# Brad Lacy Brad Lacy is a senior staff member at the [[Conway Area Chamber of Commerce]] who presented the Project Stratus Memorandum of Understanding to the Conway City Council at the April 1, 2025 Special Council Meeting. Lacy was the principal Chamber spokesman declining to identify the "Company" by name to Council and characterizing it only as a U.S.-based Fortune 100 entity. ## Role and affiliations - Conway Area Chamber of Commerce. Email: `[email protected]`. - Works alongside [[Jamie Gates]] (Chamber / CDC) and [[Corey Parks]] (CDC Chief Economic Development Officer) on Project Stratus. ## Appearances in the corpus - **April 1, 2025** — opening Chamber presenter at the Special Council Meeting ([[Project Stratus MOU and April 1 Special Council Meeting]]). Per the minutes: "Brad Lacy, of the Conway Chamber of Commerce, addressed the Council stating that this community development project is larger and more involved than has been common. He told them that this action is the first formal piece of what will be multiple agreements as the project moves forward. He added that this MOU is different in that it involves three entities and the company: the company, the City, Conway Corporation and the Conway Foundation." - **Declined to name the Company.** "Not being able to share the name of the company, Mr. Lacy shared some characteristics of the company with the Council. … Councilman Grimes asked at what point the name of the company would be released. Mr. Lacy was not able to give a timeline on that point." - **Confirmed non-data-mining.** "He confirmed that this project is not a data mining center" — distinguishing from cryptocurrency-mining operations but not characterizing the workload further. - **Explained the Act 9 mechanism.** Lacy "explained that the tax abatement would result from an Act 9 Bond, or Industrial Revenue Bond, so however long that agreement is, it would be the length of term for the property tax abatement." - **Explained the Foundation.** "Conway Foundation is governed by a board and was created to accept gifts or donations and then oversee the reinvestment into the community." ## Notes Lacy's role at the April 1 meeting was the higher-level Chamber spokesman; Jamie Gates handled the detail-level walkthrough of the MOU terms. The two appeared to coordinate as Lacy-then-Gates, with Lacy framing and Gates detailing. Lacy's withholding of the Company's name from Council ("Not being able to share the name of the company") is the load-bearing moment of the April 1 meeting on the principal-identification question. The Chamber controlled project information at that point, and the Council voted 8-0 to approve the MOU without knowing who the Company was. This is consistent with the [[Conway Internal Staff Teams Chats on Project Stratus|April 2 Planning Department Teams chat]] showing City staff did not know what the annexation was for as late as the next day. The Chamber's NDA position on Project Stratus is not documented in the FOIA-2026-126 production. [[Bryan Day]]'s May 26, 2026 [[2026-05 Little Rock Port Authority Produces Project Boar Records|Project Boar production]] confirms the parallel [[Little Rock Regional Chamber of Commerce]] signed an NDA "on our behalf" for the Port of Little Rock project; whether the Conway Area Chamber holds a similar NDA on Project Stratus is an open question.