Kellams: Let's get rolling on this Friday with Michael Tilley from Talk Business and Politics. How are you doing on this Friday, Michael?
Tilley: Well, I'm doing well. And any event with Sad Daddy at it, that's a great event. One of the most underrated bands around, and one of my favorites.
Kellams: I agree, I agree. Well, let's start off with the continued effort to try to get in front of voters in Fort Smith, a chance to change from council-manager form of government to mayor-council form. Earlier this week, we thought there was going to be a ceremony with signatures handed in and a press conference, but that got postponed. Why?
Tilley: Yeah, a little sudden turn there, which is not a surprise. This whole process has had a lot of drama around it. It could have been a reality show. So there's this group trying to change the form of government. Fort Smith is one of the few cities in Arkansas that has the council-manager form of government. They want to change it to mayor-council. They need 2,608 signatures, and they're going to need to turn them in pretty soon, because state law requires them to be verified within 70 days of the election. So they have to go through the Fort Smith city clerk to validate them, then they have to get them to the Sebastian County clerk to get it on the ballot. So they've got to get moving. So as you said, they thought they were going to turn those in, but there was a little hiccup at the last minute.
Jacqueline Hooper, one of the people gathering signatures, sent an email out, and she sent it out July 14. I'm still not sure why the public wasn't made aware of it until almost a week or so later. But she alleges that she turned over several petition pages to a guy named Shayne McKinney. He and Joey McCutchen, an attorney, have kind of been leaders in this effort. She alleges that he didn't properly notarize the pages, and she alleges that petition pages provided to her by another person were not properly notarized. In her note to Fort Smith City Clerk Sherri Gard, she said, I respectfully request that my petition pages containing my canvasser affidavit be withdrawn from consideration. So with that, Joey McCutchen put out a quick statement saying, hey, we're going to step back, we're going to make sure we're only submitting valid signatures. He said they're going to investigate it, see how many there are, because we don't know if it's 50 signatures or 500. And they have about 3,800, they probably have about 3,900 now. Joey told me that they're going to continue to work to gather signatures through this process, but they're concerned, if you have to have 2,608, if you turn in 1,000 or 1,200 more than you need, hopefully you'll have enough to survive the review process. So that's what they're up against, but they've got to hurry up. Time is ticking. They're going to need to get these in soon. I would be surprised if they are not turned in by the end of July, because the longer they take to turn them in, the less time they give the city to go through the verification process. So the clock is ticking.
Kellams: Well, and speaking of end of July, in a related note, three candidates for city administrator are being interviewed by the board. It's an interesting juxtaposition.
Tilley: Yeah, it's all coming together, kind of a perfect storm, maybe, way to look at it. But they're going to interview three candidates. The acting city administrator, Jeff Dingman, is still part of the process, so they have four candidates up. We don't know what we don't know. We don't know if some qualified folks, it was a nationwide search, some qualified folks said, there's no way in hell I'm going to apply for a position, you know, and I may be out the door in two years or a year. So it'd be hard to quantify the impact, but I'm certain it's had some impact.
Kellams: ArcBest has announced some organizational changes. It means many things, but one thing is just fewer than 300 jobs overall cut, including about 60 job cuts in the Fort Smith region. So what do we make of this?
Tilley: Well, it's a tough pill, especially for the Fort Smith metro area, which has struggled in recent years to boost job numbers. And these are more than likely good jobs, and that's where the metro really struggles, is to hold on to those higher-paying jobs. But the company, and this is something companies normally do, especially these publicly held companies, they're streamlining the organizational structure. It's about 2% of total positions that will be cut, as you said, around 280. They're also reducing some physical assets. They plan to close about 10 ABF service centers. ArcBest, their largest subsidiary, ABF, is one of the largest less-than-truckload carriers in the country, but they're going to close about 10 of those ABF service centers, they said, in smaller markets. And they're cutting these jobs, they said in their SEC filing, they're going to eliminate some open positions, some positions just won't be filled, there'll be some retirements, other attrition. So if there's any silver lining, it's not just 280 cuts of people who are actively working, but it's still, I mean, that's very little consolation. But we talked last week about the Fort Smith metro taking a hit in its professional business services sector, down almost 9% compared to May 2021, and how those were much higher-paying jobs than the state average or even the local average. And these are just going to be more jobs lost in that sector, so not the direction we want Fort Smith headed.
Kellams: Fort Kids is headed the direction it wants to go. It's a planned children's museum in Fort Smith. It got a nice pledge this month from Simmons Foods in Siloam Springs.
