POST-ELECTION REVIEW Keeping the bottle corked

Wet/dry proponents in two counties learn valuable lessons

By Amy Widner

LITTLE ROCK — Efforts to place wet/dry options on the ballot in several Arkansas counties all failed this year, leaving proponents in Sharp County ready for the next fight and proponents in Izard County wondering if another battle would be worth the effort.

Sharp County

Cherokee Village resident Ruth Reynolds, 71, was the force behind the effort in Sharp County. Her group, Save Energy Reap Taxes, gathered enough signatures to get the wet/dry vote on the ballot, but two civil lawsuits were filed to challenge the legality of the signatures and the option's wording.

When Circuit Judge Phil Smith reviewed SERT's petitions, he invalidated 461 of the 4,620 signatures the group had gathered, leaving them 210 short of the 4,369 signatures required by law. SERT appealed the decision, but the Arkansas Supreme Court upheld Smith's ruling.

Many of the signatures that were invalidated came from

Reynolds. Although Arkansas Code stipulates that canvassers sign their petitions in the presence of a notary public and Reynolds knew that, she said she got caught up in the process and signed about 85 percent of her petitions without a witness. Those 85 percent were invalidated.

Reynolds said that of all the challenges she and her fellow canvassers

faced during the signature-gathering drive and the lessons they learned, that is one mistake she will never repeat.

"That was the really big downfall," Reynolds said. "Iread the rules and I knew about it, and then it just went out of my mind. I was thinking just to get things ready and be as fast and efficient as possible so the notary clerk could sign them more easily."

Another 238 signatures were invalidated because there was evidence of common authorship, a finding the Arkansas Supreme Court upheld. All the invalidated signatures were enough to kick the option off the ballot, so the question of the option's wording did not come into play.

The appeal process lasted so close to the election that early voters had the option on their ballots. Reynolds said she has heard a lot of feedback from Sharp County residents who are angry that they didn't get to vote on the issue, regardless of whether they want the county to go wet or stay dry.

Faye Fulton, owner of the Ash Flat Dairy Freeze; Denise Poulsen, a waitress at the Corner Booth in Hardy; and Carol Steen, owner of Carol's Lakeview Restaurant in Cherokee Village, said many of their patrons are angry the option was taken off the ballot and have been talking about it a lot - between conversations about Barack Obama winning the presidency.

Steen said: "Lots of people are upset about it. It's being said a lot that there's no point of driving to Missouri to get [alcohol] if we can get it here. A lot of people are talking about it. They just don't understand what is wrong with the state of Arkansas. Eighty percent of my customers are retirees. They drink, they go to Tunica, they do all of that. They just say, 'Why does all that money have to go out of state ?'"

Fulton said: "A lot of them don't even drink, they just think it should be the voters' decisions."

Poulsen said: "They're upset it didn't make it on there, and the ones who voted for it, it's like their vote didn't count."

An Evening Shade Cafe waitress who would not give her name said that most of her customers are Christians who didn't want the option on the ballot and are glad it was removed, but said the news hasn't been a hot topic of conversation.

Reynolds said some of the controversy surrounding the option's removal may work in SERT's favor. They will start gathering signatures as soon as possible to get the option on the ballot in two years.

"Mostly, for the people who are upset, it's the right to vote," Reynolds said. "They got really ticked off about that. A lot of individuals who didn't sign this time will probably sign next time, not because they want a wet county, but they believe in the right to vote about it."

Reynolds said it's a strange twist that anger over the right to vote may drive the effort from now on, because that was never her original reason for trying to get the option on the ballot. Reynolds is a retiree who has spent her life caring about the environment. Most of what she does now is on an individual basis - organic gardening for herself, etc. - but in the wet/dry vote she saw an opportunity to do something big to help cut carbon emissions.

She said people who live in Cherokee Village have to drive to Mountain Home or the Missouri line for alcohol, a 40-mile round trip. Cave City residents have an 80-mile trip. That's a lot of wastedenergy, Reynolds said. She hates the idea of driving across the county to collect signatures all over again, but sees such potential in the result that, for her, the ends justify the means. She hopes to spend more time during this petition drive talking to the residents she meets about global warming, energy independence and peak oil (the idea that the world will hit a point when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction will peak and decline).

"Another big thing for me and for a lot of environmentalists right now is localization," Reynolds said. "We see that as the future. In order to save our necks, I feel we need to localize as much as possible - grow our own food, make our own beer and wine - and we can't do that if there's a law against the manufacture and sale of alcohol in our county.

"Traditionally, alcohol is a big part of peoples' lives. I'm sorry, I didn't make that so. But we have to be able, if push comes to shove, to make it right here in Sharp County," Reynolds said.

Reynolds said that she knows her next signature-gathering campaign will face opposition again, but she hopes she has learned from this experience and will be ready for them.

"The appeals lawyer we had is helping us with a lot of advance thinking for next time," Reynolds said. "He said, 'Think about it this way: What you're really doing is getting ready for another hearing in two years. You've got to think about everything. They'll be looking for everything, so be on your toes.'"

Morris Street of Cherokee Village, one of the people who filed a lawsuit challenging the option, said he and others like him will indeed be ready for another fight. His lawsuit was combined with another by Yota Shaw of Strawberry for the case, and Street said he and others who worked against the option were organized as the Committee to Keep Sharp County Dry.

