The City Wire Editorial: Vote for the 1% prepared food tax

The owners and management of The City Wire encourage you to vote for the 1% prepared food tax. Fort Smith is the only Arkansas city with a publicly owned convention center that does not have a prepared food tax helping to support the center’s marketing and operations.

The election is Nov. 8, with early voting underway at the Sebastian County Courthouse in downtown Fort Smith.

The Times Record posted Sunday (Oct. 30) its endorsement of the 1% prepared food tax. The opening paragraph of the endorsement is one of the more concise statements on the issue penned in recent months: “Fort Smith needs the Convention Center. The Convention Center needs a funding stream. A 1 percent prepared-food tax accomplishes that — in a relatively painless way. At the end of the day, at the end of four years of discussion, it really is that simple.”

Our endorsement of the tax is an appeal to the majority of Fort Smithians who have historically been able to separate the wheat from the chaff when asked to decide on local tax issues. Even in this fiscally conservative region of the country, Fort Smith voters have never rejected a sales tax in the three decades since the state legislature gave cities the authority to levy taxes.

We believe this historical voting record represents an electorate that, while conservative and wary of state and federal government taxes and programs, is pragmatic and progressive with local taxes and programs.

Unfortunately, this sensible electorate has in the past year witnessed an unprecedented level of furor related to the 1% issue. It has been a furor not easily matched in the 29 Arkansas cities that have a prepared food tax — even in the 22 cities that enacted the tax by ordinance rather than election, which state law allows.

However, we are hopeful Fort Smithians are able to see beyond the efforts of tax opponents who depend on confusion, misinformation and misplaced anger to win the day. Likewise, we are hopeful Fort Smithians are able to see beyond the communication and public relations missteps by the Fort Smith Board of Directors and city staff in pushing for the tax.

We also are confident that if Fort Smithians step back from the furor and emotion, they will come to a similar conclusion reached in May 2010 by an ad hoc group of area business leaders. The business execs were tasked by the city to review convention center funding options. The committee reviewed several funding options, including a 1% prepared tax, finding cuts in the city’s roughly $40 million operating budget, reallocating a portion of the city’s 1% street tax, re-instituting a business license fee and finding a 3rd party operator.

On May 26, the committee voted unanimously to recommend use of a 1% prepared food tax to fund the convention center. As part of that endorsement, the committee called for a management merger of the convention center and the Fort Smith Advertising & Promotion Commission.

What the ad hoc committee discovered after careful and unemotional (rational) review is what so many cities in Arkansas and around the country had already known: a prepared food tax is the best and most efficient way to fund convention center and/or tourism marketing and operations. As the Times Record noted, it really is that simple.

The owners and management of The City Wire encourage you to vote for the 1% prepared food tax.