Correction: The Fine Arts Club of Arkansas was formed in 1914. Members of that group helped create the Museum of Fine Arts in 1937, which was renamed the Arkansas Arts Center in 1960. This article incorrectly reported the year the museum was founded.
North Little Rock voters won't be asked this year to support a sales tax increase to persuade the Arkansas Arts Center to move to the city's downtown from its longtime home in Little Rock, Mayor Joe Smith said Monday.
Telephone polls gauging interest for a tax to support such a move were conducted in January and again in May by the Arkansas Arts Center Foundation. The foundation is the Arts Center's nonprofit fundraising arm that owns the artwork and oversees an endowment that is to provide $1.6 million this year to the Arts Center, located at 501 E. Ninth St. in Little Rock.
"The Arts Center is going through an important process of determining some long-term goals," Smith said in a prepared statement emailed to central Arkansas news media Monday. "This process is neither easy nor immediate.
"In short, not right now, but who knows what will happen in the next couple years," Smith's statement said of a possible campaign to draw the Arts Center across the river.
Smith had said in previous months that if a sales tax election were to be called, it would be scheduled for the second Tuesday of August or September. With a 60-day period required between calling an election and the election date, Friday would be the deadline for a Sept. 8 election.
The sales tax proposal would have been to double North Little Rock's 1 percent sales tax to 2 percent, Smith said at the time of the first polling. Half of the tax revenue would go toward the Arts Center project and half to the city's police and fire agencies, Smith has said.
"Although both polls were consistent and appear favorable for a partnership, I think everyone realizes that a more deliberate study of all the options is needed," Smith's statement said. "And that will take time."
Polling results were never made public.
Bobby Tucker, the foundation's chairman, said in May that the foundation had been conducting research for several months concerning the Arts Center's future, including consideration of new sites.
Tucker is out of state on vacation and unavailable for comment, a spokesman for him said Monday.
On April 21, Smith sent Tucker a letter pledging to sponsor legislation on the North Little Rock City Council to call a special election for the tax increase if the foundation continued "to show a commitment to a North Little Rock location for a new Arts Center campus."
The Arts Center building is owned by Little Rock, and the city appoints the center's board of trustees. The Arts Center has been in the capital city since 1914, when its predecessor was founded.
Metro on 07/07/2015