Local churches and individuals raised the money for lawyer fees and other expenditures. Street said they may be organized under another name next time around, but their cause will be the same.

"Some [people were involved in fighting the option] because they were older and had been here when it was wet back in the '40s," Street said. "Eighty-five percent of them have had alcohol problems themselves or parents that beat the tar out of them all their lives, and they don't want that to happen to their kids. I've talked to them about it, why they're so serious and dedicated to the cause. It's not some hobby for them. They mean business. They tell me that if you had the tar beat out of you every week, you wouldn't forget either.

"I think it also has to do with quality of life in our area. They've all moved here to get away from those big cities and to get away from alcohol and all the problems that come with it," Street said.

Street said teenage drinking is a big problem in Sharp County.

"I work with about 100 kids each week at my church, kids who are dealing with that kind of stuff," Street said. "I see the effects now, and it's not going to get any better if we put liquor stores up all over the place."

Street takes issue with some of SERT's arguments. He said Sharp County doesn't have towns big enough to attract some of the restaurants, like Olive Garden, that have been frequently mentioned during the petition drive. The county also wouldn't see an increase in taxes because that state taxes on alcohol are shared evenly with all counties, wet or dry.

"We would get to keep a small portion of a 1 percent tax," Street said. "Then crime increases, you have to hire more law enforcement, and what good is that money then?"

Street doesn't personally believe in global warming and takes issue with the idea that dry counties restrict peoples' personal freedoms.

"We haven't kept them from doing what they want to do," Street said. "They just can't go get 12 cases of it and put it in their house. They just have to drive for it or go to any of the private clubs where it is served."

Street said that although the idea of a wet Sharp County has been tossed around for years, this is the first time he and his group have had to come together and figure out a way to fight it. They made the decision to combat the option through the courts because they didn't have the money to do an extensive advertising campaign to counter Reynolds' tireless efforts. They felt the money would be better spent on the lawyer.

"We just felt like with the presidential election and the huge turnout that there was going to be, it was the best chance for it to pass this year," Street said. "So we felt that our best chance would be to get it off the ballot."

Arkansas law limits the number of liquor stores to one per every 4,000 residents of a county - in Sharp County, that would have been four stores. There would have been no limit on restaurants and convenience stores that serve alcohol.

An attempt to get a wet/dry vote on the ballot in Clark County was similarly challenged in court and removed from the ballot.

Izard County

Nate Wolf of Horseshoe Bend was behind the petition drive to get a wet/dry option on the ballot in Izard County. The drive failed to meet its mission, and before deciding if he wants to try again for 2010, Wolf said he wants to get together and share ideas with the organizers from the various counties that tried and failed at getting wet/dry options on the ballot this election year.

"Our biggest challenge ended up being the sheer number of signatures we needed to collect, given the limited pool," Wolf said. "The biggest problem we see - like for example, the lottery, they only had to get 10 percent of the people who voted in the last gubernatorial election - we're required to get at least 38 percent of the county's registered voters. That would be OKif they ever purged the list, but if you look at the list, like in Izard County, probably 25-30 percent of the names that are on there are either dead or moved away. ... So in reality, you have to get almost 60 percent of the people that actually live there."

Arkansas Secretary of State General Counsel Tim Humphries and Izard County Clerk Rhonda Halbrook confirmed that the signatures of 38 percent of a county's registered voters are required for local options. In this election, June 1, 2008, was the cutoff date. Wolf needed 2,775 names on his petition. They ended up about 400 names short.

Halbrook said they county clerk's office receives death certificates once a month and updates the list. But if for some reason they don't receive the death certificate, they cannot remove names unless someone provides them with legal documentation.

"If they register somewhere else in Arkansas, their names are automatically pulled off, but if they move out of state, we don't have any way of finding that out," Halbrook said.

Wet/dry options are the only issue in the state that require that many signatures to get on the ballot, and the percentage hasn't always been that high. The Arkansas Legislature voted to increase the requirement from 15 percent to 30 percent in 1985 and from 30 percent to 38 percent in 1993.

Although Wolf was surprised at how difficult it proved to gather the signatures to get the option on the ballot, he knew that any attempt to get the option on the ballot was likely to end up in court like it did in Sharp County.

"We were prepared and felt like we might end up that way," Wolf said. "We knew that, but it doesn't seem right. If you do all that work and everything else and if somebody takes you to court, one person can decide the issues."

For Wolf, all the effort has been geared toward helping Izard County attract business and grow.

"We felt that if we didn't try to get something here that we would fall economically ... behind in the area," Wolf said. "If you wantto get a chain restaurant in the area, the first thing they look at is if they can have alcohol. That's the No. 1 issue for us. Gas is still an issue, but it's not as bad now as it was four months ago."

Arkansas law limits the number of liquor stores to one per every 4,000 residents of a county - in Izard County, that would have been three stores. There would have been no limit on restaurants and convenience stores that sell alcohol.

Elsewhere in the state, an attempt to get a wet/dry vote on the ballot in Boone County also failed to get enough signatures, while a wet/dry option in Clark County gained enough signatures initially but had a number of the signature thrown out by the Arkansas Supreme Court. The proponents of Clark County's option had until Monday to obtain enough signatures to prompt a special election to be held within 90 days, but information on the results of that effort were not available at press time.

- awidner@ arkansasonline.com

Three Rivers, Pages 50, 51 on 11/13/2008