Mayflower is an ACE of a city

By JOE LAMB
LOG CABIN STAFF WRITER

With Wednesday night's ceremony, Mayflower became the first city in Faulkner County to be certified as an Arkansas Community of Excellence (ACE).

Gov. Mike Huckabee presented Mayflower Mayor Randy Holland and Lee Elliott, 2004 chief administrator of Mayflower's ACE certification program, with plaques commemorating the work of Holland, Elliott and the community of Mayflower in attaining ACE certification.

After a performance from a choir of Mayflower children, Elliott recognized and thanked the community and the six committees formed to transform the city into an ACE for their hard work.

"Two hundred people participated in this city of under 2,000," he said in his speech to more than 100 Mayflower residents and guests at the Mayflower High School Cafeteria. "That's going above and beyond."

Holland said while it would be him on-stage, the honor of the city's ACE certification belonged to the community of Mayflower.

"I'll be up here getting the certification from Gov. Huckabee," Holland said, "but it's not me getting this."

The unity of the community and teamwork, he explained, led to Mayflower's ACE certification.

"If you work together - sitting down and working it out - believe me, you're a lot better off."

He said the guidelines laid out by the ACE manual were a great help to him as mayor.

"The tools and plans were all there" he said. "All I had to do was look at that plan and say, 'This is what the community wants to do; what the people want to do. Now, how can I get the money to do this? How do I put it together?'"

Receiving ACE certification, Huckabee said in his speech, is a more involved process than "four or five people getting together, drinking coffee, signing some papers and saying, 'Now we're going to be an ACE.' It takes some commitment."

"You are now part of an elite group of communities that have risen to the top," he said.

Huckabee echoed Holland's remarks, saying the people of Mayflower and not himself are to thank for the city's ACE certification.

"Sometimes, I go to these events and people say, 'Thank you for giving us ACE.' I say, 'There's not one thing I could have done to make you be ACE,'" he said. "ACE is an unbelievable kind of prestige in our state. It represents the hard work of a community."

Huckabee said Wednesday's presentation would likely be the last time he would present ACE certification to a city, and that he felt he had "saved the best for last."

After the presentation ceremony, Huckabee said some communities take as long as seven years to achieve ACE certification. He said Mayflower achieving ACE certification in under two years was "one of the quickest I've seen in the state."

"For a community the size of Mayflower," he said, "it's really challenging. For a small community of around 2,000 to do it says a lot."

Holland also said he was impressed the city achieved ACE certification so quickly.

"We did it within one year actually," he said after the presentation ceremony. "Their board came to the city and they actually voted on it that night. Usually, it takes two or three weeks, and they go back to Little Rock to vote on it. But that night, they voted here in Mayflower. They said that normally doesn't happen, but everything was so well put together."

Holland said the Mayflower City Hall was "full of people" the night the board voted to certify the city.

"It really shows how we come together as a community," he said. "I really appreciate the community as a whole for really working hard at this."

Holland said he has received offers to meet with the mayors of Holland, Wooster and Guy to discuss the ACE program.

"They want me to kind of show them the ACE program and how it works," he said. "I told them I'd be glad to show them what we did and how we started."

Holland said he was also impressed with Huckabee's visit to Mayflower, especially the attention he paid to the children present at Wednesday's presentation ceremony.

"He got to talk to all the kids here," he said. "That really impressed me as a person for him to take the time to do that. The kids will never forget that either. They'll have it with them for the rest of their lives."

(Staff writer Joe Lamb can be reached by e-mail at joe.lamb@thecabin.net or by phone at 505-1238. To comment on this and other stories, log on to www.thecabin.net, open this story and post a comment at the end.)