Two candidates seeking Bentonville's mayor role | Live updates

Updates

9:40 p.m. — 5NEWS' Jose Carranza is reporting from Orman's watch party at the Meteor Guitar Gallery where an electric crowd is cheering on the mayor as early and absentee votes lean in her favor.

8:45 p.m. — Unofficial, preliminary results from early voting and absentee ballots in Benton County were shared by election officials and showed Orman in the lead with 53.95% (9,318) of the vote. Galen trails with 46.05% (7,954).

7:30 p.m. — Polls in Arkansas have closed.

7 p.m. — Voting continues throughout Benton County, with polls closing at 7:30 p.m.

Stephanie Orman

Experience

"I think it's important to understand city government, understand how it works. You're always seeking community input and working with the public, and then you'll take that input and come back and put it into practice, and so getting to know all the different city departments and how they operate, and what their needs are and how they work with the community, I think, is just really important to keeping the city running."

Quality of life

"Some of the things I'm most proud of, it's just the type of high quality of life you see here in the city, and how hard we work at that. We're one of the safest cities in Arkansas, and so that's always been a really important initiative from us."

Infrastructure

"We're working on strategic plans for all of our infrastructure. We completed things like our master street update, and we combined our back and bike and ped infrastructure with that. So you're seeing us continuously put in roads and also connectivity within those roads from a water, sewer, electric standpoint, we've updated all of our master plans and put in our growth projections for that so that as we grow throughout the city."

Community collaboration

"I think we have to continue to grow on everything that we've done and to continue to collaborate with the community. You see us be very successful here in the city of Bentonville, because we have a lot of collaboration of communities that really care about our city, and working together to get projects in the ground is something I think that's unique to Bentonville and probably Northwest Arkansas in general."

Steve Galen

Experience

"I have a lot of experience working with people with different perspectives, bringing folks together, you know, finding common ground and, you know, hammering out decisions and moving forward."

Quality of life

"I love the environment we have here. Everyone's so welcoming and friendly. You know, we still are in the south, and it's just really nice to be able to go around town and have people either give you the head nod or wave and smile at you. I mean, you don't see that in a lot of big cities, which is why we love living in a small city like Bentonville."

Infrastructure

"We need an overall transportation plan to move people around faster, not just tomorrow, but 20 years from now. I'm also focused on connecting Bentonville. We don't have a public transportation system that really moves people around faster. We need to have fast buses that come from Centerton, from Airport Boulevard, from Bella Vista, from other places like Fayetteville and Springdale, to try to get more cars off the road and give people an opportunity to get around town without having to own a car."

Community collaboration

"We need to open up the city for business. We need to hire an economic director who can recruit new businesses and retails of Bentonville retail and restaurants and other places of business that other cities residents want to come to Bentonville and spend their dollars, in addition to all the tourism we get from cyclists and things like that."