Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Code waivers in Hot Springs called harmful
Chamber: Rule fostering historic area’s stagnation
Hot Springs, long a tourist attraction because of its waters and landmark buildings, has encountered an obstacle to a vision for reinvigoration of the city.
That obstacle is the town’s history itself.
Much of downtown — 54 structures along a sevenblock area called the Central Avenue Historic District — is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Many of the buildings in the district are vacant or have vacant upper floors. Such structures are not subject to Hot Springs code enforcement, said Richard Stauder, planning coordinator for the city. There is no official inventory of the number of buildings that are totally or partly vacant, Stauder said.
A recent walk down Central Avenue showed at least 16 buildings in the historic district — about 30 percent — are vacant or have vacant floors. Typically, vacant upper floors are boarded up so there is no access. Most of the buildings were built in the early 1900s, with 13 built in the late 1800s, including the oldest built in 1886.
Downtown’s lack of codes and code enforcement have held back the area, said Dave Byerly, chief executive of the Greater Hot Springs Chamber of Commerce and the Garland County Economic Development Corp.
“Largely, through no ill intent, there have been barriers created that have limited the city’s ability to handle code enforcement in a way [it] would like to and the way downtown would like to,” Byerly said.
The policy of requiring building owners to have the first floor meet city codes but exempting upper vacant floors has been in effect since the late 1980s, said Lance Hudnell, Hot Springs’ city manager. Utilities to the vacant floors must be disconnected, Hudnell said.
“If we had not allowed the first floors to be segregated, then the building would probably not have been occupied at all because it would have been too expensive,” Hudnell said. “If you were only going to remodel the first floor to bring in a new store or a new restaurant, then you probably could not have afforded to bring a three-story building up to code.”
FIVE MAJOR CHANGES
Byerly asked the city early this month to consider making five major changes to the city’s building codes to “protect the public and protect private property owners’ investment.”
In a letter addressed to Hot Springs Mayor Ruth Carney, he recommended:
Elimination of the enforcement exemption on vacant buildings and structures with vacant floors;
Requiring annual inspections of downtown buildings for fire safety and code compliance;
Conducting a full review of the city’s building codes;
Commissioning a fire and code compliance study of downtown; and
Authorizing the Historic District Commission to study properties in the district.
“Essentially the buildings are sealed up and not available for productive use,” Byerly said. “They are tombs.”
Updating the building code is long overdue, said Bob Martorana, general manager of the Arlington Hotel and president of the Hot Springs Downtown Merchants Association.
“We certainly will be one of the ones who will have to go ahead and do some things here [to meet a new code],” Martorana said. “But we’re OK with addressing the issues that we think need to be addressed from a vacant building standpoint as well as current buildings.”
The Arlington has no closed floors, Martorana said. Several years ago, the hotel made some changes to keep up with fire safety requirements, including installing more fire escapes, Martorana said.
“You hate to see buildings that are vacant,” Martorana said of the downtown area. “So if they could get those up to par, maybe they would have a better shot at renting or doing something to those buildings to make them [become occupied].”
But Rick Gale, who owns the Colonial Pancake and Waffle House and the Colonial Candy Corner in the historic district, believes requiring buildings that are vacant or have vacant floors to be in conformity to code could lead to businesses closing along Central Avenue.
‘FIXING TO BUTT HEADS’
“They’re fixing to butt heads with the property owners,” Gale said last week as he locked up his small candy store. “Who will make the changes — [the business owners] or the property owners? I’m not going to [pay for it]. So rather than [the property owners] going to the major expense to [meet the code], businesses will be closed.”
Downtown Hot Springs can’t grow any more than it is now, because of the lack of additional parking spaces, Gale said.
“We have more businesses and less empty buildings than we’ve ever had,” Gale said. “But the [city directors] now are in charge of getting us a parking deck and it will never happen. They don’t have any money and they don’t know what to do.”
Monty Scott, president of Southwest Hotels Inc., owner of the Arlington and former owner of the Majestic Hotel, said Hot Springs’ code revision proposal is a good idea. But the city is “turning a blind eye” to Hot Springs’ real problem — the presence of what he called casino gambling in only one spot in the city, Oaklawn Park, Scott said.
