Kyle Kellams: Let’s begin this Friday edition of Ozarks at Large with Michael Tilley, who’s in his office in Fort Smith. Michael is with Talk Business and Politics. And Michael, welcome back to the show.
Michael Tilley: Well, thanks again for having me. Just a warning for your listeners. We’re going to be talking about waterslides again. If you’re tired of listening to that, you can tune into something else for a few minutes.
Kellams: Well, no. I think everyone gets a kick out of talking about waterslides. Almost everyone. Maybe not city officials. Before we talk about what’s new, quickly get us up to speed. Where we were with waterslides.
Tilley: Well, where we were, so I guess to go all the way back. The city was going to buy, the city and the county, mind you, both Sebastian County and the City of Fort Smith jointly manage this Parrot Island water park, and so we were going to buy these slides, $2.1 million apiece for the city and the county. And the county decided not to pay its half.
So the city is now into it for a little over $3.5 million, give or take, and they have a plan that they may vote on next Tuesday that would spend another $2.6 million roughly, with about $900,000 of that coming out of the city’s general fund balance to go ahead and fund these now.
And these are five water slides, big towering water slides, for Parrot Island, which has about 100,000 visitors a year. The park is in Ben Geren Regional Park, which is owned by the county. So there are two schools of thought on these slides. One of them is, ‘hey, yeah, we’re in for a pound’. Let’s go ahead and spend the extra because they’ll boost overall attendance and revenue. And they do. That’s what they do. Look at other parks. Historically, attendance and revenue rises when you add new features. And this park, mind you, it’s been open since 2015, and it’s had some years where it’s lost money, years where it’s gained money. It’s about $1.1 million roughly that it’s generated in revenue. So it’s not been a loss leader for the city or the county, so to speak.
But the other school of thought is, ‘hey, no, let’s cut our losses’. We’ve spent or obligated about $3.5 million. Let’s sell the slides that we own for whatever we can, whatever we can get. Let’s save our money for another day. And so the vote coming up Tuesday is to proceed, and we’ll see how this goes. It’s always been a 4-3 vote. It’s always been a narrow vote, with each vote so far voting to proceed with the water slide project.
But look, don’t ask me which will prevail. Because I would have bet a long time ago, I would have bet all of my chips, I would have put them all in, that the deal was dead when the county backed out, because I just didn’t think the city was going to say, ‘OK, we’ll go ahead and pony up another $2.1 million’. But they did. So I don’t know anything anymore about this.
But what I do know is I’ve got an idea on this in terms of raising money that can’t lose. And I say it can’t lose because it’s really already lost. And I say we hold a raffle for the first person to go down each one of these slides. It’s like five different raffles, maybe $5 a ticket. I think we could potentially raise tens of dollars for the water park. So I’m trying to be helpful here. That’s my idea.
Kellams: Well, I have a couple of questions about this one. Let’s say the decision is made to sell them. There is a market for this. There would be other water parks, presumably across the country, who would say, yeah, we’ll take it at a discount?
Tilley: Well, that’s a debate. Some think there should be a market for it. The other part of that, these slides have been sitting there already, partially assembled. What would it cost to disassemble them to get them ready for transport to somewhere else? And if there is a market, is it going to sell in one year, two years, three years? How long do you have to warehouse these? So I don’t know. Again, I’m not smart enough to know if there is a market. I think if I had to pick, the prevailing wisdom that I’ve heard is that it would be a difficult sell, and you probably wouldn’t get as much out of them as you want.
Kellams: Does this damage any sort of relationship between the city and county going forward?
Tilley: Well, I think it has to some extent. In fact, the county is trying to back out of their 50-50 deal with the city. And to your point, there are two other issues with the water park and the slides. One is who’s going to control it going forward. And the county has essentially said, ‘look, we’ll sell our part for a buck and all the maintenance going forward is on you’. There are some city board members who are like, ‘no, you guys agreed early on. We’re not just going to let you out of an agreement’. So I don’t know where that’s going to go.
There’s also a potential management shift. The city and the county right now are looking at five different management proposals, including one from American Resort Management, ARM, which has managed it since 2015. The city-county quasi group that’s looking at the proposals will make a decision. They hope to have a decision before March 31, when the agreement with ARM expires, and it would be in time for the new management company, if they select one, to prep for the summer season.
Kellams: Numbers at the Fort Smith airport, enplanements, that is people getting on planes to leave to another destination, up in 2025. That’s good news for the Fort Smith airport.
