The Fort Smith Board of Directors voted 6-0 Monday, Oct. 5, to require an 8-foot opaque wall, 500-foot setbacks and two public reviews for any data center in the city. The first of eight German F-35s landed the same day at Ebbing Air National Guard Base, where at least 70 German pilots will train over five years. TheI-49 Arkansas River bridge is about 50% complete, with about 40% of its construction time used. September building permits in Fort Smith, Greenwood and Van Buren totaled just over $28 million, up more than 90% from September 2025.
Kellams: Got a full new show for you today. And it starts with Michael Tilley from Talk Business & Politics. Michael, thanks for being with us.
Tilley: Well, I’m glad to be here. I’m in a pretty good mood. Like we said before we went on the air, I’m happy anytime the Yankees are out of the World Series hunt. I am a happy man.
Kellams: And they were swept out of the playoffs.
Tilley: Yeah. It makes it even sweeter.
Kellams: That’s right. Well, let’s get into some of the news of the week, including Fort Smith, the latest city to really talk about data centers.
Tilley: Yes. The Fort Smith board of directors has been urging the city staff to come back with some rules that will make it more difficult for a data center to be developed in the city.
Of course, we know the Arkansas Legislature, along with Gov. Sarah Sanders in 2023, passed an act that essentially prevents, not essentially, it does prevent local governments from outright banning data center development, so that the law doesn’t allow or doesn’t prevent local governments from making it difficult.
And so that’s what the city of Fort Smith board voted this week. Essentially, they’re requiring a 500-foot setback from a property line, which is pretty significant. Has to be an 8-foot wall. The city used the term opaque wall, but it means wall you can’t see through around the entire property. And there have to be letters from public utilities explaining how they’ll handle electricity load capacity, that type of thing.
So during the discussion, we learned a few things. For example, city Director Christina [Catsavis] was worried about if the Fort Chaffee Redevelopment Authority, which is still active, they’re managing some of the land left over from when the U.S. Army turned back some of its control of parts of Fort Chaffee. She was worried, would this block that?
And Maggie Rice, deputy city administrator, said yes. Any land that’s in Fort Smith city limits would fall under this ordinance, no matter who sold it.
And there was also some concern that maybe the proposed ordinance wasn’t as strong as what the Fayetteville City Council. I don’t have to tell you, the Fayetteville City Council has been pretty aggressive in trying to make it more difficult to build data centers.
Maggie Rice’s take was that the Fort Smith rules are going to be even more stringent because you have to go through two public hearings and two reviews in Fort Smith. Now it has to go through a Planning Commission review and public hearing. And then if the Planning Commission approves it, then it would come to the Fort Smith board for a public hearing and review.
And Maggie Rice also pointed out that the board can, in the future, for example, make the setback larger. You can make the wall taller, you can require facade requirements. So it seems to be a pretty strict rule.
Now, there are some directors like Director Kevin Settle that really, I think, are even somewhat frustrated. They’ve asked the city administration to come back with language in the water contracts. The city of Fort Smith sells water to a lot of cities and water users in the Fort Smith region.
So there’s some directors that want to make sure that there’s some language in those water contracts that would either restrict or give the city of Fort Smith some ability to not sell water if it’s going to be used for data center purposes.
Now, there’s some legal things that the city will have to work out. There’ll be some contractual language they’ll have to work out with those different cities and user groups. But it’s likely [we’ll] hear more about these data center restrictions as the city begins to work on these water contracts.
Kellams: All right. So it’s a little bit harder for data centers to locate in Fort Smith. It’s a little bit easier for German airplanes to land.
Tilley: Yes. And one did this week. I think we talked about this in a recent session. But the first of eight German F-35s, that’s that fifth-generation fighter jet, landed at Fort Smith this week. It’s part of that foreign pilot training mission that’s at Ebbing Air National Guard Base.
And we got a little bit more detail. We were able to talk to Col. Michael Maltzahn. I’m sure I’m pronouncing that wrong. He’s a military attache with the German Embassy in D.C. but he was there. He said at least 70 German pilots will cycle through the training at Ebbing over the next five years. He even said that they could extend that training beyond five years.
The German presence at Ebbing will also include six German instructor pilots. All eight of those first German F-35s, which are rolling off the production floor down at Fort Worth. They fly them from fort to fort, as I say, from Fort Worth to Fort Smith. But all eight are supposed to be here by April of 2027.
Right now there are 16 F-35s. There’s eight from Poland and eight from Finland. And so they’re here already training.
