At least three members of the Benton City Council are not convinced that a recently defeated ordinance limiting truck stops in the city is a dead issue.
“I hope that it will be looked at again,” Alderman Bill Donnor, who represents Ward 3, said today. “I don’t think it’s a dead issue.”
Alderman Jerry Ponder, the city’s other Ward 3 representative, said he also hopes the issue will resurface. However, Ponder was more vocal in criticizing the recent council action.
The ordinance’s defeat was enabled, in part, by the absence of two aldermen who previously have supported it. David Sparks is receiving treatment at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and Doug Stracener was out of town on business. Their absences automatically count their votes as “no.”
Voting against the measure Monday night were Aldermen Larry Wolf, Greg White, Joe Lee Richards and Brad Moore. Moore is a member of the city’s Advertising and Promotion Commission and White previously served on that panel.
Ponder, in talking about the ordinance’s defeat, said he “found our actions ... to be quite puzzling.”
“Those very same people who have been proponents of the A&P Commission ... and its programs for continuing to market our city and attracting new retail business ... voted to kill this ordinance,” Ponder said.
“Obviously, we need additional revenues to fund upgrades in personnel, equipment, new fire stations and a litany of other things that have to come from commercial tax revenues,” he said. “Obviously, retail is our highest and best use of our geographic and demographic attributes, and what is most suited for our available workforce.”
Ponder said the council vote on the ordinance was “totally inconsistent with prior action.”
He noted that the proposed ordinance would have had no impact on Pilot Truck Stop on Alcoa Road or the vacant BP Truck Stop property located adjacent to Brown’s Country Restaurant & Store on the north service road of Interstate 30 “unless there was a change in the status of those businesses initiated by current of future owners of those properties.”
In a previous meeting in which the ordinance was discussed, Lloyd Brown, owner of BP Truck Stop, which is closed, objected to the ordinance. After hearing Brown’s concerns, the council returned the ordinance to the Community Services Committee, which modified the time constraints it would have imposed on existing businesses dispensing diesel fuel, increasing the limits from 30 days to six years.
“It certainly is difficult to figure out the thought process [of aldermen] or motivating factors sometimes,” Ponder said.
“Whether we like it or not, a truck stop is not the most conducive venue to attract adjacent commercial businesses and certainly not residential growth. When you consider the percentage of total sales from a truck stop, and the dollars that are attributable to fuel and therefore flowing to state and federal coffers, the economic impact for the city is very minimal. Those are just facts.
“While folks may not agree with my line of thinking either, it’s at least grounded in tangible fact,” Ponder said.
He added that he considers the council action on this issue as “a complete 180.”
By way of explanation, he pointed out that the council recently appropriated $70,000 to complete a retail study survey and allocated funding for three representatives of the city to attend a week-long retail seminar in Las Vegas to obtain information on how the city can compete for retail business and make contacts.
He brought up the fact that Benton lost its attempt to bring the Alcoa Exchange with its Target anchor store into an area that was totally in the Benton city limits. Most of the shopping center is in Bryant, though some of the businesses there is within Benton’s city limits.
“We sit back and watch the city of Bryant recognize a $150,000 gain in sales tax revenue collections the very first month that the Alcoa exchange is open in a strip center that you know very well would likely be located in Benton on the other side of Interstate 30 if it weren’t for an existing truck stop, and then we kill legislation directly related to preventing this type of situation from occurring again.”
Ponder said he could “find no logic in that as evidenced by my vote on the first reading, as well as Monday evening.”
“Hopefully our timing will be better next time,” he added. “This is an important issue.”
In meetings in which the truck stop ordinance was discussed, Stracener, who heads the council’s Economic Development Committee, and City Attorney Brent Houston have pointed out that the city has received numerous complaints about businesses like Pilot Truck Stop that create traffic congestion and where pollutants are emitted from commercial vehicles as their engines are idled.
Today, Stracener, like Ponder and Donnor, said he hopes the truck stop ordinance is not dead.
Stracener referred to the city’s current zoning ordinance.
“The way our current zoning ordinance is set up, a truck stop could go in any commercial highway zone, which theoretically could be in the middle of Military Road, or the Benton Parkway” he said. “The council or the Planning Commission would have no say in it because of the current zoning language.”
Stracener said he agrees that the original ordinance was too restrictive. “It was modified to allow a truck stop in a heavy industrial area ... which in Benton would be Airlane Drive, which is able to accommodate that type of traffic.
Stracener said he believes the city’s “whole area of zoning needs to be refined. It’s pretty wide open.”
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