The meeting was called to order at 4:00 PM on August 6, 2026. The committee received a detailed presentation on visitation, special events, and tourism metrics, followed by a discussion on economic development program strategies, and a discussion on potential residential outdoor lighting regulations. No formal votes were taken, but direction was given on next steps for both the economic development advisory board and a lighting ordinance amendment.
Uh we think we're recording. It's uh four o'clock. Um see we're gonna um call to order the uh city council of business and community affairs uh committee meeting uh August 6th, 2026. It's four o'clock. We have a presentation from staff. Uh the first one is going to be report on special events and visitors. So Mr. Honorable Director Olson, please. Thank you, Councilmember Jason Olson, Director of Parks and Recreation, and my lovely friend over here, Dan Shim, um, with Visit Norman. We're gonna talk to you what has happened over the last quarter or so here with visitation and special events here in the city of Norman. Uh this happened, we're got a little bit out of whack. We were trying to do it every quarter, and we end up doing this two months uh later. So we're we're trying to pack in a little bit more information than what we have in our past few months, but we'll try to do the best we can, trying to give you a full understanding and scope of everything that's happened over the past uh what would be five and a half months or so. So this is the the very first chart you see right here is visitation inside of Norman. So your one constant uh that you have if you look at that blue line right there in the middle, that is the line of residents that go all the way uh through there, and you can see it's pretty consistent. Uh since uh this is a over the last few years. You can see you go all the way back to June of uh which I can't see. I'm actually uh I probably should have worked less. That's 12 months. Thank you, Dan. Dan actually has his classes on. Yeah. Uh so that blue line right there is the resident line, that orange line you see um hopping up and down. That is uh out-of-town visitors. So when you start talking about out-of-town visitors, these are people that actually spent um some significant time inside the uh the city. Uh, like if you're on the interstate or you get caught a uh they see you going through getting caught at a red light or something like this passing through to grab graphic gas. They try not to pick you up on on that line. Uh, but you'll you'll see all these spikes that happen throughout the year, and I think this one's interesting. I was trying to think, oh, why do we have a super low spike um January 21st? I'm trying to remember maybe that was our snowstorm that we had, so there wasn't a whole lot of people on the road at all. But it's uh you do get to see the interesting um I would expect these are the weekends uh that you start seeing festivals. So uh you need more of your bigger festivals happening in this area. These spikes over here, I would think would have more to do with the football games that we had in the the last fall. Um so it's always interesting to see how that goes. It's almost a little bit like a little heartbeat. Um I wouldn't hope our our hotel data would go along with that um to show some representation of the spikes. But we like to also go through there and um hop into a lot of our Norman Ford parks. Uh these are our Griffin, Reeves, Westwood Family Aquatic Center, the Young Family Athletic Center. This big red spike you see at Reeves, uh, that is the medieval fair. Uh and then you'll see the blue line right here. That uh correlates with your your fall season of soccer NYSA out there, and you also have your your fall season of baseball. And you can see that the WiFact um always pretty decently consistent, um hovering about 50,000 visitors a month in that range. Uh typically when we start school, and we'll we're hitting this period. We actually talked about this today in a meeting. We're going through our slow period, which is the fall, when kids get back in school and you start seeing those more of those outdoor sports, uh uh baseball and fall ball that happens outside your fall soccer. Uh you see those dips in numbers of our visitors out there at the young family athletics center. Uh more specifically, uh hopping into Griffin, and you have your past uh four years of data. You can see that we've gone up a little bit uh in the past 12 months, uh about over 400,000 visitors out at Griffin Park. Uh Dan, going back in your memory banks. What is uh what do you think this spike is here in February?