Pine Bluff Rising?

NO BLUFF:

After years of economic woes and bad press,

PINE BLUFF

IS POISED FOR A COMEBACK

“ It’s not as easy as you’d think,” and “It’s a complicated process.” These are a few of the quotes Hunter Breshears provides when asked about the work of the Highland Pellets plant in Pine Bluff. Breshears, chief operating officer of Highland Pellets, is talking about his company’s procedure for making small wood pellets for use in power plants, but he may as well be talking about what’s happening in Pine Bluff.

The Highland Pellets plant, which opened in 2016, is a small part of a much broader effort to move the once-thriving Southeast Arkansas city forward and help the community recover from years of economic malaise and negative publicity.

Breshears, who grew up in Pine Bluff and worked internationally with Tyson and Hormel Foods, joined Highland

Pellets after hearing about and meeting its co-founder and chairman, Tom Reilley. Reilley, a New Hampshire-based investor and entrepreneur, discovered Pine Bluff while scouting potential sites for the pellet plant.

“I heard about Tom Reilley in late 2016 ... I wanted to talk to him because I heard about what he was doing with Highland Pellets and building and growing the company, but I also heard about what he was doing for the community,” says Breshears. “It sparked my curiosity. Why does a guy from New Hampshire want to be in Pine Bluff, Arkansas? What would make him think that he needs to help a community in a very depressed part of southern Arkansas – besides building a company? “

Breshears had dinner with Reilley during one of his many

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The Highland Pellets has more than 100 employees and can produce 600,000 tons of wood pellets per year for use as a coal replacement in power stations owned by Drax Power in the U.K.

visits to the state and, he says, after a few hours he knew Reilley was the “real deal.”

“Tom really cares about the economic growth (of the city) and the social impact on Pine Bluff. He told me that he almost felt like it’s his mission to give back to the community and make a difference, and he’s lived that out,” says Breshears. “Tom’s not just thinking, he’s doing.”

Reilley, who spends several days in the area every other week, admits he didn’t know anything about the city and visited only because “it had access to the logistics, power and fiber we needed to produce wood pellets.” As a former senior managing director with investment banking giant Bear Stearns and founder of private equity enterprise Kalan Capital, Reilley

Ryan Watley, a Pine Bluff native and former chemistry professor, leads the efforts of Go Forward Pine Bluff, a non-profit working with the city to help improve infrastructure, education, economic development and quality of life.

knew what he was looking for from a business standpoint. What he didn’t know was how much he would be drawn to the community he ultimately selected.

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“Once I started spending some time in Pine Bluff, I was saddened by some of the poverty I witnessed, but also intrigued about the bones of the old downtown,” Reilley says.

Reilley wanted to know more

Tom Reilley about the city and why it had been hit so hard by the “changing economic winds” of the last century. He noticed the issues Pine Bluff faced were similar to those faced by rural communities across the Midwest and he began to meet and talk to the people in the community through morning runs, community meetings and visits to local schools.

“Jobs, jobs, jobs was the most frequent topic,” Reilley says of his conversations with city residents.

As Reilley got to know Pine Bluff, he says he became interested in “placemaking,” a multi-faceted approach to the planning, design and management of public spaces in a community. He also saw a need for improvements in education and job training – and re-training – in the area.

Combining these interests and observations, Reilley became a director for a non-profit coalition of community leaders known as Pine Bluff Rising, which began pushing an array of community improvement initiatives and supporting efforts to promote positive news about the city. In addition, he began to take action through Catalytic Management, LLC, which is raising a new $100 million private equity fund called "Catalytic Opportunity Zone Fund, LLC" to invest in cities across Arkansas taking advantage of Opportunity Zone tax legislation for development and redevelopment projects.

Both Pine Bluff Rising and Catalytic are key players in the effort to renovate and redevelop the 105-year-old Hotel Pines,

once a centerpiece of downtown Pine Bluff. While Pine Bluff Rising owns the hotel building, an operating group called Catalytic PB leases it and has purchased other properties on the street for potential use as restaurants and other nightlife attractions.

Meanwhile, as Reilley was building Highland Pellets and engaging with the community through Pine Bluff Rising, other developments helped to fuel the effort to re-energize the community. First came the election of Mayor Shirley Washington in late 2016 and then the passage of the five-eighths cent “Go Forward Pine Bluff” economic development sales tax initiative in 2017.

The tax initiative sprang from another community group effort – the 100-member Go Forward Pine Bluff task force, which formed in 2016 to build a plan for attacking the problems that had been dragging down the city. Over the course of a year, the group developed a 27-point plan for infrastructure improvements, economic development and education and other key issues. The tax, along with private investment, donations and grants, would provide the necessary financial support for enacting the plan.

After the tax initiative was passed, Go Forward Pine Bluff, or GFBP, became the centerpiece non-profit driver for the plan, monitoring and guiding the planning process and specific projects and continuing the critical efforts to engage and inform the community. The organization quickly hired Ryan Watley, a city native who had served as an assistant professor of chemistry and assistant director of development for athletics at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, as its CEO. Watley had worked with the Pine Bluff Rising group and was a volunteer leader in the Go Forward tax campaign efforts.

“We’re a very small organization with an ambitious plan,”

Hunter Breshears of Highland Pellets and Caleb McMahon of the Economic Development Alliance for Jefferson County discuss ongoing efforts to revitalize Pine Bluff in the board room of the Highland Pellets plant.

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The 105-year-old Hotel Pines was once a community showpiece. Now owned by Pine Bluff Rising, the building is set for a major overhaul as part of the redevelopment of the city’s downtown.

says Watley. He and the GFPB team focus on four areas, or “pillars” – government/infrastructure, education, economic development and quality of life.

