Corps investigates Fort Smith center

Engineers probe possible encroachment; river easement overlooked in 2001

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is researching 50-year-old land records to determine whether a cityowned Fort Smith event center is encroaching on the Corps’ easement along the Arkansas River.

The 9,020-square-foot River Park Events Building was constructed in 2001 and serves as a meeting place downtown.

It’s difficult to tell from the 1963 records whether there’s an encroachment, said Laurie Driver, a spokesman for the Corps’ Little Rock Division.

“Some of the landmarks that were referenced in that survey are no longer there,” she said, “so we can’t say definitely that there’s an encroachment there at this time.”

The records refer to “an existing slough,” “an existing field road,” “an existing public road” and the “ordinary high-water mark” of the river.

The description will have to be compared with other land records to determine the exact location of the easement, Driver said. The process could take weeks.

The River Park Events Building is southwest of the site for the planned U.S. Marshals Museum.

Early this year, while doing research on land records for the museum site, a civil engineer found references to the Corps’ easement, said Jim Dunn, the museum’s president and chief executive.

On Nov. 13, Corps engineers surveyed the Marshals Museum site so its board could proceed with plans for the museum.

The engineers placed red flags along the easement line, which, on the museum site, appeared to be at least 100 feet from the river.

The adjacent River Park building appears to sit closer to the river.

For the Corps’ easement, land was condemned and taken through a civil action in federal court.

The condemnation records filed in U.S. District Court in Fort Smith on May 1, 1963, indicate a 133-acre “perpetual easement” along the river was purchased for $6,000.

The “declaration of taking” was signed by Cyrus R. Vance, who was then secretary of the Army and later secretary of state under President Jimmy Carter. The document referred to the area as Shoofly Bend.

The land is “necessary for use in connection with bank stabilization, channel rectification, control of floods and navigation on the Arkansas River,” according to the 1963 document.

Corps engineers located the document in the Fort Worth Federal Records Center, where federal court records from Arkansas are stored. Richard Willis, a deputy clerk at the federal court in Fort Smith, said records are normally shipped to Fort Worth five years after a case is closed.

After the files have been sent to Fort Worth, documentation of their existence is kept on hand in Fort Smith, said Willis.

Design professionals who built the River Park Events Center probably searched for easement deeds at the Sebastian County Courthouse, which is the normal procedure, said Wally Bailey, Fort Smith’s director of development and construction.

“They look for all the recorded information and put it on the documents,” said Bailey. “And something like this easement wasn’t recorded, so it doesn’t get picked up. It’s one of the unfortunate things that happens in the world.”

The River Park Events Building was designed by MAHG Architecture of Fort Smith and constructed by Van Horn Construction of Russellville.

The civil engineer was Hawkins-Weir Engineers Inc. of Van Buren.

The building is part of the River Park Events Complex, which includes an amphitheater next to the events building and a building called the Pavilion a block away on North B Street.

Construction of the complex cost $5.3 million, according to city planning records.

The real estate was donated to the city in 1996 through a quitclaim deed from Scores Inc., an investment and real estate company based in Carson City, Nev.

While the events building may be encroaching on the Corps’ easement, there’s no problem with the adjacent amphitheater.

“The building of the amphitheater was coordinated with the Corps prior to its construct and is not in question,” Driver, the Corps spokesman, said in an email.

Galen Hunter, an architect with MAHG Architecture, said company officials met with representatives from the Corps during the planning phase of the River Park Events Building, and an easement was never mentioned. Hunter said they wanted to make sure the building was on high ground in case of floods.

“You pretty much have to talk to the Corp of Engineers when you’re building next to the river,” he said. “That never came up.”

MAHG was also the architect for the amphitheater and the Pavilion.

Don Balch, chief of the Corps’ real estate division in Little Rock, said encroachment is an issue the Corps deals with regularly and each encroachment is handled individually.

“Usually, there are several ways to remedy an encroachment. Without researching it, I don’t want to speculate about how we’d solve this instance,” Balch said.

Joe Craig, chief of the management and disposal branch of the Corps’ real estate division based in Little Rock, said Corps easements aren’t normally surveyed, only described in legal documents.

“We don’t own it, so we don’t survey it,” he said. “We only took a right, not the ownership.”