Downtown Renaissance Leads To Extensive I-30 Project

Editor’s note: The author of this article, John Brummett, is a columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. The story appears in the latest magazine edition of Talk Business & Politics, which you can read here.

It looms, part opportunity and part worry. It is the next big thing for downtown Little Rock.

Talk Business & Politics was inquiring about the generally positive state of affairs in the revitalization of the River Market area of Little Rock – a “renaissance,” some call it.

The context was the 10th anniversary this month of the opening of the Clinton Presidential Center on the east end of the River Market.

One subject kept coming up, mostly as a warning.

It’s that the reborn area of downtown Little Rock will soon confront disruption and risk.

Be advised that, before long, the state Highway Department intends to tear up the traffic system for the area and build another.

“We don’t have any choice but to get this right,” says outgoing Pulaski County Judge Buddy Villines. He’s a key visionary largely credited with the savvy placement of Verizon Arena on the north side of the Arkansas River and the erection of the Big Dam Bridge out west.

“I don’t want to see the River Market turned into a ghost town for four years,” says Little Rock City Director Dean Kumpuris. He’s one of the key persuaders of President Clinton to locate his library in those once-murky bottoms east of Interstate 30.

So you’re asking: What in the world are those community leaders fretting about?

Let’s answer this way, with a question: So do you think the imminent project to replace the Broadway Bridge is a big deal?

It’s not, comparatively speaking. It’s child’s play.

It’s a matter of a mere 24,000 cars a day. It means between six months and two years of traffic disruption, producing in the end the same downtown traffic configuration that existed before.

Now consider and contrast this hovering ordeal:

• Four years of traffic disruption, affecting 120,000 cars a day, beginning in 2018, at an estimated cost perhaps to exceed $400 million, more than twice the cost of the Big Rock fly-over project for Interstates 430 and 630.
• Widening Interstate 30 from its north interchange with Interstate 40 and U.S. 67-167 to its south interchange with Interstate 440.
• Refortifying and expanding from three to four lanes each direction, or conceivably replacing altogether, the Interstate 30 Arkansas River Bridge linking the downtowns of Little Rock and North Little Rock.
• Broadening the roadways extending immediately from the newly widened bridge, presumably requiring the taking of right-of-way either from the River Market or the park at the Clinton Library, or both.
• Redoing the entire interchange system in the downtown area of Little Rock because the current exits and entrances at Second, Sixth and Ninth Streets are impractical, ill-placed, unevenly used and too close to each other for today’s standards.

That’s all.

Who decided we would do all of that?

You did.

You voted two years ago for a decade’s sales tax increase for bonded debt for highway jobs that included the vast one just described.

Scott Bennett, director of the Highway Department, provides two assurances.

One is that the department will take as little new right-of-way as possible. The second is that the existing I-30 bridge will be kept open to traffic – at times on one bottle-necked lane each way, probably – because there is no way 120,000 cars a day could be conveyed across the Arkansas River otherwise.

Beyond that, speculation is imaginative. Complications are menacing. Dread is building. Committees are forming. Ideas are rampant.

Kumpuris almost wishes, and maybe fully wishes, that the whole project would be abandoned and the status quo preserved. He seems to fear a four-year interruption of momentum more than he anticipates any eventual long-term improvement.

Doing nothing seems to be the least likely option. The 50-year-old interstate bridge needs fortification, at least. The rush-hour traffic count seems to compel widening. The existing downtown exit and entrances invite gridlock. The voters spoke. The Highway Department likes to spend voter-approved bond proceeds as it said it would.

And the department wants the job done within a decade of the tax program’s approval, meaning by 2022, which means getting started in 2018.

One idea is to merge the Second, Sixth and Ninth Street exits into one large “distributor exit” from which traffic would be directed one way to the Clinton Library and another to the River Market and another to the state Capitol and another to Main Street.

The logical place for that might be Third Street. That probably would require digging up the trolley spur on Third that goes to the Clinton Library and dead-ends at the Heifer Center. The loss would not be widely mourned. Some call that spur “the streetcar no one desires.”

But that’s a lot of distribution of traffic on very limited real estate. So there is an idea for another new interchange to the south. But that might imperil the Hanger Hill neighborhood, which is historic and reviving.

So another idea is to move the entry ramps into downtown Little Rock to the south off Interstate 630. But it’s hard to figure where big new ramps would go without slicing McArthur Park or the Mount Holly Cemetery. And City Manager Bruce Moore says experience elsewhere plainly shows that downtowns decay when freeway exit traffic is moved away from them.

Bennett says another idea is that some south-bound access to downtown Little Rock, to LaHarpe Boulevard, maybe, could be directed from freeway exits actually in North Little Rock.

Jordan Johnson, the spokesman for the Clinton Foundation in Little Rock, reads all of this from a silver lining playbook.

He says removing the Second Street exit would clear out a mountain of existing concrete between the River Market and Clinton Center. That, he contends, would provide space for widening the main interstate between the library and market without new right-of-way acquisition. And, he says, it would better join the market with the library, at least visually – to the extent that “you could see through.”

But even he, like all others with a direct stake, acknowledges that the construction period alone will unavoidably put a strain on these emerging destinations so vital to downtown Little Rock.

Presumably there will be times when the quickest way from Interstate 30 to the River Market will be via the exits at Sixth or Ninth Streets.

So it seems fairly certain that the downtown Little Rock area will begin in 2018 a transition to a new look, a new dynamic, indeed a new era. It’s one that will be recorded as “Renaissance Interrupted,” at least, but surely not “Renaissance Lost.”

As the home remodeler once said to the weary homeowner: We’ve got to make a mess to make it better.