Please read and compare and comment. I will add my comments soon on Austin's letter about Fran's column

Fran Alexander sums up biggest problem with Aspen Ridge/Hill Place site in the May 19, 2008, Northwest Arkansas Times

"Fayetteville is long overdue in identifying what functions the different types of land and soil within our urban area are performing and then making that information really matter in urban planning.
Generally we do not think "big picture "as a community in the physical sense, as a whole unit that will be seriously affected by the digging, filling, draining, dredging, scraping and building. We deflect discussions about land function because it is a really hot issue with property owners who want to utilize what they own in any way they desire, no matter how that use may impact neighbors or the town's taxpayers. And we certainly maintain a state of denial when it comes to what lies beneath the land.
A favorite word in city government, infrastructure, needs to be applied more broadly than for just defining roads, sewers, pipelines, etc. so that natural systems are recognized and accorded their importance in the physical place where we all live, and which is molded by our actions.
We spend most of our public decision-making at the planning commission and city council levels, where longterm planning like the 2025 City Plan is referenced regularly.
Often discussions that begin about land use and suitability wind up being about how our city plan calls for infill to avoid urban sprawl, as if these two topics were about the same thing. They are not. One is about the reality of what we have physically available in Fayetteville both above and below ground level. Discussing what we want to build has traditionally been more about design and scope than what the land can tolerate and still deliver to humans in its natural role in the environment. We need to get our heads and actions straight on these two very different, yet intertwined, issues."
Fran Alexander

Northwest Arkansas Times headline on Austin Rowser's letter attacking Fran Alexander, her column and the people who have built homes in the watershed in the past:

False environmentalism strikes again

Rowser's letter as it appeared in the May 25, 2008, Northwest Arkansas Times.
As a professional engineer and active community planner, I always find it interesting to read articles like Fran Alexander's "What Lies Beneath. "I have to admire the heartfelt sincerity and concern expressed by Ms. Alexander, but I am left dumbfounded by her ignorance and lack of knowledge or objective research on the topic of development in low areas.

This article is merely the musings of a sentimental emotionalist. Ms. Alexander attempts to assign human qualities to water; this could not be further from fact. Water is not "sneaky"; it obeys set laws from which it cannot deviate. Water has no motives, no personality, no malice, no love, no feelings; nothing but hydrogen and oxygen bound together and imprisoned by the laws of physics. The end result is completely predictable.

Lay people like Fran Alexander don't know the rules; lack of knowledge results in fear of the unknown. She claims that the area of the Hill Place development (formerly Aspen Ridge ) used to be a "sponge"and that the area recharged groundwater. However, it is well documented that the area is (and was prior to the Aspen Ridge debacle ) low-permeability clay and silt soil with shallow shale bedrock. These are very poor conditions for the benefits described in her article. The biggest problem with the area is not the current development (or even Aspen Ridge, for that matter ). It is the past development; the homes built in the past 100 years that are too close to College Branch and / or too low relative to the flood elevation.

Sadly, many of these property owners did not account for stream bank erosion, a natural process that existed eons before the first developer turned the first golden shovel. That is a fact; it is cold, harsh and insensitive, but a fact nonetheless.

Additionally, there are laws that must be followed to build in floodplain areas; Hill Place will be built in accordance with those laws and as such, will not impact downstream properties that are also built in accordance with the laws, both of the city of Fayetteville and of common sense. It's always easy to blame the developer because he's the new kid on the block. It's very sad to see the true motives of anti-growth sentiment get camouflaged by a false environmentalism.
Austin E. Rowser
Fayetteville