Eureka Springs Productions
PAGE 2
JUNE/JULY
2026
In 2014, Bruce Westerman wrote a bill to extend an election for Lieutenant Governor. It was going to be more than the 90-150 days. So they extended one time for this election, by 30 days. It was going to be 180 days instead of the 150.
There is a video of this meeting. In session, they talk about how this is temporary and they are going to change it back the following June, after this specific election.
Nobody ever followed up on it.
Our governor tried to to take this one time allowance to extend a specific election in 2014 by an extra 30 days and stretch it by another 220 days in 2025. It was a temporary law put in place for a special circumstance. Our governor tried to take advantage of this technicality.
“If you look at her background she’s never been a leader in any role. She’s never had the opportunity to lead people, to fire people, to have empathy for people and families. She’s never had that opportunity if life, because she’s never been in that leader role.”
We had a great quality of life and low cost of living in the Ozarks. Since the money has come in all of this has seemed to go away. Is the money worth our resources? What can the money offer us that we don’t already have?
“They are offering us destruction, is what it is. A temporary band-aid. I’m sorry I’m loading my trailer here. A temporary band-aid because she’s got bigger ambitions and we’re all going to pay for it when she is gone.”
What made you decide that the lawsuit wasn’t enough and you needed to run for governor?
“That came from the next step which was Jamie Barker and the Board of Corrections. They took over the Board of Corrections which is their next way in to get a prison in Franklin County. Not only do I not agree with two lobbyists being in charge of $700 million.
Jamie Barker and Grant Hodges, both lobbyists/political consultants. I didn’t agree nor like how they took over the board. Now we have all these guys that have some type of corruption or involvement with corruption. Corrections is one of the most expensive budget, other than education that we have in Arkansas.”
“It’s the cronyism and the political profiteering that brought me into it. We’re never going to improve as a state if we keep appointing these people that are qualified to do these projects.
We’ve got to get good people in there. If we don't get good people then we are going to continue down the same road we are on and it is a downward spiral. That’s what got me involved. That’s what got me engaged.
You know what they did to Ron Caldwell over in Eastern Arkansas. What they did to Bryan King. What they did to Jim Wooten, you know. All these guys that are true conservatives that care about the state. And the Republican Party spends all these millions of dollars to try and beat them.”
“I met Jennifer Standifer in session, going down there and basically lobbying for my county. To protect the people that live here.
I asked her if there was anything we could do about the 400 days. We looked at the constitution, 90-150 days. Boom! We had a case.”
“Before the case come about, I called Joseph Woods. He is the chair of the Republican Party in Arkansas. I was very active in the Republican Party, I’d go to Johnson County, Yale County, Crawford County and Franklin County.
Every time I was home from work and there was a Republican Party meeting anywhere that was open, I would drive to it. I would get up there and would talk to the people in the crowd, just to kind of educate them on how the Republicans are treating us.”
"Joseph Woods then informed Colt that he wasn’t going to do that. Joseph told Colt he would not help them and was just going to let the courts do what they do. Marcus Jones, the Democratic chair, spoke out saying this is not about a political agenda.
This is about representation of constituents whether they are Democrat, Republican, Libertarian or Independent. Whatever party they are, this is about the people.
When Jospeh Woods denied that right, Colt was set off. That was the day Colt left the Republican Party and joined the lawsuit.
“I finally got a hold of Joseph Woods. Now this was a trick. I tried calling Joseph Woods, he wouldn’t answer. I called Drew, the vice-chair or whatever he is, and he referred me to the Republican attorney. He said that they were not allowed to talk to me. I’m like, ‘What?’ So the chair of the Republican Party can’t talk to a fellow, active Republican member.”
“I talked to the attorney. He approved it. Then I put something on Twitter about running for governor. Well then, that same day Joseph Woods finally calls me back. Ironically. He talks to me and I tell him, ‘Mr Woods, it’s unconstitutional what we are doing here. I think if you would talk to the governor and help us out. We’ve got five Republicans running in this district for that seat. I would appreciate anything you would do to help us out.’”
See
"Eureka Springs Judge Writer Misdemeanor Charge Reveals Deeper Issue"
And Entertainment District Article further down this page
The Special Prosecutor had used the words, 'Class A misdemeanor for terroristic threatening, which is just below a felony charge.
