Board Members and Alternates
Mr. Rex Nelson, Alternate Federal Co-Chairman
Rex Nelson of Little Rock was appointed by President Bush in August 2005 as the alternate federal co-chairman of the Delta Regional Authority. Nelson had served the previous nine years as the director of policy and communications for Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. In that role, he was a member of the governor's senior management team. Nelson was responsible for supervising the division of the governor's office that set and articulated policy for state government. He also was responsible for media relations and public relations. He took an eight-month leave from state government in 1998 to manage Huckabee's campaign. The governor won with 60 percent of the vote, the highest percentage ever received by a Republican gubernatorial nominee in Arkansas.
From July 1992 until Huckabee took office in July 1996, Nelson was the political editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He supervised coverage of Bill Clinton's first campaign for president and coverage of the Clinton administration for the state's largest newspaper. Splitting his time between Washington and Little Rock, Nelson directed the newspaper's Washington and state Capitol bureaus. He appeared frequently on national radio and television programs, hosted a daily political talk show on the top news-talk radio station in the state, appeared weekly on the Arkansas Educational Television Network and wrote a biography of first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Nelson also is a former editor of Arkansas Business, which under his leadership was named the best local business publication in the country for markets of 1 million or fewer people by the Association of Area Business Publications. He spent four years in Washington in the 1980s as the Washington bureau chief for the Arkansas Democrat newspaper. Nelson is a summa cum laude graduate of Ouachita Baptist University, a member of the board of the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame, a member of the board of the Arkansas Travelers baseball team, a member of the board of the Arkansas Baseball Foundation, the vice president of the Little Rock Touchdown Club and a member of the board of the Oxford American magazine. He and his wife, Melissa, have two sons.