The Long And Winding Career Of Richard Davies

Richard Davies certainly knows his way around Arkansas. State government, too, for that matter.

As executive director of the Department of Parks and Tourism, Davies oversees development and operations of the parks and all the people and duties that go along with that. He’s worked for the department for 42 years, been director of the department for 20 and has served under eight governors.

Along the way, he’s been named State Parks Director of the Year by the National Association of State Parks Directors, and has been inducted into the Hall of Fame by both the Arkansas Game and Fish Foundation and the Arkansas Hospitality Association. The Arkansas Broadcasters Association named him Arkansan of the Year in 2004.

He can recall experiences, adventures and improvements with the best of them. Talk Business & Politics Editor-in-Chief Roby Brock sat down with Davies in February to discuss his long career in Arkansas tourism for the latest edition of our bi-monthly magazine, which you can access here.

TB&P: Tell me how you got started in this industry.

Davies: Actually it was an accident. I was a journalism major and had gotten out of the University of Arkansas and Army active duty and was looking for a job.

Bill Henderson, who was another journalism graduate from the University of Arkansas, was the director of Parks and Tourism. He was looking for an administrative assistant who could write about not so much tourism but what the department was doing.

That was in the days when [Gov. Dale] Bumpers had put a lot of money into state parks in places like DeGray and Toltec and the Folk Center and those places were just coming online. So I was writing about what the department was doing, and it became more and more administrative and less and less writing. I ended up over at State Parks for 14 years and back here for another 25.

TB&P: How big was everything back in the day then? It had to be a lot more of a skeleton crew than it is now.

Davies: It was a lot smaller. There were probably 15 or so less state parks; the tourism budget for a promotion might have been $600,000 or $800,000. The park system now makes about 25 million bucks. And I remember when the first year we made a million.

TB&P: When was that?

Davies: That was probably back in the ’70s.

TB&P: Were you just hooked?

Davies: Yeah. There’s a family tie. My grandfather was the first director of State Parks and my dad worked at Petit Jean when they were building that. And I don’t know if it’s in the blood or what, but you get hooked from both the Parks side and the Tourism side.

When people ask why I like it, it’s that you have no clue what’s going to happen tomorrow. You may have a list, you may think you know what you’re going to do, but it’s extremely diverse and you can’t ever count on anything.

We’re really fortunate that we’ve got gorgeous places in Arkansas. Not just the state parks, but a lot of the Corps of Engineers areas and the forests and private areas as well.

And the good thing about it, there’s some very good people in the industry who honestly do feel like they’re Arkansas’ front door, that they have a responsibility to make people welcome, to make them like Arkansas. One of the things I like hearing on emails or comment cards or whatever is when they say everybody in Arkansas is so nice.

TB&P: I’m pretty sure your New York counterpart doesn’t get that same type of email there.

Davies: Yes, but besides the gorgeous scenery and the resources, we really do have really nice people here.

TB&P: Let’s go prior to the eighth of a cent sales tax. What happened from your time in the system before the passage of that tax? What were the struggles, what were the assets that you had to work with?

Davies: The issue with state parks literally from the very beginning is that there’s generally more support to build them than there is to take care of them. And if you look at the history of state parks, you’ll go through these growth spurts.

Then when it comes time to take care of them, it’s suddenly time to cut government back. You know the joke around here is that everybody wants to build statues, but nobody wants to clean up after the pigeons.

So if you look at our history, it was about a 20-year cycle. Dale Bumpers called the state parks system a statewide embarrassment when he became governor. And he invested more money in State Parks in his administration than had been spent in all the time back to the 1920s when Petit Jean was established. So we were in this great expansion, and were hiring all these young college kids, and were all working together and growing up together.

Then suddenly it’s time to cut back on government. And we were given a lot of parks we didn’t even ask for in some cases and no money to take care of them. Suddenly you’ve got more babies than you can feed. We were into that cycle again.

And so prior to the eighth of a cent, the hole had gotten so deep there was no way the Legislature would ever have enough money to pull it out. So basically, we had a legislative committee, and Game and Fish did, too. There were sort of parallel issues. And we took around legislators to all the parks and said, “Guys, we’re not lying to you, take a look at this stuff.”

We literally were taking siding off the back of a building and putting it on the front if it looked better. And so they said, “Well, yes, we agree you’ve got a problem but we don’t have any money. So you’re just going to have to go get it yourself.”

Steve Wilson at Game and Fish and I got together and decided we should get into a coalition, so to speak. We decided to add the Department of Heritage because they had the Old State House and the natural areas and all that, and Keep Arkansas Beautiful, which at that time was an executive agency out of the governor’s office.

We just went out to the voters and said here’s the situation: How do you want your parks to look? How do you want your game and fish areas to look? How do you want your historic buildings to look?

