posted on November 9, 2004 01:26:53 PM new
Logansdad wrote - If Bill was not such a great guy, he would not have a library that is being dedicated in his honor next week.
Many more like this.
It Takes a Library - How many lawyers do you need to build the Clinton library?
News/Current Events Editorial Keywords: CLINTON, PRESIDENTAL LIBRARY, LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS
Source: Weekly Standard
Published: February 26, 2001 Author: By Kane Webb
Posted on 02/19/2001 18:08:07 PST by JeanS
Little Rock, Ark.
Two high-school students are asleep in the back row of the Arkansas Supreme Court, and the rest of their classmates, the ones with their eyes open, have that slack-jawed look of the video generation under the anesthetic of a school assignment. Who can blame them? It's not easy to stay awake as Tom Carpenter, attorney for the city of Little Rock, approaches the seven justices to make his case. He aims to convince the court, if not the people of Little Rock, that city financing of the purchase of land for the Clinton Library is legal. Another day, another Clinton controversy, in another court of law.
At times like this, it seems as if Arkansas has spent most of the Clinton era in a courtroom. Waiting. Waiting for the arguments. Waiting for the plausible explanation. Waiting for the verdict. Waiting for the end. But certainly not waiting for Arkansas's most famous and infamous son to save the day. Bill Clinton's only presence in this courtroom is his name. Which is more than enough to keep legal briefs flying and tempers flaring.
If it weren't for the students, there wouldn't be much of a crowd at the state's highest court this cold, gray February morning not a month into Bill Clinton's post-presidential life. Just a few local reporters, Carpenter, a lawyer for the plaintiff, and the plaintiff herself—a blunt, 68-year-old, white-haired pain in City Hall's outstretched neck named Nora Harris.
She's suing the city for the way it's buying the 27.7 acres of land along the Arkansas River that one day—2003? 2004?—will be the site of the William J. Clinton Presidential Center, now bumped up to a $200-million project by the ex-president. Yes, $200 million. It's the kind of development you don't usually find in Arkansas. Even something really important, like renovation of the Razorbacks' football stadium, runs a mere $106 million. But then, only half of the $200 million will be spent on the library. The rest? Well, there's a Camp David-like retreat in Hot Springs to pay for, an endowment to fatten, and a whole post-presidential agenda to fund. The William J. Clinton Foundation, it seems, will pay for everything surrounding the presidential library except what actually surrounds the presidential library: the land. The city of Little Rock is on the hook, with a $16.5 million bond issue.
Meanwhile, on this same morning, Dan Burton's House Government Reform Committee in Washington is finding out some interesting details about the Clinton Library. Namely, that Denise Rich, the ex-wife of America's most famous pardoned fugitive, Marc Rich, has donated "an enormous sum of money" to the library fund. Or so says her attorney, for his client has opted to take the Fifth rather than testify. This prompts a congressional subpoena to make public the names of library donors.
Things aren't quite so dramatic in Arkansas's capital. Just persistent. The Rich money and what it may or may not have bought is hardly the first controversy over the Clinton Library.
The library is just one more instance of the polarizing effect William Jefferson Clinton has had on his home state. A presidential library would seem the kind of project to quicken the pulse of every civic booster. But not here, and not with this president.
Harris's lawsuit against the city has been proceeding for almost three years now. She says the city is playing an illegal shell game by pledging general fund revenue to pay off a general revenue bond that financed the library land. She thinks there should have been a specific bond issue to pay for the land, which the city wanted to avoid for fear of having a Clinton referendum. The city has used general revenue to subsidize the struggling parks department in the past. That's where the shell game comes in. It doesn't use general revenue directly to pay off the bonds for the library land. Harris's argument is that the city is doing this indirectly—general funds to the bonds, but with a detour through the parks.
The city keeps winning, Nora Harris keeps appealing, and plans for the library have been kept waiting. This self-described retired housewife isn't the only resident of Little Rock who has taken the city to court over the library. Eugene Pfeifer III, a prominent real-estate developer and another City Hall gadfly, has sued Little Rock over its attempt to seize his three acres of land on the library site. Pfeifer's suit, which is on appeal, has held up the groundbreaking for months.
Among other things, Pfeifer doesn't like the way Little Rock officials decided to spend more than $12 million to acquire the site by using fees from the city's parks, zoo, and golf courses—a move the city made without voter approval. "The decision was top-down, secretive, non-participatory, and many of the city directors didn't know a thing about it on the night it passed and some still don't have the details," Pfeifer tells me by e-mail. "This decision to provide the land for the presidential library from our Parks and Recreation Department has raped our city zoo, parks and golf courses."
