Arlington, TX

Voters solidly defeated the proposed Crime Control and Prevention District, 56% Against and only 44% For.Turnout was higher yesterday than it has been in some recent elections. Still only about 9 percent of the city’s 182,418 registered voters cast ballots. As dismal as that sounds, it’s actually up quite a bit from the 3.9 percent who voted last May.

Had it passed, the crime prevention district would have raised our sales tax from 8 cents to 8.125 cents per dollar for five years. City officials estimated that an additional $6 million per year would have been brought in to pay for anti-crime programs. Some say the proposal failed because it included too many non-crime related expenditures, such as tutoring, camp scholarships and youth programs. These were touted as crime prevention projects although opponents didn’t see it that way.

Mayor Cluck says the city will formulate another plan to help fight crime. “We need to look for another plan to take care of the crime problem we are seeing here.” But he added, “I think we had to have a prevention piece in it.”

In other election news, all 16 of the proposed state constitutional amendments passed. Some of the major ones included:

Proposition 3: Ensures that homeowners can’t be hit with a school tax increase of more than 10 percent a year;

Proposition 4: Provides $1 billion in bond money to build prisons, maintain and repair state parks, restore historic buildings and expand crime labs, among other projects. Included is almost $50 million to build an emergency vehicle operations training track near Austin;

Proposition 6: Allows Texans who use their personal vehicles for business to avoid paying property taxes on them;

Proposition 12: Authorizes the Texas Transportation Department to issue $5 billion in bonds to pay for highway improvements;

Proposition 13: Expands the circumstances under which Texas judges can deny bail to certain criminal defendants accused of family violence.

Proposition 15: Authorizes the Legislature to issue bonds of $300 million a year over 10 years to finance cancer research.

Source: Fort-Worth Star-Telegram