The Eureka Springs City Advertising and Promotion Commission had a light and quick agenda at its monthly meeting on Wednesday, May 22.
There was no tourism update with executive director Mike Maloney missing the meeting because of a death in the family, meaning the meeting only consisted of a finance report, two public comments and the approval of four funding requests.
The CAPC once again has a vacancy with the recent resignation of Brian Weinmann, who chair Chris Clifton said resigned “for personal reasons.”
FINANCE REPORT
The CAPC’s monthly collections were again reported to be under budget, but finance director Scott Bardin told the commission there’s no need to be too alarmed.
“I feel like that number will go down to where we’re probably going to be exceeding budget in the next 60 days, so I wouldn’t panic too much on it being down right now,” Bardin said.
April collections included food and beverage being 8 percent under budget and lodging being 6 percent under projections. However, collections not yet received for the month could erase the deficit, Bardin told commissioners.
“I do at least have most of the larger [collections], I’d say 80 percent, maybe 90 percent, of the larger contributors of the tax submitted, but there’s still enough out there to cover that,” he said.
For food and beverage, the CAPC had collected $76,625 so far for April, $7,055 less than the $83,680 budgeted. For lodging, $78,005 had been collected, $5,675 under the projection of $83,680.
Food and beverage taxes so far collected from April were also $16,459 less than in April 2023, but lodging brought in $7,146 more than the same timeframe a year ago.
For the first four months of 2024, the CAPC has collected $499,552, down $31,032 (5 percent) from what was budgeted and $69,008 less than the $569,431 collected during the same timeframe in 2023, Bardin said.
The CAPC had $2,005,470.30 in the bank as of April 30.
FUNDING REQUESTS
Four groups who requested $5,000 in funding requests will get the money, but only two will actually come from the budget designated for those items.
The Eureka Springs Arts Council requested $5,000 to renew the smart phone application used for the Eureka Springs Augmented Reality Tour, an app that was created two years ago during the May Festival of the Arts, according to council chair Sandy Martin.
“It’s become very popular, which is great,” Martin told commissioners. “There are about 27 locations on the tour and split between public art and the springs.”
Approximately 12-inch-tall informational 3D printed rock cairns are located at multiple springs around the city to direct visitors to augmented reality points of interest, as well as signs or markers at various other locations. The rock cairn markers are embedded with near field communications (NFC) chips and a QR code to direct visitors to a web link with the augmented reality content.
Once a visitor arrives at a public art or natural spring location, a marker will direct them to use either an NFC or QR code to open the webbased augmented reality camera on their smartphone or tablet. Depending upon the point of interest, the visitor will then either point their camera at the artwork and watch it come to life or point it at the ground near a spring to watch a “ghostly” virtual tour guide appear and tell them about the history, interesting facts, or little known secrets.
“We’ve had over 9,000 views this year, which is darn good,” Martin said.
Instead of approving the ask as a funding request, commissioners added $5,000 to the line item on its budget already approved for the Art Council.
Also approved was $5,000 to the Eureka Springs Parks and Recreation Department for additional pocket maps that will be available around the city. However, the money will come from an “intergovernmental” account in the CAPC budget instead of a funding request.
The other two groups with funding approved were the 4th Annual Jeep Jam and a new event, Nightmare in the Ozarks Film Festival, which will be planned to go along with Zombie Crawl and other Halloween events downtown.
