Oops. An NLR insider had told me last week that Ultimate Dictator Pat Hays would persuade the NLR School District not to sue over his outrageous gerrymander to redirect taxes from schools to a downtown parking deck in a tax increment finance district perverted beyond even the dreams of Dustin McDaniel and Bruce Burrow, the architects of the school tax grab.
Wrong.
The Times of North Little Rock will report tomorrow:
The North Little Rock School Board met Thursday night and its legal objections to the Tax Increment Finance district approved by the North Little Rock City Council crystallized.
The board officially hired Jim Smith to be the board’s attorney and he recommended that the board file a complaint for a declarative judgment against the TIF district.
Smith said that new district was “procedurally defective in terms of notice and disclosure” and added that the law said 15 days notice and notifying the City Council the night before its meeting did not meet that standard.
He also recommended that an injunction be put in place and the Pulaski County Clerk not be allowed to disburse those funds. The board unanimously approved.
Smith said after the meeting that he plans on filing in Pulaski County Circuit Court by the end of next week and he thinks that all the legal wrangling will be over in a year.
This is great news. They will not likely be alone. Procedural issues are not all to be contested. The unconstitutional grab of school money is another issue. The perversion of the definition of “blighted” property is another. Hays shouldn’t have done this. He’ll soon pay a hefty legal bill to have that point proved.