Broader approach would benefit area, grow jobs

As local towns decide on how much money they’ll spend next year, the season always brings out what for councils is a bothersome and needlessly complicated question: How much money should we spend to promote tourism, and how should we spend it?

Three local municipalities collect a tax on motel rooms and campground spaces that is supposed to be spent to promote tourism. That brings groups that qualify, and some that don’t, to the town government asking for those tax funds collected from tourists.

The process is cumbersome at best and depends on the knowledge of council committee members who may or may not have any expertise in tourism promotion. Most of them, however, want to be good stewards of public funds, so they naturally want to hold onto the money, not spend it.

That tendency has harmed the local economy by an immeasurable amount over the last couple decades. Money that was supposed to be spent to boost the local tourism industry, and the jobs it can produce, has gone unused, earning miserly interest in city coffers.

But an approach proposed for several years finally got some traction last week as councils wrestling with the question again stepped back a little from their provincial positions. Most promising, the mayor of Coulee Dam proposed (and the council liked) the idea of letting someone else handle an amount the council would decide on.

This year, the chamber of commerce will likely get the task it has been performing for several years, but perhaps with less pain and pleading. But, as the chamber proposed last year, a regional tourism advisory council could and should be formed to oversee the expenditures for the good of the entire marketable Grand Coulee Dam area.

For such a plan to work, however, all three towns would have to buy into it, but Grand Coulee was not represented in earlier discussions.

It’s an idea leaders in each city and town should pursue, together.

Scott Hunter

editor and publisher