Hines reelected mayor of Rogers in close race

Updates

10:25 p.m. — According to unofficial results with all precincts reporting, Hines has been reelected mayor after winning 51% (12,308) of the vote to Latimer's 49% (11,825).

9:45 p.m. — Rachel is reporting from outside Hines' watch party, where those attending are hopeful after seeing the early and absentee votes.

8:50 p.m. — Unofficial, preliminary results from early and absentee voting in Benton County were shared by election officials and showed Hines in the lead with 50.59% (10,018) of the vote. Not far behind, Latimer has 49.41% (9,785) of the vote.

8 p.m. — 5NEWS' Rachel Williams is currently at Chris Latimer's watch party at Casa Alejo. She said that the room is packed, and the energy is high as the community awaits results. 

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

6:30 p.m. — Voting continues throughout Benton County, with polls closing at 7:30 p.m.

Greg Hines

Experience

"This is too big a city, too dynamic a city, to not have much on-the-job training. You really need to have a background, and that's what I tried to do to prepare myself to run for mayor, was serve on the city council, be a public employee, learn the community, so I wasn't just holding out for the management position. I had built what I thought was a background that would allow me to do this job, and I'm pretty proud of the record I have over the last 14 years."

Infrastructure

"Nobody's done more for infrastructure in the history of the Rogers, I'm the only mayor that's been able to run two successful bond elections, the vast majority of which the money went to infrastructure. So you're talking about several hundreds of millions of dollars going into infrastructure."

"If you don't have a plan to have the infrastructure in place, you're not in a position to grow and create an economy that makes cities survive. I think that's just, you know, there's nothing more crucial than that right now."

Natural disaster response

"The tornadoes of May 26th have left the town with a lot of damage. I mean, in city public facilities over $33.5 million alone. So that process to clean up and rebuild stronger is going to take some time, and it's not going to be next month or just after Christmas or even next summer. It's going to take 24 months or so to get the community back up to where it was and maybe stronger than it was."

Housing

"We have a huge gap in workforce housing, and that's going to necessitate really broad ideas, and maybe it's going to necessitate strategies where you try things that may or may not work very well, and then you back out and try them again a different way. I'm going to be focused on that in the next four years. I think Rogers is poised, if you listen to chief economists around here, we're poised to be the downtown of Northwest Arkansas as we grow."

Unified Development Code

"Our new UDC, our building codes and land use, this is the stuff. We're the only city in the state that has done anything like this, and likely the only city touching any of the states around us that have done this."

"Instead of having 64 different property uses and zoning, we have 16. When you create an environment like that, where way more things are able to be built, versus having to go through the long process of approvals through the planning commission and city council. So it's just it's a totally different sort of idea of how communities should grow and what you should be focused on."

Crime

"Our crime rates have been down and going down for the last four years, some 50-something percent. So, you know, I think, having been in law enforcement most of my adult life, I think that we've got a pretty good strategy there."

Chris Latimer

Experience

"I have a background as a pastor. I'm also currently a [Benton County] justice of the peace. Any community is about people, and it's about meeting people's needs and serving those. Really, that servant leadership is what I bring to the table. I know what that is. I know what it looks like, and that's what I'm ready to bring to Rogers."

Infrastructure

"I think our downtown is great. We want to make improvements because it's a cool place, it's a fun place to be, and it really should be."

"I hear almost every person that I talk to talking about infrastructure and roads and really making sure that we're really kind of reprioritize our infrastructure projects. You know, we've got roads in different parts of town that are falling apart, that need attention, and it's not just one part of town that's more important. It's not uptown, it's not downtown, but it's the whole town that really needs attention."

Spending

"There's always more that we can do, and there's always more ways that we can be more efficient at the money that we spend, at the tax dollars that we get in, and really being responsible about where we spend those tax dollars to have the greatest impact."

Housing

"If we can make our town as appealing and as efficient to build in, then we can have builders building here, and hopefully, build houses that are a little more inexpensive to help with some of those housing problems."

"Cutting red tape in our housing ... "I think it's about making everything more efficient — communication, getting things through planning and development as quickly as possible. Because time is money for a lot of builders and developers and really, those costs are what add to a lot of those issues."

Unified Development Code

"There’s going to be a lot of speed bumps that we're going to have to navigate through this new zoning as we move forward."

Crime

"I think our crime rate's going up, can't wait four years. I think in four years, we have a bigger problem than we have today, and we really need to address it now."

"I think one of the big things that we've seen in my conversations with some of the people at the sheriff's department is that we've seen a rise in gang activity. They're in our jails, they're in our communities, and they're in Rogers. And really one of the first things that I would do would be to reactivate our gang task force to combat some of this."