Backers of petition drives to put alcohol sales proposals before voters in Crawford and Johnson counties in November soon will see if their months of work paid off.
Both counties are dry, and passage of the ballot questions in the general election Nov. 8 would permit alcohol sales in the counties.
"We're down to crunch time," Susan Edens, spokesman for Keep Our Dollars in Johnson County, said last week.
The group's deadline was Sunday to turn in extra petitions to the county clerk after coming up 477 signatures short of the 5,428 it needs to qualify the question for the election ballot.
The number of signatures required is 38 percent of the total number of registered voters in a county.
In Crawford County, the deadline for Keep Our Dollars in Crawford County to submit its petitions is Wednesday, according to the county clerk's office. The organization has to have 12,110 signatures to qualify its question for the ballot.
Chris Powell with the secretary of state's office emailed a portion of Arkansas Code Annotated Section 14-14-915 that says all petitions for initiated county measures must be filed with the county clerk no less than 90 nor more than 120 calendar days before the election.
He said in the email that that sets the time frame for submitting petitions as between July 11 and Aug. 10.
Johnson County Clerk Michelle Frost opened her office Sunday afternoon to receive the extra Keep Our Dollars in Johnson County petitions, the group's treasurer Ronald Dail Jr. said. He couldn't say how many signatures were submitted but believed they were sufficient to reach the total needed to get the issue on the ballot.
Frost said last week she would begin certifying the signatures today. By law, she has five days to complete the count.
It would seem getting another 477 valid signatures would be easy, but Frost said the group has been working for a year and turned in petitions July 18 with about 9,600 signatures. It may be difficult to find registered voters who have not yet been approached to sign the petition.
Johnson County has 8,793 registered voters.
Edens said volunteers and canvassers will work up to the last minute to find anyone who may have been overlooked.
"We're waiting until the last day to leave no leaf unturned," said Kevin Holmes, Keep Our Dollars in Crawford County treasurer.
Shayne McKinney, chairman of Keep Our Dollars in Crawford County, said the group has gathered about 18,000 signatures but wants to get about 2,000 more before Wednesday's deadline.
McKinney said the percentage of registered voters needed to get a measure on the ballot is ridiculously high, and he doesn't expect voter turnout for the liquor question to come close to 38 percent of total registered voters.
He blamed the high-percentage threshold on liquor-store owners who lobbied for it to make wet-dry questions difficult to get on the ballot.
Crawford and Johnson counties are surrounded by at least partially wet counties, and owners of liquor stores on the boundaries of Crawford and Johnson counties don't want to lose customers in those counties.
Proponents for the petition drives say liquor sales will be a boost to the economies of Crawford and Johnson counties, increasing tax dollars through alcohol sales and creating more jobs in building and operating liquor outlets.
The groups opposing the Keep Our Dollars in Crawford County have been mostly anonymous.
An organization called Stay Dry, Stay Safe appears to be one of the biggest opponents of the petition drive. It listed the phone number as that of D.J. Cagle, the treasurer. A call to the number went to an automatic voice message system. Two messages left on it were not answered last week.
On its April financial report, Stay Dry, Stay Safe listed contributions totaling $84,000. During the campaign, Stay Dry, Stay safe has spent about half of that amount on consultants, printing, advertising and signs.
The $84,000 Stay Dry, Stay Safe received came from an organization called Citizens For Our County's Future, which also opposes the liquor sales proposal in Crawford County, according to the financial reports.
Calls to the number listed for that organization also went to voice mail, and there was no response to a request for a return call.
The main contributor to Citizens For Our County's Future was a Van Buren real estate development company whose handwritten name was not decipherable on the report. That company contributed $38,000 to Citizens For Our County's Future in February, according to the report. The report showed $34,000 going from Citizens For Our County's Future to Stay Dry, Stay Safe.
In Johnson County, an organization called Stand Strong, Stay Dry, Be Safe opposes the Johnson County liquor sales drive. The group spent $33,782 on its campaign in June, according to a report it filed last month with the Arkansas Ethics Commission.
Among the 21 itemized expenses it listed were newspaper and television advertising, a billboard, direct mailing, consulting, legal advice and contract labor.
Its report showed it received a total of just more than $180,000 in contributions and spent more than $172,000 since it was set up in February.
Stand Strong's main contributor was an organization called the Share Committee that gave $175,000. Rockport Refreshment of Cabot was listed to have contributed $5,000.
The Share Committee, which named Denise Hoyt of Russellville as its chairman/treasurer, listed its top contributor as the Conway County Legal Beverage Association, a trade association in Morrilton, which gave $190,000 to the Share Committee on June 1, according to the Ethics Commission report.
Bryant Adams, a spokesman for the Stand Strong committee, said the Conway County Legal Beverage Association is a group of liquor-store owners in Conway County. He said the group is opposing the Johnson County petition effort to protect its business interests.
The petitioners in Crawford and Johnson counties have waged high-dollar campaigns as well. Wal-Mart gave $365,500 to the two counties' groups. The financial reports show that Wal-Mart gave the Keep Our Dollars in Crawford County $255,500 and the Keep Our Dollars in Johnson County $110,000.
Of the $163,447 that the Crawford County drive spent on its campaign, according to its financial reports to the Ethics Commission, $130,723 went to a Denver firm, Blueprint Action, that provided a petition canvassing service for the drive.
The Johnson County campaign also used Blueprint Action and paid more than $105,000 to canvass for signatures. Edens said it would have been impossible for a few volunteers to gather the needed signatures in the time they had available.
Wal-Mart spokesman Anne Hatfield told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in April the company granted the two county groups' requests for help because alcohol sales would better serve Wal-Mart customers in Crawford and Johnson counties, giving them more choices and making it more convenient for them because they wouldn't have to drive to other counties to buy alcohol.
NW News on 08/08/2016