andrewjensen

Aubrey is actually a man.

A Springdale company has signed on to lease the original Proctor & Gamble building on Millsap Road in Fayetteville. TrestleTree, a health and wellness company ... http://www.arkansasbusiness.com/article.as...Proctor+Millsap

The city has $5.2M of the $6.7M total cost (rest paid by state/federal funds) set aside to widen Garland from North to Melmar in 2009. I believe the $3.66M is set aside for widening 112 farther north.

It's not on the Web yet, but the new baseball stadium will be named Arvest Ballpark and the bank has a 10-year agreement for the naming rights.

To be clear, I was no way advocating curbing the drinking policy at either venue. While it is technically against the law to drink in public, it has been tolerated for decades in LR and tolerance of it has been expanded in Fayetteville with the tailgating area built. My point was seeking out people in the state capital to enforce the law on public drinking is a little like asking Las Vegas to tone down the gambling.

If they're going to crack down on public drinking at BBBBQ, then they better crack down on it at War Memorial Stadium where people set up kegs and walk all over with open containers. The public drinking at BBBBQ is far more controlled than the free-for-all in LR on game days.

Well, it wouldn't be any fun if we agreed on everything. While I do not disagree on your point about Coody's actions, I think mistakes on the wastewater plant predate Coody. When I was in school in '98 and having to go to council meetings I remember the foot-dragging and delays in getting this project started well before Coody took office. I remember hearing things like "We're at 90 percent capacity right now" and thinking to myself, "Well, you better get cracking." But still it took years to get going. Given rising costs of construction materials, making the same mistake now on road infrastructure improvements will end up costing extra millions down the line as well.

cities experiencing rapid growth are more likely to choose impact fees as a funding method. for one thing, they aren't a tax, no matter what the campaign says, and they are based on capacity consumed just like the sewer impact fee. years of scientific research coming up with these trip averages is more solid to me than anecdotal reasoning by developers about how much extra traffic they will create. the fact Fayetteville is way over budget on the water treatment plant is the main reason they didn't seek more bond money for roads. Now, it can certainly be argued Fayetteville mismanaged the sewer plant process and now taxpayers are covering the cost of those mistakes, but it was the rapid development that caused such an urgent need for a new wastewater facility in the first place. would impact fees cause developers to be more conservative? probably, but isn't there already concern about an oversupply of unoccupied commerical real estate? I think anything that encourages smarter growth would have benefits down the line.

I had to write a story on it, so I did a bunch of research. http://www.arkansasbusiness.com/article.as...p;k=impact+fees The thing I learned about impact fees is they aren't new, they are everywhere across the country. Fayetteville didn't just pull this idea out of thin air and Arkansas is actually one of the most recent to legislate them. The constant is always developer opposition, so Fayetteville is not unique from that angle either. The problem I can see for developers is that the impact fee must be paid when the certificate of occupancy is issued. That means that even if a developer hasn't leased all 60,000 SF of office space, he still has to pay the impact fee when the building is completed. Then he has to fill the building before he can start recovering that impact fee from his leasees. If anything, I could see impact fees encouraging developers to build more wisely. As for infill, I was not trying to make a case against it. The Mall Avenue improvement is one of Fayetteville's unfunded road projects. More infill there is fine as long as the access is improved. If developers are going to keep infilling around the mall corridor, some sort of funding is needed to fix the snarls over there.

I understand what they are trying to do (suggesting the "tiered" system), but I don't see how it makes sense. How do you set the borders? What do you do when growth reaches the outskirts? Do you move the borders farther out? In-fill projects cause increased traffic, too, and they cause increased traffic where there is already a lot of traffic. For example, Mall Avenue needs to be expanded. Should a developer putting up a hotel or commerical center or a new restaurant have to pay less impact fees because it is infill when they are attracting more traffic to an already overwhelmed corridor? Does a hotel that generates $150K in sales tax really pay its share of a $5M stretch of road widening (as a hypothetical, say the Hampton Inn and the overloaded Exit 62)? Would an $8M hotel really not locate in Fayetteville because of $200K in impact fees? Especially a national chain that is used to paying impact fees all over the country? There already is a tiered system in place. Office/retail (which will generate more traffic) will have a higher impact fee than a warehouse (generating less traffic). The home impact fee is based on averages of how many daily vehicle trips originate from a home. These are averages, so a one-bedroom house (and who is building a one-bedroom house, really) and a five-bedroom house are given equal weight in the formulas. I think it is something like 4.6 trips per day for an average household. That seems about right for work, school and a trip to the store or out to dinner. I understand the developers' position, but from researching the subject I couldn't find studies showing impact fees had stifled growth (in cities already enjoying rapid growth, where impact fees are usually used as an alternative funding method). The independent studies I read concluded improved infrastructure attracts growth, it doesn't hinder it, and also increases the supply of buildable land. Florida has had impact fees for the longest of anyone (more than 20 years) and five of the top 10 American midsized cities in terms of job growth are in Florida in towns with much, much higher impact fees than proposed in Fayetteville. Buyers pay as much as $17K for a house and developers as much as $9-$10K per 1000 SF of retail space. The biggest impact is going to be lower land prices. Developers end up offering lower prices for raw land to offset the cost of impact fees. I just can't see how some impact fees are going to drive development out of the largest city in NWA. Either way, those road projects need funding somehow. The city can't keep going deeper into debt. There is a case to be made against impact fees, but I don't think it is the breathless, "we're going to kill Fayetteville" hyperbole going around now. This is a pretty good study on the subject from The Brookings Institution. "A conservative interpretation would at least claim that no discernable adverse economic impacts from impact fees could be found. A liberal interpretation of these model results would argue that the imposition of impact fees typically results in positive effects on local employment, at least in Florida during the 1990s." http://www.brook.edu/es/urban/publications...nimpactfees.pdf