LITTLE ROCK — It’s been three weeks since North Little Rock rushed to set a Nov. 8 election for increasing the city’s sales tax, but without any noticeable campaign drumming up support so far, it would be easy for potential voters to overlook.
Organized opposition to raising the sales tax by 1 percentage point in a sluggish economy also has been non-existent.
“It is quiet,” North Little Rock Chamber of Commerce President Terry Hartwick said Friday of election talk so far. “But if you don’t get the people who come out and are just blasting you, that’s a good feeling.
“I think this will be a real grass-roots kind of thing from people who really want North Little Rock to go forward,” he added. “It’s just a matter of getting the word out.”
With just more than four weeks until voters go to the polls, Mayor Patrick Hays said last week that a campaign to push for the tax won’t stay quiet for long.
A telephone poll of registered voters in sample areas completed Friday will help the city plot its path, he added.
“We’re in the process right now of formulating it,” Hays said of the tax campaign strategy. “Obviously, we’re going to use that [polling] on how best to convey our message.
“It certainly appears that the opportunity is there, but the message needs to be delivered about what we will do, if successful.”
Hays said his city’s opportunity arose when neighboring Little Rock was successful with a sales-tax election Sept. 13. Little Rock voters approved a three eighths percent sales tax to expire Dec. 31, 2021, for capital improvements, and a permanent five-eighths percent sales tax for general operations.
North Little Rock’s proposal also has two parts: a 0.5 percent tax for capital improvements to expire March 31, 2017, and a 0.5 percent tax to be divided evenly between capital improvements and general operations.
The taxes, if passed, would add to North Little Rock’s current 1 percent sales tax, a 1 percent sales tax to Pulaski County and a 6 percent state sales tax.
The North Little Rock City Council approved the tax package in a special meeting just three days after Little Rock’s tax passed. Hays had mentioned in April the possibility of asking for a tax increase, but no movement came until Little Rock’s election was over.
The suddenness of Hays gathering the council together didn’t allow time for public hearings to ask residents what they consider to be the city’s most pressing needs, something Little Rock did in the spring.
Hays has said the plan moved quickly because Nov. 8 is the best option for an election. Hays wanted, he said, to stay away from competing with Christmas, a North Little Rock school-millage election in February, party primary elections in May and the general election in November 2012.
Also, by state law, the city’s special meeting came just under the deadline for setting an election in November.
“We certainly didn’t have the time,” Hays said of why there weren’t public meetings to ask residents their preferences. “When I realized the deadline, and I certainly take responsibility for it, we started adding up everything the night before we had the special meeting.
“It was obvious that if we were going to do it at a time when we could allow voters to focus on just it ... we needed to move forward,” Hays said.
How the money would be spent was somewhat outlined in accompanying resolutions approved by the City Council. However, resolutions show only “intent,” so the listed breakdown of expenditures of the tax money, if approved by voters, isn’t binding.
Revenue from the capital expenses/general expenses half of the tax are listed as going toward filling 10 police officer positions, building a $2 million fire station on the city’s east side and staffing it with 13 firefighters, buying two firetrucks, upgrading emergency communications equipment, and replacing an aging police-car fleet.
The capital-purchases half is to include at least $500,000 annually in additional money for streets, drainage and sidewalks in each of the city’s four wards, adding another branch library, finishing out a Little League baseball complex in Burns Park, and a $1 million annual road, bridge and trail program.
Also in the capital portion, $20 million over that tax’s five-year life would go toward a “jobs and business park development and related economic growth opportunities.” The business park could include moving the State Fairgrounds to 2,000 acres the city hopes to buy on the city’s east side, Hays has said.
The Arkansas Livestock Show Association hasn’t decided whether to move the fairgrounds out of Little Rock. Also, Hays has recently said that the fairgrounds is “to be considered, but not to the exclusion of other opportunities” in determining how the tax funds are spent.
Other opportunities, Hays said, could mean buying out businesses along Washington Avenue downtown, including the relocation of a Greyhound bus station away from downtown, and replacing those with a city-owned performing arts center.
The voter polling last week and also in May, both commissioned by the chamber, looked positive for a successful election, Hartwick said. About 500-600 calls were made in the latest sampling, he added.
Though some of the poll’s calls are known to have gone to neighboring Sherwood residents who can’t vote in North Little Rock’s election, Hartwick said, “with as many calls as we made, it wouldn’t skew our numbers that much.”
“It was very optimistic with what we came up with,” Hartwick said, indicating that the poll emphasized the tax’s public-safety effects. “What we got shows that even in these times, people are interested in public safety, in police and fire protection, and in jobs.”
If any opposition group appears for this election, Bubba Lloyd, a businessman who received 37 percent of the vote against Hays in the 2008 mayoral election, will likely be involved.
“We don’t have the drum beaters over here,” Lloyd said last week about the city’s lack of those with the influence or willingness to butt heads with City Hall. “I don’t know anybody who is just an organizer. But I have had a tremendous amount of phone calls about it.
“What I’ve been telling everybody I talk to and what they’re telling their friends is that the city has plenty of money to take care of what they need to take care of ... if it’s used for the basic, essential needs and not for these personal projects the mayor does.”
Hays has often said that the city has kept its promises to voters on how tax revenue would be spent and would honor those pledges again.
In March 2000, North Little Rock voters approved a 1 percent sales tax and in exchange, as promised during that campaign, are still provided with free sanitation pickup. The last North Little Rock tax election, a 1 percent two-year tax that has expired, came in August 2005 to build the Dickey-Stephens Park baseball stadium and a $5 million expansion of the city’s senior citizens center. Both projects were completed in 2007.
“We have a record of keeping our promises, and that’s important,” Hays said. “Because of that, we feel - I do, and I think the community does - that while [a tax increase] would be an additional burden, they’re much more willing to accept it.”
Arkansas, Pages 15 on 10/09/2011