Made up of the municipal staff charged with developing and implementing the various downtown master plans in Northwest Arkansas, this panel will share the unique experiences in developing and launching each their community plan and identify some of the challenges to implementation.

• Troy Galloway (Bentonville) – Doing A Plan Yourself
• Steve Glass (Rogers) – Working As A Team
• Patsy Christie (Springdale) – Capitalizing on a Catalytic Project
• Jeremy Pate (Fayetteville) – Engaging Public Feedback As Municipality
• Ben Rhoads (Siloam Springs) – Working with Community Partners

These breakout groups will allow each city and its representatives to identify challenges to implementing their plans and utilize the collective experience and wisdom of the gathered placemakers to discuss solutions and strategies to continue moving forward.

Short-term, community-based projects—from pop-up parks to open streets initiatives—have become a powerful and adaptable new tool of urban activists, planners, and policy-makers seeking to drive lasting improvements in their cities and beyond are the essence of the Tactical Urbanism Movement. Mike will share how cities and citizens are working together to shape their communities in a new and exciting way.

While the population of the City of Memphis increased by 4 percent, the geographical footprint of the city increased by 55 percent. These circumstances have thrust Memphis into the forefront of civic innovation where local government are testing ideas before investing and citizen-led, small-scale, iterative approaches to city building have become the norm. Tommy will be sharing practical lessons and models that can be replicated in any city that wants to engage a new way of thinking.

This panel of accomplished urban planners have played a vital role in crafting the various downtown master plans found throughout Northwest Arkansas. Providing some general observations on master plan best practices, the discussion will also probe both real-time challenges to implementation and provide some next step thinking post- adoption on the plans they helped create.Victor Dover (Dover Kohl & Assoc.) – Top 10 List of a relevant master plan (15 min)

• Victor Dover (Dover Kohl & Assoc.) – Top 10 List of a relevant master plan
• Scott Polikov (Gateway Planning) –Connecting the big plans to a real economy
• Tim Briehan (H3 Studio) – Introducing form based code to your community

These small group discussions will allow the participants a more in-depth discussion on particular implementation challenges, with the goal of identifying both possible solutions and the needed tools for success.

Monte has focused efforts in transforming his neighborhood of South Dallas and Duncanville through direct investment, local entrepreneur mentorship and municipal advocacy. He will be discussing the importance of incremental development as the lifeblood of sustainable placemaking and sharing why supporting small and local is vital to the future of America’s cities.

This session will address questions like: How do I get started as a developer? How do I transition to development from a related field? How do I select an area of town to concentrate on? What is a good business model for the small developer? What skills do I need to have and how do a form a team that can help me with the rest? Attendees will take stock of their own personal situations and their interests as small developers to forge the starting point for their own business plan.

You may be wondering: How could I ever make a difference in a neighborhood or small town working so incrementally? This session will examine people and places that took advantage of their local opportunities so the parts added up to a larger and more valuable whole. It is inspiration to the level of perspiration needed by many working together in a neighborhood or small town to incrementally ‘farm’ your way to long term community wealth.

At the scale of 1-3 story buildings that are residential, commercial or mixed in use, there are several clear cut tiers of conventional financing tools. Depending on variables such as owner occupied, amount of down payment, credit worthiness, private or public backed loans and new versus renovation, a developer starting out has different pathways to doing their first project. Attendees will also learn about roles of operating partners, capital partners and debt/equity partners inherent in any project.

This session will demonstrate the value of using stable building types and everyday building materials and practices. There is a wide range of building types historically found in most communities that are available to the small developer below the threshold of larger scale buildings that require structured parking or elevators. By starting out within this range of options, small developers will learn the discipline necessary for larger and more complex projects.

Many early pro forma assumptions are based on how much rent the owner can charge. Memorize and repeat: If you can’t get the rent, you don’t get the building. This session will walk through strategies to organize and evaluate information from comparable properties in your neighborhood or city in order to establish a baseline for potential projects.

Recognizing the south side of the Downtown Master Plan area had specific needs in order to stimulate development, the City of Bentonville and Downtown Bentonville, Inc. embarked on creating an updated SE Downtown Master Plan that identified, among other things, two experience districts designed to merge both the hardware and software of great places and jump start an identity in an area of downtown lacking a compelling story. The Bentonville Arts District is a textbook case of incremental development from vision to implementation. This tour will provide an overview of the experience district model and discuss how to seed a catalytic project, entice anchor investors, attract a strategic tenant mix and provide the vital housing needed to fuel the district.

Where all the numbers come to mingle – the pro forma. This session will introduce and annotate a basic pro forma template, covering all the important concepts, key terms, and industry jargon. This will be a first read on the concepts related to the spreadsheet mechanism itself as a primer to understand what information needs to be gathered to include in it.

Banks and Equity Investors have very different goals and perspectives when it comes to considering the small developer’s projects. This session will walk you through how lenders and investors look at a deal and how to prepare your pitch and the supporting materials.

• Retail leasing and development
• Activating Spaces, Public and Private
• Entitlement Process Strategies
• Suburban Retrofit Strategies
• Extended Q&A with John Anderson and Monte Anderson