Hometown, Arkansas: Jonesboro Has Room to Grow

Editor’s note: This article appears in the latest magazine edition of Talk Business Arkansas, which you can read here.

Mark Young, president and CEO of the Jonesboro Regional Chamber of Commerce, is driving through the 1,500-acre Craighead Technology Park. He passes a Unilever plant that employs 475 people making beauty products, a Butterball turkey plant that employs 298 producing deli meats and a Frito-Lay plant that employs 525 packaging snack foods.

Those are just some of the employers in the industrial park, and there is room for dozens more. A rail spur reaches five miles from Burlington Northern’s main line through leased farmland that can quickly become new industrial sites. Two years ago, the line was extended to prepare for growth.

Young points to a 50-acre site that’s ready for just about any employer who wants to locate there.

“One of our competitive advantages in our community is that we have an infrastructure in place ready to go,” he said. “You don’t have to wait on it. And because this isn’t just an empty lot, all the water, all the wastewater, all the electrical capacity that you could want is already sitting right there. So again, we don’t have to make promises about what we can do in the future.”

With an estimated 71,000 residents (up from 27,026 in 1970), Jonesboro is Arkansas’ fifth largest city, but in many ways, it’s also the capital of Northeast Arkansas and Southeast Missouri. Draw a triangle between Little Rock, Memphis and St. Louis, and Jonesboro is the largest community in between.

It’s about an hour from Memphis and its international airport and distribution facilities. The Burlington Railroad and Union Pacific intermodal facilities at Marion are even closer. Jonesboro itself is served by both lines.

The city is home to the area’s largest university, Arkansas State. It has two major medical facilities, St. Bernards Healthcare, the area’s largest employer, and the new $400 million NEA Baptist Memorial Hospital. It boasts one of the last enclosed malls constructed in the United States, the 731,000-square-foot Mall at Turtle Creek, which has been a catalyst for more development.

Jonesboro’s metropolitan statistical area includes only Craighead and Poinsett counties and is home to 125,000 residents, but its labor pool draws from nine other counties and its economic trade area includes half a million people. The growing city of Paragould’s city limits are only about 10 miles from Jonesboro’s. Meanwhile, Young chairs the Northeast Arkansas Economic Development Coalition, which includes Craighead, Greene, Randolph, Lawrence and Clay counties. Though the coalition hasn’t achieved the kind of regional cooperation seen in central and Northwest Arkansas, its members work together on issues of common concern.

EXCELLENT JOB GROWTH
Last year, Jonesboro’s metropolitan statistical area had the 11th best job growth in the country when measured as a monthly moving average comparing 2013 to 2012. That’s according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers aggregated by Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business.

Jonesboro enjoyed job growth even during the Great Recession, in part because of the types of industry it has nurtured. In addition to the employers already cited, other major ones include the Hydrol Conveyor Company, which employs 750 making conveyor systems, and Nestle Prepared Foods Co., which employs 610 making frozen entrees.

Many of its manufacturers produce basic food and consumer goods that don’t depend on boom times. As Young described it, “We’re sort of recession-resistant. … Even in the most difficult times, people still eat, and so the food processors, again, may do well in certain times when others don’t.”

Ed Way, Centennial Bank’s Jonesboro market president, has been participating in the community’s growth since he graduated from Arkansas State in the early 1970s. Way said a group of forward-thinking community leaders began looking at ways to plan for growth. Lacking the funds to solicit new industry, the chamber of commerce formed Jonesboro Unlimited and asked 100 chamber members for an additional $1,000. A consultant was hired who encouraged the city to focus on the food industry.

Far-sighted annexation policies have made the city the second largest geographically in Arkansas, with room to grow in just about every direction. The city has three school districts – Jonesboro, Nettleton and Valley View – completely contained within its boundaries. Two rural districts, Westside and Brookland, also educate Jonesboro students.

Way said that the spirit of cooperation that led to Jonesboro Unlimited still exists today.

“We’ve got 14 banks, and we fight every day for new business,” he said. “We fight each other for new business, but when there is a need of a new industry or whatever, we join forces to work together to recruit that industry.”

Way also credits the community-owned City Water and Light, which hasn’t had a rate increase in many years and which is running at only about 50 percent capacity. The utility is prepared to immediately accommodate new manufacturers at the industrial park.

He recalls a meeting with City Water and Light engineer Kevin Imboden along with an engineer with Nestle Foods when that company was a prospect. The Nestle engineer asked how long it would take the utility to handle the plant’s wastewater needs. “We already have it,” Way recalled Imboden saying. “We could take 10 Nestles right now.’”

ASU ENRICHES COMMUNITY
Key to the city’s growth, of course, has been ASU, which not only educates 13,552 students, but last year brought 250,000 people onto the campus for various events.

The university is looking for new opportunities and new sources of revenue under the leadership of its entrepreneurial chancellor, Dr. Tim Hudson.

