In This Issue
Retiring ADEM Director David Maxwell reflects on his career, relationship with counties.
26 The federal
salary threshold increase and implications for public sector.
30
SPRING 2016
Features Pulaski County honors fallen deputies ....................................................................11
Former Conway police chief named new ADEM director .....................................29 Individual assistance available to residents of 11 flooded counties .................33
Inside Look Risk Management Services holds safety meeting ................................................39
Quorum Court Association annual meeting at AAC ..............................................40 Collectors come together in Eureka Springs ..........................................................42 County clerks hold meeting in Spa City ...................................................................43 Coroners offer MDI course .........................................................................................44 North Little Rock site of circuit clerks meeting ......................................................45 Assessors meeting held over two days ....................................................................46 AAC staff profile: Karan Skarda ................................................................................47 AAC staff profile: Ellen Wood .....................................................................................47
Departments From the Director’s Desk ..............................................................................................7
Randolph County is home to
two historic courthouses.
34
President’s Perspective ................................................................................................9 From the Governor .......................................................................................................11 Attorney General Opinions .........................................................................................12 Legislative Lines ...........................................................................................................13 Governmental Affairs ..................................................................................................15 Legal Corner ..................................................................................................................16 Seems to Me .................................................................................................................18 County Law Update ......................................................................................................23 Savings Times 2 ...........................................................................................................24 NACo News Updates ....................................................................................................49
Cover Notes: County Turnback
in Arkansas? For the most part counties do. They pay the bills with revenues derived from property taxes, sales and use taxes, fees, fines, costs and other sources of revenue. However, the state of Arkansas does provide county aid, known at the local level as general revenue turnback, and a few other sources of revenue to help offset the costs of state mandates on the county. County aid is not a grant. It is payment for state services administered at the
S county level. Read more about county turnback on page 18. o, who pays the bills for county government operations “ COUNTY LINES, SPRING 2016 (Photo by Randy Kemp)
The average inflation rate from 1980 through 2015 was 3.37 percent. If counties had received an inflation adjustment of only 3 percent during that time frame, the county aid appropriation for 2016-17 would be $54,705,725. — Eddie Jones
AAC Consultant ” 5
AAC F A M I L Y & F R I E N D S
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Standing down
David Maxwell prepares to retire, and learn to relax, after a decade as state’s emergency management director
Story By Jennifer Barnett Reed For County Lines Photos Courtesy of Arkansas Department of Emergency Management
But there’s a part of him that’s remained firmly rooted in the past as well — to the years he spent on the front lines of disaster response, to very real afternoons spent with desperate people who looked to him to make things better. Maxwell is set to retire June 30, 10 years after he was appoint-
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ed director by former Gov. Mike Huckabee and nine-and-a-half years after he’d originally planned to hang up his hat. In that
s the man responsible for planning how the state will respond to every conceivable kind of disaster, Department of Emergency Management Director David Maxwell has learned to live in the “what if” world of an unimaginable future.
decade, Maxwell brought stability back to the department, which had gone through three directors in the two years before he took the post. He oversaw the construction of a badly needed state-of- the-art emergency management facility at Camp Robinson. He put a lot of effort into repairing the department’s relationships with Arkansas’s 75 county judges, which had also gone through a rocky stretch for a few years. He served a one-year term as presi- dent of the National Emergency Management Association, and he has served on a number of national committees related to emergency management. It’s a pretty distinguished career for a man who never intended to make emergency management his life’s work.
COUNTY LINES, WINTER 2016
AAC F A M I L Y & F R I E N D S
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Above: The “Old” Randolph County Courthouse, constructed between 1872 and 1875, has been rehabilitated with $709,647 in grant money. Double Take Randolph County’s Pocahontas is home to two historic courthouse structures.
Story by Mark Christ s Photos by Holly Hope Arkansas Historic Preservation Program
Restoration Grant program, which uses funds from the Arkan- sas Natural and Cultural Resources Council to preserve some of Arkansas’s most-treasured public buildings. Around the same time that Davidsonville was founded in the early 19th century, Ransom Bettis settled on the Black River to establish a community called Bettis Bluff. Future Arkansas Gov. Tomas S. Drew established a business there in the late 1820s and married Bettis’s daughter, Cinderella. Te town boomed with the arrival of steamboat traffic in 1829, and on Oct. 29, 1835, Randolph County separated from Lawrence County. Bettis Bluff, with the new name Pocahontas, became the seat of government.
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he Randolph County seat of Pocahontas is the home of not one, but two historic county courthouses, one of which has particularly strong ties to the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program’s County Courthouse
and by 1839 a courthouse was erected at a cost of $2,400. Te building, located across the street from the hotel where Con- federate Gen. M. Jeff Tompson — the “Swamp Fox of the Confederacy” — was captured in August 1863, survived the Civil War but just barely. Offices were moved from the building during the war as it became increasingly structurally unstable, and in 1870 the two-story structure collapsed. It was replaced on the same site by an Italianate-style mas- terpiece built between 1872 and 1875. Situated in the center of the Pocahontas town square, the two-story building features heavy brick hood moldings over the tall, narrow windows, decorative brick quoins and a tall cupola in the center of the roof structure. Construction was not without controversy. John A. McKay of
COUNTY LINES, WINTER 2016 Drew donated land for a courthouse and public buildings,
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