HOT SPRINGS -- With no funding in place to heat or secure the former Army and Navy General Hospital after the first of the year, Hot Springs officials are bracing for problems that fire and city officials warn reach beyond the structure itself.
Arkansas Rehabilitation Services, the state agency overseeing the Arkansas Career Training Institute that overlooks downtown Hot Springs from its perch at 105 Reserve St., told city officials last week that there is no money in its budget to keep the utilities on after the building reverts to the federal government at the end of the year.
The Department of Defense deeded the property to the state in 1960 on condition that it be used as a job training facility for the disabled or for other public health and educational purposes.
Arkansas Rehabilitation Services announced in May that it's ending the institute's residential workforce training program for young adults with disabilities at the end of next month, leaving the building without an occupant and more than 100 employees without jobs.
Rehabilitation Services told local officials that its funding is restricted to serving people with disabilities.
"Our federal funders are who give us money," Rehabilitation Services Commissioner Alan McClain said. "We'll be funding a facility we're not using. There's going to be some hard stop limitations. If we're putting money into the building, we're going to have audit problems. We won't be able to use federal money to do that."
Hot Springs Fire Chief Ed Davis spelled out the potential consequences of an unsecured building without utilities in a July 26 letter to City Manager Bill Burrough, calling on the state to keep the lights on until a transition plan for the building is in place.
"In the wake of the state's swift decision to shutter the ACTI campus there will be numerous fire protection and public safety problems that will be created," Davis wrote. "These issues, if left unaddressed, will easily evolve into a cascade of direct threats to the safety of persons visiting and living in downtown Hot Springs," he said.
Rehabilitation Services cited the building's operational costs as its reason for ending the residential program, which accounted for roughly a third of its $33 million budget.
Utility bills from 2017 and 2018 that the state provided The Sentinel-Record in response to a public records request showed electricity costs ranged from $13,000 to $35,000 a month. Natural gas that powers boilers providing heat and hot water to the more than 200,000-square-foot building costs $11,000 to $32,000 a month.
The Legislature authorized more than $700,000 in state general fund money and $3.87 million in federal money to equip the 1933 structure with a water supply system after concerns were raised about the previous system's ability to provide adequate volume and pressure for fire suppression. The letter said pumps that pressurize the system require electricity, which Davis said could be difficult to restore if it's shut off for an extended period.
"It is doubtful that it could be safely brought back online due to the onset of deterioration and illegal salvaging likely to occur in an unmaintained building," he wrote, noting that pipes in the sprinkler and boiler systems will freeze if the building isn't heated.
The city's distribution system would have to supply water if there's no electricity for the pumps.
"The failure of these pumps will necessitate that the fire department relay its water supply from the city water system," the letter said. "These relays would take valuable manpower away from firefighting efforts and significantly reduce our effectiveness."
Burrough told the Hot Springs Board of Directors at its biannual retreat earlier this month that the scenario Davis described would imperil the national park and a large part of downtown.
"Not to say we won't be able to fight a fire on that complex or side of the mountain, but it's going to be much more difficult without that [water supply system] and fire connection," he said. "We would have to daisy chain firetrucks until we got to that location. You can think of a fire on that campus, what it would do to our bath houses, our promenade, the (Hot Springs Mountain Tower), that whole mountain.
"Once we no longer have utilities in that building, it will deteriorate at a rapid pace."
Hot Springs area officials have pressed the state to provide funding for the building's transition, one they said will require extensive environmental remediation if there's any hope for repurposing the property.
"I think we need to identify what the state's responsibility is before they leave, whether it be an environmental assessment or repairing things that have been left in a state of disrepair," Garland County's County Judge Darryl Mahoney said last week. "They're the ones who had use of it, and there needs to be an identification of what their responsibilities are before they turn it back over to whoever it's turned over to."
Placing the property in the Environmental Protection Agency's Brownfields Program would qualify it for federal funding, officials said, creating what Burrough said would be one of the largest brownfield sites in the state.
The Arkansas Career Training Institute will continue providing vocational training at the former Armory building at 200 Reserve St., but its primary role will shift to coordinating and training Arkansas Rehabilitation Services field staff members and developing community partnerships.
Metro on 08/19/2019