It’s an issue casting a long shadow over Fort Smith, Arkansas, after a Sebastian County Circuit Court judge ruled that the city’s acting administrator violated the state’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in a decision that adds fuel to an already simmering controversy over a botched hire, a background check gone AWOL and an annual $110,000-per-year job offer that dissolved in less than 48 hours.
“Did they know about it? And if they did, why did they not tell us?”
According to the June 3 ruling by Judge Dianna Hewitt Ladd, Fort Smith Acting City Administrator Jeff Dingman failed to comply with the legally required timeline for producing documents requested by local attorney and well-known FOIA advocate Joey McCutchen. The documents were related to the hiring—and very swift un-hiring—of Rebecca Cowan as the city’s new Director of Internal Audit.
Cowan, 48, was unanimously approved for the position by the Fort Smith Board of Directors on April 22. But, just two days later, the board rescinded her appointment after learning she had been charged with felony stalking in Oklahoma.
Cowan was scheduled to begin work on May 27. She was, evidently unbeknownst to the Fort Smith Board of Directors, arrested on June 7, 2024, as a fugitive from justice and booked into the Sebastian County Jail that same day. Cowan was released on bond three days later on June 10.
The case underscores a broader problem with how open government laws are enforced—or not enforced—in Arkansas. While the Arkansas FOIA, established in 1967, is among the oldest in the nation, the state lacks a dedicated oversight body to investigate or adjudicate violations. So when news broke that Cowan had quietly been removed from her post, it fell to a private citizen—McCutchen—to try to uncover how the hiring had happened in the first place: what internal discussions occurred and who had signed off on the decision.
In his May 2 lawsuit, McCutchen alleged that the city not only missed deadlines in responding to his FOIA request, but also omitted key documents altogether. He pointed to emails shared by Board Director Christina Catsavis as proof that city officials had access to the very records he had asked for—and failed to release them.
Catsavis, one of the board members who approved Cowan’s hiring, was allegedly told by Dingman that no background check existed. But McCutchen insists that not only did Dingman know about Cowan’s felony charge—he blocked Fort Smith Chief Human Resources Officer Rick Lolley from handing over the information to the board.
“Judge Ladd ruled in our favor on the FOIA violation and stated ... that she had concerns about the missing background documents and the lack of transparency by Dingman and the city,” McCutchen wrote in a statement. “[Dingman] lied to [Director] Christina Catsavis when he told her there was no background check.”
The fallout has been swift and chaotic. Fort Smith’s board demanded disciplinary action—possibly even termination—against the city’s top HR official. Meanwhile, questions have been raised about Strategic Government Resources, the outside recruiting firm paid more than $15,000 to vet candidates. The firm was contractually obligated to conduct background checks and produce media reports, but apparently missed or failed to communicate a felony charge.
Further complicating the picture is a growing list of FOIA exemptions added by the Arkansas legislature.
“Did they know about it? And if they did, why did they not tell us? Or if they did not know about it, why did they not know about it?” asked a clearly exasperated Lee Kemp, the city director for Ward 3. “I think sometimes what you can see in the past is that the staff and the city board of directors are not in unison.”
The city, for its part, insists it did nothing wrong. “The city furnished all relevant documents in response to Mr. McCutchen’s FOIA request and remains committed to openness and transparency,” Fort Smith Public Relations Manager Josh Buchfink told Talk Business & Politics, a news site that covers business, politics and culture in Arkansas.
Dingman also maintained that the city “fully complied” with the FOIA request, although Buchfink admitted: “We did not meet the three-business-day deadline outlined in the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act.”
But Judge Ladd’s ruling suggests otherwise—and shines a light on the kind of legal gray zones that allow public officials to operate without sufficient oversight. Because Arkansas lacks an independent ombudsman or agency to handle FOIA disputes, citizens who feel stonewalled must turn to county prosecutors—who rarely intervene—or pay out of pocket to sue their local government. As a result, enforcement is uneven, and transparency often hinges on persistence.
Further complicating the picture is a growing list of FOIA exemptions added by the Arkansas legislature. In 2023, Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a bill shielding travel and security records of the governor and other state officials from public scrutiny. FOIA advocates warned that the law marked a dangerous precedent that would allow the state to carve out ever-larger swaths of government activity from public view. McCutchen described it as “not government of the people, by the people and for the people,” but rather “government of the government, by the government and for the government.”
Existing exemptions already cover a wide range of records, from state tax investigation documents and information on home-schooled children to the identities of people who participate in or administer state executions—including the manufacturers of lethal injection drugs.
In that context, the Cowan affair is more than a local HR debacle—it’s a case study in the slow corrosion of transparency and the fragile state of accountability in a democracy that promises sunshine but too often delivers fog.
Fort Smith officials are still scrambling to explain how a candidate charged with a felony made it to the final round—let alone got hired—without someone raising a red flag. But the city continues to maintain its FOIA obligations were met.
Which brings us back to the original question: If the city hires someone charged with felony stalking to do the auditing, who’s keeping tabs on the auditors?
In this case, it wasn’t an oversight committee or an internal watchdog—it was a lone citizen armed with a FOIA request that prompted a judge’s ruling, grounded in the belief that public trust is earned, not assumed. When the system fails to audit itself, the people must.
