LITTLE ROCK — One of Little Rock’s busiest roads is now eligible for widening and expansion with city dollars after city directors repealed a 17-year-old resolution Tuesday that said voters had to specifically approve any tax dollars spent on Chenal Parkway.
By a vote of 6-3, city directors repealed the resolution passed in 1994 that at the time served as their way of assuring residents that they wouldn’t “have to involuntarily pay for any expansion or widening of the Chenal Parkway.”
City officials insist that there is no project in the works to widen the road, which the resolution also said would be kept at four lanes. The city’s master street plan shows the road as a six-lane route, a width that in light of the repeal will now be applied to any new development on the roadway.
“This was about nothing but fairness,” at-large City Director Joan Adcock said after the meeting. She sponsored the repeal legislation.
Adcock, the only city director remaining from the 1994 board, said she broached the repeal now to avoid any conflicts in coming months when directors meet with residents about what street projects to fund with new sales tax revenue.
“We don’t want to tell any one ward that they’re not going to be treated fairly,” she said.
No dates have been set for those meetings.
In September, voters approved a 1 percentage-point increase in the city’s sales tax rate, with $72 million of the new revenue earmarked for street and drainage projects. The tax is expected to raise $36 million a year for general operations and $196 million over a decade for capital projects, including road construction and new fire and police stations.
“We’re going to have to come together with the citizenry and decide what the priorities are,” said City Manager Bruce Moore.
Along with Adcock, City Directors Stacy Hurst, Lance Hines, Doris Wright, Dean Kumpuris and Gene Fortson voted for the repeal. City Directors Erma Hendrix, Ken Richardson and B.J. Wyrick voted against it. City Director Brad Cazort was absent.
“I don’t believe in playing ward politics,” said Richardson, who represents neighborhoods in midtown south of Interstate 630 out to southwest Little Rock. “There are more streets in Chenal than Chenal Parkway. This resolution dealt only with Chenal Parkway, and it doesn’t prevent any repairs.”
Richardson said he never received a satisfactory answer to why the resolution needed to be repealed. Even without the repeal, he said, the city could spend money on repairing the roadway, and no one has said the road needed widening.
Wyrick voted against the repeal out of concern that “we’re going to start vying for construction dollars for road improvements and drainage improvements against that Chenal Parkway, and I can see that you spend millions of dollars to make improvements there that would actually take care of a number of streets we have out here in southwest.”
“When you start widening the road, you start taking parking places. And when you don’t have parking places for those buildings, you wind up buying buildings,” she said. “So you wind up spending millions of dollars.”
Despite the repeal, the city’s street boundary ordinance remains in play. The ordinance requires developers to pay for improvements to roadways along their developments. City directors offered that up to assuage any concern.
“I think we’re debating a lot about words and history,” Fortson said, before saying that the repeal would provide a “clean slate” for the city in determining what projects need funding.
In 1994, city directors said that if a bond-issue election came up for Chenal Parkway, the ballot would have to specifically state that the money would be for Chenal Parkway.
In years since then, developers have paid for improvements along the roadway, such as the turn lanes near the Kroger supermarket at Chenal Parkway and Kanis Road, and a stoplight at the Wal-Mart store at Arkansas 10 and Chenal Parkway.
Part of what is called Chenal Parkway today was paid for with bonds issued by a property owners improvement district in 1988. The city contributed $1.2 million toward the $8.3 million project cost to pay for the roadway between Autumn and Bowman roads. The construction project linked Interstate 630 to what was then Rock Creek Parkway and eventually connects to Arkansas 10.
The roadway was pulled from one previous sales-tax campaign because of the resolution.
Several turn lanes were proposed for Chenal Parkway as part of a 1 percent sales-tax increase proposed in 1999, but Adcock pulled them out after the resolution was mentioned. That sales-tax proposal failed at the polls.
Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department traffic counts show that 35,000 vehicles a day travel along the busier parts of Chenal Parkway near Bowman Road. It tapers down to 20,000 farther west.
Most of the city’s growth over the past decade, business wise and in population, has taken place west of Interstate 430.
Kumpuris said he thinks that the board should meet after the first of the year to decide how sales tax revenue will be distributed per ward, with a large percentage going to the wards that need the most attention, and dividing the rest among the other wards.
Those decisions should be made before the directors hold ward meetings asking for input on specific projects, he said.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 12/21/2011