If you elect me, grade me. Here is the scoreboard.

Why I'm running

Most of what I have shared up to now is council meeting records and a handful of perspective pieces. The election season is heating up, and I am running for a council seat in what looks to be a real race. So I want to say something about why I am running and what I mean to do in the position.

First, for anyone who does not know me: I started working for KIPP Delta Public Schools in 2011 — remotely at first — and moved here in the summer of 2014. I bought a house on Perry Street in February 2016, and in December 2019 I bought the Edwardian Inn — the same story I told the council when they asked why I came to Helena 0:10:39. What has kept me here, honestly, is a career and real estate I could afford. My own experience is not a bad framework for how we attract and retain people to this community: opportunity, and a home you can afford to buy.

For the last two years I have served as Chief Information Officer at Delta Preparatory Schools. This week our high school earned a B on the state report card, up from a D last year, and was named a 2026 Arkansas Gem School for student growth in the top 10 percent of Arkansas high schools. I do not claim responsibility for that turnaround; it belongs to a whole team, and I played my part on it. But my part is the point: my role in the school district is providing accurate and timely information to the people who make decisions. It is the same role I am asking you to give me on the council. A council is a team, and a team wins with the right players in the right roles. This is the role I am built for.

When I spoke at the September 24, 2024 council meeting about water rates, I told the council I had three subjects, and the third was the need for accountability 0:03:02. I asked them to measure their progress and report it to the public 0:07:53, and to put the full language of the rate ordinance in front of the community before the vote 0:09:17. Transparency and accountability. That is the thesis of what I hope to bring as a council member. I believe in answers before questions and actions beyond words.

My work publishing the council record is meant to support that push for transparency — building a better-informed discussion in the community, so that Helena-West Helena citizens have a stronger voice in the decisions that are made.

I have been critical of some actions the city council has taken. My aim has always been to criticize the action, not the person. I strongly feel that our city council, and the field of people running for office in our community, are at heart good people who want to see Helena-West Helena succeed. But in order to do better, we need to acknowledge failures. We need to come to terms with the fact that what we have been doing has not worked, so that we can change it in a positive way.

My impression from these past months of studying and documenting council meetings is that we are struggling to see the forest for the trees. The complexity of budgets, and the administrative burden of following proper procedures, gets swept aside for expediency and the needs of the day. Gaps in funding in one pool are filled by other pools out of necessity. Individual accounts don't hold their own. There is so much mixing and intermingling of funds that the result is a muddy picture — one where it is very difficult to tell where we are falling short and where our surpluses lie audit.

My career and background is in data administration, data management, and reporting. What I hope to bring with a seat at the table is knowledge and insight for the council to act on, better reporting, and a stronger community voice that can speak on issues before we deliberate, instead of reacting to them afterward. Fifteen years of data management has given me the skills and the tool set to do this work. But a seat at the council table brings a voice and a vote to this initiative — which is why I am asking you for your vote, when the time comes to give it.

I have been working for years to influence council decisions in a positive way. I know I have made an impact. I can also see clearly that I will not be able to make as much of an impact from the outside as I would from a seat at the table.

I have shown you the work I am already doing to increase transparency. Here I want to elaborate on what accountability looks like: what are the measures and metrics we should track that will show whether we — the council and the city administration — are doing our job? If Ward 1 elects me, this is the scoreboard I am asking you to grade me on. I am publishing it before the election on purpose. A promise made in public, with numbers attached, is harder to quietly drop later.

How to read this

Sections one through three are the city's report card. A council member is one vote of six — I can push on those numbers, not control them, so I will not claim credit when they improve or invent excuses when they fall. Section four is mine alone: whether I show up, explain my votes, answer you, and finish what I start.

Some of the most useful numbers are not published anywhere today. Those are marked not published below. Getting them reported is itself part of the job.

1. Are people staying?

12,282 people lived in Helena-West Helena at the 2010 Census. The Census Bureau's estimate for July 2024 is 8,462. That is 3,820 fewer people — a 31 percent decline in fourteen years, and it has not slowed: down 11 percent in just the last four years, including 205 more people gone in the most recent year measured Census files.

The decline is not unique to the city. Phillips County went from 21,757 people in 2010 to an estimated 14,661 in 2024 — down 33 percent, slightly steeper than the city itself Census files. The whole Delta is losing people, and no council controls that. What a city can be graded on is whether it holds its people better or worse than its region — and whether the trend bends.