Perhaps the school’s most high-profile expansion is occurring 1,450 miles beyond Jonesboro’s borders. Arkansas State will be the first American college to develop a comprehensive branch in Mexico when it opens its campus in Queretaro near Mexico City in 2015 with a goal of 1,000 students the first year and 5,000 students after year five. The school’s Mexican partner, the Association for the Advancement of Mexican Education, is investing $50-$60 million to build the physical facility.

Hudson foresees a fluid exchange of faculty and students between ASU’s Jonesboro and Mexican locations. Meanwhile, the community of Jonesboro will benefit as well. “We believe there will be commercial relations that will spin off from this,” Hudson said.

The university is opening an osteopathic medical school on campus, with the first classes scheduled to begin in August 2016. Osteopaths are holistically trained primary care physicians, and they are in high demand. The 120 graduates planned each year will hopefully fill a need in the physician-poor Delta.

As with the Mexican venture, the effort relies heavily on public-private partnerships. The school will be a branch campus of the private New York Institute of Technology’s College of Osteopathic Medicine, the nation’s second largest osteopathic school.

“We’re doing a lot of things here at Arkansas State on a very entrepreneurial basis,” Hudson said. “We believe heavily in public-private partnerships because we know we not only have to achieve our mission, [but] we have to do it with revenue that we might generate outside of the normal channels. So for us it was the right model and the right partnership.”

Arkansas State’s presence increases the number of cultural amenities offered by the city. The Fowler Center on ASU’s campus offers a venue for concerts and theater shows. The Convocation Center seats up to 11,500 people for concerts and can host a variety of events.

Jonesboro has become a retail destination for its trade area. The Mall at Turtle Creek includes more than 70 stores, including a Dillard’s, JCPenney and a Target. The mall’s construction has been a catalyst for other development in that part of town, including a slew of new restaurant chains. Jonesboro is home to two Wal-Mart Supercenters, and a Kroger Marketplace is rising from where the old Indian Mall once stood.

Meanwhile, a vibrant downtown features businesses, restaurants, loft apartments, and The Foundation of Arts, a community-based nonprofit organization.

QUALITY HEALTH CARE
Jonesboro also is becoming a healthcare hub. The area’s largest employer is the St. Bernards Healthcare system, which employs 2,800 with an annual payroll of $200 million including benefits. The hospital has 276 physicians representing 44 specialties on staff and serves as a referral center for 23 counties in Northeast Arkansas and Southeast Missouri. St. Bernards Medical Center, a 438-bed acute care hospital, anchors the Matthews Medical Mile, a part of Matthews Avenue with approximately 50 clinics providing a variety of services. According to Chris Barber, president and CEO of St. Bernards Healthcare, “It’s a destination, so if individuals are looking for health-care services, kind of the top to bottom, they can go down this one-mile stretch.”

Meanwhile, the $400 million, 800,000-square-foot NEA Baptist Memorial Hospital, which is affiliated with the Baptist Memorial Hospital-Memphis system, recently opened. The facility includes the NEA Baptist Clinic, a single multi-specialty group with more than 100 physician partners. The hospital incorporates a closed model where all physicians are on staff. CEO and Administrator Brad Parsons says that model will improve care and reduce costs. Everything is under one roof for patient convenience, and 90 percent of the equipment is brand new. Like Jonesboro, the hospital has room to grow from its current 181 beds to 300.

Both hospital administrators are confident that the community will support two major health-care facilities and that the competition will make Jonesboro more of a health-care destination. “Jonesboro is a town of 70,000 that never feels like a town of 70,000 people,” Parsons said.

Residents of the region can receive just about any type of medical care they need outside of organ transplants and various types of specialized treatments. That’s an important selling point for potential employers and a draw for residents of Jonesboro’s trade area. Between the hospitals, the mall and other amenities, Centennial Bank’s Way said, “We cut the road off to Memphis for health care and entertainment and retail.”

What does the city need? A good start would be funding to turn U.S. 63 into Interstate 555. The road is interstate quality except for a two-mile stretch over the St. Francis River floodway, but that’s enough to keep it from that coveted interstate designation that would put Jonesboro on the map for more economic developers. Community leaders also are hoping to finish four-laning Highway 226 to create a four-lane route from Jonesboro to Little Rock. Naturally, a growing city has congestion problems. A major priority is a bypass along the eastern side of the city, and several railroad overpasses are needed.

But managing growth is a much better problem to have than the opposite, and Jonesboro certainly has room to grow. Its industrial park’s infrastructure is ready to attract whatever industries have an interest. Its schools and university are successful and vibrant. Its retail and restaurant opportunities are growing by the day. And so, when talking to a potential employer, it’s not hard to convince them to give Jonesboro a serious look.

“We don’t have to sell as hard as we used to,” Way said. “I think if we can get someone here, and here longer than a day, we can sell them. It doesn’t take much to sell Jonesboro is a great place.”