To prevent abandoned and slow-moving building projects, the Conway City Council passed an ordinance introducing new procedures for revoking and amending permits Thursday, Sept. 27.

James Walden, director of planning and development, said there are “tens” of slow-moving projects in the city.

“We don’t want to have zombie projects that lay around for five or ten years where nothing ever gets done,” Walden said. “God forbid we have the Great Recession again. You know, there’s a lot of subdivisions that just got abandoned across the U.S., we don’t want that to happen.”

Ordinance O-22-111 passed unanimously. It amends the procedures for changing conditional use permits and clarifies signage regulations. Notably, it introduces a revocation process for violations of a permit. 

“Under the current ordinance, it’s not real clear. So this provides a revocation procedure where we go through, we notify them … you can go through a procedure to contest it,” Walden said. 

Violations are addressed with the new ordinance.

“Obviously we’re not going to tear down buildings, but [the revocation process] is enough for us to go through some type of enforcement process,” Walden said.

The ordinance will help construction in Conway stay up to date with city planning.

“There’s a self-storage on the east side of town currently being constructed. [Their] conditional use [was] passed numerous years ago. Likely under the current conditions, it would not be approved today,” Walden said. “We’ve got a lot of these conditional uses that are just sitting around town.”

In other business, Conway’s fire department was granted $40,000 for fuel. Fire department Chief Mike Winter said, “We’ve used all of our fuel budget … we’re requesting [funds] to get us through the end of this year.”

The Conway Police Department requested $20,787 to purchase a new fingerprint scanner.

Police Chief William Tapley said, “The state has changed the requirements for submitting fingerprints. They no longer accept the cards and ink from us. We have been [going to] the Faulkner County Detention Center for their machine.”

The purchase of the machine will free up officers’ time and will “[put] officers back on the streets,” Tapley said. 

The sale of seized assets from the police department was approved by the council. The assets will be sold on publicsurplus.com as is. There were five vehicles, 30 pieces of silver and six pieces of gold. 

The council approved the purchase of a crawler dozer for the sanitation department. Joseph Hopper, director of sanitation, reported the department is doing well financially and is about $100,000 under budget.

Conway City Council will meet again at 6:30 p.m. Oct. 11, in Conway City Hall.