Kellams: This is Ozarks at Large for the 23rd day of October 2026. Good news, actually. Great news. It is Friday. And to help us celebrate the Friday, a beautiful autumn Friday, is Michael Tilley with Talk Business & Politics. Michael, welcome back to the program.
Tilley: Hey, thanks for having me. I guess I continue to be surprised that you’d welcome me back, but I’ll take it when I can get it.
Kellams: Well, we enjoy hearing about the week’s news from Fort Smith and the Arkansas River Valley in that region. Let’s start with some news, long time coming, about Cisterna Park.
Tilley: Yeah. So Cisterna Park, it’s in downtown Fort Smith around the 10th Street area. And for several decades now, there’s been talk about what to do. It’s a great area. It’s kind of an entry point as you’re coming in from the east to downtown Fort Smith. And just, again, a lot of talk over the years, over the decades, really, about what they could do and what they want to do with it.
But in recent months, there’s been some broad momentum, maybe some consensus, to finally do something and do something meaningful at the park. I mean, they’ve tinkered with it off and on through the years, but the Central Business Improvement District held kind of a brainstorming meeting. Well, it’s what they call a brainstorming meeting. A few days ago on Oct. 13, really, and they talked about gathering as many ideas as possible.
You know, one of the key features of that park is the Gen. William Darby statue that was placed there in 2006. Excuse me. Gosh, what date was that? It’s been 10 or so years ago. Joe and Liz Armstrong put that up, and also 2027. Gen. Darby, he’s credited with creating the Darby’s Rangers during World War II. Right now the Army Rangers. And in 2027 will be the 85th anniversary of him creating that unit.
And so Gen. Darby and his history in Italy, he was killed, he was 34 years old when he was killed in action just a few days before World War II ended. He was killed freeing the Cisterna, Italy, and Torbole, Italy, area. And Cisterna is now, as everyone knows, a sister city to Fort Smith. So they’re looking at some elements from those cities to include in that park.
They want to take part of what is an old street, turn that into a walkway. There’s a downtown property owner who has said he will, if they come up with a good plan, a good management plan, a doable plan, he’ll be willing to donate some property that would expand that park area. And so the city’s going to, the CBD is going to work together all these ideas. There’s a lot of people involved. There’s a lot of passion for this.
So I think one of the challenges is going to be, can you make as many of the folks happy as possible? And then another challenge is what CBD member Stuart Ghan pointed out is that between the private sector and the public sector, they can’t do all of these things at once. So the plan needs to be long term. People need to be patient with it. And he kept using the term a canvas. We have to create a canvas that can guide the future work.
So again, the key will be keeping everyone happy, coming up with a master plan. And then where will the money come from? Part of what I’m hearing is that it’ll take a combination of private funds and support from the city’s Parks and Rec budget. Sara Deuster, who’s head of the Parks and Rec, she’s talked favorably about the city finding funds to support a plan once it’s widely supported.
So in some of the early drawings, you can see those on our story, a lot of trees, a lot of open space, green space. It really could be a very good park where they could hold events. It would be that welcoming part as people are coming, like I said, coming in from the east. Right now on the west part of Garrison Avenue, you have the Bass Reeves statue. You’ll soon have the Butterfield Trail monument statue, so that you’ll kind of have some interesting entry points on both ends of Garrison. So it’s encouraging to finally see, after all these years, there, again, seems to be some good momentum behind making something happen there.
Kellams: Do you get the sense that people are excited about this?
Tilley: Yeah, I do. And I think I was concerned early on that all these different sides, all these different folks with their different thoughts, there would be conflict. But so far what I’m hearing is people are understanding that they may not get 100% of what they want, but if they can get some of it, and if everybody compromises, that they’ll be happy with it.
Now we’ll see if that continues as things get filtered out and plans become more certain. But it’s the first time that I can remember that there’s kind of a positive vibe to getting something done.
Kellams: There is movement to get some city employees some credit monitoring, this in the wake of a cyberattack. What’s the latest on this?
Tilley: Well, the latest is after more than two months, the city has finally taken some action to alert employees about potential risk after spending two months saying that employees really didn’t have anything to worry about and they had the problem contained. And then they make this announcement. They send out an email to all city employees on a Saturday after we pressed them on Friday about employees coming forward with Social Security issues, saying they couldn’t file taxes because the IRS notified them that somebody used their Social Security number to try to file taxes and seek refunds.
And so not a good look for the city. But they did come out and said that they will help pay for credit monitoring and identity restoration services. Now, mind you, the city first admitted that they had a computer, a citywide computer system attack on Aug. 16. They’ve been very limited on the details. I’ve said this before to their defense. You know, during an investigation, I’m sure their insurance company and their attorneys are telling them to be quiet about everything. But at some point you’ve got to give some information.
