‘Official Business Only’

Although it took a months-long barrage of newspaper reports and a couple of lawsuits for Gov. Mike Beebe to formulate a new order designed to prevent the misuse of state-owned vehicles, we applaud it.

The recession and high unemployment have assaulted taxpayers’ sensibilities, and a number of state workers already earn much more than many non-government employees in Arkansas, in addition to enjoying pension plans largely extinct in the private sector. Paying for cars that were misused was just one more insult.

Beebe’s executive order provides for a number of what appear to be improvements in the current system, which was no system at all. One of our favorites is the provision that “All state vehicles shall be clearly marked with either the seal of the State of Arkansas or the seal or insignia of a state agency, board, or commission.”

This will make it much easier to determine whether that sedan that ran the red light and almost ran you over in the crosswalk was, indeed, a state vehicle. State “Official Business Only” license plates are harder to see.

The governor also acknowledged that Arkansas should rein in its spending on vehicles. “No question there are too many cars,” Beebe said.

A day later, even the constitutionally independent state Game & Fish Commission, which has more vehicles than employees, agreed. Previously, the agency routinely assigned vehicles to high-level staff members such as the director and assistant director and to other employees whose duties required them to work 60 percent or more of their hours outside Pulaski County.

The change in circumstances and conditions has caused the commission to evaluate its current assignment and use policy. Both The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and the Arkansas Times, have hammered state officials over the issue.

“It’s a political issue because it’s a political year,” Beebe said. “But the truth of the matter is … this needed to be done. Sometimes it takes the press to focus the light on things in a fashion that causes things to move and causes things to move better.”

We at the Business Journal may be rivals of our journalistic brethren, and we admit to underestimating the Democrat-Gazette‘s story when at first it concerned only limited abuses by a few of the state’s constitutional officers. But it’s only right to give credit where it’s due, and credit is due to the statewide daily for doing the heavy lifting of examining state records and shining light on the waste of taxpayer dollars.

“Fact-based” journalism requires hard slogging. The pajama-clad bloggers of Internet lore rarely are the ones reading piles of documents, asking questions over and over and then analyzing the data to “focus the light.”

The Internet is a wondrous tool, but opinionators and news aggregators can’t take the place of curious, dogged reporters given time to investigate.