A New American Town - Bentonville, Arkansas
Tune into Visit Bentonville’s podcast series for a weekly update on all things Bentonville, Arkansas. Hosted by Beth Bobbitt, you’ll hear captivating stories and updates from our city—connecting you with the locals that make this town worth visiting.
A New American Town - Bentonville, Arkansas
Why Bentonville is the Best Place to Live and Work
Northwest Arkansas is one of the fastest-growing regions in the country, with three Fortune 500 companies, plus numerous businesses and startups eager to contribute to the local innovation scene.
Join us as we talk to Nelson Peacock, President/CEO of the NWA Council—a private, nonprofit organization working to advance job opportunities, talent recruitment, physical infrastructure, health care, and quality of life.
We'll talk about all the Council has accomplished in the last 30 years and the economic opportunity and quality of life in NWA that's unmatched. With 500-plus miles of mountain biking trails and paved paths, a thriving arts community complete with world-class museums, an eclectic culinary scene, live music, and miles of lush Ozark beauty. Best of all it's a place where everyone is welcome.
Find out more about NWA Council here: nwacouncil.org
A New American Town is here to help you plan your trip to Bentonville, Arkansas. From guides, events, and restaurant highlights. Find all this and more at visitbentonville.com and subscribe to our newsletter. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, and LinkedIn.
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Welcome to a new American town presented by Visit Bentonville. I'm your host, beth Bobbitt, and today we're excited to dive deep into what makes Bentonville the ideal place to live and our growth over the next decade. We're speaking directly with the man behind it all, Nelson Peacock, the President and CEO of Northwest Arkansas Council. Welcome to the podcast, nelson, thank you. So I think this will be really helpful for listeners who either are new to the area or thinking about moving here, or maybe you know just wanting to visit, but we're going to talk about regional growth. We're going to talk a little bit about you know what wanting to visit, but we're going to talk about regional growth. We're going to talk a little bit about you know what it's been like to move to Northwest Arkansas for you, so I'd love to start there. Just what has been your experience? What really attracted you to this area originally?
Nelson Peacock:Yeah, so well. As you mentioned, I was actually born in Fayetteville when my father was at law school. We lived, grew up in Eastern Arkansas, but I went to school in Fayetteville when my father was at law school.
Nelson Peacock:We grew up in eastern Arkansas but I went to school in Fayetteville and then got to DC and then to California and when I was in California I would always continually come back for Razorback games or things like that, and I knew that Northwest Arkansas had been on all these top 10 lists.
Nelson Peacock:But I didn't really know what was going on until a friend of mine called and said if you ever want to move home, the perfect job just came open, and it was this job at the Northwest Arkansas Council. So I applied, started doing the interview process, the commitment that the companies were making in Northwest Arkansas, the elected officials and some of the prominent families here into this community, and so the ability from the vantage point of the council to bring all of that together, to try to bring collaboration across many different sectors, many different communities, just was really appealing to me. And I just knew the trajectory that this was on and I felt like I could make a difference here. Which had really been a part of what I've always strived to do through government service or in higher education is how can I make a difference? And I felt that I could here, and so I was willing to take it a shot and to try to get away from some of the California traffic. It all seemed to line up.
Beth Bobbitt :Well, we're so glad you did, and I mean, the impact has been tremendous. So the council has been around for about 30 years, is that right? One of the first projects that most people know is XNA, the regional airport.
Nelson Peacock:Talk about how far we've come since then and what the current focus is yeah, so the council started in the early 90s sam walton, john tyson, jb hunt, mark simmons trying to figure out how these smaller communities could work together to make this a place where their businesses could grow and thrive.
Nelson Peacock:I think they all knew their businesses were on an upward path but maybe they didn't know exactly how big and successful they would be. But the first project was hard infrastructure XNA, getting I-49 completed, highway 412 out to Siloam Springs. Those were the first three priorities and we've kind of grown and expanded over time. We have workforce development, economic development, we have a health care initiative and we still keep focusing on on infrastructure and also entrepreneurship and I think all those kind of have grown and we've grown into those is the region's needs have changed, but still the principles still remain. How do we continue to build a region that is going to allow successful businesses to come here? Because by doing that we create opportunity for everyone that lives here, and so I think that is kind of the goal of the council, kind of whatever it takes to allow this to be a pro-business, really successful place.
Beth Bobbitt :Yeah, and you all have done a great job with that. We're going to talk a little bit about some of the programs that have shown a lot of impact, but first let's level set here and define Northwest Arkansas so both from a geographical perspective, but also like the personality and attributes of the place.
