Are you ready? All right.
Okay, everyone. It's uh slightly after three. I'd like to call our uh special meeting to order. And uh first, I'd like to extend a heap of uh gratitude and thanks to my fellow council members uh for for being here today. I know it was a short notice. Uh the topic we're going to discuss discuss today I I think uh is important enough that it dictated that we do this sooner rather than later uh and not wait until the uh the regularly scheduled meeting on the 17th. So thank you all for being here. Um Mr. Miller, will you call the role? Matish Patel, James Reeves,
Ashley Hoffberger, present. Charles Bayer here. Jason Nicholson here. Brad Mullenex here. Jennifer Breer here. Mary Hawking here. David Bearer. We have a quarum with six. Thank you, Philip. Was this uh meeting publicly noticed? Mr. Chairman, this meeting was advertised in the Pensacola News Journal on January the 29th in the board's weekly meeting schedule. Thank you. Like to move on to the public forum. Uh I notice there is one member of the uh public to speak, Mr. Ted
Int and if anyone else would like to speak, if you would just take the time to sign up on the table uh next door. Great. Thank you. And thank you uh board for getting together on such a short notice to allow us an opportunity uh to talk to our community about this amazing opportunity of being recognized the best beach in the United States by condass traveler. I've had uh the good fortune to talk to a lot of people in our community about the value of this, but more importantly the good fortune of experiencing this myself when I worked for a resort company in Tucson,
Arizona. We won a best destination resort spa 12 years in a row. And during that time period, we were able to leverage the value of that reward into an earthshattering organization. It is still considered one of the best resorts in the entire world. It boosted the entire economy of Tucson at one time in the early 1990s during a recession. And that success continued today to the point that a second company came to Tucson believing that Tucson might be the magic to success in
destination health resorts. Um, it boosted the pride not just of the community but of all the employees. And I would tell you that I've had a pretty illustrious career and a lot of that was from the confidence that I gained from working for an organization that won that. So here's our opportunity. Our opportunity is to make sure that we get the exposure we need so people can come and experience our amazing beach. Because we won this award not just because of our beach, but because of the experience that people had when they came here. It's everybody who worked in a gas station,
a boutique, a flower shop, our first responders, the Coast Guard that fly the helicopter up and down the beach and make people feel safe. That's why we want it. And if you read the article, you notice they said very little about our beach and more about our community, our culture, and our history. So, I'll leave you with that. I know there's a great presentation for y'all to hear today. If you have any questions after this meeting, feel free to call me. I'm pretty easy to find. Thank you again for your time. Thank you, Ted. Uh coming up to our uh agenda item. Um wanted to set a little bit of a prep. Uh you'll hear from
Visit Pensacola and anyone else that um that you so choose to call on. Um I do appreciate again you taking the time. I know some of the background information and the media rationale came over late. Um, I I do know that Showcase was working uh last night and this morning to uh fill in some of the details that you might need to be u aware of um to give you a comprehensive understanding of the ad plan so you can make an informed decision. With that, I'd like to invite Nicole Stacy or I'll kick it off. You bet. Um good afternoon. My name is Sterling Gillum and
I'm honored to be the chairman of Visit Pensacola Incorporated and we come to you today to request additional marketing resources to capitalize on Pensacola's recent selection as best beach in the United States by Kai Nast. It's a huge win for Pensacola and our hospitality partners believe that we can leverage this selection to increase visitation and tourism spend in the remainder of the fiscal year. Ted mentioned it, but it's worth reading the actual citation, and I'm
going to just take a couple of excerpts from it. Pensacola is so much more than its beach. Venture beyond its perpetually summery sands and discover a thriving arts and culture scene well worth its own full itinerary. Pensacola has a fully booked dance card of cultural programming to catch, including the great golf arts festival, Mural Fest, and Pensacola Fufu Festival. Add on a revi revitalized nightlife scene plus a culinary landscape where you can tell the chefs
are having fun and you have the ingredients for formidable reader choice awards winner. Our board discussed this proposal at length at our board meeting last Wednesday and we voted unanimously to request an additional $500,000 to take advantage of this unique opportunity. I'm joined tonight by um Nicole Stacy who is the vice president for destination development.
