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Cooperation is crucial

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By KEVIN WIATROWSKI

kwiatrowski@tampatrib.com

Published: October 25, 2009

In the fight for Florida tourists' money, Pasco County is a lightweight.

The county lacks the theme parks, professional sports teams and white beaches that bring visitors to Hillsborough and Pinellas counties. It's a long way from the glamour of Miami Beach and the sugar sand of the Panhandle.

The county's tourism officials hope to take what Pasco does have - an array of events ranging from the quirky to the raucous to the sublime - and unite them with the single goal of bringing overnight tourists to the county. Reaching that mark means event organizers, hotel managers and RV park owners will have to cooperate and collaborate, two things they have struggled to do so far.

That cooperative philosophy reflects a new approach to promoting Pasco - home of the World Shuffleboard Championships, the Chasco Fiesta and the Suncoast Arts Fest - as a destination. The task has proven easier to say than to do.

Critics say the county's emphasis on overnight stays misses the broader economic benefits of day-trippers who flood Chasco, Dade City's Kumquat Festival and other festivals. Those who benefit from the county's assistance dispute the amount of funding awarded to competing events.

Comments last week by Port Richey hotel manager Karen King, a member of the county's Tourism Development Council, show how far the county's tourism industry still has to come.

At Tuesday's county commission meeting, King questioned the honesty of hotel stay figures being reported by some event organizers. County officials look at hotel stays when distributing funds to help organizers promote their events outside the county.

Two days later, during a county-sponsored tourism summit, event organizers squabbled about how this year's $53,600 in county support was divided. Some complained that others got more county support this year despite having smaller events. Others openly discussed ways to game the system to guarantee their events more money.

Jack Wert, executive director of the group that promotes tourism in the Naples area, said bickering and jealousy is natural when a tourism plan is first coming together.

"It really is a lot of work getting people to work together," Wert said.

He urged the county's event organizers and hotel owners to get beyond their own interests and focus on attracting visitors countywide.

"You've got a real opportunity to grow," Wert told the summit participants.

A new tourism plan

Toward that end, county commissioners next month will consider adopting the county's first formal tourism development plan. The new plan comes with a 1-cent hike in the county's hotel tax and expectations that event organizers will work harder to draw more overnight visitors to the county.

The current tourism plan was written in 1990, the year the county adopted its 2-cent hotel tax. Tourism Director Eric Keaton discovered that plan soon after taking office in 2006.

"Basically, it copy-and-pasted the state statute (for tourism)," Keaton said last week.

That original plan focused on developing a national tennis stadium with the help of Saddlebrook Resort in Wesley Chapel. That project died this year, leaving the county with a pot full of money and a clean slate.

The new tourism plan ties Pasco tourism to San Diego-based Sportsplex USA, which county commissioners hired this summer to develop an $11 million complex that will lure out-of-county softball, baseball, soccer and other tournaments.

The project is being financed by nearly 20 years of accumulated hotel taxes. Sportsplex will give the county a cut of the income from its complex.

Youth-league sports offer Pasco a source of tourism income that is virtually recession-proof, said Larry Pendleton, president of the Florida Sports Foundation.

Even in a down economy, parents will spend money on their children's sports events, often tying the family vacation to those activities, Pendleton said.

Sportsplex officials have until early December to determine the best location for their future complex. Next month, the county will host public meetings - Nov. 10 in Dade City and Nov. 12 in New Port Richey - to explain the Sportsplex project.

Counting hotel stays

There's a hitch in the Sportsplex plan, though: Sportsplex officials aren't in the habit of counting the number of hotel rooms their events fill.

Commissioners want Sportsplex to count those hotel stays, which county officials refer to as "heads in beds," because they generate the taxes that support the county's entire tourism effort.

"If they're going to come in, we're going to have to get them to guarantee they'll track data," Pasco County Commission Chairman Jack Mariano said.

Tracking hotel stays can be easier for athletic events because teams must register with organizers, Keaton said.

For less organized events, those crucial hotel figures can be elusive, though.

Dade City's annual Kumquat Festival stopped seeking county support in 2008 because collecting reliable hotel numbers proved too difficult, said festival chief Joey Wubbena.

"The value of the dollar earned from the county wasn't worth the work that went into getting that dollar," Wubbena said. "The county needs to assess the event as a whole, not just the heads to beds issue."

Hotel stays make up 40 percent of the point-based rating system the county now uses to distribute promotions subsidies. The value of those numbers leads some tourism board members to worry people are inflating their hotel stays to land more county largesse.

"That weighs on our minds," said TDC member Toby Caroline. "We've been (to events), then we see the numbers and we wonder how that can be."

One event that came in for criticism last week was the Pasco Bug Jam, a yearly event in Dade City aimed at Volkswagen fans. Organizer Carol Headman reported nearly 1,000 hotel stays from last year's event - a figure that provoked a skeptical response from Commissioner Michael Cox.

But Headman defended the numbers from the Bug Jam.

Headman said the Pasco Fair Association works with nine hotels in Wesley Chapel, Dade City and Zephyrhills to get Bug Jam vendors, visitors and exhibitors to stay locally. Headman says Bug Jam participants get special rates, making them easy to track. A follow-up call to each hotel produces a count of people who stayed in Pasco, Headman said.

That kind of relationship between event organizers and hotel owners will be crucial to boosting Pasco's tourism bottom line in the future, said Mariano said.

"People that run the events need to take control and document them," Mariano said. "The old excuse that we can't keep track needs to go away."

Reporter Kevin Wiatrowski can be reached at (813) 731-8168.

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