Clinton Library Worsens Little Rock's Financial Woes

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NewsMax.com

Saturday, May 4, 2002 1:25 p.m. EDT

The William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Library Foundation has been approved for millions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks by the city of Little Rock, Ark. - even as local officials worry that the city's growing budget deficit may force deep cuts in funding for health care services, education and other community needs.

"Our city is broke," Little Rock businessman and leading Clinton Library critic Eugene Pfeifer told NewsMax.com Friday. "We've got about $500 million of unmet infrastructure needs. Our county is practically broke. We can't even maintain an adequate county jail."

Indeed, just months before Clinton Library officials convinced the city and state to forgo $4 million in sales tax and user fee revenues, Little Rock City Manager Cy Carney proposed a list of budget cuts so deep they left local residents fearing the worst.

Potential cutbacks included the elimination of health care services at the East Little Rock Community Center, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported in October. Also targeted for possible elimination: two other community centers, with the city's Education Commission, its Youth Task Force and Domestic Violence Commission earmarked for consolidation.

"They're hard cuts," City Director Joan Adcock worried to the Democrat-Gazette. "They are really deep into the community."

"Our state is under a court order for deficiency in educating our children, yet the city, state and county are the entities that are getting tapped for [the Clinton Library's] tax break," Pfeifer complained.

"I'm just opposed to the public financing of what is supposed to be a private foundation," he added - while saying he otherwise supports the project wholeheartedly.

"Back in 1997, we were promised that in exchange for the city giving the Clinton Library its land, we would get back a 27-acre jewel of a project that would generate economic benefits forever and all we had to do was give that land," Pfeifer said.

But it hasn't turned out that way.

According to the local businessman, the lease between Little Rock and the Clinton Foundation stipulates that the city will pay to maintain 23 out of 27 acres on the site; a cost estimated by city officials to run at least $500,000 a year.

"That cost gets incurred in perpetuity," Pfeifer said. And that's on top of the city's initial land grant, said to be worth at least $12 million.

"We hardly absorb that news and then they hit up Little Rock for a $4 million tax break," the Pfeifer complained.

The figure is slightly larger than the 2001 budget deficit projected by city officials last October ($3.4 million on a budget of $164 million), and represents one-third of the amount of the cuts ($12 million) eventually agreed upon for Little Rock's 2002 budget.

In addition, city residents will fork over an additional $3.4 million in tax increases.

Pfeifer also complained that Clinton Library officials had repeatedly redefined the land's use in order to maximize taxpayer funding.

For instance, Library officials obtained the multi-million dollar tax break under the "Advantage Arkansas" program, which was designed to attract businesses to the state. "They snuck the library into that program as a regional and national corporate headquarters employing more than 25 people," Pfeifer said.

But two years ago, in order to obtain land owned by Pfiefer and others for the project, city officials declared that the facility would serve as a public park.

"It started out as a presidential library," he explained. "Then a year later, when I resisted them taking my land, suddenly it became 'park.' The city had to find a basis under which they could take the land, a public purpose of some sort."

"Maybe next they'll declare it a farm so they can get an agricultural subsidy," Pfeifer joked.

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