# Conway Corporation Conway Corporation operates the City of Conway's municipal utilities — electric, water, wastewater, and broadband/cable service. Organizationally distinct from the City government, it is treated in this corpus as a quasi-municipal utility subject to the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act. It appears here in two roles: as a FOIA custodian that gave an interim response on the Conway data-center records request, and as a named party to the April 1, 2025 memorandum of understanding for the [[Forgelight Ventures, LLC]] data-center project. ## People - [[Brett Carroll|Bret Carroll]] — **Chief Executive Officer** (title confirmed by the 2026-05-29 production); accepted the earliest Project Stratus meeting (2024-06-21); addressed City Council on grey-water reuse April 1, 2025. - [[Chris Odom]] — Regulatory and Risk Management Director; sent Conway Corporation's 2026-05-22 interim FOIA response and transmitted the 2026-05-29 production. - [[Mark Ferguson]] — Water Systems Senior Engineer, P.E.; the primary engineering point of contact on Project Stratus. - [[Erin Brown]] — Chief Financial Officer, CPA; finance-side contact with [[Black & Veatch]]. - [[Brett McDaniel]] — senior staff (title not stated); reviewed the Reimbursement Agreement and "Stratus contract." - [[Zach Gardner]] — Environmental Coordinator; signed a [[Spark Innovations, LLC]] NDA to join the project team. - Other staff on the Project Stratus team correspondence: Lee Tedford, Dale Gottsponer, Stephen Hogan, Trey Lieblong; Leslie Guffey (Engineering intake). ## Roles in this corpus - **FOIA custodian.** On 2026-05-22 Conway Corporation gave an interim response to the data-center FOIA request, reporting no records for several utility sub-items and placing others under competitive and utility-security exemption review. See [[2026-05 Conway Corporation Interim FOIA Response]]. - **Party to the data-center MOU.** Conway Corporation is one of four signatories to the April 1, 2025 MOU and sits on the City's Economic Development Committee. Under the MOU it would supply the project's medium-voltage electricity (13.8 kV service, expandable to 10 MW) and would design, permit, and build the treated-effluent cooling-water pipeline from the Tupelo Bayou Wastewater Treatment Plant and the cooling-tower blowdown discharge line to the Arkansas River (primary public record, [April 1, 2025 council agenda packet](../../web%20archive/2026-05-22/media.conwayarkansas.gov/april-1-2025-special-city-council-agenda.md)). Brett Carroll of Conway Corporation addressed the City Council on the project's reclaimed-water cooling approach (primary public record, [April 1, 2025 council minutes](../../web%20archive/2026-05-22/conwayarkansas.gov/04-01-2025-special-council-mtg.md)). ## Updated by the 2026-05-29 production (Production 001) Conway Corporation delivered its **first Tier-1 production** on 2026-05-29 — 26 records on FOIA Items 1 and 4(c) (see [[2026-05 Conway Corporation Produces Project Stratus Records]] and the [[city-conway/conway-corp-stratus-2026-05-29/_overview|production overview]]). It opens the utility's Project Stratus role at the documentary level: - **The cooling-water engineering is now Tier-1.** Conway Corporation engaged [[Black & Veatch]] (after earlier [[Garver]] scoping) to evaluate Tupelo Bayou treated effluent as the data center's cooling-water supply — a PFAS workshop, a 30-plus-constituent water-quality panel, a developer-funded **Reimbursement Agreement** for the TBWWTP Evaluation, and an April 2026 **Final Engineering Report**. See [[Black & Veatch Effluent-Cooling Engineering for Project Stratus]] and [[Tupelo Bayou Treated-Effluent Cooling]]. - **The utility operated under NDAs on both sides.** A corporate Confidentiality Agreement with Black & Veatch (signed 2025-05-05) and individual staff NDAs with the developer-side entity [[Spark Innovations, LLC]] (a name distinct from [[Forgelight Ventures, LLC]]). See [[Conway Corporation Project Stratus NDAs]]. - **The timeline starts in mid-2024.** CEO [[Brett Carroll|Bret Carroll]] accepted a "Project Stratus Discussion" on 2024-06-21 — the earliest dated Stratus reference in the corpus — and [[Arkansas Economic Development Commission|AEDC]]'s [[Raven Johnson]] attended the October 2, 2024 utilities site visit and Tupelo Bayou WWTP tour. - **The "no records" findings hold, but the gap is now sharper.** The production contains the Item 1 / 4(c) correspondence and analyses, but **not** the executed supply agreement (4b) or any ratepayer cost-allocation analysis (4e). The Black & Veatch **Rate Analysis memorandum** — referenced as in progress — is exactly the 4(e) document and was not produced. ## Notes The cost-recovery question — how Conway Corporation's ratepayers would bear the capital cost of the cooling-water and electric infrastructure the MOU assigns to the utility — remains unaddressed in any record produced so far (FOIA item 4(e) returned no records; the Black & Veatch Rate Analysis memorandum that would speak to it is referenced but unproduced). The City of Conway's [[2026-05 City of Conway Produces Project Stratus Records|May 26, 2026 production]] surfaces Conway Corporation in two new ways: 1. Conway Corporation owns a small parcel (DB 2012 P 7763) carved out of the [[Rezone Ordinance O-25-39 and REZ-0425-0052|160-acre rezone area]] — an existing utility easement or substation site within the Project Stratus footprint. 2. The [[April 2026 FAQ Project Stratus]] surfaces the **10 MW Conway Corp service commitment** as ~1% of the project's 1 GW design — confirming that Conway Corp's medium-voltage service is small relative to the project's [[Entergy Arkansas]] high-voltage demand. The City Clerk's May 20, 2026 "no-records" letter on FOIA-2026-126 Item 4 (Conway Corporation utility records) explicitly states "the City of Conway City Clerk's Office is not the custodian of Conway Corporation records." This routes all utility records back to Conway Corporation's own custodianship — see [[City of Conway FOIA-2026-126 Cover and No-Response Letter]].