Kyle Kellams: And this is Friday. It is not the last Friday of 2025, but it is the last Friday in 2025 that I will be talking with Michael Tilley from Talk Business & Politics. Special shows the next couple of Fridays. So, Michael, let me first welcome you, and then let me wish you a Happy New Year.
Michael Tilley: Yeah. It was, what, January a couple of days ago, right? It was 2019 a couple of days ago. Yeah. Oh, gosh. Yes.
Kyle Kellams: Well, let’s go out of 2025 with at least one story that’s kind of looking ahead, and that is the University of Arkansas Fort Smith’s Intrepid Ambition campaign. It looks like they’re going to hit that goal.
Michael Tilley: Yeah, they’re doing very well. Let me see if they’ll contract to raise money for me. They announced in April this pretty aggressive $85 million campaign, the Intrepid Ambition campaign, that had a few years of a private phase. That’s what a lot of universities do because they want to come out with a big number. But when they announced in April, they had raised $68.5 million of that. And then we just learned two days ago that that tally now is up 13%. They’re at $77.3 million. That leaves them needing just $7.6 million by 2028, which is not bad and in line for that.
No, it’s not bad. 2028 is also, speaking of time flying, their 100-year anniversary, the university’s 100-year anniversary. So this campaign will be part of that. The money, they haven’t drilled down into a lot of details yet, and universities usually don’t. But the funds will be used, to what they say, to support their three core priorities: students, people and community. For example, they want to remove financial barriers as much as they can for students, better pay and support, which is facilities, that kind of thing for faculty and staff, and then strengthen their regional partnerships.
Part of that we’ve already seen, and we’ve reported that, you’ve reported it, the Center for Nonprofits that was set up earlier this year. $7.5 million of that total goal was used to create that. It’s a pretty unique concept. Sometimes nonprofits, they don’t have the, you know, you have small business centers and a lot of things catering to businesses and entrepreneurs. But nonprofit directors have to be entrepreneurs also. And so this kind of targets that, it does target support and resources for those folks.
So it will be interesting to see how much more over $85 million. Blake Rickman, who’s the vice chancellor there, he’s head of the foundation, his quote with us was that he thinks the momentum is going to push them beyond that. I mean, you never want to jinx anything, but hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if they get close to $100 million by 2028.
Kyle Kellams: We know that more people are flying out of XNA than ever before. We got their numbers earlier this week. We also know now that the enplanements at the airport in Fort Smith are going up and should top last year.
Michael Tilley: Yeah. It was not on that path through the first half of the year. They were trending down. But through November, their enplanements are a little over 57,000, up 1.6% compared to the same period last year.
What’s been interesting is to see just the back half of the year so far. Airport use has really picked up. For example, in the third quarter of the year, traffic, their enplanements were up almost 7.5% through the third quarter. And now through the fourth quarter, they’re at 1.3%. So those two quarters are pretty big.
So barring, as we said in the story, barring any craziness in the U.S. air traffic system, they should end 2025 with numbers better than 2024. And those 2024 numbers are better than 2023. So they should end up well over 65,000 enplanements.
I know, compared to XNA, that’s not a lot, but it’s good for this airport. And the number we report every time with the point of comparison for Fort Smith is a number that I look at every month, and every month it still just kind of blows me away. The record for the airport, the enplanement record, was 112,782, almost 113,000. That was set back in 1975.
Kyle Kellams: Wow.
Michael Tilley: So yeah, I tell myself, I do the wow thing every time, and I should know better because I’m the one that posts it every month. So I guess the point is there’s still a lot of capacity for growth at the airport.
Kyle Kellams: I wonder, you probably don’t know this off the top of your head, how many airlines and how many destinations in 1975?
Michael Tilley: Yeah, there were a lot. So it is an unfair comparison because there have been some regulation changes in the commercial air transport industry. There are some subsidies and some other things that played into that.
And back in 1975, I don’t know if there was a thing called XNA. So there was a market draw from a larger area. There are probably a lot of factors that play into that, and I am not smart enough to know. If you asked me to get into the third or fourth or fifth factor, I’ll be pretty dumb about that.
