County stakeholders discuss restructuring Tourism Association

“It comes down to two words: enhanced credibility”

The Gunnison-Crested Butte Tourism Association (TA) is getting older and might be feeling some growing pains. A recent push by several important stakeholders to find new ways of connecting the board to the voters it ultimately answers to is shaking up the status quo.

The Local Marketing District (LMD) board, which is comprised of the county commissioners and oversees the Tourism Association, sent a letter to the TA board in early September requesting a change in the TA’s governance structure. The change could give county voters direct representation on the association’s board of directors.
While each of the valley’s three municipalities and the county have seats on the TA board, those representatives cannot vote. That’s where city of Gunnison mayor Stu Ferguson feels the disconnection is between the TA and the voters who authorized its funding.
“I certainly don’t mean to imply that the mechanism isn’t legitimate. It is. My point is that a closer connection with the community as a whole could go a long way,” Ferguson said. “The citizens are the ones that authorize [the LMD]; therefore I feel like they should have some representation in the specifics of how [the money] is spent.”
As LMD board member Paula Swenson points out, the relationships between the various elements of the county’s marketing mechanism are “convoluted.”
County voters have twice authorized the LMD to fund a marketing effort aimed at bringing people to the Gunnison Valley. The LMD board appointed the TA to the task.
Funding for the TA comes through the LMD from a 4 percent tax on overnight stays in the valley that, until this year, had a seven-year sunset clause. In November, residents voted to allow the tax to be collected without a sunset clause.
According to county manager Matthew Birnie, it isn’t written in stone that the county funds the TA with the funds generated by the tax; rather, it funds some equivalent effort. However, it has been the TA’s job to market the Gunnison Valley as a year-round tourist destination for the past seven years.
The LMD has authorized TA budgets of more than $1 million in recent years and has more than $973,000 from the local lodging tax to spend on the marketing effort in 2010. The representatives from the city of Gunnison and the town of Mt. Crested Butte were sure that more voter involvement would lead to more accountability for how that money is being spent.
At a meeting of the LMD board and several TA stakeholders Tuesday, November 10, the discussion about the TA’s governance was less about changing the board structure and more about adding to it.
“If I had a problem with what is going on it wouldn’t be hard, it would be easy,” Ferguson said. “But I don’t have a problem with what’s going on and I don’t think it’s broken. I just think that as an elected official, I value greatly the connection with the citizens of our community.”
Although several options were suggested for getting voter representation on the TA board, the idea of giving a vote to the ex-officio members from the municipalities and the county gained the most traction.
While Ferguson’s idea seemed to have broad support with the LMD board and the town of Crested Butte, TA co-president Wanda Bearth wasn’t so enthusiastic.
“The people [elected to the TA board] are very good at marketing and they are intimately involved in tourism,” Bearth said. “They are marketing experts and I would guess that any elected officials on the board would find marketing a little lower down on their resume and I’m looking for a gain. I’m looking for a gain for the Tourism Association.”
Mt. Crested Butte mayor William Buck stepped in to defend the idea of more direct municipal involvement on the TA board.
“It comes down to two words: enhanced credibility,” he said.
 LMD board member Hap Channell said he could understand the TA’s hesitation at adding four new members to the board, noting that “more isn’t always better.” But he couldn’t see a problem with allowing the elected officials a vote.
He said, “I’m not sure if, functionally, [having the additional votes] would change much. I am interested in the size, if having 15 board members instead of 11 would ever create a problem. But I don’t see that there is a major issue here.”
Channell thought if there were some public misunderstanding about the way the TA operates or the decisions it makes, having an elected official on the board might help open lines of communication.
“So I’m trying to get at a downside here,” he said.
Having heard the LMD’s request for a change in the TA’s governance structure, Bearth said she would take the suggestion of including the county and municipalities as voting board members back to the TA board.
“We’re nowhere near making that decision yet, because the board has not yet met to discuss the LMD board suggestion,” Bearth said. “We’re taking the LMD’s request to consider this very seriously and we’ll be meeting with the entire TA board sometime in December.”
She said an exact date for the executive committee discussion has not been set.