A Proposed Casino Resolution, The County’s Role, A Threat to the Economic Development Agreement, A Less-Than-Optimum Choice

February 12, 2024 Mike Goad

Mike Goad
Rural Pope County

Russellville City Council and Mayor Teague (via email)
cc: Quorum Court and Judge Cross (via email)

Dear Council Members and Mayor Teague

I am writing because of a proposed resolution that I believe will be on this week’s agenda.

While I live in the county, not the city of Russellville, the Pope County casino is a county issue and a city issue. I am writing to express some of my thoughts related to the casino, Pope County, and Russellville.

The casino will be in Russellville.

On July 11, 2022, the Cherokee Nation Businesses (CNB)/Legends Large Scale Development plan was approved by the Russellville Planning Commission.

One of the Commission’s requirements is that the property has to be annexed into Russellville before building permits will be issued.

Judge Cross has previously committed to annexation, as has CNB.

Amendment 100 requires that casino applications include a letter of support from the county judge or a resolution of support from the county quorum court and, if it is in the city, a letter of support from the mayor.

Pope County Judge Ben Cross has provided a letter of support for Cherokee Nation Entertainment, and the Pope County Quorum Court has passed a Resolution of Support for Cherokee Nation Entertainment. The license application will be under the name Cherokee Nation Entertainment. The casino resort will be Legends Resort and Casino, Arkansas.

Judge Ben Cross has repeatedly stated that he will not provide a letter of support for any other entity seeking the license. I have been assured that the quorum court will not have the seven votes necessary to pass a resolution of support for any new operator.

Resolution No. _____ — A Resolution Expressing the City’s Invitation to All Casino Operators To Explore The Possibility Of Locating Their Casino Operations Within the City Limits…

I don’t understand the point of this proposed new resolution. In the current environment related to the casino, it seems to me that this has the potential to result in more harm than benefit.

Even if passed, this resolution would have no more lasting effect than the 2019 Community Gaming Evaluation Committee or the City Council’s Unapproved Resolution of October 17, 2019, “A Resolution in Support of Elite Casino Resorts, LLC/River Ridge Casino Resort, LLC, to Operate Within the City of Russellville, Arkansas.”

It also seems as though this new resolution might conflict with the City Council’s November 21, 2019, Resolution No. 1782, “A Resolution Welcoming Cherokee Nation Business to the Community …”

The way this new resolution is written, it sounds like you are saying, “We are inviting all entities interested in applying for the Pope County casino license to contact Russellville except for the one already selected by the county.”

Potential Loss of Economic Development Monies

If another entity receives either a letter of support from the county judge or a resolution of support from the quorum court, the binding and enforceable Economic Development Agreement (EDA) between Cherokee Nation Businesses (CNB) and Pope County will be potentially voided.

On its face, the EDA is worth more than $150,000,000 to Pope County and area communities.
The EDA clearly states in plain language that it is contingent upon exclusive support by Pope County.
A letter of support from the county judge or a resolution of support from the quorum court for another entity would violate that exclusive support clause, potentially voiding the EDA.

o “In the event that the County, either through letter from the County Judge’s Office or Resolution of the Quorum Court, endorses or expresses support for any other casino license applicant during the term of this Agreement, this Agreement shall become voidable, at the election of the Operator, after which Operator shall no longer be bound hereunder and may continue to pursue its casino license application utilizing the Resolution of Support before the Commission.” (page 9 of the EDA)

An Undeserved Public Relations Gift

One entity, in particular, is very interested in any opportunity to get a foot in the door.

This resolution gives Gulfside an opportunity to say something like:

We want to express our appreciation to the city of Russellville for acknowledging that the casino selection process is only in its initial phase. We urge the county to welcome proposals from all casino applicants, just as the city has done. This resolution recognizes that there may be other applicants who would be a great fit for Pope County, and we will be excited to demonstrate to the quorum court why Gulfside is the top choice.

A less-than-optimum choice

Gulfside owner Terry Green has kept his 2019 word when he threatened to sue if he didn’t get a letter or resolution of support. Gulfside Casino Partnership has kept the Pope County casino license tied up in litigation since August 15, 2019, until very recently.

