The Eureka Springs City Advertising and Promotion Commission approved a motion at its regular meeting Oct. 26 to spend $15,000 toward the purchase of holiday lights and decorations for the city.
The decision, however, didn’t come without a bit of hesitation and discussion.
Tourism director Madison Dawson told the CAPC that Mayor Butch Berry reached out to her about the possibility of the commission helping the parks department with the cost of new lights.
The Eureka Springs City Council voted at its Oct. 24 meeting to spend $12,500 — also on holiday decorations.
“Essentially the parks department is requesting that the CAPC match the combined funding from city council and parks for holiday lighting and decorations,” Dawson said. “And the request is $15,000. This is a matched budget from the parks department’s original holiday lighting budget that they had for this year. … It’s going to be a reimbursement to the parks department. So, they’ll purchase [the decorations] and we will reimburse them for that.”
City council member Terry McClung, in his first meeting as a CAPC member after being voted in to replace Nick Roberts at the Oct. 24 council meeting, said since the CAPC is doing well financially this year, he supported the expenditure, although he was surprised that it wasn’t brought up at the council meeting.
“It was not explained to us at the last council meeting that anybody else was going to be ponying anything up,” McClung said. “It wasn’t talked about … a match or anything.”
Commissioner Chris Clifton agreed. “I’m curious why this wasn’t brought up at the [council] meeting,” Clifton said.
Autumn Slane, the city council’s other representative on the CAPC, responded: “Well, I think what’s going on is there’s been a group of people in town that have been pushing this for months, since April, wanting to have decorations … and nothing was done until the last council meeting.
“And Butch tried to push it through. That’s what’s going on, from my point of view. I do think that we need to focus more on holidays, but I think it’s unfortunate that we’re here doing it at the last minute.”
“It’s the way we do everything, unfortunately,” McClung replied.
Dawson said it was her understanding that the city would purchase items from stores like Home Depot so the decorations would be in place for the upcoming holiday season.
“You know the CAPC is very cash-heavy. I’ve never seen it like this before,” McClung said of the budget. “If that’s the case, we should be advertising more. But that’s another subject for another night.”
Before the unanimous vote, Clifton asked Dawson her opinion of how new and expanded holiday decorations would contribute to tourism in the city.
“I think that we get on a lot of lists that get regional coverage, that talk about how we are kind of a holiday lights town,” Dawson said. “And so, the way [it was] explained it to me is that we’re kind of under par for what we should be as far as lighting displays and things like that, if we’re going to be listed as something like that, which is great.
“If [tourists] are promised this great thing that these people are writing about and they come here and it’s kind of subpar, that’s not great. It’s not indicative of the destination.”
FINANCIAL REPORT
Scott Bardin, the CAPC finance director, reported that the Sept. 30 bank balance was $1,589,594.17.
The CAPC received $182,898 in tax revenue for September, which was $3,102 less than budgeted. The shortfall came in lodging taxes, which earned $89,391 — $3,609 under budget.
Food and beverage brought in $93,507, which was $507 over budget.
Year-to-date, the CAPC has collected $124,956 more than the first nine months of 2021.
“I feel comfortable saying that we’re leading into a strong fourth quarter, because what I also noticed today is that our tax collections for October, which we’re into now, are up over $40,000,” Bardin said. “That’s just the sales tax collection part. So, I think that this is the beginning of a strong fourth quarter, which would lead us to a budget that will exceed $2 million by the time we end Dec.31of this year.”
TOURISM REPORT
In her report to commissioners, Dawson said September traffic on the eurekasprings.org website was highest among residents of Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Illinois.
“It tends to be the same five [states] over the past few months,” she said.
Dawson said the trend in visitors is similar to 2021. “We saw the same normalization for visitor volume in comparison to our 2021 numbers, but we also saw the same visitor spend, which was on par year over year, which means that the visitors are spending the same amount of money in market as they were in 2021, even though we had less of them,” she said.
Visitors from Little Rock were the top demographic in money spent in the city with the Fayetteville area having the most overnight visitors.
Dawson said 65.7 percent of visitors to Eureka Springs stayed overnight, and 79 percent came from out of state.