Indeed, Little Rock's zoo has been struggling for years and recently lost its national accreditation. And by pledging their money to the library, the city may be driving the parks into a deficit. This will probably mean a huge increase in fees or taxpayer money that goes into the city's general fund for other basic projects. Either way, it's not what the residents of Little Rock signed on for. The city maintains that it is within its legal rights to use the fees from the parks, golf courses, and zoo to pay for the library's land and replace any shortfall from the general fund just as it has in the past.
At one especially ludicrous point in the Pfeifer case, the city tried to argue that the library wasn't really a library but a park, so it could pay for the land with park revenues. It's all rather . . . Clintonesque.
As Justice Donald Corbin puts it in a question to Harris's lawyer, David Henry: "Aren't we dealing with semantics?"
"Yes," answers Henry, "the city is playing word games. Like putting a sign on a cow that says horse."
One of the students suppresses a laugh. Hey, they are paying attention. So are the justices. To judge by their rough treatment of Carpenter, they seem to understand the Clintonesque game and the Clintonesque question: Is the city's financing illegal or just slick? What it isn't is simple. But nothing is simple when it comes to Bill Clinton and his home state of Arkansas.
A few days later, it's raining cats, dogs, and subpoenas in Little Rock. The Clinton Foundation has been served; Gene Pfeifer checks in to tell me that he doesn't expect his appeal to be heard till summer, and the actual construction of the library seems farther away than ever. The steady rain makes it feel colder than it is, and the drive from downtown to the future site of the Clinton Library takes longer than usual. Almost five minutes.
It's easy to find the 27 acres destined for Clinton enshrinement. You just take a right at the Arkansas River and head east out of downtown until you run into absolutely nothing. That's it. Desolate would be a kind description.
Only a few buildings remain on the land. Then again, only a few buildings were there to begin with. There's a 19th-century train station of rust-red brick that will be preserved and transformed into a public policy center. Next to it, sitting a little too close, is a pea-green, metal building. Windowless, empty, condemned. May Supply Co. It's Gene Pfeifer's building. It's not holding up well, but it's holding up everything.
Jim Dailey must wince when he sees that building. He can barely get the words out when I talk to him later in the day. "We've removed quite a few buildings," he says. "The only piece left is" . . . pause . . . "Gene's." Dailey has been mayor of Little Rock since 1994. He has presided over an unprecedented revitalization of the city's core. Loft apartments, a riverfront district full of yuppie beer halls and coffee houses, the expansion of high-tech businesses into downtown—the whole, gentrified, Jane Jacobs dream. Dailey has all the right connections for a politician looking to get ahead in Little Rock: He's long been friends with Bill Clinton, he's a lifelong Democrat from a prominent local family, and he gets his political advice from Skip Rutherford, one of Bill Clinton's closest friends and now the subpoenaed president of the Clinton Foundation.
But landing the Clinton Library in his city has been anything but a crowning achievement for Jim Dailey. The way the city acquired the land, the way it leveraged the parks and zoo, the way it caved in to Clinton paranoia and refused to let the people vote on a bond issue to finance the site . . . it's all led inexorably to an erosion of public confidence in city government and, perhaps most predictably, another division along the Great Clinton Fault Line.
At one point, folks got so disgusted that they flooded City Hall with phone calls against renaming a main downtown thoroughfare Clinton Avenue. It was eventually shortened to just a few blocks leading to the library.
"The way we financed the land, I've thought about it a hundred times," says the mayor. "With the available options, knowing we were being pushed to have some commitment . . . I still think having the presidential library here, despite the issue continuing to be part of the Clinton story, will be a wonderful addition to the city. There are a lot of pieces to this story that makes it a tough and agonizing journey. Knowing what I do today . . ."
The mayor trails off. Then, as if remembering his supporting role in this latest Clinton tragicomedy, he defends the decision not to put a vote before the people. "It would have been a mandate for or against Clinton," he says. "The big issue was do we want to turn this into a vote of up or down on President Clinton?"
Little Rock's leaders did not want that. After all, there's no denying the economic benefit of a presidential library. City officials estimate the library will attract about 300,000 visitors and an extra $10.7 million a year. Its location near downtown has already drawn two major business developments, and longtime residents are thrilled to have anything built in this forgotten part of the city, where old water heaters and broken washing machines go to die. But, perhaps inevitably, the financing controversy has led to lawsuits and bad feelings—over a $200-million presidential library that should have been welcomed as the ultimate slab of nonpartisan pork. Bill Clinton hasn't been pleased.
