Mayor Mark Stodola and City Manager Bruce Moore unveiled a sales tax proposal Tuesday night. I had a conflict, but here’s what I eventually put together:
They sat on the report until 8:43 p.m., hours after it was available in releasable form.
Here’s a document of priority needs, as outlined tonight.
There’s a nice round $40 million priority desire for a lump sum of “economic development needs,” including job recruitment (meaning a corporate welfare slush fund), and I’m going to need to hear a lot more on that — and what kind of promises Mayor Stodola makes about increasing the unaccountable subsidies already sent by taxpayers to the Chamber of Commerce — before swallowing that. 20 percent of bonded debt for an economic development effort to duplicate others already underway and escalate mutually assured destruction in bidding wars? Stupid. The mayor just can’t quit the Good Suit Club.
UPDATE: City Director Joan Adcock called the mayor out on this hazy slush fund during the meeting Tuesday night. Good for her. Apart from this, most everything else was specifically delineated, concrete needs in understandable amounts. $40 million to lay around for the chamber to diddle with? No thanks.
There’s $12 million for a zoo expansion and $3 million for the State Fair. Millions for police and fire facilities. And so on. Government gadfly Kathy Wells, who leads the Coalition of Greater Little Rock Neighborhoods and whose report is on the jump, notes the laundry list of capital needs required for West Little Rock (and they are required) that might not cost so much now if city leaders hadn’t fought impact fees so long while intoning the mantra “growth pays for itself.” This short-sighted growth policy came as we annexed farther and farther west, mostly relocating, rather than adding, population.
The proposal is for a half-cent, sunsetted after eight years, to pay for $200 million in capital projects (how job recruitment is a capital project I don’t understand) and a 3/4-cent ongoing sales tax to raise about $37 million a year. The existing city sales tax is a half-cent, but we also get a big share of the county penny.
The board will take three weeks to decide whether to put the idea on the ballot as is. More meetings will be held.