Arnold City Council members voted Oct. 3 on three resolutions intended to make clear their stances on the end of the controversial Arnold Parkway road project, the future of a transportation development district and area homeowners’ ability to negotiate the sale of their homes even though the property is no longer needed for the abandoned road project.
The members voted 7-0 to affirm the termination of the Arnold Parkway project, a proposed two-lane, 2-mile road connecting Hwy. 141 and Richardson Road that has been scrapped. The project, which drew instant pushback from the public, would have required the acquisition of 38 homes, multiple businesses and a portion of the Water Tower Place Shopping Center.
The announcement of the road project spurred a group of Arnold residents to gather signatures in an attempt to hold recall elections for every elected city official. The group stopped its recall effort on Sept. 27.
City officials announced on Aug. 26 that it was not going forward with the road project but decided to vote on a resolution to emphasize the end of the project.
“I am relieved to be able to pass the resolution that hopefully puts people at ease that the Parkway project is definitely dead,” Ward 1 Councilman Jason Fulbright said.
In addition, the council voted 6-1 against a resolution that would call upon the Arnold Retail Corridor Transportation Development District (ARC TDD) Board of Directors to dissolve the TDD and stop collecting a 1-cent sales tax from customers at businesses in the TDD. Ward 3 Councilman Mark Hood cast the vote in favor of requesting the ARC TDD be dissolved.
“It is simply what the people asked for; I can’t say it any differently,” Hood said. “That is what they have asked for all along.”
The council also voted 7-0 to urge the ARC TDD to continue to purchase properties in the Key West Estates subdivision, made up of Harrys Lane, Christy Drive, Big Bill Road, Ridge Drive and Lone Star Drive, if those owners want to voluntarily sell their property.
The resolution also said City Administrator Bryan Richison may continue to work with the ARC TDD to purchase property from owners interested in selling their land as funds become available.
Richison said the ARC TDD had already purchased nine homes and a business in that area for a total of $2,321,000.
He said 14 additional homeowners have expressed interest in selling their houses to the ARC TDD and estimated the cost to purchase those homes at $3,413,000, adding that the ARC TDD’s 1 percent sales tax may generate enough revenue to complete the purchases by May 2025.
“It is helpful to have clear direction from the council so there are no questions about what the city staff should or should not be working on,” Richison said.
He said the previously purchased properties and any properties purchased in the future will be owned by the ARC TDD.
“My understanding of the law is that once a TDD has completed a project, it is required to transfer it to the local transportation authority (the city or county),” he said. “Until then, the TDD can continue to own the property.”
Fulbright said a decision is needed about what to do with the purchased homes, and Richison said he would recommend they be demolished.
“I cannot speak for the council on this issue since I do not believe there has ever been a discussion with them about it,” he said. “From a city staff perspective, we do not have the expertise or personnel to be landlords or property managers. The ARC TDD itself does not have any employees. For that reason, I would recommend the homes be demolished. Ultimately, this will be a decision the ARC TDD board makes.”
Mayor Ron Counts said he is comfortable with the council’s declarations on the defunct road project and related issues that brought numerous residents to City Council meetings over the past two months.
The Water Tower owners also filed a lawsuit against the city to try to stop the project, and the ARC TDD has filed a countersuit.
“I think people are about as happy as they are going to get,” Counts said.
Ward 2 Councilman Bill Moritz was absent from the meeting.
ARC TDD files countersuit against Arnold shopping plaza owners
A lawyer representing the Arnold Retail Corridor Transportation District (ARC TDD) and others named in a lawsuit filed by the owners of the Water Tower shopping plaza has filed an answer to the lawsuit, as well as a counterclaim to the suit, court records show.
Stephen Rovak of the Dentons law firm of St. Louis represents the ARC TDD and filed the response and countersuit on Oct. 2, according to court records.
The Water Tower owners filed a lawsuit on Aug. 12 in the Jefferson County Circuit Court to stop the city of Arnold from building a proposed road called the Arnold Parkway that would have connected the city’s northern and southern retail districts. The lawsuit also called for the ARC TDD and the Arnold Triangle Transportation Development District to be dissolved.
Funding for the road project would have come from the ARC TDD.
In Rovak’s answer and counterclaim, he said the Water Tower’s lawsuit “was filed as part of an ill-conceived but well-orchestrated plan to derail a project that had the prior approval of many key parties and relevant government agencies. It contains grossly incorrect information when accurate information was publicly available and would have been obvious to anyone bothering to review the open and public files of the Circuit Court of Jefferson County.”
The counterclaim calls for the lawsuit to be dismissed and for the Water Tower shopping plaza owners to pay damages to the ARC TDD in excess of $100,000.
“We have received the filing and are reviewing,” Water Tower spokesman Lance LeComb said on Oct. 4.
In the countersuit, Rovak said the Water Tower owner’s lawsuit was never served to any of the defendants. Court records show the lawsuit was put on hold on Aug. 14.
