Convention and Visitors Advisory - Regular Meeting

Morning, everyone. Thank you all for coming. Are there any public comments?

Good morning, Cindy. Cindy Trevino, Chief Marketing Officer. Real quick, I wanted to share with you all a commercial that we put together very quickly just to help with the summertime, telling everybody that summer's not over here in South Padre Island. So we have this commercial running in the RGB, San Antonio, and in Austin. And we just put this together as of last week.

Great, thank you.

On South Padre Island, there's still plenty of summer waiting for you. Cast a line, catch the sunrise, and see what's biting at the island's new beach pier. There's never a bad day to be on the island, but weekdays on the island, well, they just give you more. So grab your rod, bring a family, and come catch what's left of summer. At South Padre Island, summer's not over.

And that's it. So we used a new videographer. We're just testing them out, see if we can use them in the future for other things too. So just wanted to share that with you.

Thank you very much. Any other public comments? You can sit there. You can stay. I mean, unless you're using the computer.

We're very pleased to present Mr. Jose Toleado, if you would stand up. Jose is our new budget coordinator, long awaited for the Convention and Visitors Bureau. He started just this week with us, so we're happy to have him here. And when we go through the budget process, you all will see him as well. So welcome him on board.

Good morning. Welcome. Thank you.

Thank you.

Any other public comments? 3, none. We'll move to item 4, approved consent agenda. Is there a motion?

Motion to approve the consent agenda items.

Discussion? All in favor say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Okay, 5.1, presentation and discussion by tourism economics regarding the Q3 fiscal year-to-date marketing summary. Good morning.

Good morning. Thank you for having me today. I wanted to give you guys kind of a brief overview of what's happened on the island from your lodging sector, a little bit of more visitation information for the quarter. You've had a really strong summer. It's nice to see that the island is doing so well. So just kind of regionally across the U.S., we are seeing increases recently. Across the country, you're seeing for the month of June, hotel demand was up 2.1%. A lot of that was affected by FIFA travel throughout the U.S. and mostly the host cities. Interestingly enough, the non-host cities actually did better in demand. Host cities actually dropped in demand during FIFA because of cancellations and blocks. But you can see also there was an increase in short-term rentals. So short-term rental demand actually increased in the U.S. for the month of June. And year-to-date, hotel demand and short-term rental demand are both up.

Short-term rentals.

Go short-term rentals. The things that we're still keeping an eye on is that oversee arrivals. So we did see international travel into the region and into the U.S. actually improve a little bit, still down year over year, but we had a lot of visitors from Europe. I'm sure you all had all of the news this summer of all of the fun stuff they were finding, like ranch dressing was a big deal for them, which is great to see. And so we're still keeping an eye on that international arrival, especially for this region. We're keeping an eye on Mexico. And then when you compare it to Texas, so the US trends, you're seeing our passengers up, hotel demand up, year to date. And then in Texas, we're still seeing our passengers down. A lot of the drops are the larger airports, but your regional airports in this area are also down. We're seeing more drive market visitation. And you'll see a little bit in some of the marketing the team is doing, you're seeing more of that, a big percentage change in that. And then hotel demand for Texas is also up 1.6%. A lot of that also, some FIFA related in June, but year to date still seeing an increase year over year in a lot of the markets. And then taxes. So when I look at just the fiscal year for the Gulf Coast, the Gulf Coast, 3.7% in actual room receipts that are collected by the state of Texas. This is from the Texas Controllers data. The Panhandle Plains is winning with a 30% gain. They have a data center. So if anybody wants to increase demand in their hotels, bring in a data center. That is starting to slow down, so you see a little bit of a leveling off on that there. And then the prairies and lakes, which is the Dallas region area, is at 4.8. A lot of demand in that region outside of Dallas, because Dallas is going through a convention center renovation. So the Gulf Coast is the third in line. I'm sorry, fourth in line behind the Piney Woods, which is the whole Bastrop area. Also, that Bastrop corridor going into Austin is seeing big increases as well. So South Padre, how are we doing? Your hotel trends showed really strong demand and great rate growth in the market. This includes most of the hotels in the area that are reporting to Smith Travel Research. Demand was up 3.2% for the quarter. ADR was up 2% for the quarter this time frame. If you look at the occupancy ADR and revenue at the bottom, the growth in occupancy was higher in May. It was 2.2% growth month year over year. June was up 2%. Where June really lifted the revenue in the market was with the rate. The combination of the occupancy and the rate really lifted the market for the month of June. And then the short-term rentals did really well. So a huge increase in demand there. of 12.6%. This is the key data looking at AirDNA, scrape data for the quarter. Rates are slightly down. There has been a shift, again, in where we see how they're reporting that information, where they're reporting the fees in it, but then also a shift in the types of Airbnb rentals, the size of them are shifting a little bit, so nice increase on all of them. There's a little bit of a mix change in why the rate is dropping. And again, June was the big winner. You saw increases in revenue each month. June was up over 12% in revenue with a little bit of a drop in ADR, but a huge gain in rate in occupancy. And then just looking at overall hotel competitively, South Potter Island for the quarter was up 0.3% in occupancy. You were just behind Galveston in the growth that they saw. Galveston did have a little bit more compression with FIFA being right next door to them for the month of June, so they saw a little bit bigger lift, but South Padre then on the rate side also grew more in rate, or grew the same as Galveston, but was second in rate overall behind Corpus, and so second in overall rev par. And then short-term rentals, same thing on the demand side. When you look at it competitively for the quarter, You can see it's a 12.6% gain in demand for the quarter versus Port Aransas was up 18.6%. Port Aransas has also grown in supply a lot more, so they're seeing a lot more short-term rentals in that region. Galveston was only up 10.1. Corpus Christi's not growing as much right now on short-term rental. So year to date, overall the year has been a great year for the island. Revenue is up 6.6%. You can see the revenue trends in the yellow line on the bottom really started to gain speed after April. So April was up, May, June was up. We started off a little bit slower and then just kind of went into high gear as the summer came in. And then when you look at the short term rentals, short term rentals kind of kicked it into gear starting in spring break. So spring break started lifting over last year, and you've been well on your way past that since revenues at 4.4% for short term rentals year to date. So looking at the individual short-term rentals, I know that you've asked in the past how we're tracking this. This is information that we get from key data, and now we're breaking it out into three different pockets. So we're looking at the Airbnb, which is the top section that you see there. That is the scraped data from Airbnb. The center section is direct, so any of the short-term rentals that are directly reporting to key data, their information is in there. If you look at the supply, it's about a third of the supply that you see from Airbnb scraped that is reporting. And then the bottom section is VRBO. There has been a shift in some of the reporting that's coming from VRBO scraped. We're seeing some of the VRBOs are moving to HomeAway. Some are moving to Booking.com. So we're looking for options of finding information of how we can get some of that scrape data from booking.com and other sources for you.

This is really good data. Thank you very much. And it mirrors what I see in our business. And so I'm very interested in continuing to have this discussion.

Yeah, absolutely. And again, it's been a great year for short term. I was just looking at the scrape data, which is the one that we rely on the most, it's got the biggest sample size, you're seeing a revenue increase again, for the month was 12.1 year to date, you're up in revenue, and really, really strong demand across the board. So congratulations. And then the hotel tax receipts. I wanted to bring this information to you. This is what is reported to the Texas Comptroller's Office of Texas from the performance from South Padre Island. Everybody reports it with a little bit of twist on how they spell South Padre, so we pull every variation that we have. And looking at total tax receipts, This is July through June of last year. Its total receipts are $186 million, and this includes, for the Texas Controller's Office, it's looking at AirDNA home away and hotel receipts for the island, and a 20% increase in total revenues received. The taxable receipts take out anybody who stayed more than 30 nights or anybody who was tax-exempt because they're a government employee. And so that increase is a little bit lower because they're removed. But again, the same trends that we're seeing from hotel, the STAR data and the short-term rental data, we've seen increases starting in March. And really, you can see the trajectory on that top right-hand side of how much higher we are in revenue receipts received in the state of Texas from South Padrean. Also, the short-term rentals, of course, seasonally always outpace the hotels. So again, short-term rentals hit their stride in March. Hotels didn't really hit their stride until April. And so that seasonality is still showing, where the summer is much stronger for the short-term rentals. As we go into the winter, you see a little bit of a higher trend on revenue from the hotel market. And then looking at fiscal year-to-date performance for the hotels, again, looking at a comparative set, South Padre beats everybody in occupancy for the year, which is great to see for the hotels. You're second in rate behind Galveston, a different mix of business, different mix of hotels that are there. But when you look at the percentage change, South Padre is not growing as much in rate fiscally as some of the other competitors. You're beating everybody in occupancy. The island is actually still growing, right, which is great to see. They're just not growing it as fast as some of the other markets. And then airports. So let's talk a little bit about the airport area because we're seeing a lot more drive market. I think some of that is related to gas prices. As we all know, gas prices have hit an all-time high. Gas prices are actually about 52% up from where they were in January, and that's affecting how people travel. It's affecting jet fuel. It's affecting flight patterns. So the regional airports, when combined, are showing a decrease in the index over last year. So March, you can see, was down about 4%. April, the same. May, down about 5%. June was down about 3% year over year when you look at the arrivals into the airports. And looking at the visitation, you're seeing a breakdown of year-to-date down in domestic and international. The biggest shortfall in international that I saw was Mexico. So Mexican travelers are not flying in to these regional airports. A lot of them are driving because we're still seeing Mexico visitation on the island. We're still seeing a lot of Mexico travelers. They're just not flying as much as they used to. And then the domestic travelers, we did see in June, interestingly enough, although you have a very small percentage of Japanese travelers into the region, I did see an increase of 12% from Japan. There was Japan games in Texas. There was one in Houston and one in Dallas. And we did see an increase of them flying into these three airports this summer.

Wow.

