Tourism to be revisited - Georgetown set to revamp its marketing

PAWLEYS ISLAND -- Georgetown County is looking at a complete revamp of how it markets itself and serves visitors. A major community forum is in the works to consider who should run the visitor centers, and how to coordinate marketing of festivals and other events.

Currently the Georgetown County Chamber of Commerce runs visitor centers in Litchfield and Georgetown. The cost of operations is paid for mostly with chamber money from member dues.

The issue was broached Monday morning at a meeting of the Georgetown County Accommodations Tax Advisory Committee, where members and other attendees were receptive to a new look at marketing and tourism services.

The topic came up because the chamber no longer wants to pay money from members' dues to operate the two visitor centers.

The coordination issue arose when several groups asked for money for festivals, but they had not coordinated the events with the Georgetown County Visitors Bureau or asked the organization for help.

The Visitors Bureau could help promote the events if it knew about them, members said.

Chamber President Annette Fisher asked for $70,000 from room tax money to finance the visitor centers through June 30. In the meantime, she said, the community should decide if it wants to keep the visitor centers and if so, how to pay for them.

"We've been going through a lot of growth at the chamber," Fisher said. She said the board decided at a retreat in June that the visitor centers are no longer part of the organization's mission.

"The business of the chamber is business," she said the board decided.

Most of the costs came from members' dues and most members are not involved in tourism, she told the tax committee.

The centers represent about a fourth of the chamber's $487,000 budget.

The situation the chamber finds itself in is partly the result of a period of turmoil and turnover in the chamber staff that began in 1998. Fisher, who has been president almost two years, was the sixth chamber president in seven years.

In 2000, with the chamber president under fire for improper use of room tax funds and the board involved in a lawsuit, Georgetown County Council voted to quit paying the chamber the 30 percent of room tax money that state law requires local governments to spend on tourism promotion.

Instead, the council formed the Georgetown County Visitors Bureau and designated it to receive the funds and handle tourism promotion, including the visitor centers.

The Visitors Bureau then contracted with the chamber to continue to operate the centers, and gave the chamber the money required to do it.

That agreement fell apart a few years later and the chamber began to receive less and less money to operate the centers.

It costs about $115,000 to pay for the centers in Litchfield and downtown Georgetown, Fisher said. The chamber received $25,000 from accommodations tax money this year to operate the centers, and $20,000 from the city of Georgetown.

The chamber's board began to question why the organization should fund a county activity with members' funds, Fisher said.

Another factor that raised questions among the chamber board members was that because public money is used to operate the centers, they must be open to all businesses' brochures, whether they are chamber members or not.

Last week, Fisher raised the issue to the Visitors Bureau's board and said she has also talked informally to several county officials.

The Visitors Bureau board has not had time to decide what its role should be in the change, but is open to ideas, said bureau Director Grace Brock.

"It really is time, it's time for us all to just sit down together and talk about how best to promote the county," Brock said.

Fisher said she is trying to arrange the meeting, which will be open to public officials, business people and members of both groups.