Earlier this week, as city officials were hashing out budgets for various departments, the decision was made to hold money back from the Delta Rhythm and Bayous Project. The money — a little more than $222,000 — was to be spent on operating costs associated with a recently completed Wellness Park and ongoing development projects.
The reason was that things are tight all over.
“We are struggling to balance the budget with the new expenditures that we have added in 2025,” Mayor Shirley Washington said during the meeting. “To pick up an additional $222,000 for the DRB is really stretching it even more.”
It is understandable to hold back additional spending proposals during the budgeting process. But we do hope this situation with the Bayous project is a temporary one.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
That entire project is perhaps the only one on the city’s table that has been thoroughly analyzed and shown to turn a tidy profit once it is completed, with money mainly coming from tourists. For a community, those are the best dollars to get because they don’t come out of any local pockets. (Think of your weekend getaway to Hot Springs when you left all that Pine Bluff money behind.)
For as long as Jimmy Cunningham has been promoting and preaching about the project, forces inside the city have been giving him the cool, if not cold, shoulder.
At the same time, tax dollars keep getting spent on a variety of other projects — a hotel that wasn’t supposed to require tax dollars but now has taken millions, for one, and a go-kart track that, in our opinion, has a questionable financial trajectory for a future — if it ever actually becomes a reality.
The financial trajectory of the Bayous project would appear to be headed in the other direction. Here we quote an Explore Pine Bluff feature that was published a couple of years ago:
Pine Bluff Advertising and Promotion Commission had an economic impact study commissioned by Tourism Economics, a Philadelphia based consulting firm which is a subsidiary of Oxford Economics. They analyzed current market conditions to estimate potential visitation at the proposed cultural district, as well as the potential fiscal (tax) benefits attributable to new visitation and tourism. Their findings showed that they estimated a total of 128,000 visits to the district annually, with $13.6 million spent annually with a total of $18.2 million in overall economic impact. The total jobs estimated to be generated is 250 and the total annual state and local tax revenues are estimated to be $1.9 million each year.
Again, nothing else on the Pine Bluff horizon sports those kinds of numbers. So, OK, take it slow until the overall budget gets worked out, but in the end, let’s keep feeding this project. The payback will be extraordinary.