TA report to CB council turns into brain-numbing debate

Doesn’t appear to be a lot of love between the two

The quarterly report from the Gunnison-Crested Butte Tourism Authority to the Crested Butte Town Council turned into a torturous sparring match between Mayor Aaron Huckstep and outgoing TA executive director Jane Chaney. For nearly 45 minutes, the two debated laboriously over minutia in metrics defining success of the TA’s advertising expenditures.

Huckstep has been very vocal for months that he doesn’t believe the TA is spending public tax dollars wisely in its marketing mission to bring people to the area. Chaney is known for inundating the council with reams of information and reports during her quarterly updates. During Monday night’s council meeting, Huckstep repeatedly questioned Chaney’s data defining success and insisted her calculations measuring Local Marketing District tax collections were skewed to show an increase, and thus positive results, when in fact the calculation Huckstep made showed a decrease. That back-and-forth debate took a good half hour.
“I’d like to see specifics of how much the TA efforts result in rooms booked up here,” said Huckstep. “You’ve told me you can’t give me those specifics.”
“We need the cooperation of all the local lodges and we are trying to work better with them to get that information,” said Chaney.
As she tried to elaborate her answers in extreme detail, Huckstep would cut her off.
“If sales tax in Gunnison is flat and it is down in Mt. Crested Butte, how effective is your ad run?” asked Huckstep.
“We measure it several ways including the volume on the 800 numbers we use…”
“Which is down 30 percent from a year ago,” said Huckstep.
“We think people are trending to using their computers and even their phones more to look at vacation travel,” said Chaney.
“It seems like a rosy picture but I don’t think the data is all valid,” said Huckstep. “Which ads on this two-and-a-half-page list are the most effective? I’m just trying to get a real picture. You have so much data but…”
“I can gather the information you want and email it to you tomorrow,” Chaney said.
The two sparred over accounting procedures and technical data points for nearly 45 minutes with no real resolution as people at the meeting for other issues squirmed in their seats.
Councilperson Jim Schmidt asked why it appeared in the TA report to the council that only the states of Colorado, Texas, Florida, Illinois and New York were targeted for winter marketing. Chaney said those were the top five states to see marketing efforts “but we reach everyone in the United States who is a skier. We have efforts that are nationwide and in other states.”
Answering a question from Councilperson Glenn Michel about cooperating with other county tourism efforts like the Rural Transportation Authority, Chaney said 96 percent of all the TA ads include the logos of the local airline partners. “In every way we can, we try to make it apparent that we have airline partners and you can fly into our destination airport.”
Chaney said she also works with the chambers of commerce to distribute promotional materials once guests arrive in the valley; the TA website, she said, is ranked very high with search engines. She said this all adds up to good cooperation between partners—except, apparently, between Chaney and Huckstep.
Chaney will be leaving the executive director position within the next four weeks; she is currently transitioning with new executive director Pamela Loughman. Loughman said she comes from a ski background and is working on the 2013 TA work program. Huckstep wanted to make sure it was Loughman who was developing next year’s work plan and she assured him it was.