Fort Smith Board again rejects funding a utility department project

You win some, you lose some. For Steve Parke, director of utilities for the city of Fort Smith, the losses are starting to pile up. Parke has faced a firing squad of questioners in the form of city Board members the last couple of months over appropriations for water and sewer improvements.

The improvements, as laid out in the city's consent decree with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), are estimated to cost taxpayers up to $480 million in response to the city's violations of the Clean Water Act. Parke has been tasked with carrying out the improvements, but thus far has received two refusals and one begrudging approval from the Fort Smith Board of Directors since July.

At the board's July 21 meeting, Parke sought $249,000 for engineering services on the Lake Fort Smith and Lee Creek Fluoride Feed Systems. In addition to being voted down 4-3 on the item, he received a tongue lashing of sorts from City Director Keith Lau, who felt Parke's department wasn't giving enough consideration to the taxpayers of Fort Smith.

"I think we owe it to the citizens, to the employees of Fort Smith, to all the payers of these high rates that we’re going to be charging," Lau said at the previous meeting. "I’m just putting everybody on notice, I’m not putting up with these kinds of exorbitant costs in the future."

Fast forward to the Aug. 18 Board of Directors meeting, where Parke was asking the Board to approve a $90,110 request with Morrison Shipley Engineers Inc., for engineering services associated with improvements to the Riverlyn Wastewater Pump Station. (The station was built in 1968 and the consent decree requires a facility upgrade.)

The item was approved 6-1, but Lau, one of the "yes" votes, wasn't enthusiastic about giving the go-ahead. He was particularly annoyed by the fact that Parke could not give a more defined answer on the overall cost of the project, which Parke said had “too many variables involved” to arrive at a ballpark figure that would be worth anything at that point in the project.

“So we are just supposed to trust you, I guess, is what we are supposed to do?” Lau asked. “How do we know that these numbers are correct?”

Pushing his point then, Lau noted that the city was able to estimate the $480 million for the EPA order, but is unable to provide an estimate on an element within that bigger picture. He also worried that “if you put $90,000 out there, it's going to get spent,” implying that projects always have a tendency to use every dollar budgeted for them.

This was a theme Lau seized on again at Tuesday night's (Sept. 15) meeting of the Board of Directors. Lau had many concerns with Parke's $2,088,420 request to enter into an agreement with Hawkins Weir Engineers for evaluations on the city's wastewater pump stations and force mains as required by the EPA consent degree. One of the biggest of those concerns was a 7% markup for "reimbursables," like $7,800 for photocopies, $18,000 to an abstract company, and almost $300,000 in subcontractor fees. In all, the "markup," which a representative from Hawkins Weir even admitted some clients never pay, comprised $620,600 of the more than $2 million estimate.

Lau was also bothered by the lack of consultant experience when it came to working within the confines of government consent decrees.

“Let me ask you this,” he said to fellow Board members. “What company – what corporation out there would build a $480 million widget without someone, who had practical experience building that widget?”

Director and Vice Mayor Kevin Settle shared many of Lau’s concerns and also was taken aback by the fact that, if approved, the resolution would be a $2 million expense for the purposes of evaluation only, not including correction/repairs of any issues found along the way.

For the two Board members as well as City Directors Mike Lorenz and Tracy Pennartz, the proposal was unacceptable. The item was singled out of the consent agenda and voted down 4-3. Directors Don Hutchings, Andre Good, and George Catsavis, voted to approve. The rest of the consent agenda passed unanimously.

In other business Tuesday night, the Board voted unanimously to table an ordinance declaring a temporary moratorium on the consideration of requests to waive fees for city services. Director Hutchings’ motion was to have city staff work on matrices for determining eligibility for waivers. Proposals will be submitted as part of the 2016 budgeting process, which the Board will take up in December.

The next meeting of the Fort Smith Board of Directors will take place Sept. 29 at the Fort Smith Public Schools Service Center.