Clinton Arkansas Record: He Won a Few, Lost a Few : Candidate: He has boasted of changes wrought in his home state, but close look shows more ambiguous result.

The idea has become a fixture of Bill Clinton’s campaign: “All my life, I have been an agent of change,” he says. As Arkansas governor, he tells audiences around the nation, “I have taken on the entrenched interests” to fight for change.

And, indeed, Clinton’s five terms as his state’s chief executive, covering 12 of the last 14 years, have brought considerable change to Arkansas, particularly in two crucial areas for a poor Southern state--race relations and education.

But a close examination of Clinton’s tenure reveals a more ambiguous record than the presumptive Democratic nominee’s speeches would suggest.

Far from consistently taking on powerful interests, Clinton often has cultivated close relations with his state’s power structure. At times, he has dragged his feet in confronting powerful interests, particularly in areas such as environmental pollution. And while he has made consistent efforts to change the long-entrenched poverty of Arkansas, the record shows at best spotty success.

Like the proverbial half glass, Clinton’s record draws sharply divergent interpretations.

The many detractors he has built up over more than a decade in public life point to the omissions.

“You’ve got a guy who looks good and sounds good, but doesn’t do what he promises,” says Clinton’s most bitter enemy, Sheffield Nelson, a Democrat-turned-Republican who ran against Clinton for governor and since then has served directly or indirectly as a key source for many of the most derogatory stories about him.

Clinton’s larger number of supporters in the state point to the successes and, to explain the shortcomings, cite a series of mitigating factors:

Clinton has had to work in an extremely rough laboratory--one of the nation’s poorest states during a period of unusually slow economic growth nationwide.

His office possesses far fewer direct powers than those wielded by governors in states like California.

And he has faced an often-recalcitrant Legislature made up of part-time lawmakers, many of whom for years literally have been on the payrolls of such major interests as the state’s timber, poultry and utility industries.

In a state like Arkansas in the 1980s, “about the best Bill Clinton could do was help keep us treading water,” says Bill Lewellen, a black state legislator who represents Arkansas’ poorest county. “The glory of it is he didn’t let it sink.”

Two former governors of neighboring states, one a Democrat, the other a Republican, offer similar assessments.

“We didn’t get here overnight, and we’re not going to get out of here overnight,” says former Mississippi Gov. Ray Mabus, a friend of Clinton’s, referring to the persistent poverty his state and Arkansas share.

“Progress comes slowly,” says Buddy Roemer of Louisiana, a Republican who supports Bush.

As governor, Clinton has faced most--although not all--the domestic policy problems a President would confront, including crime, drugs, poverty, racial tension, teen-age pregnancy, disappointing schools and an undertrained work force.

What has set Arkansas apart is its low level of both institutional and financial resources to cope with those problems. Settled by people who expected little of their government and generally received even less, Arkansas historically has had some of the poorest people and some of the weakest governments in the nation. At the close of the 1980s, despite several tax increases during Clinton’s tenure, Arkansas’ government still raised and spent less per capita than any state in the nation.

In more than a decade as the dominant force in Arkansas politics, Clinton has built up considerable power through his control of appointments to state boards and commissions and through his influence over where the state spends money. He often has been able to gather votes in the Legislature by promising jobs or state projects to key allies.

Nonetheless, Arkansas’ government structure has sharply limited what a governor could do. Under the state constitution, a governor’s veto can be overridden by a simple majority of the Legislature, making veto threats flimsy.

At the same time, the constitution requires a three-quarters vote in both houses of the Legislature to increase any tax other than the sales tax. As few as nine votes in the state Senate can kill a tax hike. Spending bills face the same three-quarter requirement except for bills to spend money on education, highways or the pensions of Confederate soldiers.

In his first term as governor, from 1979-80, Clinton paid little heed to those constraints and did, in fact, take on most of the major interests in the state. Clinton took on the utility industry over electricity rates. His environmental aides held hearings around the state attacking the timber industry for clear-cutting forests. His state health commissioner pushed for more rural health clinics and fought with the medical association. Clinton pushed for higher automobile license fees to pay for highway improvements.

The voters booted him out of office.

When he returned in 1982--chastened if not necessarily humbled--Clinton narrowed his scope, choosing to focus on only a few issues at a time and carefully picking which opponents he would take on.

Here is the record Clinton compiled as governor:

RACE RELATIONS--In a state that once symbolized segregation, Clinton has appointed unprecedented numbers of blacks to important state positions and has tried to bring blacks--and women as well--into a state power structure from which they had been absent.

Clinton has been criticized by some blacks for not channeling enough state help to minority businesses. He also drew sharp criticism when he blocked efforts by some black leaders to discover whether state economic development officials had given a Japanese firm information about the racial makeup of several towns in which the firm considered locating a plant. Publicizing the information the state gives firms would harm economic development efforts, Clinton argued. Nevertheless, black voters have strongly supported him in each of his campaigns.

