Little Rock’s Planned I-30 Deck Park Moving Slowly Forward

A rendering of what the I-30 deck park in downtown Little Rock could look like. (Little Rock Chamber)

When Interstate 30 was laid across Little Rock’s eastern flank in the early 1960s, it brought new connections to destinations across the interstate system. Unfortunately, it also created a new barrier, cutting off the eastern sections of downtown from the rest of Little Rock. After decades of separation, plans for a new deck park stretching across I-30 in the heart of downtown are looking to help tie the city back together.

A major step toward that goal was realized with the announcement in February that the city of Little Rock had been awarded $2 million by the U.S. Department of Transportation as part of its Reconnecting Communities Pilot (RCP) program. This grant is meant only to cover the cost of planning for the project, yet it represents a long-awaited beginning of an idea over a decade in the making.

Jay Chesshir

Little Rock Regional Chamber President and CEO Jay Chesshir said that in 2010, chamber officials began to hear that the state was looking at a sales tax election to fund significant infrastructure improvements across the state.

“Through a regional economic development partnership, the Metro Little Rock Alliance, which is effectively all 12 counties in Central Arkansas, we began to call a meeting and talked about, from a major project perspective, what should be our priority list,” he said.

At the top of that list was the I-30 corridor, due mainly to issues with the old I-30 bridge, which needed to be replaced due to boat strikes and other issues causing safety concerns. With discussions of constructing a new bridge came others of ways to improve the I-30 corridor through downtown. The plan ran into pushback from communities that disliked the idea of widening the interstate and making what was already an obstacle into an even bigger one.

The idea of reconnecting communities that had been separated by the interstate system came about, taking inspiration from Klyde Warren Park, a highly successful deck park in Dallas. Unfortunately, compromises had to be made to bring down the billion-dollar price tag of the I-30 project, and plans of reconnection failed to make the cut. Still, the project included a plan to accommodate the possibility of a deck park in between Sixth and Ninth streets.

“We started down the pathway in 2015 of talking with Garver Engineers about what [a deck park] could look like,” Chesshir said. “We had some preliminary cost estimates done on what that would cost, began talking to the Arkansas Department of Transportation [ARDOT] about the possibility of including it in the 30 corridor construction and the foundational aspects of what would be needed. Instead of having to come back in and tear stuff out that was just recently done, how can we build this so that the foundations for what we would need for a deck park would already be in place?”

Several years later, opportunity came knocking in the form of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, passed by Congress in 2022. This bill contained a pot of funds set aside for the Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program, which, as the name implies, is meant specifically to reconnect communities that have previously been cut off from economic opportunities by transport infrastructure.

“We knew we would be in stiff competition with communities and metropolitan areas across the United States much bigger than us, and that we needed to be able to put as much in the application as we possibly could that would move us ahead of others, recognizing that the project itself was truly almost as if it were targeted for this funding mechanism that that came about through the infrastructure bill,” Chesshir said.

50 for the Future, a nonprofit organization made up of Little Rock CEOs and business leaders, agreed to help the city by hiring Garver Engineers, which had already assisted ARDOT with the 30 Crossing project, to assist with the grant application process.

Bob Cook

“We used historical census data,” Bob Cook, government relations director at Garver, said. “We even found several before and after photos of the I-30 project to show what the area on either side of I-30 looked like before I-30 came through. It was a fairly homogenous economic area; there was connectivity all the way through to downtown.”

Through the census data, the application was able to show that the construction of the interstate had severed that previous connectivity, resulting in a disparity between the two sides. According to the application, the percentage of families below the poverty level on the east side is 200 percent to 400 percent higher than the city, county and state averages for Arkansas, and the percentage of individuals who have obtained a bachelor’s, master’s or doctorate degree on the east side of I-30 is 82 percent lower than the Little Rock city average. The east side also has a significantly higher rate of disabilities; the percentage of households with one or more persons between the ages of 5 and 64 with a disability is 58 percent to 79 percent greater than the city average.

While plans to expand I-30 experienced significant opposition, the deck park plan has enjoyed extensive support from local communities and organizations, such as the Coalition of Little Rock Neighborhoods.

Buckley O’Mell

Buckley O’Mell, vice president of advocacy at the Little Rock Chamber, said support for the deck park plan has been overwhelming.

“We received countless letters and emails from church leaders who have congregations in these neighborhoods, business leaders, residents, civil rights activists who said, ‘Yes, this is a good thing.’ It helped show to the federal government that ultimately was reviewing these that we had community support, and it wasn’t just the city and the state.”

Submitted jointly by the city of Little Rock, ARDOT and the Coalition of Little Rock Neighborhoods, the application was not only successful, but won the maximum amount of funding that can be awarded for a planning grant under the RCP program. With the $2 million awarded, the city will be able to reach a level of preliminary planning necessary to be awarded construction grants, which will come with a much greater amount of funding.

The planning stage is set to begin in the near future, and though Garver assisted with the application process, any future role in the project is not guaranteed; the city will issue an RFP open for other engineering firms to offer their services.

Details on either the eventual cost or design are unavailable at this stage. The price tag could vary wildly based on a number of factors – for example, there is a particular length at which a ventilation system would need to be installed underneath the deck park, which would obviously come at a significant expense both for installation and maintenance. Likewise, it could become much more expensive if it is decided that the deck park needs to support the weight of vehicles.

When the Little Rock Chamber announced at a press conference that it had received the grant, it showed a rendering of what the park could look like. Yet, chamber officials were careful to stress that it was only for the purpose of scale; what the park will actually look like will be decided through collaboration with the community.

“It’s really what happened with the 30 corridor process,” Chesshir said. “Yes, there were people who were against it to begin with. But going through that process helped refine the design into something that is much different than originally anticipated. But in our opinion, and I think the opinion of everyone that’s been a part of the process, much better than originally anticipated.”

Chesshir has high hopes for what the I-30 deck park will mean for Little Rock, and it’s easy to see why in the light of other recent changes to the city. Where massive spiral offramps occupy a large chunk of downtown, the park rendering shows 17 acres of greenspace. Where a large asphalt barrier now divides the community, a new deck park would connect the neighborhoods of East Village and Hanger Hill to the River Market and Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in MacArthur Park.

“I had some younger friends who, when they first saw the architectural renderings of what the 17 acres could be like, along with the deck park, immediately said, ‘Wow, I’d want to live downtown if I can live next to that.’ And so, we see it as not only a place for recreation, but a place for life,” Chesshir said.

“So, taking into account what’s going to happen at the surface, and what the deck park can be to accentuate that, all of a sudden Little Rock becomes amazingly walkable. At the same time, people can see it as they’re either coming here or coming through here. And so, it truly is an opportunity to create a city, the core of a region, that’s unlike anything else in this part of the country.”