We start today with Michael Tilley from Talk Business & Politics, who joins us from his office in Fort Smith. Michael, this isn’t our usual day to talk, but we’ll be live in downtown Springdale for Friday’s Ozarks at Large, so we thought we’d get an early start on the weekend. Welcome to a Thursday edition of the show.
MICHAEL TILLEY: I appreciate it. And good luck. I get a kick out of you guys doing these live shows. I think it’s a great idea—gets people into how the sausage is made, so to speak. So good on you guys.
KELLAMS: Well, thank you. Speaking of journalism and how things work, let’s talk about Freedom of Information—a subject we’ve discussed before regarding the city of Fort Smith. What’s the latest?
TILLEY: The city of Fort Smith seems to frequently find itself in court or in some kind of trouble with the Freedom of Information Act. This time, it’s related to meetings between the city and state officials about providing water for the planned 3,000-bed state prison in Franklin County.
Marilyn Moore, a Fort Smith resident, requested documents related to those meetings. Long story short, the city didn’t provide all of them, and the ones they did provide weren’t delivered in the manner required under Arkansas’s FOIA. So she took them to court.
Joey McCutchen, a Fort Smith attorney who often handles FOIA cases against the city, took it on. A draft order from Circuit Judge Diana Ladd essentially said the city messed up. On Tuesday, the Board of Directors voted on a resolution to accept the order and pay just over $1,700 in fines and attorney’s fees.
McCutchen says he’ll donate those fees to a press association–type program. Moore spoke to the board before the vote and said she was disappointed, encouraging the city to do better—and I’m paraphrasing very little there.
Jeff Dingman, the acting city administrator who was caught up in the issue, apologized to Moore, the board, and city staff. Interestingly, the city’s attorney had encouraged the board to take the case to court, despite the city’s track record. Fort Smith has lost in court on FOIA matters before—one well-known case is Harris v. City of Fort Smith, in which the Arkansas Supreme Court said the city can’t make backroom deals with public money.
Fortunately, a majority of the board pushed back this time. I think it was Director Neal Martin who said, “We need to have an expectation of transparency.” The resolution passed 5–1. The city has since updated how it handles FOIA requests, so hopefully this is the last case like this for a while.
KELLAMS: Speaking of final chapters—parking meters in downtown Fort Smith are going away.
TILLEY: Yeah. I don’t know if we get Cool Hand Luke to come cut the tops off of them—if no one gets that reference, go check out the movie.
More than 300 parking meters are going to be removed at some point. We don’t yet know the timeline, but this followed a nearly two-year trial period where the board waived fees and covered the meters. According to the police department and downtown business owners, there’s been no discernible change in traffic patterns—people aren’t hogging spaces.
The city was also losing about $30,000 to $35,000 a year maintaining and enforcing those meters. So it became a no-brainer. On Tuesday, the board unanimously voted to remove them.
There will still be time-limited parking around the Sebastian County Courthouse, but enforcement will now fall to the county. Other than that, parking meters in downtown Fort Smith will soon be gone—physically removed.
KELLAMS: We’ve got some tourism spending numbers for the Fort Smith metro. It’s another one of those “down, but also up depending on timeframe” situations.
TILLEY: Right. Recent hospitality tax revenue—April and May—was up. But if you look at January through May, Fort Smith collected just over $520,000 from its 3 percent lodging tax. That’s down about 2.4 percent compared to the same period last year. Fort Smith does not have a prepared food tax.
Van Buren, which collects 1 percent on both lodging and prepared food, brought in about $350,000 during the same timeframe—that’s down 7.3 percent. But they’ve also seen some uptick recently, which isn’t surprising as we get into summer.
This isn’t unique to Fort Smith or Van Buren. We’re seeing similar reports in other parts of Arkansas and even nationally. In fact, three of the first five months of Arkansas’s 2 percent state tourism tax were down compared to 2024.
What we’re hearing from Van Buren’s Merrill Keefe, Fort Smith’s Ashley Bacot, and others is that people are uncertain about the economy—worried about prices, tariffs, and so on. So they’re pulling back on restaurant spending and out-of-town trips.
These summer months are when many tourism spots “make hay,” so to speak. We’ll see if trends improve in the second half of the year.
KELLAMS: Same kind of trend with building permits in the metro—up or down depending on the timeframe.
TILLEY: Exactly. In 2024, the region saw a steep decline—almost 50 percent—compared to 2023. But 2025 is a different story.
Looking at January through July, we examined Fort Smith, Greenwood, and Van Buren. Together, they saw nearly $205 million in permitted construction—that’s up almost 42 percent compared to the same period in 2024.
Permits in Fort Smith alone are up nearly 30 percent. Van Buren’s are up 84 percent. Greenwood’s are up almost 25 percent. So it’s across-the-board growth.
From what I see anecdotally, the Fort Smith metro ramped up heavily in 2021 through 2023. There were big projects like Simmons Foods in Van Buren, Mercy Hospital in Fort Smith, and several at Chaffee Crossing. I think 2024 was a breather—not a planned one, but a natural market pause. Now, in 2025, it looks like construction is picking back up in a very strong way.
KELLAMS: Finally, there’s a great piece at Talk Business about historic aircraft and their future at Ebbing Air National Guard Base in Fort Smith.
TILLEY: Yeah, I’m an aviation geek, so some might say this wasn’t really a news story—but since I decide what’s news, I say it is.
The 188th Wing recently moved six of their historic, static-display aircraft. These are planes the unit has flown over the years, like the RF-84 Thunderflash, flown from 1957 to 1970, and the A-10 Warthog, flown from 2007 to 2014—which was the last manned mission for the 188th.
These aircraft were placed around the base, but with construction underway for the new foreign military pilot training center, they had to be relocated. For now, they’re parked on a private ramp at the airport.
In two to three years, they’ll be incorporated into a new entryway display for Ebbing. I was a little concerned when I saw them moved—I thought we might lose them—but the Air Guard has a plan to keep them as part of the base’s story.
KELLAMS: That is cool. And I love the name Thunderflash for a plane.
TILLEY: Yeah, it’s almost like a Marvel or DC superhero.
KELLAMS: Exactly. You can read about all of this—including the Thunderflash—at Talk Business. Michael, we’ll be back together Friday next week. Thanks for your time.
TILLEY: I appreciate it. Looking forward to it.
Find these headlines and more at talkbusiness.net.
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