Nelson Peacock:So the federal government would define Northwest Arkansas as Washington, Benton and Madison counties. Our work is primarily limited to Washington and Benton counties, primarily in the five largest towns, so Bentonville, Rogers, Springdale, Fayetteville and Siloam Springs. We'll talk maybe later about how that's expanding as some of the smaller towns continue to grow, and so that's how we define it geographically and that's who we work with primarily. But you know, each city is kind of anchored with a large employer, so Tyson, Walmart, you know JB Hunt and Springs and the University of Arkansas, which is a key member of the council, also one of the largest employers in the state down in Fayetteville, and so that's how we define it. Those are the main partners that we work with.
Beth Bobbitt :Want to see more of what's currently happening in Bentonville? Follow us on social media at Visit Bentonville to stay in the know of restaurants, events, things to do in town and more. We're here for you, whether you're planning a trip or looking to move here. Yeah, and speaking of some of those corporate and business entities I mean with that richness, I'm just curious you know, what does innovation call for with these businesses and what does that look like now?
Nelson Peacock:Yeah. So they're all leaders in their own field, whether it's food or retail supply chain logistics, and I think the role of the council is we try to do what we can to pull some of that out to the broader community, get them engaged with local entrepreneurs, get them to add their talent to what's going on around them. Lots of partnerships between the University of Arkansas and some of the major companies, work on accelerator programs like Plug and Play is one. There's a lot of other accelerators and getting those corporate leaders, that expertise and talent engaged with a lot of our entrepreneurs is kind of a key part of our work and that's the way we see it. Obviously, they're going to do a lot of innovation internally to help their businesses. That's going to help us in turn. But we're trying to get some of that out so we can start new companies.
Nelson Peacock:One of the things that we're really trying to do is to make sure that as we grow, we can continue to add new companies and scale companies, because you know, as we know, Walmart is 15,000 employees. In 10 years there'll probably be around 15,000 employees in the Bentonville area, same thing with Tyson Foods, same thing with the university. So those companies have kind of grown and scaled. No matter how successful they are going to be and we expect them to be very successful it'll probably be the same amount of job impact. So we need new companies to grow and scale. A company that goes from 10 to 100 or a company that goes from 100 to 1,000 employees. That's what we need to do, and then, at the same time, we're going to round out the kinds of opportunities that people have here when they do that.
Beth Bobbitt :Yeah, makes good economic sense and I'm sure helps with the recruitment and retention strategy Absolutely yeah, I'd love to spend some time talking about some fun facts and maybe fact check me on a couple of things. We hear a lot about the number of people that are coming to our region every year and I'd love for you to tell us what that number is and any predictions. I think we just heard in a conversation that there was a prediction to double our size by 2050.
Nelson Peacock:So talk to us a little bit about what's current the well, the number we throw around is 36 a day. That's around 30 new people moving here and about six I mean demographically. You know, births versus deaths.
Nelson Peacock:Yeah so that's more organic growth, but about 30 of those are people moving in here. It changes, it moves up and down a little bit, but that's been relatively consistent for the last several years and the data you're pointing to would be around a million people. It's from the Northwest Arkansas Regional Planning Commission. Every five years they do a survey like that with some demographers to help us make those projections and, yeah, they were supposed to be at a million people in 2050. We're around 600,000 now, so that's a lot of growth.
Nelson Peacock:I think we're the 98th largest MSA and if you look at those top 100, we're one of the fastest growing in that group. There's faster growing areas but there are smaller communities, and so that's us as a region. And then if you look at some of our individual towns, like Bentonville, centerton is, I think, a top 10 fastest growing city in the country. It's just not large enough to make the larger list, and so there's going to be a lot of implications around that growth for us.
Nelson Peacock:Most of the growth is occurring outside of the major cities here, and so what are the implications on that for those smaller towns that are going to go from 5,000 to 10,000 or 10,000 to 30,000 over the next 10, 20 years and we have to figure out a way, I believe, to grow as smartly as we possibly can. So how can we not eat up every bit of green space in between those towns with single family residences? We did a survey recently where we found out one of the top things that people like about living here not surprisingly is green space and getting out in outdoor and outdoor activities. They also, the thing they want the least is traffic and high housing prices. So when you kind of add those up, they kind of go hand in hand to try to figure out how we can grow, you know, densely and smartly in certain locations and leave a lot of that green space available for recreational activities, and that's also going to help us with our affordability and reducing traffic over time.
Beth Bobbitt :Yeah, yeah, let's talk about affordability. I know that you have a program focused on workforce housing. Where are we on that and how are you feeling about it?
Nelson Peacock:Yeah Well, it's certainly a challenge. Interestingly enough, if you talk to outside economic developers or experts, affordability is still one of our key attractive points. So for people coming outside of the region, but if you live here and you make a median income, you're really struggling to find housing, to afford housing. That is an important distinction.
