By Ray King

The Pine Bluff City Council made history Monday night when they held their first virtual meeting ever.

Mayor Shirley Washington was in her office as were City Attorney Althea Hadden-Scott and Assistant City Attorney Joe Childers but City Clerk Loretta Whitfleld and the eight council members used tablets and I-phones to participate in the meeting from their homes or other locations.

The council voted to read a proposed ordinance dealing with the collection of gross receipt taxes, specifically to so-called “Hamburger Tax” once and place it on the calendar for later.

Attorney Jackie Harris joined the meeting remotely and said he had been asked by the A & P (Advertising and Promotions) Commission to review the ordinance and Harris said there were some “due process” issues that needed to be addressed.

Specifically, he said the revisions would clarify each step of the process of collecting the taxes, what actions a business could take to contest the assessment, help enforcement of the tax.

The proposed amendment is 17 pages long and Council Member Glen Brown Jr., said the ordinance needed to be passed but not necessarily passed Monday night.

On another matter, a request to go back and add an emergency clause to an ordinance that was adopted at the last council meeting to accept a section of U.S. Highway 63-B, specifically 6th Avenue and Main Street where the new library is under constriction failed to get an eighth vote to be added to the agenda.

Childers said the proposal was not in writing and city codes require that amendments to ordinances be in writing. Additionally, the exact number of the ordinance that the emergency clause was to be added to was unknown.

“It would be more prudent to have it in writing,” Childers said.

Council member Win Trafford brought up the emergency clause after the council adopted a resolution allowing Mayor Shirley Washington to sign a memorandum of understanding with the Pine Bluff/Jefferson County Library System which calls upon the library’s contractors to perform sidewalk and drainage work on Main Street in front of the library consistent with the StreetScape project. The library would pay the contractor and the city would then reimburse the library for the costs, projected to be just over $39,000.

Trafford said the library system was asking that the work be done now while other construction is going on so that the street wouldn’t get torn up later. In addition, Trafford said the sub-contractor who would do the work was on-site now, and if he left and had to return the price would be higher.

After Council Member Ivan Whitfield cast a no vote , it was decided that the city attorney’s office would draft an amendment to the previous ordinance and the council would call a special virtual meeting Wednesday afternoon prior to a meeting of the Public Safety and Public Health and Welfare Committees which is scheduled for 1:30 p.m.