A couple walks up to the door of the Brown County Visitors Center on a sunny Friday afternoon. They’ve never been here before. They needed information and directions, so they tried to go inside.

The door was locked, though. That’s because the Visitors Center is closed due to a lack of funding, and has been since December.

Instead, they asked questions of a newspaper photographer who happened to be outside.

“We are losing opportunities every day that we’re closed,” Debbie Bartes told the Brown County Convention and Visitors Commission on April 8.

Bartes serves as president of the board for the CVB, which manages the Visitors Center.

Funding to run the Visitors Center, employ staff and promote Brown County comes from the innkeepers tax, a 5-percent tax on overnight room rentals in Brown County. The CVB is supposed to receive $712,500 of innkeepers tax annually.

The Brown County Music Center also is supported by innkeepers tax — moreso than the Visitors Center is since the pandemic shut down stages.

Last year, the CVB did not receive $186,250 from innkeepers tax that it was owed through the contract.

Because the BCMC couldn’t have shows due to COVID-19, the State Bank of Lizton required that innkeepers tax funds be held back to cover payments. That bank holds the music center’s mortgage.

As of April 8, the CVB had not received any money for its 2021 budget due to the arrangement with the BCMC and its bank.

CVB’s needs

The Brown County Convention and Visitors Commission manages the innkeepers tax money.

At the April 8 meeting, members of the CVB board and CVB Executive Director Jane Ellis asked the CVC about getting a $65,000 monthly payment for the next eight months to help meet their budget.

That $65,000 a month would allow for the CVB to hire the staff necessary to open the Visitors Center from June to December, along with $106,700 for marketing efforts. It would fulfill commitments already made to printing more marketing materials.

Even with those payments, the CVB would still be short of its contracted $712,500.

The Visitors Center closed at the end of March 2020 when other businesses also shut down, reopened in June with a reduced staff, then closed again in December.

The CVB board showed a video at the CVC meeting showing how the CVB and Visitors Center are integral to telling “the story” of Brown County, which has been welcoming visitors since the early 1900s.

Visitors Center staff market Brown County on social media, the browncounty.com website, blogs, emails, advertising, and through interviews and printed materials, like outdoor guides.

The CVB keeps a database of emails for past guests, but with the Visitors Center being closed, they say they are missing out on opportunities to capture that information as a way to bring visitors back.

The CVB continues to do a grassroots social media marketing campaign to bring visitors here, but the Visitors Center is unable to assist visitors once they are here.

“We need to have that front end open and we cannot do it right now. We need to hire some people and we need money to do that,” Bartes said.

“This is basically our bare minimum we’re asking for, our minimum ask.”

Currently the CVB has two full-time employees: Ellis and Visitors Center Manager Kelsey Oehler, who is helping with marketing since the Visitors Center is closed. The CVB has one part-time financial coordinator and a shared administrative position with the Brown County Chamber of Commerce.

The Visitors Center rents space in the Camelot Building on Van Buren Street for $2,625 a month. That lease ends in January 2023.

Before COVID, it cost approximately $175,000 to operate the Visitors Center including salaries, utilities and rent.

Ideally the CVB needs two full-time employees and part-time seasonal employees for August through December to get the Visitors Center operating fully.

“Many people are staying closer to home and discovering new destinations. We have a number of first time visitors and we are missing the opportunity to share with them everything Brown County has to offer, from the downtown shops to the artists studio to the variety of outdoor activities,” Ellis said.

Next steps

CVC members said that the decision on a monthly $65,000 payment to the CVB relies with the bank. The bank wants to see the innkeepers tax fund built up to ensure that interest-only payments on the music center can be made this year.

The music center’s management group is required to pay interest-only payments on the mortgage for the rest of the year. They’re currently using the innkeepers tax to do that. Full mortgage payments are around $55,000.

That fund had $211,568.29 in it after collections from January, February and March, along with $31,886.57 in December collections that did not get posted until January, but have to be shown in the January collections, CVC President Kevin Ault noted.

Even with the rollover, the innkeepers tax collected for the first three months of 2021 is up compared to last year and 2019, according to the report.

The BCMC management group also has a line of credit, but Ault said the bank prefers for them not to use it until the music center is able to cover the payments once new ticket revenue begins rolling in and shows start happening.

CVC member Barry Herring, who is also the co-president of the management group, asked if the CVB could survive three more weeks until they receive word on how much the music center receives from the Shuttered Venue Operators grant program.

Based on the grant’s formula, the BCMC is eligible for up to $1.9 million, but the exact amount to be received will not be known until awards are made at the end of this month.

“Our collections are way up. There is money in the account. Why do we have to be on the back burner? Why can’t we at least get $65,000? That is not a big ask,” Bartes said.

“If we get this (full) grant, we can make you (the CVB) whole,” Herring said.

He said he would go to the bank to discuss giving the CVB a payment of $65,000, but he was not sure if they could commit to monthly payments the rest of the year until they hear about the grant.

“I know you want to quit worrying about it. I want to quit worrying about it. You need the money and deserve the money,” he said.

“Can we work together to try to find a way to start these payments and then see what happens?”

Contingencies

The music venue’s first show is scheduled for July 3 and could be sold at full capacity if Brown County is “blue” on the state’s color-coded COVID-19 map.

The music venue does not yet have a new date for the sold-out Willie Nelson show that had to be postponed last April.

John Hiatt and the Jerry Douglas Band will perform at the BCMC in November. Tickets for that full-capacity show went on sale on April 16, but a week later, it had not sold out.

BCMC Executive Director Christian Webb said the trend for the music venue and the live music industry overall is that more people are holding on to their tickets to see a show instead of asking for a refund, which helps with budgets as the management group awaits word on this latest grant.

There was also a discussion of getting a lesser, onetime payment approved in April to get the CVB started on hiring an employee for the Visitors Center. But Ellis said the CVB needs to know money is coming to market and get materials printed.

“If we don’t know where money is coming from, we could be through our line of credit by June and not be able to do anything in July,” she said.

Ault said the CVC is committed contractually to the CVB and the members, who also own tourism-based businesses, know the importance of what the CVB does.

“What you do for us, no one else is going to do,” he said.

“But we need money to operate. We want a commitment for money,” Bartes responded.

Ault said the CVC will know more on what they can commit to at the May meeting.

A motion was approved to allow Herring to talk to the bank about freeing up at least a onetime draw of $65,000 to the CVB, and that if the music center gets at least $1 million from the SVO grant, the CVB could get $65,000 a month.

The motion also stated that if less than $1 million was received in grant funding, a meeting would immediately be called to talk about next steps, and if not, the funding would be discussed at the regular meeting on May 13.