Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Bentonville residents share feedback at Design Week
BENTONVILLE — More than 700 residents shared feedback during Plan Bentonville’s Design Week.
Ideas for the city’s future included prioritizing public transportation, greenspace and vertical growth.
Plan Bentonville is a continuation of the 2018 Community Plan, officials’ road map for city growth.
Six years later, they’re updating and expanding it.
The city held over 12 hours of pop-up events over the past week, allowing residents and community stakeholders to share their ideas.
Susan Henderson, one of the planners brought in by the city, said the next step is creating a future land use map. Every city in Arkansas is required to have one, she said, but progress is made when elected officials change zoning to match.
Henderson is a New Mexico-based architect who serves as a planner for DPZ CoDesign, a firm that’s working with the city. She said the planners are looking only at land use currently, but there are many factors to consider when planning a city.
“In 2018, the community said we want growth to be compact,” Henderson said during an interview Feb. 23. “We don’t want sprawl. We don’t want growth to go in places where there isn’t existing infrastructure and roads and we want to preserve the historic character of Bentonville.”
Mike Abb, a lifelong Bentonville resident, said his concerns involve balancing housing growth and the city’s greenspace.
“The charm of Bentonville has long been the access to greenspace and the marriage of nature and living together with it,” Abb said. “The more that we gobble up for housing and development, the less that we have to celebrate and benefit from.”
He said he understands it’s a sliding scale, but doesn’t believe the projected growth will actually move to the city if the existing appeal is taken away.
Bentonville’s population is projected to reach 200,000 by 2050, according to Plan Bentonville.
Tyler Overstreet, planning director for the city, said the proposed plan looks 25 years into the future in order to account for projected growth.
Planning for the future is a major concern, said Kate Shirley, who moved to Bentonville six months ago. She said she moved from Austin, Texas, after being priced out of that city.
“I care about this because I look at Austin and the decisions made 30 years ago,” Shirley said. “I look at decisions they made and if they hadn’t made those I maybe wouldn’t be priced out of the city.”
While some of her concerns were addressed by the planners, her major concern is the City Council and Planning Commission seeing it through, she said.
Overstreet said next steps include not only creating the future land use map but getting it approved by the city. He said there will be many versions of the plan and opportunities for public input.
The city will then work toward matching zoning designations with the future land use map, according to Plan Bentonville’s website.
“The turnout of Plan Bentonville Design Week has been incredible,” Overstreet said. “One thing that’s impressed me is not just the number of people who have turned out at the pop-up events and open houses — you can just feel a real love from our citizens about the community in which they live, which I think speaks a lot about Bentonville and the passion that people have for their city and its future.”