Letter to the Editor

Do You Live Down

In A Holler?

A couple weeks ago some friends came to visit us from Ontario, Canada. It was an embarrassing visit.

These friends love baseball and Blue Grass music. They drove all the way down the East Coast from Canada to Florida to watch Spring Training baseball. From Florida they drove to Indiana for a Blue Grass Music festival. From there they drove to St. Louis and on to Kansas City for more baseball.

They drove into Bella Vista from the north on U.S. 71. They turned east on Trafalgar and went up the hill and turned right on Deddington Drive, which brought them to our house.

That is where it got embarrassing.

After the handshakes and hugs they said "Are we in an Arkansas 'Holler'?"

I assured them we did not live in a holler and wondered why they asked that. They told us they had heard that a lot of people lived on the ridges and down in the hollers of the Ozark Mountains and based on the streets they had to drive to get here, they concluded we were definitely in the back woods.

They were, of course, referring to Deddington Drive. I would challenge anyone to drive down Deddington Drive and not hit at least one pot hole.

In fact, I would challenge anyone to drive down Deddington Drive daily for a month and not have to have their car realigned and not have to make a dentist appointment to correct all of the chipped teeth, and not have a burning desire to write a letter to the editor.

Our Street Department has, however, made major strides recently. We used to have a Street Department employee drive the streets each year and evaluate their condition, now we contract that out. We used to use a numeric value from one to three to indicate the condition of each street. Now we are adopting a four-tiered, color-coded system to indicate the condition of each street. Major strides!

However, our Street Department still needs to improve on the actual repairing of streets. They apparently do not consider how many people live on a street in their evaluations and they remain totally inflexible once a street has been assigned a number (or a color).

I sent an email to the head of our Street Department on a Friday and asked if Deddington Drive was scheduled to be resurfaced.

The only response I got was the following Monday trucks showed up and repaired nine of the multitude of potholes.

We showed our friends a lot of northwest Arkansas while they were here -- Bentonville, Rogers, Springdale, Eureka Springs -- but every time we left home or when we returned, we had to bump and thump, and wiggle and swerve down Deddington Drive.

Our visitors were impressed with northwest Arkansas but when they left they still thought we lived down in a holler.

After comparing the streets in the other parts of northwest Arkansas, maybe Deddington Drive is down in a holler after all.

Embarassing!

Larry Blech

Bella Vista