NWA Council CEO reflects on legislative session, new opportunities

Northwest Arkansas Council CEO Nelson Peacock counts this year’s legislative session as a big success for the region. At the tail end of the regular session of the 95th Arkansas General Assembly, Nelson sat down with Editor-in-Chief Roby Brock to review new laws that will have an impact on economic development, health care and housing.

Roby Brock: You guys have had a fruitful legislative session. Let’s talk first about industrial development authorities. This was a bill that was on your radar all session. Tell me what it does and how you see it benefiting Northwest Arkansas.

Nelson Peacock: This was part of several bills that AEDC [Arkansas Economic Development Commission] put forward. We were really interested in industrial development authorities because it’s a tool that a lot of states have, but it’s also something that we think that we’re going to be able to put to good use here in Northwest Arkansas. It’s going to allow us to organize, to create some strategic locations, to create new business, to be able to recruit new business in ways that we’re not able to right now. We have a lot of growth here, but it’s not really strategic in any way. We want to be able to protect strategic locations and be able to recruit companies from around the country that help us diversify our economy, round out what our offerings are, create a lot of middle-wage jobs that are not in retail or logistics or food so that we can have a well-balanced economy.

Brock: Give me an example of how you see these industrial development authorities working. Will it be the equivalent of a Little Rock Port, but it won’t be a port because you don’t have a waterway?

Peacock: That’s the idea. It’s basically a port authority without a navigable waterway, so any jurisdiction could create these. As the Northwest Arkansas Council, we’ll probably be looking to do something more regional. We’ve talked to several elected officials about this. There’s no really tax issues related to industrial revenue authorities. You can issue bonds, revenue bonds based on projects, and so with that, we’re going to identify sites, hopefully purchase land that’s strategic in nature, get it set up with the right infrastructure so that we can be competitive to recruit.

Brock: On the health care front, there have been some productive things happen. This legislative session, we certainly should see some improvement in Arkansas’ poor maternal health statistics. There was a big contingency from Northwest Arkansas pushing for some changes on the maternal health front. Also medical residency slots, another very important issue. We do seem to have funded more of those. What do you point to on the health care front that you viewed as pretty positive for this legislative session?

Peacock: Obviously, you mentioned maternal health, but we’ve been focused on the last several years on graduate medical education. We were educating medical students and then exporting them to Boston and Chicago and other places because we did not have enough residency slots. We did a study a couple years ago that showed we were about 200 residency slots below the national average. A lot of reasons for that is because of the way residencies are funded, but working with the legislature during Gov. Hutchinson’s term and now with Gov. Sanders and working with the legislature, we created a process where Washington Regional will have created 76 new slots. These will be Arkansas kids that have graduated from medical school or other places that come here that will be able to stay in Northwest Arkansas in the state to do their residency training. In addition to that great piece of it, there’s an estimated economic impact of around $750,000 per resident, so it’s a good economic impact too. If they become physicians, I believe the latest I saw was around 17 new jobs per physician, so they can really help grow the economy as well.

Brock: Let’s talk about housing, a big issue in Northwest Arkansas. Affordable housing, keeping up with housing demand — did anything come out of this session that’s going to address that?

Peacock: We’ve been doing a lot of work with our mayors of all of our large cities, which are doing some comprehensive reforms on their zoning and development codes, which we think will help. We are in the process now of establishing a regional growth strategy. We’re going to be providing, hopefully, toolkits for some of the smaller city mayors to help them grow in the right way. Around 60% of our growth is happening in the non-corridor cities, so a lot of these smaller towns are taking on growth. In the state legislature, one thing that we were supportive of was the ability to create ADUs (accessory dwelling units) so small, granny flats, some people call them, in the backyard of larger lots where you could, by state law, be able to put those in as long as they met all the other parts of the code for the individual city. Sen. Bart Hester and Rep. Nicole Clowney (D-Fayetteville) worked together on that. The legislation was modeled off of what Fayetteville had done actually, so now developers will be able to add this. We hope and think it will create a little bit more density, less burden on cost, and a little less burden on infrastructure, but we have a long way to go on housing. We have a lot of infrastructure needs — highways, water, electric, you name it. We have a lot of challenges here in Northwest Arkansas. These are good challenges to have, but they’re challenges nonetheless.

Brock: Not on the legislative front, but an important topic for you and the region is placemaking, where you create events and activities and build community and do things that draw people together and help kind of build that sense of belonging and that sense of place. Why is this important?

Peacock: I’ve been at the council for seven years, and quality of life, quality of place has always been a key component of our economic development strategy. How do you recruit, retain the best talent that you possibly can? People want to have fun. They want to have things to do outside of their work. They want to have things to go to and good places and public venues, so we really work hard to develop those. And you’ll see in all the bond issues for all of the cities’ investments in parks, trails and things like that to entice people to stay here. We want their children to stay here, and we see that as a big part of economic development.