A months-long debate over guns on college campuses posed a glaring exception to a legislative session with few fights, Northwest Arkansas lawmakers and leaders said.
The gun fight left hard feelings, said Rep. Greg Leding, D-Fayetteville, whose district includes the University of Arkansas and who was a major opponent of House Bill 1249. Rep. Charlie Collins, R-Fayetteville, sponsored the measure, which allows some holders of concealed carry permits to bring their guns to campus.
Collins said the long debate examined the issue from all sides by all interested parties, resulting in model legislation once it was amended to exempt sporting events, hospitals and on-campus daycare centers. The final version requires training for how to respond to a mass shooter on a rampage.
"The complete disregard for the concerns of people who are on campus, working and going to school there and whose opposition was overwhelming, was the thing that made the biggest impression on a lot of people," Leding said.
The exclusions to concealed carry were adopted only after organized college sports objected, he said. Those exclusions are a better measure of the clout of sports than a reflection of deliberate policy, he said.
"The only thing, we discovered, that's more powerful than the NRA in Arkansas is the SEC," Leding told constituents at a morning meeting over coffee Tuesday at the Onyx Coffee Lab in Fayetteville. He referred to the National Rifle Association, a gun lobby, and the Southeastern Conference, a college athletics conference opposing concealed carry at sporting events.
Any debate involving guns taps into very strong emotions, Collins said Wednesday.
"People on both sides have a visceral reaction and don't think it through logically," he said. "But the pattern is that people who want to commit mass killings go where there are large groups of people where no one else is armed.
"Those who say they want local control now had no problem with statewide control when it prohibited guns on state campuses," Collins said. "Nobody was angered by the lack of local control when it was a policy they agreed with."
The session, which ended Monday, was remarkable for its overall lack of fights, both insiders and outsiders said
"This was the fifth session to take place while I've been mayor, and it appeared to have less potential to be harmful than any of them. There was only one bill that really caused worry for the city," Mayor Bob McCaslin of Bentonville said. That one bill, which would have required cities to provide water service outside their city, got no further than a legislative committee's approval, he said.
McCaslin and Springdale Mayor Doug Sprouse expressed disappointment no measure passed for collecting state and local sales taxes on items purchased through the Internet.
"I'm a level-playing-field type of person, and we don't have a level playing field," McCaslin said, when out-0f-state merchants don't collect a major tax that adds to their prices and local merchants do.
Sprouse agreed.
"Sales tax is the lifeblood of a city, and it was disheartening to see our legislators vote against it," Sprouse said. "However, I'm optimistic that those who supported this measure will continue to fight for the businesses, municipalities and residents who would benefit from the level playing field that online sales tax collection would create."
Lawmakers will have to revisit the issue of Internet sales tax collection, agreed both Sen. Uvalde Lindsey, D-Fayetteville, and Sen. Jim Hendren, R-Sulphur Springs. A greater and greater share of the commerce in the state is done through the Internet, and the erosion of state revenue is becoming undeniable, they said. Supporters of the measure said the state would garner as much as $100 million in revenue, although state finance officials gave no estimate.
Both Hendren and Collins expressed their support for a tax reform task force set up by the governor. Both said they expect the group to come up with a comprehensive tax structure to propose in the next session. Such reform is almost impossible in a regular legislative session when thousands of bills are under consideration in a three-month period.
A major legislative victory, Sprouse said, was adding the region's large Marshallese population to the ArKids First health program. Rep. Jeff Williams, R-Springdale, took the lead on that issue. An estimated 2,000 children could benefit.
Williams said a $50 million state income tax cut, benefiting taxpayers who make less than $21,000 a year, will also have long-lasting benefit in the region.
Rep. Jim Dotson, R-Bentonville, said if he's re-elected, he'll try again to pass a school choice measure such as his proposal for private education savings accounts.
He also said a bill of his that did pass, Act 781, will have long-lasting effects. The law requires a review of all state regulations and a provision to "sunset," or do away with those not renewed in the process.
Rep. Rebecca Petty, R-Rogers, worked with Leding to pass a bill barring life without parole sentences for juvenile offenders. Petty, parent of child who was murdered in 1999, fought a similar bill from Leding in the 2015 session. This time, she and advocates went through the bill, made major changes to ensure victims' families would have a say in any possible parole and ensure those sentenced as juveniles for capital murder were in prison for at least 30 years.
Petty agreed to help after recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions were going to require retrial of 112 cases in Arkansas unless some possibility of parole existed. Retrying a case many years after the event would be practically impossible, she said Wednesday.
"I can see some victims will be mad about this, and I'll own it," Petty said.
NW News on 04/06/2017