The Long, Drawn-Out Fall of the Visitors Bureau

The Humboldt County Visitors Bureau has been undergoing a strange, protracted fall over the last several years. There was a time when it was the premier – and kind of the only – local organization that promoted Humboldt County’s tourism economy. What did they do? They bought ads in Sunset magazine and such. They’d wine and dine travel writers who came to town. They were, for a while, just absolutely laser-focused on the redwoods, and their bread-and-butter number one tourism target was retirees cruisin’ ’round the country in their RVs. Maybe they’d like to take a spin down through the big trees! Local governments couldn’t throw money at the Visitors Bureau fast enough.

But then, in 2019, the city of Eureka – which was actually coughing up a pretty large percentage of the bureau’s budget – decided that it was going to cut off the organization off, arguing that it didn’t do enough for Eureka proper. Simultaneously, the bureau’s longtime director, Tony Smithers, suddenly died. And then, a couple of years ago, county government started to think that maybe it should get off the Visitors Bureau train as well. Some complained that the HCVB wasn’t keeping up with its mandated reports to the county. Others thought that the bureau was siphoning off too much money that was eventually passed on to regional tourism bureaus and chambers of commerce. Others thought the county’s economic development division could do a better job itself.

But the county put off a final decision on the matter. And then it put it off again. Until, finally: Today.

Going into the meeting, Humboldt County government contributed only about $145,000 per year to the HCVB. The money comes from the transient occupancy tax – the so-called “bed tax” paid by hotel guests (and renters of Airbnbs, and camping spaces) – and from 2022’s Measure J. These days, a number of arts agencies and town-based organizations – chambers of commerce and the like – together receive much more of those funds, in aggregate. These agencies – from Garberville, Orick, Willow Creek, Loleta, Arcata and McKinleyville — all paraded through Supervisors’ chambers this afternoon with their annual report of activities, to much enthusiasm from members of the board.

Then it came time to make a decision about the HCVB. The staff report on the item recommended yanking their funding and instead awarding it to the county’s own economic development division, to be used as the board directs and to support Project Trellis. (Read that staff report here.) It would require a 4/5 vote.

Julie Benbow, the current executive director of the Visitors Bureau, stood up during public comment and gave it the ol’ college try.

“This is one last rallying cry,” Benbow said. “Maybe you think, instead of giving the $143,000 somewhere else, that you actually reinvest it in the bureau for another six months, and that way we can maintain all the things that we do outside the community and keep Humboldt’s reputation alive as a premier destination.”

But the conversation had clearly moved beyond. Employees of the county’s economic development department ran down a list of things that the board had already requested of them – an airport marketing plan, a business retention plan – that have no current source of funding behind them.

Also: Supervisor Mike Wilson sort of verbally subtweeted the agency, with an impassioned speech about how tourism marketing should perhaps not be so determinedly square. He spoke in praise of the work of the Ink People, another recipient of county bed tax funds.

“I’ve been a proponent for a long time — in terms of investment with relationship to tourism — just being a cool place to go visit,” Wilson said. “And it’s not just about redwood trees, which are awesome, and people do do that, but it’s also about your vibe. It’s about what’s happening when people visit. It’s about the spontaneous interactions that they have through the community, and if there’s an arts event here or a cultural event there, and even if they’re kind of in weird and sort of like remote spots within the community, and people run across that, those are the stories that basically generate sort of a broader understanding.”

Supervisor Rex Bohn hinted that, all things considered, he would prefer to see the Visitors Bureau continue to get some kind of funding. He reminisced about past reports from the bureau, and recalled how good it felt to see in them that the county had been written up in the New York Times, or things like that.

“I still like the Visitors and Convention Bureau,” he said. “Nothing against [the] economic development [division], but, I mean, you know, I don’t know. I’d rather keep them funded six months.”

But Bohn seemed more or less on the fence, and Supervisor Natalie Arroyo went ahead and made a motion to go with staff recommendations – to pull funding from the HCVB and reroute it to the county’s own economic development efforts.

