The Fort Smith Board of Directors held a study session on August 11, 2026, at 6:00 p.m. The meeting covered a second-quarter budget review, the 2026 prioritized water capital improvement plan (Phase II), water-related operational issues (fill stations, Parrot Island billing, unauthorized use), a potential change from CCF to gallon water metering, and regulations for data centers. The session also included a citizens forum and motions for future agenda items.
Good evening, and welcome to the Fort Middle City Board of Directors study session on this August eleventh of twenty twenty six. As you know, our meetings are being televised live. First is Shane McKinney, and each one have five minutes. The first time the water meter was changed, which just happened to him yesterday. He contacts the water department. Well, it must be usage. We did the calculation. That's 46,000 gallons. Um that's more gallons than minutes in a month. There's no way that he's got a leak like that. Uh it's a big flat property, you would definitely know it. This is Shane, do you know if he got a phone call from the city? He did not before the auto draft occurred. It just came out of his account. Okay. Um again, this is something that we could do proactively. And over and over again, I talk about proactive communication on things that impact citizens or businesses or other folks. Um our city doesn't have that down yet. It's kind of the basis of customer service that you would expect from any business that you're doing business with. And we are doing business with our citizens. Our water department is a business service. We should have a good customer-centric policy. It is not hard to put in a policy that says if your water bill more than doubles, it doesn't auto-draft this month until we've had a conversation. That would be a great policy. Um that could eliminate most of these things from happening. And if you contact them and they say, Yeah, I filled up a swimming pool, that's why it's up, then you're okay. If they say, hey, what's going on? At least we didn't uh bill somebody because he's he's gonna be okay. But what if this was my grandmother? What if this was somebody that couldn't afford that? This could uh mean put somebody in a serious, serious financial bind. Um again, I think that proactive communication is really, really important, and I think our citizens would be very grateful uh when I've designed technology around building systems in the past. Those were the kinds of things we put into place is just metrics that say has this changed? Um and also this is more evidence that our water meters aren't working correctly. Do you do you have an address you could share with us? Uh I could do that offline. Yeah, that's cool. I I know that there are policies and procedures in how they handle that exact scenario. So I want to see if that's if that was actually followed. Okay, well, it was exactly the first month after the meter change, and he already checked his online usage again, and it's showing double the usage still, so it's gonna be another 65 units uh for a one-bedroom place for his next bill. A second thing I wanted to talk about is our building inspectors. Um I have a friend who's working on a property in town. I'm gonna do a video on it probably tomorrow. It's one of the cleanest uh properties I've seen from a rental perspective, one of the cleanest jobs ever. Um, one of his contractors didn't call in an inspection correctly before a rough-in occurred, and now they're trying to throw him under the bus. You have to open up all the walls. It's gonna cost them a fortune to fix this. Um, and also it's gonna keep a house that would be available this week to some family to move into off the market for another month. Um it's very clearly the kind of thing that we can handle with just a simple go in, take a look, but instead they're wanting to push this to the extreme. And why?