The state House of Representatives on Friday defeated the governor’s effort to overhaul the state Department of Agriculture about 18 hours after an email blitz by Arkansas Farm Bureau stating its opposition to the bill.
The vote on House Bill 1725, by Rep. Dan Douglas, R-Bentonville, was 30-31, with 39 members voting present or not voting.
Douglas said a few hours after the vote that he will pull the bill down for the session.
“If the producers and the farmers don’t care enough about efficiency that could bring down a reduction in the fees they pay, I need to pull it down,” Douglas said.
He said the three major commissions in the Agriculture Department “are sitting on” tens of millions of dollars in reserve funds, built up from fees. “I think that’s something we can look at in the interim” between sessions, he said.
“This is because one group [Farm Bureau] wants to retain all the control,” he said.
The bill utilized a “type 4” transfer that would have given the secretary of agriculture more management and administrative controls over the Plant Board, the Livestock and Poultry Commission and the Forestry Commission, as well as the Abandoned Pesticide Advisory Board.
Douglas, speaking from the House floor, lamented what he called “conspiracy theories” and “propaganda” circulating around the bill, such as it being a “power grab” by Gov. Asa Hutchinson and an attempt to redirect special revenue collected by the various boards largely from the industries they regulate.
At 5:44 p.m. Thursday, Arkansas Farm Bureau sent its weekly bulletin, which encouraged its members to urge their lawmakers to vote against the bill.
The state Department of Agriculture was created just 12 years ago. “Before that, Farm Bureau was the ag department,” Douglas said. “They’re against anything to strengthen the ag department.”
Douglas said the legislation would save some $600,000 a year through eliminating duplicated services among the various boards. Each has its own human resources department and separate computer and telephone systems despite being housed in the same building on Natural Resources Drive in west Little Rock, he said.
Douglas, a rancher and farmer, noted he is a past president of the Benton County Farm Bureau, but criticized the state group’s leadership for its opposition. “Just because the executive committee is against this bill doesn’t mean the rest of the membership is,” he said.
The Arkansas Crop Protection Association, a lobbying group for major pesticide and herbicide manufacturers, also recently said it opposed the bill.
Douglas said supporters of the bill met with various farm groups in the weeks before the bill was filed, including Farm Bureau, the Agriculture Council of Arkansas, the Arkansas Cattlemen’s Association and the Arkansas Poultry Federation. He said all those groups, except Farm Bureau, support the bill.
Douglas said the Plant Board and other parts of the Agriculture Department will retain their special revenue and keep the same regulatory powers. How their members are selected also won’t change, he said.
Stanley Hill, Farm Bureau’s vice president of public affairs and government relations, said Farm Bureau wasn’t at those meetings. He said its president, Randy Veach of Manila, told Hutchinson last Friday that the group would oppose the bill.
Hill said the group’s executive board believes, despite an amendment to the bill, that the legislation still gives the agriculture secretary control over the special revenue collected by the Plant Board and Livestock and Poultry Commission.
The Department of Agriculture, Hill said, was created in 2005 for “marketing and promoting” Arkansas agriculture. “It was not meant to be a regulatory agency, not to be some grossly blown-up bureaucracy,” he said.
Secretary of Agriculture Wes Ward, who was appointed to the position two years ago by Hutchinson, watched the debate from the House’s fourthfloor gallery and declined to comment after the vote.
The Farm Bureau has some 90,000 members. Its email bulletin Thursday night said the issue should be put up for study when the Legislature isn’t in session.
The bill would have also moved to the department three sectors now under the Arkansas Development Finance Authority: the Farm Mediation Office, the Veterinary Medical Examination Board and the Board of Registration for Foresters.