FORT SMITH -- The U.S. Marshals Museum and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have reached an agreement that will allow the museum to build the Marshals Service's national museum on 16.3 acres donated on the banks of the Arkansas River.
The two parties signed a "consent to easement structures" document Wednesday, said Little Rock District Corps of Engineers spokesman Laurie Driver. The signing came after months of negotiations over the easement, the existence of which museum architects discovered last year.
The agreement will let builders extend a 90-foot-tall museum roof spire over the easement and river, but will continue to allow the Corps to remove any structure in the easement if it has to stabilize any portion of the McClellan-Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System shoreline.
Jeremy Thomason, senior realty specialist with the Corps' Little Rock district, said the shoreline of the Arkansas River is stable, and he didn't anticipate the need for any stabilization work.
"We have the river trained to go where it needs to go," Thomason said.
The agreement is mutually beneficial to the museum and the Corps, said museum President and Chief Executive Officer Jim Dunn and the Corps' acting Real Estate Division Chief Pat Bennett.
"We appreciate the high degree of cooperation of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in addressing the easement issue," Dunn said in a news release Thursday. "This outcome is a win-win and we could not be more pleased."
Bennett said the Corps worked with museum architects to help them place the building where it would not encroach on the easement but would provide the best view of the river.
The news release said that under the agreement, the museum could build such things as parking lots, pedestrian walkways and a reflecting pool on the easement property.
The Five Civilized Tribes of Oklahoma will construct its monument to tribal law enforcement officers within the easement, the release said.
With the easement issue resolved, museum architects Cambridge Seven Associates and Polk Stanley Wilcox Architects can resume work on the first phase of the architectural drawings, the release said.
Brent Johnson Design Inc., the museum's exhibit designer, has completed the first phase of its exhibit plans and will resume work once the architects complete their conceptual drawings, which is expected to take at least nine months, the release said.
The museum has raised about $26 million of the estimated $55 million needed to build and develop exhibits for the 50,000-square-foot museum on land donated by Fort Smith's Westphal family.
NW News on 11/06/2015