Years ago, a city in Northwest Arkansas attached an impact fee of several thousand dollars to the sales price of new houses to pay for the “strain” caused by all the growth going on up there. In Pine Bluff — also known as the fastest-shrinking metropolitan area in the country — there is a proposal to raise the sales tax.
Apparently, no amount of tax is the right amount when it comes to City Hall. Losing population, gaining population, more tax revenue is the answer. In Pine Bluff’s case, the proposal being considered would ask voters to approve another penny of sales tax that would be applied for a decade. In the not-too-distant past, Pine Bluff voters went to the polls not once, but twice, to say no to an extension of a five-eighths-cent, seven-year Go Forward Pine Bluff-inspired sales tax. Not only does it seem premature to ask the public again for more of their money, but it comes at a time when cost of living increases continue to make life less affordable and even a trip to the grocery store can bring gasps when the total is rung up. Upping the sales tax by another 1% seems like adding insult to injury.
The supporting documents on what this sales tax would pay for are broadly written. It is as if the sum total of what a city does and what it spends money on is included in the rationale for a tax increase, to wit: “Inventory All Equipment,” Review City Boards and Commissions,” “Make All Pine Bluff Departments Responsible for Meeting OSHA Requirements,” Include Finance Department in Major City Expenditures,” to name a few. Then there are several lines devoted to the Police and Fire departments. For the police, there is “Implement transparent and merit-based personnel practices to eliminate favoritism, rebuild morale, and restore organizational trust,” as well as outreach efforts associated with a coloring contest and Easter egg hunt. For the firefighters, there’s a plan to “Conduct an anonymous survey that mirrors the public safety survey from March 2021” and “Rotate fire engines from busier stations to slower stations.” Those all sound like reasonable ideas and goals, but even as the answers to frequently asked questions say the tax would raise somewhere between $9 million and a little more than $14 million, nowhere is there a price tag for these enumerated items. And dare we say, many of them do not appear that they would cost anything at all but instead represent a different, perhaps more demanding, way of running a city.
As in: Here are the OSHA regs, department heads. Make them happen. And it’s going to take a decade to review city boards and commissions why? When Mayor Vivian Flowers was running for office, she had high praise for former Mayor Carl Redus, who put forth his “Penny for Progress” plan that took the proceeds from a voter-approved five-eighths-cent sales tax and paid for a variety of capital improvement projects such an aquatics center, a fire station, new fire fighting equipment and a new animal shelter, to name a few. In an interview with the Pine Bluff Commercial last year, she stated: “If we are blessed enough to restore the public trust and we are able to successfully put another tax measure on the ballot, it will be with very specific measures and a timeline and a budget.” We’re not seeing any of that.
Flowers’ plan is a shotgun approach that is heavy on capitalized words and light on specifics. That represents a lack of transparency, and transparency was one of the key aims of her administration. And if she can’t say how much these items will cost, how in the world can she say she needs millions upon millions in tax dollars to pay for them. There’s also a troubling line: “Increase Property and Sales Taxes: Explore Bond Initiative.” Does that mean a millage increase is also going to be on the table?
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
In short, this sales tax plan is not baked. The city is losing a lot of population and doing so quickly, and there’s no way to know what the landscape here will look like in 10 years when this tax would expire. What did our school district do years ago when enrollment started dropping? It cut teachers and staff and abandoned school buildings, rightsizing itself to the new reality. Painful and ugly, perhaps, but it’s what happens when your job is to serve students and there are fewer and fewer of them. The city should do likewise and align itself with the smaller population that exists now. Before a tax increase is sought from the public, it would also be refreshing to first see some effort put into looking for how the city could live within its means. It’s way easier to toss out a tax increase proposal and, if it passes, rain money down on every nook and cranny of city government. It’s much harder to analyze every nook and cranny and see what can be cut and what efficiencies can be found in a city that has lost as many as a thousand residents a year for many years.
And if there are big ticket items needed, do it like Redus. Ask for a smaller tax increase and for just the amount of time it would take to pay for those bigger items. The city doesn’t need extra money to get rid of favoritism in the Police Department, for instance; it just needs better leadership in the Police Department. As for other city departments: Copy. Paste.
A sales tax is the most regressive tax there is because lower-income households pay a higher percentage of their income on necessities — like food. If the City Council greenlights this to a public vote for the March primary election, we urge council members to remove groceries from what this proposed tax would be levied on. That’s the least the city can do as it tries to prop up a dissolving tax base on the backs of the ones who are still here.