Boozman visits local officials, businesspeople
U.S. Sen. John Boozman stopped in Bella Vista to meet with city officials and businesspeople Oct. 11.
The senator dropped in to Bella Vista’s nearly-complete court facility to talk with locals and field questions. He discussed the city’s growth, Internet sales tax, tax reform, health care, volunteerism and labor.
Bella Vista has become a relatively major city practically overnight, Boozman said, after being established under fairly unusual circumstances.
“You’re almost an experiment,” he said.
The situation with Internet sales tax, he said, is important because it can help level the playing field between brick and mortar stores and web-based shops.
“You start out nine and a half percent behind, how do you sell your products?” he asked. “It is a huge problem.”
The Senate has previously passed a bill that would require web-based retailers to collect sales tax, he said, but it could not get through the U.S. House of Representatives. Boozman said he believed the bill could get through the House now.
Paula Sanders, director of marketing with Concordia and chair for the city’s new Advertising and Promotion Commission, said she is concerned about medicare and its effects on elderly health care.
“All of us are watching very closely the changes to the ACA and how that might impact us on the state level,” she said.
Boozman said that the current issue is rising premiums and how, exactly, to address that.
“The problem that we had with health insurance, before we started fiddling with it, was affordability,” he said. “The problem with the current law is there’s nothing in it that controls affordability.”
He’s opposed, he said, to single payer. He’d like to see greater control, he said, in the hands of governors.
In particular, he said, people just above the cutoff for subsidized coverage are hurting. They aren’t making enough to buy insurance, he said, but they’re not getting help that could get them insured.
Another issue is that the pool is smaller and higher risk, he said, because younger, healthier people are not participating. A possible solution, Boozman said, would be to increase the fine for being uninsured until it makes better sense to be insured, but he doesn’t like that idea nor does he think it would be popular. Alternatively, he said, companies could be heavily subsidized.
He’s OK with trying things here and there, he said, to find what works best, but everyone needs to be careful to avoid damaging the private insurance market and causing rates to increase.
“These things are very, very expensive. It’s 16, 18 percent of our economy,” he said. “We really need to find a solution.”
Mayor Peter Christie explained that Bella Vista has, recently, seen a significant decline in volunteerism.
“With this tremendous demographic change we’re seeing here, it’s having a tremendous impact on our ability to get volunteers to do things,” he said. “The young families just cannot commit to every Saturday at 10 o’clock.”
The animal shelter is asking for additional funding, he said, and the cemetery and recycling center are hurting, as are the churches, whose membership is in decline.
He asked if this is a more national trend, and if Bella Vista is feeling it more because of its rapidly shifting demographics.
Boozman said a lot of it has to do with labor and wages.
“Everybody’s working. … They’re not only working but they’re working hard,” he said. “Wages have been flattened, so to get by you have to work hard.”
He also suspects, he said, that more people believe that work typically done by volunteers should be handled by the government.
It’s possible, he said, to give incentives for volunteer work, but changes in peoples’ attitudes are also going to be important. Manners, he said, have become less relevant, for instance.
“We’re just losing some of those basic things that are so, so important to society,” he said.
Noting that he needed to head to his next meeting after talking with a few attendees one-on-one, he told those present to contact him.
“This stuff comes up that you’re concerned about, feel free to holler at us about it,” he said.
Christie said he was glad to have a chance to meet with the senator.
“Senator has done a lot for Northwest Arkansas,” he said. “In fact, he’s done a lot for all of Arkansas.”
Christie was especially impressed, he said, with the senator’s ability to address a wide array of issues in one sitting and understand the interre-latedess of everything — something he believes is extremely important for anyone in a leadership position.
“If you’ve got a health care issue it’s going to roll over and affect a completely different industry,” he said. “Nothing works alone.”