FAYETTEVILLE — Uvalde Lindsey saw people around him drawing brackish well water and driving on rutted dirt roads to work at low-paying jobs while as he grew up in Boone County in the ’50s. He wondered what life held for him. “What do people in the Ozarks do for a living? There wasn’t a lot to do,” Lindsey said. Lindsey would become a key player in regional politics over the next half-century, helping create highways and public water projects across Northwest Arkansas. He worked with politicians ranging from John Paul Hammerschmidt to Bill Clinton, learning the art of compromise.
Through his work as executive director with the Northwest Arkansas Council, he was instrumental in creating a major airport on a farm field in the little town of Highfill. Lindsey saw the project through tedious environmental studies, financial wrangling, regional in-fighting and criticism that Northwest Arkansas was not ready for an airport of its size. The airport opened in 1998 with then President Clinton in attendance. Since then, it has exceeded expectations — last year more than 488,000 travelers flew out of the airport. Lindsey, 65, will step down from the council later this year.
Life Was Better
The yellowed, poster-sized aerial photograph of the airport in Lindsey’s Fayetteville conference room is not of a completed, landscaped airport. It is one of the airport under construction, the environmental studies over, the naysayers passed by. Years of public projects work groomed Lindsey for the task. After graduating from the University of Arkansas in 1962, he was forced to take over the family’s auto parts store in Harrison, putting off his dream of becoming an investment banker. His father died, and the business needed attention. He was appointed to the Harrison City Council and kept getting re-elected, serving 10 years. During those years, he learned small-town politics and minded the city’s budget. Roy Martin, who served with Lindsey on the Harrison City Council, said Lindsey saw the need for tourism and the money that could be realized. The City Council passed a hamburger tax putting Harrison on sound fiscal footing. “He was great for the community over here,” Martin said. “He can get along with every level of person.” He got to know Bill Clinton during Clinton’s 1976 campaign for attorney general and served as Clinton’s budget officer during Clinton’s second term as governor in 1982. It was a time of high fuel prices and interest rates. State troopers were told to park their cars to keep them from wearing out. “My job was to work with the budget, tweak it, turn it around,” Lindsey said. The decision was made to freeze buying vehicles for education workers until vehicles for troopers were secured. “It pissed off the education folks,” Lindsey said. “But I couldn’t see a guy at the university getting a new car when troopers couldn’t afford one.”
His work with Dale Bumpers’ and David Pryor’s campaigns for governor added to his knowledge and opened his eyes to a political world of water projects for poor people and building better highways on which they could drive. “We were working with all these guys on things that were important to them,” Lindsey said. “I learned that (political decisions) are not always black and white … There has to be compromise. I will take that light shade of gray any day.” “You become more political,” Lindsey said. “You have to.”
Lindsey sold his auto parts business in 1982. Over a 20-year span he expanded it to 18 stores. It was a natural progression to go to work for the Harrison Economic Development District in 1985, where he helped plan U.S. 412, a federal highway designed to stretch between Tennessee and Oklahoma — and pass through Harrison.
He worked on projects bringing water lines to rural families in Marion, Newton, Madison and Searcy counties. Relating those days of meeting with rural folk who had lived for decades with bad water, wells lights up his eyes more than talk about the Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport.
“You came in and made the pitch, and they didn’t trust you, but, at the end of the day, they did trust you,” Lindsey said. “Once they had water, their life was better. They could raise chickens because they had water.”
The Council
Northwest Arkansas was booming while north central Arkansas was improving its lot in life. A group of industry and business types put together the Northwest Arkansas Council, a group to look toward the future and lobby for projects to help the region. The group hired Lindsey in 1990, the year work on the airport began in earnest. Bill Foreman, a council member, said Lindsey’s tenacity and intelligence regarding funding kept the project moving when federal officials were not so keen on the idea. “I learned an awful lot from him,” Foreman said. “We’d get a commitment from (federal aviation officials), but they would say, ‘I just wish we had some money for it.’ I knew they were dead in the water from that point. He would pull out his papers and say, ‘Well, you have this money here and some here.’” “It was scary,” said Mark Simmons, chairman of Simmons Foods and secretary/treasurer-elect of the council. “He knew the FAA regulations better than they did … He would quote them regulations and give them the reg numbers. Uvalde was a master in guiding us through those processes.” Scott Van Laningham, the airport’s CEO, said of all the projects Lindsey worked on, creating the regional airport was the greatest.
“I’m sitting in the prime example, that would be the new airport,” Van Laningham said. “A lot of folks don’t realize how difficult it is to build a green field airport.” The term “green field” describes an airport built from scratch. He said Lindsey was able to grasp the finer points of the disparate issues involved in airport construction and recalled a series of three Friday afternoon meetings during the airport’s earliest phase. Van Laningham and Lindsey were to attend all three, during which experts in airport design, finance and promotion presented spiels. “About 10 minutes into the first meeting, I realized he knew as much about (design) as they did,” Van Laningham said. “Then we go into the second meeting and he knew as much as they did … same thing in the third (meeting). “Uvalde is the master at studying the federal rules and regulations so when we went and made a presentation to (aviation) officials … they all left those meetings saying, ‘Wow, these guys know what they’re talking about.’”
