The Arkansas Municipal League will host its winter conference in Fort Smith next week.
The annual conference will provide several sessions such as training workshops an update on medical marijuana for public officials, and Gov. Asa Hutchinson will speak Friday, said Don Zimmerman, municipal league executive director.
The conference, which generally takes place in Little Rock during odd-numbered years and other Arkansas cities during even-numbered years, has not taken place in Fort Smith for several years. Zimmerman said Vice Mayor and At-large Director Kevin Settle had asked the league to host the conference here. The yearlong Bicentennial celebration was also a factor.
Fort Smith is one of three cities in Arkansas that has a city administrator-board of directors form of municipal government, and 2017 marks 50 years of doing business this way. Before that, in the the 1960s, Fort Smith operated on a commission-style government that no Arkansas cities do anymore in which three elected commissioners basically ran the city, Zimmerman said.
Instead of a traditional mayor-city council form of government where the mayor is elected and handles all of the day-to-day operations, the city administrator-board of directors style that Fort Smith, Barling and Siloam Springs have allows residents to elect directors who vote on policies and are in charge of hiring a city administrator to run the day-to-day operations and oversee the city departments. Residents also elect a mayor who is the ceremonial head of the city and does not vote on policies but does have veto power (except for personnel matters), which the board can override.
"I certainly think it's more effective," Mayor Sandy Sanders said of Fort Smith's style of government.
Sanders said that the format allows the elected directors to hire a city administrator who has the education and experience for the job.
After 32 years at Whirlpool, six years at the Fort Chaffee Redevelopment Authority and six months at the Chamber of Commerce, Sanders has decades of institutional knowledge about Fort Smith, and he works closely with City Administrator Carl Geffken, who moved to Fort Smith from Reading, Pa. in 2016. Sanders also works closely with the Chamber of Commerce to bring new businesses and jobs to Fort Smith, he said.
Five cities, including Little Rock, Hot Springs, Arkadelphia, Hope and Texarkana, have city manager-board of directors forms of government, which Zimmerman said varies little from the city administrator-board of directors format.