Ward 4 Red Oak Park meeting successful despite rain and lightning

The Government Channel video from Monday's Ward Four meeting will run once on Cox Cable Channel 16 today (Tuesday Feb. 11, 2007) and again late Wednesday evening, after the replay of the City Council session to set the agenda for the coming week and after after a replay of a week-old subcommittee meeting of the Telecom Board to discuss the performance report on the CAT channel 18.

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The exact time is impossible to predict, because the meetings before Ward 4 all occurred on Monday. The Planning Commission meeting replay will begin at 9 a.m. The Advertising and Promotion Commission meeting will follow right after that and then the Ward Four meeting. All deserve attention if anyone has time to monitor his TV all morning! I'll have them all on but can't promise to watch every minute. Everything after that on the schedule will simply follow in turn. At 6:30 p.m., the Planning Commission meeting will be replayed for the final time unless someone requests a third replay for next week. After the planning commission, one can watch an "environmental assessment of the relocation of a portion of U.S. 71 near Drake Field (that means the "finding again" of the old highway. However, in this case I believe the environmental assessment is about MOVING part of the highway or destroying a bunch of pavement and paving another nice stretch of moist-soil prairie. I haven't seen this production and can't guess what it is about. Is Drake Field being enlarged by the need to provide a longer runway for the commercial jets that are beginning to overburden XNA? Or has one of the rich and powerful (or one of the few developers still able to get a loan to build something new in our overbuilt area) come up with a new project? After that, the A&P meeting will be rerun again.
On Wednesday, the council agenda session reruns 9 a.m., followed by the Water and Sewer Committee meeting and then the PEG Center equipment committee meeting (Public, Educational and Government television center) replay from Feb. 12.
Early afternoon Wednesday, the so-called Tanglewood Creek cleanup video will be rerun. Tanglewood Creek apparently is "cityspeak" for Tanglewood Branch, which is a small branch that flows from Dickson Street and Maple, Lafayette and most other "downtown" Fayetteville areas south into the Spout Spring Branch, a major tributary of the Town Branch of the West Fork of the White River. Not everyone knows that Branch is a name applied to a small tributary of a river, creek or bayou. Therefore, "creek" gets mistakenly tacked onto after the world "Branch."

Another replay of the council agenda session begins at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, followed by the special committee meeting of the Telecom Board trying to decide how to evaluate the performance of the CAT channel (something pretty difficult to determine because CAT's mission is to allow very diverse programming instigated by the public and available at the whim of people who decide to produce a show or take the training to become CAT producers during a given period) will be replayed from last week. The second showing of the Ward Four meeting will follow. Afterward, the water and sewer committee is to be shown again, followed by a short City View program on our wonderful trails. Another night with no Sopranos or Closer? But those with intense interest in city government will have a chance to get a big dose this week.

On Cox channel 18, the CAT, Tuesday items for the Town Branch neighborhood show again but not early.
The earliest environmentally significant video begins at 1 p.m., focusing on the so-called Fayetteville Shale Play. This really has little to do with Fayetteville. The area now being explored for natural gas is mostly in north central Arkansas. But some local people are pretty concerned about the environmental disasters that come with any kind of mineral exploration. Oil and gas exploration processes are at least as harmful as coal mining! And some people in Northwest Arkansas have small shares in land about to be invaded by gas-exploration companies. So please check it out.
At 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Robert Williams of Hill Avenue spends 15 minutes talking about the changes brought to the Town Branch riparian zone and neighborhood by the developers of the now defunct Aspen Ridge project, and he reacts to the Jan. 12 meeting of the neighbors and Ward One residents with people planning to revive the development as Hill Place, an apartment complex for University of Arkansas students — the worst nightmare of some longtime residents of the neighborhood.
At 10:30 p.m. Tuesday, Deirdre Shepherd revisits the Town Branch and reminesces about her high-school and young adult days when walking the area now cleared of trees and topsoil by the Aspen Ridge developers meant seeing birds, and trees and wildflowers and a cleaner stream and, basically, a truly "green, sustainable area." Watch and find out what she really said. I am summarizing and maybe slightly distorting her words, maybe. But the wind was strong and the audio is almost as shaky as the cameraman. The editor and producer, Mike Lanphere, did a great job cutting out the worst parts. But he didn't expect any awards from editing that tape, just doing a favor for his neighborhood.

BRIEF SUMMARY OF WARD FOUR SPECIAL MEETING ON FUTURE OF RED OAK PARK

The WARD FOUR meeting between 7 and 8:30 p.m. Monday Feb. 11, 2008, got something accomplished. The relatively small group who attended — during a significant thunderstorm with the threat of ice to follow — agreed (mostly quietly) that the two City Council members representing Ward Four — Aldermen LIONELD JORDAN and SHIRLEY LUCAS — should go ahead and bring up to the full council a Red Oak Park plan that would include allowing the Game and Fish plan prepared by Dave Evans to go forward as soon as it is practical for the park division of the city Department of Parks and Recreation to begin work.
I imagine the park people and street people and whoever else is involved will have to get the downtown square back into shape first. Half the sidewalk around the square has been demolished in the past two weeks for renovation and even some small trees and many plantings and planting boxes are gone. Earthday and Springfest and the Fayetteville Farmer's Market will be coming up sooner than one could imagine while sitting here at 1:45 a.m. on Feb. 12, 2008, with sleet hitting the upstairs windows!

