Today is the first day in 18 years that Tab Townsell didn’t wake up as mayor of Conway.
“This is tough,” he said just before Christmas as he looked around his office in City Hall where he spent so many years, made so many decisions, hashed out solutions and had a lot of laughs.
A big desk, one he owned, was already gone. The perimeter of the room had plastic tubs, remnants and stacks of his mementos — a straw boater hat he got during the 2012 election; a huge, heavy antique Bible with a latch; a pair of Rodin-replica bronze bookends representing The Thinker and American Athlete. “These have been with me the whole time — thought and action,” he said, pointing to them one at a time.
Townsell, 55, who didn’t run for re-election, starts Tuesday as executive director of Metroplan, the central-Arkansas transportation-planning agency. He has a long history with the agency. As mayor, he’s been on the Metroplan board his entire tenure, and before that he served on Metroplan’s first transportation advisory committee.
The new Conway mayor is Bart Castleberry, director of permits and inspections and, before that, the longtime Conway fire chief.
“He’s been a good co-worker,” Townsell said of Castleberry, who will be sworn in today.
Townsell was 37 when he was elected mayor of his hometown, where he graduated from high school and the University of Central Arkansas.
While he was in college, he worked during the summers for his father’s construction firm.
“It was a good honest job,” he said. He did it all — estimating, bidding, loading trucks, carpenter work, job-foreman work, whatever was needed.
The seeds of his desire to be mayor were planted when he was in Texas, though.
When he was working on his master’s degree in business administration at Texas Christian University from 1984-86, a roommate and he lived in a growing area south of Fort Worth. The attractive design and planning caught Townsell’s eye.
“I was like, ‘This is well done,’” he said. “It was in contrast to what we had in Conway, and we were just starting to grow.”
After he earned his master’s degree, Townsell continued to work with his dad but moved to Tennessee because work had dried up in Arkansas. Townsell lived in Germantown, Tennessee, on the edge of Memphis. Again, he noticed the planning — small McDonald’s signs, nice architecture.
“I said, ‘Why can’t we do that?’” Townsell said.
Intrigued, Townsell collected design and subdivision ordinances to read.
He came back to Conway and decided to get involved and push for better planning, he said. He became a member of the Conway Planning Commission.
When former Mayor David Kinley opted to not run for re-election, Townsell threw his hat into the ring.
The population of Conway was “roughly” 39,000 when Townsell was elected in 1998; today, it’s estimated to be 65,000.
Townsell has been described as “a visionary” by several people, including
Castleberry.
“It’s not having a vision; it’s achieving a vision,” Townsell said. “Finding the steps to inhabit that vision, finding the way — that was the trick of being a visionary. Otherwise, you’re just spouting dreams.”
His legacy will be everything from roundabouts to the much-maligned-by-some Conway Christmas tree.
“I’ll be known for roundabouts,” he said.
A downtown planner suggested one at Oak and Harkrider streets, which was a “crazy” location, but the concept was a good one, he said.
Townsell credited Hendrix College with building a roundabout at Siebenmorgen Road and Harkrider Street. He said roundabouts work well, and they move traffic.
He said dealing with congestion was the priority at that time — the complaint everyone had. Castleberry has said street improvements are his priority, and Townsell said “he’s dead on.” Although many streets were added or upgraded to help with congestion during Townsell’s tenure, now is the time, he said, to find ways to make the extensive repairs that streets need.
Parks are another point of pride for the outgoing mayor. When he came into office, “we had nothing for kids, in essence.” Now there is a girls softball complex, boys baseball fields, a soccer complex and other parks, as well as a bike-trail system.
“We’ve become a sports-tourism attraction because we’ve done it well,” he said.
Also during his tenure, a new Conway airport was built, opening in 2014. A bid was accepted to develop the old airport property into the Central Landing shopping center, with Dillard’s as the anchor store.
However, questions about the shopping center’s likelihood have risen because the land remains untouched.
“I do want it to work,” Townsell said. “I do think we need the Dillard’s-level shopping in Conway.”
One reason for the delay is that the road work in the area is not finished. This construction includes a new overpass over Interstate 40 that would connect to the Conway Commons shopping center and provide an additional east-west roadway in the city.
He said the road work is justified, regardless of the shopping center’s fate.
“I do want that [shopping center], but if it didn’t work, and we were just limited to the value added by the road system, it would still be a great boon to traffic. Instead of just two lanes back and forth to Conway Commons, for example, during the Christmas season, now we’re going to have four lanes,” Townsell said. “On the new road, there won’t be any traffic lights; there will just be roundabouts. Then we’re going to have better connectors, … north and south, between the interstate and Harkrider.
