Our Team

Kirk Lane serves as the Director of the Arkansas Opioid Recovery Partnership, an organization formed by the Arkansas Association of Counties and the Arkansas Municipal League to administer opioid abatement funds derived from opioid settlement funding awarded to the cities and counties of Arkansas. Before this, he served as the Arkansas State Drug Director from 2017 to 2022. Director Lane also has 33 years of experience in law enforcement serving with the Pulaski County Sheriff’s Office and as the Chief of Police for the City of Benton, Arkansas.

He has attended the University of Virginia and University of Arkansas Little Rock. He is a graduate of the Arkansas Law Enforcement Academy, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Drug Commander’s Academy, FBI LEEDA, and the FBI National Academy 197th session.

Director Lane currently serves on the National Board of Directors for the National Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America (CADCA) and the Executive Board of the Gulf States High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program.

He is the recipient of numerous awards in his field including the 2021 Ramstead/ Kennedy Award for his leadership in the field of Recovery.

As Deputy Director of the Arkansas Opioid Recovery Partnership, Tenesha Barnes focuses on policy development and strategic planning to ensure effective service delivery and outcomes for the new initiative. She provides leadership in developing and implementing comprehensive prevention, treatment, and recovery strategies for substance use disorders at the city, county, and community levels.

Throughout her career, Barnes has worn many hats and has served as the National Association of Substance Abuse Directors (NASADAD) and National Prevention Network (NPN) representative for Arkansas, as well as the First Vice President for Internal Affairs, NPN Secretary, and executive board member. She was also Director of Prevention for the Arkansas Department of Human Services/Division of Aging, Adult, and Behavioral Health Services (DAABHS). In this position, she managed and oversaw all prevention activities, including the Substance Abuse Block Grant. She also served as the organizational liaison for the state’s counties, community prevention boards, non-profit organizations, community coalitions, schools, and free-standing entities.  She directly coordinated prevention activities through the State Opioid Responses Grant, Prevent Prescription Drug/Opioid Overdose-Related Deaths (PDO), First Responders-Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act Grants (FR-CARA), and the Strategic Prevention Framework-Partnerships for Success Grants (PFS).

Contributing seven years of experience as a community prevention champion and state prevention director, Barnes’s tenure helped address health disparities and create structural shifts within the prevention infrastructure for the state’s Behavioral Health and Substance Abuse Services Division..She also helped establish the CADCA membership for DAABHS/DHS in the state of Arkansas and is currently an active member.

Barnes holds a bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Sociology from Henderson State University and a master’s degree in Human Resource Development and Leadership from Webster University.

Chris Villines brings a lifelong passion of public service in county government to the AAC executive director position. He was named the seventh executive director of the association in April 2010. Chris was named as one of Ten Outstanding Young Arkansans by the Jaycees in 1998 and later that year was elected to the position of Saline County Collector. He served as collector for 11 years until his selection by the AAC Board of Directors in April 2010.

Chris led the Collector’s Association for several years and was selected to join the AAC Board of Directors in 2005. He was elected president of the National Council of County Association Executives and served in that role from 2019 to 2020.

A lifelong Arkansan, Chris was born in Harrison, but his family moved to Benton before his first birthday. His dad owned a title company in Benton, and Chris, a self-proclaimed “courthouse rat,” grew up working for him. Chris earned a degree in finance at the University of Arkansas. He then went to work for a company doing site acquisition for cellular towers. He did the site acquisition work from 1993 to 1998, when Saline County voters chose their new 28-year-old collector.

Chris has been married to Tonya Villines for 31 years, and they have two children.

Mark R. Hayes joined the Arkansas Municipal League in 1989 as an in-house litigator before becoming the League’s general counsel. He was appointed executive director in 2018. Prior to joining the League, he served the city of Little Rock as an assistant city attorney and municipal judge. Hayes received his bachelor’s degree from Arkansas State University and his Juris Doctor from the Bowen School of Law. He is a member of the American, Arkansas and Pulaski County Bar Associations and was named Outstanding League Counsel by the International Municipal Lawyer’s Association in 2012. In his role as the League’s general counsel, Hayes was one of only 1,450 members of the prestigious international legal organization, the Federation of Defense & Corporate Counsel.

Hayes is married to Alison Offutt, a reformed and no longer practicing attorney. Alison’s legal skills remain sharp, however, and are well tested in their home, where she is the regular victor in debates with Mark, their children and their pets. Between them, Mark and Alison are parents to four terrific kids, Franz, Bliss, Colin and Wells. Unfortunately, the Hayes family lost Wells to an overdose in April 2020 following a hard-fought battle with opioid addiction. Like so many before him, opioid addiction was a fight too powerful for Wells to overcome.

Wells’ struggle with opioid addiction—as well as that of hundreds of thousands of Arkansans and millions of Americans—has been a driving force behind Hayes’ fierce commitment to fighting this epidemic. In 2019 352 opioid overdose deaths were reported in Arkansas. More telling, however, is the nearly tripled rate of Narcan doses administered since the COVID-19 pandemic began in Arkansas, as well as the more than 18-percent increase in overdose deaths nationwide. Hayes believes the League’s and the Association of Arkansas Counties’ ongoing litigation against pharmaceutical companies is a substantial piece of the puzzle for ending the opioid epidemic. Addiction is a societal problem, however, and Hayes believes the greatest solution is for all of us to take our place on the front lines and take up the fight. 

Hayes’ personal and professional philosophy is simple but impactful: Be kind to others. Use your voice to advocate for those who cannot advocate for themselves. This philosophy extends not only to municipal officials and employees that the League serves every day but also to our friends, neighbors, and the citizens of Arkansas’ cities and towns.

Joy Spence is the Data Research Manager at ARORP. In this position, she will measure the impact of ARORP settlement funds in Arkansas communities. She is currently a Masters of Social Work student at UA Little Rock, where she previously assisted the Methamphetamine Grant Coordinator in creating the statewide Me Over Meth prevention campaign.  Spence graduated from Hendrix College in 2018 summa cum laude with the President’s Medal, then started the Arkansas Fellowship at Apptegy. There, Spence helped create Apptegy’s media department: SchoolCEO. As managing editor of the SchoolCEO brand and co-host of SchoolCEO’s podcast, Spence spoke with hundreds of school superintendents across the country about their unique needs and innovations in education. Spence is an Arkansas Certified Teacher in Secondary English Literature and a 200h trained yoga teacher at Sixth House Studio in Little Rock.