Not flowing well

Bethel Heights sewer solution going nowhere

It’s getting deep in Bethel Heights. The Benton County city of about 2,700 people is typically a quiet little place that draws little attention beyond its borders. But sewage surfacing on property near the town’s treatment facilities tends to raise a stink, both literally and politically.

And it has. And now, just in the last week Bethel Heights has earned attention by holding a minimally public City Council meeting as slipshod as the town’s sewage treatment system.

The town’s sewage treatment woes have demonstrated the need for major changes for the future. The large-scale septic system the city employs is inadequate for a town that had 107 sewer customers in 2005 but now has 658 residential customers and eight commercial ones. Building a traditional sewer plant of its own is out of the question financially.

The solution is connecting the town to a larger treatment facility. The most logical is Springdale’s system, just to the south, but Springdale officials have rejected that idea — that is, unless Bethel Heights becomes part of Springdale. Rogers has also rejected Bethel Heights’ connection. The town’s apparent long-term preference — other than convincing Springdale to take its sewage without requiring annexation — is connecting to the Northwest Arkansas Conservation Authority. NACA was created by 10 area cities in 2002 as a regional sewage treatment option. Its treatment plant is in the south part of Bentonville.

The NACA option is expensive, but Bethel Heights has — or at least had — the potential to get help from the Arkansas Natural Resources Commission. That panel made arrangements for an $11.6 million, low-interest loan to help Bethel Heights build a 14-mile pipeline and pump station to get its sewage to NACA. It would require the city’s sewer rates to skyrocket, and so far there’s no evidence the City Council has agreed to that.

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With all the recent developments, concerned residents had plenty of reason to believe the town’s sewer situation would come up at last Tuesday night’s meeting of the Bethel Heights City Council, even though it wasn’t on the agenda. Given that the City Council conducts business on behalf of the residents, their meetings are, by law, public. Covid-19 has led many city councils across the state to use video conferencing instead of standard in-person meetings, legally so. But the conduct of Tuesday’s meeting, which residents wanting to monitor their city’s actions hoped to attend, fell far short of anything that looked or felt like a desire to operate in full view of those the City Council represents.

Members of the public were blocked by the police chief from entering city hall and told they could view the meeting on the police department’s Facebook page. What appeared on that page was a garbled mess, difficult for anyone watching to understand.

There was another problem: They were informed of the Facebook feed at about the time the meeting started, so none of the residents who wanted to attend the meeting (there were six of them waiting) had time to get home in time to see it live. The meeting was over in minutes.

We understand city leaders in this pandemic have had to make adjustments, but they have an obligation to ensure a live-streamed transmission of their meetings can be understood. At times, city council members Tuesday could have been speaking Klingon for all we could tell.

In this day and age, one doesn’t have to be a technological wizard to hold a meeting in which viewers can not only hear well but also have a chance to participate.

It does, however, take the political will to make it happen. Tuesday’s meeting sent a signal to residents that their mayor and City Council aren’t all that concerned with the public’s involvement. Or, perhaps they’re so concerned with public involvement that they’ll do whatever possible to avoid it.

Meetings at which the public will be physically excluded should be clearly explained well in advance. The city should do its homework to give the public meaningful electronic access to those meetings. Officials can rightly say they livestreamed Tuesday’s meeting, but it showed minimal (as in none) effort to give the public a chance to understand what was being said or done.

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Now, the Natural Resources Council has backed off its loan offer. On Wednesday, the panel delayed consideration in the context of the annexation effort by Bethel Heights and Springdale residents who have turned in petitions seeking an election. Natural Resources Division Director Bruce Holland urged the council to avoid getting “involved in the local politics up there.” He recommended the council approve the loan.

But Natural Resources Council members were interested in what would happen to the loan if Springdale does annex Bethel Heights. The answer: The NACA project would be abandoned.

Under questioning, Natural Resources Division staff acknowledged the “cheapest option for this project is a connection to the city of Springdale.”

With its delay, it seems the Natural Resources Council might have decided to let the local politics play out. By holding the loan, it’s not giving Bethel Heights many options, and the city remains under an order from the Department of Environmental Quality to find a solution to its sewage treatment shortcomings.

It’s understandable the Natural Resources Commission typically doesn’t enter the fray of local annexation politics. If the commission so chose, it could play a powerful role in forcing consolidation of small towns into bigger cities with more capacity to handle sewage demands. Having a state agency engaged in such activities wouldn’t likely go over well in rural Arkansas and it might capture the attention of legislators who represent some of those small towns.

On the other hand, when a state panel might play the role of enabler, that deserves some attention, too. Whether it’s state or local, it’s hard to ignore the inefficiency of a plan to spend $11.6 million for a pipeline to the Northwest Arkansas Conservation Authority when a next-door, much cheaper solution is possible. And what reason exists to ignore that less-costly option? Is it just Bethel Heights’ effort to maintain autonomy at all costs?

That would be fine if Bethel Heights took care of its business without polluting the environment. But once the town demonstrates it can’t keep its … business … together, isn’t it appropriate for the external interests, dragged into this by Bethel Heights’ failure, to make sure they’re not throwing good money after bad?

Bethel Heights has all along had the power to keep everyone out of its affairs. That power is naturally eroded when sewage starts percolating to the surface and the state’s environmental agency recognizes the crisis situation the town has allowed its sewer system to become.

It seems Bethel Heights residents and businesses face either astronomical sewer rates to fund the state loan for the connection to NACA, or something else they’ve resisted — being consumed by a larger city that’s more capable of handling the sewer problems.

How much are they willing to pay to maintain a city government that doesn’t seem all that concerned about respecting the public it serves?

If Bethel Heights officials expect to be taken seriously when they suggest they’re the ones capable of finding the right solution to the sewage issues, we’d suggest they at least operate with transparency in their decision-making.