On November 12, 2021, Gulfside lost the license after the Arkansas Supreme Court essentially ruled that their one-line letter of support from former Pope County Judge Jim Ed Gibson was invalid and, thus, the application by which they were awarded the license was incomplete.

After that, Gulfside continued to pursue litigation through the hope that someday it might have a chance to obtain a letter or resolution of support from Pope County.

Gulfside is decidedly a less-than-optimum choice for a casino operator.

On April 20, 2020, Russellville resident and former Racing Commissioner Thomas Akin sent a five-page letter to Councilman Chis Olson concerning a resolution of welcome for Gulfside Casino Partnership. In the letter, Aiken detailed his concerns about the backgrounds of Terry Green and Rick Carter, the owners of Gulfside Casino Partnership, including information that wasn’t included in their application for a casino license in Pope County.

Following the October 26, 2023, decision by the Arkansas Supreme Court that ended the litigation, Casey Castleberry, an attorney for Gulfside, released a statement saying:

Just as the Racing Commission selected our superior application in 2020 in a head-to-head with Legends, we look forward to demonstrating again to county leaders and residents how our proposed world-class resort will benefit them and the entire state.

On the unlikely possibility that members of the quorum court might consider a resolution of support for Gulfside, I started researching the backgrounds of Terry Green, Rick Carter, Carter-Green-Redd, LLC., and Pride Cruise Lines. I compiled a 30-page document, Omissions – Pertinent gaming industry history not included in Gulfside’s application, detailing what I found.

In 2020, before the Arkansas Racing Commission, Terry Green denied that he had ever been a party to bankruptcy and that he and Rick Carter had only been minor shareholders of Carter-Green-Redd and Pride Cruise Lines.

Green and Carter were not just minor partners; they held senior positions as president and vice president in both organizations. They were responsible for making or approving most of the critical decisions during the short lives of both companies. Though they may have been minor shareholders during the bankruptcies, they played a vital role in the operations of the companies leading up to the Chapter 11 and Chapter 7 filings.

Green claimed that neither he nor Carter had ever been denied or lost a casino operating license.

Again, in 1993, Green and Carter were minority investors in Gulfside Casino, Inc.’s Copa Casino in Gulfport, Mississippi, but they had been brought on to run it. Because of complaints about the 1989 Chapter 11 bankruptcy, Carter and Green were not able to gain approval to hold an interest in a gaming license. It would have taken months for the understaffed Mississippi Gaming Commission to complete the investigation required for Carter and Green. This posed a severe threat to the opening of the Copa.

To get past that and to enable the licensing of the Copa, the McDonald family (the majority owner of Gulfside Casino, Inc.) bought Carter and Green out for $3.5 million each.

That resolution

As far as I can see, without the support of the county, this resolution is meaningless.

A more effective resolution would:

request the Racing Commission to initiate an application period and swiftly grant a license, and
state that Russellville would be an ideal location for the licensee to conduct business.

——————

Thank you for taking the time to read and consider this. I also want to express appreciation for the recent work of the council and the mayor. Though I live in the county, Russellville is the county seat and its progress affects the rest of the county. I am also an administrator of the Pope County Majority Facebook group, where we publish and share many posts and pictures related to Russellville and the county.

Mike Goad
Rural Pope County

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arkansas, casino, pope county, russellville

The Silent Warriors

January 28, 2024 Mike Goad

I served on this boat starting a couple of years after this article appeared, first in the Los Angeles Times, then in the Pacific Stars & Stripes dated October 13, 1971.

“In the darkened control center, illuminated dials and
gauges outline two helmsmen steering the submarine like some giant airliner in a windless sky.”

That’s one of the jobs that I was qualified to do when the division I was in had an over-abundance of newbie sailors and some of the other divisions were short.

My main work was back aft in the engineering spaces along with the rest of the nuclear operators.

The article is mostly accurate, which it should be to be republished in Stars&Stripes publication.

I was just a couple of months away from heading to boot camp when this article was published.

Read the article: The Silent Warriors—revamped polaris subs pack devastating nuclear punch.