“The purpose of the [chamber’s] letter was to motivate downtown landowners and building owners to improve their buildings,” said Scott, who agrees with the code changes. “But there is a lack of economic incentives for downtown.”
It is a formidable challenge for downtown businesses to remain competitive “when surrounded by casino gambling,” Scott said.
The state Supreme Court has ruled that Oaklawn, which is about two miles from downtown, is not a gambling casino. The court said the Thoroughbred racetrack’s video games, such as slot machines, blackjack and poker, are “electronic games of skill.”
For years, Scott has been a proponent of an initiative to legalize gambling in Arkansas.
Scott said he made $ 1.2 million in renovations to the 84-year-old Arlington Hotel last year, including a continuing renovation of the rooms, an upgrade of the Crystal Ballroom and improvements to the kitchen. Another $1.3 million in upgrades are planned this year, Scott said.
He was unsure how much it might cost property owners to make upgrades, Martorana said. But the 11-story Arlington spent $150,000 to install the fire escapes, he said.
“That was a safety issue that needed to be done,” he said.
The former Majestic Hotel Resort and Spa at the intersection of Central and Park avenues is vacant. The 130year-old hotel, which offered 260 rooms for visitors, closed in 2006.
Southwest Hotels owned the Majestic until last year, when it donated the hotel to The Arc Arkansas, a nonprofit organization that works with the developmentally disabled.
The Arc Arkansas is working with a Kansas City, Mo., developer, Garrison Community Development, to renovate the Majestic into apartment units, some for the disabled, said Steve Hitt, chief executive of The Arc.
Garrison Hassenflu, president of Garrison Community Development, said he plans to invest about $20 million to renovate the Majestic, if the project can receive housing tax credits. If the tax credits are received, work on the project could begin in October and be completed in about a year, Hassenflu said.
BIG TOURISM AREA
Garland County, which trails only Pulaski County in attracting tourists, drew almost 2.5 million visitors last year. That’s up 35 percent in the past 20 years.
Illegal gambling flourished throughout the town until the late 1960s when then-gov. Winthrop Rockefeller shut it down, said Orval Allbritton, president of the Garland County Historical Society and the author of four books on Hot Springs’ history.
Gambling began in Hot Springs as early as 1847, Allbritton said. When gambling was outlawed by the state constitution in 1873, “people over here didn’t think that applied to people in Hot Springs,” Allbritton said.
Mobsters, including Al Capone, visited the city often.
“Hot Springs could have been the Las Vegas of midAmerica, if [gambling] had gone on long enough,” Allbritton said. “At one time, [gambling] income was estimated at $300 million a year.”
Hudnell said the city looks forward to working on the issue.
Because downtown is the heart of Hot Springs, everyone in the city has a concern about what happens, Hudnell said.
“Whatever we do obviously has to involve the [building] owners because it is their property,” Hudnell said. “We need to be sure the merchants have an interest in what occurs, the property owners have an interest, those who live adjacent to downtown have an interest as well as the whole community.”
Many of the buildings need to have electrical and plumbing systems upgraded, Hudnell said. “Some buildings don’t have elevators, some have nonworking elevators.”
Anthony Taylor’s firm, Taylor-kempkes Architects, is at 210 Central Avenue in the historic district. He was unaware that the city had a vacant structures code until the Chamber of Commerce sought to change it.
“I’ve had a concern for some time about the number of vacant upstairs in downtown,” Taylor said.
Taylor noted that at least twice in the 20th century, downtown Hot Springs has been damaged by fire.
“I think it is very important that our downtown properties be secure and safe,” Taylor said.
Despite the scale of problems the downtown faces, Byerly said the responses he has received about the suggestions have been overwhelmingly positive.
The suggestions for changing the building code are just the beginning of a plan for economic development for the area around Hot Springs — including Garland, Montgomery, Pike, Clark and Hot Spring counties — that was announced by the Garland County Economic Development Corp. in September.
Improving downtown is the first goal of the economic development plan, followed by business attraction and expansion, and recruiting young professionals and entrepreneurial talent to the region.
The region has long been promoted as a destination for recreation, leisure and the arts, but never in an economic development context per se, Byerly said.
“Our economic development strategy has been more traditional,” Byerly said.