Panel for tech park suspends meetings

The Technology Park Authority Board’s Community Housing Committee will suspend its monthly meetings until after a site for the park is chosen, the committee announced Monday.

A handful of committee members went to a short meeting Monday to discuss two community forums held last week for residents to ask a site consultant questions about the four commercial sites being considered for the park’s location. The housing committee was formed this spring in response to a call from the chancellors of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences asking the tech park authority to include more community input.

“This will be our last meeting until a final site is selected,” said C.J. Duvall, tech park board member and chairman of the housing committee. “There has been a great deal of discussion from the community in the last two or three meetings and it’s clear that we can’t fulfill that second part of our mission until a site is chosen and we can evaluate the neighborhood around that site.”

The committee’s mission will also include providing information about new homes and renovations to those residents who might be displaced by the park, as well as looking for ways to create a sense of community in the area surrounding the final site for the park.

A half dozen people attended the short meeting Monday and Duvall said he had talked with residents who live in the three sites originally considered for the park prior to the meeting. He said they had

agreed it might be more useful to meet again once a site is selected.

The technology park is a partnership between UALR, UAMS, Arkansas Children’s Hospital and the city of Little Rock. The aim is to bring in private and public investors interested in developing the research being done at the city’s research institutions.

All four entities agreed to pay $125,000 in seed money to develop the plan for the park, and the city agreed to give an additional $22 million to help construct the park. Other funding sources for the construction, which was estimated to cost more than $50 million, have not been secured.

The park authority began studying three mostly residential neighborhoods for the park’s location in November of last year. Many residents in those sites, located in the Forest Hills, Oak Forest and Fair Park neighborhoods, spoke publicly and held protests saying they did not want to lose their homes for the park.

The Little Rock Board of Directors passed an ordinance in June requesting that the tech park authority board take six months to look for a nonresidential site for the park.

The board received 23 proposals, mostly from commercial real estate developers, for potential locations. An outside consultant, Charles Dilks, helped the board narrow the sites to four earlier this month.

The four sites include a building on the former Verizon campus on Riverfront Drive, 10 acres east of Interstate 30 between Sixth and Eighth streets and College and Collins streets, 37.5 acres at the intersection of John Barrow Road and Interstate 630, and 84 acres at a former Coleman Dairy site adjacent to UALR at University and Asher avenues.

The tech park board has not set a strict timeline for when a final site will be chosen. Board members said last week that they will invite site representatives for those four sites to give presentations to the board at the November meeting.

The list may be narrowed further before engineering and other logistical studies are done and a final site would be chosen.