Tilley: Yeah, it is good news. It’s the right direction. It’s not a big gain. The total was 62,300 and something, a little over 62,000. It was up 1.5% compared to 2024. The 2025 gain is the second consecutive year of growth. And it tells a story of an airport trying to recover, the airport had more than 95,000 enplanements annually prior to COVID. So they’re really kind of like a lot of institutions, organizations, infrastructure, kind of knocked the wind out of it. And so it’s taken some time to recover.
The airport staff have a grant, and part of that grant is to help them increase the number of carriers. Right now, American Airlines is the only one flying out, and you can only fly to DFW. So they’re working on getting extra flights and getting a new route, maybe to St. Louis or Chicago, something that can get folks east. But they need more of this good news. They need the numbers going in the right direction.
There’s been a push even to encourage businesses and individuals in the Fort Smith metro area to use the airport as much as they can. I know from my personal experience we try to use it. Sometimes we just have to fly out of XNA or Little Rock because it’s easier and it’s cheaper and it’s a direct destination. So they have their challenges. But the good news is they’re moving in the right direction. They had a strong third quarter, had a good fourth quarter. Hopefully that points to momentum that will continue into 2026.
Kellams: Some more numbers. Building permit numbers for the Fort Smith metro up in 2025 compared to 2024. Let's push 2023, as we've talked about before, that record setting year aside. But year to year, this just completed year, up about 4%.
Tilley: Yeah, 4.2%. It’s a good direction. We were kind of watching last year, the bottom fell out. The 2024 numbers were almost 50% lower than 2023. And you’re right. They had $520 million in permit values in 2023. That’s when Mercy Hospital was in the middle of a big expansion, Simmons Foods over in Van Buren was in the middle of a big expansion. So that’s kind of an asterisk year.
Although 2025 will be a little bit of an asterisk because we didn’t get Greenwood’s numbers for December. They were in a system change and they were just not available. But it’s not a big difference. Greenwood numbers are anywhere from $1.5 million to $2 million a month. But the numbers in those three cities were almost $283 million. That’s up 4.2% compared to 2024. Fort Smith numbers were a little over $251 million. That was up 6.5%. Van Buren’s numbers were just under $20 million, and that was down about 13%. So it’s kind of a mixed bag. Greenwood numbers through November were down 3.5%.
So it was the activity in Fort Smith that carried the metro to a gain. One other caveat, I think we talked about this, and I have to remind myself too, there is a lot of activity going on that doesn’t get permitted just because of, what I think are unique circumstances. The consent decree works, millions of dollars every week, every month. And then there are millions of dollars in construction at Ebbing Air National Guard Base with the Foreign Military Pilot Training Center. That doesn’t get permitted.
Normally you would say, well, the construction companies, architecture companies, design companies, all of that, all the civil engineering related to that, they're not as busy because the numbers are down. Well, there are two other factors that don't get permitted that are pulling that capacity, not pulling it out of the system, but they're keeping the system busy. So again, that's just a reminder that these numbers don't tell the full story quarterly.
Kellams: Quarterly at TalkBusiness.net, you can find the compass report that gives out letter grades, the traditional letter grades that you might find on a report card to metro areas, economic activity for three months. The latest one is out with some passing grades yet
Tilley: Yep, some passing grades. What we look at central Arkansas, northwest Arkansas, the Fort Smith Metro and the Jonesboro Metro, we also look at the state as a whole. What it showed was that, and we've seen this for the last two or three quarters, that economic conditions continue to be good. I'm sure there are a lot of metros around the country that would love to have the economic conditions in any of Arkansas's four metros, but they are moderating even in northwest Arkansas.
I think that's just the age old issue of, you know, an economy just can't stay hot forever. In central Arkansas. We saw that drop to a B grade. Fort Smith Metro was down a little bit. I think the northwest Arkansas held its own as it, which is not a surprise. The Jonesboro Metro was down a bit. I encourage everybody to give a look at more detail. We got the links for the raw data for the narrative, but it's a good snapshot. It's an independent snapshot. There's not a private sector company pushing the numbers. There's no political influence to make the numbers look good or bad, whatever. We look at eight different metrics and we just compare them and the grades. I don't know if we mentioned this. The grades compare. So if you get a C grade for example, it means your economy is at the same place it was the same quarter the previous year. So anything above B is good, anything below C, just like school, you know. Don't get a D.
Kellams: Exactly. You can find those grades in all the stories we've talked about at TalkBusiness.net. Michael, have a great holiday weekend. Talk to you next week.
Tilley: You do the same. Thanks.
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