08/24/2026
The Greenbrier Chamber will be hosting a “Lunch and Learn” Sept. 10 where guests can hear a presentation and answer questions about concerns they may have.
Issue 3 is a ballot item this fall which if passed, will have major economic implications for Arkansas when we compete against our neighboring states, and small towns like Greenbrier who are primed for growth, but have nothing to offer in the way of incentives for business.
Incidentally, this column was written by this newspaper’s most liberal and longest tenured columnist.
—Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Aug 20, 2026
You will have Issue 3 on your general election ballot. It’s legislatively referred, so it’s not going to get thrown off by the politicians who put it there. That only happens to initiatives by the people.
I’ve received a spiel in support of the proposal, which is supported by chambers of commerce and the like, and I will now relay it to you. Warning: It’s about debt financing for economic development. But it’s never too early to bite the bullet of boredom in pursuit of casting an informed and responsible ballot.
Issue 3 would give local jurisdictions in Arkansas—cities and counties—a tool generally available already to their counterparts in 48 states, including all our abutting states.
There is the story of a north Arkansas mayor on the phone with a project developer who asked about the kind of financing provided by Issue 3 and abruptly ended the conversation when the mayor said it was unavailable in Arkansas, a situation the developer found unthinkable. The project went a few miles north … just across the Missouri line.
Local governments would be authorized to form economic development districts, and, within those areas, issue bonds to generate development. The debt would be paid from future revenue to be generated specifically by the development, and the payments could include not only property-tax revenue but, for the first time, local sales-tax revenue. And the developer would hold the bonds.
Let’s say you have a “food desert” in rural Arkansas—a relatively small town that might have had a grocery store not so long ago, but has one no longer. Issue 3, if passed and then translated to enabling legislation by the General Assembly, would permit the local government to create debt to get the grocery store built with the payments on the debt to come from, say, increased sales-tax proceeds to local government attributable to the grocery store. And a grocery store produces reliable sales-tax revenue for local jurisdictions. The state has eliminated its sales tax on groceries, deeming that humane.
Does Benton County need affordable housing? Issue 3 might be the ticket, financing the developer with bonds to be paid from the sales or property taxes generated by building homes and having people buy them, equip and furnish them and live in them.
Texarkana, Texas, has this tool. The Arkansas side doesn’t. You see the argument driving through on Interstate 30.
The Kansas side of Kansas City just won the new Chiefs’ stadium by quicker and better use of this kind of financing.
Ideally, local government revenue is not affected since the repayment comes from additional revenue generated by the financed development. People get work. People get groceries without burning so much gasoline. Burning high-priced gasoline to get high-priced groceries is a compound burden.
There are three forms to this financing: One uses property taxes. One uses sales taxes. The other is called the Texas 380 model and I’m having a devil of a time working up any instinctive skepticism about it. The developer fronts the money. The incentive is negotiated in the beginning. The developer gets rebates only as tax revenue from the development is generated.
On bonds, one legislator asked Sen. Jonathan Dismang, the main sponsor, what would happen if a government did a deal with bonded revenue and got hit in three months with a wipeout tornado. Would the government be the guarantor, and thus liable? Dismang said there were things to be worked out, presumably in the enabling legislation.
My state senator, Clarke Tucker, a center-left Democrat (and close pals with Dismang), voted for referral and says he’ll vote for the proposal in November. It’s a tool and entirely a local option, he stressed.
Tucker told me, “People arguing you lose tax revenue assume all the projects would happen anyway, which they wouldn’t.” He means the additional government revenue generated by the project that, under this method of financing, would go to rebates or abatements. If the project located without this program, the government could keep all the money for general purposes of its choosing.
The main argument against Issue 3, I suspect, will be the “what if?” Let’s say some local government makes a boneheaded or corrupt deal using this tool, and the local taxpayers are either on the line or at least separated from some taxes that could have gone to general county use rather than an incompetent or corrupt scheme.
The best answer I’ve heard on that is that boneheadedness and corruption are potential problems for any law you could make. The parable I’ve heard: We have worthy highway safety laws, and they work to the common good, yet there are speeding, reckless and drunken drivers and fatal crashes.
I do know that Arkansas needs economic development and could use any reasonable tool other states have. The test is reasonableness.
