BENTONVILLE -- A last-resort effort to raise more money for state highways will come Monday, Rep. Dan Douglas, R-Bentonville, said at a forum Saturday morning.
Douglas will ask the House to expunge the vote on his House Bill 1726 on Monday, he said at the forum hosted by the Rogers/Lowell and Greater Bentonville chambers of commerce. Expunging a vote allows a bill that has already been defeated in one House vote to be reconsidered.
HB1726 would have put a 20-year bond issue before the voters in the next general election for roads. However, the bill would only take effect if voters also approved applying the state's 6.5 percent sales tax to the wholesale price of diesel fuel and gasoline. Despite support from the governor, the bill failed in the House with many members not voting against the bill, but by not voting at all on the measure.
"I'm going to say from the well that this is your last chance to do anything to fund highways," Douglas said.
"We need $150 million a year just to maintain the highways we have, much less build anything new," Douglas said. The bill could finance up to $200 million a year in highway projects, mainly resurfacing and repair of existing roads.
"It's a choice of maintaining our highways or managing their decline," he said.
House Bill 2085 by Rep. Johnny Rye, R-Trumann, would divert sales tax collections on Internet sales to highways. Major Internet vendors agreed to start collecting state sales tax after Douglas introduced legislation to force those collections, legislation he stopped pushing after the vendors acted. "In my opinion, it's not worth a flip," Douglas said of Rye's bill. In the first place, the new sales tax revenue the first year is expected to be $32 million, a fraction of road expense, he said. Further, the bill would divert money the state is already receiving from some Internet sales delivered through local outlets such as Wal-Mart and Academy Sports to highways.
"I wish it would work, but we're struggling to make ends meet now," Douglas said.
In other matters, Rep. Rebecca Petty, R-Rogers, detailed the effort to pass a bill ending life-without-parole sentences for juveniles. Petty lost a daughter to kidnapping and murder before becoming a state representative. She was a staunch opponent of a similar bill in the 2013 session but co-sponsored Senate Bill 294 by Sen. Missy Irvin, R-Mountain View, after helping draft provisions that ensured that parole, not early release or limited sentences, was allowed and that victim's families were kept informed of parole hearings and other steps in the parole process, among other protections.
Recent U.S. Supreme Court cases were going to force retrials of many prisoners who were juveniles when convicted if the law was not changed, and a major concern for Petty, she said, was to ensure families of victims did not have to go through that.
"Retrying many of these cases would be impossible," Petty said. "Recalling all the witnesses, all the people involved, can't be done. People go on with their lives."
NW News on 03/26/2017