The Fort Smith Board of Directors held a study session and special meeting on July 15, 2025, at 6:00 p.m. in the Blue Lion, back room. The study session covered three major items: a request from Fort Smith Cemeteries, Inc. to transfer three historic cemeteries to municipal oversight; a discussion on policing and funding of community special events; and a review of the parking meter fee waiver. The special meeting included an executive session to interview candidates for Director of Internal Audit.
Thank you, Mayor. The first item on this evening's agenda is a discussion regarding the Fort Smith Cemeteries Inc. request regarding Roselon, Holy Cross, and Forest Park Cemeteries. As the board will remember, in each of the past two years, the operations of the cemeteries could not sustain the cost of maintaining the vegetation on the properties to the point that the city's demolition and cleanup fund was used to abate the nuisance resulting in liens on the properties. This continues to be a difficult task, uh leading to a request from Marty Clark, president of the Fort Smith Cemeteries Inc. that was included in your packet for this evening's meeting and request to address the board the city's board of directors about this item. So uh Mr. Clark, if you'd like to you can come and sit at the table if you like, but I think you have to turn the microphone on. Are we good? Okay. That's the long-term care and the management of three of Fort Smith's most historic cemeteries. Rosalon and Holy Cross are sort of one. Rose uh Forest Park is another, and then Washington Cemeteries uh we're also including in this request. Um Fort Smith Cemeteries Inc. was created I think in two in 2020. Um or maybe 2021 by Bill Wilson. And at that time it was created to take over Forrest Park uh and Roselawn and Holy Cross, which was previously owned by the Codner family. Um the economics of running a cemetery are pretty terrible. And so at that time uh Bill Wilson approached the Codner family about taking these over, and and they did that. They w they gladly um dispersed of their ownership of that. And uh it got rolled into this uh nonprofit called Fort Smith Cemeteries Inc. Bill Wilson, some of you may know, may remember he was the former CEO of Pradco. Um he was passionate about the project, and he's a very persuasive person. And he created this nonprofit to um essentially um take uh take over and improve those um cemeteries which had been greatly dilapidated by the lack of financial means and they had fallen into some significant disrepair. Um Bill like I said, I think he had great intentions. He he borrowed a lot of money, he put a lot of money into the projects. Most of that went into Roslawn and not into Forest Park, which actually has the greater needs. Um I believe, and Bobby, you may speak to this as well. Uh Bobby runs the the Washington cemetery, and she was actually part of that initial group. Bill had uh visited with her and recruited her, but she kind of saw the direction in which his management style was going, and it wasn't to her benefit, and she basically removed herself from that arrangement. And so that's why Rosalind Holy Cross and Forest Park are the only two two different three different cemeteries that are part of Fort Smith Cemeteries Inc. currently. Uh let me keep reading this. Uh Bill Wilson was motivated primarily by the fact that he had family buried at Roselon, so he put most of his resources into that. Me personally, I was extremely impressed by what he did because my father, Larry Clark died in 2020 and he was buried at Roselawn. And when he was when he was buried there, um it was in really bad shape. The roads were washed out, it was terrible, you know, the maintenance was horrible. My brother Scott and I had to go out and weed eat the area before the night before the cemeter before the funeral. Um, you know, so it was not in good shape. And then I go out three months later and it's it looks great. It's got paved roads, it's got a new fence, um, the maintenance is good, and I found out that Bill had had been involved in this project. And so I actually saw Bill out in the public one time at uh shortly thereafter, and I went up and thanked him because I was like, you know, this is this is awesome, it looks great. Um, you know, and I I didn't really know. I'd heard he'd put a million dollars of his own money into it. That turned out not to be exactly correct. But um I thanked him for that, and then he started to sort of recruit myself and Ed Ralston over here to kind of be on his board. But we met with him a few times and we we decided we shouldn't join the board at that time. Um story short is there was meaningful progress that was made at Rose Lawn, but the reality is that the business model for op operating cemeteries today is broken. And Ed's gonna talk about that. It's the economic realities of the situation that we're in and more importantly, how that would affect Fort Smith.