Her and her marketing team will walk you through the details of this request. Nicole, over to you. Well, this was Sterling's slide right here. So, thank you very much for having us today. And as Sterling said, we are here to request the additional 500,000 for what we think is a great opportunity for all of Pensacola. I want to walk you through first a couple of the things that we are working on internally to bring awareness on all of the visit Pensacola own channels already. So beyond what this ask is doing,
how can we incorporate it into our already existing marketing. So as you'll see on the screen, this is our website. We did purchase the license from NAST within the Visit Pensacola budget. So Visit Pensacola now owns this license for one year. We are allowed to put it on all of our own channels and any of our marketing that we purchase and cond Nest approves. Unfortunately, we're not allowed to share this license with our partners. You all
can buy a license if you'd like. Um, but we have created a partner badge that you all can use and we encourage the community to share as well. This is our website. These are some of the social media graphics that we've created and are using. This is the partner badge that we created and we encourage everyone in Escambia County to use it. Um, as you can see here, some examples for the standards, but this is a great opportunity for everyone beyond just Pensacola Beach to really showcase that Pensacola is the best beach in America,
but I'd argue Pensacola is the best destination to visit in America. The campaign that we are presenting today is to recognize this new national award. It's to do marketing above and beyond our already approved and allocated marketing budget. It's to talk to a household income that we currently do not necessarily speak to, but it'll be in markets that we are already in. So, we will have an overlap opportunity to not only hit the people that already come to Pensacola and love it, but a new audience who has that cond NAS household income.
This is the proposed budget and part of the plan that you all received. And again, I do apologize for some of the more meat and potatoes of the plan. um what you received last week from Darren is this plan. What you received earlier this week is just the um more of the information for it. So with that, I want to turn it over to showcase so they can really kind of go over the plan, explain it to you at length, and then we're all here to answer any questions. I'm sorry. How do we advance the just the down arrow? Yeah. Or the arrow. Okay,
great. I'm gonna bring this down a little bit because I'm a shorty. Um, I am Lesie Parino with the showcase team. I have been dealing directly with Condi Nast, the publisher on their opportunities. Condi Nast is not someone we typically advertise with. Their audience is a little bit out of our normal household income that we're targeting. It's an aspirational audience for certainly the people that we want to come here. Um, so it's a fantastic audience for us to reach it. just when we're making our decisions, we're like, we got to stick to our core and do a little bit of the reaching. So, here's an opportunity for us to reach out to
them because they have now endorsed us. So, the things that we're looking at is a is an email campaign and these are direct dedicated emails. Uh there will be five separate emails going to an audience of 30,000 a piece. This will cover the campaign time period. So, we can do these any time between when we start and the end of the budget year, which is when this will conclude. Um, so that's the first part that comes in at 284.95. The social amplification and social lead generation, those are campaigns served from the Condi NAS brand and that's where the value comes in in
those. That's something we cannot do without them. So that is getting that very valuable third-party endorsement from Connie Nast. It's going to look like a editorial post, not an ad. So it's going to be sharing that article saying here's what you need to know about the best speech in America. So if you know much about meta advertising, social advertising, there are different kinds of campaigns. So this is two separate campaigns. One is an amplification campaign. So that's trying to get that broad reach, trying to reach new audiences that are, you know, fit the
the kind demographic and then also a social lead generation. So that one we are actually capturing names and emails that we can remarket to. So another very valuable resource. And then finally, there's a print ad opportunity with visit Florida. There's there's a visit Florida section that was already happening that we were able to get them to give us an extension. And so that will be in the May June issue and we would like to be a part of that. So that comes in at 59504. Um, do you have any questions right now or do you want to save them to the end? Okay. Well, then