I think at that time one-eighth of one cent came to $10 a taxpayer per year. We also found out that … people would do things for their kids that they wouldn’t do for themselves. So the slogan was “Save it for the Kids.” And, of course, you remember, we had to do it twice because it wasn’t advertised by the secretary of state correctly. So in ’96 we finally got it passed and it saved us, I mean, literally.

TB&P: So take me back to the backstory – where did the idea for an eighth of a cent as the funding mechanism come from? Were you guys in a backroom at Doe’s one night?

Davies: No.

TB&P: Who was the brainchild?

Davies: Missouri. Missouri had done it. And I don’t know if theirs was constitutional. Ours had to be constitutional because of Game and Fish. They couldn’t accept general revenues.

So we had talked to them about what they had done, what they had learned. One of the jokes up there was that Missouri, I think, ended up on one election with a sixth of a cent. The people of Missouri thought that a sixth was less than an eighth, you know. So they said, “well heck, we should have gone for a quarter.”

Anyway, what we did, though, is we went to the Legislature and we backed into a one-eighth of a cent. In other words they said, “OK, what have you got now? From all sources, whether it be general improvement funds, whether it be the real estate transfer tax, whatever. OK, you’re not going to fix it all at once anyway, so if you took 10 years and spread it out, how much would you need?”

So we had our money calculated, and literally we backed into one-eighth of one cent that would generate the amount of money we needed. The only thing wrong about that was that as soon as we got it, the natural inclination of governors and legislators is, “well, you’ve got your own money, now you don’t need that [the other fund sources].” I said, “Wait a minute, that wasn’t the deal.”

TB&P: We would’ve asked for more if we’d known, so…

Davies: That’s right. Or give us a sixth and we’ll give you all of it back. So that’s the only thing that bothers us about the sustainability. … We can’t overbuild to the point that the funds we have can’t take care of it. And that’s the monster in the closet in the park business.

TB&P: Yeah. So you’re coming up on 42 years?

Davies: I started in ’73, so, yeah, 42.

TB&P: Is that eighth of a cent conservation aid the biggest thing that you think has catapulted the tourism industry?

Davies: There is no question. If somebody said what’s the best thing you had anything to do with, it’s the eighth of a cent. Because of it – the theory on it was on the front end, and it’s still working this way – is most of that money is going to go to fixing and replacing things. And over time, if you take care of it you won’t have to do that much of that.

So over time that fund eventually will become more of a maintenance fund than it will be a capital fund. It’s working pretty well. But … as you know, it would be very easy to spend more on building things and then someday saying, “Daggone, I can’t pay the light bill again.”

TB&P: In your 42 years you’ve seen the tourism industry evolve into a more than $6 billion industry. Could you have in your wildest imagination thought what has happened would happen?

Davies: When I started, tourism was just asserting itself that it was in fact an industry. I’ve always called it the “Rodney Dangerfield of economic development.” Everybody loves factories, but tourism employs almost 100,000 people.

What has happened over time is the industry has gotten organized. Technology has changed everything. It used to be that tourism research was fairly simple. You’d put an ad in Southern Living and you’d get a coupon back and you’d know how many people answered the ad. There were no such things as websites, Facebook, Twitter or blogs. I guess the product has changed because the demand has changed. I can remember, for instance, if you went to Petit Jean, and they had a trail, you might walk it. But that’s not why you went.

Now people go to hike the trail and if you’ve got a cabin they’ll stay in it. If you see what’s happened, it’s completely turned around. The activities are driving the visitation a lot more than it did.

Back in the ’70s, how many adult bicyclists did you know? I remember my wife putting down the paper one day and saying, “Do people really ride bicycles down mountains?” I said, “Yes, on purpose.”

Motorcycles. We just reprinted 100,000 motorcycle guides. And we can’t keep them. Go to Mount Magazine, Petit Jean, any of the places in the Ozarks, the resorts on Ouachita, and there are motorcycles everywhere. So things have changed.

The Clinton library. I grew up in Little Rock. I used to tell people that the River Market’s where you went to get murdered, not get a drink. It’s just transformed. Look what Crystal Bridges has done up in Northwest. Everything has drastically changed. The industry, to their credit, is doing their best to keep up with it all.

TB&P: You’ve seen a lot in four decades. What’s your vision for where the tourism industry goes next?

Davies: If the trends continue, it’s going to become more and more specialized. It used to be when we promoted, you could talk in vast generalizations.

TB&P: The Natural State.

Davies: Exactly, the Natural State. But now if you have a specific interest, you want specific information on that specific interest.

TB&P: So you will leave this agency on Nov. 30 of this year. What are you going to do in retirement?

Davies: Probably play with grandkids, hunt, fish, go to the family place and mow grass and fix fences. Somebody said do nothing but that kind of stuff for six months and then figure out if you like it or not.

TB&P: It’s been a good ride.

Davies: It has been a good ride. I mean, it’s like family. That may be the hardest part. I love my family and wife, but all my friends – and some are all over the state – I’m not going to be seeing them every day.