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Drive west on Centerton Boulevard past the Main Street intersection and the road narrows from five lanes down to two, right where the shoulder turns into open field. That squeeze has been there for years, long enough that residents have stopped expecting it to change on any particular timeline. It's also, as of this year, the exact spot where the city's downtown master plan proposes a split between Old Town and New Town.

Centerton just finished a downtown master plan, the kind of document that usually gets filed away after a public meeting or two. This one is different, because the fields on the south side of that boulevard, the ones everyone driving through has looked at for a decade without much thought, now have a name and a use attached to them.

Old Town, New Town

City planner Kayla Knight has been calling the two halves of the plan by working names that stuck: Old Town for the existing strip along North Main Street, and New Town for the land south of Centerton Boulevard that's currently open field. The final draft, presented by the planning firms Garver and ISG at a City Council and Planning Commission work session in late August, went before the Planning Commission on September 1. According to reporting from the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the council could move toward formal adoption within weeks of that review.

What's notable is how much the New Town half grew during the planning process. When the city first floated the idea back in 2025, officials described roughly 400 acres of undeveloped land south of the highway as the target for a new mixed-use district. The plan that actually reached the Planning Commission last month covers about 830 acres for that New Town Center, more than double the original footprint, alongside roughly 130 acres of Old Town revitalization to the north.

"The one thing that Centerton lacks is that we don't have a defined downtown area," Mayor Bill Edwards said.

That line, reported by 5NEWS back when the concept was still 400 acres, gets at why the plan exists at all. Centerton counted about 490 residents in 1990. The Census Bureau's estimate had reached 23,953 by 2023, according to KUAF, and Mayor Edwards has since put the figure at close to 25,000. Almost all of that growth showed up as rooftops. The city has houses. It doesn't have a center.

The Highway That Splits the Plan in Two

The same stretch of Centerton Boulevard that divides Old Town from New Town on the map is also the reason both halves of this story move slowly. ARDOT's plan for the road calls for widening it to five lanes with curb and gutter, adding multilane roundabouts at the Highway 102/Highway 279 intersection and at Sun Meadow Drive, Blake Drive, and Highway 102, plus a 10-foot shared-use path along the south side. It is not a small project, and it has not moved on the schedule anyone hoped for.

The widening was supposed to go out for bid in April 2026. It got pushed to May, according to reporting from NWA Homepage at the time, because ArDOT was still working through utility relocation and right-of-way acquisition. That acquisition work has kept dragging: minutes from an October 2025 Centerton Utilities Commission meeting show the utility relocation piece finally went out for bid that fall, with eight property owners along the corridor disputing their compensation offers above full appraisal value. The federal permitting dashboard for the project lists an estimated completion date for environmental review and permitting of March 2027, which gives a sense of how far out the full five-lane build actually sits.

What did happen this spring was smaller. In May 2026, ARDOT scheduled alternating lane closures at the Highway 102 and Greenhouse Road intersection for milling and inlaying work, the kind of pothole and resurfacing maintenance that keeps a road drivable while the bigger widening project waits on its right-of-way. It's worth knowing the difference: the patchwork happened, the real fix is still years off, and the same bureaucratic bottleneck, easements and utility lines, sits underneath both the road project and the downtown plan that depends on crossing it safely.

What's Already Standing in Old Town

Whatever happens on the New Town side, Old Town isn't getting bulldozed. The plan treats North Main Street as a preservation project, not a clearing project, and the businesses already there give some sense of what's being kept.

• The Ravington, a 1909 former general store turned event venue with 18-foot ceilings and exposed brick
• Challulajah Bakery
• Marrs Mercantile
• Davitt Electric
• Bemco, a plastics manufacturer that's been part of the Main Street footprint for years

The former City Hall building on that same strip is being remodeled into what the city calls a multifunctional community space, part of the same building surge that brought Muse Burger, Chipotle, and Centerton Animal Hospital into town in 2024. On Wednesdays through the end of October, City Park a few blocks off Main Street hosts the Centerton Farmers Market from 4 to 8 p.m., a market that runs on its own schedule separate from the bigger Saturday markets in Bentonville and Rogers.

None of that changes because a New Town district gets built across the highway. What changes is where the next round of retail, restaurants, and gathering space actually lands. For years the answer to "where would that go" in Centerton was "there isn't really anywhere." The master plan is the city's attempt to give that question an actual address.

The Planning Commission has already had its look. Whether the City Council adopts the plan this fall or takes longer to work through the details, the land south of Centerton Boulevard has gone from an open question to a specific proposal with acreage, phasing, and named firms attached to it. That's the part worth watching, more than any single ribbon cutting: the fields aren't empty because nobody's decided what to do with them anymore. They're empty because the plan for them just got finished.

If you're watching how Centerton's next chapter takes shape and wondering what it means for a specific street, subdivision, or piece of land you already call home, Hello Home NWA is happy to talk through it, no obligation, just two agents who live in this market and like tracking it as closely as you do.