And again, when you look at the top origin markets, these origin markets are based on air arrivals. So you're looking at actual itineraries of where people purchase a ticket to where the ticket ends, regardless of how many stops they've made. So they bought a ticket into one of these three regional airports. Houston, you're seeing a less percentage of Houston's. travelers that are flying in, you're seeing still an increase in them visiting the island. So you're seeing now that they're probably driving into the region. Dallas is still flying in. Austin is driving a little bit more. Minneapolis is about flat. Las Vegas is still flat. Orlando, there was a nice increase from Orlando, and there was a nice increase from Chicago, which are much further regions. And so that also would attribute to your hotel and your short-term rental. And then looking at comparative insights. This, we're looking at mobile location data. So a lot of information on this chart, so let me walk you through it. On the left-hand side, you're seeing April through June this year. On the right-hand side, you're seeing April through June last year. These are visitors that have come onto the island, have stayed a minimum of four hours, and have come onto the island less than three times in a month's time frame so that we don't attribute any of the commuters onto the island into the visitor's number. You can see on the far left hand side there's that distance share. 50% of the visitors that came onto the island in this timeframe were from inside a 250 mile radius versus last year, it was only 30%. So a lot more regional travel. They're flying in less, but you're seeing that increase in the short-term rentals. You're also seeing a little bit longer length of stay, not much, 1.6 nights versus 1.5 nights. But now these regional travelers, 91% of them are staying the night. So that would show in your short-term rentals and your hotel demand data. where last year you were only seeing 78% that were staying the night. So a much bigger increase in these travelers coming on. Again, that's regional traveler. 36% are now from the Edinburgh Valley area. San Antonio is showing 15% versus last year they were only 13%. So you're going to hear from our friends in San Antonio. Some of that is driving in and they're coming and you're seeing an increase there. And then Houston, I used to be from Houston, so Houston is beating Dallas. Houston's always trying to beat Dallas. And they are seeing an increase in travel over the Dallas market. So again, we're seeing more of them coming to the island. We're seeing less of them flying in, so it's more of a driving market, regional drive area.

Is airlift a factor in that less travel, air travel?

Yeah, so I think if we're seeing them show up in the island with this mobile location data, but we're seeing a shortfall in air travel, that would show that they're driving in.

but is our availability of flights reduced?

There's not a shift. There's not a big shift. Spirit Airlines would be one of the shifts, but I don't think that any of the three regional airports, I think maybe McAllen had a lift from Spirit Airlines, but I can go back and look at specifically each of the airlines and see which one might be the shortfall and get back to you on that.

One of the airport people just walked in back there. He can answer questions too, so.

Yeah, I would love to hear if there's any specific flights that have changed, but I know Spirit Airline is the biggest shift that we've seen across the U.S. this year. Need nothing here? So locally, he's saying Spirit Airlines did not have any lift.

Introduce yourself when you come to the mic, please, Nico. Good morning. Good morning. Good to see you.

Nico Meerman from Hallington International Airport. Spirit Airlines, you say exactly right. They went out of business. So nationally, they did have a little bit of an effect. Here in the Valley, they don't have any effect because they didn't fly here. But they did to San Antonio. So if for some reason you have somebody flying into San Antonio and then driving around, that would be the effect of Spirit in particular. Yeah. And then for the rest of the airlines portfolio, we're pretty much flat on the three airports, not only ours. Year over year, the same kind of portfolio. We do have an extra flight on Austin, but one less from Houston, so balance is out. So that is why you see the Austin increase, but the Houston decrease. And that's pretty much it. Yeah.

So the great news about that is that if you're seeing a decrease in flights, which we saw the flight information was brought down from Houston, you are seeing them show up in your mobile location data in a bigger percentage share than they used to in the past. So that would be your drivers. They're still coming in.

Very good. Kelly, if we could please get Nico a copy of this report. If he doesn't already have one, see if he has anything that jumps out to him that would be of interest.

Yep, I will. Thank you, Nico. Good to see you, Nico. Thanks for being here.

You're an invaluable asset to us. Airlift is critical to... and making sure we have the availability. Thank you.

For sure. Thank you.

I will say my flight last night was full, which is great.

You came from Austin.

I came from Austin into Harlingen, so it was packed. It was good to see. And then just looking at that international visitation, every time we look at it, I look for those little dots on the map. Those are heat maps. And, of course, being from Monterey, I always look for that Monterey heat map, and it always gets a little bit larger. But also we're seeing a little bit more from Reynosa. So Reynosa is showing a little bit more of that drive market, and they're more of a regional market. And that may be part of the reason why we're seeing Mexico flights down when you're seeing more of those border areas increasing in visitation. About 40% are from Monterey region, I would say, and the Reynoso is about 19.5%.

We've heard, anecdotally, Cindy, we've heard that they're here. Folks, it felt like the last couple of months there's been great visitation from Mexico. And today we're looking at our proposals for an agency down in Mexico, too. Yeah. Great presentation. I think she did a great job wrapping up a quarter instead of doing it every month now. I really like how you showed the U.S. perspective and then where Texas sits in that. I'm always curious why the northern Texas does so much better than the coast. I would have thought the coast was

single biggest attraction area in Texas you know the big thing about the north right now is that Dallas doesn't have a convention center and so the regions around it are doing really well they've targeted a very specific small group strategy to bring those those groups in so they've kind of almost I call it the vacuum sign they've vacuumed out smaller groups from other regions in Texas. Fort Worth is a big deal right now. They've got filming going on. They've got Taylor Sheridan's all over the place. They have new hotels going in. They also, Frisco has Universal. They've just added a universal that opened this June, and so that was a big driver. And of course, FIFA was in that area, right? So when you put FIFA in the middle of all of the Dallas Metroplex, they had two base camps. They had a media center. So they're seeing some of that. And the panhandle is that data center. They're showing occupancies over 80% with double-digit hotel revenue increases and short-term rental increases. They're opening up camps, you know, like 10... temporary camps for them, it'll die off. It'll slow down as soon as it's built and completed, but that's what we are expecting to see whenever a data center opens up or runs into an area. I know there's lots of regions in Texas looking at data centers, and that's one of the effects is the hotels just lift.

Interesting, kind of like the gas in the West Texas a while ago. Any other data that you all would like to see?

One of the things that I think to make sure we're comparing apples to apples, and I mentioned this before, I really would like to see the number of permits on short-term vacation rentals from one year to another. We may see an increase in demand or increase in supply, but If we don't know what we're really dealing with and the number of permits, if there's 1,000, if there's 1,500, obviously that's going to change the numbers. It's going to change the ADR if there's more supply because there's more to run. But then we're going to get, hopefully in theory, we're going to have more, we'll have higher. A tax increase and things of that nature. So I think it's very important to have, and we should be able to have access to the permits from one year to another. I mean, I think after COVID, I think we increased almost 33% in short-term rental. And so obviously... we're gonna increase the amount of money that's in taken, but it's not gonna show apple to apple. I mean, we've increased 10%. Are we really increasing 10%? Or is it just because our inventory has increased 30%?

It's a great question, and I was gonna address some of that in my next agenda item, so put a pin in that. All right.

My only other question here, Cindy, and this is great. We've always long been concerned about shoulder seasons, and I'm starting to see this really good, and I'm looking at some of the, maybe some of the increases in the shoulder seasons, and I think that we probably, I don't know how we look at that data better.

Yeah, I can do a little bit more digging on how those seasons have behaved. I've also got a call in to a couple of vendors to see if we can work with Kelly on getting you future data and demand on the book, so then you can see that going into the future and proactively see what's happening in October, what's happening in November time frames, and see kind of at least what's on the book on a pacing.

Yeah, I think a lot of us are seeing weekends and some of the things start to fill up more. I mean, right now we're looking, the fall's looking really good.

Yeah.

And I just want to kind of stay on top of where it's coming from and how we're doing that and what is it we need to continue to focus on. Yeah.

And we can do an analysis too. One of the things that we always do is like events, like 4th of July, the holidays. It might be good for us, and I can work with the team on doing an analysis of these two shoulder seasons, those two weeks of kids going back to school before it's Labor Day. In Texas, that seasonality of kids going back to school has changed. A lot of schools used to go in the last week of August. Now they're going in the week of the 11th of August, which is super early. So we can go back to the last four years and see those two weeks specifically here in the next couple weeks.

Great. On that aspect, at what point did the council this the island council would go and try to lobby um with congress to try to change the date because it always seems like every five to ten years it seems like they change it and it can't start before labor day or the week before labor day and then somehow schools start inching closer and closer to the beginning of august and then somebody brings up just what you mentioned i read that in the news that they were going to try to do that again but but i know the island used to to have the lobbyists go and fight for it and make it at that point.

So hopefully we can. I can take that one. I'll direct Luis Sanchez, who's our island advocate. But we work through that with the Texas Travel Alliance on an annual basis. And there is actually a law in Texas right now that they're not supposed to start school till the weekend after Memorial. I get them confused. Labor Day. Labor Day. Thank you. But then they allowed these things called schools of innovation, and if you showed that you were being innovative, then you could do certain things, and people changed the innovation or claimed innovation by opening schools. So they've since done some studies through the Texas Travel Alliance to show that the grades aren't necessarily better in these schools of innovation. So we'll go back, and when we have an opportunity to do that, I'll make sure that you all are aware and that we send our voice up to Austin through Louie and through a resolution as well.

I think one of the balances on that, just to add to that real quick, one of the balances is that they do, Texas now does a fall break. So that week, Indigenous People Day or Columbus Day in October, the October 10th, 11th time frame, at UCB that school's got out that Monday. Now there's school districts in Houston that are letting out the whole week. So that would be a week to keep an eye out for at the beach because that whole week is now starting to become a week.

Yeah, we can pull all the school calendars for the year and work in a fall thing. Great. Thank you, Cindy.

Was there anything else for Sandy? All right, cool. 5.2, update on the year over year hotel occupancy collections and fiscal. I just wanted to follow back on an ongoing. The fiscal year 25, 26, and 26, 27. I gotta read it on for the record. Go ahead, hit it.

