Fort Smith City Administrator recommends terminating River Valley Sports Complex contract

River Valley Sports Complex (RVSC) organizers Lee Webb and Sen. Jake Files, R-Fort Smith, could soon be terminated from their agreement with the Fort Smith Board of Directors to build “tournament quality” softball fields at Chaffee Crossing.

City Administrator Carl Geffken recommended terminating the 3-year long agreement at the tail end of the Tuesday, Jan. 31, study session of the Fort Smith Board of Directors. Geffken reached his decision after speaking to Files, who was to have the Board an update by the end of January. Neither Webb nor Lee were at Tuesday’s meeting. Additionally, Geffken said, the city should terminate a $26,000 grant the city had received for the project and request the return of those funds.

The resolution to terminate will come before the Board at the Feb. 7 regular meeting. Geffken told Talk Business & Politics the $26,000 was for an Arkansas General Improvement Fund (GIF) grant. The city is not requesting a return of expended funds thus far on the project (approximately $1 million) because RVSC had only received payments from the city upon completion of certain milestones.

“We will be meeting internally to see what potential steps to take moving forward, and we’ll be doing that through internal work throughout the city, processing data and information,” Geffken said, adding he had spoken to Files earlier in the week. “He told me the information we requested and timeline at the Jan. 10 study session would be coming either today or tomorrow. The Board had said it at that session it should be due today and requested it at a study session.” Geffken hand-gestured to the meeting room at the Fort Smith Public Library Central Branch community room. “This is the study session.”

Files and Webb, a Fort Smith businessman and chairman of the Arkansas Economic Development Commission, were administrators for the project and were using mostly in-kind services, private donations, and a director-approved $1.6 million contribution from the city to advance the RVSC.

At the previous study session, Webb acknowledged the project’s many missed deadlines as a frustration, but also observed the draw schedule had not caused the city to be out any funds in excess of the agreed-upon milestones. When asked by City Director George Catsavis to provide a hard deadline, Webb said he could give an “arbitrary” date, but he did not want to continue the cycle of projecting completion dates that could not be met.

“I feel like we’ve been getting the same information for nearly a year now,” City Director Mike Lorenz responded. “We’ve had assurances before, and I feel like there’s not an overall game plan that says, ‘Here’s our finish date, and here’s how we’re going to get there.’ We have to see a plan of how you’re going to get there. It’s easy to say we’ll be playing on it by summer, but we’ve got to know how.”

Lorenz said it was “really discouraging and concerning that the money we’ve invested already is really at risk at this point.” He continued: “We realize the timeline of when we started, but to the general public, this is something that’s been going on four years with no end in sight. What have we got with the money we’ve spent? Do we have the ability on our side to show we’ve got what we paid for and that what we’ve spent is accurate?”

Dingman then suggested the Jan. 31 deadline — and the Board and Webb agreed to it — for a written report detailing the work accomplished, the work remaining, and a date for completing the next milestone, which included fencing and irrigation for the playing surfaces.

Webb and Files entered into the agreement with the city in 2014 with a target completion date of June 10, 2015. Substantial completion after the second extension pushed the next date to July 22, 2016 with an opening day of July 31. After missing that deadline, other dates followed — one in mid-October 2016 and one in mid-December.