Although Sunshine Week, when journalists gang up to promote open government, is still a couple of months off, the recent downfall of former state Rep. Micah Neal provides us a good opportunity to make an appeal to his former colleagues in the Legislature to undo some of the damage he did.
In 2015 Neal pushed legislation, Act 1102, that exempts local option taxes, also called hotel-motel-restaurant or HMR taxes, from the state’s Freedom of Information Act. Those taxes are paid to cities’ advertising and promotion commissions or visitors’ bureaus.
Arkansas Business used the tax totals to calculate the revenue of the top-selling restaurants around the state. We published that information yearly in lists and throughout the year as we wrote about eating establishments, and our readers — including restaurant owners, investors and developers — loved it. They still ask for those lists, but Act 1102 made it impossible for us to deliver.
Neal, when he wasn’t taking kickbacks, operated Neal’s Café in Springdale, and he told us in 2015 that “it’s nobody’s business what individual businesses’ gross sales are every month.” Neal added: “They’ve threatened to pass a hamburger tax up here where I’m from for years, and I don’t want my gross sales in the paper where all my neighbors and friends can say, ‘Oh, Micah made this much money this month.’”
Neal was so concerned that someone might learn — legally — how much revenue his business received — legally — that he persuaded his colleagues to shut down the public’s right to know. Meanwhile, he wasn’t nearly concerned enough about the impact the kickbacks he received — illegally — would have on himself, his family, his community and on the public’s faith in its government.
Although HMR taxes aren’t the only government information we’d like to see restored to the public through the FOI, it’s a start. The reversal of self-serving legislation by a man who has admitted he was on the take at the time would be a gesture of goodwill to the public that both lawmakers and newspapers serve.