My apologies. I just wanted to bring back a conversation that we had started when I came about what were some of the indicators we were gonna drive. We settled theoretically on state or local taxes. specifically because people don't tend to exaggerate their revenues in order to pay their taxes, so it seemed like a good indicator. This is, you'll see, a trend line from 2017 to 2025. The way that people report to the state, where we pull it out at source strategies, we can have the hotel only. then all is what everybody paid, so the delta between the hotels and all is what the short-term rentals are paying, and that's very relevant because I think you all know Airbnb will pay the state taxes on behalf of the client but they're not paying the local taxes. And when Cindy threw up that slide just a minute ago, $30 million all told in revenues from the short-term rentals from the month of June were Airbnb, VRBO, and others. I suspect some of those are paying, but I don't know that all of them are paying. So that's the first thing to say. Sandra Garcia is new CFO with the city. She shared the Decker contract with me. Decker is who we pay $120,000 a year to to normalize this. They should give me, Brian, that number right immediately. They should know that immediately. They're supposed to be sending letters out. They're supposed to be identifying people who are not paying. I haven't talked to him yet. Sandra's new. She hasn't talked to him yet. So I'd like to bring him here and have them do the pitch for you. Again, because I've also run into another company that I think could do some of this work as well. And then we can see if there is a delta between the short term rentals. Why I wanted to pull this up, though, is I wanted to see what was the best year that you all had had in this most recent run of 10 years. I'm not showing you anything you didn't know. Pre-COVID, you were bringing in about $8 million in taxes for the city. After COVID, you've been bringing in about 12. That number down at the bottom is how I'm trying to train everybody to talk about the penny value. You will always charge 17 cents or maybe 15 when you take the venue off of tax. It becomes a question of what is the tax worth. Here it's worth 1.5. In Galveston, it's worth 3.8. In Virginia Beach, it's worth 5.6. It's a calculation of your occupancy and your ADR. If you've got suppressed ADR and you're not charging as high as you can, we're not making as much taxes as we can. And I've said to a couple of you, if I want to get you guys to where Galveston was in the amount of business we're doing, where do I place double the amount of tourism? Can't place it in the summer. It's got to be midweek in the summer. It's got to be the shoulder seasons. and we gotta lift that ADR and we've gotta get higher ADR. So I've been tracking what the penny is. This year, so 2002 was your highest year so far. I hope that tracks with your businesses. We're gonna hit 2002 numbers this year and we might go over them a little bit. So as we talk about projections forward, then I think this is the base that we're always going for and we're trying to build off that base of the penny value of 1.3 for collections in the city of 12 to $13 million of taxes.

Can you explain the per penny value again? I'm not sure I clearly understand how you do it.

So the state here collects six cents. I take the total revenues they collected, and I divided it by six, and that gives me a value for every penny that they collect.

Assuming that the state is the one who's doing the best at collecting.

because they've got everybody. That's the benchmark I think we should use for the moment. And we're gonna compare ourselves against that benchmark to see if we're leaving anything on the table.

I mean, if you look at the numbers, according to state hotel revenues, STRs would only be paying 11% of the occupancy taxes. So we do have a collection problem locally. I mean, it's obvious from the state numbers.

Okay.

half, this shows 11%. That's a huge problem.

Yeah, that's a huge problem.

And I brought up several times to several members of city council that, hey, Airbnb is paying the state direct. It's automatically paid. You got a lot of people evading taxes.

Yeah, how do you even collect them then, right, to pay them? Let's bring Decker in at the next meeting. Let's agree that the base is 2002 year. That's as low as we want to go, and it's all up from there, and we're going to try to drive incremental, just like you do in your businesses. We're going to set goals every year, and we're going to drive goals.

Great.

That's why I included that, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you. Any questions? All right, hearing none, we'll go to 5-3, discussion of possible action to recommend to city council to have the city manager renew the marketing partnership contract between Visit South Potter Allen and the San Antonio Spurs for the 26, 27, 27, 28, and 28, 29 seasons. Who wants to begin, Cindy?

Yes. So we have some visitors from the San Antonio Spurs, which is Ryan and Stacy. So they're going to be presenting the renewal partnership to you all right now. Thank you.

Very good. Thank you. Good morning. Thanks for coming down.

Good morning. Thank you guys for having us. We are thrilled to be here. We're very happy with the partnership and we're appreciative of it. For the past three years, I've gotten to work alongside Cindy. And for the past several months, I've gotten to work alongside Kelly. And we're very happy with where we are. We're very happy with what Cindy and I have put together for the next couple of seasons. And we're excited to share it with you. So today, what I'm going to do is just briefly touch on the Spurs as a whole and where we are at the moment, and then what our partnership has looked like this past season. And then I'll go into some of the conversations that Cindy and I have had about how we can optimize how we've been working together moving forward.

Great, thank you.

So where are we on the court with the Spurs? I'm sure a lot of you have seen the excitement that this past season entailed. I want to always call out that, yes, we were in the finals. We didn't quite meet the goal that we had in mind. But regardless of that, had we just been kicked out in the first round, we would have seen this season as a great success. Wemby has come into his own. He was the first unanimous defensive player of the year. And then Dylan Harper is one of the most exciting rookie point guards and guards that we have in the league. And then Keldon Johnson, who is our most tenured Spur, he's been with us for eight or nine seasons at this point, just won the NBA sixth man of the year. So all of those things are accomplishments that kind of get overshadowed by the finals appearance, but we want to make sure that we're just voicing our accomplishments on the court. And as a whole, what this looks like for our fans is that they're engaged now more than they have been, certainly in the season's past. But at a point now when social media is so prevalent and there's multiple ways of watching these games, we're seeing a lot of fans engaged more than we have. And that's exciting, especially for our corporate partners. So I wanted to call out some numbers here just from our broadcast media from the season before we began this partnership with Visit South Padre Island. Our numbers have increased more than 80% across the board in terms of fans watching, rating, and then the amount of households that we see. So all of that to say, the Spurs are in a position to where we have a bright future. And the positive thing about being in San Antonio and having the San Antonio fans is that they're always supportive of the Spurs no matter how we're doing on the court. And so it's just only augmented on top of the fans. Their excitement is only greatened when we're doing well. What does that look like for specifically our partnership with Visit South Padre Island? So this was the first term of a partnership that we've had. And so usually with a lot of new partnerships, what we will try to do from our side is ensure that we're aligning the brands as effectively as we can. So a lot of the assets that you'll see that we've had for these past three seasons are highly focused on aligning the brand and in making sure that fans are recognizing that your brand is legit, essentially. And aligning it next to the Spurs brand when we have some legitimacy with our fans is just a way of increasing the fan perception. So that's what you're going to see. You're going to see a lot of impression numbers, a lot of engagement numbers. The main thing, I won't dive into them too much, is just you could really think of it as an impression is how many times your content or your logo was seen. Engagements are just how many times they've been interacted with. So like I said, the main focus here was just to ensure that the brand was being seen. So one of the ways that we did that was with our end cap signage. This was running for one quarter during every regionally broadcast game that we had this season. And then we also had an opportunity, and I worked with Cindy on this as well, to display the South Padre Island logo virtually. So this looks like it's actually on the court. This is only during our regional broadcast. So we're able to augment this on top of the court. You could see here, we don't need to dive into the numbers too much, but we ran this at a shorter clip time frame than the end caps. And the impressions and the views were much higher. And I know anecdotally, we had a lot of people Here on the island and then in San Antonio who really appreciated the fact that this logo so closely aligned with our fiesta colors and it looked great on our courts, so this is something that we'll talk about later as we move forward. And then we had our ticket tower led as fans walked in and out of the arena and we had our concourse displays which are on 500 TVs throughout the arena. And then one way that we did engage fans these past several seasons are through our sweepstakes. Every season, Cindy was fantastic and would work with me on what the messaging would be. Are we going to be reaching out to college fans for spring break? Are we going to be reaching out to families for the summer? Are we going to be reaching out to everybody for the summer? So we've tried a couple of things every season. Over the past three years, we've had over 11,000 entries. And most of those entries, if they opt in, we're able to pass along back to the CVB here for their own data and outreach. So it's a great way of getting customer data into your business and be able to reach out and retarget those. So that's where we have been. What does that actually look like? What's the actual impact of the partnership so far? We've seen the number of Spurs fans in San Antonio who have visited South Padre in the last year increase from or increased 29% since 2022. We're able to find that compared to non-Spurs fans at just 5%. So we feel like this is, of course, derived primarily from our success and from Cindy's efforts in increasing traffic from San Antonio. But we're happy to see that we can correlate some success from the partnership in getting fans from San Antonio down to South Padre. And so what we are going to be looking for moving forward is how are we going to continue to elevate South Padre Island's brand in arena with our fans when we have those 18,000, 19,000 fans in the arena 41, 42 times a year? How are we engaging them with your brand? We want to make sure that we're keeping the presence on our broadcasts highly relevant. And we want to engage college-age Spurs fans more directly and expand the messaging with them past just spring break messaging. We want to make sure that college students understand that the beach is accessible to them all the time throughout the year. So we took a look at the partnership as it is. And as I mentioned earlier, we're going to go ahead and remove some of the brand awareness assets that we've had. We'll replace them with some other opportunities. Really what we did is we removed some of these and we reallocated the resources towards some other initiatives that we're excited to share. The first will be our Spurs College Pass program. We launched this about one season ago. And on a foundational level, it's essentially a way of getting our college fan base to expand. And we offer college age fans ticket discounts and different ticket packages. So we are going to be bringing South Padre on as the presenting partner for this. And that will help both us be able to reach out to more locations like UTRGV. And then also it's going to allow us to create different landing pages and different accessibility for Cindy and her team to put together landing pages of promotions or excursions or different ways of offering packages towards these fans as well. So there's going to be a lot of AB testing and different ways of tailoring that messaging as we go through these seasons. But this is going to be something that our team is very excited about. And then adding a brand like South Padre Island on it just increases the legitimacy of it to our fans. And so we're excited to see how that plays out. And then with the success of the virtual logo, we will be bringing that on as a permanent asset. So you can see some of the screen grabs from the broadcast this past season. We haven't unveiled our new courts for the year, so that will remain a surprise. It should come in the next coming weeks. But this is going to be something that will stay this season. As we remove the end cap signage, we're going to be bringing on the virtual signage. It's higher exposure. And this is a way that we always want to make sure that we do still have those brand awareness assets in there. We do want to make sure that we're still just aligning the brands and increasing that visibility with our fans. Another fun activity that we're going to be doing is what we call our seat upgrades. So five times throughout the season, we will be reaching out to a pair of fans up in the balcony. The ones that are typically we've seen our most fervent fans are the ones that come in and they're the loudest and they're the ones that are just happy to be in the arena. And we're going to go up there and we're going to bring them down courtesy of South Padre to fantastic seats, you know, within the first 10 or 15 rows. And what that will look like in reality is our team will put it up on the Jumbotron and we will go up there with our in arena hosts and we'll highlight the fact that South Padre is offering them better tickets and it'll pan down to the seats, the empty seats down on the lower end of the bowl. And then Cindy's going to be, we'll work with Cindy and we'll provide, we're basically going to beach out those chairs. So it's going to be something to where the fans are going to be coming down and feeling like, you know, hopefully they're, not only watching a fun game, but also getting to relax courtesy of South Pottery. So that'll be fun. We'll also be able to share the internet footage with you guys so that you guys can use it on social or some other activity that you can do. And then we also want to make sure that this goes both ways. We want to make sure that we're bringing the beach to our Spurs fans, and we want to make sure that we're bringing Spurs brand down to the beach. So the first part of that is we're going to be having a seasonal arena activation in our arena. And our conversations would span about two games or so. This will evolve. Our main focus here is just ensuring that we're getting the brand and the feel of the beach into San Antonio. And so we've discussed things like genuinely importing heaters and fans and sand and beach chairs and having a little area in our ultra courtyard area and having some sort of beach feel there. This is a great way of also promoting the sweepstakes or any other marketing initiatives that you guys have in the moment. But this should be a fun thing. And this could be something that changes every season. It could be different ideas every year. And we could really evolve it as we go. And the last thing in the arena that we want to make sure we're doing is for the fans who are on site to be able to see the marketing efforts of Visit South Padre Island. So this is, just want to be clear, this is not a actual LED that was provided by Sydney. This is just a mock-up, so it will look much more beautiful when she is done with it. But this is just an opportunity. This is around the arena, and it will rotate throughout the game, every single game, regardless if it's a regional or a national game. And then we want to make sure we're bringing the brand down to the beach, right? So every year we'll bring the coyote down for whatever seems to be the most appropriate measure that summer. So it could be a commercial shoot. It could be a social shoot. It could be a surprise and delight for some beachgoers. It could be just to get him down for a fishing tournament and getting some social caption, sorry, some social content filmed there. So this is something that, again, will evolve. But we want to make sure that we're providing the opportunity to get our brand into your marketing efforts as well. So what does that look like? Oh, sorry. Yes, and our Suite Knights. So this is a new asset that we'll be bringing to you guys this season. I know that there's always opportunities to bring people to games. So we want to make sure that we have two Suite Knights on the year that we'll work with Cindy to schedule. But what these look like, they could be used for a variety of whoever you want to bring. Sales. Sales, yes. It's a great way of engaging the fans who you want to engage with and then bringing them just for a fun night also. But you can expand this out to like a San Antonio version, a San Antonio excursion or something. And you could do things with the before meetings. bring them to the game. You could even utilize some of our meeting spaces with those clients before the game and work through some ideation or brainstorms or something and then go to the game to cap off the night. So we'll have two of those nights as well. So all in all, what we've seen is we're moving away from just solely focused on brand awareness and we're really trying to get our brands more integrated and interactive with our fans. And so what that will look like is a three-year term at $400,000 a season, and we're really excited, and we've been working on it for the past several months, and I think we're content of where it is at the moment, and we're excited to move forward. Thank you, guys.

