Downtown revivals

They held the third in a series of public meetings on the future of downtown Hot Springs last week. The tone of the Downtown Game Plan Task Force’s Monday night session was optimistic because can-do people from three Arkansas cities-one from the northern third of the state, one from the central third and one from the southern third-gave concrete suggestions on how to revitalize a dying downtown.

Mayor Bob McCaslin of Bentonville, Conway Area Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Brad Lacy and El Dorado private developer Richard Mason represented cities that have become examples of success when it comes to downtown renewal. The three men had a message that the leaders of Hot Springs-where political infighting and backbiting is a bigger sport than thoroughbred racing-needed to hear.

“If you wait for everybody to agree, it will never happen,” Lacy said. Indeed, not everyone will be happy with what must occur to spur downtown development in Hot Springs. The owners of decaying downtown properties must either develop them or put them on the market at a reasonable price so we can see if there are people out there with the will and capital to bring them to life. To have empty floors in so many historic buildings is no longer acceptable. It’s time for all Arkansans to hold those property owners directly accountable for the deterioration of the national treasure that is downtown Hot Springs.

In the 1970 census, Hot Springs had 35,631 residents. The city had grown in every census since 1860. Conway had a population of 15,510 in that census. Conway was at almost 59,000 residents by the 2010 census and now is estimated to have a population of more than 63,000 people. Meanwhile, Hot Springs had fewer residents in the 2010 census than it had four decades earlier.

It’s a huge asset for Conway to be the home of three four-year institutions of higher education. But Conway also built an environment that attracts young, talented people who want to call the city home after college.

“We’ve been very deliberate in recruiting more white-collar employees to town,” Lacy said. “You have to get the coolness factor right. Young professionals want things that are different from what Conway traditionally offered.”

Lacy said Conway experienced a crisis of confidence in the 1990s when high-tech Acxiom Corp. decided to move its corporate headquarters to Little Rock. Though Acxiom employs more people in Conway than in Little Rock, the fact that the company’s top executives would now be working in the capital city caused Conway’s leaders to examine their priorities. The Conway Downtown Partnership was formed in 2001, and the trajectory has been straight up since then. Smart people who could live in much larger cities are moving to Conway. More and more of them are choosing to live in or near downtown.

McCaslin of Bentonville is a Hot Springs native. Like most natives, he loves the town and wants to see it prosper. He was elected Bentonville mayor in 2006. A year later, voters there overwhelmingly approved a massive bond issue to be paid off by 1 cent of the city’s sales tax. That bond issue included $85 million for street improvements and $15 million for park improvements. In identifying where to spend the money, Bentonville city fathers decided that downtown was among the city’s strengths. Already in place was a charming town square that once had been the home of Sam Walton’s five-and-dime store.

“Renovating downtown was the greatest investment we could have made with those taxpayer dollars,” McCaslin said. “There has to be the community and political will to make these kinds of things happen. I can tell you that Hot Springs has a lot better bones to work with than we did at the start. Hot Springs has more history. The downtown footprint is bigger. There’s a bigger palette to work on than we had.” The story in El Dorado is a bit different. If anything, it’s even more impressive given the years of population loss in far-south Arkansas.

“We started a long decline in the 1960s,” said Mason, who has been involved for many years in the oil and gas business. He said cities require a vision, and El Dorado didn’t have one. He talked of old families who made no improvements to the buildings they owned, something that must have sounded familiar to the people of Hot Springs. Mason eventually purchased 17 buildings, renovating them along the way.

“To attract a quality tenant, you have to have a quality piece of property,” he told those in Hot Springs. “I think you should look seriously at Central Avenue and encourage business owners to begin buying these properties. You want downtown to be your key destination. It should be special because there’s only one downtown in each city. We now have one of the best retail districts in the state at El Dorado. We’ve recently raised $45 million to make El Dorado what we’re calling the Festival City of the South.”

Mason talked about the people who come from much larger cities such as Shreveport to do their Christmas shopping in El Dorado due to the festive atmosphere. There’s no doubt El Dorado has developed one of the best downtowns of any city its size in the South.

Here are words from Mason that people in Hot Springs and every other Arkansas community should heed: “If the downtown is perceived to be dead, the whole town is perceived to be dead. The downtown is more important than most people realize.”

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Freelance columnist Rex Nelson is the president of Arkansas’ Independent Colleges and Universities. He’s also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.