In Service to Our Community

Hot Springs and Garland County Arkansas is one of the nicest places on earth to live and work but our present city leaders continue to fail to plan and have taken actions that have serious negative impacts on the growth, progress, safety, and welfare of our citizens. 

As an example, one recent action (May 7, 2007) by four of our seven city directors was a vote to NOT allow the citizens of Hot Springs a vote for an expenditure of approximately $14,000,000 to build a new city hall.  Those directors are: Tom Daniel, Steve Smith, Carroll Weatherford, and Elaine Jones.  The only public input was a hasty and brief "public hearing" held during the same meeting.  No financial spreadsheet justifying such an indebtedness to the public was provided.  In fact, six of the directors even voted to declare an "emergency" so that bonds could be sold  in 30 days.  The Arkansas Constitution and courts describe such emergencies as issues that have immediate affects on the health, safety, or well-being of the public.  We could not see how an immediate sale of bonds or a new city hall can constitute a true emergency.

Another extraordinary action taken by the city board at the same meeting was to change the name "Franchise Tax" to "Franchise Fee" in the City Tax Code.  This was an all-too-obvious effort to disguise their real actions and support their claim that taxes would not be impacted.

We took no position either for or against the construction of a new city hall but most citizens questioned the priority of such a large expenditure when many other areas that do directly affect the health, safety, and welfare of the public need addressing.

For example, if you drive the Central Avenue portion of Arkansas Scenic Highway 7 from its beginning to its end, you cannot help but notice that there is only one small 3 or 4 block section that is not 4 lanes wide.  This is the section where a small selfish group of business owners managed to persuade our city board to close half of our only north-south thoroughfare so that they can have free on-street parking for themselves and their patrons.  This is also the portion that local residents refer to as the "bottleneck" for obvious reasons.

On June 19, 2006, four of our city board members arrogantly ignored the pleas of most citizens, a petition with 650 signatures, and substantial factual evidence by voting to make the 2 lane bottleneck with parking a permanent condition.  Those 4 members who have onceagain proven to have no concern for the safety and well-being of our citizens are: Tom Daniel, Steve Smith, Carroll Weatherford, and Elaine Jones. Click on the names above and you will see directors who are not representing your best interests.  

The track record of the above 4 officials is not good.  Note that these are mostly the same city directors and the same special interest group who decided that our new multi-million dollar downtown parking garage needed a waterfall and some rusting statues more than we needed a street to get to it.  That was their justification for closing Bath Street which could have fed traffic directly to parking.  Click to See Map 

If you are interested in knowing what factual information was provided to but ignored by the city board in this action, the following is a short summary which pointed out that a "Yes" vote to keep the 2 traffic lanes with parking would mean: 

1) Violating the primary goals of Focus Garland County - Vision 2010 and the Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) plan. 

2) Violating the city's own comprehensive plan and code which requires all of Central Avenue to be four lanes. 

3) Ignoring the huge negative impact to the economy of the city and recommendations made by the Director of the Hot Springs Convention and Visitors Bureau.  (see letter)

4) Ignoring the increase of accidents in the bottleneck area from none before the bottleneck to almost 40 during the first 6 months the bottleneck existed. 

5) Ignoring statistics which prove two of the top three locations for pedestrian accidents occur "when pedestrians are entering or existing parked vehicles" and "emerging from in front of or from behind parked vehicles." 

6) Ignoring the input and comments from EMS, Sheriff, Police, and Fire departments.

7) Ignoring the City's 2003 Citizen Survey by UALR which found that a large majority of Hot Springs citizens considers the city suffers greatly from congested traffic conditions.

8) Ignoring the fact that the vast majority of citizens are opposed to the bottleneck. Some 650 additional names on petitions were provided to the city board.

The actual meeting handout is available by clicking here or by checking the meeting minutes.

You will find that this website makes no apologies for taking the position that our city needs leaders who will cease actions such as closing streets and traffic lanes to accommodate the whims of their special interest friends.  We do not apologize for believing that elected officials should represent the wishes of the people who elected them rather than preventing citizens from speaking at public functions.  We strongly believe that the primary function of any public official is to protect the safety and welfare of the public.  It is certainly not their function to authorize bottlenecks that impede traffic, cause tourists and locals to avoid downtown, and impose life-threatening delays on our police, sheriff, fire department, and EMS.