Thank you. Questions?

What percentage of your fans fit the college spring break?

The college spring break? Age range kind of thing. Age range? I think the number is around, I can obviously come back and provide those demographics to you. It would be around 20%-ish is the last number that I remember.

Yeah, I would say 20% is accurate. We are trying to get younger as our team gets younger. So it's definitely a demographic that we've been targeting starting with the last season and going into the upcoming seasons as well. We can provide that data to you. We can give you a breakdown of all of our fans and our IBGs. Our IBGs are individual game buyers.

One of the things that I've been pushing for a long time here is trying to just get ourselves away from too much of the college spring break attitude, but I can see that it's still an important element. Others here will disagree with me a little bit, but that's okay. It's still an important element to what we do, but after the families and the other things, it's part of really what I have believed our focus needs to continue to be.

What's a ticket cost for a college kid to go to a game? I mean, I know when I go to a professional sports event, and I work full-time, it's pretty expensive.

Yeah, it will depend on the game, right? And I think that's the reality of the world that we're in now. It depends on the day of the week, the opponent. Our team really does work to make it very aggressive in terms of providing that accessibility. And so the rate for a college fan will range depending on... the game, like I said, but that rate can go anywhere between 20% off to, you know, 5% off to any specific game throughout the year.

Well, there's a college pass program. I mean, what, that isn't like a ticket. This is just some, that's like an advertising campaign or something.

Essentially it's a database. So what we'll do is you'll enter into the college pass program. And so then you will be entered into our marketing efforts for that specific program. And so then we're able to share different excursions or different opportunities or ticket packages or ticket discounts solely to that program. And so we're able to offer those rates specific to that demographic.

And so what was the ticket price? I know the worst game. I don't know. Yeah. When you're playing the worst team in the NBA, what would the lowest price that they could anticipate for a ticket?

I would say the lowest price just off the top of my head is around $40. They do dynamic pricing based on who we're playing. And as we get closer to the opponents, they will start to shuffle the prices and decrease them. But what the college gives the whole intention of the pass is to give them a discounted opportunity that a normal buyer wouldn't have access to. So that's the benefit of being part of the database.

And then the idea is to have a landing page, and if you're a member of the database, not only can you access discounts from the SPURs and the activities, but the partners that are in it. And so we would want some discounted or special prices from you all as well, and we would populate that college landing page specifically with discounts for that database.

Yeah. Like if we wanted to do a spring break package, we could put it on that landing page?

We would love to make that landing page just in addition to a discount for our tickets, discounts that you guys can provide too. So they're going there just to see what all they can get. And the more we can put on there, it benefits everybody.

So essentially we could put our spring break promotions or specials on there as well to kind of highlight them through this page. Correct. Okay.

I don't suppose the island would be able to get any of the marketing, anybody that signs up, so that we could also send out marketing to them?

if they register for the college pass they've got to put their information and i would imagine so would we have access to for the city to end up sending out our own promotions what we would do there is when you do sign up we'll have a button and we do this for the sweepstakes as well we'll have one that says they they opt in to marketing from visit south padre island and what we find is about you know, 70% of people will opt into partner messaging. And so, yes, you will receive that as they opt in. We'll, of course, share that with you. And then I think the other side of that is that in our outreach, because I want to also be clear that this program is not just a digital program. Our group sales team goes out to colleges throughout the season during their orientation days or during their you know, like tabling events, they'll go out there and they'll have those booths and they'll canvas the students and try to increase this program. And so we'll be able to do that and bring the South Padre Island brand alongside us there. And then what I've mentioned to the team here is that as you guys are going out and going to UTRGV or you're speaking at classes, you know, we would love to provide you whatever you guys need for this program and so that you guys are able to offer that and promote it there as well on your end.

When you do that, would the city be able to also send maybe some swag for you to hand out as well?

Absolutely, as long as I get some for myself.

Sure.

Would we be able to send somebody with you guys to maybe help promote South Baja Island as well?

Absolutely. I'm really fascinated by the next level here in terms of the kind of closer integration of brands and really kind of almost cross-branding in a lot of ways. It makes me wonder, though, too, are we going to do enough here on the island to kind of give that fan, that rabid fan who's coming down to the island, the experience of being, oh, yeah, this is the Spurs' place to go.

That's one reason I was telling Ryan. I said I think I need to have more presence from them, the Spurs, and that's why we're bringing the Coyote as well. And I want to shoot a commercial with the Coyote that we can share on social media and TV commercials just to show their collaboration here on the island as well. Yep.

what percentage of your fan base or arena attendees would you consider a new Texan? Possibly individuals that moved here the last three to five years?

I don't know that off the top of my head, but we can ask.

If you could let us know. Yeah. Really, the reason we've tried some of these things, along with yourselves and Austin FC, is to introduce South Potter Island to Texans that have never visited us before. We can no longer take them for granted that they just know that we have a beach. Yeah. We all know this when we're traveling. You say South Potter Island, even in Texas, that doesn't ring a bell necessarily to them. We're trying to change that.

And then going back to your question about bringing the brands together, you guys will have the use of our IP. So y'all can use our logo on any of your advertising here in South Padre. It all has to run through Ryan for approval. But I think that's where we see a huge increase with our partners that do it the best, is if you're just advertising South Padre and you put a Spurs logo next to it, that just shows your guests and visitors that we are partners. So I think that's a great way.

I know our team here has already done some nice things that I've seen.

That's good. What do I have down here?

Oh, are we still the only beach destination that you're doing business with? Correct. Okay. What other destinations are you doing business with?

In regards to travel?

Do you have any other strategic partners that are destinations?

No, we don't. Obviously, France is a major focus for us in Mexico, but in regards to destinations, no.

You mentioned as far as the ticket tower and you put down as far as the impressions and things of that nature. Was there a particular reason why that is being taken out if it appears to be successful as far as the number of impressions?

Yes, I decided to take that one out. So I wanted a bigger presence inside the arena. We didn't have anything running on the LED. And so, yes, so the LED shows up more, the seats that are going to come out on the Jumbotron, I'd rather do that than be on the ticket towers to be able I noticed HEB every time that popped up. I was like, I want that. That's where we should be. So that's why I decided to change that. And same thing for the TVs. They do have a lot of sponsors. And when I would see the Concourse TVs, yes, they have a lot of TVs. But it took a while for our logo to pop up. So I decided to take that out and do these other initiatives.

The reason I ask is because when I have been to the Spurs, I've noticed the ticket tower as we're coming in because it's a larger presence as you're walking in, whereas the other one, we already have the presence on the court. Yes. And I think we're on the side at the bottom of the court, correct?

