Tourism Tempest Brewing
Over Control Of Tax Dollars
Drive through any McDonalds and you’re contributing your share to the effort to lure tourists to the City of St. Charles. We have a tax on hotels, which most communities with tourism efforts employ, but we also extend our tourism tax to restaurants. Since the restaurant portion of the tax brings in far more than the hotel portion, those of us who choose to eat in our own town help generate over $1.3 million per year to promote St. Charles.
In theory, that’s a good thing. If you spend money promoting St. Charles, you attract more people who spend money in our town. That’s good for business, employment and our tax base. Besides, we have a lot to offer visitors in our fair city…real historic sites, a beautiful riverfront, new convention center and a downtown filled with specialty shopping and unique dining establishments.
If you think about it a little longer, you would probably also name Bass Pro as an attraction. The big one in Springfield is one of Missouri’s largest tourist attractions. Ours has outpaced the company’s own projections. The day after Thanksgiving, the line waiting outside for the doors to open took twenty minutes to get everyone inside. There were guys at the end holding signs, “Will Work For Ammo”.
But don’t stop with Bass Pro. The nature of what St. Charles has to offer visitors is expanding and we have to expand the more traditional definition of tourism to keep pace. We are now the proud home of The Foundry Arts Center. The “opening” parties for new exhibits are drawing upwards of a thousand people and the Friday Night Bistro is drawing its own loyal following. St. Charles as a cultural showcase is about to get another boost from Lindenwood University. They want to break ground on a performing arts center at West Clay and First Capitol. It will be larger than the Touhill Center at UMSL and promises to host diverse avant garde and classical entertainment.
Another major source of visitors to our community is sports. We may not have a Major League franchise, but high school, college and amateur sports tournaments bring tens of thousands of people to our community every year.
There is a lot more to St. Charles as a destination for tourist, visitors and shoppers than meets the eye. We need to be flexible and respond to new trends and new opportunities. I would never trade our position as the start of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, but let’s remember when Lewis and Clark visited St. Charles, they didn’t come back for three years. Businesses in our historic districts are, first and foremost, businesses. They need a steady flow of customers to keep their doors open.
This has caused somewhat of a “tourism tempest” between various interests in the community. At issue is whether our tourism tax dollars should be used primarily to fill hotel rooms (heads on beds in the vernacular of the industry) or to tap a larger share of the discretionary spending of consumers in the St. Louis Metropolitan Area.
The heads on beds crowd believe tourism dollars are best spent luring traditional tourists and conventions. They argue that people who stay here for a few days spend more on average. As someone who has survived my share of family vacations and conventions, I’ll attest to that. This faction supports the status quo which has been to spend the majority of our resources targeting those more than fifty miles away to make St. Charles a destination.
The tap St. Louis gang point outs the metro area has over two million people who can come here to shop, dine, attend festivals or discover St. Charles on day trips. They say traditional tourists are too seasonal and they need customers year round. They want to see far more tax dollars spent within our fifty mile radius.
I like to see our community written up in national magazines. I like to encounter out-of-state visitors on South Main. But statistics supplied by the Missouri Division of Tourism probably made more of the case for local spending than those who invited them in to justify the status quo would have liked. Our largest source of tourists, as a State, is our neighbor Illinois. The numbers then drop off rapidly for other surrounding states and become infinitesimal for the East and West Coasts. Less than 2 percent of Missouri’s tourists come from California, the most populous State in the Nation.
It’s not that we don’t have great things to offer. We do. It’s simply a matter of location and logistics. I don’t vacation much in the Napa Valley. There are great historic towns in Missouri like Arrow Rock and Lexington. But they don’t get a fraction of the visitors we do because we’re blessed with being within a major metropolitan area.
This debate on the focus of our tourism effort has been going on behind the scenes for some time. But two things have brought it into sharper focus recently. First, the City Council, at my suggestion, set up a review committee for spending by the Convention & Visitors Bureau (CVB). Councilman John Gieseke is chairman of the committee and they’ve started to question how some of the money is being spent.
Example: the committee recently questioned $17,000 the CVB was going to spend to be in the magazine Oprah. With all due deference to the Queen of daytime television (I’d be popular too if I gave away new cars at Council meetings), the magazine only has 38,000 subscribers in Missouri. I’m not one to peruse the ads or inserts in national magazines much myself. But if I did, I’m not sure that would be enough to entice me to book a flight to St. Charles for my next vacation. If 10% of the subscribers even saw our ad that would reach only 3,800 people in our prime market area for $17,000.
Needless to say the defenders of the status quo had their toes stepped on that anyone would dare question how any of the $1.3 million tourism budget is spent. I simply feel we need more consideration of the return on investment for our advertising dollars.
The debate has come into even sharper focus with a bill I’m cosponsoring. It would reduce the size of the Tourism Commission from 13 members to 11 and add the City Administrator as a voting member to provide more oversight of spending. Among other things the bill would finally spell out the role of the commission, allow the Chairman to vote, strengthen the voice of business and district representatives and reduce from two to one the number of hotel representatives.
Currently, hotels and restaurants have three votes on the commission. Now even though the change I proposed would only reduce their influence from 3 members out of 13 to 2 out of 11 (23% to 18%) it’s been enough to elicit some loud protest from the status quo lobby. In support of that group, one of my fellow Councilmen on Tuesday questioned the bill, and stated hotels and restaurants deserved more votes on the commission because they pay the tax. I quickly pointed out they don’t “pay” the tax…they “collect” the tax. We pay the tax and visitors to our community pay the tax.
If approved by the Council, the new make-up of the Tourism Commission should help provide a more balanced group to recommend where and how we should be marketing St. Charles. We’ve been given a wonderful marketing resource in the form of the tourism tax. We just need to remember it’s a gift from the taxpayers of St. Charles who expect a return on their investment. Sorry Oprah, but can I still get a new car? Just to drive through McDonalds?