"There have been times . . . he's vented a little bit," says Dailey. "I agonized on my role as mayor in the midst of all [the Clinton scandals]. Bill Clinton is my friend, and I certainly don't wear a halo. I tried to be as supportive of him as Webb Hubbell, another friend, but at the same time, I'm the mayor of the city. . . . It was a difficult time for me."
A difficult time that never quite draws to a close. When Bill Clinton visited Arkansas to address the state legislature during his last week in office, he surprised local officials by declaring the library a $200 million project—more than twice the original, $85 million estimate. Two days after his visit, the president cut the deal to have his Arkansas disbarment proceedings dropped. But the Pfeifer and Harris lawsuits drag on, and now the fund-raising prowess of a non-profit, tax-deductible foundation that may have to publish every donor's name will be put to the test.
In a state like Arkansas and a city like Little Rock, where everybody knew everybody even before we all met in court, Skip Rutherford is the kind of local personality who is well-known for his well-knownness. Like a TV weatherman. He's regularly described as a Good Guy, which is the highest of southern compliments, and even his ideological opposites usually have a good word for the Skipper.
He may be the aboriginal Friend of Bill, and he's one of the few FOBs not to be tainted by scandal. Which is why it's something of a shock to see his name on a congressional subpoena. "To Skip Rutherford, President, William J. Clinton Presidential Foundation. You are hereby commanded to produce . . ." Will Little Rock never see the end of this?
In his capacities as a Clinton defender, both officially and un-, Rutherford has earned a reputation for always returning phone calls and never dodging questions. But on subpoena day, he uncharacteristically doesn't get back to a reporter. Instead, his assistant, Jordan Johnson, calls back with the Clinton Foundation's latest line: "I can neither confirm nor deny that Denise Rich contributed. We have got a subpoena. I can't comment. We haven't done anything differently. We've been using the two-term model set by Reagan."
About the only thing Johnson can say is that the Clinton Foundation may still pay part of the rent for the ex-president's offices in Manhattan, even if he moves to cheaper digs in Harlem. How will this new role for the foundation sit with donors? Johnson says he hasn't received any complaints so far. Rutherford said he hadn't, either.
But this arrangement surely came as a surprise to library contributors, especially those in Arkansas, who must have thought they were giving money for bricks and mortar in Little Rock. Joe Ford, a conservative businessman and CEO of Arkansas-based Alltel, a telecommunications company, pledged $1 million in 1999, specifically citing the project's impact on downtown. When a reporter for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette asked how he felt about helping Clinton pay his rent in New York, Ford said simply, "We gave money to the Clinton library. We didn't give to anything else."
On the other hand, one prominent local Republican and non-donor to the library says that's what post-presidential foundations are for—picking up the tabs and saving the taxpayers some bucks. "That doesn't trouble me," he says. "As a taxpayer, I'm delighted."
But the Harlem office is the least of Rutherford's worries. As another FOB facing a subpoena, he's got a bigger controversy on his hands. The day after the foundation gets its full-disclosure demand from Congress, Skip Rutherford is traveling from Little Rock to Fayetteville, where he teaches a journalism class once a week at the University of Arkansas. His subject: crisis communications. He shouldn't have any trouble finding material.
posted on November 9, 2004 01:33:56 PM new
Still jealous Clinton has something named after him?
Are you waiting for Iraq to be renamed Bushland?
People were upset that their land was be taken to be used as a National Park. But Bush wants to take land from national parks so he can drill for oil and this is OK for you.
Q. What's the difference between the Vietnam War and the Iraq War?
A. George W. Bush had a plan to get out of the Vietnam War.
--------------------------------------
There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again." —George W. Bush, Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002
----------------------------------
"Give it up for George W. Bush, the best friend international jihad ever had."
[ edited by logansdad on Nov 9, 2004 01:36 PM ]
posted on November 9, 2004 01:34:42 PM new
It seems like Arkansas is taking the brunt of the Library. Here's another article.
Clinton Library Worsens Little Rock's Financial Woes
NewsMax.com ^ | Saturday May 4, 2002 | Carl Limbacher
Posted on 05/04/2002 7:13:21 PM PDT by Carl/NewsMax
The William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Library Foundation has been approved for millions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks by the city of Little Rock, Ark. - even as local officials worry that the city's growing budget deficit may force deep cuts in funding for health care services, education and other community needs.
"Our city is broke," Little Rock businessman and leading Clinton Library critic Eugene Pfeifer told NewsMax.com Friday. "We've got about $500 million of unmet infrastructure needs. Our county is practically broke. We can't even maintain an adequate county jail."
