Meetings seeking public input on what new street and drainage projects Little Rock should undertake with sales tax revenue in the next three-year cycle that starts in 2016 are to begin this month.
City officials and department directors are to host a series of meetings in all seven wards to update the public on the status of projects undertaken in the first cycle, which started in 2013, as well as get suggestions for new projects.
The next round of projects will be done in 2016, 2017 and 2018.
The ward meetings will take place throughout March and April. Specific dates have yet to be set. Residents will also be able to submit project requests online until April 30.
"That will give us the summer months to look at the proposed project requests and make cost estimates," City Manager Bruce Moore said at last week's meeting. "Then we'll go back out in September and October in the wards as we did last time and present a plan, get a consensus and the [city Board of Directors] can adopt that in November or December."
A request form can be found on the city's website on its "Sales Tax and Bond Projects by Wards" page. The form can be accessed by going to www.littlerock.org, clicking on "city departments" on the drop-down menu to the left of the page, then to "public works," "civil engineering" and "sales tax and bond projects."
Moore told the board Tuesday that most of the projects the city committed to in the first round of funding are complete and that the rest will be under construction soon.
At least 85 percent of the projects are complete or underway, and they all will be finished on time, he said. Because the city really started the projects in the middle of 2013, Moore said the three-year end date will bleed over into 2016.
"What we said we were going to do we will have done or have substantially done by that end time," at-large City Director Dean Kumpuris said.
The revenue comes from what the city calls the "new tax" -- a 1 percent sales tax increase that voters approved in 2011. The city opted to spend the funds in three-year cycles because priorities change. The tax will be collected for 10 years, and collections began in 2012.
Some of the tax revenue was promised to large-scale projects such as capital funding for the future Little Rock Technology Park or construction of a new police station.
The money to be discussed in the coming meetings, however, is the $72 million allocated for public works projects over the 10-year life of the tax. Ten percent of that is set aside for citywide street projects. Then funding is split evenly among the seven wards for ward-specific projects. Each ward receives $2.6 million every three-year cycle. Projects include street overlays, bicycle lanes, speed bumps and drainage improvements, for example.
Some of the projects submitted for the first round of funding weren't selected by the city to be completed. A list of those projects has been compiled and will be presented during this year's meetings in case residents still see them as priorities, Moore said.
Ward 6 City Director Doris Wright and Ward 7 City Director B.J. Wyrick said emphasis needs to be put on making sure people are notified of the March and April meetings well ahead of time. While the first round of meetings was well-attended in all seven wards three years ago, both directors said they got calls afterward from people upset that they didn't meet the deadline for submitting requests.
Ward 1 City Director Erma Hendrix said she will tell her constituents not to attend the meetings because they shouldn't request new projects when their first requests aren't finished yet. Moore said the projects will all be completed on time.
Wyrick said the city needs to be sure to update the public on where the first projects stand.
"The projects we adopted are in various stages of being completed. When we go to meetings, we need to be able to give an update of the projects we did adopt and where we are on them before we proceed on to talk about new projects because we are going to lose the confidence if we don't let them know," Wyrick said.
Moore assured the board that the city staff had already planned to do that and will have a presentation on the first round of projects.
Mayor Mark Stodola asked for an update on how the citywide money has been spent to date.
"Remember," Moore said, "the goal was to not allocate all of those dollars because of various things that come up. ... Part of it was to give us the latitude during that funding cycle if something comes up that we need to address."
Metro on 03/02/2015