I will turn it over to I do have the emails that are going out. Is that a condandy NAS email list or where is correct emails? Yeah, it is a condandy Nast email list and they will work with us on the targeting. So you will see later we are targeting some specific cities. If we want to hit those cities again with those emails, we can do that. We can choose different cities. There's all kinds of things that we can do with that targeting. And do they work with you on scheduling of other emails that might be going out from the same organization? So someone's not getting Pensacola beaches and then getting best downtowns. That's a really good question. And so I will definitely
make sure that there's some exclusivity or at least not overlap of audience. So you know we wouldn't want to both be targeting Atlanta at the same time with similar messages. Thank you. Yes. I'm Lesie Ryan also with the showcase team. Uh before we move on one thing. Of course, Conde Nast had several other options that were all very expensive and we evaluated all of them and these are the five we're recommending so that we have additional dollars um to use in channels that we know work um and things that we are already doing in all of our other efforts but being able
to incorporate this message to this audience like they've mentioned that we aren't currently talking to. So that includes digital dis digital display native and online video with over 8 million impressions and that would be a mix of display native and 30% online video. Now most of this is high um upperfunnel awareness messaging but there is in this piece we are able to do some trackable um metrics to be able to uh show that return on investment. One thing we're not currently doing,
but these funds would allow us to do is the Peacock pause screen. This is a perfect place for this message. And that's when you're watching streaming television and you pause on Peacock. There it is. Our beautiful beach with this America's favorite uh beach and we'd able be able to use the seal there as well. Um, moving Oh, I think I skipped our meta, which is very important. Meta and Facebook. This would be on our existing channels, but again to those other audiences um with this message as well, uh Lesie mentioned,
but we're proposing focusing on Atlanta and Dallas. And in these markets, we obviously are already talking to these markets in our existing efforts, but we would layer in another connected TV buy with over 2 million impressions to a custom curated uh beach traveler audience segment. These would be buys with A&E, Disney and ESPN, Netflix, HBO Max, Warner Brothers, Paramont, Fox one. We'd also um like to do a digital outdoor campaign. So, how this works is it's just like we
buy digital advertising programmatically and we can very much identify specific areas within both the Atlanta and Dallas metro of higher um income areas so that we're talking to the right people. Why do we pick Atlanta and Dallas? Oh, there's our budget one more time. Um, if you we very much intentionally broke this out in about thirds. So, not all of this are we recommending to go to cond some of it supporting our standard markets digital efforts there and
then those focuses in Atlanta and Dallas. But why did we choose Atlanta and Dallas? Uh, we've spoken a lot about the different audience and this being a much more affluent audience than we're currently talking to. Um Atlanta and Dallas are ranked number one and three in our hotel revenue. Um ranked number one and two in the median household income. They are two of our top five origin margin origin markets that fluctuate some depending on the season. Um and the demographics closely mirror the cond NAS readership and the share of voice here as you can imagine in Atlanta
and Dallas we could spend $500,000 like that um in just one of them doing one tactic. So we're trying and the more we uh there's plenty of room for growth in those two areas. Finally, a little bit more on the condas traveler. Um it's an affluent, experienced driven person, professionals with that discretionary income. Travel is a regular part of their life and they're reading this of course for both planning and inspiration. Again, just for the a little bit of data, their household income around 143 and our current
um visitors income is 86. So I think we have hopefully driven home how important this traveler is to us and we are not currently talking to them. So these dollars allow us that opportunity to get this very clear and important message in front of them. Any questions? Any questions so far? Okay. Is that it? I think yes. Sorry. I I think that that's all right. Thank you. Um thank
