Regional Mobility Authority reconvenes

SPRINGDALE — Regional planners resurrected a group Wednesday that hadn’t met in four years to coordinate regionally significant transportation projects and find ways to pay for them.

The Northwest Arkansas Regional Mobility Authority last met Aug. 1, 2014. The authority’s purpose is to spearhead projects that cross jurisdictional lines or that individual cities or counties can’t do on their own.

Planners placed the authority in a holding pattern after voters in 2012 approved the 10-year Connecting Arkansas Program, which the Arkansas Department of Transportation has been using to construct projects in Northwest Arkansas, such as Interstate 49 and Arkansas 265 improvements and building the U.S. 412 and Bella Vista bypasses.

Planners said Wednesday it’s time to dust off the authority because the Connecting Arkansas Program is winding down and will end in 2023, taking with it about $16 million a year

cities and counties in the region have been receiving for projects.

Tim Conklin of the Northwest Arkansas Regional Planning office pointed out several areas where the authority may want to focus, including federal grant applications, a regional traffic management program with the state Transportation Department, a 10-year transit development plan, regional bike share programs and the end of state-funded programs.

“There are a lot of different components of the infrastructure out there that are beyond these cities’ abilities to manage,” Conklin said. “We just wanted to give you a list of ideas and thoughts of what the region might want to look at as we may have a million people by 2050.”

Authority members approved a federal grant application BikeNWA wants to use for a regional Safe Routes to Schools program. The authority will ask for $115,920, and BikeNWA would have to come up with a $28,980 match for the program, which has a total estimated cost of $144,900.

The program would benefit school-aged children and the community at large, said Paxton Roberts of BikeNWA.

“We want to both encourage and make it safer for kids to walk and bike to school,” Roberts said. “And, if we do that, it also makes the community at large safer for them to walk around their neighborhoods and go to parks and get to destinations because if you draw even a 1-mile circle around every school, it covers a large footprint.”

The authority will be the applicant through the state Transportation Department, and, if successful, BikeNWA will run the program. Neither the regional planning commission nor BikeNWA could apply under the grant guidelines, but the authority could.

The two-year plan would see BikeNWA hire a regional coordinator and create a task force to implement plans, write specific travel plans for individual schools, train instructors and identify larger pools of money that could be used for Safe Routes projects.

Roberts said the first year the organization would work with schools in Fayetteville, Springdale, Rogers and Bentonville. The second year, they would focus on smaller schools. Roberts said many schools want to participate in Safe Routes programs but often don’t have the people to do it.

“We don’t want to force anything on anybody,” Roberts said. “If we get started at one school, community support will help it spread.”

Planners said they expect to know by fall whether they’ll get the grant and the program could start in January.