New lights, a fresh coat of paint on the bleachers, remodeled bathrooms, dressingroom touch-ups, scoreboard fixes and a refinished basketball court are all on deck for Barton Coliseum.
The Little Rock Board of Directors will vote on a resolution Tuesday to award the Arkansas Livestock Show Association $98,700 in revenue from the city’s sales-tax increase, which started in January.
The association, which manages the State Fairgrounds on Roosevelt Road, where Barton Coliseum sits, was promised about $3 million in sales-tax funding as one of several incentives to keep the fairgrounds in Little Rock.
“The timing of the funding is really good for us because of the commitment we made to make these repairs,” said Ralph Shoptaw, the Arkansas State Fair and Livestock Show’s president and general manager.
“We’re going to take two weeks in November to take the basketball floor out, repaint and refinish it. You know, our coliseum is an excellent place for basketball games because there’s not a bad seat in the house. The renovations and lighting will make it an even better experience.”
The floor has already been removed from the coliseum in preparation for the State Fair, which runs from Oct. 12 through Oct. 21. Some fixes totaling about $130,000 have already been made, such as repairing leaky leaks over the coliseum bathrooms.
Most of the fixes will wait until after the high-traffic fair events are over, Shoptaw said.
He said the repairs and refurbishing should be finished well in advance of the February and March sporting events making their way to Barton Coliseum for the first time ever or the first time in more than a decade.
With the help of the Little Rock Convention and Visitors Bureau, the fairgrounds staff was able to book the AAA high school basketball championships.
A few days later, the coliseum will host the Gulf Coast Athletic Conference basketball tournament, which came to Little Rock after Philander Smith College joined the Gulf Coast conference earlier this year.
The Convention and Visitors Bureau has renewed its focus on bringing events to the fairgrounds and to Barton Coliseum.
The bureau also is bringing the Hot Rod Power Tour, a car show featuring 1,200 to 1,500 cars, to the fairgrounds later this year. The tour will make a one-day stop in Little Rock before continuing its eightstop tour.
Several other event coordinators are considering the fairgrounds or have scheduled site visits in the near future, staff members said.
Gretchen Hall, director of the bureau, said selling event planners on the fairgrounds was designed to make it easier for the fairgrounds to stay in the city, and, in turn, the planned improvements are making it easier to sell event placements.
“We’ve always tried to sell that facility,” she said. “The improvements being made are definitely going to be an asset for those efforts in the future. And we’ve had a pretty good year of booking events at the fairground for next year, including the tournaments.”
The two basketball tournaments were conditional on the fixes and renovations being made, Shoptaw said.
The remaining $2.9 million in city funds is slated to flow in over the life of the capital improvements portion of the sales tax. Shoptaw has said the money will be used to revamp buildings, parking and other out-of-date structures to better use the fair’s current footprint.
The fairgrounds consistsof 140 acres - only about half of which is usable because of topographical concerns. Fairgrounds officials have said years of frustration with aging buildings, lack of space and crime in the surrounding neighborhood spurred them to look at other location options, even putting out a call for proposals and land in 2009.
That call was answered by several cities with viable options, but most of them fell through or didn’t include enough funding to rebuild the fairgrounds on the properties being offered.
The livestock association’s board of directors made the decision in June to stay in Little Rock for “the foreseeable future,” according to the resolution.
Board members said the association will likely use a combination of expansion options offered by Little Rock Mayor Mark Stodola in order to stay put.
Those options include expanding west to two different parcels of land - one that requires railroad tracks to be reconfigured and another that requires the cooperation of the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department in building a pedestrian walkway over Roosevelt Road.
Another option would include building an additional entrance to the fairgrounds on its south side with the help of a direct off-ramp from Interstate 30.
The association also has the option to use property across the street from the main entrance on Roosevelt Road, mostly as an overflow parking area.
The last option includes buying vacant homes, city land, and titles as they become available on 58 acres to the east of the fairgrounds.
Neighbors have protested the idea of losing their homes for the fairgrounds’ expansion, and association staff members have said they don’t expect to use eminent domain to take any houses at this point.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 11 on 09/28/2012