That’s when Supervisor Steve Madrone stepped in with the most serious challenge to the proposal. He was all about yanking funding from the bureau, but as he did earlier in the meeting – see below – Madrone sought to use the proceedings to divert funding back to his home district. He proposed using some of the HCVB money to up contributions to the Arcata and McKinleyville chambers of commerce, and to give $20,000 to the Trinidad Chamber of Commerce, which is not currently funded through the bed tax. Trinidad deals with a lot of tourists in the summer, so that would be only fair. He asked Arroyo if she would be open to that amendment.

It turned out that she was not. She said that the ad hoc subcommittee that she and Supervisor Michelle Bushnell had served on had started work on the current list of recommendations many months ago, and hinted that it was a little bit late in the game to pull new proposals out of thin air.

“If we’re going to kind of open up the whole process again to analyze the return on investment and who’s doing what where, I think it would be a whole different conversation,” she said. “But I came to this conversation today with [the idea] that this is the staff recommendation and being able to, by and large, support it. So I’d like to stick to that.”

Madrone – again, as he did earlier in the meeting (again, see below) – said he would hold firm and vote no unless Trinidad gets some scratch. He noted his special leverage in this particular matter.

“I’m sure you’ll probably be able to get another second, but we do need four-fifths,” he said. “So we’ll see where we go with this.”

But if Bohn still held any qualms about defunding the Visitors Bureau, Madrone’s intervention had erased them. The motion passed 4-1, with Madrone dissenting.

That Measure Z Windfall

If you read yesterday’s preview, you may be wondering what the board decided to do with that $400,000 quasi-windfall of Measure Z funds that showed up all of a sudden. Money from Measure Z – a sales tax generally aimed at public safety — had previously been earmarked for brush-clearing along county roads. But now we have Measure O, another sales tax aimed at transportation, and everyone agrees that the brush-clearing should more appropriately be funded by that.

The regular distributions, as graded by the county’s Measure Z advisory committee, were probably not going to be that controversial. The city of Eureka was going to get about $32,000 to buy some safety gear; Fortuna would get nearly $200,000 to fund a program to place a police officer in local schools; Rio Dell would get about $100,000 for a community services officer; and the Humboldt County Fire Chiefs Association would get nearly $1 million for fire suppression efforts across the county.

But what do we do with that extra cash that we didn’t expect to have? There were three options:

Option 1: Give it all to county agencies, with a big bunch to the Sheriff’s Office and the rest to the District Attorney, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Probation Department.

Option 2: Give most of the money to those internal county agencies, but also give a little bit more than it would otherwise give to the Humboldt County Fire Chiefs Association.

Option 3: Give all the money to Measure Z applicants that were otherwise rejected for lack of funding. These applicants included Wild Souls Ranch, a horse therapy outfit in Loleta; the Bear River Band of Rohnerville Rancheria, which runs an Office of Emergency Services; and the City of Trinidad, which wants some cash to repair its water system.

During discussion, it was clear that the board was veering toward Option 2. But Madrone said that he would withhold his aye unless Trinidad got some money for its water system. There was some pushback against this, centering around the idea was that this was stretching the notion of “public safety” pretty far, but eventually Bushnell agreed to add some money — $40,000 – for the project.

This didn’t sit will with Bohn, who waited a few moments before deciding how he would vote.

“We’re paying for infrastructure for an incorporated city,” Bohn said. “I wouldn’t care who it was, but I’m just saying we went so far off the path and again, we’re going to have to do it again.”

“Valid criticism,” Wilson remarked.

But Bohn voted in favor anyway, because, he said, of “fire and the public safety and everything else.”

As the vote was announced (5-0) Bohn’s sotto voce could be heard grumbling into a hot mic, saying “It’s more political…” before Bushnell’s bright “Thank you!” to the staff drowned him out.