you. So I turn to my council members and ask uh what are your questions, comments? I have a question. How will we track or how will we know if this investment was a success? What trackable metrics are there to know if the ROI is a is there? Sure. I'm going to have Brian come up and speak to the trackable digital that we're able to buy. But I think one of the ways to show the return is one are hopeful that these readers will vote for Pensacola again as America's Best Beach,
but two that we will see an increase in our collections over the years as we track with our regular budget and hopes for an increase in the TDT collections. I'm Brian McCall. I'm also with the showcase team. I guess I'm the analytics guy. Um there there are some limitations in this. This messaging is mostly uh top of the funnel, meaning it's awareness. We're trying to get this brand message out. One of the challenges we have working with visit Pensacola as opposed to being, you know, a hotel chain and that kind of thing is we don't have a book now button. Uh there are some
several ways that we can measure who comes to the to the market. Uh we can tag certain percentage of our digital ads depending on the channel with uh some data tools that allow us to see how how many people came to the market from how how many people came to the market from a campaign or an origin market or whatever and how they spent their money, how many broom nights, that kind of thing. There would be a percentage of this campaign in the digital space that would be that it probably about a quarter of the spend is isn't all of it because it doesn't work on digital outdoor doesn't work on CTV that kind of thing. But we can use that to extrapolate how the
message performed. We can also come back and look at any lift from the markets that we target. Did uh did we get more people from Dallas after this campaign run than before it ran? It's not precise. I can't come back and tell you that it generated, you know, an exact number of million dollars in revenue and room night, but we can judge fairly well uh how it performed relative to our other campaigns. Is that does that answer your question? So you mentioned not being able to there's not a book now button but there it is a clickable link
and you are driving people to the visit website. How frequently do you get those updated numbers? I mean I mean daily. Okay. So when would you think that we would start seeing higher volume traffic from these areas on the visit Pensacola website? Uh well one the first thing we would do is is the the media that we own the emails that we can control I mean any links to us to our website I mean we track immediately so if they if any clicks came from those campaigns we know immediately
uh and there you know and again what's the opportunity cost would those clicks have come from those markets if we hadn't done this campaign I mean there are there are formulas and there are algorithms we can look at that to try to judge what the lift was but we would know we would start seeing that immediately. And then are you adding this badge to any of the marketing you already had in the works? Yes. So where appropriate and where NAST will approve, we have already gone ahead and added it in. So the first example I showed was a garden and gun ad. Um and then we just finished
off a convention south which is a meetings ad. We just sent that off for approval. So yes, anything that's existing that makes sense and where is appropriate, we're absolutely including it. Awesome. Thank you. Welcome. Thank you, Ashley. How quickly can you get this up and going? As soon as Stefan gives us the money. So, you're ready to go. We're ready to go. Thank you. How much money do we have? So, we were saving and looking forward,
I mean, we've been pretty tight. Just saying. We spend our money. Where is this going to hit us? Stephan, correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm looking at the marketing reserve uh holding a balance of 3.5 million. Yeah. Good afternoon, chairman. Good afternoon, council members. Yes. Yes, sir. You are correct. Uh that would be the pot of money that if if approved, this $500,000 uh marketing allocation would come out of the marketing reserve. Thank you. Yes. Yes,
sir. And what's the duration of this ad plan? When is this will go to September 30th? So, the current fiscal year. Yes. Okay. Any further questions? No, not really. Thank you, Mary. Just a thought. I I understand it's a great opportunity, but it does make me nervous if we don't know what success is. And if success is we get this win it again another year. Yeah. Okay.