Had the Judge specifically said how he was going to kill you, that would have tipped the scale indicating a premeditated action, and a lower-class felony charge that would automatically remove the Judge from office'.
Dan and Gia Voorheis regularly attended the meetings and said,
"This meeting had three big law enforcement officers present instead of the usual one officer. It was posted on Facebook that you would be at the January Quorum Court meeting because you were distributing fliers to get Mill Hollow residents to attend to save the county road from Writer's abandonment.
Facebook is monitored by government and law enforcement to be forewarned of events before they happen."
Dan said that he wasn't close enough to hear, but he saw David Writer's attempt to incite me to violence by his physical aggressiveness, "It was a setup to have you removed for a violent action -- with extra officers ready at the end of the row, backing up Writer -- except you didn't take the bait and left Writer standing there".
Dan said he watched them as I was 'trespassed' from the room by the police officers. This is on the video, and violates my Constitutional rights, because I was not acting unlawfully.
I don't think it 'proves a setup to discredit' me, just because the circumstances point toward that. There isn't any direct witness testimony to the fact, like witnessing the threat and profanity, and how county roads used to be maintained by county judges without problems for decades.
Yesterday, I responded to a Reporter for the Harrison Daily Times (who was sitting next to me when I was threatened by Carroll County Judge, David Writer, after the January Quorum Court meeting).
He asked if I had any comment about the Judge's 'misdemeanor harassment' charge that was just filed (the Carroll County Judge had threatened to kill me, and also referred to my Mom as a b*tch.
Note the discussion has entirely left the Judge's county-wide road abandonment problem, the original issue, altogether. ; )
“Sarah Sanders just somehow found $300 million of wasteful spending in Arkansas. She just said it in her State of the State.
How do we just find $300 million of wasteful spending. You know what I mean? That is neglect on a lot of people’s parts. Somebody needs to be held accountable.”
The three pillars of Colt’s campaign are access, accountability and affordability. These are the ideals Colt’s team desires to bring back.
“This is all just a pissed off farm guy. If everybody is just going to stand around and watch. It’s time to put your gloves on and go to work.
Arkansas is just not affordable anymore. Yes we are one of the cheapest states in the nation but we also have some of lowest incomes in the nation.”
“It’s been a humbling ride. I lived in the most perfect life you could imagine. My life was pretty much copy and paste from day to day. You know, go to work, go home, go to church, work the farm. Copy and paste. It was great. There was no trouble.
This was going to be my life, my kids’ life, my grandkids’ life and so on and so on. Politics was never in my picture, nor my future.”
“Honestly I don’t like it. But I’ve lost so much trust in my state government, how do you fix that? If we keep doing the same thing over and over we are going to keep getting same results.
We hired Sarah Huckabee Sanders based off her being a celebrity, not because she is good for the job. Her not talking to the legislators, that’s a problem. Why would you not want to be on the front lines talking to these folks asking how we are going to accomplish these goals? If I get enough votes we can put a stop to it.”
“I want to focus on more important things to me. That is, the government overreach is at an all-time high. We shouldn’t be funding things that people do not agree with. They’re using us as a bargain bin state with all these wind turbines.
I believe that people should have all the rights in the world to do whatever they want with their land. However, when you start affecting your neighbor, that’s not very Arkansas like.”
“We need to be considerate. 50 years ago this wasn’t a problem because you didn’t treat your neighbor like that. You would have the whole town mad at you. If you did one neighbor wrong, the whole town was coming after you.
Now people just don’t care. They chase the dollar and that is their lifestyle. I mean, I hate it. I hope I get the opportunity to change it. I would be more of a common sense approach. Just try to get people to have good morals. Which most Arkansans do. Most Arkansans are good people.”
Colt continued . . .
Eureka Springs Judge Writer Misdemeanor
Charge Reveals Deeper Issue
Judge Writer Misdemeanor Charge story continued on page 3.
by Eric Schuenemann, Eureka Springs
“I may not have a lot of money but if I can get enough support to either win this thing or at least put a dent in her, to where she does the right thing.”
What is winning to you?
“Winning to me can come in two forms.
The governor realizing that she made a mistake and undoing it. Not just the prisons but also education. Everything that she’s touched and undo it all. Or…
Winning out right and just restructuring everything. Things can be restructured. There’s a route you got to take but you can restructure the boards. It’s got to go through the General Assembly to get it done.