Our primary objective is to stop this insanity.  We are now past the initial project of helping city leaders understand that our community must adapt and support the inevitable growth of metropolitan Hot Springs including properly planning for the necessity for handling additional traffic.  The voices of our citizens continue to be ignored.  We are now appealing to the Arkansas State Department of Highways and Transportation (ADHT) and other state agencies.  We hope that the safety related information we provide will be more seriously considered at the state level but we must be fully prepared to take appropriate steps for placing these issues on future ballots.  If we discover that neither the city or state is concerned about the public's safety and well-being, a referendum could prove to be the only guarantee that the public will be listened to. 

Our members are currently working to develop future plans and would appreciate your help in this endeavor.  Please E-mail us to join this most important effort. editor@Hot-Springs-Metro.org

     A Note About Our Representatives

• IF YOU READ OUR NEWSPAPER ADS, you already know that we took a strong position against the incumbent city directors including the mayor during the last election.  The reason you didn't see director Edwards in our ad was because he actually voted against the downtown "bottleneck" and demonstrated that he does try to vote in the best interests of his constituents rather than for special interests or self-serving interests as is apparent for most of the directors.  Director Edwards has done a fantastic job over the years and, in fact, received the honor of being selected as City Director of the Year for the entire state of Arkansas.  He certainly does not deserve the harsh criticisms constantly directed at him by rude directors.

• We gave Bush a bit of a break by informing you that he only voted to create the "bottleneck"  downtown once because he wasn't there during the second vote.  Also, someone asked how can we vote against director Weatherford when no one ran against him.  We recommended a write-in vote for Scooby Doo and Scooby did get some votes.  Following is the ad we ran prior to and on election day.

• No local organization currently holds our elected representatives accountable for their actions.  It is our intention to be an apolitical completely non-partisan website.  Once we more fully develop a readership base, we do expect to select an annual best and worst elected official.  Perhaps, even on a monthly basis, if warranted.

• Our prime focus will always be to keep you, the citizens of the Hot Springs Metropolitan area fully informed. As you can see by our editor's letter to the editor (click here), we are usually not allowed to speak at city board meetings so we have developed this website to allow the public a voice.  We encourage your participation and will publish your comments on our "Discussion" page which is a forum designed solely so that you can make your voice heard and your opinion considered.  We will sign your letters however you sign them.  To really help us, we encourage you to become a regular contributor or join the Garland Good Government Group which is a registered, non-profit organization.  You can also write us at Hot Springs Metro, Inc. - PO Box 22084 - Hot Springs, AR 71903 or e-mail us at editor@Hot-Springs-Metro.org.

• NEXT STEPS:  Now that our directors have stuck us with additonal debt, increase fees, "dysfunction junction," the downtown bottleneck, and have closed the street to our nice parking garage, one of our options is to replace our directors and put a stop to the "good ol' boy" insider control of our city.  We are also still working to gather information and ask for opinions from the Arkansas Attorney General and explanations from the Arkansas Highway Department as to why our directors are allowed to violate their own city comprehensive plan and not properly plan for our city's growth.  Other possible actions are also being developed.  Let us have your recommendations.

• Most of work was devoted to helping form a good government or watchdog type group which would promote voter participation and inform the public of candidate positions and the real impact of future referendum issues.  To this aim, we anticipate the group would host local debates where future candidates also answer questions directly from the public.  Our principal goal is to always encourage fair, open, transparent, representative government. When the apparent reason individuals run for office is to serve selfish interests or self-serving interests such as taking multiple annual vacations at the taxpayer's expense, we must expose them.  

• The group is now formed but it is vitally important that you continue to let them have your thoughts.  The new group that was formed is the Garland Good Government Group and you can join them at a meeting or on their website www.GGGGNews.com.  We hope you will commit to be part of the solution for our community because citizens who remain silent can only contribute to the problem by allowing our leaders to continue catering to selfish or self-serving interests rather than the best interest of all of our citizens.

• This website is no longer directly affiliated with the Garland Good Government Group but will continue so that you, the citizen, will have a forum where your views, concerns, complaints, critiques, commentary, and compliments will be published for all to see.

E-mail your comments to

Editor@Hot-Springs-Metro.org