The Fort Smith Parks and Recreation Commission convened on September 11, 2025 (the agenda listed September 10, 2025 at 12:00 pm). The primary agenda items included a detailed review of the FY26-FY30 Capital Improvement Plan (CIP), updates on numerous ongoing park projects, and public comment. The Commission unanimously approved the minutes from the previous meeting.
We have a poor. We'll go ahead and get started. Thank you all for attending the September parts of Rio. First one of the appreciate that. So uh we'll just get started with uh the June minutes. It's been a while. We took a look at that. I'll entertain a motion. Okay. We'll go to second. Everybody's got to do second. All right. Any other discussion? All in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? All right. Got that. Alright. Let's jump in. The vote's the capital improvement. This is very tiny up there, but you have a printout in front of you. You'll see really, I mean, kind of in years past, we really focus on next year because those of us who've been on this commission have been around 2027 and on, it is very fluid, it changes. So really what we would request the commission to focus on is next year's. And I can tell you everything in the estimated 2025 column that will be out the door spent. So we've made a lot of progress, and I think in years past, this year's gonna be eye-opening for some because they're used to us having huge reserves, huge carry forwards, and we don't have that because we finally made a lot of progress, and I think citizens see that. So in the past, there's kind of been a lot of money that just gets moved around and it's there, but no longer have that, but and it is for very good reasons. This money is here to spend, not to sit in the account and collect interest. So the biggest expense is it's okay with y'all. 2025 really will be in project updates, so I'll just save it for that. And there's not many line items in 2026. So if it's okay with you all, I'll just go line by line and kind of explain that. Okay. Alright, so the biggest one is May Branch Greenway. And I know that 5.1 million dollar number, that looks like a lot of money, but on the back page of the grants and revenues that you'll see, we have three almost 3.5 million dollars of that is funded by grants, so it looks like a big number, but it's not really that much whenever you think of just our 1-8 cent sales and use tax. And we are working with the city's government relations manager on that. You know, we made a lot of progress on that ORLP grant with National Park Service. They've kind of gone dormant, I think I would say, so we're calling in our state senators to get that ball rolling again. We had a Chris, you've been here in Madeline. We had to do that the first time and got a lot of movement, so we're doing that now and very proactive in that because we're ready for reimbursement. Okay, so are we just not hearing from them or getting some pushback? It we heard from them, and then whenever we said, hey, we've supplied you all of the information. Where are we on being able to submit a reimbursement? Because we phase one a all of that we can get our 50% cost share back, but nothing. And we tried three times and nothing. So we're going to Bozeman's office, gonna work with them. He was successful in the past, but that's where we are because we don't want to sit there and keep saying, Well, we haven't heard from them, we haven't heard from them. No, let's move. We have a lot of momentum going. We don't want to stop just because of your office, pretty much.