Forum attendees complain of lack of water service

They urge Hot Springs lines

Lack of running water in Garland County's incorporated area that is within the Hot Springs water utility service area is hurting property owners and the county's economy, witnesses told a legislative task force Wednesday.

The Water Provider Legislative Task Force covered briefly decades of tension between residents and business owners in the unincorporated areas and the city water utility. Essentially, residents in the mostly rural county want city utility services, but the city doesn't always extend services.

The task force includes six legislators, including co-chairman Sen. Alan Clark, a Hot Springs Republican who runs a business in Garland County's unincorporated area. The county issue has been a major focus of the task force, said Rick Davis, county judge of Garland County, the only nonlegislator on the task force, but the task force plans to examine utility concerns statewide.

Some called Hot Springs' behavior a strategy to prevent growth outside of Hot Springs and encourage more growth in the city.

A memo sent to the task force by the city water utility, which was not represented at Wednesday's meeting because of the deputy city manager's medical appointment, stated that it approves nearly all applications for water connections, no less than 95 percent of the time.

Many residents live in improvement districts, or quasi-government entities of subdivisions that form for a common goal. Often in Garland County, the improvement districts allowed residents to collect assessments from one another and spend the money on waterlines to the city.

Across the state, it's common for improvement districts to pop up in unincorporated subdivisions and then try to connect to city utilities later. The districts pay to do so through an assessment, but usually the subdivision developers are never involved.

In Garland County, most residents -- about 61 percent -- live in the unincorporated area, Davis said. That is unlike most counties, he said, where residents congregate within cities.

For a period in the 1950s, the state did not allow people to build new structures in Hot Springs because of a lack of water and sewer service, and for a time in the 1970s, the state did not allow people to build new structures near Lake Hamilton or Lake Catherine in the county's unincorporated area.

That motivated some rural movement and establishment of improvement districts, Davis said. But generally people desire to live outside city regulations, he said.

Many of the improvement districts assessed residents a fee that was used to construct waterlines to the city under the impression the city would connect the homes to water and sewer services. No contracts were signed guaranteeing this, but residents were placed in the utility's service zone, making them unserviceable for other water utilities. For some people, the city never extended water or sewer, stating that the city did not have the capacity from its water sources to serve more people.

Some residents and businesses have gotten service but others haven't, with no clear pattern, witnesses testified Wednesday. Some homeowners and property owners have gotten service for a five-eighths-inch water meter but are unable to get larger meters because each property owner is restricted to the five-eighths one.

That could serve a house but not much else, Davis said, thus restricting other construction on a property.

"To me, this is just wrong," Davis said.

David Hall, franchisee of more than 30 Sonic Drive-Ins in Arkansas, said he could not run his business with only a five-eighth-inch pipe.

Others testified that they got mixed messages from city officials about whether they could connect and whether doing so would present a water shortage for the city.

No city officials were present at Wednesday's meeting. Clark said it marked the first time city officials hadn't attended since the task force began meeting monthly in August.

A phone message left for the city utilities director late Wednesday was not returned.

Metro on 04/12/2018

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