FRANKFORT — Money from Kentucky's share of a national tobacco settlement is being put up as a sweetener to keep the National FFA Organization's annual convention in Louisville.

        As long as the convention stays, it would get half the interest on a $2 million endowment.

        This year's convention opens Wednesday and runs through Saturday at the Kentucky Fair and Exposition Center. It draws about 45,000 people, and its estimated worth to the Louisville area is $20 million.

        On top of that is the money spent by high-school FFA members, their families and leaders in traveling to and from Louisville.

        “They impact the entire state, whether it's the aquarium in Newport or the Corvette museum in Bowling Green,” Harold Workman, president and chief executive officer of the Fair and Exposition Center, said Monday.

        FFA, which has 460,000 members and formerly was Future Farmers of America, held its conventions in Kansas City, Mo., for 71 straight years before Louisville won the right to play host from 1999 through 2005.

        Louisville is competing for conventions in 2006 through 2010. Other finalists are Columbus; Nashville, Tenn.; and the city of FFA's national headquarters, Indianapolis.

        To help Louisville, the board that dispenses the settlement money being paid to the state by cigarette companies voted Friday in Bowling Green to put $2 million into a trust fund for FFA projects.

        A new promotional organization, Kentucky FFA Foundation Inc., would administer the trust. Half the earnings would be dedicated to the national convention as long as it remained in Louisville. The rest would go to Kentucky FFA activities.

        John-Mark Hack, executive director of the Kentucky Agricultural Development Board, said the money would not be an outright grant to the national FFA. As with the board's grants to FFA chapters, it is effectively being matched, he said.

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