Yeah. So we got rid of the end caps, and so since we got rid of the end caps inside the arena— Now we're running around the whole LED, right? And then for TV, the digital logo's gonna be there. They put that digital logo the last part of our partnership this year, and I tell everybody, I don't think I've ever received so many comments about that logo, emails, text messages, phone calls. We see your logo everywhere. Every time I'd get in an Uber, one time I was wearing the South Padre Island logo shirt, and the Uber driver said, oh, you're the ones that we see there at the Spurs game. What is this? And so it's getting noticed. And so I said, we definitely have to keep that digital logo. Not only that, when the Spurs games are playing at all the restaurants, I saw our logo up there. They were playing the games. So it's not only being seen at your house. It's now in businesses because they're showing the basketball game. Yeah, that was towards the end, like the last few months.

I remember watching the games, and I would only see the end caps, and it was occasionally when they would panel out to that. And so I guess before I thought that was like, well, that seems a bit, I guess. I was questioning whether the last package was worth it because it wasn't always there, but this is always going to be there.

Yeah, this you see. It's very visible now. Mm-hmm.

I've just got a kind of a general question, I guess, for our staff. I guess this is the Pollock in me, but I have no idea if this is a good deal or a bad deal, and no offense to the Spurs here. I don't know. I'd be like, hey, Chad, go buy a yacht today. I'd be like, I don't know what a yacht's worth, right? This is kind of like a yacht because this is really expensive for a small beach town, right? It's a huge marketing spend. It's really hard to translate it to heads and beds. It's definitely a brand awareness thing, and I get that. We're a city. It's not got to sell room with it. My question for the staff is, I know if I was going to buy a yacht, one of the things I would do is, I'd definitely shop the yacht. So do we have any proposals from the Dallas Cowboys, Houston Astros, Oklahoma City Thunder, to see what their package would look like side by side with what the Spurs is offering?

The only thing I can say in regards to the Dallas Cowboys, If you partner with the NFL, you will not see your logo on TV unless you partner directly with the NFL. If you partner with the Dallas Cowboys, you'll see it when you go to the game, you'll see it, but they have so many sponsors that we're just gonna be hidden.

Well, I'm just bringing up professional sports teams. I'm not seeing all the Cowboys.

Let me put a different twist on it. We recently got a proposal from UTRGV for their sports activities. to sponsor some of their tailgate games, to be on the boards for the scoreboards for some of their games and stuff like that. The value is not a package value, it's a per item deal. And for us to put a package together that we get the kind of exposure that we're getting here, wouldn't even be possible with UT-RGV and we'd be spending the same kind of money.

That's a division one tier two school though, like not only is it a new program for football, like there's no way.

Right, right, no that's what I mean is that it doesn't have the same kind of reach that we're gonna get with the Spurs and the prices are comparable. And so I think, let me just finish, Chad. So I think this is a great deal. And I think one of the things that you've stumbled onto inadvertently is that this is the crew that does the sponsorships and the strategic packages for that stadium in particular. I think that Cindy was probably one of the first strategic partnerships that you all had. Yes. So she's gotten her way into getting some negotiations, Ryan, that other people haven't gotten because we were first in the line and we've been with them for a while. I haven't worked with a team like this that works so hard to accommodate us. We said to them specifically, hey, we've got some folks that are interested in spring break and college, And that's when they came back with the college database and how to work that. I'm interested in sales. And so that room up there for 18 people to do a VIP party, I envision that we'll do corporate business up there where clients that we want to VIP treatment so that we can bring their business down here for the convention center. Super excited about the piece outside. They have a whole drinking area outside with a bandstand on it that I envision will get a band from the island out there, put out some chairs, it'll feel like South Padre, get some Corona or some Modelo, whoever else is your partner on that, and create that environment. You're absolutely right, it doesn't translate into heads in beds, it's awareness raising, but when Cindy Decker put up the slide for our visitation year over year, San Antonio's growing. And so in value, I think you've gotten a great value just because you were early in the game. And when I looked at what it cost for UTRGB, I was impressed with what we were getting and with the distribution that they've got. And I'll finish by saying I think that San Antonio is one of our most important markets outside of the Valley. We seem to have a close relationship with a lot of people there and a lot of movement between us.

I think my question still remains unanswered. It doesn't sound like we have any other professional sports team where we've ever even requested a proposal. And I don't understand if this is a good deal without trying that. It's fine. You guys wanted the Spurs. I totally understand it. I'd rather see a Spurs game than anything I mentioned. I'm not a Cowboys guy anyway. What I'm trying to say is,

Comparative shopping.

We just aren't doing it. The government's like, this is a great deal. Says who? I mean, obviously Spurs are going to say it's a great deal. I don't know that it's a great deal. And I like northern drive markets. I know San Antonio is a top market. I get it. It's not for me. Not for my business. I'm renting condos and homes. I need a longer stay. So much of our marketing and advertising effort is directed to really short stays. And San Antonio is a pretty short stay. You can drive down, do a weekend pretty easy from San Antonio. Start getting to Austin North, it's usually gonna be a three to four night stay. It's just too far to drive. That's my only comment. Again, I'd be really voting on something that I have no expertise in, so I don't wanna say too much. But the other hand is, as soon as I get into a competitive, I gotta buy bed linens. This guy says he's got a good deal. Well, I'm going to look. No offense to you guys. If somebody looks at my condos, they're shopping on Airbnb at 5,500 or other rentals. So I got to be in the mix. I can tell you why wine's the best, but they're going to look around, right? And hey, maybe this is a deal of a lifetime. I have no idea. But I'd sure like if somebody comes to me in the public and says, you guys are spending almost half a million dollars on the Spurs. I haven't sold any rooms off it. Why are you doing that? I want to be able to say, well, the Oklahoma City Thunder had a similar deal. No better, same money. That's not as good a market. That's a valid point, right? I can't do that right now. I don't know what they would charge. Same thing with Austin when we've got our soccer team in here. I've never even been to a soccer game, except in Columbia. So I don't know what the value is on that. But be that as it may, those are the questions I have, is have we asked anybody else? And that's no offense to you guys. I'm sure this is a deal of lifetime. I just don't know. I don't think anybody up here knows. We're just a rubber stamp in half a million dollar buys. We're going through little deals at 30 grand and arguing for 30 minutes about it. That does concern me. So that's all I'm saying. I don't have any other points. One thing I want to ask, the NBA season is like October 8th to April 11th, right? Is that the season?

That's the regular season, yes.

Okay, and then the playoffs in like June, right? They go through that in June. So that is extra exposure. And does this run through? We have the same program through the playoff games if they're in San Antonio, right?

For the majority of your assets, yes. The NBA does come and take over the TV, so you would lose some of that. But your LEDs, your digital presence, yes, it will continue. All your activations in the courtyard will stay.

So on the positive side, that definitely extends our season, usually. If your season goes well April, May, and even part of June, it's almost like you're three months. So that is a very big thing. If this team never won, you're kind of done in April. It's very unlikely that's going to be the case, but that is something to bear in mind. So it would add value to this. It's something I'm trying to develop the pitch when people hammer on me. Why are you spending this? I'm like, I try to have an answer for things. That's all.

You know, I remember starting on this committee. I don't know. It's been seven, eight years ago. I don't remember. And it was all about impressions at that point. All about impressions. Everything was impressions. How many impressions did we get? And that used to drive me crazy because Chad's great at ROI and I understand OIs and KPIs and those other kinds of things. And so I understand his point exactly. And so yeah, that's a little bit of a stretch to do some of this. But, man, I think that the brand integration and really where it goes with the brand and the value of the brand for us and for the Spurs is tremendous.

Yeah, we're trying to be a clean destination for families at the end of the day. The college program is a bonus, I think. I don't think that's a major drive. I don't know how many college kids are even going to go because of pricing. By the time you get a Coke or whatever, you're probably $100 is what it is. But for adults, the demographics can be higher income, and that would probably translate for short-term rentals, longer stays. That's where I'm going with this. Yeah, that's what I was questioning. I know, like, for us, like, my best drive market when it comes to, I'm tracking, like, length of stay, it's always Dallas Metro. I know it's huge, but, you know, and I know hotels, San Antonio, I'm sure you guys are crushing San Antonio. And I want them to do well, too. You know, high tides float all ships, but...

One other question. I had a couple questions. Number one, I mean, we were with you all while you all were on the rise. Now you all are up there as far as a team. So I think the exposure is great. There's a lot of excitement with the Spurs. So in that regards, for our size of budget, it is a pretty high price for it. But I think the exposure and being San Antonio is a great mix on it. On these packages, do you have any other options? Or is this it? Is this like the best package that you? The best proposal? Sorry, yes, the best proposal as far as the options that they're providing or are there multiple options? Come up to the mic.

Yeah, we've been going back and forth for months so we tweak it all the time and I think what they're proposing today was the best option for us.

Yeah, there's two parts of the option that I question a little bit, and I know you alluded to one of them already, but the college one, I'm wondering if there's some tweaking that we can do, because I don't, I don't know how much benefit it's really going to be as far as college, and I think it's on the right track, but maybe it might be a little bit more expanded a little bit somehow where we can get more database that we can maybe build than just college. I think we aren't casting a big enough net when we do college because essentially you're pretty much looking at You're looking at UTSA, SAC, San Antonio, Trinity, and we're already spending money advertising spring break for Sal Padre. So I think it's going to be a very... We're using a bullet for a small net that we're already advertising when we're doing college. So I think it's the right track, but maybe try to include either families or something, some other way to try to get a bigger database, if that makes any sense. Let me help you. Are you doing the sweepstakes this year? The sweepstakes is for family. Yeah, I just don't think the college is gonna pull in a lot. I just don't, I think we're wasting time. Effort, and it's not gonna be a very big pool. At the end of the day, the cost of the ticket, what it is to drink, what it is to eat, it just, I mean, it just is not gonna be Your pool is going to be very big on it.

It was interesting to me because you did allude to it in terms of trying to go after that younger audience with a lot of things. Yeah, it's a younger team. It's a younger crowd. I'm an old guy, so I've got to look at this kind of stuff. And I go, yeah, do we have to really cater to the younger stuff? And maybe it's just part of the messaging. that we need to look at, too. I mean, you guys all know, I mean, down here, we've got generations that have come down here as a result of coming here on spring break. I mean, that's just been our history.

