Between The Lines: A Tale Of Two Campaigns

Serious pushes are under way for quite different local issues in Washington and Benton counties.

One election is a certainty. The other is not.

Both depend on securing public support now, before the proposed votes, which would be on opposite ends of the Northwest Arkansas region.

The certain election, scheduled to coincide with the Nov. 4 general election, will be in Benton County, where the county is trying to solve a critical funding issue for rural ambulance service. The county Quorum Court has referred two related questions to voters and the push now is to educate voters to the issues involved.

The less-certain effort is for a referendum intended to repeal Fayetteville's recently enacted civil rights ordinance. It is the more contentious issue and will draw staunch supporters and opponents to the polls, if a petition drive succeeds. The push there is to get the question to the ballot.

Petitions began circulating in early September to refer the ordinance to voters. The ordinance prohibits discrimination based on a person's race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, socioeconomic background, veteran status and other characteristics.

Passed by the Fayetteville City Council in mid-August, after almost 10 hours of public debate in one night, the ordinance is not yet effective and can be challenged with a successful petition drive.

Petitioners need 4,095 valid signatures to force the referendum and must submit them to the city clerk's office by Saturday. The clerk will have 10 days to review and certify the signatures. An election must be held within 120 days of certification.

Notably, petitioners are requesting a Dec. 9 special election.

The ordinance was passed on a timetable that foreclosed a general election vote this year. The City Council could have chosen at the time of passage to refer the issue to a public vote but chose instead to pass it. An effort to refer the measure failed on a 6-2 vote, which was the same split among council members to pass the ordinance itself.

According to those circulating the petition, there is strong interest from the city's business community and from churches in putting the issue to a vote.

But, given the huge turnout for the council's consideration of the ordinance last month, there is strong interest from supporters of the measure as well. Expect the coalition of people who backed it to get to the polls to reinforce the council's action.

In Benton County, the ambulance questions are mostly about money, although the situation affects life-and-death matters.

For those who've ignored the situation, the county for many years depended on municipal governments, currently seven of them, to provide emergency medical services to the rural areas. City taxpayers paid the costs for maintaining ambulances and emergency personnel at the ready.

Benton County's rural population grew and the burden became such that the cities asked the county to pay part of the costs for that standby service to rural areas.

County and city officials worked out an agreement for the county to pay the cities. This year's tab is $942,000 for all seven cities. The county is now trying to secure new revenue to support that annual cost.

The Quorum Court referred two questions to voters, one a $40 yearly service fee and the other a countywide property tax hike.

Only those voters who live in the proposed service district, which includes most of the unincorporated county as well as smaller cities, would pay the fee. Only they can decide that issue.

Every property owner in Benton County would pay the tax increase, which would be just 0.2 mills, or roughly $4 a year on property valued at $100,000.

County officials apparently won't let the rural areas go totally unprotected, so the third choice is to fund ambulance service from the county's existing budget.

Recently, county officials made plans to promote the election by developing information sheets on the two funding proposals and by using social media to alert citizens to a series of town hall meetings and provide links to information on the county website.

These are pocketbook issues for Benton County voters, who need to be well informed or they may reject both and leave the county to make upwards of $1 million in budget cuts to keep the deal with the cities.

It is a critical outreach effort, which should help bring voters concerned about the availability of emergency services in rural areas to the polls.

Those people, of course, cross partisan lines, although tax votes traditionally draw more conservative voters to the polls.

And this is Benton County, where conservative voters already dominate voting and are expected to be out en masse for political races on the November ballot. So they especially need to be educated about what is at stake with the local issues on the ballot there. Otherwise, other county services will take a big budget hit.

Meanwhile, the Fayetteville special election, if it happens, will draw from all spectrums of the political base. Whether the ordinance survives depends on which side turns out more voters.

BRENDA BLAGG IS A FREELANCE COLUMNIST AND LONGTIME JOURNALIST IN NORTHWEST ARKANSAS.

Commentary on 09/14/2014

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