BRANSON, Mo. -- Making Springdale a more desirable place to live as well as work appeared on the priority list of every topic brought up at a planning session Friday of more than 100 business leaders, city staff and elected officials.
"If we're going to keep up economic growth, Springdale has to be more than the place to drive to work," said Joe Rollins, spokesman for the study group on economic growth. "It has to become the choice of where people want to live and spend their leisure time."
The crowd of at least 140 echoed Rollins. The group attended the CityFuture 5 conference hosted by the Springdale Chamber of Commerce at the Chateau by the Lake Resort in Branson, Mo. The retreat kicked off Wednesday evening and ended Friday morning.
The four major categories discussed at the conference were economic growth, Springdale's development as a community, transportation and infrastructure and downtown development. Even the transportation and infrastructure group put a priority on quality-of-life issues, including providing foot and bicycle access to the rest of town for residents living west of Interstate 49.
Anissa Starnes, a consultant for Swingbridge Consulting who helped facilitate the conference, called the participation at the conference exceptional. Getting a similar crowd to a conference that stretches out over all or part of three days would be impossible for many of the cities she advises, Starnes said. Swingbridge is based in Charlotte, N.C.
Mike Gilbert led the group that studied "Springdale Growth," or community development as distinct from purely economic growth. His group decided drawing knowledge-based jobs to Springdale was vital to the city's future "so the people who grow up here will come back home," he said. Those are jobs such as computer programming and engineering with skills that aren't learned once but require adapting and changing at a rapid pace.
Chamber President Perry Webb agreed. Webb said in his remarks closing the conference average household income in Springdale lags below other cities in the region and retail outlets follow income.
Springdale has a key disadvantage in attracting employers in skill-based jobs, Gilbert said. When executives for high-tech companies come to Northwest Arkansas to consider a move or business opening in the region, they stay at either the Chancellor Hotel in Fayetteville or the Embassy Suites Hotel in Rogers, he said. Springdale should consider attracting a "high-end" hotel to the region, he said.
The opening of Arkansas Children's Northwest in the city will be a major boon to its skill-based economy, Gilbert said. The city should do what it can to develop a medical district in the vicinity of the hospital, he said.
Derek Gibson, spokesman for the transportation and infrastructure group, said his group's top recommendation reflected one of the priorities of the conference as a whole: Making sure the city passes the bond issue Feb. 13. Projects paid from the sales tax revenue will address many of the road and connection issues that concerned his group, Gibson said.
Josh Danish emphasized the downtown needed mixed-use residential development to make sure the area has a constant hum of activity and to address the city's exceptionally tight housing market. The occupancy rate for dwellings in Springdale is greater than 97 percent, he said.
Danish, spokesman for the downtown group, said his team voted development of entertainment and culinary opportunities downtown as the priority, followed by development of the area around the city's ballpark, mixed-use development downtown, and better east-west traffic corridors.
One vital issue conspicuously absent from discussions, Webb said in his concluding remarks, was the lack of diversity at the conference.
"Half of our community does not look like us," Webb told the almost exclusively Anglo audience.
Springdale is home to a large Hispanic population and one of the largest Marshallese populations in the United States outside of Hawaii.
"I don't think that came up at any level," he said. "We're going to start talking about that."
The city and the School Board needs participation from all sectors of its residents, he told the conference.
Eldon Alik is consul general for the Republic of the Marshall Islands with an office in Springdale. Informed of Webb's remarks, Alik said he would do what he could to encourage the Marshallese community to respond.
"Marshallese culture is one where we're not aggressive, and it is one of our challenges to get people to take an active role in a community," Alik said. "Another factor is, I don't think people realize just how many Marshallese are here and that we should be taking more of a role."
State Rep. Jeff Williams, R-Springdale, represents a large proportion of Marshallese in his legislative district. He praised Webb's remarks.
"There is a perspective you just cannot get if you do not have people with that perspective there," Williams said. "I represent many Latinos and Marshallese, but I will never know what it is like to be Latino or Marshallese. I have to hear from them to represent them.
"If you're going to plan for a city's future, you need to hear from the city you are planning for," he said.
Rey Hernandez of Rogers is state chairman of the League of United Latin American Citizens and of Northwest Arkansas' chapter of the same organization, Council 754. He said Webb's comments were welcome, but could have come much earlier.
"The entrepreneurial community has already changed Springdale," he said. "Look at all the Latino businesses in town. So this is a great step, but it should have come before now."
NW News on 12/09/2017