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blast from the past, military, now that’s cool!, ocean, submarine

Girl with doll standing by fence

June 1, 2023 Mike Goad

Title devised by government cataloger.
Original color slide image created: abt. 1941—1942
Library of Congress—Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information Collection

This image cropped and digitally enhanced, 11/25/2005 © MpG
Public domain digital file from original slide available at loc.gov

Post from one of my abandoned blogs – North Farnham Freeholder – recovered from Internet Archive WayBackMachine and edited 2/27/2011 – page

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american history, history, life, people, photography, vintage photos

history, life

On the coast of Puerto Rico (December 1941)

June 1, 2023 Mike Goad

This image cropped and digitally enhanced, 11/25/2005 © MpG

Public domain digital file from original slide available at loc.gov

Post from one of my abandoned blogs – North Farnham Freeholder – recovered from Internet Archive WayBackMachine 2/27/2011 – page

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american history, history, photography, vintage photos

history

New “Desktop” PC

February 13, 2023 Mike Goad

Note: This is cross-posted from my new blog, Mike’s Place, where I plan to focus most of my future blogging activities. I will continue to cross-post on the appropriate old location for several months.

A few days ago, my seven-year-old “desktop” PC stopped working.

I’m pretty sure that it was just a power supply problem but given that the average lifespan for desktops is 5 to 8 years I decided that the money it would take to repair the old one would be better spent on a new machine.

I wanted something with a smaller footprint. Unfortunately, that had been the goal with the old device, too, but I didn’t do my homework and ended up with a much larger tower PC than I desired. It was so large that to keep from cluttering the top of my desk, I suspended it beneath.

The PC I decided on certainly has a smaller footprint—5 1/4″ long, 5″ wide, and 2″ high—but when one thinks of the computing power that goes into a small laptop like the Dell I am typing this on, that’s not all that amazing.

I’ve not set up the new PC yet. Unfortunately, after I ordered the machine, I started feeling sick, enough so that I don’t feel like getting into the nitty gritty of getting all of my stuff back up and running and enough so that I needed to do an in-home COVID test—fortunately negative.

I didn’t lose any data or files with the old machine dying. I spent about $30, including taxes, for a flat docking station that turned the 2-terabyte drive from the old machine into an external hard drive. (The docking station is actually dimensionally larger than the new PC.)

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Uncategorized

Well, that sucks!—a twilight zone kind of sucks

January 28, 2023 Mike Goad

I have a habit of having way too many tabs open in my browser. I may have two or three browser windows open, but each one generally has a grunch of tabs that I’ve left open.

It’s not usually a problem except if I have or need a computer restart. Then, because, I guess, of how much I had opened, it takes a while before any of them reopen so that I can get back to whatever I was doing before.

A couple of days ago, communication between my mouse and Windows stopped. I knew it shouldn’t be the mouse or the batteries because it was only a couple weeks since I bought the mouse. The old CNTRL-ALT-DEL didn’t work so that left a hard restart—power down the the computer and then turn it back on.

I turned back on and everything came back. No problems…

But…

I still had three Firefox windows, each with lots of tabs…

But…

Everything was from November 2022!

All my windows and tab changes for the last 2 months were GONE.

Gone… GONE.

It’s not a terrible disaster, though. I’ve been working on rewriting the Wikipedia page for our local county with factual references and most of that is documented. Other stuff I’ve been working on is captured in reference link pages I’ve built.

Still, there were some tabs that I had left open because I wanted to come back to them for some reason or another.

Oh, well.

Still plenty of things to do.

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computers, facebook, give me a break!, internet

Soviet submariners revealed the details of the collision of submarines of the USSR and the USA near Scotland

November 10, 2022 Mike Goad

This article is from a 2017 Russian media source

——

This was a Russian news article about Russian sea stories. They got the boat wrong.

The US boat was the James Madison.

Unidentified Victor Class Soviet Sub¹ and USS James Madison (SSBN-627)

Советские подводники раскрыли детали столкновения субмарин СССР и США у Шотландии²

1/25/2017 NTV.RU
translated from Russian with Google Translate

Today, the British newspaper The Times published materials shedding light on the incident that in 1974 almost brought the world to a nuclear catastrophe. We are talking about a collision in the North Sea of two nuclear submarines—Soviet and American.