Right, but what I'm saying is with the package, it's not like you're doing a package of Texas. And you're getting, more than likely, you're not getting anybody from Dallas that's going to come primarily, I mean, unless they're playing the Mavericks. I mean, what's the percentage that you're going to actually get, I guess?

When you partner with an NBA team, the NBA will dictate marketing territories. So 150 miles around San Antonio is the Spurs' exclusive marketing territory. Mavs can't market there. Rockets can't market there. Outside of the 150 miles from Dallas and Houston, Texas is fair game. So we're able to, obviously, market our brand down through the RGV out to West Texas. So with this College Pass, two things. I want to make clear that we're not just tailoring the College Pass to spring break. This is actually, in the past with the sweepstakes, it was tailored, hey, college students, marketing campaign, come out for spring break. This is expanding the presence of the college crew throughout the season. So we want to make sure that those fans understand that the beach is accessible all year round. And we will not gate just to San Antonio colleges. So that was one of the things that Cindy brought up, just as you did, was what can we do at UTRGV? What can we do down at different community colleges down in the valley? And so our team is thrilled with that. We're not wanting it to just be San Antonio because we do want to expand our fan base as well. So this will be a small piece of the partnership, but it will be one that I think we're already going to be reaching out to these colleges. We're already going to be going out. And so if we're able to augment on top of that into some colleges that are key demographics for you guys, we're happy to do that. We have connections at UTRGV already. And so as this becomes official, we'll go ahead and start figuring out what that looks like integrating with them throughout the year.

Yeah, I was just alluding just if there was different offers or pieces of the puzzle that could mix in.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, with any corporate partnership, we want to make sure that we are expanding the database or the marketing database if that is a key objective for you guys. And so the other two pieces that I think could tailor that for you would be, one, the sweepstakes. So to harp on the sweepstakes a little bit, that's an eight-week marketing campaign, essentially. and we're able to promote that on our in arena online and then through paid ads on social that can also be integrated into marketing campaigns that cindy's doing on her end as well and then again if people opt in to marketing from visit spi then you guys are able to get that as well and add it into your qualified lead and then also this season whenever the team comes up and they have some sort of activation on site, that's another great opportunity to cannabis people and build your database there on site and form an even more, you know, personal relationship with those fans. So there's, there are two options there. And then again, as we go forward through, you know, one season or two seasons, if we do need to tweak the college pass program to see how we can expand it or your other ways, we're, we're open to that. We're not going to lock into something that is failing throughout, you know, a certain asset over a couple of seasons. We'll always course.

and i don't think it's a matter of failing it's just a matter of how can we make it better right and how can we make it more productive because i i do think you know there's a there's a tremendous amount of excitement on spurs especially right now especially it's been building right um you know for the last three years so so i think it's just it's not a matter of i don't want to use the word fail i just think it's more it can be a little bit more productive it can be a little bit more a little more successful i think it's it's a good partnership on the eight-week sweepstake is there is it already defined on what eight weeks is it

And we've changed it, you know, season over season. The first season we did it a little earlier in the year to make sure that we could get somebody out the winter out for spring break. We've done it later in the season and we've offered that for the summer. So that's something that could change depending on messaging, marketing campaigns that you guys have revolving year over year or just, you know, what time of the year you want to align alongside our brand.

And so what was the price previously on this?

We ended at... No, we ended at, yeah, about 320, 320 or so.

I thought it was 360. 360, I misquoted.

So what was the price increase due to?

There was a 3% increment each year.

Okay, no, I mean this one.

And she picked out some things that were a little bit more expensive than last year. Okay. To be inside the arena, running around the LED.

In a three-year term, so if our economy goes to the heck, We're paying this no matter what happens.

The city lawyer will not allow us to sign any contracts like that.

So it's a three-year commitment.

We are looking for a vote today, Mr. Chairman.

Just to, I agree with Chad. I think we should, I mean, we would want to see what other NBA teams are doing for in a similar, I mean, type of marketing package. I think that's, you always want to get a concept, but I would say that it is a fair price. I mean, at least I think it is based on different sponsorships we've done with certain events, right? We've sponsored some. boxers fighters you know that have either a pay-per-view bellator um or mvp and typically to get just a placement in their shorts or shirts or something of that sort it's somewhere around um five to twenty thousand dollars for a one night event so i mean this is 40 games right uh home games where you're going to see the the logo in the arena or we get to see it on TV, you have the whole sports market. So that's about a little bit less than $10,000 per game. So price-wise, it's not bad for a one-night event. If you look at it that way, I know the $400,000 price number seems excessive. And I don't know what other NBA teams charge for a similar package or other sporting teams do. But I know that for an individual night event, a boxing fight or an MMA fight, which is only that fighter's going to be there for 25, 30 minutes, maybe tops an hour, that you're going to be able to see that. It's somewhere around, I would say, $10,000. It's about the same cost. So for me, price-wise, if you break it down by night, it makes sense.

My team just reminded me. They go, Cindy, don't forget, when we signed on with the Spurs, We received so many phone calls, so many emails from different teams, I actually forgot about that. So we did get proposals from the Astros, we got proposals from the Dallas Mavericks, we got proposals from the Timberwolves, and nothing compared to what they're giving us. Their price might have been a little bit less, but it was maybe one sign at the arena, it wasn't that big of a deal. I remember the chairs, I actually brought that to their attention because the Timberwolves, that's what they were gonna give us, just the chairs. And I was reaching, well, the Timberwolves, I was talking to them because Minnesota, well, it's one of our top visitors, so I said, let me hear them out. And they wanted to put two beach chairs there in the arena, That was one of the recommendations I gave to the Spurs, but they're putting five chairs that are branded with South Padre Island, and we're going to be on the Jumbotron. So they're giving us a lot more than what the other teams would have. The Astros, I think it was one sign while they're playing. It'll come out on TV, but it was just one sign right there on the field. The other one was the Dallas Cowboys. The reason why I do know about the Dallas Cowboys is they said you can only have signage there at the stadium, but it won't be broadcasted at all. And that's the NFL period. It's not just the Dallas Cowboys. That's the NFL period. You would have to have a partnership with the NFL to be seen a little bit more. And it's a lot more expensive. Port Aransas, I believe, has a partnership with the Dallas Cowboys. I've never seen their ad at all. So yeah, just wanted to say that.

What's our deadline on this? I know you're asking for us to vote today. Is that why?

We're preparing for next year's budget. As soon as you all give us the go-ahead, this is an expenditure that'll have to go to council, so it would go to council on the September agenda with an aye to start at October 1st budget.

How long does it take, would you say, to negotiate this contract with city management?

They've already, I suspect, approved the contract itself, the city lawyer. Are you looking for some time?

My colleagues, if they would like more time. If we cannot do more time, then I understand, because it has to go here, to city management, to legal, to council. I want to know if this makes sense to wait or not.

Well, personally, Cindy's been doing this for a while, and she's negotiated with a lot of others. I'm confident that she's bringing us a good deal. I believe that Spurs want us to be part of their team, and so I'm ready to make a motion if you call for one.

Mr. Hart, anything else?

My concern is just always on our economic indicators in the United States right now. We're paying more money for nearly the same thing as last year. It sounds like we're moving end caps or adding. I remember we're doing more signage outside, I guess. End of story. Anytime there's a price increase, it's always going to come up like, hey, we're a great sponsor. We're the cleanest sponsor this bridge can probably get. We're a beach destination. We're not beer. We're not. You know, not that you're doing SIGs anymore, but you get my point. Like, it's as good as it gets. You know, oh, these guys want to promote their beach in Texas. So, you know, I doubt there's other municipalities lining up to give you $400,000. Again, I never mean any offense. I'm just bringing this up as a business person. I negotiate everything. Like, it's just in my blood, I guess. But if you're going to vote today, I think that there might be some more questions about this, at least community-wise. And also, it is going to get pushed through legal and it's going to go through city council. I mean, if you want a rubber stamp on it, I guess we could give that, but I think the idea here is to get it passed, right? Like, to get a yes, like a real yes, not a, hey, this board likes it.

We'll go to the next channel, I guess, next level to see what legal says and whatnot and see how Kelly feels.

Yeah. I mean, what is, obviously, you've worked hard on this. You're in the CBB, and you're the director now. I think it's worth the 30-second pitch for me to say yes or no and why.

I support this. I will say that when I first came on, I told Cindy not to raise it up at all. I met those folks on the first week, but when we shuffled our budget and I saw what San Antonio was doing, the fact that you're in Fiesta at the same time, The fact that that market's growing, I think that this investment is a good investment. It's not the same thing that they did last year. One of the things that is different this year is they're giving us those two suites, and they hadn't wanted to do the suites before because it could look, without transparency, like we were benefiting or we were taking our friends up to the game. The idea with the suites is that we've got clients for convention and group business in San Antonio and Austin, and we would host them in the VIP suite for a party. That's the relationship kind of building stuff we do. We already do things like go and prepare tamales with them in a house in Austin or something. another thing that we could do. The other thing they're activating that we didn't do last year is the outside area with the band, and I think that can create a real good environment as well. I hear you, you are boots on the ground, you want conversion, you want leads, you want names that you can send these people out to, and I understand that, but having done this several years, I understand first we gotta create some awareness, and I'm amazed at the amount of people who don't know where Sal Padre Island is, And it's in Texas, and we're going to talk about that at the next agenda item. But I think this partnership with SPURS, as they said, gives us, I don't want to say legitimacy, but it positions us as a premier class to be with a premier class team. And I think that's, we want to hang out with the Eagles.

Thank you, Kelly. I'm calling for a motion.

Motion to approve to send to city council.

I second it. Second it. Alexis, you need any more details on that motion? All right. Any discussion? All in favor say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you guys for coming down. You presented very well.

Thank you very much. Very much appreciated. Thank you.

Thank you for the gifts, too.

Yes, thanks for the whatever's in those.

I'm sorry. I didn't understand what the final vote on that was. Brian, how did you vote? Yes. Okay. Thank you. Alexis? Alexis? Oh, okay. I didn't understand that, thank you. Okay, very good.

