Serco News Lands with a Thud (Opinion)

So hundreds of new jobs are coming to Rogers.

A huge mail center is being set up there to handle the flood of insurance applications that the Affordable Care Act will generate beginning in 2014, when the law’s individual mandate takes effect.

According to news reports, the center, operated by Serco Inc. of Reston, Va., will be so big and so busy that anywhere from 600 to 1,000 people are needed to staff the center.

People are already being recruited for those jobs. If Serco fulfills the entire contract, then the mail center will be in Rogers for at least five years.

Consider this. The total contract is for $1.25 billion. Serco announced that in total, about 1,500 people would be hired. That figure includes operations in Alabama and Kentucky.

This is dirty math, for sure, but if Rogers got a third of the contract, then that would equate to about $416 million over the life of the deal, and that doesn’t take into account the ripple effect of those dollars. 

The arrival of hundreds of jobs and millions in salaries should be great news for any town or any region, including Northwest Arkansas.

But it really wasn’t.

State Sen. Cecile Bledsoe, R-Rogers, reminded us the contract was temporary and those jobs would eventually go away.

Rep. Steve Womack, R-Ark., begrudgingly welcomed the mail center, essentially telling his constituents to close their eyes, hold their noses and swallow hard.

Their reactions, of course, were understandable. For Bledsoe and Womack, President Barack Obama’s health care law is an excellent example of big government and bad legislation, two things they detest.

What’s puzzling, however, were the reports that U.S. Sen. John Boozman, R-Ark., knew nothing about Serco. He’s been a senator for almost three years, and before that, served in the U.S. House of Representatives for five terms.

He didn’t know Serco was coming to his town? Really?