It’s Popsicle time, finally, for retiring mayor
It won’t be the kind of exit for Jonesboro Mayor Perrin that I would have expected.
He loves being mayor so much that I always figured he’d have to lose the office somehow at the ballot box or be carried out on a stretcher when his batteries finally ran down.
After his initial election as mayor in 2008, I wrote in a Jonesboro Sun editorial: “From the time he announced for mayor in early February to the last day that votes were being cast, Mr. Perrin was on the go like the ‘Energizer bunny.’ He must have shaken every hand in the city at least twice, including those of many people who couldn’t or wouldn’t vote.”
He has carried out the duties of mayor in much the same way, pushing himself almost to the point of exhaustion every day, even on weekends — all for the city he loves. In his farewell speech last week to the City Council, he was not bragging on a long list of achievements but rather still “selling” Jonesboro.
Only a bout with cancer in the midst of a pandemic could have convinced him not to run for re-election this year.
While Perrin might have been a candidate for higher office, perhaps even Congress, he won his dream job in 2008.
I was still editor of The Sun then, but I had known Harold since the late 1970s when we were both young and living in Batesville, where I was editor of the Daily Guard and he was a bank officer whose duties included public relations. He would drop by the office on occasion with a news release, never pushing or prodding, just providing the information.
His bank’s main competitor, on the other hand, was known to use a hammer to try to get publicity.
We occasionally crossed paths over the years as each of us followed our careers in different cities, both winding up in the hometown of our alma mater. He got here before me, in fact had served on the Arkansas State University Board of Trustees and had been on the City Council since 1993.
Some people forget, or may never have known, that our city government was in dire straits in 2008. City facilities had been neglected for years, and the city was running annual budget deficits as high as $6 million. State auditors were raising reg flags about the accounting procedures, and the City was unable to publish its annual financial statement for two straight years, which certainly caught my attention since the statement was supposed to be published in The Sun.
Change had started with the election of five new aldermen to the Council in 2002, but the lack of a progressive mayor stalled things for a time. When a vacancy for the top administrative position opened in 2008, four candidates jumped in, including two members of the council, Perrin and Alec Farmer, leader of the council’s “reformers.”
Those two wound up in a runoff, and Perrin emerged victorious. Farmer urged his supporters to united behind the new mayor, and indeed the two men would become staunch allies. That helped the city especially after Farmer was appointed to the state Highway Commission.
In 2009 city offices were spread out in various buildings, and the council met in a former church building. To get to the mayor’s office, which was in an old savings and loan building, you had to take a tiny elevator or negotiate a narrow stairway to the second floor.
Perrin set out with two major premises: get the city’s finances in order and make customer service a mantra of city government. That doesn’t mean handle city government like a business because the main goal of a business is to make a profit. Government can’t and shouldn’t try. Imagine the consequences of requiring a police department to make more money than it spends.
Even if he had accomplished nothing else in 12 years as mayor, getting those two things done would have made his tenure a success.
I can’t cover all the achievements of the Perrin administration in this space, but you can go into any city office and judge for yourself. Day in and day out, the mayor has emphasized to the nearly 600 city employers that the citizens of Jonesboro are their customers and deserve good service.
A year or so after I retired as editor of The Sun, Harold asked me to become a contract adviser on communications and other issues. I had never been on the inside of government but rather had been an antagonist to some mayors over the years. However he’s one of the few public officials who I thought held the public interest over his own so I agreed.
One of my first projects was to create the office of communications director, which has been critical in connecting city government to its customers.
Over the years I also filled interim positions four times, first as communications director, then as chief operations officer or chief of staff as the position came to be called.
Especially in the office next door, I saw important another principle — transparency — was to this mayor. His communications, including the calendar and emails, have always been open to other members of the staff. He never tried to hide anything in a personal account. He conducted weekly department heads meetings, not to micro-manage but rather to keep up with the progress of the various departments, to keep them accountable to the citizens.
On various occasions I tried to get him to take a vacation, but in 12 years he never did. Even his weekends were seldom his own. I recall one Saturday when he had seven events on his schedule, and he made every one.
His tenure started with an ice storm and ended with a pandemic, complicated by a tornado. But Jonesboro is immensely better for what he has done.
In 2008, when he decided to give up his Council seat and run for mayor, I asked him what he would do if he lost. “I told Susan [his wife] that if we don’t win, you and I can stay home and eat Popsicles,” he said.
Break out the Popsicles, Susan.
Roy Ockert is a former editor of The Jonesboro Sun, The Courier at Russellville and The Batesville Guard. He can be reached at royo@suddenlink.net.