The Advertising and Promotion Commission is considering reducing the money it transfers to the Pine Bluff Convention Center by $300,000 a year as the commission works on its 2026 budget.
The topic came up at a recent A&P Commission meeting when Executive Director Sheri Storie said the time has come to cut the Convention Center’s funding because the commission is unable to do its job on the money it has left over.
“The struggle is how much we fund the Convention Center and how much we need for the A&P,” she told commissioners. “We should be doing a lot more to bring in tourism, but we’re not doing that because 60% of our funds goes to the Convention Center. They’ve become very dependent on us.”
For 2025, the amount going to the Convention Center from the A&P actually constitutes 64% of the tax revenue — some $1.3 million — that the A&P collects from sales taxes on prepared food vendors and lodging operators.
Storie said between 2018 and 2025, $8.7 million has been given to the Convention Center for its operations. The yearly amount represents almost 80% of the Convention Center’s total funding.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
“That’s way too much,” Storie said. “They need to do a little more. I don’t know what the solution is, but they need to figure out a way to bring in more revenue.”
Storie said she would like to reduce the percentage on the A&P funding transferred to the Convention Center to 50% this coming year – about $300,000 over a year, which would still see $1 million a year going to the facility.
“There will be difficult conversations ahead,” she said. “But if we don’t change, nothing will be done.”
She said traffic at the Convention Center had continued to drop, citing the past 2½ years as an example. From January to August in 2023, 41,300 people came through the Convention Center. That includes paying and non-paying events. Last year, the number dropped to 38,300 over the same time period. And this year through August, 25,400 people had been to the facility.
Storie said that despite the high percentage of funding the A&P provides the Convention Center, the A&P has no control over where the funds go.
“We don’t get a say in how that money is spent,” she said. “We are completely separate.”
A hotel is being built alongside the Convention Center that supporters say will bring in more events to the facility, but Storie worries that prediction will not pan out.
“Our lodging tax has been down for two years,” she said. “And other than Hot Springs, occupancy rates are down pretty much all over the place.”
Storie said she is not proposing eliminating the funding in question.
“We are an autonomous commission, and our commissioners determine what and how much we fund,” she said. “We don’t have to fund it if we don’t want to. I am absolutely not suggesting that we cut funding, not unless we want to have a closed Convention Center. But I would like to see the number get closer to $500,000 a year rather than the $1.3 million it is today.”
Storie said other cities have different arrangements for how their convention centers are operated. Fort Smith used to operate its convention center, but a separate entity does it now with limited input of funds from the city, for example.
Storie said she had talked to Barbara Dunn, executive director of the Pine Bluff Convention Center, to give her a heads up on what is being discussed by the A&P Commission.
Dunn said Friday she was going over her budget for 2026 and looking for places she could trim spending, but her analysis is in the early stages.
“Our budget is coming up in October,” she said. “Losing that much funding would affect us, true, and at this point, I can’t see where we have any room at all.”
And at a time when funding might get tighter, Dunn said the almost 50-year-old structure continues to need work.
“We want to bring in more events in the auditorium, higher-scale events,” she said, “but things like the dressing rooms need to be updated and so many other areas need work. And there is a lot of cost to anything we do. That’s where we are right now. I would love to be able to wave a magic wand and make all of this happen right away; that’s my personality. But we are working through it day by day.”