On January 7th and 8th, 2025, the Department of Corrections held meetings with Vanir Construction Management to discuss the project goals for a proposed prison in Franklin County.
The Franklin County and River Valley Coalition learned about these meetings through a Freedom of Information request; members of the Coalition naturally assumed the meeting would be open to the public and made the two-hour drive to attend the meeting in North Little Rock’s Department of Corrections office; along with a reporter for the Arkansas Advocate, we also bundled up to see what the “project goals” entailed.
Except…
Employees barred Hennigan and FARP/OAW from entry and removed the Coalition from the room after threatening them with arrest for criminal trespassing. The Department employees aren’t very concerned about government transparency, despite promises to the contrary.
Here’s What Happened
The meeting was slated to run from 8:30-1:00. We arrived a few minutes early and went into a room that’s normally used for intake and processing. We told an employee we wanted to attend the Vanir meeting; without asking further questions, they directed us to ask another employee for a gate code that would grant entry into a parking lot leading to the meeting room. Another employee apparently told member of the Coalition to simply wait for another car to open the gate and follow it through.
It seems reasonable to assume that building employees knew the meeting was happening, expected folks to request entrance into the rear parking lot that granted access to the meeting room, and were comfortable telling attendees how to access that gate.
Outside the building, however, we ran into Mary Hennigan (who, we’re sure, is soon to have some stellar reporting describing this event) of the Arkansas Advocate, who had been denied entry into the room. A building employee stopped me at the door and said the meeting was not open to the public.
A few minutes later, employees removed Adam Watson, a member of the Coalition, and Joey McCutchen, a Fort Smith lawyer, from the room and after threatening them with arrest for criminal trespassing. They told FARP they believed under the Freedom of Information Act that the meeting should be open to the public, but DoC employees told them that because at least two members of the Board of Corrections were not present, it didn’t qualify for the open meetings provision of FOIA.
So that was that.
Except…
Did the Employees Violate FOIA?
Broadly, the Freedom of Information Act – to quote former AG and current Lt. Governor Leslie Rutledge’s version of the FOIA Handbook – should benefit the public interest. From page 27 of the 2022 version of the FOIA handbook: “Statutes enacted for the public benefit are to be construed most favorably to the public.”
That same page goes on to say that any meeting of a commission which involves “the transaction of business” counts as a public meeting. Sounds fairly clear to us, but the handbook is advisory and not necessarily legally binding.
However, there’s also the text of ACA 25-19-106(a):
“Except as otherwise specifically provided by law, all meetings, formal or informal, special or regular, of the governing bodies of all municipalities, counties, townships, and school districts and all boards, bureaus, commissions, or organizations of the State of Arkansas, except grand juries, supported wholly or in part by public funds or expending public funds, shall be public meetings.”
That “all meetings” phrase sure does sound dispositive to us!. It’s not clear at this time what provision employees are relying on that would satisfy the “otherwise specifically provided by law” phrase.
If Vanir wants a billion tax dollars to make this unwanted prison appear on a rocky mountaintop that’s incredibly poorly suited for construction, it seems like the public should get a say in the planning process, don’t you think?
FOIA contains many twists and turns, and we’re not lawyers, so we can’t say for sure if employees violated our rights.
However, we’re certain that this is another data point in a long line of data points that indicate the Sanders administration really, really doesn’t want folks looking too closely or asking too many questions.
Joey McCutcheon said explicitly that some members of the Board weren’t even told this meeting was happening. Benny Magness, per FOIA-d emails, was apparently on a long invite list but to our knowledge didn’t show; only Lona McCastlain seems to have been there, despite not showing up on the email invite. Lee Watson didn’t know that the meeting was happening.
If the DoC employees are relying on the idea that only one member of the Board means it’s not a public meeting, then it seems just a tad suspicious that some members of the Board didn’t know the meeting was happening.
Indeed, here’s the invite list, again obtained via FOIA; you can see only Magness received the invite:
If we are to liberally construe the law in the interest of the public, this many public employees absolutely constitutes “public interest,” especially when – and we cannot hammer home this point loudly enough – this project will end up costing our state a billion dollars or more.
Maybe kicking us and the Coalition members out didn’t technically violate FOIA, but after the original dustup, both the Board and the Sanders administration renewed their commitments to transparency.
We’ll believe it when we see it, because this? This isn’t it.
Remember, folks: if they can do it to Franklin County, they can do it to you. Who’s to say Sen. Missy Irvin’s Mountain View district isn’t next, for example? Sure, the Batesville prison is only 38 miles away from Mountain View – short of the usual 60 mile radius used to determine where new prisons should go – but it’s not like “the usual” stopped the administration this time around, did it?
If you’d like more information on how to help Franklin County (even, and especially, if you don’t live there!), we put together a handy advocacy guide you can find here.
