Revising and updating a vision plan for the city is underway thanks to a brainstorming session held by members of the Eureka Springs City Council and planning commission.

The joint workshop held Thursday, Oct. 9, focused on the city’s needs aiming for future goals.

“The concerns that I have as a city council member is we’re getting ready to go into a budget session, thinking about what’s coming down the pipeline, what are our plans for the next year, making sure that we have the appropriate appropriations in place for those things to develop, and kind of looking at what we have,” council member Rachael Moyer said. “And what I’ve seen up until this point is that we have been planning based on zero growth for the community.

“Now we are surrounded by a lot of growth and I think it’s not realistic to think that we would not grow, particularly if we have the opportunity. We are faced with some major financial challenges ahead of us. To maintain our infrastructure, we need to grow. We need to be, but we want to grow in a way … to preserve what makes Eureka Springs one of the most spectacular places on the planet, in my opinion, but certainly one of the most unique and beautiful places in the state. If you don’t have a plan and things come at you, you make decisions, and then pretty soon, you have something that looks very different from what you had when you started.

“So in my mind, I’m just searching for a comprehensive plan so that I know, in my role as a city council person, when it comes to allocating money for projects moving forward, that money is going to be there. And if we don’t, if there are gaps in funding, then we know that we need to go somewhere else to find that funding. So that’s what led me personally to look for a more comprehensive plan, because there’s a lot of things besides just what has been mentioned already that is typically involved in a comprehensive plan.”

The most updated vision plan is from 2021, the group discussed.

Planning commission member Scott Price took a more specific approach in sharing his thoughts.

“I’ve read through both plans twice now, and some of the items that kind of popped out to me is that there’s a lot of growth happening in Carroll County,” Price said. “You can go to Berryville and see it. They’re doing new construction constantly, and I think mainly part of the planning commission’s responsibility with the master plan is that we need to… concentrate on items that were not implemented that were in the plan. Example, how can you attract industry or even light industry if there’s no homes for employees?

“So, maybe we should look at incentivizing conversion of the empty motels into more living spaces, which is happening on the 62 corridor. I think part of what’s mentioned is that we need probably an updated master street plan. I don’t know if that has to be initiated through public works or does the city planning hire a contractor to produce this?

“Also there was mentioned in the plan of the Carroll County Collaborative. It is supposed to be an outreach program to bring in industry or businesses into the area. Definitely, something is happening over in Berryville and even in the Green Forest area, but we seem to be stagnated and I think part of the problem with that is that we just don’t have the housing for the workers for any light industry or for our service industry, you know, they’re hurting to have employees because they can’t rent here, and it’s prohibitive for them to drive in from other little towns to work here, especially at the wages that they’re being offered in these service industries.

“So, I think the plan is good. I’ve noticed a lot of things were implemented in the initial plan, which took two years to formulate. I don’t think we have two years to kick the can down the road. We probably need to go through the initial plan and the update plan and pull out items that we can act on now and get going, instead of doing another drawn-out process that would take two years, to produce another master plan, when we already have something that we could work on.”

Planning commission member Susan Harman, who has been involved in city government for many years, agreed that Eureka Springs should have something more specific in place.

“… I totally agree with whoever is for doing, not necessarily doing a new master plan, but knowing what the plan is,” Harman said. “The city should always have a five-, 10-, 20-year plan. A lot of us aren’t going to be here, I mean, I’ve got my place for sale. I could be gone in another six months. Unfortunately, you know, as we age out, we’re not going to be here, and I looked at this Master Community Vision List for 2004. It was 2004. And one of the items I asked about during our grant meeting was developing arts and cultural districts. It’s on here. So, we do these plans, and then we don’t do anything with them.

“I just feel like planning, city council, the city as a whole, should know what the city is hoping to do in five, 10, 20 years. I just don’t understand why we don’t have that. Now, maybe that’s manpower, maybe that’s whatever, but I think we should, because there are so many plans, and this isn’t the only one out there, there are many plans that get purchased and we spend money on them and we, you know, yay, yay, yay, but then they go and they sit up on a shelf and they collect dust.

“So, I’m excited about this meeting. I’m excited that there is conversation because that conversation has been going on at least 11 years since I’ve lived here. I mean, we either wanna do something or we don’t wanna do something. I mean we either work as a group or we don’t work as a group. And we can’t continue to work in silos. …” Various ideas were talked about including the city possibly pursuing various grants, the challenges of bringing new industries because of the city’s terrain, a lack of housing, and the possibility of looking into annexing areas outside of the city.

“The city has not been stagnant with these things with growth,” council member Terry Mc-Clung said. “The mayor enabled a city economic development commission years ago when I’ve been on it. It hasn’t met in a year or better, most because of … inability to get anything done.

“We have looked at housing. We have looked at small businesses, industry, light industry, anything that would be conducive to the growth of Eureka Springs, and actively reached out in these areas. No takers.

“To come in and build … employment-type housing, apartments, there’s not a cost-effective way for anyone to come in and do that. It just doesn’t exist. That’s why no one has picked up that kind of a project. It’s not doable … they’re not going to make any money. And if they can’t make any money, they’re not going do it. And the same with the light industry, where our highway avenues in and out of town are limited, our land topography, as it is, is very restrictive to any kind of commercial development. So, you know, we’ve searched and we have plugged a lot of different areas trying to bring things in with just no luck, and it’s exasperating. It truly is.”

Perhaps a fresh look at possibilities is needed, McClung said.

“Maybe something will come,” he said. “But, we are so limited because of what we have here in our town that it’s a very difficult equation to solve.”

Mayor Butch Berry agreed, but said housing issues are a countywide problem.

“… We’ve looked at housing, we’ve looked at serious housing in the county,” Berry said. “We’re not the only one that has housing problems. Berryville has terrible housing problems, Green Forest has terrible housing shortages. We’ve also came up, and we looked at trying to entice developers to come over and build projects. Well, to get somebody … or some of the developers from Fayetteville to come over, they won’t look at us, because they’re looking at doing 1,000 units, 500 units at a time, minimum. Most of them are doing more than that. So they look at Eureka and Carroll County, and they just kind of laugh at us. … And we’ve gone out to Harrison to bring people in, with still no luck.

“One of the suggestions that we’ve had, and we’ve been kind of successful, is recognizing Eureka isn’t for, in order to do apartments, and a lot of the people here know, it’s not just the building that takes up land, but it’s the parking. It takes a lot space to do an apartment complex.”

The planning commission will focus on brainstorming ideas in future meetings and workshops after going through the most recent vision plan, with another joint workshop with council members in coming months. Meanwhile, council members will provide a “wish list” of vision plan ideas to the commission, it was discussed.

“I like the idea of the vision, it’s wonderful, but I think immediately we need to go in and define, as the city planning commission, the scope and then come up with deliverables that we can act on immediately, because there are some deliverables in here ….,” Price said. “There’s many items in here that were actually accomplished, but there’s a lot that weren’t even followed up on for various reasons. Maybe the conditions of why they weren’t followed up have changed now. So I think probably city planning needs to go in and define the scope and actual items that we can actually deliver on. It’s difficult to have a vision plan and have all the input when we actually have a vision plan now that we can act on. I think that’s great for the future, but then again, I feel like it’s like kicking the can down the road when we really need to act on things immediately because we don’t have any growth …”