Mt. Crested Butte takes another look at Tourism Association

“We need to get it together and we’re not”

The Mt. Crested Butte Town Council devoted a work session Tuesday, July 17 to gathering ideas about what a restructured Tourism Association might look like.
The Gunnison-Crested Butte Regional Tourism Association (TA) is an independent contractor that was created more than 20 years ago to market the Gunnison Valley as a year-round destination. The TA is funded through a 4 percent local marketing district (LMD) tax. Being funded by public money has made the organization open to public scrutiny.
Recent criticisms of the TA’s effectiveness have turned attention to the way it is run, with the valley’s elected leaders largely left on the sideline.
In particular, the Mt. Crested Butte Town Council has been frustrated by the level of participation they’re allowed in steering the TA, which offers only non-voting board positions to representatives from each of the valley’s three communities.
At the same time, about 43 percent of the lodging revenue that generates the tax is collected in Mt. Crested Butte, according to town statistics. The Town Council would like to make an elected leader responsible for how the TA’s annual budget of nearly $1 million is spent.
“Unfortunately, it’s taken too long to get to this point,” Mayor William Buck told TA president Wanda Bearth at the work session. “We’re discussing [the restructuring] because it’s our administrative duty as overseers of the tax money.”
The Board of County Commissioners is the ultimate authority over the TA, acting as the LMD board of directors that doles out funding to the TA, but otherwise mostly stays out of the organization’s day-to-day decisions. Those day-to-day decisions are where Mt. Crested Butte hopes to have a voice.
During the work session, several members of the council tended toward a governing structure like the Rural Transportation Authority’s (RTA), and similarly Mountain Express, which has elected members from each local government on the board of directors. The RTA board gets direction from a citizen advisory committee that doesn’t have a vote in how the money ultimately is spent.
“[The advisory council] gives us a lot of very good information and helps us craft a successful program,” Councilman Chris Morgan said. Morgan, who is also the chairman of the RTA board of directors, continued, “I also personally believe that the people executing the expenditure of taxpayer dollars ought to be elected officials.”
However Gunnison County isn’t the only place in the state with a LMD. Town Manager Joe Fitzpatrick had looked at other communities to see how they handled the money and the marketing.
To illustrate different approaches to marketing destination areas, Fitzpatrick explained briefly how each method worked. “In any of these, the elected officials aren’t the primary people,” he said. “They do approve the budget … so there’s a relationship there. But there isn’t the overall control.”
The marketing decisions, Bearth agreed, are better left to professionals. “As a business owner and president of the Tourism Association, I think it would be a mistake to have elected officials making the marketing decisions for the valley,” she said. “The board is comprised of 11 people who are residents of the valley who are fully vested in the business of tourism … There’s a marketing committee comprised of what are considered experts in the field, not elected officials.”
While the TA might seem to function like an arm of the county government, it’s technically an independent contractor. Mayor Buck said he’d like to see what other options are out there for contract marketing work.
In recent months, members of the Gunnison Valley community, as well as members of the Crested Butte and Mt. Crested Butte town councils, have questioned publicly if the TA has been using its budget to reach the right market with the right message.
Even at the work session, councilman Andrew Gitin pointed out a piece of marketing material produced by the TA recently that included an outdated mountain biking photo promoting a place that’s known to be a biking Mecca.
“It’s like a 1980s picture shown in a hard-core mountain bike magazine,” he said. “So it’s kind of frustrating, to me, to see that those readers are going to be hard-core mountain bikers and are going to see an ad with someone in all purple on a bike with no suspension.”
Bearth said that picture isn’t being used anymore.
But other members of the council had concerns with the job the TA was doing. Buck said, “There needs to be substantial cleanup on the process, from my point of view.”
Morgan said he wasn’t there “to pick on the Tourism Association,” but added, “I’ve been on your website and it’s just not very good.”
Bearth told the council the TA had just asked for more money from the LMD to build a new website, in the process right now. “There’s serious talk about incorporating the chambers [of commerce], and maybe even the towns, into that website,” she said.
The back and forth between council’s concerns and Bearth’s explanations continued until Buck responded to Bearth, saying, “You’re solidifying your position. Your feet are cemented in the ground in one position … That’s part of the frustration. We just don’t have a growth pattern here.”
Council member David Clayton produced a set of graphs and illustrated as much and Morgan pointed out that the town of Mt. Crested Butte passed an admissions tax on event ticket sales, like lift tickets, the same year the LMD tax was passed in the county in 2002. The town grants admissions tax money to the marketing efforts of individual businesses, events or organizations.
“If you were to add that level of public sector marketing to [Clayton’s] graphs, Mt. Crested Butte would overwhelm everyone else in the valley in terms of [its marketing contribution].”
Clayton added, “The other interesting thing to know is that during that period, the collection of admissions tax has been on an upward curve almost every year. So we’ve been able to collect more in admissions tax money, even though the actual lodging revenue for the county is going down.”
There was another small barrage of criticism aimed at the TA and after giving some history behind the attempt to get every business in the valley behind one marketing plan, Morgan said, “Instead, what we have is a community of different marketing arms that are fractured.”
Clayton added, “And they don’t look the same, so there’s no common message that reinforces why people want to come here.”
That frustrated Morgan, because he saw everyone getting equal treatment by the TA, so nothing stood out to a potential visitor.
“Which brings us to the point about brand and brand awareness,” Buck said, referring to an ongoing conversation about the valley’s image being projected in marketing material. “We need to get it together and we’re not.”
“You realize this Town Council adds to that problem with the distribution of your admissions tax dollars,” which go to individual marketing efforts as opposed to one organization with a cohesive message, Bearth said. The council disagreed with her assessment and another round of sparring started up between Morgan and Bearth.
“Wanda, you got a lot of guts showing up here tonight,” Buck finally said. With that, the bell rang and the council agreed to take on another round, with a second work session on the governance of the TA coming up.
“We’re going to have an additional work session, because I think all of us have additional points on our lists that maybe didn’t get enough time,” Buck said. “There’s coordination between Crested Butte and Mt. Crested Butte with regard to marketing and branding and a whole number of things. So we’re going to continue the conversations.” No date for that meeting was set.