Roby Brock: The Northwest Arkansas Council met this week to discuss long-term and short-term strategies for helping control growth in the Northwest Arkansas region. I caught up with Nelson Peacock, president and CEO of the Northwest Arkansas Council, for a conversation on today's Northwest Arkansas Business Journal Report.
Nelson Peacock with Northwest Arkansas Council, thank you for making time for me, Nelson.
Nelson Peacock: Thank you.
Brock: Your latest council report is out. There's some big takeaways in it as it relates to growth in the region. As you head towards a million people living in Northwest Arkansas in the next little more than a decade and a half, you've got growth, you've got housing, you've got infrastructure strains. Tell me a little bit about just the overall takeaways from this latest annual report.
Peacock: So what we put out is a kind of a regional vision for growth as we prepare to take on nearly a doubling in population over the next 25 years. And really what we wanted to do was to start to try to define and align all of our regional leaders across the municipalities and the counties towards a common vision. The council's strong suit over the past 30 or so years is really to try to offer vision for the future, but through collaboration and convening of our business leaders, elected leaders and others. And so this vision that we are releasing is really the product of well over a year of work, getting stakeholder engagement and information from citizens and elected leaders, business leaders and others to help us understand what people love about Northwest Arkansas, what they want to build on and what they want to preserve. And so that's what this report is going to help us do, we hope. And it really breaks down how we want to grow and why, in several major categories.
Brock: I feel like you constantly have your finger on the pulse of what's happening in Northwest Arkansas. You have too many people engaged, too many people that you're talking to, to not have a good sense of where things are at. But are there any surprises? Did you learn anything different or new or unexpected in this report?
Peacock: I wouldn't say that we learned anything new or unexpected. We know that people love Northwest Arkansas for a variety of reasons — the strong economy being paramount, but also access to outdoors, ease of getting around, all those types of things that are unique in a fast-growing region. I think what we found is that as we grow, to have the right kind of planning, the right kind of transportation systems, water systems, the kinds of things that you need — the hard infrastructure — they really leverage each other. If you do these things the right way, you can preserve your rural lands and your green space. You can build community resilience through making smart investments that make sure that your city's fiscally resilient over time and can continue to upgrade its infrastructure and invest in parks and things like that. And ultimately those investments will help city leaders build community where people want to live. I think that was one of the most interesting things — that these are six different strategies or ideas that we're working towards, but they all kind of work together. If we can get them all moving forward, they're going to leverage off each other. So I think that's the good news.
Brock: So you hit on two topics that I wanted to dive deeper into. You talked about water and transportation. Let's take water first. What do you see as the water needs for this region of the state? And what do you think needs to happen in terms of planning over the next two decades?
Peacock: So there's quite a few things that go into water. Where we've been leaning into lately is our wastewater challenges. Basically the long and short of it is we've grown too fast in certain locations to be able to meet the demand that we have in wastewater. And so what we've done is partnered with the Department of Agriculture in the state, and we are about three-quarters of the way through the process of doing a regional wastewater analysis. Part of that is going to be the engineering part — where should different flow go to be the most efficient, and how do systems work together the right way based on different watersheds and things like that? But that will actually in many ways be the easy part. The hard part will be the governance. All of our cities, or many of our cities, already have systems in place. A lot of times cities will work with the adjoining city on different elements of that, and there's reliance from some of the bigger cities on the smaller cities. But what we're trying to do is put together a regional framework that ensures that we are as efficient as possible in how we treat and process wastewater. That is going to require some trust, that is going to require a lot of discussions around governance and who gets to say, because ultimately you're talking about billions of dollars of infrastructure investment over the next 20-plus years — ratepayers and all those types of things. That is one of the major things that we are working on right now, and it's critically important. We already have some places that are slowing down in development because of restrictions related to wastewater. So that's critically important.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
