Kellams: A man who will put the news tiles of last week into an order we can understand, Michael Tilley with Talk Business & Politics. Welcome back.
Tilley: Well, thank you for having me. My wife's trying to get me to learn mahjong, and I think I've found the limits of my intelligence. That's just too many tiles of too many colors and shapes on them. I'm aware of my own limitations when it comes to that game.
Kellams: Well, I would like to. I want to know how to play. I just don't know if I have the patience to learn.
Tilley: Yeah, that's me. I think that's me. Can I learn in five minutes? No, you can't.
Kellams: Well, then I'm not interested. Well, you can help us. It's not a good trade, but it is what it is. You can help us put some things in order here. Let's start with some Fort Smith job numbers, the metro area job numbers. What do they tell us?
Tilley: Well, so yeah, we looked at the May report. Those are the latest numbers out. And look, we do a lot of these numbers reports, and there are very few that ever concern me. Sales tax revenue numbers, building permits, home sales, they're all going to ebb and flow. But we've kind of noticed in the last couple of months this decline in professional and business service sector jobs. It's somewhat troubling. I'm not going to say it's alarming. There's no reason to run for the hills. And look, there could be a revision. The Bureau of Labor Statistics often puts those out. But it's something we're watching with interest.
What we're watching is that in May, there was an estimated 10,300 jobs in that sector, which was down almost 7% compared with May 2025. And it's down almost 9% compared to 2021. So, and let me back up a little bit, that 10,300 jobs, that's maybe 10% of the overall job numbers in the Fort Smith metro. So it's not like it's 40, 50% of the jobs, but it's still worth watching for the reason that these are higher paying jobs. The Arkansas average pay in that sector is around $66,300. The average pay for all jobs in Arkansas, according to the BLS, is around $53,800. So you can see the difference.
So in this May, that sector was down 1,000 jobs compared to May 2021, if you look back five years. So that's somewhat troubling. So even if you take the overall state average pay of $53,800, that's almost a $54 million estimated payroll, annual payroll loss, in the metro. So we're watching that. There's no background or tab data to kind of give us an idea of where those losses are coming from.
On the upside, though, although they're not high paying jobs, the area's tourism industry jobs are up 10% in the past five years. And education and health services, which do have pretty good paying jobs, those jobs are up 3% in the past five years. So that's good.
And then a little bit more of a good news, bad news situation. Manufacturing jobs in the Fort Smith metro are up almost 13.5% in the past five years, and that looks good. That's about 2,100 jobs. So that looks good, and it is good, but it's almost 40% below peak employment, or down about 11,400 jobs, when the area manufacturing sector was really humming about 26, 27 years ago. So that's catching up.
But just back quickly, the professional business services sector, it's an important sector, it's a high paying sector, and hopefully this trend will reverse or there'll be some revision. But we're going to keep watching it.
Kellams: Let's stick with numbers and talk about the latest building activity numbers for the area. Tell us, any good news, different news there?
Tilley: Yeah, well, it's a little down, and there's going to be a caveat to this report also. Building activity, if we look at Fort Smith, Greenwood and Van Buren, it was $36.1 million in June. That's almost 39% lower than it was in June 2025. But it was a big rebound, it was up 76% from May. In the first six months of the year, those three cities had a combined $145 million, roughly, in permitted building activity, and that's down about 19% from the same period in 2025.
Year to date, January through June, Fort Smith had about $123.5 million permitted activity. It's down about 20, well over 20%. Van Buren numbers are down about. Excuse me. Van Buren numbers are up about 7% and Greenwood numbers are down about almost 32%. And the numbers are up against what was a pretty good rebound in 2025, although the record year for permits was $520 million in 2023.
Now, the caveat is that I see some folks, they want to point to this decline since 2023 as being some kind of clear message that the regional economy is not doing well. But I think that's presumptive. I think it's in substantiated position. And because there are several different factors that we've not had in past years.
