City taking it slow on public-drinking zones

Keeping a watchful eye on how other cities in Arkansas are establishing rules and boundaries for setting up entertainment districts, North Little Rock is showing interest without being in a hurry to join the crowd.

Mayor Joe Smith has held recent discussions with other city officials, the city’s Chamber of Commerce and the Argenta Downtown Council to discuss ideas about establishing a North Little Rock entertainment district, though the city doesn’t have plans to do so anytime soon, Smith said Friday.

“I’m not quite sold on it yet,” Smith said. “I certainly want to see what others have done. So I’m going to slow-play this decision for a while.”

Neighboring Little Rock is scheduled to open its first entertainment district Friday, though Little Rock City Attorney Tom Carpenter said last week that the legislation approved by the Board of Directors last month isn’t fully safe from a referendum to challenge it until Sept. 21, which is 30 days past the effective date of the ordinance.

The state’s new Act 812 allows cities the authority to establish reasonable standards for the regulation of alcohol possession within such districts, where public consumption of alcohol is allowed.

Little Rock is the third city in Arkansas to establish an entertainment district, behind Mountain Home and El Dorado. Four others — Fayetteville, Hot Springs, Bentonville and Texarkana — are either working on or considering setting up their own entertainment districts.

Add North Little Rock to that list, but only in pencil.

“Maybe we’ll get a feel about it from Mountain Home and El Dorado,” Smith said. “We’ll see how it works in the next two to three months in Little Rock, then try to make a decision.”

Danny Bradley, the mayor’s chief of staff, said meetings on the subject have only happened “a couple of times.”

“In the last meeting, we kind of left with a consensus on a couple of things,” Bradley said. “First, see how Little Rock’s program goes, and, secondly, we may want to investigate other cities that have different rules regarding their entertainment zones and see what has worked for them and what may not have worked.

“We’re still thinking about it and looking around,” he said. “We’re not in a hurry to make a decision.”

Bob Major, chief executive officer for the North Little Rock Convention and Visitors Bureau who also has been involved in the discussions, said the city is “still in the talking and planning stages with nothing ready to move forward.”

“The thought is, right now, we’re going to kind of let it settle down a bit,” Major said. “We’re just going to look and see how it works out. We might as well let somebody else be the first.”

North Little Rock is more focused, Major said, on completing the city-owned $5.36 million Argenta Plaza on Main Street that officials are counting on to attract visitors to downtown from both inside and outside the city. The plaza is to open the Friday after Thanksgiving.

“It may be something we get a better feel for once we have the plaza completed and we see how people react to it,” he said. “We expect a lot of people to be coming downtown. [Argenta Plaza] will be a family venue. We don’t anticipate it being an all-day, all-night party downtown. But, people do like to get out and this will give them an opportunity.”

Bradley mentioned that each city’s entertainment district will have to be different from another’s because each municipality must do what best fits a particular city.

“I don’t know if we share a lot of the same characteristics with Fayetteville,” Bradley said, mentioning that it is home to the University of Arkansas and the advantage of having several Razorback football games on campus each fall. “We’re trying to do our homework and do the background and make a good decision.

“There’s not a sense of urgency to get that done,” he said. “I don’t think anyone is opposed to it. We just want to figure out what’s right for North Little Rock. Learn from the successes, and possible failures, of what other cities have done.” merit to allegations that Gray and his staff had violated party rules, but overall, it determined that most of the alleged issues stemmed from the party breaking ties with a compliance company that it had long relied on to compile state and federal reports.

Gray said the party fired the firm, Next Level Compliance, in 2018.

Attorneys with the Shults and Adams law firm are continuing to investigate additional grievances filed by party members.

Meanwhile, the state Ethics Commission is investigating a complaint that Campbell made against Gray in regard to missing campaign finance reports from Gray’s unsuccessful re-election bid for the state House of Representatives last year.

Gray said Saturday that any problems with his reports amounted to “clerical” errors, and he expressed optimism that the Ethics Commission will resolve the matter.