So far, there have been no official confirmations and documents. But now—at the disposal of journalists were the declassified archives of the CIA. Of the 13 million documents declassified by the CIA this month and posted on the Internet, one cable received particular attention in English newspapers. In November 1974, President Ford’s National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft sent it to Henry Kissinger, who was the US Secretary of State at the time. It was about the collision of two nuclear submarines off the coast of Great Britain.

In 1974, American missile submarines were based in Holy Lough in Scotland, 50 kilometers from Glasgow. One boat carried 16 ballistic missiles on board— that’s 160 warheads. What this clash threatened to turn into at the height of the Cold War does not need to be explained. All information about the incident was immediately classified for more than 40 years. And only now Western journalists have received documentary evidence that the collision did take place.

However, today’s sensation for Western journalists would not be so loud if they read the memoirs of Soviet submariners. They wrote about the collision in Holy Loch 13 years ago. True, for some reason our officers called the American submarine not “James Madison”, but “Nathaniel Green”. From our side there was a multi-purpose nuclear submarine K-306 , whose task was to wait for the “American” to leave the bay and record his so-called “noise portrait”. To do this, our sailors dropped stun grenades into the water. After each explosion, the sonar screens of both boats were illuminated for several minutes. Thus, both submarines, which were on a collision course, turned out to be “blind”.

Vladimir Podchinenov , foreman of the nuclear submarine K-306 : “ What were the times? You understand, there was a cold war. A new American submarine was released. It was necessary to record the noise of the propellers. Because the acoustics under water are guided only by the noise which ship is coming. And so, as they say, they were sent.”

The collision was quite strong. The Soviet boat received a small hole in the torpedo room, which was quickly dealt with. The “American” had a badly wrinkled nose.

Alexander Kuzmin , captain of the first rank: “The American boat was forced to surface. We surfaced under the periscope and immediately saw her. The Nathaniel Green was in the water, listing heavily to starboard. Confused sailors climbed onto the hull, the commander from the bridge tried to understand what had happened. It was necessary to photograph the picture through the periscope, but there was no film in the navigational camera. I had to take a pencil and quickly sketch.”

The American submarine sustained significant hull damage and was towed to Holy Loja drydock for inspection and repairs. K-306 went home for two weeks at a depth of 40 meters to relieve pressure on the torpedo tube covers. An investigation into the emergency was appointed, the commander of the submarine was severely reprimanded. The American crew was awarded the Golden Dolphin badges for their courage. But at the same time, until today, the US Navy has always refused to comment on what happened at Holy Loch in November 1974 .

I was unable to find any image of the K-306 or any other info other than it was a Northern Fleet boat.
“Soviet submariners revealed the details of the collision of submarines of the USSR and the USA near Scotland.” JSC NTV Television Company. https://www.ntv.ru/novosti/1751197

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history, in the news, military, ocean, submarine

Connecticut town on the sea

October 24, 2022 Mike Goad

Dust, Drought, Depression, and War No. 30

Connecticut town on the sea, probably Stonington

Almost as long as I’ve been blogging, I’ve been sharing public-domain images, many of them from the period of America’s Great Depression. Early on, I came across color images that had been created by photographers of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and, later, the Office of War Information (OWI) between 1939 and 1943 and shared some of them in my blog. The Stonington image, above, was posted on December 28, 2005, in North Farnham Freeholder, an early blog that was abandoned in favor of other, later, blog endeavors.

Approximately 1,600 color photos that had been created by the FSA and OWI were misfiled when they were transferred to the Library of Congress in 1944 and largely forgotten until they resurfaced in the mid-1970s. Taken shortly after the 1935 invention of Kodachrome film, the rich, saturated images are some of the only color photos taken during the Great Depression and early war years.

The FSA photographer who shot the image above, Jack Delano, also produced other color images as well as black and white images during his November 1940 visit to Stonington. Those included below are available in high-resolution format from the Library of Congress. The titles used are those from the Library of Congress. Image links are to the corresponding image on Flickr.

