Kyle Kellams: It is Friday, and it is time to talk with Michael Tilley from Talk Business & Politics. Michael, welcome back.
Michael Tilley: Well, thanks for having me. I’m kind of hunkered down here for the great snow event that’s going to, I think, ruin society as we know it, from what I hear.
Kellams: I guess the one thing everyone’s agreeing on is there will be a winter storm. It’s not one of those will it, will it not. It’s just how much.
Tilley: I’ve got the regular list. I’ve got toilet paper, bread and whiskey, so I’m good to go.
Kellams: All right, let’s start with a jet that landed at Ebbing this week, kind of a milestone for the pilot training center.
Tilley: Yes, we have another country. The first jet from Finland arrived. And so we have that jet. We have planes from Poland, the F-35 fighter jets from Poland. So look, Kyle, we’re set in the event that Putin decides to invade, we’re going to be good to go.
But no, it has arrived to much fanfare. It’s part of this foreign pilot training center that’s in the process. It’s not even fully operational yet, but it’s in the process of getting fully operational. We’ll have later this year planes from Singapore, Switzerland, other European ally planes here for training.
And what this is — I talked to a military official this week — they kind of put a better explainer on it. These foreign pilots that are coming here and training in these jets, and there will be eight of these jets from Finland here when it’s all said and done, about 20 pilots, their maintainer crews. So there’ll be a healthy delegation here for a couple of years. I think they cycle out in February 2028. But what they do here, they’re training the trainers. So these pilots are here to be trained up, and then they’ll go back to their countries and train everybody else in that jet.
They’re also going to have their maintenance crews here. That was part of the press release. They have this term called interim contract support maintainers. That’s just a fancy word for maintenance crews. So they’ll be here also, so it's not just pilots, the fly boys probably working with Lockheed. Lockheed’s the manufacturer. These planes are manufactured in Fort Worth at Lockheed’s facility there. So this plane that flew to Fort Smith rolled off the floor in mid-December.
So a brand new plane. And one of the things — and I think I knew this — but it’s always kind of good to remember these are new jets. They’re becoming a growing part of the U.S. and NATO fleet. According to the F-35 folks, there are almost 1,300 F-35s operational. About 20 nations have them. Thirteen of those are in Europe, obviously allied with the U.S. Finland will have 64 when it’s all said and done, and it only costs Finland about $9.4 billion for 64. So if you’re trying to figure out if you can afford a couple, there you go.
Kellams: Very good. We figured out the city of Fort Smith can afford waterslides.
Tilley: Yeah, well, some people would argue with you on that. But the board just voted, and this is the gift that keeps on giving in terms of headlines and stories. But yeah, the Parrot Island Waterpark board voted Tuesday, 4-3, as has usually been their votes on these waterslides. Quick background: these are five waterslides the city bought in early 2025. It was supposed to be a $2.1 million deal. Sebastian County was supposed to throw in another $2.1 million.
The county didn’t want to do it, which is when I thought the whole deal would be dead. But the city board said no, we’ll pick it up for $4.2 million. Then we learned in October it’s going to take another $2 million to $3 million to get these things installed. Well, that was certainly controversial. And there was a good chance it could have died then. But city staff worked with a couple of board members, and they came up with a $2.6 million, almost $2.7 million package to get them installed. About $1.7 million is coming from the general fund reserve balance. There’s a little over $20 million in it. So it’s not that big of a hit, but it’s still almost $3 million adding on to the $4.2 million. There was a pretty large anti-slide crowd that showed up and showed out, to some extent. So that’s moving forward now.
I don’t think we’re through reporting on this. Will there be surprises when construction begins? Will contracts come in under estimates? Will there be change orders down the road that drive the price a little higher? Those could be fun issues for the board to tackle.
And also, for anyone hoping the water park issue is behind us, we’re going to slide into a few more months of reporting on it, no pun intended because there's also a management contract up. Five or six companies have applied, including ARM, which is currently managing the water park they have also applied for. And now Sebastian County is trying to back out of this joint management agreement.
Kellams: Wow.
Tilley: Imagine if you were a 50-50 partner and I decided I want to do something and you said, no, you don't want to do it, and I went ahead and did it. What kind of partnership do we have?
