Fort Smith City Director Rego and four others delay addressing water and sewer contracts until October 20
A $2.474 million contract to put an outside firm in charge of Fort Smith's next phase of federally ordered sewer work will not come up for a vote Tuesday.
At 8:24 a.m. on Oct. 1, Director Jarred Rego asked the city clerk to pull the item from the Oct. 5 regular meeting under Section 2-31(4) of the Fort Smith Municipal Code, which lets four directors remove business from an agenda before the meeting. Directors Andre Good, Lee Kemp and George Catsavis concurred.
Director Neal Martin also concurred after the four-vote threshold was already met. Director Christina Catsavis did not. Director Kevin Settle could not be reached. The same item is now set for the Oct. 20 regular meeting.
The resolution would authorize an agreement with Arcadis U.S. Inc. for program management of the federal wastewater consent decree, listed as Project No. 26-01-ES1.
City staff recommended the contract. It is budgeted in Engineering-Utilities and would be paid from the five-eighths percent reallocated sales and use tax for utilities. The fee is not to exceed $2,474,000 for the first year. The city could extend the agreement for three more years after a review of the firm's work, but only with another board vote.
Rego's Oct. 1 notice does not say why he wanted the contract delayed. A separate clerk's notice the day before is more explicit about another item he pulled from the same meeting.
On Sept. 30 he asked that a resolution on cemetery property be removed because he will not attend Oct. 5 and because negotiations are still open, which he said made a vote premature. Good, Martin and Kemp concurred on that removal. The consent decree contract notice contains no comparable explanation.
The delay is awkward in one respect. Kemp and Martin are the directors who placed the Arcadis resolution on the Oct. 5 agenda after the board's Sept. 22 study session. Both then agreed to take it off that agenda and to put it on the Oct. 20 agenda. For the later placement, under Section 2-31(3), Martin, Good and Kemp concurred.
George Catsavis and Christina Catsavis said they had no preference. Settle again could not be reached. Christina Catsavis is the only director on record as opposing the removal.
The contract is the city's proposed way of managing a program whose full cost is now estimated at almost $800 million through 2038. Fort Smith entered the consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Arkansas Division of Environmental Quality after years of sanitary sewer overflows and alleged failures to maintain the system.
The original order, filed in 2014 and effective in 2015, required the city to assess and fix condition defects and capacity problems on a 12-year schedule ending in early 2027. The city has said that schedule was not realistic. A federal judge approved a modification in July 2026 that moves the completion deadline to June 30, 2038, keeps required performance goals, confirms annual sewer rate increases of 3.5 percent through 2030, and drops a previously expected 19 percent rate increase after 2031. The modification also requires a financial management plan.
Between 2015 and the end of 2024, the city spent about $136 million on consent decree work. Voters approved a bond proposal on May 13, 2025, and the city issued $100 million in bonds on Oct. 30, 2025. Funding for the larger program is expected to come from sales tax, sewer rates and bond proceeds.
Assessments are finished. Staff have said 347,852 feet of sanitary sewer and 3,976 manholes were found structurally deficient. Repairs, replacements or contracts cover 264,658 feet of pipe and 1,540 manholes, and designs for another 177,363 feet of pipe and 567 manholes are close to completion, with bids expected within about six months.
That is the handoff the contract is meant to cover: from assessment to construction, prioritization and compliance tracking. A five-member panel of City Administrator Jeff Dingman, Engineering Director Todd Mittge, Deputy Engineering Director Jimmie Johnson, Water Resources Director Lance McAvoy and Deputy Water Resources Director Rahul Thukral reviewed three firms that answered a solicitation the board authorized after its Nov. 10, 2025 meeting.
The firms were Arcadis, Burns & McDonnell and CDI Contractors. The panel interviewed all three on Aug. 7 and recommended Arcadis, which has a Little Rock office. The parent company is based in Amsterdam and has its U.S. headquarters in Highlands Ranch, Colorado.
. The first-year proposal has 16 tasks. The largest is $586,000 for construction management and construction administration. Program launch, transition and an initial assessment are estimated at $320,000. Another $289,000 is for infiltration and inflow work, modeling, and checking whether improvements are working. Infiltration and inflow is groundwater and stormwater entering the pipes and consuming capacity that should carry sewage.
Arcadis told directors the engagement would start with a 90-day launch. The first month would be spent meeting staff, consultants and regulators' files, and producing a risk and opportunity assessment. The second month would set near-term priorities, reporting rules and delivery methods. The third would produce a program execution plan, an integrated schedule, a compliance calendar and the frame of a financial management plan.
Vice President David Stanley said the firm expects to have a roadmap at the end of those 90 days, and that some staff would live in Fort Smith for the duration of the work. The company also said some of that product depends on timely access to city data and people, and that it would substitute a preliminary framework if information is late.
One stated aim is to leave asset-management practices the city can still use after the decree ends.
The Oct. 20 date keeps the decision inside this board, but not by much. The terms of Mayor George McGill and the three at-large directors, Christina Catsavis, Settle and Martin, expire Dec. 31, 2026. Martin has announced he will seek another term. Ward directors Rego, Good, Kemp and George Catsavis have terms running through 2028.
Until the board votes, the program-management slot stays empty while the city moves from a completed assessment into the construction years of a decree that now runs to mid-2038. The Oct. 5 agenda packet is to be posted when it is final. The Arcadis resolution will not be in
it.
