The Little Rock Board of Directors voted Tuesday night to move forward with a study for a potential “deck park” over a large swath of Interstate 30 near downtown, even though funding to actually construct the park is uncertain.
Most of the study will be funded with a $2 million federal planning grant, but the city is responsible for another $500,000. The city board approved a resolution to spend $500,000 out of the city’s street fund to commission the Garver engineering firm to do the study. At-large Director Joan Adcock and Ward 3 Director Kathy Webb, who represents Hillcrest and the Heights, both voted against the resolution.
Adcock and Webb both noted that future funding to build the project was anything but guaranteed. Webb said dozens of constituents had contacted her to express concern about pushing the project forward when there wasn’t a clear path for funding its construction. Adock and Webb also said they were concerned about spending $500,000 on planning a new park when the city’s current parks are not being maintained and there are many street maintenance issues that need to be addressed.
Before the vote was taken, Adcock and Webb tried to get the issue voted on separately from the rest of the agenda but failed.
At-large Director Antwan Phillips also expressed some concern about the project but ultimately voted for the resolution. Phillips said he didn’t think Little Rock voters would be willing to foot the bill for the deck park, noting that voters rejected a sales tax in November that would have raised nearly $300 million for park upgrades over the next 10 years. But he said that he was encouraged by his wife to be optimistic and vote for the study even if future funding was uncertain.
At-large Director Dean Kumpuris supported the plan. After the vote Tuesday night, Kumpuris told the Arkansas Times that opponents are looking at it as “money that could go to something else,” but he said the city had made an agreement to spend the $500,000 for the planning process. The money was allocated for that purpose in the city’s 2025 budget, he said.
“If you don’t take initiative, if you don’t take a bold step to do something to further this city, then we’re done. And that’s it,” Kumpuris said.
Kumpuris and other city leaders envision a park connecting the two sides of downtown Little Rock that have been separated by I-30 for decades. The park would be a deck that extends over a swath of the freeway between the 6th Street and 9th Street overpasses and would run along I-30 Frontage Road.
Plans for a deck park have been swirling around Little Rock since 2023, when the Coalition of Little Rock Neighborhoods partnered with the city and the state to win the $2 million federal planning grant through a program that was created under President Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law. The park can be found in Little Rock’s “Downtown Master Plan,” which contains dozens of strategies for revitalizing the city center in coming years.
While the city received federal money to cover most of the planning and design process, the city agreed to put up half a million dollars out of the roughly $26 million annual street fund to cover the rest. But there are many questions over where the funding will come from to pay for the actual park if the city gets that far.
And the project could be very expensive. A comparable deck park in Dallas called Klyde Warren cost $112 million to build, requiring numerous sources of private and public funding working together to complete the project. Mayor Frank Scott Jr. has said that the deck park could take “hundreds of millions” to build, according to KARK-TV.
The program that funded the initial planning for the deck park was for the years 2022 through 2026, but the $1 billion allocated under the bipartisan infrastructure law has already been spent down. On Jan. 10 of this year, when the Biden’s administration was leaving office, the U.S. Department of Transportation pushed $544 million worth of planning and construction grants out to communities across the U.S.. But Little Rock’s proposed deck park wasn’t one of them.
The “One Big, Beautiful Bill” recently passed by congressional Republicans and signed by President Trump recently cut billions out of another potential funding source, the Neighborhood Access and Equity program.
In other news, the Little Rock city board also approved funding from Central Arkansas planning organization Metroplan for 29 new electric vehicles for the city.
Source
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
