The Pulaski County Election Commission will meet at 4 p.m. today to consider two additional early voting sites for the Little Rock School District's May 9 special election on a 12.4 debt service mill property tax extension.
Both of the new early voting sites would be south of Interstate 630 -- one at the Sue Cowan Williams Library, 1800 S. Chester St., and the other at the West Central Community Center, which is the former Rosedale Optimist Club location at Colonel Glenn and John Barrow roads.
If approved by the Election Commission, the two sites will be in addition to the early voting site previously approved for the Pulaski County Regional Building, 501 W. Markham St., across from Little Rock City Hall.
The additional early voting sites are being considered in response to requests made last week by opponents of the proposed tax extension and by two groups of Little Rock area legislators.
The Election Commission agreed to give the people requesting sites until noon Monday to identify possible usable locations after it was determined that the preferred site -- Sidney S. McMath Library, 2100 John Barrow Road -- had committed its available space for other uses and was unavailable.
The Williams Library has not been used as an early voting site in previous school district-related elections, but Bryan Poe, director of elections for Pulaski County, said Monday that the site is regularly used as an early voting location in bigger elections.
The West Central Community Center is just a few months old and has not been used in past elections, Poe said.
Each site will cost approximately $2,000 to operate, Poe said. That will be a district-borne expense, part of the cost of the entire election, which includes opening some 50 polling places around the district on May 9.
Off-site early voting in a school election is usually 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. over four days -- Tuesday through Friday -- in the week before election day Tuesday.
Mike Poore, superintendent of the Little Rock School District, asked earlier this year about putting an early voting site in each of four quadrants of the district but decided later, he said, to stick with the traditional one early voting site at the Pulaski County Regional Building to avoid any appearance that he was trying to manipulate voting.
The McMath Library was initially listed as an early voting site for the special election but was missing in a later Notice of Election approved by the Election Commission. That led to accusations of voter suppression from some. Leaders of community organizations opposed to the tax proposal and some lawmakers, including Sens. Joyce Elliott and Will Bond and state Rep. Clarke Tucker, sent letters to the Election Commission or to Poore, asking for additional early voting sites.
Gary Smith, chairman of the Rebuild Our Schools Now campaign that is in support of the Little Rock district tax extension, said Monday that it had been Poore's decision earlier to stick to one downtown early voting site.
"The only comment I have to make about it is this," Smith said. "If we are going to start having early voting sites all over the city, let's just start opening them all up early or let's have one in every ward. We need to hit the entire city."
If the additional site or sites are approved, a fourth version of the required Notice of Election will be published. A Notice of Election includes the wording of all proposals that will be on the ballot as well as information about early voting sites, dates and times and a list of all the polling places that will be open on Election Day.
The Little Rock district is seeking a 14-year extension of the 12.4 debt service mills as a way to finance a bond issue of $202,645,000, the money from which will be used to pay off existing bond debt and finance $160 million new debt.
District leaders have said the new money will be used for the construction of a new southwest Little Rock high school to serve the current McClellan and J.A. Fair high school attendance zones, a new classroom building on the existing McClellan High campus for possible use as a middle school or kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school, and updates to most other schools in the district.
Extending the 12.4 mills from 2033 -- when the mills are now due to expire -- to 2047 would not increase the amount of school taxes that are paid annually but would result in paying those taxes for more years.
The 12.4 mills generate more than $40 million a year, not all of which is required for debt payments. The surplus -- which is currently about $26 million a year -- that is not used for debt is used instead to help meet the district's day-to-day operating costs.
The election on the tax extension comes at a time when the district is in its third year of operating under state control without an elected school board and will be closing three schools in 2017-18 and repurposing a fourth school as a way to cut expenses by $3.5 million. The school closures are part of $11 million in budget cuts planned for the coming year and what will be a total of $41 million in cuts over four years beginning with the 2014-15 school year, Poore has said.
The No Taxation without Representation and Save Our Schools community organizations are working against the tax extension, arguing in part that the district has no locally elected school board to hold accountable for spending the debt service money in the way that it has been described. They have said they do not trust Education Commissioner Johnny Key, who acts in the elected board's place, to follow through on the use of the money and the building commitments.
Key late last week spoke about the issue of distrust regarding the money.
"Mr. Poore and his team have identified a list of projects and ... it is the department and the commissioner's commitment that those projects will be funded according to the list they have produced based on their needs."
Metro on 04/18/2017