First, there's a lot of construction at Ebbing Air National Guard Base for this pilot training center. For example, they just broke ground on a $74 million facility. That's not on the permit list right now. There's tens of millions in consent decree work on Fort Smith's sewer system. That work doesn't show up. All of the work going on directly and indirectly to build this I-49 segment through the Fort Smith metro, that's not on the list. So just those three things are pulling out capacity from the building sector. But that's all economic activity. That's real payroll, that's real equipment purchasing, that's real materials purchasing, real materials movement.
So I think the building permit numbers give us a good indication of what's going on in the private sector, so to speak. But you have to take in what's going on in the public sector to get value of that. And I challenge anyone to drive out or in and around Fort Smith and not see a large number of trucks moving dirt or concrete trucks moving around. So there's a lot going on. I just wish we had a better way to calculate on a monthly basis some of that public activity.
Kellams: Well, one more set of numbers. Let's talk about employments. Zn a in June had another record in Fort Smith Regional Airport, down a little bit?
Tilley: Yeah, not so much in Fort Smith. So the airport had a little over 5,600 enplanements in June. That was above the number in May, but it was almost 6% below June 2025. And the first six months of the year in traffic out of the airport is down 1.2%.
So I talked a little bit with Andrew Meyer, the director of the airport. He said that there was an unusual number of weather events in and around Fort Smith, primarily the Dallas-Fort Worth area. That's the only connection that Fort Smith Airport has right now. He said that had some impact. He said the month started out pretty strong with the numbers and then had a few days where they were really off.
And the issue is, though, that the airport continues to struggle to get back on this pre-pandemic track before, in 2019, before the COVID pandemic, the airport was back on a track that had 95, almost 96,000 appointments. And then that fell to about 39, just under 39,000 in 2020, and has just struggled. So it was about 62,000 in 2025. So it's just struggled to return.
Part of that is we lost the Portsmouth Airport, lost a connection to Atlanta when Delta left, and also American Airlines reduced the number of flights. It's since brought some of those back. But that's part of the struggle. And I think the frustrating thing for the airport staff, and maybe the community, is that a lot of these issues are outside of their control. You've got fuel prices, capacity issues with airlines, with the airports. An airport only has so many gates. Saint Louis and Chicago, for example, they just can't snap their fingers and open a new gate. So there's a lot of outside factors with any airport, not just Fort Smith, that result in whether enplanements are up or down.
Kellams: And staying with infrastructure, you had more reporting at talkbusiness.net about trying to fix water problems in Fort Smith and money associated with that.
Tilley: Yeah. And quickly, the Arkansas Department of Agriculture has started this new fund where they will help cities and counties meet some of their water system needs. So I asked the city if they were applying, and they said yes, they are. What they're applying for is a little under seven, around $6 million I think, which is a lot. They've got money they're applying for, like Portsmouth pump station work, master wastewater treatment plant work. But it's just a million here and a million and a half there. Again, it's a little over $5 million.
And this application, in our story, really points to the difficulty in securing enough money to make a dent in what are really significant needs of the city's water system. There's been a delay for decades in maintenance and upgrades, and some people say it's about to catch up. I think it has caught up with the city. To track down $5 million for needs that approach $600 million, that'd be like me donating a nickel a month to the retirement fund. You're going to be living on the streets at that rate, right?
Kellams: Right.
Tilley: So, again, it just points to the need, and it points to the conundrum that the city and the city board are in. They have people telling them that they're being negligent in not addressing the water needs. But then some of the same people say, don't raise my water rates. Well, good luck with that.
Kellams: That's quite a dilemma.
Tilley: And so that's what our story addresses, the fact that they are applying for grants, but it also provides some perspective on the limitations of what grant funding can do.
Kellams: All right, you can read about that, everything else we've talked about and much more at talkbusiness.net. Michael, have a great weekend, and I will talk with you again next Friday.
Tilley: All right, I always appreciate it, and I look forward to it.
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