Changelog

Read against the City's own Residential Guide: accepted plastics are 1, 2 and 5 — not 1, 2, 4 and 7; yard waste is collected weekly, not every other week; branches go up to 4 feet long and 3 inches thick, not 8 feet by 1 foot; and the brush haul-away has published prices. Added the holiday rule, the free walk-out service for elderly and disabled residents, where glass and electronics actually go, and Project Concern for households struggling with the bill.

Tap your part of town when the lights go out and see whether anyone else has — the question OG&E's map takes a while to answer. Same six areas as the water board. Reporting the outage to OG&E on 800-522-6870 is still what gets a crew.

One address gives your ward and its director, your polling place and its address, and the state, county and school-board districts that decide the rest of your ballot — read live from the City's ward map and the County's precinct map. The mayor and all three at-large positions are on the 3 November 2026 ballot, alongside the change-of-government measure the Board put there on 18 August.

The page went live earlier this week but the code behind it did not ship with it, so it showed nothing. It reads the federal Clean Water Act record for Massard and P Street again — and now also shows how many discharge limits each plant exceeded in the last three years and for which pollutants, next to the compliance-schedule counter that put Massard on EPA's serious list. The two say different things, and the page now says which is which.

Is there school today, when the next day off is, and every break in the Fort Smith Public Schools 2026–2027 year — first day Wednesday 12 August 2026, last day Friday 21 May 2027. Every date was read off the district's own calendar, which stays the authority; the three days it lists only as "No School" are listed here the same way, and the parent–teacher conference days are named rather than guessed at.

The research note behind Fort Smith's water and sewer tools has been re-checked. It carried the water-rate increase as August 2025; it was August 2024, and that error had propagated into two live tools. Both are fixed, and the note now records the correction rather than quietly overwriting it. It also gained the half of the sewer story nobody local publishes: what the federal Clean Water Act record says about the two treatment plants, which is now its own tool.

A review of Fort Smith's pages this week turned up four things that were wrong, and they are fixed. The bill estimator was adding $14.59 a month for sanitation. That was the October 2020 rate; it has been $15.89 since January 2022 and did not change in the city's November 2025 rate package, so every estimate was running about $1.30 light. It now uses the current figure. Two dates were out. The water-rate increase — the first since 2011 — took effect on 1 August 2024, not 2025; the rates page had the wrong year. And the modification to the sewer consent decree was approved by the Board of Directors on 3 March 2026 and entered by the federal court in July 2026, not in March 2025 as both the rates page and the bill estimator said. Both now describe what actually happened, including that a second water increase was proposed and held off, so the 2024 water rates are still the current ones. The trash page carried a phone number, 479-784-2465, that the city does not publish anywhere we can find. Solid Waste Services is 479-784-2262. While fixing it we rewrote the page: yard waste was missing entirely (it is every other week, on its own truck), the Dial-A-Truck rules are now spelled out — free once every three months for up to five items — and the page no longer says there is no collection map, because the city has both an address search and a downloadable one. Also on the events board: both farmers-market entries pointed at a page that has since gone. The Saturday market now links a working listing. The midweek market is listed differently by different sources, so the board no longer names a day for it.

Two new tools, both about the thing Fort Smith complains about most. **Your Drinking Water on the Record** reads EPA's compliance database live for Fort Smith Water Utilities and six neighbouring systems. Right now it shows no drinking-water violations on record for the city system in the last three years, 86,209 people served, and a state inspection in February 2026. It also says plainly what that record is not: it lags by a quarter or more, it carries no boil-water notices, no pressure or taste or colour problems, and the sewer overflows behind the consent decree are a different federal programme entirely. A clean drinking-water record and an expensive sewer decree are both true here, and now you can see both. **Water Watch** is the other half. Nobody publishes Fort Smith water outages in real time, so this one is neighbours: sign in, tap your part of town, and say the water is off or wrong where you are. Reports fade after eight hours, and when several people in one area report at once the board says so — which is the answer to "is it just my house?". It is not an official channel. Real problems still need the 24-hour utility line, 479-784-2342, and the page says so.

A colored-pencil drawing of the old frontier fort on the bluff where the Poteau meets the Arkansas River, with the wooded Ouachita foothills beyond.

A new board collects the questions Fort Smith keeps asking — the best local, non-chain eats, the Fort Chaffee-rooted Vietnamese and Lao spots, where to take visitors — answered by residents and ranked by votes. Anyone can read it; adding a pick or voting takes a free account.

A new tool shows the National Weather Service alerts in force for Sebastian County right now — tornado, thunderstorm and flood warnings — with the wind at Fort Smith and plain guidance on getting warned indoors. It carries the hard lesson of the 1996 tornado and points to the county's official storm-shelter map. It's not an alert service: when a warning is out, act on it now.

A live reading of the Arkansas River height at the National Weather Service gauge at Van Buren, just across the river, shown against the official flood thresholds — so you can tell at a glance whether the river is normal, rising toward action stage, or into flooding. It carries the 2019 record crest (40.79 feet) for context. It's a gauge reading, not a warning; the page points to the National Weather Service and 911 for those.

A new calculator: enter roughly how much water you use in a month and see what your bill should be at the current rates — water, sewer and sanitation broken out. It also shows how the bill grows as the sewer rates rise 3.5% a year through 2030 under the city's federal consent decree, and explains, plainly, why they're rising. It's an estimate to help you plan, not your actual statement.

Fort Smith is live with its first tools, starting with the two questions residents raise most — the consent-decree-driven water and sewer rate increases, and how trash and recycling collection works — plus a What's On board for the city's festivals and markets. More tools will follow as we learn what's most useful.

A plain reference for residential collection: the weekly cart (out by 7 a.m., day set by route), how to get a free recycling cart, bulky pickup through Dial-A-Truck, and what to do about a missed pickup. Because the city sets collection days by route with no public zone map, the guide points to the city's address lookup and the Solid Waste Services line, 479-784-2465.

A single page for the city's recurring fixtures and dated events: the Garrison Avenue Farmers Market (Wednesdays and Saturdays), the Old Fort Days Rodeo, the Steel Horse Rally, the Arkansas-Oklahoma State Fair and the Peacemaker Festival, each linked to the page it was checked on. Festivals still being scheduled, like The Unexpected mural festival, are linked under the calendars at the bottom.