Annexation or not?

Bethel Heights voters face momentous decision

As a matter of annexation, Tuesday’s election about Bethel Heights’ future doesn’t really have a right or wrong answer.

Whether the small (about 2.5 square miles) Benton County town will become part of Springdale has been at the core of the town’s existence since its incorporation back in 1967, when 31 property owners filed a petition with the courts of Benton County, according to Bethel Heights’ own historic recollections. “The property owners believed if they were not incorporated they stood the chance that Springdale would attempt to annex their lands,” the town’s website says.

The towns, big one and little one, have co-existed ever since, and for most everyone in Northwest Arkansas, it didn’t matter one way or the other.

For some in Bethel Heights, that it has come to an annexation vote testifies to a relentless pursuit by Springdale interests to consume its small neighbor to the north.

Mayor Cynthia Black, for example, explained last week on the city’s taxpayer-funded website that “ethics rules prohibit me from using city resources to influence this election. Two sentences later, Black says “we must resist today’s effort of turning our community into just another subdivision of Springdale.”

She goes on to predict more traffic, louder noises and an increase in crime if “a small number of large landowners and speculative investors” get their way and win annexation to Springdale.

“Let there be no doubt — a vote to join Springdale will impact your life in many unforeseen ways. Home real estate professionals inform me we can all expect to see a decline in our shared home values.”

Well, at least she’s not using city resources to influence the election.

The suggestion, we suppose, is that all the Springdale mayors and civic leaders of the last 53 years have just been biding their time until they could somehow ensnare little Bethel Heights. Oh, we have no doubt there are some ulterior motives going on in this drama, but let’s not forget why Bethel Heights finds itself in this situation.

The reason annexation is knocking on Bethel Heights’ door in 2020 is that the town’s leadership failed to either prevent more growth than the town’s infrastructure could handle or to make the investments necessary to handle that growth.

That’s reflected mostly in the insufficiency of the town’s sewer system, which had 107 customers in 2005 but now has closer to 700 residential and commercial customers. The Arkansas Division of Environmental Quality has taken enforcement actions as part of its longstanding investigation of Bethel Heights sewage treatment system. The agency has told Bethel Heights to close its treatment plants, which have polluted the community, and find a new way to effectively treat its sewage.

The city, after first denying much of the responsibility for polluting, says it will build a sewage-pumping station and a 14-mile pipeline to a treatment facility in south Bentonville. Its history can fairly be used as a basis to remain skeptical of whether the town can work itself out of its sewage woes.

For anyone outside Bethel Heights, it doesn’t really matter how the annexation turns out. But Northwest Arkansas does need communities capable of addressing their growth-related challenges, especially pollution. Bethel Heights has not succeeded in that.

What seems reasonable for voters to consider is this: Don’t look at defeating annexation as a solution for Bethel Heights’ sewage problems. Defeating the measure will make fixing the sewage problems more difficult and costly than connecting its system with Springdale’s utility. Perhaps most unnerving, rejection of the annexation will put the problems right back into the hands of the Bethel Heights leaders who created or exacerbated those problems, and they’ve shown little ability to solve them.