Pay-to-Move Programs Deliver Modest but Measurable Growth in Arkansas Communities

Rob Sitterley, CEO of AR-TX Regional Economic Development Inc., or REDI. (Provided)

When Melanie Daniel went looking to leave Memphis for someplace new, she found Texarkana, and the city was happy to welcome her.

Daniel is one of a growing number of employees who are finding communities to pay them to relocate. Daniel, an online systems administrator, received $5,000 from Texarkana’s REDI, Set, Move program, sponsored by the two-state city’s regional economic development group (REDI).

Texarkana joins West Memphis and Fort Smith with programs that offer incentives to employees, mostly remote workers, to relocate.

Meanwhile, the state’s two most populous and prosperous communities, northwest Arkansas and Little Rock, had incentive programs in recent years that have been discontinued.

For Daniel, her move was borne from curiosity after one of her friends was paid to become a teacher in Europe. In October, Daniel went online to see if anything was offered in the United States, applied to the programs she found and was accepted by Texarkana within a week of her application.

Daniel made a visit to Texarkana to make sure the offer wasn’t a “trap,” and was pleasantly surprised by what she found. She sold her Tennessee home and moved into an apartment on the Texas side of Texarkana.

If Daniel had bought a home rather than chosen a rental, Texarkana’s program would have paid her $10,000 rather than $5,000.

“It was just on a whim that I went ahead and applied,” Daniel said. “I was ready to sell my home and just do something different.

“I did get a chance to come out here beforehand and visit and I was, like, ‘Oh, it’s nice out there.’ I definitely wanted something very specific in the place I was looking to rent, and this place just had everything that I was looking for.”

That is exactly the reaction that REDI CEO Rob Sitterley was hoping the initiative would elicit. Sitterly said the program, which is just over a year old and funded by foundation grants, was recently extended for three years.

Sitterley said the first-year goal was to attract 10 employees, which was quickly achieved. Now the goal is 20 annually for the next three years to add to the region’s 150,000 population.

“We could not be happier with how it’s progressed to this point,” Sitterley said.

Sales Job

West Memphis’ Start Fresh program, like Texarkana’s, is managed by MakeMyMove of Indianapolis, an online recruiting service.

West Memphis attracted seven new employees in its first year, which may not sound like a lot, but those seven employees brought along 17 family members. The addition of 24 residents could have nearly a $400,000 economic impact annually on the town of approximately 24,000 on the west bank of the Mississippi River.

West Memphis not only offers up to $10,000 in relocation incentives — $5,000 for renters — it includes a luncheon with Mayor Marco McClendon. The funding for the program comes from the city’s utilities department, and it initially focused on remote workers. West Memphis has a welcome-all mindset when it comes to attracting residents, who do have to meet a certain income minimum,  usually standard for worker incentive programs.

Incentives Offered by Arkansas Communities to Attract Workers

*Incentives include different levels of value. (Source: Cities, chambers of commerce and MakeMyMove)

“We thought, ‘Let’s incentivize the employees to live where they work, and we’re starting to see a little bit of that,” said Ward Wimbish, the city’s economic development director. “The worst-case scenario is nobody comes. You’ve got to take the long view of it, and I feel it’s one of these programs that builds on itself.”

Fort Smith had a program through MakeMyMove that awarded up to $10,000 for relocating workers, but the city’s board of directors canceled the monetary incentives in March after less than one year. Fort Smith now has a $1,100 package for relocating employees that includes amenities such as memberships to the U.S. Marshals Museum and Fort Smith Museum of History as well as season tickets to University of Arkansas-Fort Smith athletic events.

Fort Smith spokesman Josh Buchfink said some board members questioned the program’s effectiveness. Before the monetary awards were discontinued, Buchfink said, one recipient received the $10,000 bonus, five received $5,000 and two accepted the $1,100 rewards.

Marketing Campaign

One of the highest-profile incentive programs was Life Works Here, run by the Northwest Arkansas Council and funded by the Walton Family Foundation.

The program started in late 2020, operated for about a year and awarded monetary incentives to 100 people to relocate. The council’s program had specific worker targets: those in the STEM fields, creatives such as writers and chefs, and entrepreneurs.

More than 67,000 applied for Life Works Here, which the council also used as a marketing campaign for northwest Arkansas, which is centered on the population and economic engines of Benton and Washington counties.

“Life Works Here was about changing how people across the country see northwest Arkansas,” Northwest Arkansas Council CEO Nelson Peacock said in an email to Arkansas Business. “Before the campaign, our region was already growing but national awareness was low, and many companies struggled to attract the talent needed in cutting-edge industries. By pairing the incentive with a national awareness campaign, we told the story of life in northwest Arkansas and elevated the region as a place of opportunity.”

The 2023 Love, Little Rock campaign was short-lived but successful, said Little Rock Regional Chamber CEO Jay Chesshir. Chesshir said the three-month program was company-led and acted almost like a corporate headhunter would in recruiting specific candidates for specific jobs.

Chesshir said he couldn’t comment on how many employees took advantage of the program to move to central Arkansas but said more than 750 submitted resumes. The city analyzed the metrics — who applied for Arkansas jobs and from where — to better map out future workforce recruitment efforts.

“We’re actually in the process of raising funding as we speak, to do that on a bigger scale nationally, beginning in ’26 based upon what we’ve learned from the previous campaign,” Chesshir said. “We had significant interest from people, and we mapped it by state.

“We will target our marketing to those communities in those states that we know we received a whole lot of resumes from. We’re taking what we learned from that campaign and now trying to do it differently than we were before, but do it in a way that hopefully helps us be even more successful. But it won’t include a bonus.”