A square with old houses in an old fishing village, Stonington, Conn.

The same location for this photo can be viewed on Google StreetView with images captured in 2012. The buildings from 1940 still exist.

Connecticut town, probably Stonington, on the sea.

A view of the old sea town, Stonington, Conn.

A bank for sale in Stonington, Connecticut

A square with old houses in the old fishing village of Stonington, Connecticut

Connecticut town, probably Stonington, on the sea

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american history, connecticut, history, photography, vintage photos

history

June 23, 1965—It was a hot summer day in Houston

October 20, 2022 Mike Goad

Every day was hot in Houston in the summer of 1965. We lived in a second-floor walk-up Midtown apartment in an old building on Hadley Street with no air conditioning. I can remember a rotating cube on a nearby bank building that displayed the time and temperature. It was always in the 90s.

On June 23, just under 2 miles west of our apartment, Houston police captain Charles Bullock and his partner L. M. Barta went to 1815 Driscoll Street to check on an elderly couple at the request of a worried nephew.

As far as I can remember, I never knew anything about this case until just recently.¹

1815 Driscoll Street, Houston, Texas,
scene of what was to become known as the Ice Box Murders

The 1965 Houston Ice Box Murders²

On June 23, 1965, two Houston police officers were dispatched to the Montrose neighborhood home of 81-year-old Fred and 72-year-old Edwina Rogers to conduct a welfare check after Edwina’s nephew Marvin reported that his phone calls to his aunt had gone unanswered for days. After receiving no answer after knocking, the officers forced their way into the Rogers’ home. Upon entering, the officers found nothing unusual but noticed food sitting on the dining room table. One officer opened the refrigerator and found what appeared to be numerous cuts of washed, unwrapped meat neatly stacked on the shelves. The officer later recalled that he thought the meat was that of a butchered hog. As the officer was closing the door, he noticed two human heads visible through the clear glass of the vegetable bin. The heads were those of Fred and Edwina Rogers. What the officer initially thought were unwrapped cuts of hog meat were the couple’s dismembered limbs and torsos. Police later discovered the couple’s organs in a nearby sewer (the organs had been removed, cut up, and flushed down the toilet) while other remains were never found.

Police determined that Fred and Edwina Rogers had been killed on June 20, Father’s Day. An autopsy showed that Fred was bludgeoned to death with a claw hammer. His eyes had been gouged out and his genitalia were removed. Edwina had been beaten and shot, execution style, in the head. Police further said that the bodies were dismembered in the upstairs bathroom by a person “with some knowledge of anatomy”. There was little blood in the house and it appeared it had been thoroughly cleaned after the murders. The little blood that was found led to the bedroom of Charles Rogers, the 43-year-old son of Fred and Edwina. There, police found a bloodstained keyhole saw but no trace of Rogers himself. A search for Rogers was launched and a warrant was issued for him as a material witness to the crime, but he was never found.

In 1975, a Houston judge declared Rogers legally dead so his estate could be probated. The case still remains officially unsolved and Rogers remains the only suspect.

Houston forensic accountant Hugh Gardenier and his wife Martha have continued to investigate the case and concluded that Rogers did murder his parents and was later killed in Honduras. While they have dismissed John R. Craig and Philip A. Rogers’s claim that Rogers was a CIA operative due to a lack of evidence, they admit that Rogers did have dealings with contract workers for the CIA when he worked as a seismologist.

The Gardeniers believe that Rogers planned the murder of his parents for years because his father was abusive and both parents were “devious con artists”. According to them, Fred worked as a bookie who regularly engaged in illegal activities such as gambling and fraud. They believe he continued abusing Charles into adulthood and began stealing large sums of money from him. The Gardeniers claim that after Rogers killed and dismembered his parents, he fled the U.S. for Mexico and was never found because he was aided by “powerful friends” he met through his ham radio hobby and while working for various oil and mining companies. They have theorized that Rogers eventually made his way to Honduras, where he was killed over a wage dispute with miners.

__________

1815 Driscoll remained empty and abandoned after the murders. It was bulldozed in the early 1970s. The property was joined with others for deluxe townhomes built in 2000.

