More funding for the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture is a top priority in the coming legislative session, House Speaker Jeremy Gillam said recently.
In its 2015 and 2016 sessions, the Legislature kept the Division of Agriculture’s general revenue budget at $62.8 million a year. However, Gov. Asa Hutchinson and the Legislative Council in July 2015 authorized $3 million in one-time funds to be used by the Division of Agriculture. The division planned to use the money to make sure that each of the state’s 75 counties had at least two extension agents, a division spokesman said at that time.
The Division of Agriculture is seeking to add $3 million to its state general revenue budget in the coming legislative session, said division spokesman Mary Hightower. The regular legislative session starts Jan. 9.
“Our people are our strength. We need these funds to continue to provide programs of value to the state of Arkansas, especially to rural Arkansas,” Hightower said.
According to its website, the division’s primary mission is helping producers and processors of food, fiber and fuels access and use appropriate technologies. But the division — which includes the Cooperative Extension Service, also helps other people by addressing food safety and security, health and nutrition, natural resource conservation, and offering 4-H and other programs that serve youths, families and communities.
The Division of Agriculture “dipped into our reserves to keep as many people on board as possible” during the federal government shutdown of 2013, Hightower said.
“Even though the federal numbers have inched upward, they are not keeping pace with overhead costs, which are rising at a rate of 3 [percent] to 5 percent each year, even with fewer employees,” she said. The division had 1,217 employees as of Nov. 1, 2012, but those numbers slipped to 1,187 as of this Oct. 1, she said.
Farmer Tommy Young of Tuckerman, who grows rice, corn, wheat and soybeans, said at a December meeting of the Arkansas Farm Bureau that the Division of Agriculture is the “Encyclopedia Britannica for farmers. Yet we’re starving them to death, and we are keeping them back with the funding that was done in the 1980s.
“We are depending upon them more than we have ever. We need technology to be introduced, not in five or six years, because we are going to be broke. It needs to be where they can look at it and study it and know if it is good and safe to use and for all the state to be happy with, and then at that point in time we can use it,” Young said during the meeting in Hot Springs.
At that meeting, Gillam, a Republican who is a berry farmer in Judsonia, said he has been trying to find a solution to increase state funding for the division, which is in a bind from “the lost revenue from sequestration at the federal level.”
“It has been a struggle in our communications with the system itself because we send a tremendous amount of money to the UA System,” Gillam said.
“They could reallocate it if the [UA] board and administration so chose to send some of the funds into the Division of Agriculture. We have worked that angle consistently and have not given up on that,” he said.
UA System President Donald Bobbitt “doesn’t have any recollection of any talks or efforts to do this,” UA System spokesman Nate Hinkel said when asked later by a reporter.
Gillam said he and other lawmakers “also looked at places within the [state’s $5.3 billion general revenue] budget as a whole that we might be able to reallocate some money over, and [in 2015] we were able to take some one-time money in the neighborhood of $3 million that the governor saw fit to move over to the division’s resources.”
“I am still optimistic that we are going to find a path forward, although it is going to be a very, very tight [state] budget,” the speaker said. “As much as I feel like agriculture should be one of the top priorities, there are 135 total members of the General Assembly that have a voice.
“In the House, I am one of 100 [representatives], even with the title I have. … There are others who feel like foster care, health care and a lot of other issues are worthy of state dollars as well. It is a balancing act to make sure that we allocate everything appropriately, and it is going to be a fluid process over the next several months.”
In November, Hutchinson presented lawmakers with his proposed general revenue budget of $5.48 billion for fiscal 2018, a $153 million increase in which most of the additional money would go to the state Department of Human Services. The state is now in fiscal 2017, which ends June 30. The Republican governor’s proposed budget for fiscal 2018 provides no increase in the $733.5 million general revenue funding for the state’s colleges and universities, including the Division of Agriculture.
I n m i d - D e ce m b e r, Hutchinson also said he wants lawmakers to reduce individual income taxes for Arkansans earning less than $21,000 a year. The proposal would take effect in mid-fiscal 2019 and reduce revenue by $25 million that year and $50 million the next year.
It would be the second income tax cut under Hutchinson. The 2015 Legislature enacted his plan to cut individual income tax rates for those with taxable incomes between $21,000 and $75,000 a year. That cut reduced revenue by $100 million a year.
Hutchinson’s tax plan for the coming session includes other tax reductions totaling $19.3 million a year: exempting retirement benefits of retired military service members from state income taxes; reducing the tax on softdrink syrup in exchange for levying the full sales tax rate on the sale of candy and soft drinks; applying the sales tax on the full cost of manufactured housing; and removing the exclusion of unemployment compensation from income taxes. He said the plan could be implemented as early as fiscal 2018.
At the Hot Springs meeting, state Rep. Dan Douglas, R-Bentonville, said he and other lawmakers are going to work on increased funding for the Division of Agriculture.
“I’ll be honest, there is a big incentive to try to cut taxes and stuff,” said Douglas, who is chairman of the House Agriculture, Forestry and Economic Development Committee. “We can’t cut taxes and then give [out] more money. We have to try to make government more efficient.”
Sen. Missy Irvin, R-Mountain View, said it’s difficult to find more general revenue for the Division of Agriculture.
“I think a lot of folks just think of the Cooperative Extension Service as testing soil, [and] it does so much more than that,” ranging from children’s camps to nutrition and exercise classes, she said. She noted that her husband, who is a doctor, prescribes classes at the Cooperative Extension Service office for his patients in Mountain View.
Irvin said she’s given a copy of a law she sponsored, Act 1005 of 2015, to Department of Human Services Director Cindy Gillespie, who started work in Arkansas in March.
Act 1005 requires the Cooperative Extension Service and the Department of Human Services to implement the Healthy Arkansas Educational Program “only to the extent that adequate funding is specifically made available.”
The program allows people on Medicaid to receive training and education in areas such as nutrition, food safety, food preservation, family and consumer economics, marriage, parenting, family life and health, wellness and prevention.
“I have told her that you need to be able to support the Division of Agriculture, the Cooperative Extension offices that are located in every single county in the state, by seeking opportunities for federal grant funding to supplement that because of what they can offer … to improve … the health of the people that we serve in the Medicaid population,” she said.
In response to Act 1005, “we sought and [were] awarded a grant from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture’s Rural Health and Safety Education Competitive Grants Program for a twoyear project to provide health literacy education for Medicaid-eligible Arkansans,” said Hightower of the UA Division of Agriculture. The grant is for $162,364, she said.
“The ‘How to Talk to Your Doctor’ program was developed for us by the [University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences] Center for Health Literacy and is being conducted by county extension educators and community volunteers,” Hightower said. Delivery of the program in partnership with the Department of Human Services will begin in January, she said.