Three buildings to be demolished

Structures will be utilized for law enforcement training first

BELLA VISTA — By the end of this month demolition is expected to have started on three buildings in Bella Vista. Before then, area law enforcement agencies will get the opportunity to use the abandoned structures for training exercises.

The buildings to be razed include the Sugar Creek 10 Cinema in the Sugar Creek Center as well as the Vacation Rentals business and former city hall buildings located in Town Center East.

Jim Keith, senior vice president at Cooper Realty Investments Inc., said the three buildings will be turned into restaurant pads in hopes of luring more dining options to Bella Vista. “This goes along with (Bella Vista Mayor Peter Christie’s) thought process on how to capture taxpayer dollars that are migrating south,” Keith said. “It’s one way we’re looking to add more services for the city’s residents.”

In the meantime, law enforcement agencies will use the buildings to train for such scenarios as dynamic building entry, active shooter, hostage rescue and building clearance.

Neff Basore, who also serves as a senior vice president of Cooper Communities Inc., and is a shareholder, director and member of the executive committee, is helping coordinate the training opportunities. He is also the commanding officer of the Benton County Sheriff’s Office’s 50-member Reserve Division consisting of patrol and CID deputies, SWAT team operators and medics, instructors of specialized law enforcement subjects, helicopter pilots, search, rescue and diver personnel.

“Whenever you can have real buildings to play with it’s extremely helpful,” he said.

While officers receive training in these various situations while in the academy, Basore said the structures they train in are minimal and don’t offer variety or the realism of actual buildings.

“When you’ve got real doors and real corners to deal with and a real environment that was built for another purpose it’s just invaluable,” he said. “It gives you a number of different scenarios and training options.”

This won’t be the first time these three buildings have been used as settings for training.

Basore explained that the movie theater has been used for active shooter training and building clearing exercises while the other two buildings have hosted the Bentonville Police Department for K-9 training and the Regional Bomb Squad team for some of its exercises.

He said the Benton County Sheriff’s Office is planning to hone its dynamic entry skills and more advanced SWAT operations in the abandoned theater before its demolition while using the other two locations for building clearing practice by its field deputies as well as additional training for the SWAT team.

“It’s not the first time a SWAT team has utilized a Cooper Community building. We’ve been doing this now for the last 5-10 years,” Keith said. “It’s a nice gesture that lets people in the county know this is the kind of training that’s being offered and to know historically the significance of why these (law enforcement) guys and gals are as good as they are.”

The Town Center West buildings were also used in this manner before they were torn down. Basore said the office-style buildings were helpful because they provided a different, yet realistic, training setting.

Over the years Cooper has also provided many old structures for local fire departments to use to train on live burn training exercises.

Basore said the former Phoenix University location in Rogers is currently used almost monthly for active shooter response training in a school environment for both the SWAT team and field deputies.

Keith added that it’s “incredibly important” that his company offer these buildings as training grounds as part of its overall commitment to its communities.

“What people don’t realize is Cooper Community’s quiet commitments to the people that live in the areas of our villages — we’re not out there looking for self-promotion, it’s for our citizens,” he said.

Basore pointed out that Cooper Communities has supported first responders since the early days of Cherokee Village, the first Cooper development, when it donated the first fire truck and a couple of police cars to the community in the early 1960s. Since then, the company has built fire and police stations in all the Arkansas communities it developed.