Last weekend, hotels across Jackson were filled with baseball and softball players and their families. Like nearly every weekend during the summer, families travel to Jackson to play in tournaments at the West Tennessee Healthcare Sportsplex.
Jim Meyer is the president of the St. Louis Fire Baseball and Softball Club. He brought 10 baseball teams, along with team members’ brothers and sisters, moms and dads and grandparents, to Jackson to play in a tournament at the park last weekend.
In total, Meyer said there were more than 150 people who drove the nearly 270 miles from St. Louis to Jackson.
“We try to go somewhere a little different that has something to offer family wise, like the [Jackson] Generals, and has a good facility,” he said.
While it may not seem like it, travel baseball teams coming from St. Louis for the weekend represents tourism, and Jackson benefits with every night spent at a hotel and with every meal eaten at a restaurant. The Jackson Convention and Visitors Bureau and city and county officials are partnering to find ways to grow tourism and the funding it takes to make that happen.
“We’re challenged because when people think of tourism in this town they immediately think of the Old Country Store, and that’s the only thing they’re thinking of,” Lori Nunnery, executive director of the Convention and Visitors Bureau, said. “And the [Jackson] tourism story, while they’re an important part of it, is much broader than that.”
Nunnery is on a mission to show community leaders and residents that tourism in Jackson is more extensive than most people see at first glance and is worth the investment it would take to help it grow.
Effects of tourism
Thousands of people come to Jackson every year to learn about music history, visit the Tennessee Safari Park in Alamo and to eat and shop at Casey Jones Village. Many of those people stay in Jackson.
Henry Harrison, owner and curator of the Rockabilly Hall of Fame, guessed that 80 percent of his visitors are from out of town. People from 29 different countries have come to learn about rockabilly, he said. Harrison estimated that more than 2,500 people visited the museum in 2014, most of them coming from overseas.
When tourists come, they inject money into the local economy. The longer they stay, the more money they will spend and the more money will be put into local businesses.
“If you stay here overnight, you are going to spend more money because you’re going to buy a hotel room, you may have time to go shopping, and you’re going to eat more than just one meal,” Kyle Spurgeon, president and CEO of Jackson’s Chamber of Commerce, said. “You’re going to leave more money into the community than if you had just stopped off the interstate and only spent an hour or two.”
Tourism investments are as effective as recruiting a new industrial plant to come to Jackson, Spurgeon said. It gives people jobs, which help people buy homes, which helps the community and adds a broader tax base to the city and county.
Billie Duke is the general manager at Comfort Suites Hotel, which has 70 rooms that fill up throughout the year because of tourists coming to the Sportsplex, family gatherings and business retreats.
“Tourism basically means welcoming someone into your city and showing them what you have to offer,” Duke said. “It’s not just limited to the big cities.”
Duke employs 16 people at Comfort Suites. According to Nunnery, in 2013 the tourism industry in Jackson-Madison County employed more than 1,670 people.
Madison County Mayor Jimmy Harris said the impact of tourism is unmistakable.
“It is one of the largest industries we have in our community,” Harris said. “It’s an investment that has a return to it.”
Fighting for funding
Convention and visitor bureaus across the state are funded through hotel and motel taxes.
In Madison County, the money comes from a 5 percent charge added to hotel and motel bills, which totals approximately $1.5 million each year, according to Nunnery.
Jackson’s Convention and Visitors Bureau splits the first $975,000 of the hotel and motel tax with the city and county. The city and county each receive 40 percent and Nunnery’s one-person office receives the remaining 20 percent, or about $195,000, which includes her salary.
Due to an inter-local agreement with the city and county, any hotel and motel tax revenues over $975,000, normally reached in the early fall, are allocated to the Sportsplex debt.
In 2014, nearly $540,000 was sent to the Sportsplex after each body reached its cap.
Jackson Convention and Visitors Bureau is funded at a lower rate than other bureaus in areas of similar size.
According to the 2010 census, Johnson City had 63,481 people compared to Jackson’s 66,955. However, its visitors bureau receives 50 percent of the hotel and motel taxes and has a budget of $663,000 with four full-time employees, according to documentation provided by Nunnery.