Indeed, just months before Clinton Library officials convinced the city and state to forgo $4 million in sales tax and user fee revenues, Little Rock City Manager Cy Carney proposed a list of budget cuts so deep they left local residents fearing the worst.
Potential cutbacks included the elimination of health care services at the East Little Rock Community Center, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported in October. Also targeted for possible elimination: two other community centers, with the city's Education Commission, its Youth Task Force and Domestic Violence Commission earmarked for consolidation.
"They're hard cuts," City Director Joan Adcock worried to the Democrat-Gazette. "They are really deep into the community."
"Our state is under a court order for deficiency in educating our children, yet the city, state and county are the entities that are getting tapped for [the Clinton Library's] tax break," Pfeifer complained.
"I'm just opposed to the public financing of what is supposed to be a private foundation," he added - while saying he otherwise supports the project wholeheartedly.
"Back in 1997, we were promised that in exchange for the city giving the Clinton Library its land, we would get back a 27-acre jewel of a project that would generate economic benefits forever and all we had to do was give that land," Pfeifer said.
But it hasn't turned out that way.
According to the local businessman, the lease between Little Rock and the Clinton Foundation stipulates that the city will pay to maintain 23 out of 27 acres on the site; a cost estimated by city officials to run at least $500,000 a year.
"That cost gets incurred in perpetuity," Pfeifer said. And that's on top of the city's initial land grant, said to be worth at least $12 million.
"We hardly absorb that news and then they hit up Little Rock for a $4 million tax break," the Pfeifer complained.
The figure is slightly larger than the 2001 budget deficit projected by city officials last October ($3.4 million on a budget of $164 million), and represents one-third of the amount of the cuts ($12 million) eventually agreed upon for Little Rock's 2002 budget.
In addition, city residents will fork over an additional $3.4 million in tax increases.
Pfeifer also complained that Clinton Library officials had repeatedly redefined the land's use in order to maximize taxpayer funding.
For instance, Library officials obtained the multi-million dollar tax break under the "Advantage Arkansas" program, which was designed to attract businesses to the state. "They snuck the library into that program as a regional and national corporate headquarters employing more than 25 people," Pfeifer said.
But two years ago, in order to obtain land owned by Pfiefer and others for the project, city officials declared that the facility would serve as a public park.
"It started out as a presidential library," he explained. "Then a year later, when I resisted them taking my land, suddenly it became 'park.' The city had to find a basis under which they could take the land, a public purpose of some sort."
"Maybe next they'll declare it a farm so they can get an agricultural subsidy," Pfeifer joked.
posted on November 9, 2004 01:39:52 PM new
"Still jealous Clinton has something named after him".
Not really lognsdad. I didn't like him but as long as he was President I didn't bash him.
It just seems like Clinton Takes and Takes. What has he donated to his own Library. Do you think it will attract enough tourists to give the city of Little Rock some of their money back so they can help their people?
posted on November 9, 2004 01:49:27 PM new
One more article....
Our Presidential Libraries
by Robert Dallek
Robert Dallek has worked in six presidential libraries.
Illegations that President Clinton pardoned Marc Rich partly in return for donations to his presidential library have raised questions about the value of such institutions and the federal appropriations that support them. In raising funds for his library from friends and supporters, Clinton followed a tradition established by Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt and continued by all subsequent Presidents. Private contributors have funded the ten presidential libraries and museums, which with the exception of the Nixon Library were then given to the government. Nixon's library will also become a ward of the National Archives once his papers and tapes are processed and deposited there.
The Clinton flap has exposed all these presidential repositories to public fire. "Why do these white elephants exist at all?" Eric Gibson asked in the Wall Street Journal. Presidential libraries, Gibson complains, have lost touch with the "tasteful beginnings" evident at the FDR site. "Nowadays they look like the fruit of an unholy alliance between the Smithsonian and Graceland--repositories doubling as shrines to a personality cult." FDR's Hyde Park facility "plays up the Hundred Days and plays down the packing of the Supreme Court," Gibson says. "JFK's library celebrates the Cuban Missile Crisis while having strangely little to say about the Bay of Pigs invasion or the Diem assassination."
Gibson's complaint is not without merit. The museum tied to each of the libraries is a forum for celebrating the President's life and Administration. These museums do put their best foot forward, but a country needs people it can look up to. And each of the ten Presidents memorialized in their museums had some--and in FDR's case, considerable--virtues worth remembering.
Gibson believes we would be better off if we housed presidential papers at the National Archives. But if the tens of millions of papers and the thousands of hours of tapes and oral histories in the presidential libraries went into the archives, it would limit the availability of these records to biographers and historians and impoverish the public's understanding of twentieth-century US history and the institution of the presidency. The libraries do a superb job of organizing these vast collections and making them available in a timely fashion to anyone with a legitimate research interest.