CRIME--Clinton supports the death penalty and has allowed four executions to be carried out. Assuming he receives the nomination, Clinton will be the first presidential candidate from either major party in over three decades to actually have signed a death warrant.

During his first term, Clinton commuted a number of lengthy prison sentences. In at least one case, he commuted the death sentence of a convicted murderer who committed another killing after his release. The man, James L. Surridge, was 73 when Clinton commuted his sentence. Clinton says prison officials told him at the time that Surridge was ill and near death. When he ran for reelection in 1982, Clinton pledged to commute no more first-degree murder sentences.

WELFARE REFORM--Clinton has proposed a series of plans in Arkansas and played an instrumental role in drafting federal welfare reform legislation that passed in 1988 after negotiations between the nation’s governors and the Ronald Reagan Administration.

The Manpower Demonstration Research Corp., a New York-based group that studies welfare reform plans, determined last year that an Arkansas program to move welfare mothers off the dole and into the work force had shown measurable success. Like all such experiments in the country, however, the success rate has been small.

STATE ECONOMY--When Clinton regained the governorship, the country was just beginning to recover from the deep recession of 1981-82. Not surprisingly, he made economic development a top priority.

In his drive to bring new business to the state, Clinton offered companies a host of tax breaks for new investments. Piled on top of the special tax preferences that already existed, the tax credits and exemptions have eaten seriously into the state’s revenue. By now, special tax exemptions for businesses cost Arkansas some $400 million a year--roughly one-fifth of the state’s budget--according to state figures.

The special tax deals “in some instances have been appropriate. In other instances, the governor has been so concerned about maintaining jobs that he may not have been the best negotiator,” says Mahlon Martin, Clinton’s former director of finance and administration. “He may deserve some criticism” on that score, Martin says.

In some cases, the incentives have worked well. Clinton supporters point to a large International Paper Co. plant near Pine Bluff that profited by special incentives adopted in 1985. The company saved more than 1,000 jobs in the state because of the 1985 law, state and company officials assert.

In other cases, however, critics argue that the efforts to attract new business have been not only costly, but ineffective. Often, the critics say, the state subsidized business investments that would have taken place anyway.

Not all of the tax preferences in state law were Clinton’s doing. Powerful farm interests, for example, have guaranteed that nearly all products used on farms have exemptions from state sales taxes. Because of the constitutional requirement that income tax increases must receive a three-fourths vote in the Legislature, the state has turned repeatedly to sales taxes to fill in the revenue gaps that business tax exemptions open up.

As a result of that mix of policies, corn fed to chickens in Arkansas gets sold tax free, but not corn fed to people.

Overall, Arkansas has one of the nation’s most regressive tax systems. The state, however, did make some progress last year when Clinton won approval of bills that dropped many of the state’s poorest citizens from the tax rolls while increasing corporate income taxes for the state’s largest companies.

Clinton’s other industrial development efforts also draw sharply mixed reviews. In 1984, for example, the governor won approval for a new Arkansas Development Finance Authority, which could sell government-backed tax-free bonds to help finance expansion by Arkansas businesses.

Since 1985, the state has underwritten $90 million in bonds for some 70 firms, creating 2,700 new jobs and supporting more than 3,000 others in construction, services and other spinoffs, according to ADFA records.

Critics, however, contend that ADFA has funneled millions of dollars to prosperous firms that could easily have found financing from other sources. In addition, these critics allege that politically well-connected Little Rock law firms, banks and brokerage firms have profited excessively from ADFA fees.

During Clinton’s tenure, the state’s economy has grown somewhat faster than most neighboring states, but it has remained one of the poorest states in the country. Arkansas has added some 200,000 jobs in the last decade, and industrial growth has outpaced the national average.

The statewide averages conceal substantial variations within Arkansas. In the northwestern part of the state, where the poultry industry has added some 30,000 jobs over the last decade, incomes have risen rapidly. One northwestern county, Washington, had a 15% increase in per capita income, adjusted for inflation, during the 1980s.

By contrast, the Mississippi Delta in the eastern part of the state, which has long been the poorest part of the country, has continued to stagnate, offering little to attract new business.

ENVIRONMENT--As a result of the state’s drive to improve its economy, neither the governor nor members of the Legislature have wanted to run the risk of driving businesses out of the state by toughening pollution controls.

The politics of environmental protection began to change in Arkansas in the late 1980s, and in the 1990 election, the environment became a serious issue for the first time. Partly as a result, in 1991 Clinton won approval of tougher anti-pollution laws, the first big package of environmental measures that he had pushed since his first term.

At the same time, however, at least some recent accounts of pollution in the state appear to have substantially exaggerated the extent of the problems. Overall, Arkansas remains one of the nation’s cleanest states, in part because it has few major polluting industries and most of the industrial plants in the state were built in recent years and have been subject to federal environmental control laws.

Two pollution problems have attracted the most attention so far.

One involves a plant near Jacksonville, Ark., built by Vertac Corp. to produce herbicides, including Agent Orange used by the Army in Vietnam to defoliate jungles. The plant, shut down for more than a decade, contains wastes contaminated with dioxin.