All right, where are we? Okay, 5-4, discussion of possible action to recommend to City Council to approve the media placement by for AGR Media Group for $51,860.37 for the fiscal year 26-27. Is everybody here familiar with AGR?

all right sandy just give us like the quick quickie on this uh we've been doing buys with them for yeah we have been doing it for many years correct um we because it went over the 50 000 um that's why i'm here today um we did we added triple a explorer um so that's another reason why we increased it and then we have bigger pages also um through some of these publications so This includes the Texas State Travel Guide, Texas Highways Magazine, Texas Highways Digital Newsletter, Tour Texas, and as I mentioned, AAA. So the 51 is for the entire year for all of these publications. For next year? For next year, correct.

And same thing, we're just trying to line our contracts up to get them started on October 1st.

Good. Kelly, you said you had something to comment on regarding Texas. No, it'll be the next one.

Oh, okay.

And these guys, they just do like a simple markup on the placement, right?

They're both digital and print, and so they put out a catalog. They put out, of course, AAA magazine it goes, and then there's a newsletter it goes digitally to people. They've got massive distribution. And, of course, an older crowd.

Is there any questions for Cindy? Is there a motion?

Motion to approve.

Discussion? All in favor say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Okay, now we're, okay. Update regarding the South Powder Island logo and Texas' best beach badge. All right. Sydney, are you gonna run this one or?

Yes, it should be pretty quick. There you go. Okay, so what we wanted to show you all today is we did a little update to the South Padre Island logo. What we noticed is that not a lot of people know that we are in Texas, and especially when we do our marketing efforts in the Midwest. Now when they see South Padre they'll know it's Texas. So this is the logo that we want to use in all of our marketing efforts and so I just wanted to show you all what it looks like. And we also are using this badge. We wanted to use this badge that says Texas is best beach. So this would be used on billboards, pretty much all of our marketing efforts. We want to be known as Texas is best beach. And so I was telling Kelly, one of the billboards I wanted to place was It's heading from Austin to Port A or Corpus, and for it to say you're almost at Texas' best beach, just a few more minutes away. And so this is something that we wanted to add to our marketing efforts.

I was thinking about this, and the only, just throwing it out there, is having the word visit maybe in there. I think we can use voted. We've won a bunch of awards on our beaches. Enjoy the best beach in Texas. I don't know. But, and Kelly, you made a great point when we met, I don't know, a couple months ago, about including the word Texas and the stuff we're running beyond just the logo. Ultimately, that's the most important thing. On the, you know... Obviously they're in Texas, they know it's Texas, but I mean all the other stuff we do. I think that's important and I think that maybe it's just an oversight on our part around here that we get so used to it. Going back to that false assumption that people know we exist.

And on the logo stuff, we're talking about moving forward. We're not doing like the city of Austin, a million bucks for like a PR campaign. We got a new logo because they got really fried up there for that. This is just moving forward. We're going to use this new logo. We're not changing. We're not spending $100,000 because now we have a new logo. Okay.

There was a couple of things we needed to do. Because we are placing some advertising nationally, it was important to point to Texas. I was surprised at the number of people that were not the center of the universe. And then the best beach, I think Texas should be in the middle. and best beach around it, apparently, but designed by committee is the worst thing that you can do. What we would like you all to do is start referencing Texas' best beach, and so we'd like to share this logo with you, because that is our claim to fame. When people come down, that's what I hear repeatedly, and I'm sure you do, too. Gosh, I forgot how nice the beaches are here. The water's gorgeous. So that logo is simply a certification. It'll go, I do like the idea of voted, Best Beach, I think instead of saying it was self-proclaimed, which is never a problem, it's nice when someone else proclaims it.

Well, you're doing it all in-house, right? So you can play with it and you can, you know. There's no action on this item, gentlemen. They're just trying to show us what they've been working on.

I think that the idea of Texas needs to be promoted in the logo itself, I agree. I'm not sure that that's artistically probably the best way to do it. There's some other input.

Mm-hmm. Get them to go back on that one.

On the TX? Yeah. Okay.

TX or on, no, on the Best Beach?

On the Best Beach and the TX is also. And then this one here. Yeah, the color just, maybe it's just the one I have here, the color looks.

Can you go back to the Salpadre Island logo? Okay. You want the color to be the same. It looks odd that it's a different color.

Yeah, it's matching the umbrella up there, but it kind of just gets lost.

This is to show you it depends what's on the background, what photo we're using in the background to promote this. That's why the color kind of changes so it can stand out. So these are three different ways that we can use it.

Cool.

I mean, we can go around in circles on logos and tell we're all dead.

Absolutely. I think you can make it whatever color you want as long as...

We agree. I think you're hearing consensus, Cindy, that including Texas in there, I think, is a great idea.

We did it at these LeGrand ourselves, putting South Padre Island, Texas on one of our logos just to make sure that whenever we are promoting these LeGrand, people know it's in South Padre Island. So I think the same thing.

I get phone calls sometimes asking if they need a passport, so at least they know it's in the US, it's Texas, so.

Yep, right on. Very good, Cindy, thank you. Okay, we'll move to discussion of possible action to recommend to city council to approve the policy regarding special events funding.

We do special events here? Good morning. Luis Rios, events manager. So since the special events workshop, Kelly and I have been working together to update the current policy. And so in front of you, we do want to highlight some changes. Some of the terms that we do want to highlight is room nights. Those are just going to be total confirmed or contracted room nights that we will be counting. Another way we can count is going to be out of town attendance or ticket sales, which is 60 miles outside the South Padre Island radius. The total attendance, which is going to be verified figures that they submit to us. off season, which is going to be January, February, April, May, September, October, November, and December, and the peak season, which is June through August and March. The first change that we want to do, and we ran this by the Special Events Committee, is going to be having six meetings per year, which is every other month. we did propose four meetings but they said it might be a drastic change and we will probably be doing special meetings so we came up with six meetings per year every other month and you would have to submit your application 120 days prior so first meeting will be november that would be for events in march you would have to submit your application on the first of november to be considered considered sorry about that um so that was going to be the first major change um If you scroll down, we do have a VSPI scoring sheet breakdown. This is going to help make the funding process more transparent and uniform. So it helps promoters from just putting random numbers when they're applying for funds. So basically, we'll be looking at the total attendance. So if you have, let's say, 437 attendees, you can only apply for the $5,000 to $7,000 range. And we did apply this scoring card to 16 events. Seven events went down in funding, five stayed the same, and four actually went up. So this is gonna be the primary scoring card. So once they go to the meeting, we will show the committee members the secondary scoring sheet. You notice there's 10 categories that they can score the event on. Basically it'll be 10 points per category and that'll just help show if they're gonna get the higher or the lower amount that they request funds for.

Great, all right, what did SEC, they passed this unanimously, is that correct? Correct, yes. All right, anybody have any questions regarding this policy? As you well know, the staff and the Special Events Committee have been working on it tirelessly to get this cleaned up. We've been kind of operating in a laissez-faire way for the last several years for a variety of reasons.

And we are currently working on other policies for the arts and culture and the sponsorships for 5,000 and under.

I have one question. How many events do we have that did 1,500 room nights? That's a lot of rooms.

Luis will tell you.

Really contracted? None. So one of the categories that you can get the funding for the 1500 room nights is if you have 2600 total participants, you would still be able to qualify for that amount of funding.

So the OOT is participants or something?

The TP is total participants. Okay, gotcha. Yeah. So those are the three categories.

So it might not be room nights, but a number of people attending. Correct. So it could be one. They just got to meet one.

Yeah. You get the most credit if it's a room night and a room block. You get one credit for that. If it's out-of-town participants, and we can track that now with this new placer technology we have outside of 60 miles. Then you get 0.75%. 0.5. Say it again.

Out of town participants is 0.5, and total participants is you multiply it by 0.25.

So you would have to have four times the amount of total participants to validate that amount of money than you would a room night. We're having trouble getting people to do blocks, room nights.

I always thought when we did the workshop and everything, we have so much special events money left over. It seemed like it made it harder, not easier. I don't know.

Well, I think we're seeing later that there's reallocations of those funds.

We've got some reallocation of that funding going. The first thing that'll happen is we've relocated out of the $700,000 that's in the budget, we put $75,000 for $5,000 sponsorships. Okay. and those will go pretty quickly, and we've never done that many already, and so it'll be interesting to see if we can do that many. We put $400,000 in this bucket right here where we're talking about right now, and the years that you've given $400,000 have been the years that we were doing events ourselves and we're not gonna do any of those events ourselves. So let's see if we can give that $400,000 away. And then we've got another bucket of $200,000 that's going for ecotourism specifically to invest in that. And we're investing in the fads and the reef as well. And we're investing in the museum, the historical museum. And so there's another box or pool of money that we're using specifically for, I call it brick and mortar, local groups that are here on the island that are doing good things that help to bring people, that isn't a special event. And so those are the three areas.

Yeah, that's good. Will the category of arts include kind of quality of life events as well? Because we've funded small amounts to a lot of quality of life events around here that really don't produce any kind of ROI based on what we're outlining here.

No, I'd say quality events are going to be 5,000 and below. Those are our community partners that we want to partner with, and we want to be good partners with them. But that larger amount has to really be that Texas two-step. It's going to bring people, and it supports the arts, or it supports...

I just want to make sure we're still reaching some of the smaller people and the smaller events that take place that really attribute not so much to return, but to the quality of life.

There is some allocations for that. We'll be good neighbors, yes, sir.

Okay, good. Great.

Any other questions? Is there a motion?

Motion to send this to City Council for approval.

Second it. All right. Discussion? All in favor say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you, and good luck at the next council meeting.

Thank you.

Okay, 5-7, discussion of possible action to consider a resolution of commitment to obtain the state of Texas governor's film friendly community designation in 2027. Finally. Yeah, we've had this over the years, but I don't know how it all faded away.

I could find in the records that the governor's office has three programs, Texas Tourism Friendly Communities, and you all are certified as a Texas Tourism Friendly. Texas Music Friendly, we are certified, but we're not working on that. And so when I bring the CTO on, they'll reinstate the music committee and start working together on culture and music. And then the third is film friendly. I have not found that we're film friendly certified. If we are, not bad to go back and do it again. What I'm asking for today is a resolution of support. The Texas legislature has allocated tremendous amounts of money. for film incentives in the state of Texas over the next 20 years. In order to be a film-friendly community, all we have to do is create a portfolio of five different scenes, venues, kind of ideas that they would maybe like, and then start to work with city council on what could be some incentives. If a group came in, and they were gonna take over the island for two weeks in one hotel, what kind of consideration for permits would the city be willing to give them? The Economic Development Corporation has already passed this similar one. We would not be supervising this initiative. That would be out of the EDC, but we will be a supporter to it, and we are asking for your support to go after this designation today.

