In The News

Local Investment Group Buys Conway Towne Center

LEROY DONALD

Conway Towne Center, the shopping center at Interstate 40 and U.S. 65 in northeast Conway, has been sold.

The buyer is the Conway Towne Center LLC, an investment group of local people. The seller is Centro Properties, which is an Australian real estate investment trust.

The center has a sort of historical significance. It was built in 1986, one of the first, if not the first shopping center of any size in the outlying areas above Little Rock.

Because of its location, the project was highly visible to traffic and became a magnet for shoppers from north-central Arkansas.

Flake & Kelley Commercial handled the sale, and the new owners have kept the company on as property management, said Hank Kelley.

He said it was a good move for his company as it seeks to grow in the area, where a lot is going on these days. (In addition, his office is preparing to work with Hewlett Packard, the big computer company that is moving a major operation into Conway.)

Daryl Peeples, who with Gary Smith, also worked on the shopping-center transaction and the new management, said the deal should help get the fairly old center back up to where it once was.

The 180,000-square-foot center was built with a Wal-Mart Supercenter as the anchor. Other anchors and tenants now include: a J.C. Penney; Cinemark; a Sears Roebuck store; Bath and Body Works; Cato Corp.; sporting goods store Hibbett Sports; Regis Hair Salon; El Chico restaurant; and several local businesses such as dentists offices.

Peeples, who will be leading the effort to revive the center, said, “We think having local management will help. Local ownership will have the capability to make it nicer.”

The center is 75 percent leased.

It has about 80,000 square feet available with spaces ranging from 1,100 square feet to about 25,000 square feet. The lease price will range from $9 to $12 a square foot.

ONE DAY

Betty C. Dickey, retired chief justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court, has joined the board of directors of One Day at a Time, a nonprofit company dedicated to reducing substance abuse.

“It would be hard to find someone with more impressive qualifications than Betty Dickey to help us tackle the nation’s annual $1 trillion bill for addiction,” said David Palmer, chairman and president of the company.

Dickey is the first woman in Arkansas to be elected prosecuting attorney, the first woman to serve as chief legal counsel to the governor and the first woman to serve as chief justice of the state Supreme Court.

She is licensed to practice law in Arkansas and Texas. A native of Black Rock and Walnut Ridge, she lived in Pine Bluff for 35 years and now lives in Heber Springs.

She is a graduate of the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville and received her law degree from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock law school.

Palmer is a Harvard Business School graduate, Navy veteran and was in advertising and public relations and owner of a newspaper. He founded One Day at a Time in 2004 to help change lives of addicts. One Day at a Time publishes a quarterly newspaper that is distributed to 17,000 individuals in the Little Rock area via a mailing list and more than 100 racks, as well in the state’s prisons. The organization also has a Web site.

Other members of the board besides Palmer and Dickey are Dorothy Payne and Jack Fryer.

CLIPPING

Stone Ward, the Little Rock advertising agency, has announced that Sport Clips Inc., the nation’s largest men’s and boy’s hair-care chain, has chosen Stone Ward for its creative branding agency after a national search.

Sport Clips, based in Georgetown, Texas, has more than 600 locations.

Stone Ward has served as the Sport Clips national public relations agency since 2007.

“Now we have grown that business to include marketing and branding work for them,” says Brenda Scisson, public relations counselor for Stone Ward.

The venture will involve targeted strategies in print, broadcast, Web and direct-mail advertising, said Millie Ward, president of the agency.

PROMOTED

Robert Knapp Jr., 40, formerly of Little Rock, has been named executive vice president of NIC Inc., the nation’s largest provider of “e-government” services that builds and maintains official Web sites for 2,900 state and local agencies that service more than 70 million people in the United States.

As executive vice president, Knapp has daily oversight of operations and contributes to the development of strategic company-wide growth.

Knapp, whose parents still live in Little Rock, is a graduate of Little Rock Catholic High School and holds a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Tulsa.

He joined NIC in 2000. During his tenure, NIC has experienced continued revenue growth and application development, a news release on his promotion states.

NIC is located in Olathe, Kan., a suburb of Kansas City. Knapp lives in the Kansas City area.

Everybody’s Business runs every Sunday in the business section of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Send your business news to Leroy Donald, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, P.O. Box 2221, Little Rock, Ark. 72203, or e-mail: leroylero@att.net.

This article was published on page 72 of the Sunday, February 15, 2009 edition in the Business section.

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