Pauls Valley City Council members had a lively discussion during their Nov. 11 regular meeting regarding the future of the annual Okie Noodling Tournament, with various council members and tourism officials offering very different perspectives on the issue.
Councilwoman Amy Richey said she requested the discussion regarding the viability and cost of continuing to host Okie Noodling be placed on the agenda.
“You guys know my stance; I’m for tourism 150%. Anything that’s going to put our little town on the map. But I think with the current economic challenges we have faced this year and the things that we have going on, I’m not sure that maybe 2026 is the right year to continue on with this festival right now,” Richey said, going on to suggest the funds normally spent for Okie Noodling could be put to use for tourism projects that would also benefit citizens throughout the year such as lake improvements or recreation-related projects.
“I think we’re all open to discussing any ideas. Maybe we look at downsizing it drastically, maybe we look at not doing it at all this next couple of years,” Richey said. “I just think we really seriously need to consider how that money is being spent.”
The actual cost of putting on the tournament has been a topic of conversation at tourism board meetings over the last year, as a new tourism director and new city manager struggled to pin down a firm budget number from previous years’ records. Their best estimate was an annual cost of more than $200,000.
The 2025 Okie Noodling Tournament in June celebrated the event’s 25th year by returning to its roots – a day shorter and on a tighter budget – highlighting the original noodlers, the filmmakers who started the tournament, and local icon Phil Henderson, who offered his restaurant, Bob’s Pig Shop, as the tournament’s first venue.
“I do think we did a really good job of making it look like a success this last year. It was very pretty from the outside,” Pauls Valley Tourism Director Tawni Huggans told council members. “But we also did a very detailed budget report of what it actually cost, which is what was assigned to us.”
From that budget report, Richey shared a “snapshot” of the 2025 event with other council members. The document showed revenue from the event totaling nearly $35,000, private donations or sponsorships of just over $24,000 and a $106,000 appropriation from tourism funds.
Expenses for the 2025 tournament came in at $132,583, however Richey said she did not see the liquor and sales tax payments to the state, based on alcohol sales, included in the expense totals, and she noted labor costs for city employees working the event were also not reflected.
As the discussion progressed, Huggans said she wanted to make sure the public understands the distinction between the city’s general fund and tourism tax dollars as the council makes decisions on where to spend tourism funds.
“When we say ‘tourism dollars’ and we say ‘city money,’ they are two different pots. Tourism dollars come from the hotel/motel tax. So, when you see the arguments on Facebook, or wherever, that we shouldn’t be spending tourism dollars on things and we need to put it toward infrastructure – we need to fix the roads, or we need to fix the park – that simply cannot be done. It’s not legal, we cannot do that,” Huggans said. “We still have to spend that money on drawing people to town. Doesn’t mean we can’t change the way we’re spending it, on the events we’re having, things like that, but we simply can’t just say, ‘Here city, spend this money however you want.’”
Huggans told council members the tourism budget for the 2026 Okie Noodling Tournament has already been cut back to $75,000.
“That’s the line item we set aside for this event. So, from that aspect, we have cut back,” Huggans said. “Now, what that means is we either cut back what we do at Okie Noodling, or we increase the sponsorships, and that’s kind of what we’re looking at.”
In order to continue to produce the type of tournament the city has hosted prior to 2025, Huggans said they will need to come up with $125,000 in sponsorships.
Richey, who has served on the Okie Noodling planning committee for the last five years, said with the exception of a large sponsorship of $50,000 during the pandemic, the amount of sponsorships and donations raised for Okie Noodling over the last several years has hovered consistently in the $20,000-$25,000 range.
“We’ve not moved the needle much,” she said.
Richey said it has been a financially difficult year for the community and the country as a whole, and she is concerned the need for more donations and sponsorships in 2026 comes at a time when businesses, large and small, are already stretched thin.
Councilman Jonathan Grimmett voiced strong opposition to canceling or temporarily postponing the tournament.
“I’m dead set against stopping it,” Grimmett said, at one point.