Nelson Peacock:It really is, and if you add transportation to that mix it's called the HTNI metric we're not very affordable at all. Other cities like Austin, texas, are more affordable than us because they have a robust public transit system and we don't have a very robust one right now, very robust one right now. So when we think about housing, you know obviously there's affordable housing, low income, homeless, all of those things. But for the council we're looking at those, the key workers. So if you think about your nurses, your teachers, your firefighters, your police, those are the people that make up, kind of, the fabric of your community. It's what makes these places special, and if we have a region where they can't afford to live in a town where they serve, I feel like we've lost something along the way. That's what you see in big cities across the country, where the teachers have to commute into the city where they work, or the firefighter has to do the same thing, and so we need to do everything we possibly can to prevent that from happening. And so the first thing that we're doing is educating, or trying to educate, the general public and our policymakers about the types of housing that we need, the options of housing that we need and kind of what the market will do on its own without these rules in place.
Nelson Peacock:So there's a reason that places like downtown Bentonville are so expensive because this is the lifestyle that a lot of people want. They want to be able to walk, bike to restaurants and other places. So how can we produce that level of optionality for people in other places? We look at it like this a lot of times. One of the examples is a lot of people around here have been to Seaside, Florida. We're like why can't you just design a town like that to live in? Maybe you wouldn't have the beach. But there's a reason. People like that and I think our research shows if we give people options, they'll take them. They're affordable. Obviously can't afford. You know certain locations are going to be unaffordable, but we can build in options for people to live so that they can live where they serve.
Beth Bobbitt :Yeah, certainly, being a more bikeable place is one of those factors that I've. We've come a long way. We'll say that. Well, let's talk about some of the really successful programs that we can highlight here. Maybe start with Startup Northwest Arkansas.
Nelson Peacock:Yeah. So Startup NWA is a program really designed to help facilitate our entrepreneurial ecosystem. As I mentioned earlier, there's a lot of accelerator programs. There's a lot of innovation coming out of the University of Arkansas. We're trying to provide a place for those companies to get support once they're founded, they're up and running. So how do we bring people together? How do we get them? That first check in the door? That's beyond friends and family, and so we've been doing a lot of work recruiting venture capitalists from around the country to come here in our VC Immersions Program.
Nelson Peacock:We've had several events over the last year where we will curate a visit. So if you're a venture capitalist from Kansas City or from Washington DC or from California, we are going to invite you here, see all that Northwest Arkansas and Bentonville particularly has to offer and then set you up with founders who we think are investable companies, and so we've done that about four times so far. We're going to keep doing it and we've already gotten about eight companies. Their first check Wow, and those are local companies. They don't have to leave, we can bring it here to them, and those are the companies that are going to grow. They're going to add jobs and add to our innovation ecosystem. So that is kind of where we are trying to play.
Nelson Peacock:We have opened up a kind of studio innovation studio in downtown Bentonville called Onward HQ. It Onward HQ and a lot of those venture capitalists that have come here they've seen what's happening in Northwest Arkansas, so they we've actually they're putting an office in this, this building, so that they can come and stay. Maybe they'll have someone permanently here. And then we have startups that are going to get a subsidized office or desk space and then just starting to create those connections and create those opportunities to get together, learn from each other, and so we just opened that. We haven't officially had a grand opening yet, but we're really excited about where we're headed with that one.
Beth Bobbitt :Super cool, win-win for everyone. Okay, how about Healthcare Transformation Division?
Nelson Peacock:Yeah, so healthcare. When I got here in 17, healthcare transformation was part of our Northwest Arkansas Council strategy. I never knew what it was. I never looked at it, I didn't know what it was at all, and so, when we were redesigning our strategy, I wanted to ask more about what this was.
Nelson Peacock:And you know, I got a little of the background that basically we did not have a lot of the expertise that people needed like that high level cardiac care, cancer care here, and so people had to leave the region, and so ultimately we got some funding for a study to figure out what that actually meant, what we needed to do in the future, and we found and released in 2019 the study that showed we were losing $950 million per year from people leaving to go to Tulsa, to Little Rock, to Mayo Clinic for their health care, and so that really, I think, motivated a lot of people to put it in those terms, and so that was when we created the health care, and so that really, I think, motivated a lot of people to put it in those terms, and so that was when we created the health division that's with Mercy, washington Region or all the other major providers Heartland, whole Health came along and they joined and we've been working together to solve some of these problems around quality and access, and we just released a new report last year, late last year, that showed we'd improved by about $200,000 and are on a really positive trajectory.
Nelson Peacock:We're doing three things primarily to try to address that. The first one was a medical school which Alice Walton has stepped in to create the Alice Walton Medical School.
Beth Bobbitt :Well open in 2025. That's right Taking students.
Nelson Peacock:Actually, I think they start in July the first class.
