Barbara Moorman's questions about Southpass project

I would like to understand why the city did not put the annexation machine into motion for South Pass directly. If they had done that, a public vote would have been required, and a yes vote by 2/3 of the city council. Instead, the city let the developers buy the land before the council had voted approval of the zoning, the annexation, the cost share, etc., thus throwing the whole contract into questionable disorder. (The developers filed a petition, as owners, for annexation with the county in March 2008. The county produced an annexation order for city approval and the council okayed the annexation in November, but according to the contract this should have happened before the purchase not after it.)

Why no public vote? Because the city allowed annexation by owners’ petition. Since it was supposedly the city that wanted the annexation for its regional park, the logical move was for the city itself to annex. Obviously a vote in the general election November 4 could have been had without huge additional expenditure, but no.

Well, some people have wondered why the developers bought that land before the contract required them to. Maybe the public vote requirement is part of the reason? (For details of procedure, see Arkansas Code 14-40 and also city 2025 Plan 12.3.3.)

I'm not an attorney and I can't vote in Fayetteville. (Not even after annexation because the city violated its own guidelines and annexed around several landowners, creating an unincorporated island.) And I don’t belong to the strangely quiescent 501c3 local enviro groups. And yet I believe I see the city disregarding its own guidelines to destroy, for the profit and glory of a few, the natural environment it claims with fanfare to be preserving.

Barbara Moorman