Legislative town hall to keep Texarkana citizens engaged in state politics
Federal agencies come to Texarkana to provide in-person storm recovery aid
'We're doing town halls across the state to help educate people about the Arkansas Legislature, which just adjourned, about all the new laws that they passed and educating people about how their legislators voted on some of those key bills that came up,' said Bill Kopsky, Executive Director of the Arkansas Public Policy Panel, who organized the event along with Citizens First Congress.
They are applauding legislation passed concerning maternal health and childhood nutrition.
'We're excited about students getting free breakfast, and now we're saying, how about lunch?' said April Reisma, President of the Arkansas Education Association.
However, they feel other new pieces of legislation, such as DEI restrictions, are a step backward for the state.
'Our view is that if you're in a community that's 60% black and the school staff doesn't look like that, then that's an issue that the school district should be able to at least talk about,' said Kopsky.
Changes coming to downtown Texarkana in the name of pedestrian safety
Looking to the future, they hope to find support for securing access to ballot measures after several new laws were passed that make the process more difficult.
'I mean it's been in the Arkansas constitution for over 100 years. Arkansans have used it to do really important things that legislators just aren't capable of doing, so like passing ethics and term limit laws, for example, or campaign finance reform laws, or raising the state's minimum wage. Those are issues that politicians are never going to really take much action on, but they're not very controversial with the public,' said Kopsky.
They say the main purpose of these town halls is to keep citizens engaged in the political process.
Over 1 million meals served by Texarkana Resource Center during first year
'Legislators or politicians go up to Little Rock and they make decisions on a lot of laws that the public doesn't really have any idea about, and our whole view is that when the public knows more about what's happening at the Capitol and they can talk to the legislators about it, those legislators do a better job,' said Kopsky.
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