Stories will bring visitors

Jimmy Cunningham is onto something. Actually, he’s onto a lot. Cunningham is the executive director of Delta Rhythm & Bayous Alliance, and he made a pitch last week to members of the Advertising and Promotion Commission.

The proposal was, at its foundation, selling an idea, and to that end, Cunningham made a convincing argument.

It is that Pine Bluff has a story to tell. Actually, he said, it has a multitude of stories to tell.

The other element is an “if you build it, they will come” argument. Again, Cunningham made a splendid case, explaining that one of the hotter concepts in tourism is that which concentrates on an area’s culture, heritage and art.

If that weren’t enough, Cunningham connected the dots, quite literally.

Across the country, there are several “trails” that connect one like site to another. Pine Bluff’s stories fit within many of those trails, which include such collectives as civil rights, cotton, music, Native Americans, Southern literature, slavery, railroads, the Delta and crafts.

Cunningham even worked in some comparisons, pointing out how smaller towns such as New Iberia, La., Clarksdale, Miss., and Paducah, Ky., have been able to market themselves to a much greater degree than Pine Bluff has.

Actually, to start the meeting, the A&P director, Sheri Storie, said Pine Bluff really has no tourism.

We’ve often thought the same thing. The city is in the middle of making the lives of its residents more satisfying, with a new library and aquatic center and public buildings.

But is there really much to attract someone from Little Rock to Pine Bluff?

There’s definitely the casino, and it’s nice and is attracting scads of people, but that’s a unique environment.

Once people are there, we imagine they mostly stay there.

For them to do otherwise begs the initial question: If they left the casino to do other touristy things, where would they go, exactly?

Storie said she knew it was bad when revenues actually rose last year. That’s not a typo.

If Pine Bluff relied very much on tourism, the pandemic would have crushed those revenue numbers for last year, she said.

But the city doesn’t have any tourism to speak of so the bottom line was not much affected by the lock down on most activities.

Back to those other towns that are much smaller: Cunningham simply looked at TripAdvisor reviews.

In short, those towns had hundreds if not a few thousand reviews posted on the travel website about the various destinations in those areas, while the much larger Pine Bluff had fewer than 150.

The idea is for the A&P Commission to give this effort $1.5 million over the next seven years as seed money to get started. Once started, the effort should be able to attract some state, federal and special-purpose matching dollars.

Pine Bluff can be dreary to look at, although that is changing, what with the downtown beautification project in high gear. And it’s not as if we will suddenly get a Disney Land of Delta Enchantment theme park.

But we don’t need that anyway. As Cunningham said, we just need to provide the infrastructure that will allow us to tell the stories that make this area special.

We urge the A&P Commission to take the necessary first steps to start down this trail, a trail that could and should lead to the discovery and celebration of our own past and why we are more than worthy of a tourist’s notice.