No decision on Perla’s water

Judge sets follow-up hearing on turnover of beset system

A decision on whether to hand over the operations of the troubled municipal water system in Perla, a small community just east of Malvern and less than 50 miles southwest of Little Rock, to the regional water utility Central Arkansas Water was not reached at a hearing Friday morning.

A court filing Friday from the office of Circuit Judge Stephen Shirron — who is overseeing the case in the 7th Judicial Circuit, which covers Grant and Hot Spring counties — set a three-hour follow-up motion hearing for 9 a.m. Dec. 1.

The city of Malvern in 2018 sued Perla and the Perla Water Association for failure to pay its monthly bill in full for the water Malvern provides to the community.

By April 2019, according to an amended complaint, Perla’s outstanding bill had increased from nearly $56,000 to close to $224,000.

Perla Mayor Raymond Adams in June told Marine Glisovic of the Little Rock television station KATV, Channel 7, that Perla was being billed for water it was not using.

On Sept. 13, Malvern filed a motion asking the judge to put the neighboring municipal water system into receivership and requested he appoint Central Arkansas Water as the utility to take over its operations.

In response to Malvern’s request for receivership, Perla attorney Gregory Crain suggested a sale of Perla’s water association to Central States Water Resources, Inc., was expected on or before the end of November.

He wrote in a court filing that Malvern’s claim amounted to tortious interference.

During a meeting of Central Arkansas Water’s board of commissioners Thursday, Chief Executive Officer Tad Bohannon showed several images illustrating the Perla system’s state of disrepair.

He said the utility was prepared to send crews to work on the system as soon as this weekend, should the judge order the system into receivership.

Bohannon estimated improvements at close to $4 million despite the Perla system’s small number of customers, which he put at approximately 800, attributing the amount of work to “years of neglect.”

Last month, Central Arkansas Water’s government affairs manager Chelsea Boozer said via email that Central Arkansas Water has experience with the receivership process and referenced a 2005 court ruling that the Brushy Island Water Association be placed in receivership to Central Arkansas Water.

“We have operated the system with about 400 customers ever since as a consolidated part of Central Arkansas Water,” Boozer wrote at the time.