Watley says he decided to help the GFPB campaign because he wanted to make a difference in his hometown and to help ensure that local workers and minority contractors were included in the efforts to improve downtown Pine Bluff. He was also drawn to the work because of his experience in development and fundraising in higher education.

Despite the challenges inherent in helping a community make a major turnaround, Watley is undaunted.

“It really only takes what we’ve essentially already begun to do – get people working together and have the right leadership in place,” says Watley. “We have an excellent mayor and we’ve seen the spirit of coming together that you need to solve any challenges. And then it takes investment dollars to provide the quality of life and infrastructure improvements and support the educational system.”

Watley points to what the group has already accomplished, from involvement in developing the new Downtown Master Plan and Vision, the Pines Hotel redevelopment, and the recent successful relaunch of the King Cotton Classic basketball tournament to conducting numerous small business workshops through “The Generator,” its entrepreneurial and “innovation” hub.

In addition, Watley says Go Forward has worked to improve community spirit and quality of life through the launch of several festivals celebrating regional culture and the holidays. Specifically, the organization sponsored Forward Fest: Blues, Batter and Brew, a summer festival held downtown and featuring numerous live music acts, and it partnered with the city to present Mistletoe Magic, a holiday festival that incorporated the city’s annual Christmas parade.

Conceptual drawings of the new library and aquatics center. Images courtesy of the Pine Bluff Mayor Shirley Washington's office and design firm Crafton Tull.

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Watley emphasized that these events and other examples of change and success are important to maintain public support and enthusiasm for GFPB’s work.

“Keeping the people informed

Mayor Washington and communicating about our progress is key, because people want to see results. They want to see things come to fruition,” he says. “We don’t hold as many forums as we did in the past, because people aren’t as interested now in attending community meetings. We’ve showed them the plan and told them what we’re going to do and now they want to see the results of the plan. They want some tangible evidence.”

Some of that tangible evidence is coming later this year, in the form of two new public facilities for the community – a new public library and a new community aquatics center.

“I think people are noticing all of it,” says Mayor Shirley Washington of the city’s progress. “But the new aquatics center really stands out in my mind. It’s a $12 million project. We’re hoping to open it at the end of June or in July, but we’ve had so much rain, we’re a little behind schedule.

“We don’t have any real public swimming pool for the community, so this aquatic center is going to provide something that we’ve needed for many years. It’s going to house a 25-yard swimming pool and a recreational pool, with lanes for aerobics and swimming lessons. It will also have a spa and a water park for kids with water features in one end and a large water slide.”

She adds that the facility will also generate revenue because it will include rooms for parties, a conference room and a concession area.

“The library will also be big plus for the community, in that it will be more than just a library where you check out books. It will be a learning center,” says Washington, who spent her career in education before becoming mayor.

Washington also points to key elements of the Go Forward plan that are on the way, particularly a “streetscape project” that will make downtown more walkable, and development of mixed-use development in the area. She has worked closely with GFPB and has been involved with the organization from the beginning.

“I was a part of that group before I announced that I was running for mayor, so I had already embraced the vision of Go Forward,” says Washington. “I felt that this public-private partnership was something that we really needed to aggressively move our community forward and that’s actually what has happened.

“This was an initiative that had a hundred people – citizens from all walks of life and all ages and ethnicities in our community – coming together to forge this plan and I was happy to be a part of it. Coming on board from the beginning, I was able to catch every facet of the vision. That made it easier for me to embrace and to also encourage others to support.”

Caleb McMahon, director of economic development with the

Economic Development Alliance for Jefferson County, was also closely involved with the Go Forward effort from its early days. After becoming co-director of Pine Bluff Rising at Tom Reilley’s request, he was very active in the community conversations that led to the planning effort.

“I’ve been here for more than two-and-a-half years now,” says McMahon, a Monticello native who spent years in China doing legal consulting for contracting and engineering firms. “Within my first week of being here, Tom walked into my office.”

McMahon says he and Reilley now talk regularly and he is active in the Hotel Pines effort and other downtown projects. He and Reilley have also worked on fundraising events for local charities and Reilley has helped him in his other economic development efforts.

“When we have prospects come to see if they want to locate here, we’ll bring in Tom and Hunter (Breshears of Highland Pellets) and they will sit there and be our salesmen,” he says. “That carries so much weight with other industries. Hearing that from industry that’s already here is so important, because they know it’s my job to sell them on Pine Bluff.”

McMahon notes that “socially responsible” investing has been on the rise in recent years, with more companies and company shareholders expecting to do more than just make a profit. He says that he has sold some companies on the city with the idea that they could make a genuine difference in the community and change lives in a very real way.

Mayor Washington believes such economic development efforts and the efforts of private business are critical to Pine Bluff’s future and she acknowledges that Tom Reilley has been an important connector for all of those working on behalf of the city. “We’re doing far more than the city could do working solo,” she says. “We bring so many resources together – human resources and capital resources – to make a more powerful impact.

“Tom Reilley is amazing because not only does he come here making his investments, but he has a strong arm of outreach to draw others in and he’s doing everything in his power to get other eyes on Pine Bluff.”

Nevertheless, despite the positive developments and the work done so far, both Washington and GFPB’s Watley recognize that more challenges lay ahead and that some in the community and the state may still have their doubts.

“Anytime you have something new and something that involves change, you can face resistance. You can face uncertainty and doubt in people, so the most challenging thing is making sure people understand our role – the private sector’s role – in this public-private partnership. We want them to know that we’re not here to overhaul city government, but to do the private sector’s part in supporting city government.”

Washington adds, “At the end of the day, when people see the impact it’s going to have on the city – and that it’s already having – they can’t help but say, ‘This was a good move for our city.’”

For more on the Highland Pellets plant and additional interviews with community leaders, visit our blog at www.TasteArkansas.com.

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