Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Bentonville free to decide lake’s fate
BELLA VISTA — While Bentonville appears to have the legal right to decide how to develop the Lake Bella Vista park, the exact decision of how to proceed may not be made immediately.
A judgment was issued in Bentonville’s favor Aug. 27 by Benton County Circuit Judge John Scott in a case between Bentonville and Cooper Realty Investments over whether Bentonville had the legal right to remove the Lake Bella Vista Dam.
The property was conveyed by Cooper to NWA Trailblazers in 2000 by limited warranty deed, and the Trailblazers conveyed the property to Bentonville under a special warranty deed in 2006, according to court documents.
George Spence, an attorney representing Bentonville in litigation with Cooper Communities, said the city hasn’t decided whether to remove the dam and needs to examine this judgment before deciding where to go from here.
“It’s not something that’s going to happen extremely quickly,” he said. “We’re going to be very deliberate about how we proceed.”
The case provided an amount of clarification the city needed, he added.
“One of the objectives of the case was to allow the council to be able to know what the parameters of where its decision could be made, what its limits were,” he said. After a hearing like this, a formal order needs to be drawn up and that can take some time — and it can be very difficult to estimate how long that will take, he said. The final decision on what to do with this park will be made by Bentonville’s City Council and will be a public process, Spence said.
David Matthews, an attorney representing Cooper, declined to make a statement regarding any future action from the company regarding this park.
Greg Van Horn with Friends of Little Sugar Creek — a pro-removal group — said this decision could lead to dam removal, allowing the creek to flow freely for the first time in over a century.
“That’s a big deal,” he said. Removal could mitigate flooding in the area and reduce maintenance compared to the current out-of-service dam, which is frequently damaged in floods, he added.