As expansion push ends, Huntsville looks to water lines

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Another round of requests for voluntary annexations into Huntsville required city officials to send maps back to the Northwest Arkansas Regional Planning Commission in Springdale for more revisions.

Huntsville Mayor Kevin Hatfield hopes all petitionsfor voluntary annexation will go to the City Council within the next several weeks.

“We have some additions to be made,” Hatfield said. “Just as soon as the planning commission gets the map drawn and the properties drawn, I hope we could present it to the City Council in December.”

Huntsville city leaders began a push more than a year ago to stretch the city’s borders to the U.S. 412 bypass through voluntary annexations. City officials hoped to persuade landowners along the roadway to become part of the city before the completion of a project to widen U.S. 412 from two lanes to four lanes betweenHindsville and Huntsville.

“We believe the expansion of Huntsville will be along this bypass,” Hatfield said.

With the annexation push nearing an end, city leaders will turn their attention to extending city water and sewer lines to the properties, starting with an application for state and federalfunding, Hatfield said. He anticipates such a project will cost $4 million.

City crews also have stayed busy with improvements to downtown Huntsville, Hatfield said. Festivities are planned for 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday, with a formal dedication of Polk Square at 5:30 p.m.

The widening of U.S. 412, roughly between where the roadway meets Arkansas 45 and U.S. 412B, is on track for completion in August, depending on the weather, said Stacy Burge, resident engineer in Harrison for the Arkansas State Highway Commission. Crews will begin shifting traffic from the old roadway to portions of the new roadway after Thanksgiving.

Commercial businesses that open along the widened U.S. 412 will need water and sewer services and fire protection from the city, Hatfield said. Though Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has not announced any such plans, city leaders have speculated the retailer might choose to move its Huntsville store to the bypass. The city would lose a major contributor of sales tax revenue if the store moved to property outsideof the city limits, he said.

Huntsville property owners began submitting petitions for voluntary annexation in the spring, with the City Council initially hopingto have all petitions submitted by mid-May. Those petitions were sent to the Northwest Arkansas Regional Planning Commission, and the commission began creating a map of the proposed annexations based on legal descriptions of the properties.

The commission’s work was delayed after a server storing key data for mapping failed, said Jeff Hawkins, executive director of the planning commission. Once the mapping process resumed weeks later, the commission and Huntsville city leaders had to correct some legal descriptions.

The commission completed the mapping and returned maps to the city for review about two months ago, Hatfield said.

Since then, the city has received a half-dozen more requests for annexation, primarily for land along U.S. 412, said Pamela Garrett, a city administration employee whose job included ensuring that all properties proposed for annexation were contiguous to the city’s borders.

“It’s a puzzle,” she said. “You’ve just got to piece things together.”

The planning commission is revising the map based on the additional petitions, Hatfield said.

“Sometimes it just takes awhile,” Hatfield said.

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 9 on 11/14/2012