__________

Endnotes

I had been in Houston for only a couple of weeks.
After finishing the 7th grade, my grandparents had driven me from North Platte, Nebraska, to Wichita, Kansas, where I boarded a bus, alone, heading to Houston.
I was 13.
My mom had left my sister and me with our grandparents three years earlier when she went chasing after a husband who had left her. Now, I was spending the summer with her and her newest husband, Harry—not the same man she had been married to in 1962.
“Charles Rogers (Murder Suspect).” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, most recent edit August 28, 2022. Accessed October 20, 2022

Note:

There are numerous articles and posts on the murders and on Charles Rogers. Rather than use them as references to create still another post, it made more sense to just use material from Wikipedia.

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crime, history, texas

Refugees from Russellville, Pope County, Arkansas.

October 17, 2022 Mike Goad

Dust, Drought, Depression, and War No. 29

Highway 33, Stanislaus County, San Joaquin Valley, California. April 1940

This 1940 photo by legendary photographer Dorthea Lange shows a caravan of four families displaced from Pope County, Arkansas, during the Great Depression.

The full caption from the National Archives record reads: Grayson, Highway 33, Westley, Stanislaus County, San Joaquin Valley, California. Caravan of four related families, refugees from Russellville, Pope County, Arkansas. Younger married members arrived in California November, 1939. Mother and father have just arrived. They still own their farm in Arkansas. ‘People like us can’t plan far ahead, but we are hoping by following the fruit this Summer to get us a place, pay something down. That’s the plan we have.’

National Archives info:

National Archives Identifier: 521688
Local Identifier: 83-G-41444
Creator(s): Department of Agriculture. Bureau of Agricultural Economics. Division of Economic Information. ca. 1922-ca. 1953 (Most Recent)
From: Series: Photographic Prints Documenting Programs and Activities of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics and Predecessor Agencies, ca. 1922 – ca. 1947
Record Group 83: Records of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, 1876 – 1959
This item was produced or created: 4/9/1940
The creator compiled or maintained the series between: ca. 1922 – ca. 1947
Contributors to Authorship and/or Production of the Archival Material(s): Lange, Dorothea, 1895-1965, Photographer

NARA Permalink

Mike’s notes:

Image restoration note – This image has been digitally adjusted for one or more of the following:
– fade correction,
– color, contrast, and/or saturation enhancement
– selected spot and/or scratch removal
– cropped for composition and/or to accentuate subject matter
– straighten image

Image restoration is the process of using digital restoration tools to create new digital versions of the images while also improving their quality and repairing damage.

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america, american history, arkansas, california, Dust, Drought, Depression and War, economy, great depression, history, life, photography, public domain, vintage image, vintage photos

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Exit78

Dear Council Members and Mayor Teague

The casino will be in Russellville.

Amendment 100 requires that casino applications include a letter of support from the county judge or a resolution of support from the county quorum court and, if it is in the city, a letter of support from the mayor.

Resolution No. _____ — A Resolution Expressing the City’s Invitation to All Casino Operators To Explore The Possibility Of Locating Their Casino Operations Within the City Limits…

Potential Loss of Economic Development Monies

An Undeserved Public Relations Gift

A less-than-optimum choice

That resolution

This article is from a 2017 Russian media source

——

This was a Russian news article about Russian sea stories. They got the boat wrong.

The US boat was the James Madison.

Советские подводники раскрыли детали столкновения субмарин СССР и США у Шотландии2

Today, the British newspaper The Times published materials shedding light on the incident that in 1974 almost brought the world to a nuclear catastrophe. We are talking about a collision in the North Sea of ​​two nuclear submarines—Soviet and American.

The 1965 Houston Ice Box Murders2

__________

__________

Советские подводники раскрыли детали столкновения субмарин СССР и США у Шотландии²

Today, the British newspaper The Times published materials shedding light on the incident that in 1974 almost brought the world to a nuclear catastrophe. We are talking about a collision in the North Sea of two nuclear submarines—Soviet and American.

The 1965 Houston Ice Box Murders²