After five public forums across Little Rock, the city's Governance Structure Study Group plans to pull together common threads that arose and incorporate them into the recommendation it will present to the city board.
At least a dozen people attended each of the five forums that took place at churches and city buildings across Little Rock, with around 50 people attending the second, at the Southwest Community Center.
Group chairman Rick Campbell said the next step will be grouping various public comments based on topic and factoring them into a report the group plans to complete around the end of August.
Some themes have emerged. Many people who spoke at the forums were supportive of a mayor-council form of government, with some saying the current form caused duplication and confusion.
"If you look at any successful organization, there's accountability," Lance Levi, a developer and Ward 3 resident, said at the final forum, which was held at Immanuel Baptist Church on Monday night. "Right now, we don't have that in this city."
Little Rock's government is a hybrid between mayor-council and city manager forms, with a board of directors, a full-time mayor and a city manager who manages some day-to-day operations. The city board has seven ward representatives and three members elected citywide.
Resident Lauren Morris, who attended a previous public forum at Christ Little Rock church on Hughes Street, also said the hybrid form didn't seem to be working.
"We have very limited resources in this city, and it's really not working for us very well," she said. "It's really confusing. There's not clear, cohesive vision. There's not clear leadership. There's not clear accountability."
The group and members of the public who spoke at forums have been divided on the issue of at-large representation on the city board. Some residents expressed gratitude for the work of an at-large director who helped them personally, and some pointed to structural reasons.
"I'm afraid we will turn into a collection of villages with no purpose," resident Robert Walker said Monday. "We have to have a focus. We have to have people who think of the city as a whole ... They have to think of city needs as a whole and respond to it."
Others have asked the group to consider getting rid of the at-large positions, saying they make for less diverse representation.
"Any body that's all white is suspect," resident Henry Droughter said at the first forum at the Centre at University Park.
Ward 1 City Director Erma Hendrix has continued to speak out against at-large representation. On Monday, she said she plans to put the issue to voters in the form of a ballot initiative in 2020.
The desire for more education about city government -- both in the form of outreach to citizens and information provided to newly-elected officials -- was also prevalent at the meetings. Campbell said some kind of orientation for city directors would likely be one of the group's recommendations.
Metro on 06/25/2019