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Once More, with Feeling (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

3 min read

Last week, Arkansas Business published a second, detailed story about construction irregularities at the Chicopee plant in North Little Rock. The folks at Polymer Group Inc. of North Charleston, S.C., the company that owns the plant, are probably starting to feel put-upon. After all, they aren’t doing anything that the city of North Little Rock hasn’t let them do.

PGI received a building permit — we’re still not sure exactly how, since most of the documentation that was filed last year has apparently disappeared — for a 57,000-SF addition to the plant at 1301 E. Eighth Ave. The company is simultaneously renovating 200,000 SF of the existing plant with no paper trail on file whatsoever.

Maybe that’s because it was so easy to get around the rules in the first place. The City of North Little Rock did, in fact, reject the first request for a building permit. After all, the site plan that was filed with the application was clearly marked as preliminary. The out-of-state engineer hadn’t even signed it.

But the plans that were eventually used to get the permit weren’t complete either (57,000 SF with no plumbing whatsoever?), and demolition work had apparently started long before the permit was granted. (Picky, picky, picky.)

If the city of North Little Rock didn’t take notice when senior editor George Waldon’s first story about PGI’s permitting problems was published back in October, I think it has now. In fact, Mayor Patrick Henry Hays has assured me that he’ll look into it.

“We do try to be business friendly,” Hays said, referring to the article’s suggested reason for the city’s less-than-stringent enforcement of development standards, “but we don’t try to avoid our responsibility.”

Maybe the mayor will be able to learn more than we could about how PGI got the building permit in the first place. And why the $2 million valuation and, therefore, the permit fee paid to the city seem so low. And why a company that didn’t want to get proper permission seemed so confident that it would receive forgiveness.

***

After our first Chicopee story, a lawyer representing PGI called to complain — halfheartedly, it seemed to me — that Waldon’s reporting technique was unethical. It was Waldon himself who filed a complaint against the company with the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality, the lawyer informed me.

That seemed questionable to me, too, and not much like something an experienced journalist like Waldon would do.

As it turns out, Waldon had called ADEQ to ask whether PGI had filed for appropriate permits under the Clean Air Act. When no paperwork was found, the ADEQ — having no procedure for logging inquires — filed a report naming Waldon as the complainant and sent an inspector to the site to check out the goings-on. The inspection that followed found no problems — primarily, we believe, because PGI had already removed the evidence that at least two small outbuildings had been demolished. (A second inspection resulted in a letter of warning for removing a section of roof without first inspecting for asbestos.)

So what we had here was a lawyer calling to complain that a reporter had been unethical for trying to determine whether the lawyer’s client had followed the law, which it clearly hadn’t. It is unfortunate that the ADEQ has no procedure for logging inquiries other than filing an official complaint, but I’m certainly not going to apologize for the fact that Waldon asked the questions in the first place.

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The implications of the Chicopee story are especially worrisome. Is it the exception or the rule? Is North Little Rock routinely winking at basic permitting procedure? Are only “nit-picky” issues like asbestos removal and compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act being ignored? Or could structural cost-cutting be conveniently overlooked as well? Is it merely coincidental that the most infamous structural flaw in the state — the cracked raker beam at Alltel Arena — is also in North Little Rock?

(Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. She can be reached via e-mail at gmoritz@abpg.com.)

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