Kellams: It doesn’t sound like a good one.
Tilley: Yeah. So that's going to have to be figured out. And that's going to be that's going to happen in the next few months, if not a few weeks. So, as we say often, just stay tuned.
Kellams: If you go to Talk Business & Politics at talkbusiness.net, you’ll see the latest unemployment numbers. For the Fort Smith metro, unemployment was up 4.2% from 3.2% in November 2024. Do we glean anything from that?
Tilley: The good news is the metro is still adding jobs. There were 105,500 estimated nonfarm jobs in November. That was 1,000 jobs compared with November 2024. Just under 1% compared to November 2024. On the downside, a little bit of the downside. I don't want to be too negative, but it was the lowest pace of growth in terms of percentage among the other of all four metros, which you look at northwest Arkansas, central Arkansas and Jonesboro. So it had the lowest pace of growth percentage wise.
And regional employment in the Fort Smith Metro is still below the peak of 108,800, almost 109,000, in November of 2027. That was right before the manufacturing sector took a nosedive, and also the number of employed in the metro was up almost 33% compared to November 2024. So it’s again, one of those. The good news is this, and the bad news is that kind of thing. Fortunately, trade, primarily the retail sector and the tourism sector, those sectors drove job growth. There was significant job growth in those areas, 500 estimated new jobs in tourism. The same with trade, transportation, utilities. Again, that's good news. The other side of that coin is those sectors aren't known for having the best salaries and benefits. In the manufacturing sector, which typically does pay better in terms of salary and benefits. In the Fort Smith Metro, it really continues to struggle to generate momentum. There's 18,000 estimated jobs in November, ‘25 that was below 18,200 in’24 in that sector, the sector posted a record employment of 29,200 in June 1999, so it's considerably off the high, and it recovered back to around 18,000 jobs in 2023, but hasn't really broke broken out past that since. But just to finish off on a good note, the numbers, at least the non-farm jobs are moving in the right direction.
Kellams: Earlier, we talked about 2.6 million dollars for water slides. That gets an approval, but 150 thousand dollars a year for Main Street, Fort Smith on pause.
Tilley: Yeah. We're going to, so historically, the city of Fort– Well, not historically it goes back to 2023. Main Street Fort Smith formed, tied in with Main Street, Arkansas, the whole Main Street effort nationwide, because up until that, up until that time, the city of Fort Smith really, not really did they didn't do anything above and beyond in terms of promoting, encouraging downtown development, revitalization, business recruitment. So Main Street Fort Smith has stepped up and is doing that. It's about a 100– or it is –150 thousand dollars a year contract. Director Neil Martin wants to review that, so they pushed that to a future study session, which we don't know the date yet.
Kyle, there was a time the board was pretty unanimous on supporting these downtown improvement efforts. And I'm not saying there's a big change. But there has been this rising voice, and I still think it's a small minority, but it's a vocal minority that are looking for budget cuts because there are even a few that they'll get up and speak to the board and say, Fort Smith needs to DOGE its budget. You know, you need to have your DOGE program. And we know how well that worked out on the federal level. So we'll see if that sentiment continues. Main Street has really become active in the past few years. They've secured grants for facade improvements. They've recently signed an agreement with this central business improvement district to work together on projects and a small business incubator. Biz Recruitment, beautification efforts, grant funding efforts. So if the city were to pull the plug or significantly reduce it, that could kind of pull the rug out from that momentum. I talked to Amanda Hager. She's director of Main Street, Fort Smith, and she was very non-plussed. She seems very confident when she presents to the board their past successes and what they do, that they'll continue to support it. But look, I don't know, placing bets on what the board will do or not do. That's like placing bets on those baby crawls, you know, um, just don't know which way that's going to go.
Kellams: Well, I wasn't expecting that. That's a great comparison you can read about, maybe not baby crawls. Maybe that's not at talkbusiness.net. Not that. But everything else we talked about was, that's where you go, talkbusiness.net. Michael, best of luck with the coming snow. We'll talk to you next week.
Tilley: Yep. Hunker down. Stay warm. Keep that dog inside.
Kellams: Oh, she'll be inside. Don't worry.
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