Editor,
City Council’s endorsement of new trails in Lake Leatherwood Park certainly reflects a broad community support for vitalizing our local economy while enhancing our area’s attraction to the growing sector of mountain bike enthusiasts seeking exciting facilities. The Parks Commission and its hard working Trails Committee gained the City’s approval for its Trails Master Plan in part from its goal to develop “public notification procedures and a public hearing process for trail development.
This plan from 2014 makes no mention of expanding downhill challenge trails and includes no information about extreme sports skills or needs for a Gravity trail concept.
This plan has not been sufficiently updated to reflect how a coordination of various city agencies are involved in the process of trail development and how those services will be engaged in the process. There is no provision for creating and approving ordinances to form additional Park property assets by expanding a Park property or the expansion of the City’s municipal limits.
How then does this quickly formulated “project” comply as some form of exception to the Trails Master Plan and gather hasty endorsement by City Council without a true public hearing based upon a series of well considered informational presentations about the full scope of the assessment, design, construction, maintenance, and funding involved in this new activity?
Shouldn’t the Planning Commission and other review scenarios be engaged to fully explore the larger land use issues this “boom” promises? Perhaps a Comprehensive Master [Plan] for the City of Eureka Springs would better guide us through our consideration to embrace and implement this new facility’s imprint on our landscape.
Christopher Fischer