By: Stephanie Reynolds
“WHOOAA…OW!” I thought to myself as I painfully skidded to a halt on the grippy rubber mat. At least I think I thought that to myself; it’s all kind of a blur. I remember shooting down the slide, a bit of airtime, then a hard landing. I realized that my dress wasn’t where I had tucked it at about the same time I saw two honored elders sitting on a bench six feet away. I scrambled to prevent any evidence of wardrobe malfunction and apologized with as much grace as a 53-year-old woman launching out of a metal tube with her untucked dress could muster.
“You’re fine, nothing showed,” laughed one of the gentlemen, and the other seconded his assessment. I think they were just being polite because I felt a very definite rubber mat burn distressingly high on the back of one leg…but plausible deniability is a wonderful thing to preserve the idea of dignity when actual evidence of such is lacking.
I was at Discovery Park in Union City, Tennessee for the Rural Tourism Conference. You might have seen in the paper back in June that we (Athens-Limestone County Tourism) won the bid to host the 2025 conference when we, along with Chamber, LCEDA, Main Street, and the mayor, presented at Tuscaloosa against two other great organizations.
This a huge deal for us as an office and as a county. The host community arranges hotels, venues, food, entertainment, shopping, speakers, and more. The 200-300 guests get a chance to visit other areas, shop at our stores, eat our amazing cuisine, learn new ways, and share struggles.
Regardless of location, rural tourism generally shares the same difficulty: funding. Large counties with big venues and attractions such as theme parks, large convention centers, zoos, and beaches have very little trouble proving their tourism worth and get budgets to bring in more.
However, in smaller communities where there are no built-in attractions, the struggle is real. You need tourists to bring in funding for the county, which provides money for roads, schools, and services. You need funding to bring in tourists. Tourism in Limestone County brings in $55 million a year (yes, that is correct), but because the tourists are coming in ones and twos, and shop, eat, and browse individually. It is difficult to see what we do and what we can do in the future with a few brave decisions.
But let’s look at Union City…
Union City, where we visited, is a town of 11,000 people in a county of 30,000 people. In comparison, Athens has a population the same as their whole county! And Limestone County has a population of 110,000!
But they have Discovery Park, which welcomes 250,000 visitors each year. I had no idea the key to turning me back into an 8-year-old girl was simply walking through the doors. I went high in the air and stood on a glass floor 13 stories up. I held onto a rail as a room shook in an earthquake simulation. I climbed through a tunnel to pop up in a polycarbonate observation bubble, face-to-face with a mildly bored catfish.
We had free rein of the entire park, and it was glorious! Room after room of history and science and space and cars and every cool thing! And I didn’t even tour outside!
Now, this is where the tourism professional in me kicks in: Imagine the revenue from those visitors eating, sleeping, shopping, buying fuel. The park provides jobs. The park provides documentable proof of tourism. The park provides mightily for the city and county and for quality of life for the residents. We need something like that here.
But I am careful with progress—not all progress is good, and my job is to watch out for my fellow citizens and improve their quality of life. I looked at “250K” and thought, “Would that negatively impact Limestone County in some way? Would this make a ton of traffic and congestion and strain?” I don’t want that for me or for you.
But breaking down the numbers, that’s just an extra 685 people per day. Fiddlers Convention brings in 10 thousand people over the course of 3 days, and the only traffic impact was around the university, which is right in town on narrow streets. A venue that is just outside of town wouldn’t even have that tiny bit of headache.
If we got a venue that would host just 250,000 people per year (for comparison, the Von Braun Center seats 10,000 people at one time), and those people spent a mere $100 in Limestone County, that is an extra $25,000,000 per year! That money goes to us directly (shops, restaurants, etc.) and indirectly (roads, tax savings, etc.).
Why am I bringing this up? Because we need to invest wisely in the future of our community. We are past the point of relying mostly on passive tourism to fund us. We can, wisely, draw people in, provide them with an excellent experience, then use the revenue they provide to better our future. We need something, even if it isn’t another Discovery Park (though if we do get a big slide, I’ll make sure to wear shorts under my dress).
By: Stephanie Reynolds, Athens – Limestone Tourism Association
November 14, 2024
