FAYETTEVILLE — A committee of University of Arkansas and city representatives have rejected a plan to pay for a new fire engine or ladder truck using a proposed student fee.
After the Town & Gown Advisory Committee’s 16-4 vote Jan. 11, both sides said they would continue talking.
Under the plan rejected last week, UA-Fayetteville would have contributed money over a period of 10 or 15 years to pay for the vehicle. The plan was a compromise between no contribution and the city’s proposal for a new $3.50-per-credit-hour student fee. A committee task force endorsed the plan last month.
“We just don’t feel like this is enough,” Don Marr, Mayor Lioneld Jordan’s chief of staff, told the committee. The university spends more than $3 million a year for its own Police Department but “not one dollar” for fire protection, he said.
“We’ve heard loud and clear: No student fee works,” Marr said, referring to university opposition to the idea. Marr added that the mayor hopes to come up with other possible options with university Chancellor Joseph Steinmetz, who started the job at the beginning of the year.
“We will go to whatever level we have to,” Marr said.
Matt Trantham, senior associate athletic director for the university and a committee member, cautioned against rejecting an offer on the table in favor of a hypothetical one.
“This is all there is right now,” he said of the university plan.
The 10- or 15-year plan would have cost between $600,000 and about $1.6 million, depending on the type of vehicle, Fire Chief David Dayringer has said.
The student fee, meanwhile, would have raised $1.4 million a year.
The city hoped to build a fire station to tackle medical and fire calls that jumped almost 50 percent since 2010, climbing to roughly 10,000 calls last year, Dayringer said. Response times and survival rates have begun to lag slightly as firefighters deal with a growing residential population, he said.
The university’s population accounts for about a third of the city’s, according to university figures and the U.S. Census Bureau.
Mike Johnson, associate vice chancellor for facilities and a committee member, balked at the idea of a student fee last year. He pointed out the university’s enormous economic impact on the area, which a university study last year pegged at almost $1 billion. He said the university pulls its own weight but might consider leasing a piece of land for a station or paying for an engine.
Trantham, Johnson and two other university officials voted in favor of the proposal. Members of the task force that originally endorsed the plan, including Dayringer, decided to vote against it. Last month, Dayringer said the university’s plan would have been “very helpful” for the city’s aging fleet.