I think if we take a dictator out and let the legislators legislate I think we’ll have a lot better state. Appointees need to be people that are qualified. Not friends, just because they need a job.”
"I think if we take a dictator out and let the legislators legislate I think we’ll have a lot better state. Appointees need to be people that are qualified. Not friends, just because they need a job.” -Colt Shelby
The lawsuit was filed in Pulaski County. It has now been moved to the Arkansas Supreme Court, as the governor was not happy with the outcome of the lower court’s ruling. “It doesn’t matter. We won. We got representation.”
Eureka Springs Productions and Eureka Yard Party Copyright 2026 ©
– By Matthew Nagy
Dear Council,
The purpose of this email is to urge you to respect the citizens' definitive voice regarding the proposed entertainment district. The people of Eureka Springs have already twice engaged in direct political participation on this matter and voted "no."
Pushing forward with this initiative despite that outcome undermines the fundamental purpose of the ballot box and erodes municipal trust.
While my own doctoral work only briefly touched on public policy under Jill Young, and I do not claim to be an expert in this specific field, I am knee-deep in research daily. I know that both foundational democratic theory and modern empirical data heavily support a single truth: stable governance relies entirely on respecting the vote.
Furthermore, the suggestion to bypass the public's "no" vote by implementing a "90-day trial period" is fundamentally flawed from a policy design perspective. In rigorous policy evaluation, an experimental timeline must match the intervention's internal logic.
According to evaluation frameworks published by the Penn State Center for Evidence to Impact (2023), one of the most common reasons pilot programs fail to yield valid data is an inadequate timeframe to observe outcomes.
A 90-day micro-timeline is methodologically incapable of isolating real policy data. Because an entertainment district is novel to downtown, a three-month snapshot will capture nothing more than the initial novelty spike of curiosity and implementation turbulence, rather than stable economic or social impacts.
More critically, a 90-day window fails to isolate time-varying confounding variables—such as pre-existing seasonal events, holidays and weather patterns that already independently draw crowds to the area. Attempting to evaluate long-term urban planning on a 90-day schedule is an exercise in political expedience, not sound public policy.
On a deeper note of community concern, it is highly curious that the controversial figure who originally spearheaded this entire initiative has remained consistently absent from public dialogue, choosing instead to use non-threatening proxies to do his bidding on the floor.
When the driving force behind a major municipal shift operates entirely from the shadows due to severe reputational liabilities and a complete lack of public trust, it is the duty of this council to question whose interests they are actually serving.
Pushing a highly unpopular policy through backroom influence—while shielding the actual architect from public scrutiny—is a profound failure of transparency.
"Pushing a highly unpopular policy through backroom influence—while shielding the actual architect from public scrutiny—is a profound failure of transparency."
As a council, your primary mandate is to represent the will of the electorate, not the backroom interests of controversial power brokers. Council Member Moyer, who shared that she holds a PhD in public policy, contributes greatly to the research.
She also served on the editorial research team for the Policy Studies Journal, and contributed to a text highlighting this exact benchmark of governance: "In democratic polities, we typically assume that policymakers make choices in these arenas consistent with preferences of constituents and stakeholders" (Jones et al., 2021, p. 333).
When an elected body decides to circumvent a direct vote of the people, it violates that basic assumption of democracy. It signals to residents that their votes only matter when they align with the council's agenda.
This approach breeds deep public cynicism and creates unnecessary local conflict.
In fact, literature highlighted by Dr. Moyer’s own editorial team warns that policy conflict drastically escalates when local governments dismiss resisting citizens and ignore direct political participation, leading to "increasingly antagonistic posturing of policymakers toward opposition groups, which frustrated communications and extended conflict" (Jones et al., 2021, p. 334).
Democracy functions on the belief that votes carry absolute weight. Overturning or bypassing a vote is not leadership; it is an overreach that damages the fabric of our community's trust.
I urge each of you to look at the precedent you are setting, honor the democratic process and respect the explicit vote of your constituents by rejecting the entertainment district.
Respectfully submitted,
Heather Wilson
Entertainment District Pilot Program - Democratic Accountability and Methodological Flaws –By Heather Wilson
The following public email was written to the Council prior to their vote on this matter.
UPDATE July 14th As a follow up, Heather Wilson addressed the Council on the evening meeting of July 13th.
The video consists of the entire session. If you only wish to see Heather's address to them, it starts at 7 minutes in, and concludes around 2 and a half minutes later. Video Link