Jason Tolbert with our content partner, The Tolbert Report, is reporting that former House Speaker Bill Stovall will serve in a newly created position of chief of staff.

Stovall currently serves as Administrative Assistant to the Speaker and Director of Constituency Services.

The new House of Representatives post is part of a reorganization effort that has been underway for several months, according to an email from current House Speaker Robbie Wills obtained by Tolbert.


For several months, House leadership has been exploring reorganizing the structure of the staff of the House, in conjunction with Speaker-designate Moore. After much consideration and discussion, House leadership has approved the reorganization as shown on the attached organizational chart.

Effective today, August 18th, Bill Stovall will assume the newly created position of House Chief of Staff.

Amanda Story, spokesperson for the Arkansas House, sends along a job description for the new post. It’s a pretty exhaustive list.  You can access it here at this link.

UPDATE: The new chief of staff for the House, Bill Stovall, spoke with Talk Business on Wednesday evening.

Talk Business: What is the reason for the new position?

Bill Stovall: Speaker Wills and Speaker-designate Moore have been coordinating and sharing thoughts about reorganizing the House of Representatives with our personnel.  After evaluation, they felt like there wasn’t any one, particular, central communications person so that the Speaker could easily be involved in whatever to address in his day or legislative week. So they wanted a central communications point.  They thought the logical person for that was me and that was primarily the reason for the change.

TB: What will you do in this post that wasn’t being done previously?  

Stovall: I’ll certainly be the first line, the direct supervisor of constituency services and the assistant to the Speaker.  Our coordinator of legislative services will continue many of the same things that he has been doing as well as our Parliamentarian and I’ll take on some additional job responsibilities. The primary change will come from the fact that people are going to be directly supervised to the chief of staff so that anything that the Speaker needs to be aware of can easily be communicated to him from one individual.

TB: Part of your job description says: An ability to deal politely and effectively with the public. Are you qualified?

Stovall: I’m a peach of a guy.

TB: Will there be other personnel changes?

Stovall:  I doubt it. The Speaker and incoming Speaker have addressed most of what they have on their plate and we’ll probably refine and further define some additional job descriptions, but I don’t anticipate any other personnel changes.