A Team
“Getting that kind of money is a difficult task,” Lindsey said. “You are in competition with people all over the country. … I found that success in securing those kinds of funds (depends) on how well you understand (funding regulations).” The corporate strength of Northwest Arkansas was the airport’s foundation, he said. Bonds sold to finance the project were key. “Selling $79 million worth of bonds when you didn’t have an airport, that is an impossible task,” Lindsey said. “You just can’t do that … A lot of that was just Alice Walton selling them, saying this is going to work.” He still does not think much of the “executive director” title the council hung on him a few years ago. “I prefer not to have a title,” Lindsey said. Lindsey’s son, Michael, characterized his father as someone able to simultaneously promote a project while remaining in touch with its finer details over the long haul. I think it is his attention to detail,” Michael Lindsey said. “No. 2, he can be extremely driven. It (the airport creation) was an eight-year deal.” The death of Lindsey’s wife, Carol, in 2000, took its toll on his father, Michael Lindsey said. “After Carol died, he was really at a low point,” said Michael Lindsey, who works with his father at their consulting firm, Ozark International Consultants. “Before that, he was all about work. Now, I think he realizes there is more to life than working 16-hour days.” Uvalde Lindsey gives much of the credit for his successes to Carol, who worked beside him at Ozark International Consultants.
“She was the cheerleader,” he said. “She kept us all moving forward … She was very, very good at communicating with anybody.” Foreman said Carol Lindsey’s force of personality spurred projects. “She had a hearing problem in that she couldn’t hear the word no,” Foreman said. She also was a freelance spokeswoman for Arkansas. The Newton County native once told The Morning News that the state was unfairly criticized by outsiders. Arkansas, she said, is “filled with bright, talented people.” The projects she and her husband promoted provided those people with a chance to expand their horizons, she said. XNA may become the epicenter of Northwest Arkansas growth. Census data shows the region’s population is moving hard to the west. The Two-Ton water project brought Beaver Lake water across rural areas of northern Benton County and to western portions of both Benton and Washington counties. Carol and Uvalde Lindsey had a strong hand in that water project, too, according to Millard Goff, former chairman of the board that oversaw the water project. “Uvalde and Carol were a team,” Goff said. “Carol had for a long time believed in making water available to the two counties … They were the best resource people could hope for. If you needed something done, they knew every rock to turn over and were knowledgeable about so much.” Rural water will allow smaller cities and communities in the western portions of the counties to take on more growth in the future, Goff said. Goff said Carol Lindsey worked almost full time for two years without compensation on the project. “I never knew her to get a dime,” he said.
The Future
Lindsey is careful not to suggest what his replacement may need to accomplish. He speaks only in general terms of issues needing attention. Lindsey said, however, a report commissioned by the Council and released in 2003 will give guidance to his successor. The report states that Northwest Arkansas has performed well, with this caveat: “Overall, the labor market and employee base are negative factors in recruiting new industries to Northwest Arkansas.”
The key to turning that around is education and “research that becomes commercialized,” Lindsey said. That is slowly happening, he said, as industry continues to throw more support toward the University of Arkansas. “What they are doing at this university is world class,” Lindsey said. “We are not losing our best and brightest folks now.” Private sector-public sector relationships, especially those that involve firms that can produce high-tech jobs, are key, Lindsey said. Those jobs also create manufacturing and service industry jobs, he said. The dearth of venture capital in Arkansas is also mentioned in the report. Lindsey said laws addressed by the Legislature this session have helped that area by improving research and development tax credits and allowing more firms to reap benefits from venture capitalism.
The region’s infrastructure needs work. The report calls for 400 million gallons of additional wastewater treatment capacity by 2032. The conservative estimate for adding that capacity is $363 million, according to the report. A western bypass that loops from Interstate 540 near Greenland, passes near the airport and ends up near Bella Vista has been on Lindsey’s planning map for years. It received official recognition as a possible highway in Northwest Arkansas earlier this month when members of a Northwest Arkansas Regional Planning Commission group penciled it in on their maps. “It needs to be studied just as much as 540,” Lindsey said of the local interstate. “We are going to have to build more highways. We are going to have to protect our water.” An airport access highway is also a concern. That could, under the best-case scenario, be constructed by 2009, he said. Such a highway will link with the planned U.S. 412 bypass, which will provide a true east-west traffic moving-highway for Northwest Arkansas, Lindsey said. Lindsey will remain president of Ozark International Consultants, which lists the airport as one of its clients. That will smooth the transition process, he said, because his firm will be available for consultation with Lindsey’s successor. Lindsey said he could not comment on who that successor might be. A nominating committee, of which Van Laningham is a member, is evaluating potential candidates to replace Lindsey.
He said Lindsey’s expertise will be valuable for years to come. “Uvalde is not going anywhere,” Van Laningham said.