Little Rock officials are close to finalizing a plan for spending $72.2 million in sales tax and millage funding on street and drainage projects throughout the city over the next three years.
INTERACTIVE: Little Rock street and drainage projects
The city’s Public Works Department and City Manager’s office staff has presented plans for projects in 2013, 2014 and 2015, broken down for each of the city’s seven wards, during meetings over the past three weeks.
The plans lay out priority lists that include 103 major projects and about 102 miles of roads scheduled for repaving throughout the city.
The meetings gave residents a chance to offer feedback and ask questions about how these projects were chosen. Residents at almost every meeting asked why specific projects were or weren’t chosen, but staff members and several city directors said they’ve received only a handful of calls or e-mails in organized efforts to shift priorities in specific wards.
City Manager Bruce Moore said those requests will be examined, and once staff members feel that the lists of priorities are complete, they will be rewritten into an ordinance that will go before the Board of Directors in May. If the board signs off, Public Works Department staff members will get started on designs and drawing up bid documents.
“This process has been very valuable for both the residents and for city staff,” Moore said. “I’m really excited to be able to initiate this round of funding and get started on these projects. At this point, we’ve encouraged residents with concerns to contact their ward representatives or at-large representatives.”
The plans presented this month outline priorities for the first of three, three-year sales tax funding cycles and for what staff members said they hope will be the first of two rounds of bond funding. Plans include the first $54 million in bond funding and about $18.2 million in sales-tax funding.
Last summer, city staff members went out to each ward and to neighborhood association meetings and made announcements on television and during board meetings that the city was taking project requests from residents to help prioritize ward-by-ward funding.
The meetings, which wrapped up before the millage election in September, gathered more than 1,400 project requests. Staff members said many requests were about the same projects, but 60 or more individual projects were sought in each ward.
The millage funding will bring in $105 million for street and drainage repairs, plus the interest earned once the money is bonded out. The board still has to vote on how to bond out the money - and whether to separate the millage funding into two rounds of bonds or risk losing some to taxes or a higher interest rate.
Every ward received $2.6 million in sales-tax funding from the capital improvements portion of the citywide sales tax increase that voters approved in 2011. That three eighths of a percent portion of the tax will sunset in 2021, while the five-eighth-percent portion for operations will remain.
The bond funding for each ward was not equal during this funding round - the amounts ranged from $6.7 million to $8.8 million, depending on the ward. Moore said that when the second funding round is complete, the wards will be close to even.
“I’ve stressed to residents in every ward that the numbers aren’t even now, but they will even out - maybe not to the exact penny, but they’ll be pretty close,” he said.
The Little Rock Board of Directors voted to split the money from both funding sources evenly among the city’s seven wards, reserving 10 percent from both funds to pay for citywide projects or emergencies. That money has not yet been dedicated, partly because Moore said a contingency fund is needed in case ward projects go over budget or if bids don’t match cost estimates.
Several activists and residents complained and launched petitions asking the board to divide the money based on needs rather than an even split. Those efforts to reallocate the money failed before the September millage election, but many activists have continued to deride the board’s plan.
Arkansas Communities Organization, a grass-roots nonprofit that says it works to help low-income and working families, has led several tours of outstanding infrastructure needs in Wards 1, 2, 6 and 7, arguing that projects in the older part of the city need immediate attention. It has also argued that west Little Rock neighborhoods have newer infrastructure because of development booms and the city’s streets and drainage requirements when new developments are built.
Joe Busby, the former president of the Fair Park Neighborhood Association, was among those who asked about how city staff members chose the projects listed as priorities during the Ward 2 meeting. He pressed repeatedly to know why staff members chose to fund projects that had not been requested by residents during the comment period last fall.
Since the meeting, Busby has sent out e-mails to several neighborhood associations, including Fair Park’s, asking residents to stand up against the two large projects scheduled for bond funding in Ward 2. One project would leverage $2 million in bond funding from the city to receive more than $8 million in funding from state and federal sources to build a railroad overpass on Geyer Springs Road.
Public works staff members said the decision on that project was made because the city has put off finding its share of matching funds for the overpass for more than 8 years and state officials had told the city the funds would be awarded elsewhere if funds weren’t found soon.
The other project proposes to spend $3.8 million in bond funds to widen and improve Scott Hamilton Road, including drainage and sidewalk fixes.
Busby has repeatedly written and said the project, “pays to fix 12 blocks of street where not one resident lives.”
Several projects in each ward from both the sales tax and bond money priority lists were not requested by residents during the comment period - $6.675 million worth in Ward 1, $5.8 million in Ward 2, $1.52 million in Ward 3, $3.36 million in Ward 4, $3.22 million in Ward 5, $2.98 million in Ward 6 and $3 million in Ward 7.
Jon Honeywell, the assistant director of the Little Rock Public Works Department, said staff members could not fund all of the residents’ requests because some of them were too costly, some were too large and some wouldn’t have an impact on a large number of people.
“We tried to distribute the projects throughout an entire ward, rather than in one area,” he said.
“When a project was funded without being on the request list, it doesn’t mean that we pulled the project out of thin air,” he added. “A lot of them, we had a history of knowing where the problem was because we had received multiple complaints and phone calls sometimes over several years, asking us to help with a problem.
“We were constantly going to some of these spots just for maintenance, and our thought was to fix them so we can spend time at other places that need our attention or need maintenance that can be done out of our operating budget.”
Another issue that rankled some residents during the meetings was how many roads were scheduled for overlay in each ward.
The city’s proposal would spend exactly $3 million in each ward on repaving streets in disrepair. That amount adds up to the same square footage of paved asphalt and the same tonnage of asphalt per each ward, but it doesn’t add up to the same amount of linear miles.
In Ward 1, 13.2 miles of linear roadways will be resurfaced, while in Ward 4, 25.1 miles of linear streets will be resurfaced.
Honeywell said despite the same price being spent in each ward, the difference in the number of streets happens simply because some streets are wider than others.
“Some streets might be 36 feet wide, some might be 24 feet wide and some might be 54 feet wide,” he said. “If you pave a handful of streets that are 24 feet wide, and one street that is 54 feet wide, it could be the same square feet of asphalt being repaved.
“It may seem like more streets in one ward, but it’s the same area being paved.”
While the city has asked residents to register complaints with their city directors, no plan for incorporating those complaints has been presented to the public or to the board.
Staff said during the meetings that any project switches would have to be considered carefully because of the need to find projects that cost about the same amount and that don’t affect just single homes or a few neighbors.
City Manager Moore stressed that there will be two more funding cycles for sales tax money and one more for the millage bond money. He told residents who asked to add to the request list that their chances would come, but not right now.
He said staff members will use the list of projects not selected during this round as a base for the next funding round in 2016. The city will likely seek additional requests in 2015 to prepare the priority lists for the second round of funding, as well.
“Obviously we will keep these lists and use them when we come back, but priorities can change over a three-year period,” Moore said.
Information for this article was contributed by Chad Day of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 04/29/2013