When peeling back the layers, the Bossier City Council’s recent decision to deny a rezoning request isn’t about accommodating a commercial enterprise at the edge of a residential neighborhood but illuminates a consequence of poor spending choices made in the city’s past.
Last week, the Council, contrary to the recommendation of the Metropolitan Planning Commission, voted 6-1 to deny the request – for a second time – to open a chiropractor clinic at the corner of Douglas Drive and Benton Road. South along the east side of Benton Road up to that point are a string of commercial establishments, but behind these are the older neighborhoods. The west side of Benton from just south of Douglas is all large-lot residences almost to Viking Drive.
Councilors introduced multiple reasons to deny the request again. One questioned why the owner, who lives nearby, wouldn’t buy a more suitable commercial property as the location to transfer his business, with speculation that he was trying to get a price break and then count on changing the zoning. Another noted that the city was in the process of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a new master plan and any zoning decision should wait until after its completion rather than carving out what could be a last-second exception.
However, the main concern was over safety. Indeed, Assistant City Attorney Richard Ray gave a presentation showing a marked increase in accidents around that intersection since 2023. The planned change would have allowed the clinic to have parking around the back utilizing Douglas and patrons might have been tempted to park on the street. The traffic increase would have been marginal but it would have added to attempts to turn left, southbound, onto Benton across the two lanes northbound.
That Douglas acts as an east-west corridor between Benton and Airline Drive to the west, two heavily-travelled commercial arteries, through a residential area with only four other such direct connecting routes between the mile-plus mostly residential area between East Texas St. to the south and Interstate 220 to the north, exacerbates the problem. This draws traffic heading west on Douglas from Airline, with the southbound turn especially worrisome. That a bus stop operates close to that intersection also compounds matters that disrupts traffic and can block sight lines.
One possible solution could be to extend a median on Benton northward to Douglas, preventing a left turn. Yet this would inconvenience neighborhood residents and increase side street traffic off of Douglas heading north potentially to turn left off of a more northern outlet, which in turn would send more cars careening through the neighborhood, and in any event would have to be in place before the clinic took over. Another solution, making it a lighted intersection, defeats the purpose of having Benton serve as a high-speed corridor through that point.
And the reason why it must serve this role is a spending mistake made by the city many years ago. When the Arthur Ray Teague Parkway was completed to the then-city limits under the Jimmie Davis Bridge looping around the city’s southside (later extended further as the city became able to annex land heading south along the Red River to Sligo Road), plans began forming for the then-called ART Parkway North extension past E. Texas. Conceptually, it would head somewhat along the river northward, bypassing crowded intersections and over rail lines to empty out around I-220.
It began as a $24 million project but quickly spiraled out of control. Less than a decade later it had ballooned to $50 million before any dirt was turned. And then it became attenuated. Information presently publicly available doesn’t reveal when or why it happened, but sometime before 2021 policy-makers unknown decided the northern terminus would be a bit south of Douglas, just north of the location conveniently of long-time then-Councilor David Montgomery’s place of business.
Cost considerations surely drove this decision. Eventually, the cost of the Walter O. Bigby Carriageway would hit $89 million or about $50 million a mile. Another half mile to empty out just short of Viking Drive would have cost tens of millions more but would have been far more effective in speeding up travel and reducing Benton Road congestion, begging the question of whether it should have been built in the first place if it so cost-ineffectively addressed traffic concerns.
As well as, it would appear, would have avoided at least an association with the spike in accidents (the Carriageway opened at the end of September, 2024), if not the causal agent. Dumping more traffic just south of Douglas onto Benton appears to made that intersection less safe.
This left the Council with unpalatable choices: crowd even more a neighborhood with transient vehicles that create more hazardous conditions in and around it and might subvert future planning efforts, or stiff-arm a business asking for special treatment. It’s not unreasonable a majority chose the latter option even as the city tries to promote its economic development prospects.
The previous three decades of city governance featured reckless spending on unnecessary or negative cost/benefit, yet expensive, things. This episode exemplifies that the long-term costs paid by the citizenry can’t be measured just in dollars thrown away, but also in a legacy of degraded growth and quality of life.
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