Not Just The Home Of The Hogs

If you could choose anywhere in America to call home, would the following city make the final cut?

– It was ranked by Parade magazine as the country’s most beautiful city among those with a population between 50,001 and 100,000.

– CNNMoney.com called it the 15th best place to retire.

– Forbes ranked it number 15 in its list of the top 100 metropolitan areas for businesses and careers.

– Kiplinger’s said it was the fifth best city for mid-career professionals.

– Livability.com called it the country’s 64th most livable city.

You might travel far to see if that city were a good fit for you, unless you lived in Arkansas, in which case you would merely have to drive just up the road – to Fayetteville.

Long known as the home of the Razorbacks, Fayetteville is more than just a college town. The city now has 80,000 residents and adds another 2,000-plus each year, according to Steve Clark, Chamber of Commerce president and CEO. Nine apartment complexes, all with more than 200 occupants and one that will have 1,000, have been built or approved in recent years to accommodate that growth, particularly among the student population. The city each of the past four years has issued more than $200 million in permits for capital construction. “The beauty of that is, almost all of that’s out-of-state money. So the world’s discovered us,” Clark said.

They are coming for good reasons, and not just the University of Arkansas. From April 2013 to April 2014, the city saw a net increase of 319 businesses and 545 jobs. Clark said the city is building its economic foundation on three pillars: “Eds, Meds and Innovation.”

Start with “Eds.” The University of Arkansas has an annual budget of $800 million and a fiscal 2013 payroll of $414.5 million. Its Center for Business and Economic Research estimated the institution’s statewide economic impact was $725 million in 2009. It’s home to more than 25,000 students. At a time when many of the state’s other colleges and universities are experiencing flat or declining enrollment, it has added about 6,000 students in about six years and is the country’s 13th fastest growing university.

It’s hired about 69 tenure track faculty and about 100 nontenure track faculty members over the last four or five years, according to its chancellor, Dr. David Gearhart. According to Mike Johnson, associate vice chancellor for facilities, since 2000 it has either completed or has under contract $1.3 billion in construction, including auxiliary costs like streets and landscaping. Much of that has involved building renovations, but there has been some construction.

The entirely self-funded athletics program – a rarity in college sports – is providing about $2.2 million per year to fund the school’s nanotechnology building and also Champions Hall, a classroom/lab building under construction.

“We feel, those of us that work here every day, that we’ve become the institution of first choice,” Gearhart said. “People want to come here.”

Gearhart isn’t satisfied. The school has embarked on a plan to become one of the top 50 public research institutions in the country. It’s also in the quiet phase of a new fundraising effort, Campaign Arkansas. The previous fundraising effort, the Campaign for the Twenty-First Century, raised more than a billion dollars. Gearhart expects this campaign will increase the university’s endowment, now about $850 million, past the $1 billion mark.

Gearhart said the university’s location is part of the reason for its success. A Fayetteville native, he said it’s a beautiful place to study with a pleasant climate. Major employers donate to the college and offer internships to students. The relationship between the university and the city is good, he said. Mayor Lioneld Jordan, in fact, worked for the university’s physical plant as a carpenter. A Town and Gown Advisory Committee with representatives from the university and the city meets about issues of common concern.

“It’s hard to beat Fayetteville. It’s just a great place with a college feel,” Gearhart said.

The university is not the city’s only prized educational institution. If Fayetteville has a city color, it’s not red – it’s purple, the color of the Fayetteville High School Bulldogs, who now call a new high school home. Meanwhile, Haas Hall Academy, a public charter school, was ranked as the state’s top high school for the third consecutive year by U.S. News and World Report.

As for “meds,” about 5,500 people are employed in the health care sector, including 2,300 at Washington Regional Medical Center and 1,300 at the Fayetteville VA Medical Center, Clark said. UAMS Northwest educates future physicians, pharmacists, nurses and other health care providers.

For what’s supposed to be a college town, Fayetteville has a surprisingly strong manufacturing base, with about 4,500 working in that sector, according to Clark. The largest manufacturer, Superior Industries International, employs 900 making wheels for American car manufacturers, while Tyson Mexican Original employs 700 in the world’s second largest tortilla manufacturing plant. About that same amount work in a Walmart Optical plant, while about 600 work in a Pinnacle Foods packaged foods plant.