Questions about whether Clinton exchanged donations to his library for pardons can serve at least one useful purpose. Let's avoid future allegations of this kind by providing federal funds to build and administer all future presidential libraries. A nation with a $1.96 trillion national budget can afford to be generous in support of historical studies.
It's not as if the country is so well informed about its past that we can take historical knowledge for granted. A survey in the New York Times of 556 seniors at fifty-five leading colleges and universities revealed that these young people knew more about Beavis and Butt-Head than about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Where 99 percent of those surveyed could identify the TV cartoon characters, 40 percent could not correctly name the fifty-year period in which the Civil War occurred. Only one student in the survey answered all of the thirty-four high-school-level questions correctly; the average score was a troubling 53 percent.
Lawmakers, who will surely object to providing money for presidential libraries, especially for an opposing party's President, would do well to reflect on John Dos Passos' assertion, "In times of change and danger, when there is a quicksand of fear under men's reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present."
Full federal funding for presidential libraries should bring with it new rules of control over papers and artifacts. All the libraries currently include privately donated materials with access restrictions. Two examples at the JFK Library are cases in point: Recently donated Joseph P. Kennedy papers are made available only to applicants approved by a screening committee; a 500-page Jacqueline Kennedy oral history is closed until after the death of both of her children [see David Corn and Gus Russo, page 15]. Limitations on access imposed by private parties should become obsolete. Under federal national security and privacy rules, papers are already carefully reviewed before being made available. Special access should become an anachronism. Like the country's history, a taxpayer-supported institution is the property of all its people. Access to presidential materials should be as wide as possible.
posted on November 9, 2004 02:06:01 PM newLet's avoid future allegations of this kind by providing federal funds to build and administer all future presidential libraries. A nation with a $1.96 trillion national budget can afford to be generous in support of historical studies.
We can build the George Dubya Bush Presidential Library in Iraq since that is where Bush has made his legacy and spent over $200 million. Our country is trillions of dollars in debt, Bush does not deserve to have a presidential library named after him.
Q. What's the difference between the Vietnam War and the Iraq War?
A. George W. Bush had a plan to get out of the Vietnam War.
--------------------------------------
There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again." —George W. Bush, Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002
---------------------------------- "Give it up for George W. Bush, the best friend international jihad ever had."
posted on November 9, 2004 06:36:51 PM new
The Clinton Library is associated with the University of Arkansas and includes the university's Clinton School of Public Service.
The library is projected to have an annual economic benefit of $10.7 million annually and created more than 1,500 jobs during its construction.
My guess is that the City of Little Rock was in deep doo-doo before the Clinton Library came along.
Just another cheap shot for those who still wish the BOOGEY-MAN would disappear. He won't
____________________________________________
Dick Cheney: "I have not suggested there's a connection between Iraq and 9/11..."
posted on November 9, 2004 06:55:18 PM new
That's just a projected amount, as this is happening the city of little rock is going down the tubes. But who cares. Well it is built and the construction jobs are gone. I am sure with Clinton's popularity they will be beating down the door...
I wish the City Good Luck and I hope they recoop their loss and I mean that.
posted on November 9, 2004 07:22:22 PM new
Maybe some are just jealous that their chosen leader doesn't even read.
And discussing Clinton may take away the worry of how Bush will dig his way out of the mess he's made in Iraq where innocent people are being killed daily.
posted on November 9, 2004 08:04:29 PM new
The Bush library will undoubtedly be filled with stuff other people read, perhaps read to the President.
I wonder if Crawford is ready to foot the bill with tax breaks??
____________________________________________
Dick Cheney: "I have not suggested there's a connection between Iraq and 9/11..."
posted on November 9, 2004 08:37:57 PM new
This thread was started to respond to Logansdad telling us about the Library to be dedicated. He made the comment in another thread and I was just answering his comment.
So Kiara you are telling me that Logansdad is jealous?
I am not jealous as I honestly don't care about Clinton but I wanted Logansdad to see that there was a price to pay for this library.
The dems were chasting Bush about not funding the No Child left Behind. Well look what happened in Little Rock to those children and other services.
Evidently you didn't read the articles so I will highlight areas.
From the article.even as local officials worry that the city's growing budget deficit may force deep cuts in funding for health care services, education and other community needs.
Our state is under a court order for deficiency in educating our children, yet the city, state and county are the entities that are getting tapped for [the Clinton Library's] tax break," Pfeifer complained.
