The Hill Line: Why a Vote for Frank Scott Jr. Is a Vote for French Hill’s Little Rock

French Hill’s name won’t be on your ballot for mayor on November 3rd. The race is nonpartisan, and Frank Scott Jr. has spent years presenting himself as the city’s firewall against the Republican right. But a ballot doesn’t only pick a person. It picks a program. And the development program Scott has run out of City Hall since 2019 was built hand in hand with French Hill.

That’s not a slogan. It’s the record.

Little Rock Mayor, Frank Scott, Jr., U.S. Congressman French Hill, Annie Abrams, Martha Hill, Rep. Denise Ennett

The Trip to Washington

Scott took office in January 2019. Within weeks he was in Washington, D.C., meeting with Congressman Hill to lay the groundwork for bringing Trump White House officials to Little Rock. By August, the two of them were co-hosting an all-day summit with the White House Domestic Policy Council to sell the city’s four federally designated Opportunity Zones to investors: East Little Rock, South Little Rock around Pettaway, the 12th Street corridor, and the Dunbar and downtown stretch.

Nobody forced Scott into that room. He went looking for Hill. He put the city’s first popularly elected Black mayor on stage beside a Trump-era tax shelter and called himself Little Rock’s “chief growth officer.”

Two Bankers, One Vision

Look at where these two men come from. Before he ran, Scott was a banking executive at First Security Bank who’d served in former Governor Mike Beebe’s office. Hill’s résumé reads like the same story at a higher altitude: banker, Senate Banking Committee staffer, Treasury official, economic policy aide in the first Bush White House, and senior advisor to Governor Mike Huckabee in 2008. Today he chairs the House Financial Services Committee.

The letter after their names is different. The worldview isn’t. Both believe the job of government is to make a place attractive to capital and then get out of the way. At the summit Hill pushed Arkansas legislators to go further than federal law, stripping restrictions and cutting property tax assessments so Little Rock’s zones could be the most attractive in the country. Cutting property tax assessments means taking public revenue and handing it to investors. Scott was his co-host.

The Room Told Him

Scott can’t say he wasn’t warned. He was warned at his own summit.

South End developer Reginald Hampton told the crowd he didn’t see Black folks being able to take real advantage of what they were discussing, that outsiders would reap the benefits while the community got pushed out or had no stake. Martie North of Simmons Bank, a member of Scott’s own task force, admitted the rules were lax and the zones were focused on the needs of the investor, not the community. Chris Caldwell of the Delta Regional Authority said the absence of strategy was killing them.

Scott’s answer to all of it was one line: “We don’t want to talk about gentrification.”

Hill’s version was even blunter. He said this wasn’t a dollar taken away from anybody, and that “there ain’t nothing going on in some of these places.”

Those two statements are the same move. They erase the people who already live in these neighborhoods so that outside money can be described as pure addition. If nobody’s there, nobody gets displaced.

The research since then has backed Hampton, not Scott. The Urban Institute found Opportunity Zones mostly helped large real estate projects while many low-income communities saw nothing, with nearly three-quarters of the capital gains going to the top 1 percent. Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families pointed out there’s no mechanism to make sure current residents benefit, and that Little Rock’s two downtown tracts were already among the area’s fastest-improving. In other words, the subsidy rode a recovery that was already underway instead of reaching the neighborhoods that needed it. By 2025, Governing was reporting that after nearly eight years the program had mostly enriched wealthy investors and steered money into luxury apartments, offices and hotels.

The Task Force Moved In

Scott’s 20-member Opportunity Zone Task Force was stacked with finance: Arvest, Simmons, a Rockefeller, Rockwater Village. One of those members was Virgil Miller of Arvest Bank. Miller was later appointed to the Ward 1 seat on the city board after the death of City Director Erma Hendrix, and in 2022 he won the seat outright by a wide margin.

Ward 1 covers downtown and much of the territory the Opportunity Zones were drawn over. So the investor coalition didn’t just advise the mayor. It took a seat at the table that votes on development in those same neighborhoods.

Crumbs at the Edges

Scott’s defenders will point to what came after: OpportUNITY Little Rock for minority- and women-owned businesses, over a million dollars in waived permit fees south of I-630 and east of I-30, a 100-unit affordable housing goal with a $20,000 down payment subsidy, and the heirs’ property program in the Little Rock 2030 plan.

Some of that will help some families. But look at the shape of it. The MWBE program trains Black businesses to be suppliers to the growth machine, not owners of it. A 100-unit housing goal sits next to a target of adding 50,000 to 75,000 new residents. And the heirs’ property program helps Black families hold onto land in neighborhoods that the Opportunity Zone strategy is making more valuable to outside buyers. That’s a defensive measure against pressure the administration helped create.

Mitigation layered on top of an investor-first program is still an investor-first program.

Paperwork, Not Patrols

The same posture shows up when the federal government comes to town in uniform.

