The Brown County Convention and Visitors Bureau hosted a meeting on Sept. 4 at the Brown County Playhouse with around 150 people in attendance. It was the first of many meetings that will target the future of the bureau and its relationship with the Convention and Visitors Commission. The primary reason for this specific meeting was to get locals more familiar with the bureau and take public questions for the next one.

There was also a survey provided to gauge what the community would like to see from the bureau moving forward, according to Brown County Convention and Visitors Bureau Chair Brian Tadlock.

The survey can be found at threesixtygroup.typeform.com/to/eSwvPM8U.

The meeting was moderated by Amy Oliver with panelists Secretary and Chief Executive Officer of the Indiana Destination Development Corporation Elaine Bedel, Brown County Art Gallery Foundation President Lyn Letsinger-Miller and Department of Natural Resources Director Dan Bortner. Tadlock and Three Sixty Group Creative Director Eric Murray also spoke about their roles with the bureau and marketing team.

“I remember telling my staff, ‘we’re going to start running this organization (DNR) on business principals because in 2005 we were looking at closing 11 parks and were bleeding financially,” Bortner said. “I can still remember someone telling me I can’t run this like a business because we don’t make a product. Incorrect, we’re in the memory making business. We’ve been doing it for 100 years and we’re very good at it. We have the perfect product, all we have to do is not screw it up. Being able to take what we have here in this community from a business standpoint is a one-day business, the park makes it two or three at best. When you get all of these things, when you take all of the sights here and just roaming downtown, you’ve got a long destination.”

One of the challenges many locals bring up is balancing increasing tourising while keeping the small town feel. Letsinger-Miller said that the small town feel comes from the people in the community.

“Hoosier hospitality is real in Indiana, I think that’s what makes us stay that way,” said Letsinger-Miller. “If you lose that, then maybe you do start feeling like you’re in a big city and you don’t know anyone, but Indianapolis is known as a big small town as well and I think we can all keep that here in the whole state of Indiana by just concentrating on not losing our Hoosier hospitality.”

Bedel’s advice for the bureau was to be thoughtful, respectful and to develop a plan that would help everyone.

“Don’t worry about getting too big, there are ways to take care of that,” said Bedel. “Worry about being successful and worry about being a great place that people want to come visit, but people want to live as well because they don’t want to visit here if they don’t think they want to live here. Those go hand-in-hand and I think that will be successful.”

The next meeting is scheduled for Tuesday at 8:30 a.m. at Cornerstone Inn (54 E. Franklin St.) and is open to the public.

“We plan on addressing the questions that a lot of the community wanted to ask last night (Sept. 4), but didn’t because the panelists aren’t aware of what is happening locally, and also talk about the roundtable discussion,” said Tadlock. “We will have the roundtable discussions already scheduled, but would like the entire board’s input on their setup and a universal form to follow as several of us will be leading different ones as we will have the survey results tabulated by then.”