Matthew Moore: Fayetteville Mayor Molly Rawn is proposing a batch of bond initiatives that, once approved by City Council, will be on the ballot for voters in the March 2026 primary election. Mayor Rawn joined me in the Bruce and Ann Applegate News Studio Two last week to discuss the proposals, but she starts by talking about how a municipal bond works and why would a city propose them.
Molly Rawn: That’s a great question, and I think that it’s great that you’re starting with the basics. So a bond is an opportunity for cities to essentially leverage its credit to be able to invest in capital projects. So it requires going to the voters, as it should. And the voters have an opportunity to specifically vote item by item on how a certain portion of their sales tax dollars are spent.
And so right now, there is a 1-cent sales tax in Fayetteville that goes to bond projects that is maturing — or, if it’s easier to think about it in terms of how you might think about your own finances, that is essentially being paid off. And so what we are doing is asking the voters to allow us to continue that 1-cent sales tax so that we can make further capital investments without having to raise taxes.
Moore: First on the list of things — we’ll have a rundown on our website of all of the different proposals and priorities that you have suggested here — but I want to start at the top of your list. Here is water and sewer upgrades. Why is this top of the list for you?
Rawn: This is top of the list for me because it is absolutely critical, and nothing that we do can have as much of an impact if we don’t have adequate water and sewer. And it’s tricky in a lot of ways because it’s one of those things that, if it’s working, you don’t notice it. You don’t necessarily notice that you have clean and safe drinking water. We take it for granted. You don’t necessarily notice that the sewer is working and functioning the way it’s supposed to and that it’s not polluting and that it’s healthy and that your toilet’s able to flush.
Most of us don’t think about that, and so that can make it a little harder to explain how critical that is. But if you look at the cities that are around us, a lot of them are experiencing moratoriums on housing growth or moratoriums on development of any kind because they don’t have adequate capacity.
And so water and sewer is one question. We’re presenting it as one question in the bond — $146 million — but that is for both water and sewer. So a big portion of that is repairing what’s known as the Nolan Plant, which is one of our sewer plants that is in town. Another portion of that is also for replacing one of our primary water mains through town. It’s a 36-inch water main that is critical and needs upgrading, as well as other specific projects, which will be in detail on our website, that improve water lines.
Because we know that we don’t want to be in a situation where our growth is limited because of capacity.
Moore: Also on the list is a new fire station.
Rawn: Yes. So fire is an important part of this bond. And in addition to a new fire station, it’s also the associated apparatus — which is the fancy way that our firefighters refer to their fire trucks — and also a new fire training facility.
So specifically with the new fire station, I expect that that will be somewhere in the northwest corner of the city, where we see the growth. Our fire department is — I would just put them up and say they’re the best in the state — and they are fantastic. And it is critical, I believe, and important that we maintain a really low response time. I believe it’s four minutes is what we shoot for.
And as the city grows and more people move here and more houses are built, we have to make sure that we are keeping up by having fire stations that are appropriately situated so that we can keep that response time. Also along with that comes the fire engines that you need to be able to do that.
And then the fire training facility. So right now, we are at our property in South Fayetteville. We train not only our firefighters but firefighters from across the region. And they do a great job out there. There are classrooms, there’s outdoor and indoor training. It’s a temporary space. It’s a flex space. And so having a purpose-built space for them to do their training is something that the fire department has wanted for some time.
Moore: You have two specific areas highlighted for road and pedestrian improvement. One is the North Street corridor between Garland and College, and another is the Huntsville-MLK corridor on the other end of the city, on the south side of the city. Why those two corridors specifically?
Rawn: Yeah. So those are two that are listed as part of what is projected to be a $54,350,000 transportation roads portion of this.
Specifically with North Street, this was a project that was originally intended to be a part of the 2019 bond, and we were not able to complete it. It is also one that we have gotten some grant funding for, partially from the Northwest Arkansas Regional Planning Commission.
And that intersection — if you have driven North and Garland — is such a high student-population area. It is what I would consider to be an economically diverse area of our city. It is one of the most transit-accessible places in our city, and yet the infrastructure and the roads are not designed to support that pedestrian infrastructure and that public transportation as much as they could be.
Moore: I would argue it’s one of the most multimodal intersections in the city, but it is not necessarily designed that way.
Rawn: One hundred percent, and our public works director would love that you said that and that you used that term. It’s also — anybody that’s traveled in Fayetteville knows that we struggle with east-west connections, right? It’s easier to connect north and south than it is east and west.
