Implementation of a Little Rock municipal identification program has been pushed back to later this summer.
Officials said they hope to start offering the new city IDs to residents sometime in July, but they haven't set an official start date.
The program has been two years in the making. The idea came from the Working Together in the Community group started by At-large City Director Joan Adcock as an effort to reach out to the Hispanic community.
The group -- made up of residents, community leaders, law enforcement and city officials -- quickly determined that a lack of identification was a problem for many Hispanics who are in the country illegally.
Police said such people are often the targets of burglaries and robberies because thieves assume they carry large amounts of cash since they can't get bank accounts without identification.
The city is working with area banks to accept the new municipal IDs.
"We do not have any formal agreements at this point, but several banks have told us the Municipal ID could serve as a secondary form of identification. We are continuing conversations with individual banks regarding the Municipal ID as a primary form of identification," said Emily Cox, the city's intergovernmental relations manager.
Little Rock is following in the steps of other cities across the nation. A growing number have already started offering municipal IDs, including Baltimore; Detroit; Hartford, Conn.; Los Angeles; New York; Oakland, Calif.; San Francisco; and most recently, Chicago.
Other cities are looking into starting a program, including Philadelphia and Charlotte, N.C.
The first municipal ID program in the U.S. started in New Haven, Conn., in 2007 after the 2006 murder of Manuel Santiago, a 36-year-old Mexican immigrant who was robbed and stabbed to death after cashing his paycheck.
The IDs can assist people in seeking jobs, obtaining city services, proving their identities at schools or to law enforcement officials, and applying to rent houses or apartments, among other uses.
"This would serve not only immigrants, but homeless people who have no ID to get a job or apartment, or to pick up things at the post office, or to get a library card," Adcock said. "[Some] people with disabilities never get a driver's license. Home-schooled children have no form of ID."
The IDs will be available to people 15 and older.
The IDs cannot be used to access state or federal services that require state or federal identification. For example, a person could not use it to verify age to purchase alcohol, prove identity when going through airport security, or to vote.
Each ID will have the person's name, address, date of birth, eye color, height, picture and signature. It will not include the race or gender of a person, although that information will be kept in a city database.
There will be a fee to get the ID, but the city has not yet set a price. The plan is for the ID to expire after three years.
In order to get an ID, a person must present one primary document, two secondary documents or three tertiary documents to prove identity.
Primary documents include passports, driver's licenses, state identification cards, consulate ID cards and work permits.
Secondary documents include birth certificates, Social Security cards, school transcripts and voter registration cards.
Tertiary documents include employee ID cards, jail discharge papers and marriage certificates.
Proof of residency also is required through two documents, such as bills, bank statements, personal checks or other documents with the person's address on it. People who are homeless must work with a shelter if they have no address.
Little Rock has budgeted $180,000 this year to operate the new ID program. It has begun advertising for a new position, called the multicultural liaison, who will run the ID program.
The program will be housed at 7414 Doyle Springs Road -- a former fire training center that recently had housed a neighborhood resource center before maintenance problems forced a relocation. The building must be renovated before the ID program can start.
City officials said they don't have an estimated cost for the renovation, but they plan for it to be completed this summer.
Chicago is the most recent U.S. city to authorize a municipal ID program. Amid some objections, its council approved the program last month -- though the details of how it will work and when it will start weren't decided.
Soon after, the federal Justice Department sent letters to officials in Chicago; Cook County, Ill.; Las Vegas; Miami; Milwaukee; New Orleans; New York; Philadelphia; and Sacramento, Calif., warning that the cities would lose federal funding if they continued to be "sanctuary cities" for illegal aliens.
A sanctuary city is one that limits its cooperation with the national government's efforts to enforce immigration laws. That includes cities where police departments don't routinely refer illegal aliens to federal officers.
Little Rock's city attorney has looked into whether providing municipal IDs would label Little Rock as a sanctuary city. He has said he doesn't think that action alone would warrant the label.
In Chicago, there were concerns that information provided by people obtaining city IDs would be used by the federal government for deportation proceedings.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said that city would erase any information as soon as it is provided "so it can't be used to entrap any citizens who have come forward to become part of the mainstream," according to the Chicago Tribune.
Other cities that have such ID programs also have a policy of not keeping copies of the documents used to obtain IDs. Many also erase any information in their city databases after IDs expire.
In Little Rock, however, applications and documents provided by residents will be subject to disclosure under the state's Freedom of Information Act, the city attorney said.
Metro on 05/30/2017