Count on This (Editorial)

Dennis Milligan

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette last week stopped just short of joining the Jefferson County Republican Committee in demanding that Dennis Milligan resign as state treasurer. Instead, the statewide daily suggested that Milligan, who took office in January, should resign and hoped that he would do that soon.

We’re not quite to that point, although we are growing weary of the drip, drip, drip of mini-scandals out of that office. A guy with as much government experience as Milligan — he was chairman of the Arkansas Republican Party and Saline County clerk — ought not to need quite so much runway to bounce around on before finally getting airborne.

Milligan is mighty proud that he has improved short-term investment returns for the state’s taxpayers, and we agree that the job of the treasurer should be done better than it was done by his predecessor, a convicted if untalented extortionist. In fact, that’s the very least we expect.

But more than a few more dollars in the bank, what the taxpayers of Arkansas needed was for the new treasurer to restore faith in that elected office. For one of Milligan’s first acts to be hiring his cousin in violation of the state nepotism law was like a gut-punch to the state. Instead of bringing that office’s ethical standards to the maximum, Milligan started out by skirting the legal minimum.

It cost him some of his own dollars, and it cost him the kind of political honeymoon that Arkansans are eager to have with their new constitutional officers.

It goes without saying that the state treasurer need not be an elected office at all. Investing taxpayer dollars wisely should not be political, and we’ve seen in living color why. But as long as it is, Arkansas deserves for the job to be done effectively, efficiently and ethically. And it’s not too late for Dennis Milligan to do better.