As for “innovation,” some of Fayetteville’s most important employers are smaller ones with game-changing ideas. The Arkansas Research and Technology Park provides business incubation and other services to 37 knowledge-based entities, mostly private ones, According to Phil Stafford, president, the tenants employed about 350 with $80,000 average salaries at the end of the last fiscal year. The park works hand in hand with the University of Arkansas and is served by the University of Arkansas Technology Development Foundation. Among its current stars is Arkansas Power Electronics International, which makes transistors and other products, and BlueInGreen, which uses ozone to purify drinking water.

In addition to jobs and educational opportunities, the city offers its residents a high-quality of life that Mayor Jordan is trying to improve through its transportation infrastructure. His “Mayor’s Box” design, almost all of it already built or funded, encircles the city with a boundary of streets meant to reduce sprawl. New construction on the box involves four-laned boulevards with tree-lined medians, sidewalks and bike paths. As part of the effort, the city is about to four-lane Van Asche Drive, a country lane leading to the Northwest Arkansas Mall. When that construction is complete, significant development surely will follow.

“You learn that from being a carpenter,” Jordan said of his commitment to infrastructure. “You build the foundation right; then a house you can build pretty much any way you want to. And if you don’t have the right kind of foundation, I don’t care how pretty a house you’ve got, it won’t hold up.”

The city also is building a network of trails that will make it a walkable community. So far, 25 miles of paved, multi-use trails, most of which are 12 feet wide, have been laid. The city tries to average laying two to three miles of additional trails each year at a cost of about $500,000 a mile, according to Matt Mihalevich, trails coordinator. The goal is 100 miles. Included among the current total are 9.5 miles of the Razorback Greenway, a trail network leading from the south end of Fayetteville through the Northwest Arkansas region.

Fayetteville’s trails are more than just nice places for exercise – they’re an alternative form of transportation. The main paths easily average 500 travelers a day, and there have been peaks as high as 3,000. Walkers and bikers, particularly students, use them as commuting paths that will become more important as the trail network expands. Meanwhile, the trail serves as an economic development tool because the slower pace encourages walkers and riders to stop along the way. “The trails have become for us ribbons of commerce,” Clark said. “It is as easily quantifiable as anything you could do.”

Part of Fayetteville’s livability includes its amenities. The soon-to-be-built Fayetteville Regional Park will have soccer and baseball fields on 200 acres alongside the newly purchased Mount Kessler, which features parkland and natural trails. The city is home to numerous annual events, including the Walton Arts Center’s month-long Artosphere Festival; Bikes Blues and BBQ, a motorcycle rally that attracted an estimated 400,000 last year; and the Joe Martin Stage Race, which brought 700 cyclists to Fayetteville in May. The local farmers’ market in the downtown square is the state’s longest continuously operating one, Clark said. The Fayetteville Public Library was awarded the Gale/Library Journal 2005 Library of the Year Award.

Fayetteville’s success can’t be separated from Northwest Arkansas’. The region’s metropolitan statistical area, which includes Washington, Benton, and Madison counties along with McDonald County in Missouri, ranked fourth nationally in its 2013 moving average of nonfarm job growth, according to information from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics aggregated by Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business. Community economic developers in Northwest Arkansas work together to attract opportunities to the region as well as to their cities.

The Chamber’s Clark points out that it takes no longer to drive from Fayetteville to Bentonville than it does to drive from one side of Little Rock to the other. According to the UA’s Gearhart, “We try to look at it as the community of Northwest Arkansas. It’s nothing to hop in the car and drive up to Bentonville, and I do that – I think the most times I’ve done it is maybe three in one day back and forth.”

The region’s future is as bright as the past few decades have been. The recent renaming of I-540 into I-49 will increase funding as well as momentum for finishing the interstate network from Canada to Mexico. Northwest Arkansas is within a month or two of reaching a population of 500,000, causing it to show up on an expanded set of radar screens for economic developers and site selectors. When that happens, more jobs and opportunities will find their way to Fayetteville – a college town that’s so much more than that.

“We’re very fortunate,” Clark said. “We virtually have no crime. We have a scenic and beautiful place to be, so it works out very well.”