Written by Blake Mathews
After 14 bitter and belligerent months in the public consciousness, the Advertising and Tourism Promotion tax was rejected by Searcy voters Tuesday, 1574 votes to 1331.
When the unofficial vote totals were announced just after 9 p.m. at the White County courthouse, the crowd reacted passively, without cheers or protests. Citizens who had spent every available moment of that day promoting their side of the debate rose from their seats, turned and calmly exited the building. Representatives for both the pro-tax Searcy city council and the anti-tax Searcy Friends of the Voters group said they were glad the year-long fight was finally over.
“The democratic process prevailed today — liberty prevailed today,” said Greg Niblock, attorney for the Searcy Friends of the Voters group. Niblock got involved last summer, when the group sued the city council for the right to vote on the tax. A judge ruled in the group’s favor last November, and since then Niblock’s efforts have been focused on rallying voters against the A&P tax.
“I don’t like increasing taxes or increasing the role of government, and this was a situation where both were going to happen,” he said.
However, Niblock acknowledged that the main goal of the Searcy Friends of the Voters had been to have a city-wide vote on the tax, and that supporters of the tax should not consider themselves defeated.
“Regardless of which way you cast your vote, it was a success for all the citizens of Searcy,” Niblock said.
Searcy mayor Belinda LaForce said she was “disappointed” with the results. She had spent the past 14 months trying to lead a divided city council, with aldermen openly challenging each other over the legality of the tax. Trying to conduct regular council business as the debate wore on was “draining,” she said.
The council was petitioned to have an election on the A&P tax last summer, but LaForce and a majority of the council aldermen denied the petition and maintained that the tax was an administrative affair and strictly council business. When asked how she thought the public would have voted if the council had not fought the election, LaForce said the tax might have had a better chance, though she blamed Tuesday’s loss less on the council’s stubbornness and more on bad information spread by opponents.
“There’s been a lot of misinformation put out in all forms of the media and talk around the community, and I think people were totally confused at what [the tax] was for, how it was going to play out,” she said.
Searcy Friends of the Voters chairman Scott Biddle, whose group referred to the A&P tax by names like the “Harding tax” and the “food tax,” said during the voting that he felt “confident that the people have been informed about what’s going on, and that they will do the right thing.”
“We have worked with the ethics commission to make sure that we areabove reproach in everything we’ve done,” Biddle said.
Officially, the A&P tax raised the price of prepared food by 1 percent and the price of renting short-term accommodations like hotels and campgrounds by 3 percent. Due to the fact that meal plans and DCB are bought when Harding’s prepared food is still in raw material form, the 1 percent tax does not affect Harding students who swipe their ID for meals.
According to Searcy’s Web page, the revenue from the tax would be managed by an A&P commission and used to improve parks and recreational areas with the aim of attracting more tourism. Brian Smith, department head of the Searcy Parks and Recreation Commission, said he hoped 70 percent of the A&P revenue would go toward improving existing ball fields and acquiring more land.
Niblock and Biddle said they did not trust LaForce and the A&P commission to spend the revenue on parks. The A&P commission has no budget for how they would spend the revenue, Biddle said, and other cities with A&P taxes and commissions had spent their funds on things besides promoting tourism.
Smith confirmed that there was no detailed plan for how to spend the A&P revenue, but if the tax had passed a plan would have been created.
LaForce said the parks and sports complexes that needed to be upgraded will now have to wait. With no tax revenue dedicated to parks and recreation, the city will have to apply for grants to get funding for any new projects, and the city must match 50 percent of the grant amount with its own money. Since the city council will only appropriate a maximum of about $150,000 per year to match grants, she said, “we’re just going to have to keep inching along like we’ve been doing for the past couple of years.”
But Niblock argued that citizens should not depend on the government to take the initiative in improving the city. Rather, parks and ball fields could be fixed up with money contributed and organized at the ground level.
“People within the community should just get together and do what they believe is necessary,” he said. “If enough people feel like we need another ball field, we ought to get together, raise enough money and build it. We don’t need a government to do that.”
When asked if she would stand behind a community-driven effort to raise funds and improve the city, LaForce said, “We’ll see what proposals they put forth to the city council.”
