HOT SPRINGS – Elk Horn Bank & Trust Company hosted an open house celebration Wednesday to mark the opening of its new branch location in Hot Springs, at 4138 Central Avenue.

GURDON – December’s Clark County Strategic Planning session took place Tuesday night at Gurdon City Hall, in an effort to more closely involve Gurdon residents in the process.

The setting was more “party” than planning, Tuesday evening at the Captain Henderson House as leaders of the Clark County Strategic Planning Committee updated community residents on the progress of the process.

Situated in the impoverished Mississippi River Delta, the county has the highest poverty rate, 33 percent; one of the highest unemployment rates, 8.7 percent this fall, and the lowest homeownership rate, 56 percent.

HELENA-WEST HELENA, AR (October 19, 2006) Dr. Steven Murray, Chairman of the Delta Bridge Project Steering Committee, today announced that the Boys & Girls Club of Phillips County will receive up to $240,000 in grant funds over the next three years. The funding will be used to bring a nationally proven model for youth development to Phillips County.

Community Counseling Services, a nonprofit psychiatric center based in Hot Springs, Ark., USA needed space. Its programs were split between two cramped, old building that were expensive to maintain.

For five years, G. David Yarber rented space in Marianna for his income tax service, Pro File America Inc., but that hindered his small business’s ability to grow.

“We were just a seasonal business, about four months of the year,” said Yarber, the president and chief executive officer of the company.

The William J. Clinton Foundation had $154.8 million in the bank at the end of 2005. That’s shy by a few million of the bucks held by the Gates Foundation ($29.1 billion) or Arkansas’s home-grown Walton Foundation ($1.1 billion).

It’s sweet potato harvest time and the beginning of what many hope will become a new industry for the Arkansas Delta.

“We have probably the only strategic plan in the country that envisions the sweet potato as an agent of social change,” said Steven Murray, chancellor of Phillips Community College of the University of Arkansas.

PINE BLUFF, AR -More than $1 million has been accrued in special savings accounts by low-income families across the state in their effort to improve their economic situation by building personal assets. The special matched savings accounts are called Individual Development Accounts (IDAs).