It's 9AM

What Would You Do?

Chris Lowry

Dec 04, 2023

We talked about Pine Bluff a lot.

He is the President of a bank in a small LA town.

But he knows a lot of people who know me and…

He knows me too.

We’ve been baseball dads together for three years and he sees how people act around me.

And maybe more important, how I act.

We’ve both made predictions that turned out true.

About the games, the outcomes and the bigger world around us.

Especially PB.

I didn’t know he’d done a deep dive into the blog and read up on my PB rants.

But he did and shared with some friends, some of who knew a little about the going on’s with the Quorum Cort and City Council and more.

And they wondered, like me, why no one was taking at least some of the ideas and running with them.

Take one of the largest projects going on in the City.

They want “something” for the youth to do.

Other than shoot at each other.

They held meetings with the citizens who told them what they wanted.

And the thing for the people…

A go cart track.

I have to ask a question.

How many times would you go to ride a go kart?

Once?

Maybe with your own family, and then again when someone is having a birthday party?

I wasn’t too concerned about the numbers of visitors to a go cart track out by the casino.

I doubted a privately run enterprise wouldn’t last too long.

Except it’s funded by the city.

By tax dollars.

I don’t want the city in the go kart business.

I’d rather them be in the park and recs business.

I’d rather that money go to repairing and rehabbing the two dozen neighborhood parks we have so kids would have a safe place to go play.

I’d refer the tax dollars be spent on patrol cars and cameras.

Or smooth roads and clean streets.

But I also wondered…

Maybe it’s just me.

Maybe I don’t care enough about go carting.

Maybe I’m not open to the experience of it, though I’ve ridden dozens of times.

Maybe it might work.

I mean, it is “something” for kids to do.

PB doesn’t have a movie theater.

We had three when I was growing up there, plus a drive in.

But violence in the theaters in the early 2000’s and declining population shut them all down, one by one.

The last one in the Mall closed.

Reopened under new ownership.

And closed again when the Mall owners left for Texas.

Our something to do was going to the movies.

Or cruising.

We did that a lot too.

They still cruise Regional Park on Sundays, but it shuts the park down to almost anyone else because it takes so long to get in and out of the one road entry.

So no fishing. No picnics. No softball games. No boating on the river, unless you get there before ten am and don’t plan to leave until after seven.

No golf at Harbor Oaks unless you plan the same hours, except it doesn’t open until noon on Sunday.

A lot could be solved with a law making caravanning illegal, except how do you determine who is caravanning and how is cruising and who is just trying to go from point A to other points?

Tougher laws need smarter cops to enforce them, and smarter cops deserve better pay.

But PB isn’t paying cops more. They’re running a go cart track instead.

Which I shared with the bank President.

I suggested turning downtown into a bedroom community and build on the corridor up to Little Rock, like Texas did from Garland to Richardson to Plato and now beyond.

I don’t know if I was prepping him for a funding pitch, or just brainstorming.

After all, I reminded him, they were building a new gas to liquid plant just off that same corridor, and there was a seven year plan attached to it.

Plus the construction of a major hotel at the casino south of the city, and only five minutes from downtown.

We played around with the ideas for a few minutes, just spitballing.

The only thing missing were a couple of cold one’s.

But we ended up with nothing concrete.

It made me feel like the city council and quorum court were right.

There were no easy answers.

Maybe this will be easier:

How Do You Top Your Tree?

Did you get OLD MAGIC

And