Audio raises policy questions

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first of two articles on the May 23 Water Provider Legislative Task Force hearing in Little Rock focusing on water and sewer issues affecting Garland County.

An audio recording from a December 2016 meeting between city administrators and a Conway developer raises questions about the city’s stated rationale for a utility connection and extension policy limiting service in the unincorporated area of the regional water and wastewater systems, Sen. Alan Clark, R-District 13, of Lonsdale, told a legislative panel last week.

The recording was entered into the record during last week’s Water Provider Legislative Task Force hearing at the state Capitol in Little Rock. Clark, the panel’s co-chair, said it contradicts the supply and capacity reasoning the city cited when the Hot Springs Board of Directors denied Chris Thornton’s application to connect 176 new apartment units at the Crossing at Thornton Ferry in April 2017.

A 2005 resolution granted service for 288 units, but only 112 were built.

The city engineering department told directors during peak times the units would add 102,960 gallons a day to system demand, or the equivalent of 93 three-bedroom homes. Directors were told the added demand would strain capacity that struggles to meet consumption during prolonged periods of hot, dry weather, but the recording captures city officials, including City Manager David Frasher and Deputy City Manager Bill Burrough, assuring Thornton that service would be granted if the property were annexed into the city.

Thornton’s annexation petition failed to elicit support from property owners in the area, requiring him to apply to the city board for service.

“There’s a credibility problem,” Clark told Burrough, who testified before the panel. “I’m sitting here looking at the script, where Frasher says ‘absolutely, you will get water and sewer,’ but there was a shortage. I have a problem squaring the two.

“I don’t have any problems when people tell me there’s a shortage. I have a problem when there’s two different messages. Can you make me understand this?”

Burrough told the panel the city does not condition service on annexation, which a 1994 consent order prohibits, but conceded that planning considerations are taken into account when reviewing applications.

“We subscribe to orderly development and orderly growth,” he said. “When we see the number of lots available to build on, we’d like to see those infilled. We feel like it’s more orderly for us to have a portion of the policy that takes into consideration orderly development, whether that be in (the planning area) or available subdivisions inside or outside the city.”

Thornton testified that the city is effectively forcing applicants to build inside the city at the expense of growth and development outside the corporate limits.

“They called it orderly development, which equals politics, which equals tax money, which is not the same thing as a water shortage,” Thornton said. “The reality is the city has blighted areas nobody wants to build in, but cutting off places outside the city limits, people are being forced to come in and take what they don’t want.”

The lengthy slideshow Burrough presented to the task force summarized the city’s effort to secure an allocation from Lake Ouachita and the evolution of its utility policy, which Burrough said has become less restrictive as an agreement with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for additional supply wended through the Corps’ dense bureaucracy.

The journey that began in 2004 culminated in May 2017 with a storage agreement giving the city rights to a 23 million gallon average day allocation from Lake Ouachita. Restrictions put in place in 2013 were relaxed when it became apparent an agreement was forthcoming, Burrough told the task force.

In October 2016, the city board amended the policy, allowing commercial connections for one five-eighths inch meter per lot of record in the city’s planning area and one single-family connection systemwide on any lot traversed by a water main.

“I’ve heard the analogy that someone building a carport was promised a car if they built a carport, so everybody built a carport and nobody got a car,” Burrough testified, referring to improvement district property owners who have said the city’s policy prohibits them from using water and sewer facilities they paid for through tax assessments. “In October 2016, everybody was guaranteed that car.

“It might be a Ford, and they want a Ferrari, but they’re guaranteed a connection. If somebody wants a connection, we give them a connection. If they want 175, we have to step back from that.”

Thornton took exception to the analogy, testifying that the city’s refusal to honor the 2005 resolution granting water and sewer service to the second phase of his apartment complex denied him a return on the investment he made extending a sewer main to the undeveloped parcel.

Thornton said he made the investment with the understanding service would be granted.

“I built a whole infrastructure for an apartment complex, and I didn’t get a car,” Thornton testified. “I got handed a Matchbox toy car. I can’t use that. I can’t use the investment I put into the ground for what I was promised I could.”