Looking ahead

And now for the Top 10 Fort Smith regional stories of 2020. Yes, 2020.

10. U.S. Rep. Philip Merry, D-Fort Smith, ends his fifth term as Arkansas’ 3rd District Congressman by announcing his retirement. Merry in 2010 stunned Arkansas’ political pundits — such as they were — by breaking the Republican stranglehold on the 3rd District, thanks in large part to a chaotic GOP primary following the departure of then U.S. Rep. John Boozman in his losing bid to seek the U.S. Senate seat.

9. Lowell-based J.B. Hunt Transport Services announces it will build a $75 million logistics center in Van Buren along the Arkansas River as part of a growing intermodal facility managed by the Regional Intermodal Transportation Authority. The center will serve as a corporate control hub for Hunt’s far-flung intermodal operations and will include a logistics software development and training center affiliated with the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith.

8. Following the takeover by hospital services conglomerate Tenet/HCA, Sparks Health System and Summit Medical Center are consolidated, with an emergency medical clinic to be built in Van Buren and all other hospital operations to be moved to Sparks’ Fort Smith campus. The move is likely to result in the loss of 300 jobs.

7. Morril Harriman, the first to serve as president of the Fort Smith-Van Buren Area Chamber of Commerce, stepped down after five years on the job. Prior to taking the job in 2015, Harriman served as the former state senator from Van Buren, was director of the The Poultry Federation and worked eight years as chief of staff for Gov. Mike Beebe. Harriman said leading the effort to more effectively partner Fort Smith and Van Buren in community and economic development efforts was the perfect way to end his career in public service. Harriman said his only disappointment was in not finding a company to locate manufacturing or other operations in the large facilities that once housed Whirlpool’s Fort Smith operation.

6. Former TCW Media president and CEO Tom Kirkham was found in his large luxury catamaran near Pitcairn Island in the South Pacific. Kirkham was wanted for questioning over tax irregularities resulting from his sudden wealth from TCW Media. He had eluded authorities for more than three years. Authorities confirmed that the five women with him on the boat — including one woman who was one of the 73 eventually linked to Tiger Woods — were all there of their own choice and none were under age.

5. The U.S. Marshals Museum in Fort Smith posted a record 231,418 visits in 2020, the fourth full year of operation. Of those visitors, museum officials estimated that 41.5% — or about 95,000 —were from outside a 100-mile radius. The economic impact of the museum was estimated to be $31.5 million in 2020. The museum also served as the site for former Sebastian County Prosecutor and Arkansas Attorney General Dan Shue’s announcement to run for governor in the 2020 special election. Shue won in November, being the first person from Sebastian County to serve as governor since William Fishback in 1892.

4. Officials with the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith announced another record year of enrollment, with 11,786 full-time equivalent students in the fall 2010 semester. The student growth is one of the reasons behind unpopular eminent domain actions university officials said they were forced to pursue to seek land for new classrooms, student housing and a football field. UAFS Chancellor Takeo Suzuki confirmed the university was looking at the now empty baseball stadium on the Riverfront as a satellite location for the UAFS athletic department.

3. The 3,500 Riverfront Stadium in downtown Fort Smith saw its third independent league baseball team come and go in 2020, with Fort Smith officials saying they could no longer afford to provide incentives to recruit the financially-strapped independent league teams. Initially expected to cost $22 million, the stadium eventually cost $31 million and was never able to draw large enough crowds to support stadium operations since its opening in 2012. Efforts to support the stadium with other events and regional baseball tournaments helped, but not enough to keep the annual deficit from growing. Fort Smith voters in 2018 rejected an effort to increase the hamburger tax from 1% to 2% to help support the stadium.

2. A high-profile effort that included former President Bill Clinton and Lucy Jo Baker, the 2018 American Idol winner from Mena, failed to convince Congress to provide any meaningful funding for the construction of Interstate 49 through western Arkansas. The cost to complete the roughly 175-mile segment through western Arkansas has ballooned from about $3 billion in 2008 to $5.5 billion today. Baker, who said the effort failed because “we couldn’t show those Godless a#@bags in Congress that this would somehow line the pockets of their high-dollar suits,” partially apologized, saying she should not have linked members of Congress to the respectable colostomy bag industry.

1. After two years under the mayor form of government under Mayor Michael Tilley, Fort Smith citizens voted overwhelmingly to return to a city administrator-council form of government. With 77% of voters in a heavy turnout voting to return to a form of government they had rejected by a 53% margin in 2018, the search for a new city administrator began. Problems began when Tilley used more than $500,000 in city funds to open an office in Las Vegas. Tilley said that because what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, the Las Vegas office helped the city avoid FOI requests on sensitive economic development matters. Tilley was last seen delivering boxes of vodka and grapefruit juice to a large luxury catamaran docked in New Orleans.