LITTLE ROCK — Little Rock has purchased more than 80 cars and trucks, hired dozens of new employees and completed more than $2.6 million worth of street repaving so far with the first year of revenue from a citywide sales tax increase.
Supervisors from the various city departments gave updates Wednesday to the Citizen Evaluation of the New Tax Committee on what tax revenue has been spent and on plans for spending in the beginning of 2013. The committee is charged with keeping track, reviewing and letting the rest of the community know how the city is spending the tax revenue.
The committee met at the Willie Hinton Resource Center at 3805 W. 12th St. to hear the updates.
The 1 percent increase, which brought the city’s portion of the sales tax to 1.5 percentage points, went into effect in January. The increase is broken down into two parts, with three-eighths dedicated to capital projects and infrastructure and fiveeighths dedicated to operations. The portion of the tax dedicated to capital projects will expire in 2021.
Representatives from the finance, police, fire, fleet services, information technology, public works, community programs, housing and neighborhood programs, parks and recreation, and planning and development departments, along with the Little Rock Zoo, all gave updates on sales-tax spending.
Some of the highlights included an update on the new police substations at 12th Street, the potential police substation in west Little Rock and the search for property for a southwest fire station.
“Hopefully, in the January window, we will be able to make a recommendation on a construction manager for the 12th Street station,” said Police Chief Stuart Thomas. “At that point we’ll likely have to update the architectural contract because we’re looking at a building much bigger than the original contract called for. We’re actually obtaining one additional piece of property for that and we’ll close on that [today].”
He said the city has received dozens of e-mails from real estate agents with available property in west Little Rock after recent articles ran about issues negotiating a lease to rent property at the unfinished Pankey Community Center on Cantrell Road. Negotiations were held up when several city officials questioned why the city would spend $1 million to finish building the center and then pay monthly rent, all of the taxes and all of the utilities.
The city is also working on negotiating a price and surveying land in southwest Little Rock to build a fire station. City officials dedicated the West Little Rock Fire Station on Rahling Road on Monday, which was paid for partly with sales tax revenue.
Other department officials highlighted new hires, including 10 of the 20 new code enforcement officers, four animal control officers, several full-time coordinators at the zoo, and administrative and planning staff members to make city services run more smoothly for residents.
Because of the way sales taxes are collected in the state, the city won’t receive all of its 2012 sales tax revenue until the end of March or early April, city officials have said.
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 12/13/2012