Kyle Kellams: Let’s talk home sales in Fort Smith for 2025. A little below 2024.
Michael Tilley: Yes. And this has kind of been a trend through the year, up and down, and it looks like it’ll be down. It’s again a function of higher interest rates. It’s also a function, we hear from some realtors, that there’s just not a lot of inventory. People aren’t selling their homes, and not a lot of homes are being built. There’s a lot of apartments being built in the area.
But home sales in the Fort Smith metro, which is primarily the bulk of it from Sebastian and Crawford counties, the numbers are a little over 2,700 homes sold in the first 10 months in the market. That’s down 8.5%. The combined value of those home sales totaled a little over $685 million. That was down 3.3 %.
However, the good side, especially if you’re a homeowner, the average home sales price was up 5.6%. So the activity may be down, but the value of the homes has not dropped.
One thing we did in this recent report, we pulled out homes sold in the Fort Smith area based on ZIP code, and those numbers are down. I was surprised by how much they were down. They were down 16.5% through the first 10 months of the year.
Back to Sebastian County, their home sales were down 13.3%. The county represents 43% of all homes sold in the metro. Crawford County home sales are down 5.6%, and they represent 21% of all homes sold in the metro. So those are obviously the two biggest markets.
I’m not hearing any panic from realtors. It’s just a slower pace. It’s coming off what was a pretty hot pace, 2021 and 2022. So it’s slowed down a little bit. But it’s higher interest rates, a lot of uncertainty in the economy around tariffs and other things, and just, I think, a lack of inventory.
Kyle Kellams: Gotcha. Finally, let’s talk about Reimagine ACME. What is Reimagine ACME?
Michael Tilley: Well, we will see if we reimagine ACME. So ACME, the former ACME brickyard property, it’s almost dead center in the city of Fort Smith on Old Greenwood Road. It’s about 111, 112 acres. It’s where the brick company used to pull the clay out to make bricks.
They sold that. The city bought that for about $2.28 million a couple of years ago. The primary purpose is for flood mitigation, or what they call stormwater drainage. There are a lot of engineers who love, they can’t just call it flood control. It’s got to be something fancy.
But there’s been a push by some groups and individuals to do more with it, to have biking trails, walking trails, maybe some type of amenities around those retention ponds.
There was a public input session that began this week. There’ll be an online input session that’ll go on for three weeks. This group out of Des Moines, Iowa, RDG Planning and Design, they’re going to come up with some options, get those back.
The target is to get those back to the Fort Smith Board and the Fort Smith Parks and Recreation Commission sometime around August, maybe a little sooner or a little after, and then just see what kind of stomach the city board has for investing.
There are some board members who are of a mind that we just need to get those stormwater ponds built and that’s it, and sell out the rest of it. There are some directors who want to spend as much as they can, over whatever time it takes, to make it a first-class quality-of-life type amenity right in the middle of the city.
So there’s a range of options, and there’s a range of political will that will play out later this year. We’ll see where it goes. We have some questions out to the seven members of the city board, kind of getting their initial thoughts on it. We hope to post that story this weekend, either Saturday or Sunday.
Kyle Kellams: Final decisions don’t have to come right away, though, right?
Michael Tilley: No, no. But I just wanted to get a feel for who they are. And look, we’re going to have some elections. Some of the people that are on the board now may not be the ones voting for it if it goes to a vote late 2026 or early 2027.
And there are other things competing for dollars. They’re all good things. It’s just going to be a matter, and I’m not advocating for or against, it’ll be an interesting decision process to see what the citizens want, what the board thinks it can afford, what the city staff wants to push.
That’s why I’m in this business. I’m a news geek. I like following these kinds of things.
Kyle Kellams: Well, we’ll have something to talk about in 2026 then.
Michael Tilley: We’ll probably have one or two things to talk about.
Kyle Kellams: Michael Tilley is with Talk Business & Politics. Michael, it’s been a fantastic year talking with you. Can’t wait to do it again in the new year.
Michael Tilley: Well, look, I appreciate your time and patience.
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