Director Neal Martin seeks another term on the Fort Smith board

Fort Smith Director Neal Martin announced Monday (Feb. 2) he will seek a third four-year term on the Fort Smith Board of Directors. The board has seven members, with three elected to at-large positions, and four who represent one of the city’s four wards.

The board terms that expire Dec. 31, 2026, are Mayor George McGill, and the board’s three at-large members, Directors Christina Catsavis (position 5), Kevin Settle (position 6), and Martin (position 7).

No other candidates have publicly announced for the at-large position 7.

In his announcement, Martin said he is proud to have been a champion of “fiscal responsibility, taxpayer interests, and open government.”

“I am proud of what we have accomplished together over the past eight years, from addressing our greatest problems to greater transparency to economic opportunities,” Martin, who was first elected in 2018, said in his announcement. “Fort Smith is on a positive trajectory, and I am asking for the support of Fort Smith residents to continue this momentum in a third term.”

In an interview with Talk Business & Politics, Martin said the city has grown, but he’s “a little frustrated” with recent growth trends. He said a recent decline in the city’s building permit numbers have him worried. Fort Smith issued $251.11 million in building permits in 2025, up 6.5% from $235.776 million reported in 2024. However, the city’s permit numbers in 2024 were down 46.8% compared with the $442.856 million in 2023.

The 2022 and 2023 permit numbers included a significant one-time project at Mercy-Fort Smith, and large projects at Chaffee Crossing. Also in recent years, the region’s construction industry, including engineers and architects, have been busy with the city’s consent decree work to make sewer system improvements, and the ongoing creating of a foreign pilot training center at Ebbing Air National Guard Base in Fort Smith. None of that work is included in the city’s building permit numbers.

Martin’s focus in another term would be to put the city on a better financial path. He said there has been too much spending in recent years, and the city’s budget needs to be balanced in future years.

“We’ve got to get back to being fiscally sound,” Martin said, adding that the board is already getting spending requests that could change the conservative budget approved for 2026.

He’s also interested in doing more to address the city’s homeless issue, which he said will have the added benefit of improving tourism and other business development in downtown Fort Smith. He’s also aware that the city has an obligation to improve overall living conditions in the city, and that includes efforts to not only fund or help fund parks and other amenities, but incentive job creation.

“We’ve got to create an environment where our kids, our people, want to come back here,” he said. “Is our parks going to be that driver? Probably not. … We’ve got to have good jobs, and good entertainment options for people.”

The filing period for the board positions and the mayoral election begins at noon, July 29, and ends at noon on Aug. 5, according to Fort Smith City Clerk Sherri Gard. Candidate packets will be available at the clerk’s office on May 7.

If there’s only one qualified director candidate for each position, that individual will be declared elected without being on the Nov. 3 general election ballot. If there’s more than one qualified candidate for each position, all candidates will be on the general election ballot. If no candidate wins a majority of the votes cast at the general election, the two candidates with the most votes will be on the Dec. 1 runoff election ballot.