Helena-West Helena council stalls spending measures amid budget strain

Helena-West Helena aldermen tabled spending measures Tuesday night after not enough members were present to reach the two-thirds vote needed to waive competitive bidding, pushing the items to a special meeting set for 4:30 p.m. Thursday. The delay left the city waiting on the kind of purchases and repair work that keep daily operations moving, from equipment buys to service projects.

Arkansas law lets cities waive competitive bidding only in exceptional situations where the process is not feasible, and some professional-services exceptions also require two-thirds approval from the governing body. In Helena-West Helena, that threshold mattered because the council could not even get to a final vote, turning a spending decision into another test of attendance, coalition-building and trust between the mayor’s office and the board.

The meeting came after a year of financial upheaval that has reshaped city hall. Arkansas State Police arrested then-Mayor Christopher Franklin Sr. on June 24, 2025, on four felony counts of failure to pay or file a tax return, and state police said he had not filed taxes in four of the previous five years. Franklin was later removed from office, with Don Etherly serving as mayor pro tempore before Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders appointed Joseph Whitfield to finish the term.

A July 11, 2025 legislative-audit hearing put hard numbers on the strain. Auditors said Helena-West Helena’s 2023 deficits totaled more than $604,000 across the general, street and landfill funds, and they said the city’s inability to pay debts on time led to late fees, overdraft charges, utility shut-off notices, repossessions and vendors demanding cash on delivery. The same hearing said the city was more than $2 million in debt, up from $173,000 before Franklin took office in January 2023.

The city’s finances have also collided with basic infrastructure needs. In July 2024, the state Board of Health ordered Helena-West Helena to develop a plan to upgrade its water system or face a penalty of about $685,000, after officials acknowledged they had gone several months without a qualified water-system operator. The city also went through major water outages in summer 2023 and again in January 2024.

Even so, the council has found ways to move some purchases forward when the votes were there. In one special meeting, members approved a $112,000 used bulldozer for the landfill after waiving competitive bidding, saying revenue from an incoming contaminated-soils project would cover the cost. That contrast between stalled votes and urgent purchases shows how tightly Helena-West Helena’s next repairs now depend on cash flow and on whether enough aldermen show up to act.