What ever happened to that movie we spent time on?

I don't know. Good question. I was thinking about that the other day, too.

Good question.

I don't know if it ever, I mean, I know they filmed it, but I don't know if it ever got distributed.

Doesn't sound like it. I guess not.

Well all right, so just so I understand it a little bit better. EDC will be spearheading this and ultimately this isn't the CVB staff time. You're gonna jump in and give help them if they need help or?

Correct, but we're not gonna lead.

Okay, cool. There's a lot of stuff lined up over the next three years. That's right. They want us to bite off more to weaken you.

We've got other priorities. Okay.

Is there a motion? I'll make the motion. Thank you. To approve.

I'll second.

All right. Any discussion?

All in favor say aye.

Aye. Motion carries. Thank you, Kelly. Update regarding the City Council approved decision for the South Potter Allen Convention Center proposed project. Again, there's no action on this. Kelly's going to give us an update. She's been attending several meetings that some of you have and some of the people in the audience have. So where do you think stand?

I'd like to share with you that over the last two meetings, City Council has made some decisions. The first one is they hired a consulting construction company called Broadus Construction. Broadus is the owner's representative. Of course, this is a very large project that we're talking about. They've gotten some initial quotes at what they call 60% design and engineering. Those quotes I included in your PAC for you. for three different options there. The task that Broadus has is to go over the budget to determine if city council can afford, or the city can afford the project. The second meeting then that city council had, they established a budget for the convention center of $60 million. So you'll see that the three quotes for prices on the three alternatives range from $84,000 to $92,000. City Council has said to them, try to get that bill down to $60 million alone. And they opted for what's called option B. That would expand the exhibit hall of the convention center almost twice. And then it would expand some rooms off the back that could be made into a ballroom when you take down the walls in the middle. Or the walls could be established. You could separate them again, and you would have a ballroom. One of the things that they're telling city council is that you want to expand the ballroom and the meeting rooms concurrently. because you want to have a certain amount of breakout rooms for the square footage that you've got in the ballroom, which makes sense. They have asked Broadus to come back September 15th to say if they can get the budget down to $60 million. They've also asked Sandra Garcia, the CFO and I, to project a pro forma. Two pro formas have been done previously by consulting firms. They've asked us to internalize that pro forma, make it ours, and commit to it on us. and they are considering that the venue funding will come, the long-term debt note will come out of our operations. It will not be funded out of the venue tax so that the venue tax then can be collected to go on to the other commitments that need to be made. And we did develop a budget that I can incorporate that into the operations, and if you'd like to see that at the next meeting, I'd be happy to share that as well, how that money flows, and how we'll be able to continue our operations. I will say that in the meantime, the Short-Term Rental Association did send a formal letter to city council asking about the benefit of the project. And I'm sorry, I don't have a copy of this. We'll send it, Alexis, if you would, to the board just so they have the benefit of it, of questioning, I think, the level of financial commitment to the project.

Did everybody hear, well, I want some clarification. I think that was from one individual property management company, not on behalf of VRMA.

Yeah, it was from Will Greenwood.

Did everybody get Will's email?

I misunderstood that. Thank you for clarifying that. I missed that completely.

How did you get the email, Brian? Did you get the email? Okay, you don't need to send it to us.

We got the email.

Okay, great. You know, VRMA would like to send in anything in regards to that. I think that would, I mean, I'm all ears. If they would like to speak with one voice, great.

We will have that conversation.

And we'll move forward after that process.

I had somebody ask me, too, what the, like, rent in the past, like, our best year at the convention center, how much was it?

$450,000. How much was it? I would love to do this breakdown for you at the massive numbers at the next meeting. It costs about $1.3 million to maintain that convention center going. We generated in the best year $450,000 of revenue. Those revenues come off of rentals, they come off of commissions. Out of those commissions, you have about $150,000 from food and beverage. That means local businesses did a million dollars worth of food and beverage in the convention center, of which we made $150,000. If you wanted that convention center to be self-sustaining, I could make that not self-sustaining, but I could make a lot more money, but I would be providing all of the services. Right now you've got decorating services, you've got AV services, you've got food and beverage services in there, and everybody's making a little bit of money, and that's a much better proposition because we can hold the convention center on the tax. And I'd like to show you at the next meeting how we hold the convention center, pay the debt, continue to market as we need to market and do the sales that we need to do.

Convention centers are always a lost leader.

Yeah, there's not a city that I know of that, I think the challenge is to make sure that you don't overbuild so that the debt is not more than we can handle right now and then to leverage the best we can all the relationships for the small businesses in that platform.

Just from an overarching viewpoint here, this has to be addressed. First of all, the facility itself is pretty old, and it's showing lots of signs of wear and tear. Second of all, I don't think we're looking far enough into the future with some of this stuff. I really don't. I mean, second causeway, laugh about it if you want, is gonna happen at some point, and hopefully next year we'll start to see that. When we do, we're gonna see all kinds of development happening north, which just increases, not only on this side of the bay, but on the other side as well. We're gonna continue to see it in Laguna Vista and port isabel and all those areas over there and i just we become a better draw all the time and i know we've got this this conversation going right now between uh the conventions that are there and possibly something in the south and and um down there next to margaritaville and that and so i you know how do those fit together and i is that i there's just there's We're not getting, I just feel like we're not getting the direction. I felt like when I saw the studies before, the amount of lost business should be a clear enough indication of what we need to do with this facility. The question is what do we need to do with the facility based on the demand as it will change also in the future for convention facilities. So you got a lot of crystal ball stuff going on here at the same time. The other item with this is that folks, I hate to say this, we're sitting on a lot of money.

Any other comments regarding this? Yep, and hopefully between now and our next meeting, Kelly, you'll have more information on the polls.

I will. They are going to ask, City Council has asked that you all make an up or down vote in recommendation in support of or not. I'll bring back the overarching budget and what the debt service is gonna do. If you're interested, I can bring in Broadus and they'd be happy to go through the alternative with you and share with you what that is. When I have the pro formas done, I'll send those over to you as well. If there's something else that you need, let me know.

I think it's very important for our group I'm really surprised that we have not been more involved. I know that you just got involved, but when this went along a while back, this is the second go-around where the first time we were very heavily involved. In this discussion, lately we have not since this has gone on. And I think it's very important this is what we do. Yep. And I am in support of doing something with the convention center. I'm not sure, you know, I need to see more of the plans, but it's a long time coming. All we've done is band-aid it. It's... for I think probably about the last 25 years, it's just been a band-aid.

You can't just kept getting kicked down the road.

Right, and so, and all that's done is probably in the last 10 years as the price has gone from a 30 million increase to 90, and hopefully we settle at 60. I mean, and the longer we keep it down, the more it's gonna be a dilapidated building, and it's gonna not be worth anything.

And I have to say, Sal Padre's in a good position. You have money in your reserves. Not a lot of communities can say that they've got the amount of money in reserves that Sal Padre does, and ability to pay down the debt with the taxes that we're generating. Because you're an 80% leisure, 20% business destination, even if business goes bad on the business side, you'll still be able to carry the note, most likely on the leisure side. I can see Chad sighing deeply about the economy coming. They did ask us to make some worst case projections about what that could look like.

Absolutely.

And the last thing I should say is that the county did write a letter of support saying that they agreed with the new design and that they need to see every subsequent iteration, but right now they are supportive of what the plan is.

Very good. Anything else? All right, 5-9, discussion regarding potential agenda items for a future convention of visitors advisory board meetings. Gentlemen, if you have anything you'd like to put on the agenda, please let Alexis know. If you have something now, tell her now. And that's what that's about. If you know now you're not going to make it, please say so now.

I don't even know what I'm doing next week, all right?

Very well.

We actually called meeting on September 9th, which I got just about everybody's confirmation, or everybody responded to me with that. Along with that, it's not an action item, so you guys don't need to tell me now. But I did list some dates to take into consideration, which would be for the meeting date in November. That one falls on the 25th. I know that's Thanksgiving. We are considering canceling that one. For December, that one's on the 23rd, also a holiday week. So we want to move that one up. That way we're not canceling two in a row. And then for March, just because that one falls during spring break, canceling that one.

Is there any objections to canceling November, gentlemen? Okay, float that, do that, you know, do whatever legal mechanism you got to do to do that. And then definitely historically, we've moved up November and moved up December for obvious reasons. Just take a poll or do whatever you do.

Yes, closer to the date or next month, I'll send out an email just so we can circle back and confirm attendance.

Very good.

Okay, I do have one couple of comments, sorry. I know it's already 11 o'clock, but hey. What else are we gonna do, right?

Is this about gender items? Is that what you were talking about?

Yes. Okay, go ahead.

Yes, Kelly, thank you very much for all the work you're doing. I've been very impressed and grateful for what you're doing. Thank you for all the great efforts. There's no but to that. What I'm looking at, though, is right now, I still would love to see us address more of an overall strategic plan. I know that the city has a comprehensive plan sitting on the shelf somewhere, and I'd love to see us to be able to work more closely with that, and I think that becomes critically important as we look at the next three or four years of what's gonna happen, not only economically, but also on the island itself. Cameron County continues to explode, with growth, I mean, if you talk to developers, Inland, other types of things, and it's great to see us moving some of the budget item rounds, and yes, we're doing some more focus on the valley and some of those things that are there, which is, it's just interesting, and I'm glad to see, and I really do appreciate the efforts, I still think that there needs to be an overall strategic plan.

Are you requesting to put it on the agenda?

Yes, I am.

Okay. Noted. So we can take discussion, have discussion about that whenever you think that timing is best for you, Kelly, I would say.

Let's start the conversation at the next meeting. That sounds good.

Very good. Anything else, gentlemen? This meeting is adjourned. Thank you.

Thank you.