Changelog

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.