Metroplan redo moves ahead
Board votes to put restructuring out for public comment
A proposed restructuring of Metroplan “seems like it’s good to go,” the executive director of the long-range transportation planning agency for central Arkansas said Wednesday.
Tab Townsell made the comment Wednesday after the agency’s board voted unanimously and with no debate to put the restructuring out for public comment for 30 days. The board could formally adopt the restructuring at its next meeting Oct. 3.
“Public comment could produce a thought someone hasn’t considered,” Townsell said. “There’s always that chance.”
The restructuring effort grew out of the often bitter discussions over the $630.7 million project to improve Interstate 30 through downtown Little Rock and North Little Rock, which Townsell and others say exposed weakness in the 63-year-old agency’s structure.
Planning on the 6.7-mile project to improve the congested and aging corridor between Interstate 40 in North Little Rock and Interstate 530 in Little Rock has been four years in the making.
Most agree the section needs work. The I-30 corridor features the convergence of six major highways and a bridge over the Arkansas River that dates to the late 1950s and carries 124,000 vehicles daily.
Opponents object to the magnitude of the project, the costliest civil engineering project the Arkansas Department of Transportation has undertaken, and its expected impact on their quality of life and property values.
The project likely will require 10 lanes, with six of them through lanes as the corridor has now and an additional four lanes for local traffic between the two cities.
The project has the backing of a range of interests, including the Little Rock
Regional Chamber of Commerce, the Central Arkansas Library System and the Clinton Presidential Center. A coalition of downtown neighborhood residents and community activists have opposed the project.
The latter found support in the Regional Planning Advisory Council, which is an all-volunteer body that develops transportation policy recommendations for the Metroplan board, composed of the region’s mayors and county judges. The board, however, rejected council recommendations not to move forward with the project.
The 40-member council would be eliminated under the proposed restructuring and replaced with three 25-member committees with different policy responsibilities, including economic vitality, transportation systems and livable communities.
People on the council now would be eligible to serve on the new committees.
The committees would develop their policy recommendations, which would then go to a beefed-up executive committee of the board, which would in turn make its recommendations to the full board.
The executive committee now consists of the board president, vice president and secretary and has little responsibility.
Under the proposal, the committee would be expanded to include all county judges; mayors of cities with populations of more than 50,000; the mayors of one city in each county with populations between 9,999 and 49,999 except Pulaski County, which would have two; and the mayors of two small cities with populations of 9,999 or less.
The restructuring also will eliminate another advisory body, the Technical Coordinating Committee, which is composed of city and county planning and public works staff. Its members also would have places on the new committee structure.
The board also would be expanded under the proposal to include the Little Rock Port Authority and Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport/Adams Field.
They would join the state Transportation Department and Rock Region Metro, the transit agency for Pulaski County, as members of the board and have voting powers when the board considers transportation-related matters.
The full board, which now meets every month, would meet every other month under the proposed reorganization. The executive board would meet in the months that the full board didn’t meet.
Townsell and a restructuring task force say the changes are designed to foster more communication between the board and the advisory committees, which was identified as a shortcoming under the existing organization.
Barry Haas, a community activist opposed to the I-30 project and to the re-organization, attended Wednesday’s meeting but didn’t speak.
Afterward, Haas said he remains opposed to the reorganization and said it sends the wrong signal to the “talented people” who are members of the Regional Planning Advisory Council, often called RPAC, or other volunteers who devote time and effort to help shape transportation policy.
“Some of the board members didn’t like RPAC speaking truth to power” and so they were “fired,” Haas said.
Assuming the board votes to adopt the reorganization at its Oct. 3 meeting, it will take time to fill the new committees. People will have to apply and get a recommendation from the agency’s county caucuses to the full board.
“Won’t be able to stand up the committees until March 1,” Townsell said.
The Regional Planning Advisory Council, meanwhile, is scheduled to meet at least one more time.
“RPAC may actually meet more times, but there’s probably waning enthusiasm,” Townsell said. “I don’t know if we will be able to get attendance” if the council is about to be eliminated.