The Little Rock City Board is scheduled Tuesday night to take up the resolution asking the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department to broaden its view of changes to Interstate 30 through downtown from its preferred plan to widen the divisive freeway to 10 lanes, with all the attendant additional decay it will cause.

There’s stout resistance on the City Board, particularly from Directors Lance Hines and Dean Kumpuris, to even talking about anything but going ahead with the highway department’s preferred plan. Study? They need no studies. Lance Hines laughs at the notion that self-driving cars could change the transportation equation in years ahead. Sounds like a Dick Tracy wrist TV to him. Who’d be crazy enough to think such a thing was possible? I’d like to sell him a newspaper. Because surely the Internet couldn’t affect ad sales.

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The Little Rock Regional Chamber of Commerce, which nominally works in the city’s interest, has declared no further study is necessary. Build it. Now. The private engineer heading up the project for the AHTD responds sarcastically when people suggest to him further alternatives should be studied. Little Rock members of the Highway Commission have indicated their minds are made up. All seem to have a greater interest in the needs of suburban commuters — though the work will help them little, if at all — than in the needs of the residents of Little Rock. Metroplan, whose planning work of three decades speaks for itself, is derided for bringing up inconvenient facts about induced traffic demand and collateral damage of the project.

Dean Kumpuris, whose work downtown is at the heart of his interest, seems to forget that everything that happened there happened DESPITE, not because of, freeway obstacles.

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But the fix is in, I’m repeatedly told. That great alternate plan from local architects will be thrown straight in the dumpster.

Little Rock is always slow to join national movements and reluctant to substitute facts for faith.

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City activist and former city hall worker and UALR faculty member Jim Lynch steps up today with his own recollection of the city’s refusal to consider consequences.

I write to refresh the public record with you about the LR City Board’s history with big planning issues. None looms larger than the 30 crossing resolution proposed by City Directors Webb and Richardson.

Below I show the record of the major annexations of wooded, unpopulated territory yo the City of LR during the 1990s period, a timeframe which myself and many pthers at the grassroots well remember. We dedicated ourselves to promote the interests of older LR neighborhoods and were repeatedly dismayed by the constant expansion of the city limits to accommodate land developers. The annexations noted below drew strong citizen opposition, especially those in the latter half of the decade when the policy trend and impacts were clear and obvious:

1989 — 2,180 acres, Original Chenal Valley annexation

1991 — 615 acres, Second major Chenal Valley annexation

1993 — 800 acres, Spring Valley Manor, vicinity of Cooper Orbit Rd

1996 — 190 acres, Capitol Lake Estates

1997 — 717 acres, Chenal – Duquesne Annexation

1998 — 53 acres (Pulaski Academy)

1999 — 1,230 acres, Chenal – Wildwood Annexation

These seven annexations add up to 5,785 acres or 9 square miles of mostly raw land.

The Coalition of LR Neighborhoods correctly and repeatedly insisted that in-depth studies be conducted to unveil the true costs of annexation. Chenal folks continuously produced phony numbers and city planning chief Jim Lawson was mostly uninterested.

In 1999, when the final Chenal annexation was approved, Lawson famously rebutted “Yadda, Yadda, Yadda” to our demand for rigorous analysis. Also note that our strong decade-long campaign had finally made a dent with the city Planning Commission which voted against the 1999 annexation because the city and Chenal analysis was pitifully deficient. Lawson admitted in front of the city board that the planning staff did not really know how to analyze annexation costs or determine impacts on transportation, housing, schools and the like.

I write all of the above because LR City Director Dean Kumpuris was elected to the City Board in 1994 and was present for most of these planning battles. And Dean Kumpuris never expressed the slightest interest in knowing in-depth costs or learning about Impacts on other community sectors. This history stands in great contrast to Kumpuris’ current demand that he will not support even a paper analysis of the 30 crossing issue until someone can tell him where the costs are, where the money can be found, etc.

I greatly respect the work Director Kumpuris has done with the RIvermarket area and the Clinton Library project. His seed work now appears to promote upgrading even more East LR territory in Hanger Hill and the Cromwell project on the other side of I-30.

Dean Kumpuris was wrong in the 1990s on annexation, in my judgement, but he has toiled for the last 15 years to clearly help downtown and older LR. Why would he jeopardize his success by ignoring a simple study of 30 Crossing alternatives?

“RIvermarket Dean Kumpuris” seems to be reverting to “Annexation Dean Kumpuris” by refusing intelligent analysis and discussion. He has been greatly and wisely beneficial in the River Market and we need him to continue to be so by supporting 30 crossing analyses.

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