Northwest Arkansas Council CEO talks about key strategies, vision

The Northwest Arkansas Council recently released six strategy documents related to the group’s regional vision. A discussion of those key strategies, which include a big focus on supporting population growth, took place at the council’s annual meeting, held at Razorback Stadium.

The six strategies touched on infrastructure and stormwater; transportation and mobility; housing and development; regional governance; finance and funding; and regional character.

Nelson Peacock, president and CEO of the Northwest Arkansas Council, visited with Northwest Arkansas Business Journal Editor-in-Chief Roby Brock about some of the report’s biggest takeaways.

Brock: Water and wastewater have been huge topics of conversation regionally as the strain on infrastructure and sourcing continues with regional growth. As the region heads towards a million people in population, what do you think needs to happen over the next two decades on this front?

Peacock: Where we’ve been leaning into lately is our wastewater challenges. The long and short of it is we’ve grown too fast in certain locations to be able to meet the demand that we have for wastewater. So what we’ve done is we partnered with the state Department of Agriculture, and we are conducting a regional wastewater analysis. Part of that is going to be the engineering. Where should different flow go to be the most efficient and how do systems work together?

The hard part will be the governance. All of our cities, or many of our cities, already have systems in place. A lot of times cities will work with the adjoining city on different elements of that, and there’s reliance from some of the bigger cities in the smaller cities. What we’re trying to do is put together a regional framework that ensures that we are as efficient as possible in how we treat and process wastewater. That is going to require some trust. That is going to require a lot of discussions around governance and who gets to say because ultimately you’re talking about billions of dollars of infrastructure investment over the next 20-plus years and ratepayers and all those types of things.

So that is one of the major things that we are working on right now. It is critically important, and we already have some places that are slowing down in development because of restrictions related to wastewater.

Brock: I think when people think of the Northwest Arkansas Council, obviously its origins were in the need to build I-49, which is built and continues to expand. From a transportation standpoint, where is the focus now? And how has that changed over the last several decades as you head again towards a population of a million people?

Peacock: The transportation needs have become much more complex than just a big interstate system. To be honest, we’re still trying to complete the priorities that were set out 20-plus years ago. We have yet to complete the Springdale bypass. We also have funding needs related to expansion of (Highway) 112, which would be a north-south corridor.

Ultimately, we are going to need to have better ways to get around than just one major highway running through the region. If you look at this analysis that we’ve done, there are so many trips that end up getting to I-49 and someone going north or south and then going to their destination. It’s a lot of pressure on one highway, and we’ll need to alleviate that over time. It’ll be really difficult to build enough lanes to be able to handle that. So that’s probably one of the main priorities.

The regional planning commission is in the process of announcing their Vision 2050 that’s going to help outline some of their priorities. As we’ve learned through this report, every time a city or a county takes on a new road project, that is an investment they’ve made in perpetuity – the upkeep and the maintenance on that.

Even though we’re talking about highways, I think there’s a big question for the reason to ask and answer around density in certain locations. Can we have people living closer to where they work? Can we make transit an option for people?

Clearly, there’s going to be more highways. There’s going to need to be more investment in roads and bridges and hard infrastructure, but can we reduce that? One example that people have talked about is getting more development and businesses and housing on Highway 71B, where there is already a highway there, but very little housing in certain locations, very little development, no multi-use kind of facilities there. A lot of that is a result of zoning choices that cities have made over time. So things like that are things that we’ll be looking at going forward.

Brock: You’ve got cities of all sizes, and you’ve got county government to contend with. Is it time to start advocating or looking at a different regional governance model? Is there something that exists elsewhere in the U.S. that might be a blueprint for Northwest Arkansas?

Peacock: That’s one of the priorities mentioned in the report – leading together with regional governance. We have cities, we have counties, we have Beaver Lake, we have Ozark (Regional) Transit … I do believe that we need some kind of council of governance model that lays over the top of all of that so that we can make sure that all these decisions are done strategically. For cities and counties, when they make decisions, there’s a formal process rather than an informal process to understand how that affects the region.

One of the things that we’ve always pointed out, especially to planners, is that water flows downhill, and it doesn’t really take into account a city’s jurisdiction. So, we have to figure out how all of these things work together. I think one of the things that we will be doing is looking at other models from other communities to see how they’ve done things and what might work here in Northwest Arkansas. This is critically important as we go forward to make sure that all these communities have a seat at the table, have equity in how decisions are made, but ultimately all understand that we’re in this together.

I think all of this matters for the state as well. We believe that we need to (do) all that we can to continue to grow our economy, strengthen our economy. And we have to do it in ways that if we can fund things for ourselves or build more strategically, so that we don’t take up more state resources than we have to, we can leave that for the rest of the state for investment that the state needs to make in other places.

Hopefully, this vision and this framework will put us on the course to making some really good decisions over time that are going to preserve the character of Northwest Arkansas and continue to grow the economy, even as we preserve the rural lands and all the other things that make Northwest Arkansas special.