LITTLE ROCK — Little Rock residents told the mayor and city manager Thursday that they want their neighborhood alert centers reopened and for locals to get preference for the dozens of new jobs the city will be filling next year.
Their comments came in response to a presentation on Little Rock’s proposed $158.6 million 2012 budget, the largest ever because of a sales tax increase that voters approved in September. City directors are expected to vote on the budget Tuesday now that four community meetings are over.
Unlike meetings earlier in the week, many of the 16 residents who gathered Thursday at the Dunbar Community Center were highly critical of the city’s spending plan. Some said it didn’t put enough money into youth programs or place enough emphasis on hiring minority-group contractors or limit the dozens of new jobs to city residents.
“Some of these jobs, you need to hire people from our community,” said Robert Webb, who led the anti-sales-tax campaign earlier this summer. One of the issues during the campaign was that Little Rock does not have a residency requirement for employees and many of its workers live in surrounding cities.
Although city directors aren’t going to be considering a residency requirement anytime soon, City Manager Bruce Moore said the city attorney is working to develop a local preference contract that would increase the opportunity for Little Rock firms to win city bids.
“Other places have done it,” said Mayor Mark Stodola about local preference contracts, asource of contention among some city directors who have long urged the city to give Little Rock companies more weight in bid considerations.
The city attorney has long opined that City Hall could not treat local companies any differently, but Stodola said, “We’ve been urging our city attorney to re-review it.”
On the job-hiring side, the city expects to advertise 57 new positions and fill 102 vacant positions, some that have been kept vacant for years, with the resulting savings used to help balance the budget. This year, the city kept more than $7 million in jobs vacant.
The new jobs will range from a veterinarian for the zoo to 15 maintenance workers for parks. The zoo will have 10 new positions next year to help with its reaccreditation efforts, and the Fire Department expects to hire 12 new firefighters to staff a new station in west Little Rock. The city also will fill 32 vacant police officer positions and eight code-enforcement jobs.
Little Rock is adding 12 new officers to its Community Oriented Policing program, made up of officers who are stationed at alert centers or are out on bicycle patrols. The city expects to have two recruiting classes next year to fill all of the police positions that the new sales tax will fund.
Overall, the city expects to spend $111.6 million on staffing next year, an $11.2 million increase over 2011 after new salaries, pay increases and benefits are figured in.
Hearing about those new officers and the increased funding from the sales tax, Sheila Miles said she wanted to see the Wright Avenue Alert Center reopened. The alert center and two others were closed last year as part of budget cuts that also included layoffs, reduced hours at community centers and fewer dollars going to outside agencies.
“The reasoning for closing the alert center was that the city didn’t have any money,” said Miles, president of the Wright Avenue Neighborhood Association. With the new sales tax revenue that the city should start receiving in March, “I feel confident now the city has the money.”
But there is no money in the proposed budget to reopen the alert centers, where codeenforcement officers and community policing officers were stationed.
“If we opened the alert center Jan. 1, we wouldn’t have anyone to staff it. We wouldn’t have the capacity,” Moore said. “I promise you that the board is hearing you very clearly and that it’s a priority for us.”
The proposed budget does contain $3 million more for youth prevention and intervention programs, although the specific programs receiving the new funds won’t be identified until next year. Since the early 1990s, the city has paid outside agencies for mentoring and after-school programs to keep teenagers off the streets and out of gangs. The city currently spends about $2.5 million a year on those programs.
Some of the funding will go toward a skills center or re-entry program for residents coming out of prison who need job training.
Moore said there’s also been recent discussion about turning the city’s sidewalk-building efforts into a job-training program.The details won’t be ironed out until next year, although City Director Ken Richardson said he thought the city should start now on the planning.
“I don’t think it’s anything we can’t move forward with right now,” he said after Moore mentioned that discussions wouldn’t start until February. The city’s history with youth-intervention programs has laid a foundation and built relationships with jobtraining programs already out there, he said.
The proposed budget also includes an additional $100,000 for the city’s land bank program that buys vacant lots in olderneighborhoods south of Interstate 630 to resell to people interested in building houses on the lots. The program has been using federal grants to buy properties, which come with income guidelines for buyers.
By putting city money into the program, Moore said, the Land Bank Commission will be able to open up sales to more people.
Arkansas, Pages 15 on 12/09/2011