20 sites on state’s list to pare for vets home

Sunday, December 15, 2013

Two golf courses, a former hospital and a half-dozen farms are in the running to be the site selected for Arkansas’ new nursing home for veterans.

Twenty applications have been submitted by cities, real estate agencies and economic development groups from around the state to be considered for the Arkansas Veterans Home. The Veterans Home Task Force created by the Legislature will meet Monday and the Arkansas Veterans Commission is to meet Tuesday to discuss those applications.

Ultimately, Arkansas Department of Veterans Affairs Director Cissy Rucker will select the site. She said earlier this month that she hopes to forward her pick to the governor by the end of the year. Rucker said she will consider any input that the task force and the commission submit to her by Thursday.

In June 2012, the state agency shuttered its decades-old and dilapidated Little Rock veterans home after officials estimated that it would cost $10 million to repair its collapsed sewer lines, leaking roof, and failing electrical and heating systems.

In a search earlier this year, the 22-member task force solicited applications and visited a handful of proposed sites over a six-month period, but the members could not agree on a location.

After that initial search for a site proved fruitless, a second search began from scratch. As part of the second search, an application form was created to obtain information about a site’s access to utilities, property costs and the demographics of its surrounding communities. That information includes such things as lists of nearby hospitals, hotels, recreational facilities, parks and trails, and restaurants.

The Arkansas Department of Veterans Affairs released the 20 applications to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette last week in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Several applications were resubmitted after being passed over in the first search.

“Cissy has not made any kind of decision at this point, and there are a lot of factors that will weigh into that decision,” said Kelly Ferguson, spokesman for the Veterans Affairs Department. “She’s poring over the proposals and doing a lot of research on each one.”

Proposals came from BaldKnob/Judsonia, Benton/Haskell, Clarksville, Crossett, Fordyce, Fort Chaffee, Jacksonville, Little Rock, Monticello, Mountain View, Newport, North Little Rock, Pine Bluff, Russellville, Searcy, Sulphur Springs, Trumann and Vilonia. About half of those proposals were resubmitted or were updated from the first search.

Almost all of the 20 properties proposed in the second round are offered at no cost to the state. Several cities offered to buy the private property in question if the state would agree to locate the home - and its up to 250 jobs - in their communities.

Arkansas has applied for an $18.1 million federal matching grant to build the veterans home, and state lawmakers set aside $7.5 million in surplus funds for the project.

The federal funds cannot be used to purchase land, Ferguson said.

Officials from Clarksville, the Crossett Economic Development Foundation, Pine Bluff, Trumann, the Monticello Economic Development Commission, the Searcy Regional Economic Development Commission and Mountain View offered to broker deals with private landowners, or to purchase the land and then donate it to the Veterans Affairs Department.

The Newport Economic Development Commission offered for free the closed Newport Hospital property - now owned by a hospital group. City officials volunteered to pay to demolish the three buildings now on the 21-acre site.

The cities of Bald Knob and Fordyce own the properties they have proposed to the department.

Russellville offered to broker a 99-year deal with Arkansas Tech University to lease 20 acres that the university has previously used as farmland. Mayor Bill Eaton said last week that the lease terms had not been formalized, but he expected that the lease would cost “next to nothing.”

“We have two facilities built on university property, including a fire station,” he said. “The lease would likely be for something like $1 to just show the agreement.

It’s basically a nonmonetary lease.”

Mary Lou Mauldin, a private landowner, has offered a 40-acre site in Sulphur Springs about 5 miles outside the Pine Bluff city limits. The property is a former farm that has a horse corral, and she wrote, “wouldn’t cost the state anything.”

The Saline County Economic Development Corp. resubmitted a proposal to build the veterans home on more than 20 acres at the Arkansas Health Center near Haskell, which is already state property.

North Little Rock and the Fort Chaffee Redevelopment Authority offered golf courses that could be converted into a site for the home.

The Fort Chaffee site on Taylor Avenue would be free and consist of 30 acres at the outset, and an additional 20 acres are available if needed. The land was once owned by the U.S. Department of Defense and was at one time a Boy Scouts adventure trail.

The proposal submitted in the first site search was revised and resubmitted in the second search to include portions of the Deer Trails Golf Course and a clubhouse.

North Little Rock is also offering former military property that is now used as a golf course.

Nathan Hamilton, a North Little Rock spokesman, said the nine-hole Emerald Park Golf Course is technically still owned by the federal government. The city has a lease with the federal government to operate the course, which he said lost about $26,000 last year.

“We don’t expect to make money off of that particular course,” he said. “And the lease doesn’t cost anything, but it also doesn’t bring in any money. It’s just an agreement to manage the land.”

The course has been operating for “as long as anyone here can remember,” Hamilton said, noting that that is at least four decades.

Emerald Park hosts about 4,500 rounds of golf a year, while the nearby Burns Park, which has two 18-hole courses, hosts about 35,000 rounds of golf a year.

“It’s just a suggestion at this point, but there have been preliminary conversations with the federal government about the possibility,” he said. “And it’s literally across the street” from the Eugene J. Towbin Healthcare Center, a veterans hospital.

The Jacksonville Chamber of Commerce offered two proposed sites - a privately owned 30-acre parcel of farmland on Military Road and a 20-acre area on the Little Rock Air Force Base.

Jacksonville had submitted a different parcel on the Air Force base during the first round, but concerns were raised about that parcel because it is near a former Superfund site.

Proposals for two sites in Little Rock and one in Vilonia requested some payment for the properties being offered.

Vilonia suggested a privately owned 61-acre site that would require a fair-market-value purchase, but the city offered to extend the water, sewer and other utility lines to the site for free.

A Little Rock resident resubmitted a proposal for roughly 13.3 acres that includes mostly state Highway and Transportation Department property along the south side of Interstate 630. As part of the proposal, the state would purchase about nine homes and several vacant lots at fair market value, and strike deals with several nonprofits to buy their treatment facilities and dormitories.

The other capital-city proposal came from a private landowner in west Little Rock looking to sell more than 20 acres in the 4100 block of south Shackleford Road. Real estate broker Steve Hockersmith said the owners were interested in selling the property at a “substantially reduced rate” because of how it would be used.

Ferguson said cost will not be the deciding factor in the site selection. Other factors will be considered. For example, several of the proposed sites are in areas that have large veteran populations.

The only other state-run veterans nursing home in Arkansas is in Fayetteville, Ferguson said.

There are more than 252,000 veterans in Arkansas, according to a 2012 survey by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 12/15/2013