Rotary hears about state parks’ impact on tourism
Arkansas State Parks Director Grady Spann spoke to Oaklawn Rotary Club last week about the economic impact that state parks have by bringing in tourism dollars, and the positive and negative affects the COVID-19 pandemic has had on the system.
Spann, who spoke to the club Monday, June 1, at Family Park, presented statistics that demonstrate how businesses in hospitality, recreation, historic preservation and retail tie in with the parks system, making it the state’s largest tourism destination.
Of the 6,792 state parks in the country that cover over 18 million acres, he said Arkansas has 52 parks that cover a little over 54,000 acres.
“Here’s what happens in our park system,” Spann said. “We have four lodges, 210 cabins, 1,702 campsites, 218 guest rooms,
41 playgrounds, three group lodges and three group lodging facilities; so we’re in the hospitality business. We are truly there to welcome people to Arkansas and to take care of people.”
He said the Arkansas park system also has 13 museums, seven of which are national historic landmarks, and 22 park sites on the national registry are “historic places.” Mammoth Springs State Park is the one site in the system that is a national natural landmark. There are also four battlefield sites from the Civil War.
Spann said these sites put the state’s park system in the “historic and historic preservation business.”
“We also have 12 swim beaches, 37 boat launch areas,
10 marinas, 19 fishing (piers), four lodge swimming pools, seven public swimming pools and access to 24 lakes and 18 rivers; so we are in the recreation business, obviously, very heavily,” he said.
The system’s two horse camps, two golf courses and 45 gift shops put it in the “retail business” as well.
“We typically roll out about
8.5 million visitors a year, which makes us the largest tourism destination as a unit in the state of Arkansas,” he said. “Nobody else attracts that many people. And the estimated economic impact for what we do for the state of Arkansas is about $1 billion in the economy.”
With Arkansas having such a prominent park system, Spann said it is able to function efficiently because they believe in the “idea of being a public servant.”
“We are here to serve the public, regardless of what their need is,” he said.
A drive to serve the public also ties in with the decisions made over the past 10 weeks to restrict certain aspects of the park system during the pandemic.
“The thing that drove the decision to restrict access was simply how do I protect that park staff and how do I protect the public?” Spann said. “As you can tell from the numbers, we have a lot of facilities; we have a lot of opportunities to serve people; and we always want to do that as efficiently as we can.”
Arkansas was one of four states in the country that never completely closed its park system during the pandemic.
“The governor understood the impact of Arkansas State
Parks on peoples’ well-being,” he said. “We became an essential service in a sense that people needed to see the trails, they needed to go fishing, they needed to get out on the lake, they needed to float a river; and Arkansas State Parks provided all those things.”
Although never closing completely, Spann said the pandemic affected the economic impact the park system usually has on the state. Since mid-March, he said the system has experienced a $9 million cash shortfall, and its general revenue was reduced.
Due to this decline in revenue, he said they basically froze expenses in the parks except for the utilities and employee pay.
“I know a lot of State Park Systems had to furlough a lot of people, but we never had to lay anybody off,” Spann said. “We were very adamant about keeping people on the payroll because we knew once the governor started lifting restrictions that people would want to love our State Parks even more.
“And we learned that actually throughout the entire pandemic; our State Parks have been loved to death. We realized that we are important to people, and that’s a good feeling.”