JPs approve Grand Avenue property acquisition
The Garland County Quorum Court authorized the expansion of the county courthouse and district courts building campus, approving the purchase of 538 W. Grand Ave. during a special called meeting Monday night.
The county plans to use the property for more parking at the courts building at 607 Ouachita Ave. It hopes to find a tenant for the building until then. It was the location of several restaurants that are no longer in operation.
“We might be able to lease it to someone or provide it for some type of other business,” County Judge Darryl Mahoney told justices of the peace. “I’d like to have someone in it to at least keep it up and keep the utilities going on it until we get ready to raze it and move the parking lot down there.”
The quorum court’s Finance Committee approved a $60,000 transfer within the general capital improvement fund last week to fund the purchase. Intrafund transfers don’t require the approval of the full quorum court. The ordinance adopted Tuesday night authorized the purchase. It included an emergency clause, putting the ordinance into immediate effect and allowing the county to close on the property by the end of the week.
The quorum court created the general capital improvement fund in 2017 to fund the migration of the county’s analog public safety communications system to the Arkansas Wireless Information Network, the interoperable digital platform used by more than 900 federal, state and local agencies. The fund received excess collections of more than $4 million from the temporary five-eighths cent sales tax voters approved in 2011 to finance the construction of the $41.7 million Garland County Detention Center.
Former County Judge Rick Davis signed the termination of tax certificate at the end of September 2016, but the sales tax didn’t sunset until the end of 2016. State law doesn’t allow the levy of a sales and use tax to end until the first day of the calendar quarter after 90 days from the date the Department of Finance and Administration received the termination of tax certificate from the state treasurer’s office. The 90-day period allows DFA to notify retailers that a sales tax no longer needs to be collected.
Collection of the countywide sales tax resumed in the summer of 2017 after voters renewed it in a 2016 special election authorizing $54.6 million in road improvement bonds, debt that’s helping fund the extension of the King Expressway to the junction of highways 5 and 7.
The Ouachita Memorial Hospital Sale Fund has since supported the general capital improvement fund. It received a transfer last year from the OMH Fund for the $218,000 the county paid to acquire 518 W. Grand and the backside of 510 W. Grand. The county plans to use the two parcels and 538 W. Grand for district court parking.
The two district judges in the county became full-time state judges at the start of the year, converting the local district court into District 41 State Court. Mahoney said last year that an increased caseload was expected to accompany the change, creating more demand for parking at the county campus.
The county’s sale of the Ouachita Memorial Hospital in the 1980s seeded the OMH Fund. According to a summary of treasury accounts presented to the quorum court last week, the fund had a $6.85 million cash balance at the end of last month.
The 2021 budget the quorum adopted last year included a $600,000 transfer from the OMH Fund to the general capital improvement fund.