After more than two decades in the heart of Nashville, the Brown County Visitors Center and the Convention and Visitors Bureau have moved several blocks south to the former site of the Circle K gas station.
But that move is not the only shift happening in the organization.
CVB Executive Director Jane Ellis said she is taking the move as an opportunity to re-evaluate how the bureau operates.
That includes breaking down the invisible wall between the visitors center and the visitors bureau, she said.
[sc:text-divider text-divider-title=”Story continues below gallery” ]Breakdown
The publicly funded side of tourism in Brown County is a kind of alphabet soup.
There is the visitors center, a physical location; the Convention and Visitors Bureau (CVB), which both operates the visitors center and is charged with marketing Brown County as a whole; and the Convention and Visitors Commission (CVC), which serves mainly as an appointed body through which funding flows.
All of it is tax-funded but by a very specific tax.
Under state law, the county is permitted to collect a kind of sales tax on short-term — less than 30 days — overnight rentals of up to 5 percent. Though this tax is primarily charged to tourists, it also increases the final price businesses have to charge for overnight rentals in the county.
In Brown County, that innkeepers tax is collected by everyone from hotel owners to individuals with tourist rentals and paid to the county treasurer. From there it is passed on to the Convention and Visitors Commission.
The commission is allowed to allocate that money “to any Indiana not-for-profit corporation to promote and encourage conventions, visitors, or tourism in the county,” according to state law.
In Brown County — as in many counties — the nonprofit organization that the commission contracts with is the Convention and Visitors Bureau.
Since 2009, the five-member commission has approved budgets for the bureau that used between 85 and 97 percent of the tax collected in that year, according to records from the county auditor’s office.
In that time, the annual innkeepers tax revenue has generally been increasing from around $658,000 in 2009 to almost $814,000 in 2016.
Though the bureau’s contract with the commission indicates the bureau will receive 95 percent of that revenue, the actual budget requested by the bureau has been $693,500 each year since 2012, when that request was 97 percent of the revenue. In 2016, it was only 85 percent of the revenue.
Often the bureau will return to the commission later in the year to request an additional appropriation for a specific promotion, said bureau Board President Bruce Gould.
However, over the years, the commission has consistently dispersed less to the bureau than it has taken in. As of Dec. 31, 2016, the commission held a balance of around $342,000 from tax revenue that had not been dispersed.
Gould said that the commission does not actively seek ways to spend the money, so unless it is approached with a request, the money stays in the commission’s account.
The commission has given some of the funds to other entities in years past.
In 2008, it awarded $30,000 to the Chamber of Commerce for events and festivals planning, though the bureau was included in an oversight committee for those funds.
In 2011, the commission turned down a request for $80,000 to buy theater equipment for the Brown County Playhouse but did earmark $80,000 given to the bureau specifically to market the Playhouse.
In 2016, it gave the Brown County YMCA a $5,000 grant for marketing related to the Hilly Half half marathon.
The commission can require financial and other reports from any entity receiving funding. Since the funding is through tax dollars, those documents could become public record.
While the new location will still have the administration offices of the bureau physically separated from the visitors center — currently both are housed in the former Edward Jones office on the south side of the building — Ellis said she wants to eliminate some of the administrative divisions between the two.
By June, Ellis hopes to have the new visitors center space facing Van Buren Street on the west side of the building open for business, she said. What the final product looks like will depend a lot on how the remodel is funded.
Getting there
The bureau is seeking a loan to cover the remodel, but without any property to use as security collateral, and being dependent on a three-year contract with the Convention and Visitors Commission for all its funding, the bureau may have to pay out of pocket for the remodel, Ellis said.
One strategy calls for the bureau to cut all advertising funding for 2017. The advertising budget, which goes to the Indianapolis-based ThreeSixty Group, was $204,000 in 2016.
A draft budget for 2017 presented by Gould leaves around $250,000 available for the remodel. The difference requires raising the total budget by around $19,000, eliminating advertising, and cutting almost $30,000 from other budget lines compared to 2016.
The bureau does not have a firm cost estimate for the remodel, Ellis said. They are waiting to get quotes until they know if a loan is possible.
At a Jan. 12 meeting of the commission, commission member Barry Herring pressed Ellis for a “ballpark” estimate for the remodel.
Ellis responded that an initial proposal from someone who designs trade show booths was around $200,000. Most of the cost would be for technology, such as the touch screens, she said.
Ellis said she does not want the public to think that cutting the advertising budget — which includes efforts such as buying radio time in metropolitan markets — would mean the bureau would do no marketing at all.
Advertising was about 29.4 percent of the total budget in 2016. In comparison, the bureau spent around 5 percent on marketing, and Gould’s draft budget would keep that amount steady at $35,000.
In comparison, Gould’s draft budget would give the bureau $165,000 to pay Ellis, two full time staff and two part time staff in 2017, and $55,000 for visitors center staff. Wages would make up 30.9 percent of the budget.
Insurance and other employment expenses would take 7.6 percent of the budget.
Ellis’s plan would involve engaging all employees in marketing to different degrees, in part to make up for the drop in advertising, she said.
“There’s paid advertising, but there’s also marketing,” Ellis said.
Ellis said she plans to take advantage of the free opportunity to promote the county at the Indiana State Fair by working the Indiana Office of Tourism Development’s booth this year. In addition, the bureau will continue to attend trade shows from Chicago to Columbus, Ohio, and make use of the partnerships with Columbus and Bloomington as well.
“We’re taking advantage of every opportunity,” she said.
Moving forward
If there is enough funding, Ellis said she would like to implement a range of interactive features in the visitors center, including touchscreen displays that would allow visitors to browse information quickly and easily.
It would also allow seasonal employees who are not experts on Brown County to be more helpful to guests, Ellis said.
Rather than someone who is not familiar with the area trying to come up with a restaurant for a tourist, they could instead guide the tourist on how to find their preference through one of the interactive displays.
While the visitors center would continue to stock print materials as well, it could cut some cost by stocking fewer brochures. That same information presented electronically could also be less daunting than racks of brochures, and more useful to the average tourist, Ellis said.
In addition, the new visitors center plan includes an area with removable seating and a display that could be used for short presentations to charter bus groups, Ellis said.
In the past, staff have taken armfuls of welcome bags onto the same buses visitors have been sitting in for hours and have done the presentations there.
That same multi-purpose space could also be used for meetings of the bureau’s 12-member board, which are currently carried out at different hotels around the county, she said.
The plan also includes public restrooms and parking spaces for visitors, both of which have frequently been requested in the past, she said.
But if funding is short, the plan may have to be scaled back, mostly in regard to technology, Ellis said.
In that case, the interior of the new visitors center have many of the same displays as the previous one, but with public bathrooms and parking.
