Trafalgar fire suit goes after former board members

Two members of the Bella Vista Property Owners Association are suing former board members to recoup money spent battling an underground fire.

Jason Wales filed the lawsuit last month in Benton County Circuit Court for Michael Armstrong and Amie Armstrong against 47 former board members. The pair are suing on behalf of the Property Owners Association, which was also named as a nominal defendant in the case.

A nominal defendant is a named person or entity because the lawsuit would be deficit if they were not named, not necessarily because they are responsible, according to Black’s Law Dictionary.

The lawsuit claims the former board members were aware the association was using a site on Trafalgar Road as a stump dump and did not take any action to stop the dumping at the site.

The lawsuit accused them of causing the association to use the property and allow people to dump trees, limbs, logs, stumps, yard waste and other flammable debris at the site for a monetary fee from January 2004 to December

2016.

An underground fire burned at the site for almost a year before the association hired firms to put it out. City firefighters discovered the fire July 29, 2018.

Kim Carlson with the association previously said the cost to put out and remediate the site is estimated between $4 million and $4.1 million.

The lawsuit is seeking to have the former board members responsible for paying the association the millions of dollars spent to fight the fire. The lawsuit is not seeking any money from the association.

“We have not yet completed our review of the allegations,” Carlson said. “We are unable to make further comments regarding ongoing litigation.”

Wales, a lawyer in Fayetteville, did not return a phone call Tuesday afternoon.

The association took over responsibility May 3 from the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality to extinguish the fire and to restore the site.

The fire was out June 4. Work included site stabilization, according to the association’s website.

Bella Vista resident Jim Parsons is named as a defendant in the lawsuit. He filed his answer to the lawsuit and asked he be added as a plaintiff in the case. “I would like to be added,” he said. “I hope they will accept me.”

Parsons held a press conference at his Bella Vista home last week, where he stated he believes himself and some other nominal defendents should be removed from the suit because they had limited involvement or worked in opposition to the POA board’s loyalty oath, which he said is unjust.

Further, Parsons argued he has espoused dissolving the POA for years and sued the organization multiple times.

In particular, Parsons said he was concerned because the ADEQ did not shut down the unlawful dump operation in 2008 when it was brought to the department’s attention following a complaint from Parsons and his associates about Cooper Communities dumping concrete mixing drums in the stump dump site.

“ADEQ didn’t do anything,” he said. “That’s kind of disturbing.”

If the dumping had stopped then, he said, it’s possible the fire never would have happened.

Parsons filed a separate lawsuit against the association and other parties, but his lawsuit was dismissed. Parsons was attempting to recoup money the state was paying to put out the fire.

Six Bella Vista residents filed a lawsuit against Cooper Communities, the association, Thomas Fredericks, Fredericks Construction and Blue Mountain Storage.

The residents’ lawsuit accuses the parties of negligence for causing the fire, failing to properly manage it and creating a nuisance because hazardous smoke emitted by the fire drifted onto their property.

The case is assigned to Benton County Circuit Judge Xollie Duncan. She has dismissed Cooper Communities from the case and set a trial date for April 12, 2021.