Four Arkansas counties will lose a total of eight justice of the peace positions beginning in 2023 because of a state law that bases the number of a county’s quorum court members on the county’s population.
Shelby Johnson, geographic information officer for the Arkansas Geographic Information Systems Office, said Ashley, Crittenden, Phillips and Polk counties will reduce their justice of the peace districts by two each.
“It’s going to be an interesting new decade,” Phillips County’s County Judge Clark Hall said. “Because of the drop in population, we have had to rearrange the whole Quorum Court. The nine seats remaining have been totally rearranged with new rules and margins for deviation. It has changed a lot of our districts up, and Quorum Court members have to run against each other. It’s a tragedy, but it’s the way things go.”
Arkansas law states that the number of quorum court districts per county in Arkansas is based upon population ranges. Apportionment of those districts is the responsibility of the county board of election commissioners and is based on federal decennial census information.
The U.S. Constitution requires a census every 10 years. The most recent one took place in 2020, and the results were announced last year. Since then, U.S. House and state legislative districts have been redrawn based on how the population changed.
Justices of the peace serve on quorum courts, the legislative body of counties. The county judge is a county’s top executive.
Josh Curtis, governmental affairs director for the Association of Arkansas Counties, said that while a multitude of counties saw a drop in population and might be dropped in classification, the drop must be pretty steep for a county to lose two justice of the peace positions.
“Those who this affects should have been made aware of it last year,” he said.
The number of justices of…