Both Clinton and federal officials have wanted to dispose of the wastes by incinerating them, arguing that incineration is the safest way to destroy dioxin. Local activists, however, bitterly oppose the idea, claiming the incinerator will pollute the air in the region and arguing the wastes should be shipped elsewhere.

A second major controversy involves water pollution caused by runoff from chicken wastes in northwestern Arkansas.

An area of considerable natural beauty, the northwestern part of Arkansas is also a land dominated by chickens. From the air, scores of chicken sheds, each holding 50,000 birds, can be seen scattered across the hills like so many long, silver-gray matchsticks. Each chicken produces slightly over two pounds of feces--politely referred to as chicken litter--during its 10-week trip from egg to shrink-wrap.

All told, three northwestern Arkansas counties produce an annual amount of animal fecal waste equivalent to that produced by the people of a city the size of Los Angeles.

Traditionally, farmers have taken most of the chicken litter and spread it on their fields as fertilizer.

But when farmers dump more poultry litter on the ground than the soil can absorb, the excess washes off during rains and ends up in streams and lakes. All that fertilizer causes excessive algae growth, which, in turn, sucks oxygen out of the water, killing fish and turning clear crystalline pools into weed-choked swamps.

Some 150 miles of streams in the state have been polluted too seriously for swimming, and several major lakes in northwestern Arkansas have begun to suffer from low oxygen levels. And at least some of President Bush’s aides have talked of sending a film crew to northwestern Arkansas to produce campaign commercials about pollution, much as Bush operatives did with Boston Harbor in 1988.

If they go, however, they may be disappointed. Unlike Boston Harbor, the region’s main streams--the White River and its tributaries--remain beautiful, swift-flowing and largely clean. Most of the pollution in the region cannot be seen. And while pollution levels have jumped in recent years, the problem has not yet been serious enough to affect human health, Tom McKinney, head of the Arkansas Sierra Club chapter, says.

However, the problem has had an effect on Clinton’s reputation. For most of his tenure, Clinton took no action on the chicken waste problem. The nation’s largest chicken processing company, Tyson Foods Inc., is also one of the state’s largest employers, providing jobs for 21,000 people. The company chairman, Don Tyson, and his family, as well as several of his top executives, have strongly supported Clinton in the past, contributing to his campaigns and lobbying for his programs.

When the problem began attracting attention in the state in 1990, Clinton appointed a task force to study what to do. But nearly all the members of the panel had ties to the chicken industry. Only in the last month has Clinton’s Administration proposed mandatory regulations to govern how chicken litter can be disposed of.

Clinton aides correctly point out that the federal government has done nothing at all about water pollution from agricultural wastes--a problem in farming regions across the nation. And most farm states have done even less about their waste problems than Arkansas has done. While Clinton has been “a disappointment” to environmentalists at times, he has also taken a number of positive steps, says McKinney. Under Clinton the state has put hundreds of miles of streams and acres of wilderness under protection. And while Clinton has shied away from taking on the timber industry as he did in his first term, he has quietly given support to environmentalists in their efforts to do so.

EDUCATION--Clinton’s proudest boasts concern his record on education. His program has had three major elements: tax hikes to funnel more state aid to local school districts, particularly those in poor, rural areas; statewide standards to require local schools to improve their curricula, and competency tests for teachers to weed out those who cannot meet state standards.

Clinton has also been a strong advocate of early childhood education programs, such as Head Start on the national level. Along with his wife, Hillary, he introduced to the state an Israeli program known as HIPPY--the Home Instruction Program for Pre-School Youth--designed to teach mothers how to teach basic skills to their children.

The competency test sparked one of the fiercest political battles of Clinton’s tenure, as the state teachers union fought bitterly to kill it. Very few teachers actually failed the test--in part because the state allowed teachers who failed once to take courses to improve their skills and then try again.

Local school districts over the years also have tried to get the new state standards watered down or delayed, arguing that they would cost too much to meet.

But Clinton, who in other fields often has made compromise his hallmark, has stood firm on education. He has argued that Arkansas will never emerge from poverty unless its people are better educated. Moreover, he says, the state’s taxpayers will not agree to pay more to support education unless they know that both school districts and teachers are meeting consistent standards.

Clinton’s program has improved education in the state, says Kern Alexander, a nationally known expert on schools who teaches at Virginia Polytechnical Institute. In 1978, Alexander did a study of Arkansas schools and found them the worst in the nation. Now, he says, progress can be seen.

Many state school districts are now offering courses such as foreign languages and advanced mathematics that students had no opportunity to take in the past. The percentage of Arkansas students attending college has finally reached the national average, in part because of new state programs to offer scholarships to those who graduate from high school. And the drop-out rate has edged down.

Nonetheless, here, too, the record has darker spots. As more students have stayed in high school, the state’s average score on nationally standardized tests has dropped. And Arkansas continues to rank near the bottom on teacher salaries and per pupil spending on education.