CAVE CITY - The decision by Cave City voters to become a dry township in wet Sharp County will definitely have an impact on the town's budget, but the city plans to still have 24-hour police coverage.
Cave City Township elected to make it dry by a vote of 500 to 436. The ballot issue was the result of a months-long petition supported by leadership in churches within the community.
"We were getting about $200,000 (in sales taxes) last year," Cave City Mayor Ron Burge said. "We'll probably lose around $20,000 (per year)."
Burge said that despite the loss, the 24-hour police presence will remain.
"We're going to continue to do that," Burge said. "We have enough money to do that. The sales tax was a little more than we predicted that it would be."
On social media, there had been comments tying the 24-hour police coverage directly to the sales of alcohol in the city because of speculation that it would result in more crime.
Burge said that is not the case.
"We had wanted 24-hour coverage for years," Burge said. "We had break-ins in the middle of the night before alcohol and we'd have to have an officer on call all the time. We would have to call somebody and it would take maybe an hour for someone to get there if you had a problem in the middle of the night. We wanted 24-hour coverage, (but) we just had not been able to afford it."
Burge said his own business had been broken into during the nighttime hours. He said officers would work until 11 p.m. or midnight, but be on call until 7 a.m.
Since the county, and thus the city, went wet in 2013, Cave City has had four full-time officers.
It's not just the city sales tax that will be affected, the Batesville Guard Online reported. Businesses will see loss in revenue as well, possibly affecting their employees.
"We got pretty much until the end of the year to sell what we got," said Sam Johnson, manager of the Flash Market in Cave City. He also said the store will have to cut back on staff as well as hours for employees who remain.
Another business that sells alcohol in Cave City is Dollar General, a nationwide chain. Although they are a publicly traded company and thus do not comment store by store, they did reply to an email from the Guard.
"We operate our business in accordance to all local, state and federal laws; we plan to remove the products from store shelves when the law goes into effect to comply with the new local regulation," Crystal Ghassemi with Dollar General Corporation Corporate Communications wrote.
In other parts of Sharp County, particularly the northern parts, brand new liquor stores were constructed when the county went wet. Liquor stores include T&C Sportsmans Liquor near Ravenden, Bootleggers near the Fulton County line, The Liquor Store in Hardy and Triple D in Ash Flat. So far, there have been no moves to make the townships that the liquor stores are in dry. If one of those townships were to vote to go dry, though, it could mean the liquor store owners will lose hundreds of thousands (or more) dollars that were invested in constructing and filling the stores.
"The permit would have to be canceled," said Milton Lueken, attorney at the Alcoholic Beverage Control division. "The law allows any such store affected 60 days to sell inventory on hand. They would not be able to purchase more inventory."
Lueken said that there would not be any legal recourse for store owners to cover the losses of construction. The only hope they would have is to find that there were irregularities in the election.
"When you're in a small township where people are more conservative, you run the risk of having an election and putting you out of business," Leuken said. "What some people have done is file a transfer to put the liquor store out of the township."
The wet/dry issue is a contentious issue in Independence County. Throughout most of 2016, there had been a petition signing effort throughout the county, led by the group Keep Our Dollars in Independence County, to get a wet/dry vote on the Nov. 8 ballot. The petition also had the support of both Walmart and Kroger retailers.
The petition was submitted July 22 and was 744 signatures short of the 7,996 (or 38 percent of registered voters in the county) required to get the measure on the ballot. Keep Our Tax Dollars in Independence County was given a 10-day extension to recoup the difference.
On Aug. 9, the group resubmitted 13,503 signatures. Of those, the clerk's office verified that 7,619 signatures were valid, but still 377 short of the required number. Some 5,884 signatures/signature lines were rejected if they were duplicates, if the person was not a registered voter and if a person registered to vote after signing the petition.
Signatures of people residing outside of Independence County also were rejected as well as those contained on sheets without proper notarization or dates. Illegible and incomplete signatures/signature lines also were thrown out.
However, 424 valid signatures were rejected if they were listed on sheets containing a signature(s) from individual(s) residing outside of Independence County.
Independence County Clerk Tracey Mitchell told the Guard that she followed state law when validating the petitions because Arkansas law on local option elections says if a petition includes signatures from petitioners of more than one county, the entire petition is rejected.
Keep Our Dollars in Independence County filed a lawsuit claiming registered Independence County voters' signatures were improperly rejected by Mitchell.
Currently, the lawsuit is under appeal. If the court rules in favor of Keep Our Dollars in Independence County, the wet/dry issue will automatically appear on the 2018 ballot.
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