NWA Council Hosts State of the Region Luncheon
by October 2, 2014 2:54 pm 91 views
Rosalind Brewer’s job brought her to Northwest Arkansas three years ago, and when friends and family come to visit for the first time, they often arrive with preconceived notions about the area.
More times than not, Northwest Arkansas showcases its strengths to Brewer’s guests.
“They are always awestruck when they leave about the richness of this region,” Brewer said Thursday. “We just have to get them to come here.”
Brewer, the CEO of Sam’s Club, made the remarks Thursday while welcoming guests to the State of the Northwest Arkansas Region luncheon.
She was addressing the audience in her capacity as the presiding co-chair of the nonprofit Northwest Arkansas Council, which hosted the event that drew more than 300 business leaders to the Holiday Inn & Convention Center.
Local economist Kathy Deck, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research in the Sam. M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas, gave an overview of the region by going over the 2014 State of the Region Report, which is produced in collaboration with the Northwest Arkansas Council.
The annual publication can be found here.
Here are some of the highlights from the report, which highlights a wide variety of economic indicators including employment, income and wages, academic research, adult education, cost of living and poverty indicators, as compared to other peer regions:
- Employment in Northwest Arkansas reached a new annual peak level of 214,500 in 2013, and employment grew at a rate of 2.4 percent from 2012 to 2013, a better rate than in Tulsa (1.5 percent), Kansas City (1.0) the state (0.1) and the nation (1.7)
- From 2012 to 2013, the number of business establishments increased 2.9 percent to a total of 12,021 in Northwest Arkansas, ahead of the state (2.2) and national (1.1) growth rates.
- More than $123 million in research and development expenditures were made by the University of Arkansas in 2012, a 2.7 percent increase from 2011. That ranks the UA 137th among research universities.
- Home ownership costs accounted for 17.9 percent of household income in Northwest Arkansas in 2011, decreasing to 17.4 percent in 2012 before dropping to 16.1 percent in 2013. That is one of the lowest cost of living regions among peer areas.
Deck summarized her analysis by saying the potential for continued growth in Northwest Arkansas is unlimited because of balance among industries.
“When you look at all the sectors I just talked about, you see a lot of different industries that are carrying the weight,” she said. “We do best when the industries are reinforcing each other in that way.”
She added that Northwest Arkansas will reap the benefits of decades of infrastructure investment, listing the ongoing project to widen Interstate 49 from Fayetteville to Bella Vista.
Commercial real estate broker T.J. Lefler of Sage Partners said he thought the right tone was struck at Thursday’s luncheon.
“I thought the Northwest Council would just pump up Northwest Arkansas, but they were being very honest,” he explained. “We have positives and negatives, it’s just the positives far outweigh the negatives right now. But they were talking about it all.”
Mike Malone, president and CEO of the Northwest Arkansas Council, said events like Thursday’s luncheon play an important role in the ongoing effort to market Northwest Arkansas.
“One of the issues we face in job recruitment and business attraction is we are somewhat of an unknown, or people have in their mind a picture that is really not Northwest Arkansas,” he said. “The more we can do to better tell our story and bring people to it, we will eventually win the talent attraction and business attraction.”
Thursday’s event also included guest speaker Ted Abernathy, whose economic development career has spanned nearly 35 years of working with cities, counties, regions and the private sector.