That that's that would be great. But it just seems to me like it just makes me nervous for a half a million if we don't know what a success is or or or or not. And I can appreciate that. I think it's also important for all of us to know which I know you all do the amount of hotels that we have coming online. the demand that not only Pensacola Beach, but downtown Pensacola is going to need to serve. Um, so these additional dollars allow for us to invite more people to visit, to stay in our hotels, to eat in our restaurants, to go to the bars, to enjoy all of the experience
that is Pensacola. So, while some of it unfortunately is not trackable, I do think that we can leverage this to encourage a new traveler to come and spend more, potentially stay longer, and come back. Nicole, do you know um how much accommodations revenue would have to be created in order to replace a $500,000 TDT allocation? I do not have that number on me, but I'm happy to work with the team to get it for you. Um so if it we're at 5% I'm going to do the math real quick. For 5%
to replace $500,000 in TDT, we'd have to create new and incremental $10 million in room revenue, accommodations revenue. I'm looking around at Stephan to check my math. I think 5% of $10 million is $500,000. We can get there pretty easily. So, could it be that? And I didn't look at Jennifer, the math professor. Could it could it be that you could look at the star report, a lagging star report, and identify those markets where you're advertising to see if we see room revenue lift in those markets that total $10,000 incrementally in the date range for the ad plan?
We can absolutely that be a measure of success. I think we can look at the star. I think we could look at key data um just to talk to our other accommodations. Um but yes. Yeah. And visit Pensacola still uh uh purchases the star report. Yes. The star global report. Could you explain what that is for my fellow council members? So I can explain that it helps us track with our hotel revenue and the lift and who's coming and how much is spending. Um unfortunately that is definitely Darren's lane. So I understand that it is a successful metric tool for us and for our
advertising team and for our hotel years, but that's about as far as the information I know. I have a little bit of legacy knowledge about the star report and for your benefit it it's it's this wildly incestrial u report in which hotel years provide their performance data to star global and they aggregate that data and and report it back to the um the subscribers of this report where they list the subject hotel and then in an agnostic view the competitive set of and the competitive
set can defined as anything. It can also be built for a market and in this case for visit Pensacola, I believe y'all subscribe to the market star report which combines the performance of all the hotels in a given market and analyzes that over a period of time and looks at those feeder markets. Brian, absolutely. I just wanted to point out as well she mentioned key data. We also subscribe to the key visit Pensacola subscribes to the key data service which essentially provides similar data for vacation rentals outside of the hotel hotel space. So exactly we can look how often do
they update their information? Star Global is a a lagging report 20 days lagging the month as I recall. Uh key key data is actually a little bit different if I I I can't there is a lag to it. I don't know the exact days. One of the advantages that key data gives us is uh over the star report is it also has a look ahead. It looks at upcoming bookings rather than just reporting past bookings. So it's kind of a flowing thing but uh the data is always there. It's instantaneous, but we have noticed you can look back about 30 days and it'll shift a little bit. So, there's
a 30 to 45 day attribution window on Q data. Great. Thanks, Brian. Um, I I would challenge Visit Pensacola to really break down the economic impact of the $500,000 allocation. You know, what what we often talk about room nights, but that's the the leading indicator that we look at that room nights creates TDT, but what we're really looking at is the the encompassing economic impact. What's a sales tax? How many how many jobs might $10 million in in accommodations uh revenue create? One of the things we would definitely look at in this campaign is the one of the another data
tool that we have is Adara impact. It's the one I I mentioned earlier where we can tag uh uh digital ads and then it they use data partners in the in the travel space to give us reports on how those campaign performs in terms of room nights, room searches and and even hotel revenue and I mean uh daily rates and time spent in market and one thing that I think would be very interesting to to look at is uh are those numbers higher? Are these are these travelers from from that we reach through this cond outreach are they spending more money? Are they staying here longer? And I would
certainly expect those numbers to be higher. So that would certainly be a number we would want to look at as well. Great. Okay. Thank you. Thank chairman. So Nicole, how much does Visit Pensacola get from the unified budget? Our overall budget completely is 10 million. How much? 10 million. 10 million. Okay. And so none of those resources go to this segment of the population, the 143,000 odd people that are we're trying to attract. Now, our current marketing plan does not address this
