Move on to shed at-large Little Rock slots

Hendrix drafts board proposal

A member of the Little Rock Board of Directors is asking fellow board members to support doing away with at-large positions and changing to a 10-seat, ward-elected board.

Ward 1 City Director Erma Hendrix passed out a draft ordinance to city directors this week and said it was for discussion only. Approached after the meeting, Hendrix said the ordinance would be on a future agenda for a vote, but she didn't know when.

Hendrix has been an advocate for changing the way officials are elected for years. She brought up the same proposition in May 2015, but the discussion never went anywhere and she never proposed an ordinance for a vote.

In order to carry out Hendrix's plan, the board would have to approve her ordinance, and then the mayor would call a special election for voters to decide whether they want to change to the new board makeup. It would require rezoning the city's wards. Little Rock is currently split up into seven wards, and it would have to be redrawn to 10 wards.

Others besides Hendrix have advocated for changing the makeup of the Little Rock board.

State Rep. John Walker has twice proposed a bill in the Arkansas Legislature that would have required cities with at least 10 percent of their populations made up of minority groups to have only ward-elected representation in the city's governing body. His bills failed to make it out of committee.

Currently, the Little Rock city board is made up of seven members elected from their respective wards, three members elected by the city at-large, and the mayor, who is elected at-large and only votes in the event of a tie. That system has been in place since 1993 when voters approved it. Prior to that, all the seats were elected at-large.

In an email Wednesday, Hendrix said changing to an all ward-elected board would be "fair."

"At-Large Board of Directors have been in 'charge' for the past Twenty-plus years. WHY???" she wrote.

She also said the ordinance would save the city unnecessary court costs. She has threatened a lawsuit periodically for years at different points during city board meetings. It is never clear who she is indicating will be sued, who will be the party that sues, or what a lawsuit would be about.

"I'll see you in court," she has said to various city officials, the mayor and board members.

In her email Wednesday, Hendrix said she has no further comment on her proposed ordinance.

In 2007, Walker, the state representative, filed a federal lawsuit alleging the board setup violates the U.S. Civil Rights Act, but the suit was later dismissed at his request.

In 2015, Hendrix College came out with a report that said evidence indicates that doing away with at-large seats would advance Little Rock and give minority-group populations a better representation in local government.

Three faculty members and a student studied the city's government setup with a focus on race and the cost to run a citywide campaign. They studied 128 board races between 1957 and 2012.

The study said that it is more costly to run a citywide at-large campaign, and therefore at-large candidates need more money and political backing to win. That makes it so that candidates from lower-income sections of the city have less chance of winning, the report said, adding that the parts of the city mostly made up of black residents generally report lower incomes.

In the 2010 census, Little Rock's population was reported as about 49 percent white and about 42 percent black.

The Hendrix College study found that historically over the time period studied, 87.6 percent of the elections for at-large seats resulted in a white candidate winning, compared with 59 percent of the ward elections. The report did not say how many candidates from minority groups actually participated in the races.

By eliminating at-large seats and introducing ward-only elections, the reports' authors determined the likelihood of electing a white director would be 73.6 percent. That conclusion was based on a statistical analysis that assumes the electorate has a median racial composition, income, education and age.

Hendrix is black. All three current at-large directors are white.

Supporters of at-large positions say that those directors look at issues from a citywide perspective, therefore avoiding what is referred to as "ward politics."

At-large Director Joan Adcock, the longest-serving member of the city board, said at the time the study was released that it didn't take into account the outcomes of at-large directors, such as what they had accomplished for the city.

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Metro on 04/12/2018

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