Land Issues Lead Legal Debates

Land continues to be a hot-button legal issue in the minds of many local lawyers.

“You’ve got a lot of land changing hands, a lot of land transactions,” said Micki Harrington, managing partner of Harrington, Miller, Neihouse and Krug in Springdale. “If you don’t grow, a lot of these issues don’t become very hot.”

Many voices contribute to land development, she said.

“The developer has a side, the neighborhood has a side, the [U.S. Army] Corps of Engineers has a side. Everyone has a side,” Harrington said.

Land legislation approved in the 2003 session of the Arkansas General Assembly has changed the rules on impact fees and manufactured housing, among other land issues.

Impact Fees

ACT 1719 made it acceptable and provided guidelines to follow when enacting impact fees. Although Fayetteville and Bentonville already have them, more cities in the Northwest Arkansas area could be approving them soon.

“There is a list of things that cities are allowed to spend their impact fees on,” said David Shoan of the Arkansas Municipal League. “It’s going to enable cities to recoup some costs of development, and it clarifies that they do have the authority to impose an impact fee.”

Under the new law, cities can pledge the impact fee for the payment of bonds, to finance capital improvements or other public facilities for which development is imposed.

“The way the statute is written, they can’t just take the money,” Shoan said. “The city council has to pass an ordinance and adopt a capital plan for all of the public facilities to be financed.”

Manufactured Housing

ACT 624 requires that a city must have at least one residential zone for manufactured houses. Cities are not permitted to establish ordinances that restrict manufactured housing to mobile home parks.

Under federal law, manufactured housing is considered a structure transportable in one of more sections that is 320 SF or more, built on a permanent chassis and made before 1976.

“You can still regulate them like you would regular housing,” Shoan said. “You just can’t discriminate. You have to [allow] manufactured housing alongside regular housing.”

Cities will probably look at zones that have mixed uses and make that zone the manufactured housing zone, Shoan said.

“I suppose theoretically if they had some vacant land or annexed it, they could turn it into a manufactured residential housing zone,” he noted.

An average of 400 manufactured homes are sold in Washington, Benton, Carrol and Madison county each year, according to Mark Williams, general manager at the Fleetwood Home Center in Springdale. Their average price is $48,000.

Fleetwood Homes accounts for 31 percent of the market share, selling an average of 150 homes per year. Williams said that his business has watched the law very closely.

“I think it is up to the cities and how they are going to handle it,” Williams said. “We are all kind of sitting here waiting for what is going to happen.”

Although it’s not new to Northwest Arkansas, Harrington said that ACT 779 is still a fiery issue. The law allows small cities that are unable to provide certain services to their residents to de-annex and join a the neighboring cities services such as sewer, water and police.

“It causes the very existence of small cities to be threatened,” Harrington said.

The biggest legal issue with land issues is growth, she said.

“How is the local government going to fund the infrastructure necessary to support growth?” Harrington said.