“It creates a boon to help traffic congestion in that area of town. It’s another way across the interstate, majorly, … and then if we have to seek another developer for that land,” the land’s going to be worth a lot more than was originally paid, he said.
Townsell said he persuaded the City Council to add a hotel tax, then a restaurant tax about six years later.
He calls the push and success of liquor by the drink a necessary move for the growth of the city, despite the objections of many.
It was a political gamble Townsell said he didn’t mind taking. He got a two-year bonus in his term because a special census in 2005 showed the city had more than 50,000 residents, which requires the mayoral election to be in presidential-
election years. Townsell said a “quirk in the law” gave mayors of cities those size another two years.
“I knew I had an extra play in me,” he said of working toward restaurant liquor sales. “It was a hill to die on. Economically, it had to happen to create the quality of place for people to locate their business here.”
He used Hewlett-Packard as an example, saying officials would ask: “You can’t buy a drink in a restaurant?”
“If I had to give up the political ghost on that issue, it was worth it.”
Townsell did not succeed in everything — getting an aquatic center built, for one. The City Council unanimously approved in 2009 buying the massive, empty Spirit Homes building, but the sale didn’t go through. When Townsell pushed it again in 2015, the final verdict was no “because they got afraid of the cost,” he said.
Townsell said he considers it a failure that he wasn’t able to get a public pool built in Conway.
“We are by far the largest city in Arkansas without a public swimming pool,” he said.
He also wishes he could have ushered in public transit.
However, because of the design standards implemented, the ideas for which were created during his time in Fort Worth and Germantown, “we’ve completely transformed downtown,” he said.
Other designs he’d seen in bigger cities — tree-lined streets, parking lots with landscaped islands, hanging baskets — were implemented. Building owners put in their own money to spruce up buildings, too.
The Conway Downtown Partnership was formed, and Townsell credits former newspaper publisher Mike Hengel as the driving force behind the partnership.
Townsell and Hengel put together a committee and developed a plan that emphasized property owners and their involvement.
Rogers Plaza in downtown Conway has been a big plus, he said. That’s the site of the 54-foot Christmas tree, which had problems with its lights from the get-go.
It cost a total of $137,000 in Advertising and Promotion funds, which Townsell has said — until he’s almost blue in the face — could not have been used for street construction or improvements.
“I still don’t see that tree as an albatross. I am unrepentant,” he said.
The tree was wired wrong from the beginning, he said. The company went bankrupt with the tree in its possession, and Conway officials had to retrieve it.
“We should have asked for a performance bond — a materials bond — and we didn’t. We would have had recourse. That I do regret. The actual tree? Not a bit. That’s going to be part of the Christmas lore of growing up in Conway. If that’s my folly, I’ll take it,” he said.
Townsell said his goal has been for Conway to be the best it can be, not just do the minimum.
Andy Hawkins, who has served on the City Council for 24 years, is a big fan of the outgoing mayor.
“I fully believe that when the history of the Tab Townsell years is written, they will be remembered very fondly,” Hawkins said. “They will be remembered as the years of the architectural prototype of how to develop a city, of having a vision — a plan — and working that plan to its completion. Of building roundabouts and, despite the naysayers, watching them work to near perfection. Of having the vision to add hundreds of acres of parkland to Conway and building on them facilities worthy of our children and our children’s children and beyond. Of having the foresight to build a technology park. Of not knowing we couldn’t recruit an international giant like Hewlett-Packard and finding a way to make that happen. Of presiding over the downtown renovation and revitalization. Of bike lanes. Of nonpartisan elections.”
Hawkins said Townsell also “taught us about quality of life and the things that bring a good quality of life.”
“I will miss most his ability to be able to see beyond today and into the future, and to have the ability to map the road there,” he said.
Townsell, who is divorced and has an 11-year-old daughter, Riley, is engaged to be married. Although he said no date is set for the wedding, he expects to move to Sherwood at some point.
He also plans to stay involved in Conway. It is where he grew up and where his parents, daughter, and brother and his family live. “It’s home,” Townsell said.
Through his position at Metroplan, “while I’ll not have the chance to touch physical projects,” he said, patting the top of the big Bible,
“I’ll be able to work on a much larger canvas indirectly with mayors and cities.”
And he will take his Rodin bookends to remind him — thought and action.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.