In 2015, six people attended an Augusta Chamber of Commerce meeting, one of only two that took place that year. At the time, the chamber presented an annual banquet that raised about $2,000 that year, but the chamber board was otherwise dormant. At the end of that year, after then-president Regina Burkett announced her resignation, Winston Collier hoped to help find a suitable replacement until he was moved to take on the role himself.
“I agreed in November or December of 2015 [that] for one year, I will serve as your president if this group of five or six people here will give me their word that we’re going to change things,” he said. “And so I did it. And we’ve just finished that one year that I agreed to do it. Now, we have to bring in chairs [because] there are so many people in our meetings.”
At the chamber’s February 2016 meeting, extra chairs were needed for the 40 community members who showed up, which Collier called a humbling experience.
Collier said there’s now a renaissance taking place in Augusta. If you don’t believe him, try Google Earthing what downtown Augusta looked like 10 years ago and compare it to what you see when taking a stroll down Second Street today.
“If you would have walked out here 15 years ago, all these buildings, including this one, were truly falling in on themselves,” he said, sitting in The Collier Firm, his law firm in downtown Augusta. “It’s almost surreal.”
Collier’s family moved from Pine Bluff to Augusta in 1981, a year after his birth. He said the 1980s, ’90s and even the early 2000s were devastating in many ways for the Augusta community.
“We saw population centers moving to your more urban and suburban areas. Changes in agriculture — and this was an agriculture-based town — made it more difficult for some of your smaller farming operations to exist in these small towns, just tough to be profitable for a litany of reasons,” he said. “Those decades were really tough on the small town, and those were the decades I was growing up.”
It’s always been a goal of his to give back to Augusta and promote small towns, said Collier, who also serves as general council for ArCare, a health care company based in Augusta.
“They were one of a few players that sort of pioneered the reinvestment in a small town in Augusta,” he said. “Naturally, being a leader in a company that was geared toward helping rural small towns, it was something that sort of was important to me. And so, I wanted to get involved in the chamber for that reason.”
Collier studied English and political science at the University of Mississippi and attended the University of Arkansas for law school, along with spending a brief stint in Cambridge, England, studying international law. After law school, Collier had opportunities to practice in other states but knew he wanted to practice back home.
“I did that, and it’s just been the best decision I’ve ever made,” said Collier, who also has an office in Searcy. “Part of our branding is owning the small-town lawyer deal and not being ashamed of it because with technology the way it is, you can have your law office in a small town, and you’re not limited to little old ladies’ wills. You can be in San Francisco one week negotiating a settlement and back in Augusta, Arkansas, the next week.”
In Collier’s presidency, the chamber has experienced an about-face. It held meetings every month, presented ribbon cuttings, recognized area businesses each month and examined what the future of Augusta could look like. Trash cans were even added to the sidewalks downtown.
“That sounds little, right? But that’s a noticeable win,” he said. “We were looking for noticeable small wins, so we did it. And we put it on Facebook: ‘Look, hope you take note of our new trash cans in downtown Augusta. Please help us keep Augusta beautiful.’”
This year, the chamber also did away with its annual banquet and presented its inaugural Mallard Masters Championship, which raised more than $200,000, to create scholarships for graduates of the Augusta Public School District.
“We had an excellent event, we raised a lot of money, and we’re going to send a lot of kids to college with that money,” he said.
He said the chamber had to begin focusing on promoting the tourism unique to the area, thanks to its proximity to the White and Cache rivers, instead of aiming to bring industry and manufacturing to Augusta.
“Those types of things are going to Little Rock or Jonesboro, and why would they come to a town of 2,000 folks? We don’t even have the workforce,” he said. “So someday, if we can get regional with other towns, maybe that’s what we want to do, but for right now, the best thing that we have going is recreational, is tourism.”
Collier said Augusta is a duck-hunting mecca, with public land for hunting owned by the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and outsiders have taken notice.
“That was a fundamental shift in our perspective, when we realized we had to start focusing on what we have and drawing attention to it. I think it’s worked. Augusta is cool again,” he said. “Orthodontists in Memphis and lawyers in Little Rock and bigwigs in Searcy now want cabins over here. They’re shopping in our stores, they’re eating in our restaurants, they’re buying gas from our gas stations, and they’re hiring lawyers like me.”
However, the chamber is not only about holding an awesome event, Collier said.
“It’s really fun here in the summer. This river is a boating paradise — kayaking, canoeing. We have a festival called Augusta Days that brings in over 20,000 people that our chamber is involved in,” he explained. “I think as a leader of the chamber, I would not be doing my job if I limited us like, ‘We’re only about that duck-hunting tournament.’ That’s just a means to an end; that’s a means to put Augusta back on the map.”
Boyd Wright, chairman of the Mallard Masters Championship, said Collier is charismatic.
“He’s infectious,” he said. “The chamber before him would have maybe three to five members who would [attend meetings]. Now that he’s leading it, he’s a good charismatic leader, and people tend to want to get behind some of his ideas.”
Wright also said Collier has a vision for Augusta that area businesses have begun to take part in.
“Most of the businesses in town are now active and involved in the chamber and volunteering and participating in the chamber’s activities, such as the Mallard Masters Championship and helping make phone calls and talking to local businesses and getting donations from them,” Wright said.
Though Collier initially said he’d take on the role as president of the chamber for one year, he’s been talked into serving another year, he said.
“But I’m serious; this is my last year of being president, and I told them that,” he said.
Collier said 2016 was monumental for the chamber and that 2017 will be about keeping that momentum going.
“It’s my hope both as president of the chamber and just as an attorney in the state of Arkansas that you’ll see a resurgence in some of these small towns,” he said.
Staff writer Syd Hayman can be reached at (501) 244-4307 or shayman@arkansasonline.com.