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Mountain Home City Council held a relatively light council session Thursday evening.
For its main agenda of the night, the council approved the purchase of three new police vehicles for the Mountain Home Police Department, totaling $130,500.
The new 2024 Ford Explorers are being purchased locally from Ultimate Ford in Mountain Home. The vehicles are expected to arrive in the next few weeks and will then be sent out to be equipped with a full police package.
The package will include lights, computers, radios, cages, and body wrap for each vehicle.
Following their approval of MHPD’s purchase, City Council authorized City Treasurer Alma Clark to make some line item adjustments to the city’s budget for bookkeeping purposes, as well as some updated line item numbers for the city’s parks department.
The Parks Department is getting ready to roll out a new roller hockey clinic alongside its usual baseball and soccer programs this year. The clinic will be overseen by Tyler Rockey at Hickory Park on Wednesday nights from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. and will run for eight weeks beginning on April 30th.
The clinic is open to boys and girls, ages 5-17. Each child will need to bring their own skates, hockey stick, helmet, hockey gloves, mouthpiece, and any other padded equipment they want to use.
The fee for the new hockey clinic is $50. Payment for the clinic is due by April 10th at 4 p.m.
A registration link for the program can be found here.
In other council news, Hap Myers, who is not a resident of Mountain Home city limits, had several back-and-forth exchanges with many members of City Council over various issues from the quality of the Public Safety Committee’s meeting minutes to the city’s recent purchase of MHPD’s new headquarters.
Myers demanded that he and other community activists be listed as attending various meetings in the city’s meeting minutes and made complaints about not having a full written transcript of what was said during the Public Safety Committee’s last meeting.
Each meeting is recorded by city officials and is made available upon request as required by law. The City is not required to write a full transcript of its recordings.
City Councilman Bob Van Haaren had a terse exchange with Myers by asking him if he was a resident of Mountain Home. After initially claiming that he was a resident, Myers then admitted he lived outside of the city limits.
Baxter County resident Debbie Anderson followed up that exchange by asking if non-residents were allowed to attend government meetings in Mountain Home. Van Haaren agreed that non-residents were allowed to attend government meetings, even if they did not live within the city limits.
Members of City Council answer to and represent their constituents, which are comprised of residents living within the city limits of Mountain Home.
Under state law, nonresidents can freely attend and record meetings, and can submit Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain government documents if they choose, so long as they are residents of Arkansas. Nonresidents do not have the ability to vote in local Mountain Home government races, nor can they vote on ballot issues submitted to the public by the city during an election year.
City Council and the public at large also retain the privilege to know who is addressing them and if that individual is a resident within the city limits. The council is not required to allow residents or non-residents to speak before them under Robert’s Rules of Order.
Robert’s Rules is a framework that is comprised of a set of codes and rules of ethics that helps groups and organizations conduct orderly meetings that allow the majority to rule while allowing minority voices to be heard.
It should also be noted that the City of Mountain Home is a completely separate government body from Baxter County as well as the Mountain Home Public School District.
While each government meets within Mountain Home, largely due to the city’s size and position as the county’s seat of power, they are their own separate governments under Arkansas state law. Each holds the power to tax residents living within their districts.
The separate government bodies, while having generally good relations with each other, do not hold sway over each other’s operations.
The meeting ended after more terse exchanges with Myers and city officials.
