Grassy Lake Road Now High and Dry for Area Residents

First posted on 12-06-2011

Not long ago, Grassy Lake was a recurring headache for people who lived downstream from Lake Conway.

A new bridge, then a new road was the prescription that stopped the pain. Creating this panacea was a team of a half dozen or more entities that worked out the plan, admittedly with some difficulties.

The Grassy Lake success is one segment in an extensive and ambitious plan for the Lake Conway Watershed Advocacy Group, now more than two years old. The advocacy group, or LCWAG, has a persistent driving force in State Rep. Jane English of North Little Rock.

A bit of background here: Craig D. Campbell Lake Conway Reservoir, which celebrated its 60th birthday last summer, has problems. Some go back to the beginning, when not enough land around its shoreline was put into permanent public ownership. The lake has excessive vegetation. The lake levels have fluctuated too much. And, a key to all the problems, the residential and commercial development in the surrounding watershed has accelerated runoff into the lake and contributed excessive amounts of silt, which has reduced the depth of a large portion of the lake. The AGFC also had to restrict the spillway gate operations to reduce the frequency and duration that the road was inundated. That made it less efficient to manage flood water.

Years after the lake was built, a real estate development called Rogers Country Estates put dozens of homes near the lake’s lower end but just across the line into Pulaski County. Access was from near Mayflower by Grassy Lake Road and from North Little Rock through Camp Robinson. The latter route was shut off by heightened security after Sept. 11, 2001 at the military facility.

Grassy Lake Road was the only access, and frequent flooding closed it, isolating the Rodgers Estate people and other area residents.

A solution came in two stages over the past seven years.

A new bridge, elevated by several feet more than old structure, was built across Palarm Creek downstream from the Lake Conway dam. The bridge was completed in 2004 but did little by itself to ease the road’s flooding issues.

A raised road was the second step, and it took a massive meeting of minds along with creative financing and engineering to achieve.

English called together such organizations as Metroplan, the Little Rock-area visionary group, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission which owns the lake but not the territory below it, Faulkner County, Pulaski County, the Arkansas State Highway and Transportation Department and Arkansas Natural Resources Commission and two citizens groups – Lake Conway Citizens Advisory Committee and Lake Conway Homeowners Association.

The solution was a new road linking Arkansas Highway 89 at Mayflower to the new Palarm Creek bridge. It had to be elevated, and it was – not enough at first then much better with an additional foot and a half added to the roadbed to match the elevation of earlier floods.

This new route replaced the old Grassy Lake Road that ran under Interstate 40 and which was closed by floods every time there was significant rainfall in the area.

Along with the creative pooling of funds for the work, a maze of paperwork was required because the area includes wetlands, meaning federal permission for any construction.

Today the new hard-surface road parallels I-40 from Exit 135 south for 8/10ths of a mile to the bridge over Palarm Creek, and elevates the road to withstand high volumes coming down Palarm Creek and also backing up from the Arkansas River when it is at flood stage.

Changes to the road will allow the AGFC to change the Water Level Management Plan to include less restrictive spillway gate operations and increase the efficiency of flood water control in the future.