“Instead, as soon as it was filed it was circulated as part of a public relations campaign, replete with a press release and organized meetings,” the counter lawsuit said. “But as Plaintiffs were well aware, the mere existence of the Petition and its allegations as to the legality of Defendants’ actions (related to the) Outer Road Project would cripple its financing either by creating such uncertainty that it would be impossible to find underwriters for bond offerings, or if underwriters could be found, by making bond sales or other financing vehicles prohibitively expensive. Moreover, it would cause such uncertainty as to make the financing of other public works projects for the benefit of the public difficult if not impossible.”
The Water Tower owners held a community meeting on Aug. 15 at Studio C in Arnold, one of the businesses in the complex the ARC TDD would have needed to acquire and demolish for the road project. About 60 people attended the meeting.
Attorney Dave Roland of the Freedom Center of Missouri, who has experience researching and litigating cases involving governmental entities using eminent domain to acquire properties for public use, was at the meeting.
Roland told the crowd that eminent domain cases sometimes can’t be won in court but can be won by getting the public behind the cause, making it a political issue that becomes “impossible” for the governmental entity to continue pursuing.
“One of the most important things is getting the public on our side,” he said.
The counter lawsuit said, “The widespread publicity of these false allegations has made governance of the City of Arnold, with respect to public infrastructure works, unnecessarily difficult.”
Along with the ARC TDD, the Water Tower owner’s lawsuit named the city of Arnold, Arnold Acquisition Company, Triangle TDD, City Administrator Bryan Richison, Ward 4 Councilman Gary Plunk, Community Development director David Bookless, City Treasurer Dan Kroupa and Mayor Ron Counts as defendants.
Richison is the executive director of the ARC TDD Board of Directors, and Plunk, Bookless, Kroupa and Counts are the board’s members. Only board members vote on actions taken by the ARC TDD.
The Water Tower owners’ lawsuit claimed the Arnold Acquisition Company was formed by the city of Arnold to secretly acquire property for the city’s development project. The countersuit said that claim is “nonsense,” and the Arnold Acquisition Company “was formed on May 12, 2021, by a single individual, without regard to the relevant projects, and was not a secret to anyone, and was not ‘caused to be formed’ by the city of Arnold.”
The Triangle TDD was formed in 2006 for the development of the Arnold Commons and Arnold Crossroads shopping plazas.
In the countersuit, Rovak disputes the Water Tower owners’ claims in the lawsuit that the Triangle TDD is no longer active.
“Triangle TDD’s projects are the ARC TDD’s projects, and the Triangle TDD must exist so long as the ARC TDD exists, as Triangle TDD provides the basis for governance of the ARC TDD, per Missouri statutes,” the suit says.
The countersuit also says the Water Tower lawsuit calling for the ARC TDD and Triangle TDD to be dissolved is impossible and illegal. It also says the 1-cent sales tax customers pay at businesses in the ARC TDD cannot be repealed.
The countersuit says a district can’t be abolished if there are authorized but not yet completed projects in the documents pursuant to which it was formed. Some of the projects not completed include building a road connecting Hwy. 141 to Michigan Avenue and improvements to Jeffco Boulevard, Hwy. 141 and other publicly accessible roadways, parking facilities and transportation-related improvements benefiting the district.
The countersuit also says the two TDDs cannot be dissolved because they were named in the Water Tower lawsuit, and the 1 percent sales tax cannot be repealed because that would impair “the district’s ability to repay any liabilities which it has incurred, money which it has borrowed or revenue bonds, notes or other obligations which it has issued or which have been issued by the commission or any local transportation authority to finance any project or projects, and here there are just such liabilities, notes and bonds, the repayment of which will be impaired to the detriment of the public as well as the defendant TDDs.”
The ARC TDD is required to make an annual contribution of $200,000 to Arnold to help pay off tax increment finance (TIF) bonds for the Arnold Commons and Arnold Crossroads developments.
The countersuit also challenges the Water Tower owners’ claim that the plan for the abandoned road project was developed in secret, and that there was no notice given that a section of the Water Tower shopping plaza would need to be acquired to construct the road.
The countersuit said the Water Tower owners “were aware of the ARC TDD’s intended projects, to the extent they impacted or would have impacted them, since the commencement of conversation and correspondence between representatives of the Plaintiff and the Defendants in August of 2023.”
The counter lawsuit said the Water Tower lawsuit has caused substantial damage to the Triangle and ARC TDDs and the public.
“The ARC TDD was poised to issue bonds in September of 2024,” the counter lawsuit said. “The bond documents, including such primary documents as bond indenture and preliminary offering statement, were in final form, but the underwriter was prevented from proceeding with the issuance of the bonds due to the uncertainties raised by Plaintiffs’ Petition which called into question not only the authority to do the projects the financing was to pay for, the authority to maintain the sales tax revenue that was the source of bond repayment, the authority to issue the bonds, but even the authority of the issuer of the bonds to even exist.”
Read previous coverage on the Arnold Parkway Project:
