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Jonesboro Behind on Clearing Ditches; Officials to Work on New Rental Ordinance

City of Jonesboro

A lack of an internet sales tax is hurting small Arkansas towns…that according to Jonesboro Mayor Harold Perrin. 

In Tuesday’s Jonesboro City Council meeting, Jonesboro’s mayor says the Arkansas legislature is expected to consider an internet sales tax in the state when it convenes next year.  He says sales tax in Jonesboro has been flat and is not expected to move much the rest of the year. 

Perrin says smaller towns than Jonesboro have been significantly hurt by the state not having an internet sales tax.  After a U.S. Supreme Court ruling about the issue, states across the nation that don’t have such laws will consider putting one in place.  The Arkansas General Assembly will go into full session in January. 

In other news, Perrin answered a concern about the city’s ditches not being cleaned out properly.  Jonesboro put priorities on cleaning out over 60 miles of ditches in the city after a devastating flood in 2016. That happened when over six inches of rain fell in just over 3 hours.  One of the causes was that the city’s ditches were not properly cleaned out.  The city focuses on the ditches, but Perrin says recent rains have slowed down the work and left workers very behind in trying to clean out the ditches.

Finally, at Perrin’s request, aldermen voted down an ordinance that would have set the rules for operations of vacation rental properties in Jonesboro.  He says that ordinance will be replaced with a better version that has better definitions of such properties and would set the same taxes that hotels charge to be the same that owners of vacation rentals would charge, among other changes.    

Johnathan Reaves is the News Director for KASU Public Radio. As part of an Air Force Family, he moved to Arkansas from Minot, North Dakota in 1986. He was first bitten by the radio bug after he graduated from Gosnell High School in 1992. While working on his undergraduate degree, he worked at KOSE, a small 1,000 watt AM commercial station in Osceola, Arkansas. Upon graduation from Arkansas State University in 1996 with a degree in Radio-Television Broadcast News, he decided that he wanted to stay in radio news. He moved to Stuttgart, Arkansas and worked for East Arkansas Broadcasters as news director and was there for 16 years.