BRYANT — Deciding whether to put a turn lane or a median in the expansion plan for Alcoa Road has put a major kink in the project to take the winding thoroughfare that connects the cities of Benton and Bryant from a two-lane road to a four-lane road.
Representatives from Benton, Bryant, Saline County and Metroplan, the regional metropolitan planning organization, met Monday to hash out a disagreement over whether to install a center turn lane or a raised median during the widening project.
Bryant representatives have said they’d prefer a median for safety reasons, and Benton officials have said businesses along Alcoa Road prefer a turn lane.
The original agreement, reached several years ago between the cities and county and presented to Metroplan with a request for funding, called for a raised median.
Metroplan officials said Monday that if that major aspect of the road changes, the plan would be scrapped and any widening project would require reapplying for funding consideration with dozens of additional requests.
Other areas of disagreement on the widening project include whether to include a bicycle lane and traffic circles, or specific stoplights. Officials are also debating what safety mechanism to use in front of an elementary school on the road in order to help students cross safely.
Those issues, which are considered details of the larger plan, won’t be up for discussion until the cities and county decide whether they will move forward with medians or change the plan and lose the matching grant from Metroplan.
“We are allocating a limited amount of money to roadways that cause the greatest benefit,” Metroplan Director Jim McKenzie said.
“We on average have been getting between $8 million and $10 million to allocate for roadways. We have maybe 750 miles of road that can be funded with that money. There’s been a little bit of confusion in Washington, D.C., these days about the next transportation bill, so that could change.”
Benton Mayor David Mattingly said he and the City Council will talk and make a decision on the medians in the next two weeks and come back to the group.
“Alcoa Road is becoming a corridor on our eastern border that will have strong businessdriven activity,” he said. “I believe very strongly that it is our responsibility to listen to the input of what those people want. I have heard from [15] of the 21 business owners and they are against it.”
Metroplan would pay for 80 percent of the road widening, while the three governmental bodies would be responsible for coming up with 20 percent of the total cost to widen the roadway. Of that cost, the amount would be split based on the amount of road each municipality would be responsible for maintaining.
About 68 percent of the road is inside of Benton city limits, which would amount to about $1.7 million for its contribution. Bryant and Saline County would have to respectively split the remaining amount, about $850,000, in needed contribution for matching funds.
Benton is in a precarious position because its contribution would come from a portion of a 1.5 percent sales tax passed in 1998 and renewed in 2004. Of that tax, a quarter percent is dedicated to road paving and construction.
The revenue from that tax, which will expire in December 2016, has been dedicated through spring 2013 to pay for the work being done on Military Road.
The Alcoa Road project would require another one to two years of tax revenue be reserved, meaning smaller projects will go longer without funding. If the project doesn’t move forward from 2013 to 2016, the city will not have dedicated funds to work with.
Bryant Mayor Jill Dabbs said during the meeting that she has mixed feelings about the situation.
“Let me be clear, I am not married to the medians,” she said. “I would hate to see us lose the funding that was already ... sitting there for this project, for the sake of taking medians out.”
In order to move forward, all three local governments must agree on the structure of the road, so in essence, one no vote on the medians would send the project back to the drawing board until a different consensus can be reached.
As the populations of Benton and Bryant have increased over the last decade, Alcoa Road has served as a local connector between the two towns for people wanting to avoid Interstate 30.
The plan to widen the road from two to four lanes began more than seven years ago, said Saline County Judge Lanny Fite, but the need for the project to move forward has escalated as housing developments, bustling side streets and about two dozen businesses have cropped up along the road.
With the announcement last month that Saint-Gobain plans to build a manufacturing plant at the site of the Alcoa plant on Alcoa Road, the thoroughfare stands to have even more traffic.
The Benton City Council talked last week about repealing the 2007 ordinance the council passed agreeing to the Alcoa Road design. Several aldermen said they were under the false impression during that debate that the federal matching grant was dependent on several features in the design for safety, including the raised median.
McKenzie, the Metroplan director, said Monday that the project’s selection was not based on whether the plan included raised medians. He said changing them at this stage, however, would trigger the project being restarted through the selection process.
The reason for that rule, McKenzie said, was a “jurisdiction that was good at gaming the process” at Metroplan several years ago by presenting projects that would get the most votes and then radically changing them to what the city actually wanted after they received funding.
He also said the designers who had come up with the preliminary plan for the road widening added a bike lane because the city passed a bike path plan and incorporated bicycles into its master planning. He said the traffic circles are also not set in stone, but were included at the suggestion of city representatives as a traffic slowing alternative.
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 10/18/2011