When Governor Sanders sent National Guard members to assist ICE, with a share of them stationed in Little Rock, Scott’s response was to reassure. He said he’d just learned of the decision, and that from what he understood the Guard members would be “processing paperwork,” not patrolling city streets. He said the move had nothing to do with crime in Little Rock, praised LRPD, and promised the city would always be welcoming and inclusive.

Read that again and notice what isn’t there. No objection. No limits on city or LRPD cooperation. No protections for immigrant residents. No plan. Paperwork is how deportations happen. Calling it administrative doesn’t make it harmless; it makes it quieter.

That’s the same pattern as the summit. When the Republican state and federal apparatus Hill belongs to brings its agenda to Little Rock, Scott doesn’t fight it. He manages the public’s feelings about it.

What His Defenders Say

To be fair to the mayor, here’s his best case. A Democratic mayor of a blue capital in a deep red state has to work with the Republican delegation to get anything done. The zones were federal law whether Scott liked them or not, so working with Hill was about capturing money that would otherwise go elsewhere. He has fought the right before: in 2022 his campaign mailers warned voters not to let Mike Huckabee bring Donald Trump’s policies to Little Rock. He put body cameras on every patrol officer and created the city’s first citizens review board. And a mayor has little legal power over a Governor’s Guard deployment.

Those points deserve weight. But they’re arguments about constraints, and the Hill partnership wasn’t a constraint. It was a choice. Scott went to Washington. Scott co-hosted. Scott told the room he didn’t want to talk about gentrification.

The Choice in Front of Us

Scott is running again, and he’ll face city director and vice mayor B.J. Wyrick on November 3rd. Wyrick is running on public safety, job growth, potholes and parks. Nothing in that platform tells us she’d treat investors any differently or stand up to ICE any harder. She owes the city answers too.

Voting is a limited strategic tactic. It won’t build what our neighborhoods need. But if we’re going to use it, we should use it with our eyes open. Before you cast that ballot, put these questions to both candidates and make them answer in public:

Will you direct LRPD to refuse cooperation with ICE beyond what state law strictly requires?

Will you publish every Opportunity Zone project in Little Rock, who invested, and who lives there now compared to 2019?

Will you support any rule that ties public subsidies to anti-displacement protections for current residents?

Will you cut off city surveillance data, including license plate reader data, from federal immigration enforcement?

A vote for Frank Scott Jr. is a vote to keep French Hill’s vision of Little Rock running from City Hall. If that’s not the city you want, make the candidates prove they’ll build a different one.

ALL Power to ALL People.

Sources

“The French Hill Collaboration: The 2019 Opportunity Zones Summit,” research dossier (summit coverage, task force roster, and statements by Frank Scott Jr., French Hill, Reginald Hampton, Martie North, and Chris Caldwell)
Urban Institute, Opportunity Zones analysis (2020)
Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), Opportunity Zones critique
Boston Review, Opportunity Zones critique
Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, Opportunity Zones analysis
Governing, Opportunity Zones assessment (2025)
KARK, Mayor Scott on National Guard assisting ICE: https://digital-release.kark.com/?p=2298343
FOX16, “Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott Jr. announces re-election bid”: https://www.fox16.com/news/your-local-election-hq/little-rock-mayor-frank-scott-jr-announces-re-election-bid/amp/
KARK/Nexstar via AOL, “Little Rock city director and vice mayor Brenda ‘B.J.’ Wyrick announces campaign for mayor”: https://www.aol.com/articles/little-rock-city-director-vice-165957584.html
KATV, “Frank Scott Jr. officially running for Little Rock mayor” (2018): https://katv.com/news/local/frank-scott-jr-officially-running-for-little-rock-mayor
Cook Political Report, Arkansas AR-02 race profile (French Hill biography): https://www.cookpolitical.com/house/race/481806
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, “Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott Jr. files candidate paperwork” (Aug. 2022): https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2022/aug/09/little-rock-mayor-frank-scott-jr-files-candidate/
Little Rock Public Radio (KUAR), 2022 election results: https://www.ualrpublicradio.org/local-regional-news/2022-11-09/little-rock-mayor-wins-re-election-republicans-win-big-in-arkansas-contests
Associated Press via KATV, “Deadly year could imperil Little Rock mayor’s reelection bid” (2022): https://katv.com/news/local/deadly-year-could-imperil-little-rock-mayors-reelection-bid-mayor-frank-scott-jr-democrat-violence-homicide-1993-record-high-steve-landers-sarah-huckabee-sanders-black-african-american-crime-greg-henderson-glen-schwarz
THV11, “Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott Jr., 2 years later”: https://www.thv11.com/article/news/local/little-rock/little-rock-mayor-frank-scott-jr-2-years-later/91-3b59449d-e886-4b35-b283-20d3146de84d

The Hill Line: Why a Vote for Frank Scott Jr. Is a Vote for French Hill’s Little Rock