The financial relationship between the Pine Bluff Convention Center and the Advertising and Promotion Commission is broken and has been for years.
The A&P collects sales taxes from hotels and restaurants and uses those dollars to bring tourists to town who then use hotels and restaurants. That cycle is not hard to understand or rationalize.
But forever the A&P has deeply subsidized the operation of the Convention Center, to the tune of around 60% of all the money the commission has to work with. Actually, for 2025, according to A&P Director Sheri Storie, that number is 64%.
Yes, a functioning convention center would help those same hotel and restaurant owners, but a functioning convention center, by definition, would need to be a well-oiled machine that is bringing in tourist- and visitor-related revenue on a daily and weekly basis. That hasn’t happened. Most of what the public hears about the almost 50-year-old facility is that it’s old and in need of many repairs.
Each year at budget time, Storie mentions the lopsided relationship between the two sides. In the past handful of years, some $8 million has been given to the Convention Center to sustain its operations. As she describes it, she has lots and lots of ways she would like to be spending that kind of cash that could be attracting tourists to Pine Bluff – but can’t, because the money’s not there. It’s as if your brother-in-law moved in with you and never left. You love him, but bro, can you get a job?
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
How do other cities do it? Not like Pine Bluff. Fort Smith used to run its own convention center but they outsourced that years ago, giving the chore of making the facility stand on its own two feet to someone else.
Storie suggested to her board recently that, for the 2026 budget, the level of subsidizing the Convention Center should be reduced by $300,000 from the $1.3 million appropriated in 2025. That would bring the split to about 50-50, with the A&P keeping half of what it brings in and sending the other half to the Convention Center. That would leave $1 million going to the facility for now, but Storie said she would really like to see the number drop to half of that.
That, of course, sent shock waves to the folks in charge of the Convention Center. They are already hard pressed to make a go of their predicament, but that situation needs to be addressed by the city as a whole and not placed on the shoulders of the A&P, which, despite making up 79% of the Convention Center’s overall budget, gets zero say in how the Convention Center is run.
For years, the city has averted its eyes from the messy situation because there are no easy answers. But easy or not, the city needs to find a solution to this problem. No one wants to kick the brother-in-law to the curb, but at some point, he has to stop leeching and start taking care of his own needs. Ditto convention centers.