The Arkansas wildlife agency’s rebuilt Jonesboro office is on schedule, with construction bids scheduled to open this week and a target completion date in early summer 2027.
The agency lost its Jonesboro regional office to fire a year ago. The rebuild sits on the same footprint. Bids open this week; a general contractor is expected on-site once bids are reviewed and awarded, and the agency’s project schedule points to an early-summer 2027 opening.
The new building is smaller than the old one. The agency is moving this location from its full regional-office model to a leaner field-office model — a change already made at several other locations across the state. The field-office model keeps a smaller in-house staff on-site, with regional-scale functions consolidated elsewhere and shared services rotating through the site on a schedule. For a hunter or angler in the northeast, day-to-day contact points — licensing help, wildlife-officer coordination, and program-registration support — stay in place.
Programming that the regional office ordinarily hosts is running out of the Forrest L. Wood Crowley’s Ridge Nature Center during construction. The nature center sits along Crowley’s Ridge, a 150-mile geologic feature that runs from southeastern Missouri down through eastern Arkansas. The ridge is 0.5 to 12 miles wide and rises 250 to 550 feet above the surrounding alluvial plain, and the nature center’s exhibits are built around the ecology and geology of that landform.
Agency staff said the transition has kept programming intact through the fire year. Education classes, hunter-education sessions, and the outreach programs the agency runs in schools have continued out of the nature center’s classrooms and outdoor spaces. Once the new building is complete, the agency plans to keep some of those programs at the nature center on a permanent basis, using the field office for its administrative and enforcement functions and the nature center as its public-facing programming home.