I mean, there are over 1,000 employees of the city. There are more than 36,000 city residents and businesses with water and sewer accounts. The city also has a lot of vendors that does business with. So all of that information, all of that data is potentially at risk. And now we’re learning that some of it’s not potential. Some of it is real.
I think folks at first were patient with this city. They understood that information would be scant during the investigation. But like I said, this has been going on for more than two months. Key systems are not yet restored. The city, for example, the Fort Smith Police Department is still struggling without a computer system. I have city employees tell us that our reporting is the only info they get, so it’s starting to get frustrating for folks. And the city at some point is going to have to come clean with some more details.
Kellams: Let’s move to Van Buren, where the King Opera House, which has been a mainstay of downtown Van Buren for, I think, more than a century, a long time, is going to get some needed help, about $3.5 million worth.
Tilley: Yep. One hundred and twenty-five years is how long they’ve been in.
Kellams: OK.
Tilley: And that structure has been there. The King Opera House hasn’t been there, but that structure...
Kellams: I got you.
Tilley: Yeah. Look, it’s a cool project for the region. We don’t do enough reporting about the things that are happening in Van Buren. So we were proud to get this posted, but Arts on Main, they’re the group that manages the King Opera House. And they are proposing a $1.5 million expansion.
And part of that is just, it’s an old theater. They have a small stage. One of the jokes that we learned is that, you know, if you use the bathroom during the performance, just don’t flush. It’s right there, right behind the curtain, or...
Kellams: Yeah, I guess unless you’re doing an “All in the Family”-themed show.
Tilley: There you go.
Kellams: You shouldn’t flush, but there’ll be very few people that will get that.
Tilley: But so they have limited space. For example, they have to build the stage there. And so that impacts their rehearsal. So part of this expansion would be provide space for a scene shop and for storage.
And this is also, I think, another part of this, and we’ll report on this later. This is also part of a bigger project, infrastructure project that the city is doing, City of Van Buren is doing, around that facility in terms of street, sidewalks, to improve the look of the overall area, access. If anyone’s been to downtown Van Buren, if you haven’t, I encourage you to go, but it’s a great walkable area. And so the city is just trying to maximize what they can do with that.
We talked to Arts on Main executive director Bill Ratcliff. He estimated that about 50,000 people have attended events at the theater in the past few years. So it’s definitely getting attention. They want to expand. And by expanding, too, they can also recruit more shows to the area. They’re limited right now. So good for Van Buren.
It’s tentatively, they’re kind of looking at a January to March 2028 closure to make some of these things happen. So it’s still out. But they’re raising money, they’re getting their plans together. And we plan to keep tabs on their progress going forward because, like I said, this would be one of the cool projects that we don’t get to report on as much as we’d like to.
Kellams: You also keep tabs on the number of people flying out of the Fort Smith Regional Airport. We’ve been talking about this for some time. Numbers have been dropping, and we kind of thought, well, it’ll come back up, but numbers keep dropping.
Tilley: Yeah. The September numbers were pretty tough. The September enplanements were just under 5,000, and they were down 21% compared to September 2025. And that followed in August, in which enplanements were down 12.5%. And then so far through the year, year-over-year numbers are down about 5.5%. There was some hope that 2025 numbers were better than 2024. And there was some hope that it was kind of gaining momentum, but this is not the right direction.
We talked to Andrew Meyer. He’s the executive director there. He said the issue in September, that American Airlines, which is the only carrier servicing the airport, they had fewer scheduled departures in September. But he said the silver lining, I guess, part of it, is that their load factor increased from 68% to 77.2%. So when American does have planes fly out, they’re more full than they were in September 2025. So the key is just to get more planes flying in. And the airport’s working on that. They’re working on trying to get more routes other than just DFW out of the airport.
But look, it’s not just the Fort Smith airport. This is a broader market issue. The industry’s kind of facing some serious headwinds with fuel costs. And so it’s especially difficult for these smaller airports like Fort Smith to create a case to a large airline to bring in more planes and to increase the route.
So I don’t know how the traffic’s going to continue through the rest of the year, but hopefully it rebounds. Andrew, Mr. Meyer, seems to be pretty positive about it. We hope his positivity comes through, but a 20% or 21% decline in September was, well, just discouraging, frankly. And because we need to keep commercial service. And that’s the ultimate goal, is to keep it and to expand it.
Kellams: All right, we’ll keep track of that and all of these other stories that you can find at talkbusiness.net. Razorback football team won last week, will not lose this week. They’re idle. Things are looking up.
Tilley: Well, they won one more game this year than I thought they would. So I’m good with it.
Kellams: All right, Michael, thank you so much.
Tilley: You’re welcome, sir.
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