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Telluride Council discusses tourism board responsibilities

Thursday, March 24, 2022

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Telluride Town Council held a work session regarding its intergovernmental agreement with Marketing Telluride Inc, also known as the Telluride Tourism Board, and the scope of services for the organization Tuesday morning during its regular meeting.


Talks about the role of the tourism board have taken place since the start of the pandemic. Mountain Village recently terminated its agreement with the tourism board in December 2021. Telluride officials would like to see more transparency from the tourism board, including where money is spent and on what. Telluride currently funds the tourism board through 74 percent of building and business fees.


Other than the scope of services, the amount of money the tourism board receives from the town was also discussed Tuesday.


“Sustainable tourism is the new buzz term across the entire state and definitely locally. We’ve been talking about it since before 2020. However, I don’t think we can completely dissect that from the funding question. They go hand in hand,” Mayor DeLanie Young said, adding there will be more conversations about the scope of services and the tourism board’s role.


She explained that local government officials, including those from San Miguel County, had previously met and outlined several suggested changes to the relationship between the tourism board and its primary funding entities.


“Part of the concern in the past that has come up regularly was transparency, lack of information. We were getting updates, but it wasn’t necessarily what we wanted to see or what we needed to see. There may have also been some disagreements in how things were being marketed, or where they were being marketed, to whom,” Young said. “But I think one of the things that rose to the top the most was having a seat on the board. As the primary funders for the organization there was concern that the board didn’t represent the major funders.”


Several council members, including Geneva Shaunette, expressed the desire to see the tourism board’s recent financials, including budgets and expenditures over the past three years.


“I feel like we’re a little bit in a chicken-and-egg situation right now. For me, it’s really important to see a scope of services clearly called out and what the costs are for those,” she said.


Council member Meehan Fee suggested five-year contracts between the town and tourism board moving forward, so officials can review the agreement and track its return on investment more regularly.


“I think that this is a really, really big conversation because this is the entire economy of our entire community, our entire destination. It’s a big conversation that needs to be had. There is significant transparency that needs to be shared with us from the tourism board. Some of the things that have been talked about need to be addressed and need to be addressed immediately. But I think that’s going to be a much bigger conversation, and I want to make sure we don’t take the train off the track while we’re doing that,” she said.


Fee added that a “destination management component” should be considered as well.


“We need to be able to manage the visitors that we have coming in here for the visiting public and our locals, most of all. We have to make sure we’re not seeing this stress compression that we’ve seen over the past two summers on our local community, because that’s not the community that we want to be leading,” she said.


Dan Jansen, the current tourism board chairman, said he’s previously had discussions with council members about the organization’s financials.


“We are happy to share the budgets. Some of you have come to our offices and we’ve shown you down to how much we spend on office supplies. You can see it all. We’re happy to share it. There’s nothing to hide here,” he said.


Before the end of the morning work session, council members unanimously agreed to include several components in the new scope of services, which wasn’t officially completed or voted on Tuesday. Officials would like to have two seats on the tourism board, meetings that are open to the public, for the tourism board to remain an apolitical entity and operate on a five-year contract cycle.

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