LITTLE ROCK — On the premise that nothing is more basic than good drinking water, we should give our full attention to the fury attending the underplayed issue of protecting, or not protecting, Lake Maumelle.
The issue will be the subject of a public hearing at 2 p.m. today in the Pulaski County Quorum Court’s conference room in the county administrative office building at Second and Broadway in downtown Little Rock. So let us make it the subject of this space today as well.
Some of what I’ve heard lately on that subject is about as logical as saying there is no problem with boozing and driving as long as we can take sobriety tests. I refer to overwrought pronouncements from right-wingers, Tea Partiers, property-rights zealots and frightened, misinformed landowners. These excitable sorts say that we impose sufficient regulations already for the quality of water in Lake Maumelle. They say we don’t need further regulations restricting the development that free and independent people may choose on their own land that happens to fall in the 88,000-acre area around the lake known as the watershed.
A lot of this hysteria is being stirred by the Koch Brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, which does not believe in government, or at least a government that may restrict an individual property right in the greater interest of the community. The main Koch agent in the state is Teresa Oelke, who lives in Rogers and agitates from the outside to make the drinking water for nearly 400,000 residents of Central Arkansas—in Little Rock, North Little Rock and beyond—somehow her business.
But the issue is one for local consideration by rate-paying water users. It also is simple: What do you prefer in the way of neighbors for the lake that provides your water supply—a few good neighbors or more bad ones?
Without a zoning plan at all in this unincorporated region, it is possible that a landfill or a hazardous-waste dump or a junkyard could come in near the water. Unrestricted housing development could produce an abundance of pollutants such as phosphorus, pharmaceutical waste, lawn fertilizer and oil leaking from old automobile engines. Runoff into the lake of those substances would be enhanced by destruction of the rain-absorbing natural woods and meadows.
While uncommonly pristine, Lake Maumelle also is uncommonly shallow, thus especially vulnerable to polluting runoff. So we need a plan.
Further westward development—sprawl, that is—is inevitable on Highway 10, probably within five years and probably continuing for decades. The planning board of Pulaski County’s government has been at work on a plan for months. It also has been hearing from people seeing socialist conspirators flying over in black helicopters.
Now, with the latest version of the plan on the Planning Board’s agenda this afternoon, it appears that the proposal has undergone privately negotiated 11th-hour changes in favor of more density of development. That seems to be the result not of the hysteria, but of the quietly emerging influence on county planners by Deltic Timber, the largest private landowner in the watershed.
A new section of the zoning plan would permit two houses per acre in much of the watershed if certain “best management practices” were used and if 25 percent of a developed tract was left undisturbed. But county planners doubt the contingencies would ever actually allow that much development, considering the terrain.
On one hand it appears that Central Arkansas Water is in a position of having to accept whatever development density Deltic can leverage from the county through its special interest power. A little undesired housing density is conceivably a price worth paying to achieve a zoning plan that at least would keep out a landfill, for example.
On the other hand Central Arkansas Water always has the option to make fair-market offers for land later if tests find development to be despoiling the lake. Of course that would cost ratepayers a sum that responsible zoning would have saved them.
Most people predict that the Planning Board will defer the issue today for another month’s comment period. They think it will eventually wind up before the Quorum Court and that County Judge Buddy Villines will attempt to handle it the way he knows best, as a political negotiation.
Let us not lose sight, then, of the transcendent perspective: Central Arkansas has its problems, but good, safe and bountiful drinking water is blessedly not one of them. We should err, if at all, on the side of not letting it become one.
But wait, there’s more
In addition to my columns published regularly on the Voices page on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, I will write a fourth column each week that will be available each Wednesday only at the newspaper’s website, arkansasonline.com.
In tomorrow’s online column debut, I will tell about trying recently, with mixed success, to bait a roomful of school superintendents on the issues of school choice, performance pay for teachers and the “Tim Tebow Law” by which home-schooled students could participate in regular public school activities.
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John Brummett is a regular columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com.
Editorial, Pages 13 on 10/25/2011