Council members also discussed continuing to scale back the event or simplifying it, before Grimmett circled back around and asked to rephrase his earlier statement.
“If you came to me and said, ‘Okay, we’re not going to do it, and here’s how we’re going to spend the $100,000,’ then maybe. But I don’t think you stop having it with the idea of, ‘Well, we’ll figure out after the fact how we’re going to spend that money.’ You know, after we rob our town of something that people come from all over the world to. My daughter has friends coming from all over the country every year,” Grimmett said. “So, before we just stop it, we need to have a plan how we’re going to replace it.”
Council members asked about the stance of the Tourism Board, which is charged with developing tourism planning for the city and making recommendations regarding tourism expenditures to the city council.
“The general consensus of the board: Okie Noodling costs a huge amount of money. We could take that same money and do three or four events a year. We could do all kinds of things that would draw in more than 5,000 people over the course of a year,” said Steven Bratcher, chairman of the Pauls Valley Tourism Board. “I would love to see Okie Noodling be a thing of the past in Pauls Valley.”
Asked why, Bratcher said, “The expense versus what you get out of it.”
During a Tourism Board meeting earlier this year, Bratcher presented the board with data from the 2024 Okie Noodling Festival generated with the location intelligence platform Placer AI, which uses data collected from mobile devices to generate foot traffic metrics for specific events or venues. It can tell you where event attendees came from, how long they stayed and where they went after the event.
During that discussion, Bratcher said the 2024 event drew just over 10,500 people to Wacker Park during the two-day festival. Of that number, 3,400 were from Pauls Valley, and another 2,200 were from other communities inside Garvin County.
“The second largest draw we had, from a community standpoint, was Ada. The third was Davis,” Bratcher told city council members during the Nov. 11 meeting.
While the event does draw people from around the world, Bratcher said the majority are coming from the immediate area and driving home afterward, not staying in local hotels.
In addition, Bratcher said in past years, the event has drawn mostly local crowds to the park, where they spend their money with non-local vendors and food trucks instead of shopping or dining at local businesses.
“Okie Noodling is paying people to come to our town and take our money and leave,” he said.
The 2025 Okie Noodling Festival was held in downtown Pauls Valley, after heavy rains and flooding forced a last-minute change of venue from Wacker Park. The shift allowed an opportunity to showcase local downtown businesses during the event.
Pauls Valley City Manager Joe Livingston said similar Placer AI data for the 2025 event showed people came and stayed longer at the festival in the downtown area.
“In a way, I have to agree with what Steve said. In the past, we’ve spent huge dollars, and I showed you that a year ago,” he told council members. “We spent a lot of money in the past. This year though, we worked the numbers. … It showed it was a benefit to our community. Now, was it a $150,000 benefit? No.”
Bratcher said he would prefer to see the city use the $75,000 of tourism funds budgeted for Okie Noodling and do three to four events in the new downtown entertainment district, to draw people to the area.
“One of those events could be Okie Noodling,” Grimmett suggested.
Bratcher agreed, adding he would love to see the tournament’s budget funded only by the donations or sponsorships that could be secured, rather than with tourism money.
Richey asked if Huggans thought she could comfortably plan the tournament for $100,000 – the total of the $75,000 budgeted by tourism and the $20,000-$25,000 in sponsorships and donations that has been raised in previous years.
“No, I think there has to be alterations to what we’ve done,” Huggans said. “I think I could put a great event on for that amount, but it won’t look the same.”
Huggans said the city has a hard deadline of March 1, 2026, to have the funding in place and to have a plan for this year’s festival, if it is to move forward.
No action was taken regarding the Okie Noodling Tournament during the Nov. 11 meeting, but council members did agree to continue the discussion, noting it was the first time they have ever discussed the event as a council.
“I think it had been put out in the universe that this is something the city council is 100% agreed upon … and the amounts being spent have to continue being spent. That’s not true. We need to discuss whether we can continue to have it, whether we need to cut the budget back drastically, whether we need to rearrange what it looks like, but we do need to be talking about it,” Richey said. “We can’t continue the way it is.”
