When your kids went on a field trip, they hopped in a trusty yellow school bus and headed off to educational experiences. What about when you need to take a group of adults, but not just any group—a veritable who’s who of community and business leaders—all the way to Bentonville, Arkansas.
The Fayette County Development Authority planned and executed that field trip recently, planning two nights and three days in Bentonville for about 50 people. Why? According to FCDA President Niki Vanderslice, multiple sources suggested to the FCDA Board that Bentonville had a good model of both business development and tourism that Fayette County could learn from.
But no one wants tax dollars paying for leaders to go a few states over. That’s where the FCDA stepped in. As a self-funded organization that no longer takes tax dollars, they footed the bill, some $102,000 to fly 50 people over, house them, provide conference space, and feed them.
Who was invited? “We invited a little over 60 community leaders, all five mayors and the chief staff person for each of our five municipalities for the county commissioners, board of commissioners, the chairman and county manager, the superintendent and the chairman of the board of education. We felt like all seven taxing entities needed to be at the table for conversation around opportunities. We took our board, and then other community leaders, who is it that when there is a vision for when we’re going can help implement that and share the message. So we invited developers, business leaders, chiefs of industry, tourism experts,” said Vanderslice.
Originally when Vanderslice and the FCDA envisioned this trip they thought they could book flights on Delta for everyone. When they went to schedule, they discovered that there weren’t enough commercial seats available to get everyone there on the same day. That’s how they would up with the more expensive, but effective, chartered flight option. According to Vanderslice, they both chartered a plane and had several anonymous business leaders offer their corporate planes at no cost for usage of the trip.
Why bother? Critics might say that this was expensive and that a hundred grand could be spent a better way. For Vanderslice and the FCDA they think that community building shouldn’t be happening in a vacuum. “Fayette County is going to grow. It’s going to happen, but how do we want it to grow? What do we want it to look like? As a community that’s not just elected officials in Peachtree City or the Board of Commissioners or the Development Authority or the Board of Education, any of those places that they’re having conversations about the impact that their decisions have on others, we can do that together,” said Vanderslice.
With a packed agenda, the community leaders from Fayette County met with the community leaders of Bentonville, hearing their take on what made their community successful.
What kind of lessons did Bentonville have? Peachtree City Mayor Kim Learnard said, “We are all grateful to the Fayette County Development Authority for creating and hosting the excellent Bentonville, Arkansas, leadership trip. Our Fayette community leaders enjoyed talks focused on Bentonville tourism, recreation, housing and economic development; we also had opportunity to get to know one another in a fun and interesting off-campus environment. We built the relationships that will help us all move Fayette forward. It was a game-changer.”
Bentonville has built interesting tourist opportunities around mountain biking and e-bikes. Might that be something that Fayette County, with its many golf cart paths and golf cart culture could utilize to build a new vision here for transportation? Perhaps the leaders who attended the Bentonville trip will work better together and bring something about.
Or it may help the next generation of healthcare, instead.
“As our community has grown, so has our responsibility to provide comprehensive healthcare services. Looking ahead to the future healthcare needs of the communities we serve, we face the challenge of securing and sustaining a well-trained and consistent workforce. To address this, we must develop innovative strategies to identify and train the next generation of healthcare professionals while ensuring that both our current and future workforce have access to affordable housing within our community,” said Stephen Porter, CEO of Piedmont Fayette Hospital who attended the community trip to Bentonville.
He continued, “Bentonville has established a community development model that embraces creative solutions in these areas. As a leader in this community, I was impressed by their vision and execution, and I look forward to exploring how we can adopt similar approaches here.”
Ellie White-Stevens
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