Nelson Peacock:So that was one Increasing graduate medical education, meaning right now Arkansas has more med students than residencies, yeah, and so we send a lot of would-be doctors here to other places to do the residencies. So about 75% of doctors practice where they do the residency, so we need to keep those here, and so we created a program with Washington Regional to create 96 new residencies with some state help. Those are about to come online or they have been coming online, so that's 96 new doctors that we don't have to recruit. They're going to be here. And then we're also trying to work to increase research. A lot of high-level physicians work in places where they can do research as well as treat patients. So those are the three major things that we're doing and, I think, having a lot of success. Obviously, what's happening here in Bentonville with the medical school, with the Cleveland Clinic Partnership, has a lot to do with that, but there are institutions all across the region that are making significant upgrades in their health care.
Nelson Peacock:And it's just going to serve the people that live here so much better, and I think the environment helps with too.
Beth Bobbitt :Having a natural beautiful environment where there's trails and lakes, yeah well that's right, you know the other thing we've learned.
Nelson Peacock:you know these hospitals are. They're nonprofits, but they're also businesses. There's a market for doctors. We have historically low reimbursement rates. It's hard to pay a competitive wage. Even Oklahoma can pay a lot more. So there's a lot of policy things that we work on, but this division has really put a lot of the foundational building blocks in place, and so we're really excited about where we could head over the next two, five, ten years in health care.
Beth Bobbitt :Well, and that wrap-up, I mean that study that's showing the $200,000 decrease that is so encouraging, and if we can be an arts destination, we can be a destination for health care too.
Nelson Peacock:I could say it was $200 million, not $200,000. $200 million, there we go. Yeah, I probably misspoke on that. Amazing, okay. Well, I probably misspoke on that.
Beth Bobbitt :Amazing. Okay, well, we're going to wrap up with a few fun questions. We'd love to hear a little bit about, maybe, a secret spot in Bentonville or something that's really meaningful for your family, either a place or a trail or kind of an unknown that maybe our listeners don't know about.
Nelson Peacock:Yeah, probably when I first moved here one of the little hidden gems it's in Bella Vista, not in Fentonville, but Tanyard Creek the waterfall there. Like our children they're 13, 11 now, but they were seven and five and just to be able to take the dog and kind of walk up that waterfall and it was just, we were like wow, what is this place?
Nelson Peacock:So, that was one of my favorites and I think I mentioned before we came on. But spend a lot of time at Best Friends Animal Shelter the last few weeks and we fostered a dog and now we've adopted a cat for my daughter. And so that's a great place you can go wash your dog there for like a donation. Oh wow, so it's that's it's a great place you can go wash your dog there for like a donation. Oh wow, so it's that's. It's a really cool spot.
Beth Bobbitt :Very cool. So a glimpse into the future. If you had a crystal ball, what do you see in northwest Arkansas, bentonville, 10 years from now? Yeah, you know, I think.
Nelson Peacock:I think it really hinges on how we handle this question of growth. I think all of the major cities have plans in place, and good ones and really robust plans. Bentonville included in that A lot of the smaller towns. We are going to have a regional growth strategy that we're going to be announcing soon to help them with some of these decisions, you know, with zoning and how they grow and how they think about growth. But I really think that that is what is going to tell the tale. Are we going to have density in the right locations or are we going to have single family homes, as far as the eye can see, eating up all of our green space, pressuring our infrastructure, pressuring our lakes and streams, and we really, I think, if that happens, we lose a little bit of our character along the way.
Nelson Peacock:One of the people that we talked to that's kind of an expert on these things was talked about the homogenization of America, that a lot of these national builders are coming into every location and building the same way because that's their business model, and you know that's totally fine and we have several of them coming in here now and we need the housing, but we also need to preserve the character of what people love about this place, and so we're different, we're unique. We're one of the fastest growing places in the middle of the country, and that's happening for a reason, and that's probably not by being like everyone else. And that's happening for a reason, and that's probably not by being like everyone else. So we need to empower our elected officials and decision makers with the knowledge and information to help make the best decisions that they can related to growth.
Beth Bobbitt :Yeah, and I love the intentionality of preserving some of those unique qualities about the five major cities. You all are doing a great job supporting and sharing resources, and thank you for coming on and for all you're doing with the council. You can learn more northwestarkansascouncilorg and you all have newsletters and social media you could follow to stay abreast.
Nelson Peacock:Yeah, absolutely Check out the website. There's also a website called Finding NWA. That's kind of our talent attraction website. But I love to go there because we put a lot of content from Visit Bentonville and others on there to kind of push out to the rest of the world. Yeah, Wonderful. Thanks, Nelson, for being on the podcast.
Beth Bobbitt :Thank you, as always, visit Bentonville is here to help you navigate things to do, where to eat and stay and what's going on in our new American town. Give us a follow on social media, sign up for the newsletter and check out our website at visitbittenvillecom. Thanks for listening.