household income. No. Okay. It strikes me that Kai Nas, part of their marketing strategy is to identify places that will then turn around, buy their licensing, buy ads, things of that nature, because now they've got us advertising or wanting to advertise with them because of something their readers said about us, which sounds like the readers already know about us. I I don't I don't get the idea of spending $500,000 for this. I also um this is nothing to do with you. I don't like the way this came on our agenda. Um, in past agendas it said request amount. Uh,
this is not. It was a marketing package. There's nothing to alert the public that there was a request. Let's say read down and saw the numbers and they just assume, yeah, well, they're probably asking for money, but I didn't get that from this. So, even up as recent as today, I was like, well, is is there anything on there? Is there an actual request or is it just a proposal? So, I don't think public had adequate notice about this. I'm not going to support it today. Thank you. Thank you. Ashley, think. So, you said that this marketing campaign essentially, we'll say, would
start now and then would run through September. Yes. So, and I don't have this printed out, but was there a expectation of how many clicks, how many views that we would get based on the campaign spend for the social media? So, we did include uh for the social media, we did not include that, but for everything else, we included the impressions. Okay. Is there a way that we could work it where the board could go on and give say half now and then at one of our future board meetings we could visit and see if those parameters were met and if so then we could fund the second half. Absolutely.
I think that this is completely flexible. I think that any amount of money is going to allow us to talk to a new audience and to um leverage this win. I think obviously the more the further we can go and the more we can purchase but I think with additional dollars we can get started and then we can report back. I will say the travel or the lead time is 60 to 90 days. So I I hesitate with that to come back in let's say June because our year is over September 30th. So while we can buy things
as you know for the county dollars everything has to be closed and shut September 30th. So, I just don't want us I want us to be smart with the dollars as we're purchasing things. So, in your ideal world, if we like Brad said, we want to see you show your work. If we wanted to see that and we wanted to see what the outcome of spending some of the money is, but still give you enough time to spend the remainder of the money, when do you think you would be ready to come back to the board and give us an update from a me from a media perspective? May. May. Okay.
Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. If that is the kind of area we're going for the print, because I think the Visit Florida magazine's probably, especially since that comes online, I hate that I'm going to say this, but when Palifox is done, I if we're going to invite a bunch of people to Pensacola, it's not exactly the time to decide. And we're including Pensacola in this, right, in this rundown. So, we need that finished before that one comes out. So,
and that one's the one that's being held off right now. Well, that's the one that we got the extension. It is under deadline. We've already passed the deadline, but I would like to say, you know, it I hear you and I understand that we want Palifox done because we want it to be beautiful, but right now we're working every angle to just get people down to Palifox to support it. So, I think it's twofold. Just saying this though, that might not cause a second time down for people that are spending money to come here right now, right? And so when we're looking at this,
yes, it may bring him runs, but it's not going to that's not the thing that brings a person back if this is where it is. I I agree that we all need to be spending money down here and keep these guys alive. That's not even the question. Um, but I think that's kind of on us personally. We're the one, especially me, you know? I mean, it's us that took this on. So, um, but that and the point I'm trying to make here is the you've already got an extension for the print. So, that we probably need to pay. So, when will the go? She said May. Yeah. So,
that's perfect timing, right? So, so that one probably needs to go. I mean, if we're looking at this and going to divvy up what now, waiting for metrics, that kind of thing, then um I think that's probably the direction is that first stuff up there on that top the um would you have a suggestion here? So, if we did the 190 150 683 for that first half, I don't know that we need all of
that right now, but we definitely need some of it. We need to be able to put the emblem on different things. That's which cost here. So, you're only covered for you, but we were going to do a group. No. So, we purchased a license, but but within this, this will all be visit Pensacola assets. So, the license will be on all of this. We did build it out into three different buckets. So if you decreased the amount given to us today, we would go back as its EM and probably decrease these buckets as a collective so that we can still have the opportunity to do the digital to do some
of the cond and to do some of the other things that we've and the print. You would do the the magazine. We would suggest doing the print. Yes. Okay. Um my feeling is that in marketing is that you have one opportunity to make a huge splash and this is something so special for our city and people are out there now planning for their summer vacations. So, in my opinion, I think we should make the biggest possible splash that we can and get as many people here as starting to look at us.