Tilley: Yeah, this has been one of the bright spots since it was announced back in 2022, and you just kind of wonder how much support is going to be for this, but I've been pleasantly surprised. A lot of folks have stepped up. As you said, Simmons Foods has pledged $250,000. This follows, speaking of ArcBest, the pledge from them of $250,000 earlier this year, and they've had some other gifts. But I talked to Sarah Strom, she's leading this effort, she's been just a bulldog pushing this effort. She says their cash and pledges are now around $4 million. They have a total fundraising goal of about $16.3 million, but she says when they get around $7.4 million, they can start working, they've looked at some analysis. The initial size of this museum is around 20,000 square feet, but Sarah said they're going to be flexible about that. They just began working with a company called Gyroscope Inc. out of California on exhibit design. So they're, well, I shouldn't say well on their way, but it seems like every three or four months, at least every six months, they have an announcement of another big pledge. So for anyone who would like to see another museum next to the U.S. Marshals Museum on the riverfront in downtown Fort Smith, let's keep our fingers crossed.
Kellams: Anyone who's ever gone on vacation with me knows that I don't think there's such a thing as too many museums. Is there encouragement that this came from Siloam Springs, which is historically, traditionally thought of as a Northwest Arkansas place, but here was Simmons Foods and Mark Simmons making a contribution to Fort Kids?
Tilley: Yeah, it was good to see that. Now, of course, Simmons has a very large processing facility over in Van Buren, a new one that they spent over $100 million on two or three years ago. But they've always had a presence here. But yes, you nailed it, yes. It's nice to see that pledge, that support, come from not just the Fort Smith metro.
Kellams: All right, let's close out by talking about someone who died recently, Emon Mahony. Sort of, well, why don't you tell us about him?
Tilley: Well, you may have started to say sort of an unknown, and that's a fair assessment. I should preface this by saying I worked indirectly with him when I was at the Fort Smith chamber for six years. He was on the board, he was chairman of the executive committee, so I benefited from having some pretty direct access with him, and got to know him well. But he's one of those folks, you know, when you think of a community or region or city that does a big positive thing, it often requires at least one person who's not only a visionary, but has the intellect and the passion to not only explain that vision to the broader public in such a way that they all pull together to make it happen. So Emon was that guy. And it is a safe bet that many folks in the Fort Smith metro don't know of him, never heard of him, but they benefit daily from having access to a stable, long-term water supply. There are probably hundreds, thousands of communities around the country that would love to have the water supply that the Fort Smith metro has. Now, that's different from having a stable water supply system, which is something we've talked about in the past, but the supply is there. I mean, he did a lot, I could go through the list of all the things he was involved with, not just Fort Smith, but around the state. He was a member of the board of Alltel, y'all remember Alltel?
Kellams: Yeah.
Tilley: He was one of the three members of Governor Beebe's transition team when he was first elected governor. He served on the Game and Fish Commission. He was on the Arkansas-Oklahoma River Compact Commission. He served eight years as an advisor to U.S. Senator John McClellan, which probably a lot of Arkansans don't know his name either. He was one of the first members of the U.S. Marshals Museum board. That's the short list. But the big thing that he did is he delivered this big win to expand Lake Fort Smith. He's always been an advocate for those kinds of fundamentals of society, and so he pushed for this. He was an advocate in seeking voter approval of a half-cent sales tax to partially fund the more than $200 million lake expansion. And what happened is Lake Fort Smith has gone from 21.5 million gallons a day to having 45.5 million gallons a day, the water storage of the expanded Lake Fort Smith moved from about 8.4 billion gallons to almost 28 billion gallons. So it wasn't just a tweak around the edges, it was a significant expansion. Some, I've heard some people say, well, with the normal pace of growth, it will serve the region for another hundred years or so. And then, as a side benefit of all of that, they had to rebuild Lake Fort Smith State Park, so there was $20 million invested in that. So we have a modern new park that people all over Northwest Arkansas, not just Fort Smith, because it's halfway between, and, you know, a large marina and hiking trails, group facilities, it includes access to the 40-mile Ozark Highlands Trail. So he was a big, key part of the city's history. I hope folks maybe someday will wise up and name a part of the lake system after Emon. The irony of that would be that he'd be the first to raise holy hell, he would not want that done. He was one of those rare folks who truly received more joy, more reward from seeing something happen than from getting any credit for it. So he will be missed, but his influence, it sounds like, is going to last a long, long time.
Kellams: Yep, yep. I wish, I don't know, maybe the Leadership Fort Smith class could just have a few minutes during every term to say, by the way, there's this guy named Emon Mahony, and here's what he did.
Tilley: Yeah.
Kellams: Well, Michael Tilley, thank you so much. You can read about Emon and all the other things, topics we've talked about, at TalkBusiness.net. We'll talk next week when we say goodbye to July.
Tilley: Yeah, well, let's try to say goodbye to the heat, too.
Kellams: Best of luck with that. All right, thanks.
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