Op-Ed: The Lectern, a Failed Prison Plan, and our Freedom of Information

The following is an op-ed piece distributed through the Arkansas Press Association Paid News Distribution Service.

By Colt Shelby, Libertarian candidate for Governor of Arkansas

My family has farmed and ranched the same ground near Cecil for six generations.

Where I come from, you judge people by how they handle other folks’ money and whether they tell you the truth when it costs them something. By that standard, Governor Sarah Sanders has failed Arkansas. Corruption isn’t always a briefcase of cash. More often, it’s a government that serves the people at the top and hides the bill from everybody else.

Start with the lectern. Everybody laughs about the $19,000 podium, but the details aren’t funny. 

Her staff put it on a state credit card in June 2023, buying from a Virginia event firm with political ties to Sanders. She bought it from a company that had been a paid consultant on her 2022 campaign and doesn’t even make or sell lecterns. When the nonpartisan legislative auditors dug in, they found seven areas where her office may have broken state law, including paying before delivery and poor record keeping. They flagged that her office’s shredding of a shipping record could itself be a records violation. And the Governor? She declined to talk to the auditors at all. Instead, she argued the rules simply don’t apply to the Governor’s office.

That’s the whole problem in one sentence. Rules for you, not for her.

Then came the cover-up. While a lawsuit was pending over passenger manifests for her State Police flights, Sanders called a special session on three days’ notice to gut our Freedom of Information Act. Her first bill would have walled off government deliberations from public view, and made her security-records exemption retroactive to January 2022, just days before she took office. Arkansans of every stripe rose up, including two county Republican committees, and she had to back down. But she still walked away with a law that shields all records about security services for the Governor. As one legislator warned at the time, a Governor could fly a big donor around on the State Police plane on the taxpayer’s dime, and nobody would ever know.

Why does this matter to a single mom in Pine Bluff or a cattleman in Franklin County? Because when a Governor can hide how she spends your money, she stops listening to you.

Ask the people of Franklin County. The state bought 815 acres there in 2024 for $2.95 million to build a 3,000-bed prison nobody local asked for. Residents packed a school gym to warn her the land wouldn’t work. She didn’t listen. The Senate rejected her $750 million request to start building, and today the project sits in limbo while she insists she’s yet to see a better location. That’s nearly $3 million of your money parked in a field because the Governor couldn’t admit she was wrong.

Or look at LEARNS. Whatever you think of school choice, the governor asked for more than $309 million for her voucher program, money flowing to private operators with far less accountability than the public schools our rural towns depend on. When a smalltown school loses students and funding, it doesn’t just lose a classroom. It loses the heart of the community.

This is what corruption costs every day Arkansans: A budget built for insiders, records locked away from the people who paid for them, and rural communities told to sit down and be grateful.

I’m a conservative in the old, plain sense. I believe government should be small, honest, and answerable to the people who fund it. That’s why, as Governor, I will restore the Freedom of Information Act the way it was written. I will be a Governor who is honest with the people of Arkansas. We know our government can’t provide every answer or remove every hardship a family or community will face. What every Arkansan deserves is honesty. That is why I am running and I am asking for your vote to be your next Governor.

Arkansas deserves honest leadership.

Colt Shelby is the Libertarian nominee for Governor of Arkansas. He lives in Cecil,where his family has farmed for six generations.