Mt. Crested Butte moves forward with chamber agreement

“I think it’s pretty clear we’re all in support of the chamber.”

The Mt. Crested Butte Town Council agreed to sign a Professional Services Agreement with the Crested Butte-Mt. Crested Butte Chamber of Commerce, contingent on the extension of a line of credit from Community Banks. The final decision, made at the meeting April 3, means the chamber can hire an executive director and start planning events important to the town, like Crested Butte Bike Week and the festivities for the Fourth of July, with the promise of financing to back up its commitments.

After meeting with the chamber’s board of directors, outgoing co-president Sarah Morgan told the council on Tuesday, March 20, “The chamber’s biggest concern is that we’re at a critical point on a lot of events that we have to make financial commitments to, like lining up bands or pulling permits and advertising. It’s difficult to make commitments when we don’t have the service agreements executed guaranteeing the funding that we’re out there committing as an organization.”
She said a major concern for the chamber’s board was that the delay could cause the event planners to miss crucial deadlines or opportunities, which could soften the impact of “some of the summer activities that are so important.” The first event, scheduled for Memorial Day weekend, is the chamber’s Sidewalk Sale, followed by Restaurant Week starting June 8.
Ideally, Morgan said, the chamber should have restaurant and lodging partners lined up for Restaurant Week by the end of March. Permitting and insurance for the Sidewalk Sale are relatively minor, she said, “but they’re things we need to be moving forward on.”
The Mt. Crested Butte Town Council opted to push back approval of the professional service agreement at their March 6 meeting because of some concerns several members had with the unclear structure of checks and balances in the agreement that would ensure a proper handling of the chamber’s finances.
Additionally, councilman and Mayor pro tem David Clayton said the mayors of Mt. Crested Butte and Crested Butte wanted to make sure the agreements for both towns mirrored each other, delaying any final approval. But the Chamber could only wait so long.
Summer is just around the corner, however, and plans need to be laid for the Sidewalk Sale, Crested Butte Restaurant Week, Bike Week and events surrounding the Fourth of July. To add even more urgency to the chamber’s request for an agreement, Morgan said, interviews with six candidates to take over as the chamber’s executive director are under way and cannot come to any conclusion until there’s money to pay the successful candidate’s salary.
“We certainly can’t make a job offer for the executive director position until we have the service agreements signed,” she said. “So there’s a lot of chicken and egg kind of stuff going on right now.” Members of the chamber’s board are so far filling the role of events coordinator to get planning for this summer’s events going. The Crested Butte Town Council will be considering its agreement with the chamber at a meeting April 2.
Clayton, who also sits on the chamber’s board of directors as a full voting member as well as the ex officio member for the town of Mt. Crested Butte, says, “I would like to say that with this professional services agreement, we need to make sure that we protect the town and the functions of the visitor’s center and events going forward, particularly with the sources and uses of funds.”
Councilman Gary Keiser asked Morgan about the status of negotiations to extend a line of credit the chamber has tapped out with a local bank. Morgan said the chamber had gotten a verbal commitment from the bank to extend the line of credit, which had been due in early March, until May 4.
Chamber Board member Andrea Greene said the bank had signed a letter formalizing the extension.
For the first three months of this year, Morgan told the coundil March 20, the chamber has been operating visitor’s centers in Mt. Crested Butte and Crested Butte “in good faith, so the towns have in good faith compensated us. But we don’t think it’s a responsible way to do business to commit to vendors or programming that we don’t have a guaranteed funding source for.”
Gitin confirmed, “After the last meeting, I think it was pretty clear that we’re all in support of the chamber, but that we had requested certain checks and balances and structure to who makes what decisions.”
Morgan responded, “Are you going to ask someone to quit a job and possibly relocate for a position that we don’t have guaranteed funding on? I certainly wouldn’t.”
Keiser moved to approve the Professional Services Agreement contingent on reviewing the letter from the bank extending the line of credit.