And so that is a primary, if not the primary, east-west connector in our city. And so it quickly rose to the top of the list, not just at Garland but eventually all the way to College, getting an upgrade.
And then Huntsville — we have heard from people in Ward 1 for years. I mean, predating me being in office, but I know city staff has heard from the residents of Ward 1 in that Huntsville Road area. We’ve heard from our two council representatives from Ward 1 that oftentimes, in terms of infrastructure, it feels neglected and feels like we have not invested there the way we should.
And so this section of Huntsville is, we think, a critical piece of missing infrastructure that we can hopefully remedy through this bond. It’s sort of — I should say not affectionately — referred to as the Huntsville Gap by a lot of people that live there, because it really kind of presents a gap in our sidewalk system and definitely could see some improvement.
Moore: We’ve laid out some priorities here. We’ve laid out kind of what we want to do and how money would be allocated with this bond initiative. What’s next? What is the City Council’s role, and what is the role of Fayetteville voters moving forward?
Rawn: So I’m speaking to you today on a Wednesday, and so last night, the City Council voted to pass a resolution of intent to move the bond issue forward. And that is simply their way of saying we are generally aligned. It is not binding to the specific language, but it is a vote of confidence that we’re headed in the right direction — and that passed.
The next opportunity then will be in two weeks. So on Tuesday, Oct. 21, this item will be before the City Council again, and it will be our official ballot language.
So, in other words, the way that I described it to you has been reviewed by bond counsel. Our city attorney works with us to hire specific legal representation outside of the city — their job is they just work on municipal bonds — and they help us develop that language that will actually be what the voters see on the ballot. And the council will have the opportunity to vote on that on Tuesday.
Moore: Additional things — any thoughts, anything that I missed here that you want to make sure we touch on?
Rawn: Yeah. There are a couple of things that I’d love to add. One is that these questions are all presented on the ballot separately. So if you’ve not voted in a bond election before, when you go, you vote on each item individually. Of course, we want you to give a yes vote to all of the items, but voters do have the opportunity to vote on every single one.
Another thing that I do want to talk about that has been raised by a lot of people is, “I don’t see housing in this bond.” That’s something that I have heard and that people have questioned me about. And I appreciate being held accountable to that because, as someone that campaigned so hard on housing, I can understand the immediate reaction of, “Well, wait a minute, you haven’t put any of this in here.”
And so I’d like the opportunity to address that if I might. And I want to address it in two ways. First of all, by saying that just because we do not see an item in this bond that says housing doesn’t mean that I don’t see this as a tool for housing.
So when we talk about needing to address the housing crisis, there are multiple ways that we need to do that on a spectrum — all the way from mitigating the impacts of homelessness to just having enough market-rate housing built. We have to attack that on multiple different fronts.
The single most important thing that we can do to make sure that we are still able to build the needed additional housing in Fayetteville is to make sure that our infrastructure is where it needs to be. And the other option that we have, if we don’t go to this infrastructure investment — particularly, I’m talking about water and sewer now — through a bond, we have to do it through the ratepayers, which means if you live in Fayetteville, when you get your water bill, we have to raise that.
And I don’t want to tell working people living in our city, “We are tripling or quadrupling your rates to be able to afford this needed infrastructure.” I would much rather do that in a bond and set the framework and the groundwork for how we move on with housing.
In terms of specifically affordable housing, there are many things the city has already put into place, including the hiring of a chief housing officer that is just now unveiling several different programs that I believe are going to have a faster, more immediate, and also a longer-term, better impact in terms of the creation of affordable housing and the preserving of existing affordable housing than I think a bond would.
A bond is restricted to capital improvements — things that we can build and we can own. I do not believe that the best way forward for affordable housing is for us to build it and own it. And that has been something that I have spent a lot of time thinking about, talking to experts about, talking to our Federal Housing Authority about.
One of the things I’m most proud of that we’ve done this year is the financial support for the Housing Authority to help get them set up to where they can do what they do best. They also have the ability to bond. We’re reactivating the Public Facilities Board — they have the ability to do a revenue bond.
And there are also several programs we are working on to help look at things like, what does it look like for us to be involved in the rental-assistance conversation?
And so a bond is an important tool for a city. It is not the only tool. And so just because the bond initiative doesn’t have a housing-specific item does not mean we’re taking our foot off the gas on looking at ways for affordable housing. Not every tool in the toolbox is a solution for every problem.
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