ACTI resolution hopes to coax local delegation into action
As the clock runs on funding that’s keeping the utilities on at the former Army and Navy General Hospital, the ability of local and state officials to stop downtown’s most prominent landmark from becoming a public safety menace diminishes.
The Garland County Quorum Court adopted a resolution Monday night meant to engage the county’s congressional delegation and avert what a member of the local committee working to keep the building viable said has the potential to devolve into an “embarrassment.”
“We have to get our congressional delegation to care,” Clay Farrar, a member of the committee the Greater Hot Springs Chamber of Commerce formed to address the building’s future, told justices of the peace. “Right now they don’t think they have a dog in the fight. By issuing a resolution we get their attention and say you can’t ignore it.
“We’re asking you to help us bang over the head of our elected officials in Washington that you can’t ignore us.”
The resolution, which the Hot Springs Board of Directors adopted earlier this month, called for the area’s congressional representatives to develop a funding plan for securing the building and keeping the utilities on after state funding expires at the end of June.
Officials have said the age of the building’s electrical system makes restoring service unlikely if power were turned off for an extended period, rendering pumps that pressurize the building’s fire suppression system inoperable. Without natural gas heat, pipes in the sprinkler and boiler systems will freeze, officials have said.
Utility bills from 2017 to 2018 The Sentinel-Record obtained through a public records request showed gas and electric costs can run as high as $50,000 a month for the more than 200,000-squarefoot building that opened in 1933 at 105 Reserve St.
“Once we lose the power there, it’s like a domino effect,” County Judge Darryl Mahoney told the quorum court. “It becomes a huge problem for us to battle and try to keep downtown Hot Springs safe.”
The resolution said the building will revert to the federal government after June, as the deed that conveyed the property to the state in 1960 conditioned the transfer on the property supporting a public health or education purpose. Those functions ceased when the state ended the residential vocational rehab program that had occupied the building for more than 50 years.
The final residential class of the former Arkansas Career Training Institute graduated in September.
Officials have said the prospects of repurposing or maintaining the building are dim once it reverts to the federal government. Demolition may be the best option absent funding to secure the building and pay the utilities, they have said.
“This building could come down,” Chamber of Commerce CEO/President Gary Troutman told the quorum court. “We need to brace ourselves for that reality, but I submit to you a worse scenario would be a chain link fence around it like there is at the VA hospital in Little Rock.”
District 13 JP Larry Raney called on the public to supplement the joint resolution the county and city are sending their congressional delegation with correspondence of their own. Persistence exercised en masse can get elected officials to take notice, he told the quorum court.
“Government reacts to the squeaky wheel,” he said. “If you squeak long enough, loud enough, over a long period of time you’ll get somebody’s attention. Letter writing does mean something. If you write your senators, your members of the House, if you write the president, and if you start getting these letters in there with any kind of volume, it makes a difference.
“It seems to me, when you’ve got no place else to turn, that it’s not a bad leaf to turn over.”