What I will track

Active water accounts deserve a sentence. The water department bills every occupied structure in the city, every month. That count is the closest thing the city has to a live measure of whether people are staying — and it is not reported to the council or the public anywhere. Asking for that number to be reported monthly is one of the first things I will do.

2. Can people afford to stay?

My blended cost of water service went from $12.58 per thousand gallons in 2020 to $28.69 this year — more than double, from my own 89 bills. That is a commercial account, and residential schedules differ; the full analysis, including the water department's own residential numbers, is in the water piece. Water and sewer bills arrive every month whether times are good or bad.

And the increases are scheduled to continue on their own. The 2024 rate ordinance allows rates to adjust without a public hearing ordinance, and a March 2026 amendment (Ordinance 6-2026) makes the water rate rise automatically every January 1 beginning in 2027, by the past year's change in the federal water-sewer-trash inflation measure, up to 6 percent, with no new ordinance. The council can act to lower or remove that automatic increase. Doing nothing raises rates. To be clear about what I am not saying: the water system needs the revenue it now collects. The question is whether increases happen by public vote each year or by automatic schedule.

What I will track

3. Is the city keeping its own house in order?

Washington awarded the city $1,019,756 in 2021 — the largest police-hiring grant in Arkansas that year — to put ten more officers on the street. Five years later, federal records show about half of it unspent: $500,323 drawn, 49 percent. The window closes September 30, 2026, and money not drawn by then goes back to Washington unless the city has requested an extension grant records. (Federal reporting lags; the city's own drawdown records are the authoritative number — which is exactly why this belongs on a public report.) Meanwhile the city budgeted for 43 police personnel, and the May 2025 payroll register shows 20 people on the police payroll. The chief told the council on September 8 he needs about nine more officers — that meeting is on the record.

The state audit tells the same story from a different angle. The FY2023 audit found two material weaknesses — the most serious tier of finding a state auditor issues — one of them repeated from the prior year. It also found the city spending past its appropriations, the legal spending limits the council itself adopted: the Street Fund by $424,531 and the Landfill Fund by $524,244. Three funds ended 2023 with deficit balances audit.

Not every number runs the wrong way, and this scoreboard reports both directions. The water department lost about $1.0 million in 2023; the city's 2026 budget now plans a $1.4 million profit — a real financial turn, though a budget is a plan, not yet an audited result. The full story is in the water piece.

The city's water and wastewater systems also operate under state consent orders — enforcement agreements with the state over violations. The council has set a special meeting for September 29 to hear updates on them. Milestones met or missed under those orders belong on this scoreboard.

What I will track

What I would move first

Measuring is not the whole job. Three motions I would bring early:

1. Put the automatic rate increase to a vote. The rate ordinance raises rates automatically every January 1, starting in 2027, before new council members take office. I will ask the current council to act on it this fall. If it does not, I will move early in my term to take the automatic increase out of the ordinance. A rate change should take a public vote, not a calendar.

2. Make every fund hold its own. Move for fund-by-fund budget-versus-actual reporting to the council, every month, so the mixing between funds shows up in the open — not in an audit two years later.

3. Publish the numbers this page marks "not published." Move to require monthly public reporting of active water accounts and consent-order milestones.

4. Did I do what I said?

Role players have stat lines. This is mine.

This section starts at zero on purpose. Nothing in it is a promise about outcomes. It is a promise about conduct — the part of the job I fully control.

I already publish the council's record. If elected, my own row goes on the same page. These commitments rest on a minimum record — attendance, votes and their explanations, and this scoreboard. That minimum is the promise; the full meeting archive continues as capacity allows.

Why publish this now

These goals are ambitious. We are working to reverse trends that have been playing out over decades, and turning a pattern like that is not going to be easy. But I believe that moving to balanced budgets, where we have sufficient funds to meet our needs, and to focused priorities that put our citizens first, can do a lot to move us in a new direction.

None of this requires permission, a budget line, or anyone else's vote. A council member can publish their own conduct and the city's public numbers on their own website — I do it now as a candidate. It is in writing, with baselines, before the vote — and you can hold me to it.

The election is November 3, 2026. If you want to help before then, say so at cheekforhelena.com.