When 80-foot-tall metal power poles began showing up in front and backyards along Willow Beach Road on North Little Rock’s eastern edge, it caught Gerald Paulton Jr. and his neighbors by surprise, Paulton said last week.
The poles are being installed by the North Little Rock Electric Department to provide electricity to the Bayou Meto Water Management Project - a $700 million joint federal and state project involving the U.S. Corps of Engineers.
“For one gentleman here,the dead center of a pole is 30 feet from his recliner, and his recliner is inside his house,” Paulton said. “We have lightning storms out here like you would not believe. No. 1, this is a safety issue. The second thing is the aesthetics of the area. This will affect property values.”
Mayor Joe Smith and Jason Carter, the Electric Department’s acting general manager, were among city officials who met last week with about 50 residents from the Willow Beach, Cypress Crossing and Stone Links neighborhoods to address their concerns and to acknowledge that city officials dropped the ball on informing those residents about the poles.
“The bottom line was we didn’t know what was going on,” said John Santoro, president of the Willow Beach Neighborhood Association. “We come out, and there are big poles in everybody’s yards.”
Engineering designs for North Little Rock’s part in the Bayou Meto project have since been altered, Mayor Joe Smith said, to relocate poles out of front yards.
“We probably did a poor job of letting them know in advance that this was coming,” Smith said after hearing residents’ concerns. “Most of them are in someone’s back yard, and there are some lines in several of the houses’ front yards.
“We have been able to do some engineering so we can move those out of front yards and put them across the street on some vacant property,” Smith added.
The Bayou Meto project will use water from the Arkansas River for crop irrigation and waterfowl management within the Bayou Meto basin in central Arkansas. The North Little Rock Electric Department was requested to provide electricity for the Marion Berry Pump Station, a major facility within the project. The city utility’s portion of the project costs $9.7 million, which the Corps is to repay to the city.
Because arrangements had to be completed by the end of the federal fiscal year in 2013, the city had an eight-month window to annex the pump station, acquire the service territory, bid the work, contract with the Corps for the work and put together subcontractors, Carter said.
“We planned for the lines to follow the path our lines are on right now,” Carter explained in an interview Friday, with every other wooden power pole to be replaced with a taller metal pole. “Of course, when we started putting large poles out in Willow Beach, it caused some concern with the neighbors.”
Carter said it was “a fair critique” for residents to complain that no one had talked to them sooner.
“We should have done that,” Carter said. “We should have been out there earlier to talk to them. We were trying to make a whole lot of things happen and that should have been one of the things on our list, and we didn’t do it.”
Santoro said city officials apologized to residents and “enlightened us more” about the city’s project involvement.
“They said it was egg on their faces,” Santoro said of the city’s response. “But that it [project work] just happened so fast, they didn’t have time to do it.”
The power-pole issue is just another problem on the city’s eastern edge, Paulton said, the only direction that North Little Rock has available for expansion. The lack of a neighborhood fire station is chief among common complaints, an issue that came up during Smith’s campaign for mayor in summer 2012.
“There are a lot of votes out here,” Paulton said. “There is a lot of tax revenue out here. This area is pushing a lot of tax dollars into the city. But I think the attitude they displayed to us was one of disdain.”
When the fire station question came up at the residents’ meeting, Smith told those in attendance that the city’s budget constraints couldn’t allow for it. The closest fire station is at U.S. 70 and Interstate 440, Smith said in a later interview, about 8½ minutes away.
“In a perfect world, everything would be around five minutes,” he said. “I think we’re serving that area adequately. I’d love to be able to put a fire station right at the end of their street, but, right now, our finances do not make it available.”
Santoro said the fire station answer “isn’t what we wanted to hear, but we can only do so much, too. All we can do is ask.”
To the Willow Beach residents, Carter said, the power-pole surprise became “one more factor that made them angry at the city, I think.”
“We listened to their concerns, and we’re trying to adjust our plans to have less of an impact on the community,” Carter said. “The project must go on. The power lines have to go through there. We want to minimize the impact on the community because we like happy citizens. If we can’t make them happy, we’ll make them as happy as we can.”
Arkansas, Pages 15 on 04/13/2014