Hot Springs Pushes Envelope, Remains State?s Tourism Star

Hot Springs is going for the hat trick.

Last year, the Hot Springs Advertising and Promotion Commission released Bill Clinton trading cards, which were a national hit.

This year, the “Antiques Roadshow,” one of the most sought-after conventions in the country, will stop by on July 13.

And next year, a $27 million sports/entertainment arena will open.

“The citizens of Hot Springs are very aggressive and forward-thinking people,” Hot Springs Mayor Mike Bush said of the town’s success.

Others say the reason for its success is simple: People like coming to Hot Springs, said Steve Arrison, executive director of the Hot Springs Advertising and Promotion Commission.

“The bottom line is it’s hard to sell a place that people don’t like,” Arrison said. “And people have liked Hot Springs for hundreds of years. So we’re just adding things and adding things.”

Hot Springs is the No. 1 tourism destination in Arkansas. In 2001, tourists spent $392.6 million in Garland County, which resulted in $19.26 million worth of taxes for the state, according to the Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism.

After receiving millions of dollars in dirt-cheap advertising with the Clinton cards, the city could receive even more when it releases Spanish and Japanese version of the cards later this spring. And the city surely will receive a wave of free publicity when the “Antiques Roadshow” comes to town.

“In the stadium venues, they want to get the Rolling Stones; in the arena venues they want to get U2. But for conventions it’s the ‘Antiques Roadshow,'” said Kevin Molloy, facility administrator for Polk County Convention Complex in Des Moines, Iowa.

Des Moines hosted the show in 1999, and Molloy said the publicity the show brought the city was worth six figures.

When PBS announced Jan. 17 that the “Antiques Roadshow” was coming to Hot Springs on July 13, it was a major victory for the town of 35,000 people, which had been trying to get on the Roadshow schedule for two years.

The show will travel to only six cities in 2002. The others will be Seattle; Cleveland; Albuquerque, N.M.; Kansas City, Mo.; and Charlotte, N.C.

The spark that landed the show can be traced to an unknown Hot Springs man who called the Hot Springs Convention and Visitors Bureau and told a secretary that he watches the “Antiques Roadshow” all the time and would be interested in it coming to Hot Springs, said Cindy DeWitt, regional sales manager for the Convention and Visitors Bureau.

The secretary passed the message to DeWitt.

“I thought, ‘What the heck, I’m going to call and see,'” DeWitt said.

Besides, she said, she likes a challenge.

“Some people didn’t think it would ever happen,” DeWitt said.

“Antiques Roadshow” is the most-watched prime time show on PBS with about 13 million viewers a week. Only the children’s show “Arthur” has more viewers on PBS.

The show is part treasure hunt and part history lesson as attendees bring in dusty items in hopes that the show’s professional appraisers will confirm their dreams of garage-sale bonanzas.

DeWitt started calling the show’s producers and told them about the historic value of Hot Springs.

“It did take a little bit of a while to get them to consider Hot Springs,” she said.

The key of getting them here was the Convention Center.

The show requires its host cities to have at least 75,000 SF of freestanding exhibit space, which the Hot Springs Convention Center has. DeWitt said the show’s producers also were impressed that, at the time, a sitting president was from Hot Springs.

Every season the “Antiques Roadshow,” which is produced by WGBH in Boston, travels to at least one venue that isn’t considered a major city “to see what happens,” said Peter Cook, executive producer of the show.

But at first, the show’s producers thought Hot Springs’ population was too small, said Matthew Haberstroh, the show’s production supervisor. It usually looks for cities with a population of 300,000 or more.

Cook said he was concerned that Hot Springs might not be able to draw the approximately 6,000 people needed to make the show successful.

Although Hot Springs is the smallest city in the show’s six-year history, DeWitt said the audience will come not only from Arkansas but Texas and Louisiana.

“We were convinced that Hot Springs has a record of drawing people to come, and we decided this was a good chance for us,” Cook said.

The show is considering traveling to smaller cities, and Hot Springs will be a good test, Haberstroh said.

The footage shot in Hot Springs will be shown during the show’s 2003 season.

Arrison said he thinks the show came because the city has the infrastructure to support 3 million people a year, with lakes and mountains.

“I think that really appealed to them in the same way it appeals to tourists and conventioneers,” he said.

When the show came to Tulsa last year, it generated a great deal of interest in the antiques industry, said Nancy Phillips, director of visitor development with the Tulsa Convention and Visitor’s Bureau.

Because the show also featured segments on Tulsa and the surrounding area, it was worth thousands of dollars in advertising, she said.

In December, construction began on the $27 million sports/entertainment arena at the Hot Springs Convention Center.

When it’s completed in September 2003, the Convention Center will be 360,000 SF, making it the largest building for meetings in Arkansas.

The arena will hold 6,000 people and will have a wireless scoreboard, a removable basketball floor and a fixed upper seating area.

The expansion comes only three years after the Convention Center completed a $34 million renovation.

In 1995, voters approved a $34 million bond issue to expand the Convention Center, which was built in the 1960s, from 70,000 SF to 240,000 SF. The bond wasn’t expected to be paid off until 2012, but the city found out that it was going to be paid off in 2002, Arrison said.

Then city officials realized they needed a sports and entertainment arena.

City officials returned to voters, urging them to approve another half-cent sales tax for the arena, which they did.

“It’s sort of unusual for a building to expand just three years after the last expansion,” Arrison said.

The expansion makes the Convention Center a multipurpose building.

“Before, we were just a convention facility,” he said. “Now we can still do conventions and bring in larger conventions but also host sporting events, which we couldn’t do in the past.”

He said a number of parents would like to see their children stay in town and play for the state basketball championship, instead of heading to Pine Bluff or Springdale.

“It’s a goal of ours to bring those [high school] championship games to Hot Springs,” Arrison said.

The center also will try and land some of the NCAA Division II basketball championships games.

When the arena isn’t in use for sporting events, it could be opened up to add another 40,000 SF to the center’s 75,000 SF of exhibit hall space.