As long as Pat Matsukis has lived in Eureka Springs, there has been controversy about the City Advertising and Promotion Commission. Most recently, two CAPC commissioners resigned after a crowd turned out to protest actions taken by the Chair to remove a brief clip of a drag queen from a promotional video.
“In the early eighties, Bob Purvis got people to give up the Downtown Merchants’ Association to put all the eggs in the CAPC basket,” Matsukis said. “In all the years that the CAPC has been operating, every few years it runs into a kerfuffle. With this last round of activities with the two commissioners, it occurred to me that we need more than advertising. We are a size 16 person trying to fit into size 8. The needs of this town are greater than what the advertising commission can provide. What if we can come up with a better mousetrap?”
Matsukis has only about a week left to collect 140 signatures (she currently has 70) to put a proposal on the November ballot that would let voters choose “Yes” or “No” on eliminating the CAPC. She said one possibility would be to replace the CAPC with a city commission that could oversee a 1 to 1.5 percent tax that would equal the current revenues from the CAPC tax of three percent on food and lodging sales.
“By putting something on the ballot, my hope is to least start the discussion,” Matsukis said. “I have always supported advertising, but we need more than that. For example, there could be a new tax that would be used 80 percent for advertising and promotion, ten percent for the Aud and ten percent for infrastructure. Currently we can’t make those changes because they are not allowed. The CAPC only does one thing. We advertise all over the place but have no measurable way to evaluate the results except how many beds are filled every night.”
Matsukis would like to see better street and handicapped accessible bathrooms and badly needed sidewalk repairs done with the infrastructure money. And she said retail needs to be represented.
“The national trend is everyone buying from Amazon and Walmart,” she said. “It is hard for small business owners to come in these days and compete with the big guns. Local retailers can’t match the low prices of these big online retailers. The question is, how do we adapt? How do we go forward?
“Because of the state CAPC ordinance, we are limited in the things we can do. Our needs are greater than what is allowed by the statute. By putting this on the ballot, people could decide in November. If they want to keep the CAPC, that is fine. I have never, ever said we don’t need advertising. But why wouldn’t we change it to get the best bang for our dollar?”
Restaurants and lodging establishments might be concerned that upending the CAPC could lead to failure to do what is necessary to bring tourists to town. Matsukis thinks this is a good time to bring this up because she believes we could do better.
“As a result of the recent CAPC crisis, I observed that we have some of the best minds around,” she said. “We have some great people in this town. It is a perfect time to restructure this tax so it is benefitting all of us. That is true success. We could be having better discussions on how to spend money if we had different parameters on our statute.”
To sign the petition, Matsukis can be reached at (479) 363-4740.