And if this is like people that might decide to go to 3A and now might come over here and they have a lot of money. They'll spend a lot of money. So, I say go big. Thank you, Nicole. How far in advance are folks uh making their reservations? How far in advance? 60 to 90 days out. 60 to 90 days. Um so so if you start advertising tomorrow and and there were some allocations made to do such really we're hoping that the impact in reservation activity is going to be April May yeah April Maypr but
then to get all those results back that that's why I hesitated a little bit we can do it absolutely we'll be ready and then we'll be ready for the fall because we know there's a need still for fall um but we would like to go ahead and allocate in place. Okay, great. Thank you, Jennifer. So, just to be fair here, we hold people's feet to the high. We are not an easy board. I mean, we have really been harder and harder and harder as of late. And so, normally stuff comes forward,
you know, with um I mean, the things that our council member down there is asking for is not unheard for. I mean, we we want all that. want to count on what we're going to get in return. And we have been streamlining how much money people are getting first off because and if you look around, that's kind of the temperament in the public right now is to be really mindful that we do this. Um we're seeing a lot of people getting stronger and stronger with uh desires that we're sure of
what we're spending money on. And obviously this is not something we can be absolutely sure on. We get that we're not. But I think that it would be fair especially with the lack of the public's involvement and I agree that I don't think um this necessarily hit the public with knowledge of it said we were going to have a discussion about cond right not necessarily that we were going to you know what exactly until it was really just making its way around with us I think very recently. So
if we did a part, I think that's a reasonable thing to do. Do part of it now, come back, do the rest of it for the rest of summer. We can have things ready to roll and we can see that there's some metrics showing how things are going. I think that's more our standard of how we've been doing things and I don't think it's an unreasonable way to go. Um that's a consideration I have here. I think there's no doubt this is exciting. There's no doubt that we want to see this do well, but we do also have to be mindful because we are um we have a lot of people come
before us and there's a lot of work to be done here that we need to be conscientious of. So, someone else go for it. You want to talk? Not really. I'm just elaborating. Well, I I see it as a unique opportunity because uh I as I it was mentioned, we're buying eyeballs. Um for most of my career in the hotel business, which which originated on Pensacola Beach, actually it started in Orange Beach. I digress. I was there for six weeks and got shipped over to Pensacola Beach. We
were hesitant to send people into Pensacola for a number of reasons. Not the least of which is they couldn't get back to the beach during peak season without a protracted drive, an hour or three. And you know, I I was never going to be the manager or the desk clerk for that matter that said, "You should go visit the National Museum of Naval Aviation only to have them get hung up in traffic for two hours and come back really angry at me for having done that." That's been eliminated. That six lane bridge gets people from Pensacola Beach to downtown Pensacola with great efficiency.
And so no longer in Pensacola Beach do we hesitate to send folks over to Pensacola, the museum or or wherever. Um the the the sports facility on NM Road that we just allocated $25 million to turf. I think this is a unique opportunity for the city of Pensacola. And I echo or excuse me, Escambia County. And I echo what Miss Hosing said that in advertising I think you got to make a big splash and we're trying to tee up Visit Pensacola is trying to tee up on behalf of Escambia County uh
an advertising campaign that really gets the most uh out of this opportunity attempts to get the most out of this opportunity. Certainly, I would envision that Visit Pensacola and Showcase could spend a lot more money uh and perhaps less, but um I'm looking to you to confirm with us that this is the most rational plan you've developed today. Per our board and showcase and the research, yes, this is the most appropriate ask. Okay. And I apologize for not being clear on my setting of the agenda.
