When they first organized in November 2011, those in the group in charge of overseeing the creation of a Little Rock technology park thought they would identify and settle on a location for the facility in a few months.
Two-and-a-half years later, the tech park still doesn't have a home, but with real estate consultant Jeff Yates set to present recommendations to the seven-member Technology Park Authority Board in two weeks, the board is closer than ever to deciding on a physical address.
The decision on where to locate has proved to be anything but simple. After months of back-and-forth debate, three initial locations for the park were taken off the table, and it took another year to consider the 23 additional proposals that came in.
Ultimately none of those sites was chosen, and in a split vote in the fall of 2013, the board decided to put the park downtown, somewhere along the Main Street corridor. The board hired Yates to evaluate potential properties and assist it in negotiations. It also started the process of hiring a tech park director and is interviewing six candidates Thursday.
But even as progress is made, there's much left to be decided. At least one issue is whether to acquire buildings that are contiguous or have the park scattered in different locations.
The path to a site
The initial vision of a tech park in Little Rock arose from a consultant's 2009 report that called for a 30-acre site within a five minutes' drive of the city's two universities and Arkansas Children's Hospital. It listed a long-term goal of 10 buildings, the first of which should be 100,000 square feet.
The hospital, the city, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences are financial partners in the venture.
The three initial proposed sites that met those criteria were all in residential areas. Residents quickly spoke out against their homes being taken for the project. They formed the We Shall Not Be Moved coalition and protested on the steps of City Hall. City directors proposed ordinances that would have limited the tech park authority's power, and state senators got involved.
In mid-2012, UALR and UAMS agreed to forgo the five-minute rule, and residential sites were eventually taken off the table. Four different sites were being evaluated by that fall.
But in January 2013, the chairman of Conway-based Inuvo Inc., a multimillion-dollar information technology company, drew attention when he said he'd consider moving his headquarters to Little Rock if the tech park was located downtown.
Mayor Mark Stodola and the Downtown Little Rock Partnership, along with other influential downtown leaders, lobbied for a downtown site for the tech park. After visiting three other tech parks in Fayetteville, St. Louis and Winston-Salem, N.C., the tech park authority finally chose to put the park in the Main Street area.
"Clearly time was an issue in selecting a location, but I think the authority is past that now," Stodola said. "They stumbled pretty badly in the beginning, but that had to do with these initial concepts that they wanted a 30-acre campus. Well, that's the old model of the 1960s. When we began to look around and finally took some trips to look at other successful parks, it became clear: The tech parks that are thriving in the country are not isolated in suburban areas; they are integrated in the heart of the city, and the heart of our city is downtown."
Owners of the St. Louis and Winston-Salem tech parks told Little Rock leaders that the criteria for a successful location is an urban, mixed-use environment close to surrounding businesses, housing and restaurants. That "live, work, play" mantra has peeked into a current debate as the tech park authority is getting closer to purchasing property.
Cluster or Interspersed?
There's a clear divide among board members on whether contiguous property is essential for the tech park or if the buildings could be located down from or across the street from one another.
"I think they have to at least be close by and contiguous if at all possible because the whole point of the park is to generate interactivity among the participants. That's hard to do if you're scattered all downtown," authority Chairman Mary Good said.
It's the same concern she raised when the tech park authority voted to choose the Main Street site. She and board members Dickson Flake and Bob Johnson were in the minority and didn't choose Main Street as their top pick.
Flake put it this way at the time: "I cannot get on board with separating the buildings. I think you are destroying the reasons why we are doing this, and that is to have the shared services and these groups stimulating each other, and each one making the whole rather than the sum of the parts. Separated physically, you are not going to accomplish that."
But board member Kevin Zaffaroni disagreed. At a recent authority board meeting, he said he considers the park's palette as a 1-mile-square area around Main Street.
Regarding the buildings being contiguous, he said: "I'm not sure that's necessary based on what we've seen or even what I think is best for the park. In other words, it's the mixed nature of community to me that is intriguing about the park."
The board does seem to agree that no matter how the tech park proceeds, there needs to be a central hub. Stodola said that can be accomplished without connected buildings.
"I know they want a physical focus, but I also think there are buildings interspersed up and down Main Street that would well suit the process and the idea of integrating those buildings into the fabric of activities that are down there right now," he said.
Ultimately, it's what properties Yates presents to the board at its meeting June 11 that will have the most influence on which path the board takes regarding the park's connectivity, Good said.
Still more to do
Even after the board decides on the location, there are a number of steps to complete before the tech park becomes a reality.
After a director is hired, he will be working to recruit tenants to a facility that is largely unplanned. There are no designs drafted, and it's not yet known how many square feet the first building will have.
Financing is also a factor that has yet to be discussed in depth. The city, Children's Hospital, UAMS and UALR stakeholders have each promised $125,000 in seed money, and the city has committed $22 million for capital costs out of revenue from the three-eighths percent capital sales tax that voters approved in 2011.
But that funding is to accrue over a 10-year period ending in 2021, and city officials' original projections that the tax revenue would grow by 2 percent each year have fallen substantially short, putting the projects to be funded in jeopardy.
It's always been the intention to attract private investments for the tech park, but local companies with potential investor funding have largely remained silent in public discussions to this point.
"One of the reasons we have not made any effort in that arena so far is because you can't go sell something you don't yet have a description for," Good said. "Once location is settled and once we have a director, I think people will begin to understand we are serious."
While there are central goals on what the tech park will be and what it will provide, each stakeholder has its own expectations for the park. Most important to the city is the tech park's anticipated boost to the economy, Stodola said, adding that the park will create an environment to create jobs and businesses that will hopefully stay in the city.
For the universities and hospital, the park is a location for students, faculty members and researchers to add to their skills and have their research used. UAMS' BioVentures plans to lease tech park space.
A variety of details are still to be worked out regarding what the tech park becomes, but at least two things are universally accepted: There's energy and momentum downtown, and today's entrepreneurial and investor environment is prime to attract companies to Little Rock.
"I suspect if we look at the tech park in five years, no one knows exactly what it's going to look like physically or all the characteristics at that point in time, but I'm confident that the people of Little Rock are going to be proud of it," said UALR Chancellor Joel Anderson.
A section on 05/28/2014