FAYETTEVILLE — Members of the Walton Arts Center’s board approved on Tuesday moving Northwest Arkansas’ main outdoor concert venue to Rogers.
The Arkansas Music Pavilion is scheduled to open on land across Interstate 540 from Pinnacle Hills Promenade by the end of June 2014.
The pavilion, also called the AMP, has been in Fayetteville for nine seasons. It opened in 2005 in the Northwest Arkansas Mall parking lot before moving to the Washington County Fairgrounds for the 2012 and 2013 seasons.
Board members said Tuesday a more permanent venue with fixed seats, a sloped lawn, air-conditioned restrooms and improved backstage space would draw bigger acts and more visitors to the area.
“I’m so excited that this offers the opportunity for us to think of and pull together as a region in a way that we have not always been able to do,” said David Gay, a board member and economics professor at the University of Arkansas. “This offers some unfolding possibilities that are going to develop in ways that we can’t imagine right now.”
“I think what you find in this project is a much more expanded venue that allows for more people and maybe even more entertainers that would look at this area as opposed to the facilities that have been there in the past,” Rogers Mayor Greg Hines said following Tuesday’s meeting.
“It’s a huge win,” Hines added. “There’s not a better spot in Northwest Arkansas for the AMP than this location.”
Peter Lane, arts center CEO, after declining to answer financial questions about the move to Rogers last week, revealed Tuesday that Johnelle Hunt, widow of J.B. Hunt, agreed last year to donate land south of the Embassy Suites Hotel and north of the Pinnacle Country Club for the pavilion. Lane said Hunt has also agreed to loan the center $3 million for the $11 million project.
A $1.5 million contribution from the Willard and Pat Walker Charitable Foundation in Fayetteville and a $2.5 million gift from an unnamed “long-term sponsor” will also go toward the project, Lane said. Hines confirmed his intent to build $500,000 of infrastructure on the site pending Rogers City Council approval. Another $500,000 could come through the sale of VIP boxes at the concert venue. The arts center will use another pending gift, proceeds from naming rights, an Arvest Bank loan, cash reserve and proceeds from an insurance claim when the pavilion’s tent was destroyed by weather to pay for the rest of the project, Lane said.
He said arts center administrators and Jeff Schomburger, board chairman, met with municipal leaders in Springdale and Fayetteville to discuss several other sites, including land near Arvest Ballpark, Dead Horse Mountain Road, the Marinoni family property at Wedington Drive and I-540 and the former SouthPass site off Cato Springs Road.
Lane said none of those sites included donated land with adequate infrastructure in place to make the pavilion a reality.
Steve Clark, president and CEO of the Fayetteville Chamber of Commerce, and Bill Waite, owner of Dickson Street Liquor, were the only two board members to vote against moving forward with a new pavilion in Rogers.
Both said they were caught off guard by a May 21 email from Lane showing many of the details of the proposal had been worked out before Tuesday’s meeting without their knowledge.
“I’m not here to worry about the site,” Clark said. “But I am here very much to worry about process. When you look at the ends before you get to the means, you sometimes find that those means are a little backward.”
Hershey Garner, a radiation oncologist who, with Clark and Waite, is one of five Fayetteville appointees to the 20-member center board, said he was well aware of the plans in Rogers.
“I spent hours looking at this over the last year,” Garner said.
“You have to look at this proposal on its merits, not at the process,” he added before making a motion to end discussion Tuesday.
“This is a gift that, just on the merits of the gift alone, I think we should jump on,” Garner said. “One of the biggest reasons to have this regional approach is that it brings more people in, and it establishes a barrier to competition, which is to me one of the biggest reasons to regionalize.”