Additionally, JORDAN and LUCAS agreed that the plan should go forward with a plan to continue to provide information about the value of rain gardens to residents of the surrounding subdivisions and to make a volunteer-led effort to bring about the creation of enough new areas where water is encouraged to soak in upstream (to the south) so that the speed and amount of water rapidly reaching the park during heavy rain would no longer create a dangerous flash flood in the park.

My plan would be the same but preferably in the opposite order. Save the money and keep the removal of trees and widening of the stream bed until the rain-garden plan is executed. Then we will know whether any or how many trees have to be removed to "save the trees."

But I would have voted for the combined plan if I lived in the neighborhood (and got to vote) and used that park. And especially if I lived downstream and was watching my land be covered by debris and gravel every time the stream flow is heavy.
Widening the channel and trying to force the stream to meander will help. However, the land is so steep that it would take pretty big reservoirs in the flow area rather than a batch of boulders and small channel changes to make a real difference. Dave Evans' Stream Team plan works great where there is enough space to create WIDE meanders and where the drop in the stream is relatively gradual. And it will work fine during light rain such as we had last night (Monday evening during and after the meeting).
One has to remember, however, that piling rocks in the Arkansas River, White River, Red River and Mississippi River to redirect the flow is a specialty of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. And the corps frequently has to redo that activity in those big rivers.

The stream through Red Oak Park is different in several ways. It is dry 99 percent of the time. If you don't go there early this morning you may not find even a small flow. At this minute, 2:07 a.m. Tuesday, there is probably a lot more flow than when I visited at about 9 p.m. Monday. Precipitation, frozen and wet, continues to fall where I live in south Fayetteville.
Also, the stream at Red Oak Park is narrow, and it is extremely steep and the bedrock is exposed for the full length of the park because of the past few years of erosion. As in the case of snowfall and other matters of major significance to human beings and Mother Nature, one can't predict how much satisfaction will come from this renovation project or how long its effects will last.

We may not have enough extended periods of heavy rain in 2008 to create flashfloods that would continue the damaging erosion of the park. Everyone knows that 2004 was the year that most streambed erosion occurred everywhere in the area. Multi-inch rains of up to 6 inches in far less than 24 hours occurred three times in this area during 2004, once in the last week of April and twice in the first week of July. A story in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette documented the surprise of people living in a high-dollar subdivision on the White River upstream from Beaver Lake when the lake itself rose into their ground-level rooms. Their title-companies hadn't explained at closing on their purchases of their homes that flooding of the area would be permitted any time the Corps of Engineers decided the flood gates at Beaver Dam needed to be closed to protect property in far north Arkansas and southern Missouri from White River flooding.

We may see the year that Beaver Lake gets so little rain that we'll be like Atlanta, Georgia, wondering where the reservoir went, and the rural people in the surrounding four counties will be wondering why they disconnected the pump from their old well or pond or spring and made themselves dependent on an artificial, manmade storage facility and miles of pipes. So, whatver we do now may be sufficient for some time. Maybe nothing will actually be needed for years!

However, in the four meetings (three Ward 4 meetings and one council meeting) I have attended and spoken about the problem, I have been the ONLY person who has volunteered to walk the neighborhood, knock on doors and hand out copies of a brochure on rain gardens and try to explain why they need to keep the water on their property. It has been said that people in some of the subdivisions there are concerned about saving the trees to allow the area to continue to serve as a nature park. But I haven't seen anyone express this concern since a few appeared at a council meeting months ago. If someone knows any of those people, please bring them to this Web log and let's hear it from them!

We first talked publicly about ways to keep the water where it falls to stop the flash floods nearly six months ago. A video shown a few times on Government channel showed people walking the park and discussing trying to save it long ago!

If the neighborhood representatives and property-owners' associations in the area haven't turned up a few people willing to make the effort to put in rain gardens or at least speak at the many public meetins, I don't know that I would benefit by starting to canvass the neighborhod on my own — so many problems, so little time.

I went to check the flow in the park after the meeting. I hope others did, too. There were some hard bursts of rain; but, as of 11 p.m. there had not been enough extended periods of heavy rain to create the kind of flash flood that has created the problem of major stream-bed erosion in the past.

So my photos from last night don't show a dangerous flow. If I could stay up all night and sit in my car on New Bridge Drive or Road or Street until dawn, I might get photos that would show the situation well enough to get people interested. But it may not rain any more tonight.

So, if you are one of the neighbors who has commented or at least found and read
Red Oak Park — Fayetteville, Arkansas blogspot
and maybe looked at our photos on Flickr (see list of links of interest at right for more Red Oak Park photos, please share this site and offer your comments here. Just click on the word "comments" below this post on either site and don't hold back. Say what you think.

It it is raining hard when you wake up, please take a camera to New Bridge and photograph it yourself. I will assist you in posting your photos if you e-mail me or comment on either this site or the Red Oak Park site that you have photos. The coding is simple to copy and paste if you have photos online elsewhere.

If not, the best thing would be to email a photo or two and let me post them. I promise to do that as soon as they appear in my e-mail.

Shirley Lucas, Lioneld Jordan and the rest of the Fayetteville City Council have patiently waited for interested citizens and the park division of the Fayetteville Department of Parks and Recreation to offer a reasonable plan. If this is the best we can do, then let it go to the council and let's get to work on it.