Plans to build a community plaza on the site of an old service station at the corner of 6th and Main Street have hit a snag after bidding came in over budget.
The City of Pine Bluff’s Economic and Community Development Department allocated $400,000 for the project, but the lowest bid from contractors was $550,000, ECDD Director Larry Matthews said Tuesday. The higher costs could see the department approach the city for more funding or instead do the project in phases, Matthews said.
“We want it to be a finished project to present to the city and compliment the new library [to be built downtown],” Matthews said in a meeting of the City Council’s Economic and Community Development Committee.
The property is 601 S. Main Street, which next to the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff’s business incubator. The city received a $200,000 grant in 2014 from the Environmental Protection Agency to clean up the site and cover it with concrete. The city tore down a building onsite and removed a waste oil tank. However service islands attached to underground pipes remain, and the site is still contaminated with arsenic, barium and other metals.
The ECDD planned to add federal Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funding to construct the plaza, but costs such as disposing of contaminated soil came in higher than expected, Matthews said.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
ECDD Assistant Director Lori Walker said the department would determine a final cost, then either ask the city for more funding or do the project in phases. The first phase would include construction of features such as semicircular landscaping facing 6th and Main Streets. The landscaped sections would have masonry walls that pedestrians could sit on, Walker said.
Plans for an arbor on the south boundary of the lot, and for a feature wall to display outdoor art, could be delayed to Phase Two, Walker said.
The site will include a place for sculpture and a kiosk for educational exhibits dedicated to prominent entrepreneurs of Pine Bluff’s past, such as Entergy founder Harvey Couch; industrialist Joseph Bocage, who helped rebuild Pine Bluff after the Civil War; and Walter “Wiley” Jones, who was born into slavery but became one of the wealthiest African-Americans in the south. Walker said she hoped local businesses would sponsor the two sites, and that the plaza could serve as inspiration to local entrepreneurs in the business community.
-Walker also received input from city aldermen on what to include in a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the proposed urban renewal agency, which the council voted to activate at its August 7 meeting. An urban renewal agency is a public entity created to transform blighted urban areas into productive property. Such agencies typically possess powers including eminent domain and the ability to take out bonds. Pine Bluff created an urban renewal agency in 1961 and dissolved it roughly a decade later.
Walker said Mayor Shirley Washington would appoint five people to oversee the urban renewal agency. The agency’s first act would be to approve an MOU that clarifies how the agency will interact with other agencies of the city. Walker and the ECDD will be putting a draft version of the MOU together for approval by the council.
“The thing we want to do is set a framework,” Walker said. “If we’re going to do urban planning, it includes our planning and zoning and economic and community development department. That’s so everybody’s on the same page. My whole thought is this needs to be a team effort, it’s not us-versus-them.”
Matthews said it made sense for the ECDD to prepare the MOU.
“Some agency will have to be the connector, the contact [between the urban renewal agency and the rest of the city departments],” Matthews said. “We don’t have a problem with Economic and Community and Development being the contact, since we have all the connections with other agencies.”