Kingsport had 52,771 people and receives 62.5 percent of the hotel and motel tax. Its visitors bureau has a budget of $2 million, with eight full-time employees, according to documents.
Hardin County is significantly smaller than Jackson-Madison County with 26,026 people, but its visitors bureau receives 90 percent of the hotel and motel tax and has a $220,000 budget, with two full-time employees, according to documents.
“I’m not complaining, it’s just the facts,” Nunnery said. “It’s not that somebody is a good guy [or] a bad guy, this is just where we are right now.
“If we want to compete, if our community and our leaders see the value of what tourism can do, to bring in more visitors and more sales tax revenue and more hotel-motel tax revenue, they [must] invest more in us,” she said. “Our goal is to go out there and generate more.”
Money on the way
Both the city and county have tentatively agreed to put $50,000 into their respective 2015-2016 budgets for Nunnery’s office. Neither body has yet approved its budget, but both mayors said they intend to keep the money allocated.
“Other places have put big bucks into [tourism], and I think it’s paying off for them,” Harris, the county mayor, said. “I think we feel like we can do a better job putting more revenue into our tourism.”
With an extra $100,000 from the city and county tentatively scheduled to work with in the next fiscal year, Nunnery hopes the city and county will realize the investment is worthwhile and more money will be allocated in the future.
In December 2016, the cap from the Sportsplex debt payoff will be lifted, meaning the city, county and Convention and Visitors Bureau will split every dollar from the hotel and motel tax 40-40-20. In 2014, this would have added about $108,000 to the bureau’s budget.
“Now does that put us at a competitive level with our partners like Clarksville and Tupelo?” Nunnery asked. “No, it doesn’t. They have budgets anywhere between $900,000 and over $1 million. It’s hard to compete with those because we just don’t have the dollars.”
Nunnery said $90,000 of her budget goes to marketing and toward tourism conventions and meetings across the state. Another $10,000 goes toward membership dues for tourism organizations and $18,000 pays for rent and accounting help at the Jackson Chamber of Commerce, where her office is located.
Any new money already has a home, she said. Sixty-five percent of new dollars would go directly into marketing, which currently only is funded with $60,000.
Twenty-five percent would be used for staffing to hire another worker, and 10 percent would go to operational needs, she said.
“We just have to spread the word,” Nunnery said. “But the marketing is only as good as the staff we have here to help answer the inquiries.”
What’s next?
Kingsport is in the northeast corner of the state and draws visitors from Ohio, Virginia and North Carolina.
One of the city’s draws is the new 35,000-square-foot convention center, which can be used for business conferences, trade shows and concerts.
For Jackson to grow into the next phase as a city and in tourism, there need to be facilities to help make that happen, Nunnery said.
Spurgeon, of the Jackson Chamber, agreed.
“For us to really grow in tourism, we need a new arena or multipurpose facility,” Spurgeon said. “It is a discussion that is time to take place. It probably isn’t a question of do we need one, but rather where and how do we fund it.”
David Freeman, co-owner of the Jackson Generals minor league baseball team, has wanted to put in a hotel and conference center behind the right field wall of the Generals’ ballpark for years, Al Laffoon, Jackson city recorder, said.
According to Laffoon, Freeman’s license agreement for the stadium, signed June 2011, includes a provision that states the city will cooperate with the club to help develop and finance the infrastructure for the project if it were to come about.
But Laffoon said the time to start the project may be waning.
“It wasn’t only the economy [that stopped discussions] it was the fact that there’s sort of a glut of hotels,” he said.
Jackson Mayor Jerry Gist said the possibility of the project is still being examined.
Along with a conference center, Nunnery said the Convention and Visitors Bureau will work to develop Jackson’s music tourism and could look at some sort of family destination, like a water park.
While the bureau may get more funding in the next budget year from the city and county, further funding will have to be weighed against other important concerns, such as a crowded county jail and an aging juvenile facility.
That doesn’t keep Spurgeon from hoping.
“People had foresight to build the Oman Arena and the Carl Perkins Civic Center,” he said. “Thirty to 40 years from now people will look back and say that the community looked forward to help grow the economy.”
Reach Tyler at (731) 425-9629. Follow him on Twitter @tyler_whetstone.
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