I wrote last week’s column pointing out the leaky roof at Champagnolle Landing …. it is time now for the rest of the story regarding the collection of buckets, tubs and containers scattered around the exercise arena.
Yes, the buckets have increased since the original leaks three years ago. But, the leaks have not gone un-noticed.
After I expressed my surprise and dismay at seeing the number of water catchers still at the senior center, Mayor Frank Hash sent me the following e-mail.
“The entire roof for the Senior Citizens Center will soon be replaced. Mayor Dumas started this effort many months ago and it will soon be accomplished. We just received the engineer study yesterday (Feb. 7) and it will soon go out for bids for actual replacement. The entire process has been long coming and Mayor Dumas deserves full credit for securing funding. Mayor Dumas has continued to work on the project and will soon see it completed. The design took awhile as additional slope has to be incorporated. The original roofing was too flat and did not drain well, speeding up the deterioration.”
Dumas is the ideal person to tackle this problem. He not only brings his years of experience of working with government agencies, Dumas himself is one of the many senior citizens who use the center for exercise.
Since 2009, when he noticed the problem, he has been working on a solution to get a dry roof on the Senior Center. But it has not been easy.
“I would think sometimes that someone pushed it to the corner of the desk and it fell in the trash can,” he said. That did not happen. Red tape did. But, Dumas has patiently persisted in poking the papers for repairs along through the process.
“We applied to the Arkansas Economic Development Commission back in 2009. We submitted the application for the new roof on the Senior Citizens Center seeking funds that the state had received for disasters that had occurred. This is FEMA money. We could use for it for repair of damage that might have been caused by wind and rain,” Dumas said.
“It was approved before I left office. We received a letter in the latter part of 2010 and we started the process, with the approval of grant pre-application with Southwest Arkansas Planning and Development District Inc. that serves this area. I turned it over to them to process it.”
“Mayor Hash took it over in 2011 and we went back and forth all of last year. Sometime in the latter part of 2011 we finally got approval to proceed. We received an agreement that the grant would be coming around Christmas 2011. Because it exceeds $100,000 we had to secure an architect. We contracted with CADM Architect (a local architect).”
The current flat roof has not kept water out of the building, so “they had to develop a design of a roof to put on the roof. They completed that last week. We are waiting on their approval, which is a formality. We look for that any time now and then we will go to the bid. That takes about four weeks,” Dumas said.
He said that the architects expect by the first of April to have a contractor.
Then, as is always true with roofing, “we will need dry weather for the 18,000- square-foot built-up roof. It has been a long process because we are dealing with all the government agencies and have to jump through a a lot of hoops,” Dumas concluded.
If all goes as expected, the roofer could be at work by April.
Dumas said that the grant is for $226,000. If there are any leftovers from that amount, it will be used to repair water damage inside the facility.
Thanks to Mike Dumas and the expected initiation of repairs, we have yet another reason to look forward to this year’s spring.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times. E-mail her at joanh@everybody.org)