uh both the city council members uh not being as clear as um you would have liked to uh declare that we're having a discussion about funding. Um we know what they say about assuming and I assume that any topic uh generally speaking is a a discussion about funding in some degree. Um so that's that's my that's all I have to say about that. Anyone else? Do we have a motion? Anybody
else? Well, I will um I make a motion that we provide half the funding now, the second half contingent upon a report in May. If you guys want to come to us earlier, I think we should entertain the idea of releasing those funds earlier. So, if we get great feedback and people are clicking the links left and right, I think that we would love to go on and put more money towards it. But based on this, move forward with half of the funding and provide the other half based on a update report from visit Pensacola. We have a motion on the floor. Is there a second? I'll second it. Uh,
any further discussion? I was going to ask what the source was. Don't we have to identify a source as well where it's going to come from? Uh, I believe we did earlier. It would be from the marketing reserves currently held at a balance of uh 3.513 million. It probably needs to be in the motion though. I make a motion that I would like to amend my a motion. Um make a motion that we provide half of the funding asked for from the marketing reserve dollars and we provide that immediately and then based on the report that we received from VISA Pensacola around May that
we would if we're pleased with that report move forward with funding the second half. I my second holds. Thank you. You're welcome. We have a motion an amended motion and a second on the floor. Uh, any further discussion? Mr. Miller, I would call for the vote. Ashley Hoffberger, yes. Charles Bayer, no. Jason Nicholson, yes. Brad Mullenex, yes. Jennifer Breer, yes. Mary Hawking, yes. Motion passes 51. Thank you. Um item number six u thank you for your robust discussion
um and your time uh to be here today for the special meeting so that viscola can get a good start good running start at uh taking advantage and exploiting the opportunities been provided to us. Uh we have no other business before the council today. So I would invite um starting with Mrs. Hawking you have any closing remarks? I would just like to say that I think we're all very very lucky to live in Pensacola and um it's only going to get better from here.
Thanks. I think that also I I think that um what Ashley said is absolutely true that if there you're seeing something earlier than that, come back earlier than that, right? I mean, we made it here today. We can do it again. I'll be sure to put funding. All right. Glaring words. Funding request. Thank you. Mr. looking forward to uh seeing these pieces and seeing it out in the social media and uh knowing it's our city. Madam Commissioner, thank you for being willing
to work with us. I know that we've had community partners come in before and if they don't get exactly what they asked for, it's not as good of a partnership. So, thank you for being willing to work and help us to see exactly what we're turning out with this money. We appreciate you. Thank you, Councilman Bear. Yes. Thank you. Um, and I want to thank you for putting the the presentation together and the funding amounts. It's just same thing happened when I was on the PEDC. We have things come up that were not identified as funding items and to me that's just not adequate notification for the public. I'm hopeful that it does work out well and that we uh have some
good metrics we can track in the future. Thank you. Thank you, Councilman. And um I echo Mary's sentiment. It's a great time to live in Pensacola, y'all. I mean, who would have thought that uh so many years ago when we used to have battles of the bands on Pensacola Beach and you know, rock uh contest that today we would be ranked number Santa Rosa Island in fact is ranked number one and two. So number one's Pensacola Beach, number two is Navar. And if you've read the poll, the next three are Hawaii. So, you know, if you're planning your vacation in Nashville, Tennessee,
and you want to go to the best beach in the US, you can go to Santa Rosa Island or you can go to Hawaii is the way I see it. So, we're in good company. I think I got to add something in. You said, "Who would think it?" I think those of us are live here. I you do it. Okay. I love the fact that that's the truth. We've married a quality of place with the southern hospitality that keeps us all grounded here. We have a great community. We have great infrastructure. our political spectrum is more logical than it has been in my experience. So, thank you very much. So,
u yay Pensacola. It's good to be in Pensacola right now. Thank you, Visit Pensacola for putting your presentation together. And if uh there are no further remarks, we are adjourned.