And I gotta tell you, Kyle, we reporters, we’re supposed to be jaded. Nothing gets to us. We got to be neutral. But when that German F-35 roared down that runway at a low altitude and then just stood up and grabbed some altitude, I won’t lie, I got some goosebumps. I could hear the national anthem in my head starting to sing, although it was a German aircraft, but they’re pretty impressive.
And again, there’s a large crowd. There were officers, like I said, from Poland, Finland, Germany. I’ve been reporting on this, so I should know better. But that event Monday, it kind of hit home like, wow, this thing is real. This is an international presence here. There’s a lot of people here. It’s going to have a social and an economic impact.
So anyway, we think the next group of planes will be from Singapore. We don’t have a clear answer yet from the Air Force. But this will be the first of, or Germany will not be the last country to arrive, that’s for sure.
Kellams: Let’s talk about something else that’s going to sort of change the landscape in the future. And that is the I-49 bridge that’s going to cross the Arkansas River. We had a bit of a milestone this week.
Tilley: Yeah. We did. Congressman Womack was in town. He brought Transportation Secretary Duffy with him. But yeah, they toured the construction here. Part of that I-49, that 14-mile section between the Alma intersection and down to Barling across the river. So they focused on the river bridge tour.
And what we learned was the project, according to Jason Hughey with the Arkansas Department of Transportation, he’s the regional district engineer, that the bridge is about 50% complete. But they’ve only used about 40% of the time, so they’re ahead of schedule on that.
So that’s interesting. And it’s impressive. You think, they’re building a bridge, but when you go down there and you look at concrete and you look at all that steel, that is an amazing, amazing project.
And we also learned that the river bridge stretches 5,232 feet, which is almost a mile. A mile is 5,280 feet. Of course, unless you’re late for an appointment, then a mile is like 10,000 feet.
But there’ll be another bridge we learned, and maybe I should have known this, but I didn’t. There’ll be about an 1,800-foot bridge that will cross what’s called Flat Rock Creek there in that Kibler bottoms area in Crawford County.
But in the project also is first of four phases. Phase two is next. It’ll extend the interstate north toward I-40 there in Alma. And then phases three and four will then complete that on up.
But still a long ways to go on this. They’re still going to be building on the bridge this time next year. And it’s a $1.3 billion project just for that 14 miles. But there’s a bridge involved that’s about $300 million. And there’s some elevated interstate because you’re in that river bottoms land.
So it’s good to get an update. Good to see it come along. Now we just got to get it built. Continued from Greenwood on down to Texarkana. That’s going to be $4 or $5, $6 billion, depending on which estimate you look at.
Kellams: And not tomorrow.
Tilley: No, not tomorrow. I don’t know if the Razorbacks will have a winning season by the time they get it built, but it’ll be a long time from now.
Kellams: Finally, let’s talk some building permit numbers. September to September for Fort Smith up. Combined year to year, not quite up.
Tilley: Nope. But September was a pretty good month for the region. Again, we look at Fort Smith, Greenwood and Van Buren, and they had combined permit values of a little over $28 million. That was up over 90% compared to September 2025. It was up a little over 57% compared to August. So a pretty good trend.
Fort Smith for the year, as you noted, Fort Smith is down about 13% in its permits, which is the bulk of the permits for the region. Van Buren, however, they’re up almost 59% for the year. Greenwood is up a little over 3% for the year.
So the numbers are looking good, but I want to stress, and we talked about this before, but I want to stress again that yes, the year-over-year numbers are down. But we’re just in an unusual period and I’ve been covering this for almost three decades now. I’ve never seen anything like this. We have three major unique projects that are all in different phases of construction.
We just talked about one of them, that Interstate 49 project. We talked about the other one. It’s that military, that foreign pilot training center there at Ebbing. There are hundreds of millions of dollars going into that as we speak. And then Fort Smith is under the federal consent decree to fix the sewer system. That’s hundreds of millions of dollars.
So all of those projects are going on. That’s construction happening, but they don’t get permitted. So they don’t show up in permits. But it’s still a lot of activity. People are getting paid, companies are getting contracts.
So normally we would say building permits are a great indicator of the construction activity in a region, but we’re going to have to put an asterisk on these numbers for the next two or three years.
Kellams: All right. You can read about all of this and much more at talkbusiness.net. If it’s nice to have the Yankees swept out of the baseball playoffs, I never have a problem with the Tennessee football team losing.
Tilley: Well, I don’t think I do either. I’m all for it. Maybe we can get another upset like we did a few years ago. I’d be all for it.
Kellams: 3:15 in Fayetteville is the kickoff. Michael Tilley, until next week. Thank you so much.
Tilley: Hey, you’re welcome, sir.
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.
