The headline out of Centerton this summer was the recreation center. Crossland Construction broke ground on July 13, 2026 on a 36,575-square-foot facility on Keller Road, and the price tag alone (26 million dollars for phase one) makes it the biggest single thing the city has built in years. But if you live here and you're waiting for that building to change your weekends, you're waiting for the wrong thing. Construction is expected to run 14 to 16 months, which puts the doors opening sometime in fall 2027. That's more than a year out.
Meanwhile, three other places finished months or years ago and most of the conversation around town has skipped right past them. The actual story in Centerton right now isn't the rec center. It's the gap between what just got funded and what you can already walk into today, and knowing which is which changes how you plan the rest of this year.
What's Already Open, No Waiting Required
Cornerwoods Park is the one worth knowing about first. It's a 9.6-acre park that opened with a full grand opening event, and it was built specifically to be wheelchair accessible while also including a BMX trail with a small trick and ramp course. It has separate large and small dog park sections with safety gates, public restrooms with drinking fountains, and its own parking, all connected so you can bring the dog and the kids and use different corners of the same park without getting in each other's way.
McKissic Station Park is the older, more established option and it does more in one stop than almost anywhere else in town. There's a splash pad, a covered playground, a walking trail, a disc golf course, and direct access to McKissic Creek and Lake Centerton. Fishing is allowed on the lake, though swimming isn't, so it functions more as a catch-and-release spot than a swimming hole.
Then there's food, which is the part of Centerton that's changed the most without any ribbon cutting at all. The Centerton Food Trucks Park runs a rotating lineup that includes Asian dishes like General Tso's chicken and spring rolls alongside Colombian arepas and Venezuelan specialties, all served at picnic tables in one lot. Around town, standalone spots have filled in the rest of the map: Takashi Hibachi and Sushi for Japanese food, El Farolito for Tex-Mex, and Ameerah's Kitchen and Desi Bites for Pakistani and Indian cuisine. None of that required a bond issue or a groundbreaking ceremony. It just happened, one lease at a time, while the bigger civic projects were still in planning.
The Recreation Center: What Phase One Actually Buys You
The rec center groundbreaking wasn't a surprise. Voters approved the project in a March 2024 election, passing it 63 percent to 36 percent as part of a broader sales tax extension, and the bonds are being paid for through a continuation of that 1 percent city sales tax. City council member and mayoral candidate Cliff Thompson said at the groundbreaking that the goal is to give residents "a good place for people to remain healthy and strong and create community." That's the pitch. Here's what phase one and the deferred phase two actually contain, because they're not the same building.
| Coming with Phase One (targeting fall 2027) | Waiting on Future Funding |
|---|---|
| 0-entry leisure pool with lap lanes and a short slide | Second outdoor pool |
| Multi-use gym, built to expand later | Additional gym space |
| Walking track and second-floor fitness area | Indoor competition pool with locker rooms |
| Community room with veranda, seats about 150 | Amphitheater |
| Two party rooms and family locker cabanas | Tennis and pickleball courts |
| Concessions area and 222 additional parking spaces |
That right-hand column matters because it's not funded yet. City officials have said they'll add it "as money becomes available," which is a real qualifier, not a formality. A recreation consulting firm hired for the project estimated the city could cover roughly 80 percent of the center's operating costs through membership revenue, with the rest coming from the general fund, and early estimates floated an annual operating gap somewhere in the 200,000 to 300,000 dollar range depending on staffing and hours. None of that is a reason to worry about the project. It's a reason not to assume the amphitheater and the second pool are part of the same timeline as the pool that's actually under construction now.
Why the Roads Haven't Caught Up
The parks and the rec center are the visible part of Centerton's growth. The less visible part is that the road network underneath all of it is still catching up, and that's not a coincidence. In its 2025 State of the City address, the mayor put the population at roughly 25,857, up 7.9 percent from 24,543 the year before, and up 41.76 percent since the 2020 census. That's not gradual growth. That's a city that added the equivalent of a small town's worth of people in five years, and the infrastructure was already playing catch-up before the ink dried on that address.
Highway 102, also known as West Centerton Boulevard, is the clearest example. The widening project between Main Street and Highway 279 south is a partnership with the Arkansas Department of Transportation, and in that same 2025 address the city said the work was still in the right-of-way acquisition phase, with utility relocations targeted for that year and early the next, and a project bid timeline aimed at 2026. In plain terms, the road that's supposed to carry that population growth was still in paperwork, not construction, as recently as the city's last full accounting of it.
The Western North-South Connector, a planned link between Highway 412 and Interstate 49, held its public involvement meetings back in April 2026, which means it's still at the input stage rather than the design or construction stage. And downtown itself is in a similar spot. The city received a grant from the Northwest Arkansas Urban Land Institute for a downtown redevelopment study and ran public input meetings on a Downtown Plan in June 2026. There's no finished plan yet, just a process that's actively gathering resident feedback right now, which means anyone who wants a say in what downtown Centerton looks like in five years still has a window to weigh in.
What This Actually Means If You're Already Here
Put the pieces next to each other and the pattern is obvious. Centerton has been funding and finishing the things people use casually, the parks, the food scene, the recreational trails, faster than it's been finishing the roads and the downtown framework that everything else depends on. Cornerwoods Park and McKissic Station Park are done. The rec center is funded and under construction with a real completion window. The roads and the downtown redevelopment are still in the acquisition and public-input stages, which are the slowest, least visible parts of any civic project.
If you live here, that timeline is useful information, not just trivia. This fall and through 2027, expect road work around West Centerton Boulevard to be a fact of life rather than a short-term inconvenience, since right-of-way acquisition alone typically takes months before a shovel goes into the ground. Expect the rec center to still be a construction site through most of 2027 even as people start asking when it opens. And if you have opinions about what downtown Centerton should become, the input process is happening now, not after the plan is finalized.
None of this changes what's already good about living here. It just means the next eighteen months in Centerton are going to look like a city building its future in the correct order, parks and food first, roads and downtown structure second, even if that order isn't the one most people expect.
If you're weighing what any of this means for your own home, whether that's how a nearby park or road project affects value, or when might be the right time to make a move in a neighborhood that's still filling in its own infrastructure, Jillian Chamberlin can walk you through it with the same level of detail. Reach out for a free consultation or a home valuation, and get a straight answer instead of a guess.
