After Urbana pulled its funding earlier this summer, the Champaign County Convention and Visitors Bureau has been in financial trouble. The Champaign City Council will weigh this issue among others at Tuesday evening’s study session meeting.
The bureau is a private, non-profit organization that seeks to further tourism in Champaign County. A city report to the council looks into the current funding situation of the bureau and methods of tourism promotion.
When the city of Urbana cut its funding from the city budget in June, the bureau suffered greatly. The cut drastically decreased the bureau’s budget from $312,580 in fiscal year 2011 to $255,760 in 2012. According to the report, Urbana had put $71,820 into the bureau in fiscal year 2011.
The elimination of Urbana’s financial support left Champaign with the bulk of the bureau’s funding, said Champaign Mayor Don Gerard. Champaign now covers about 87 percent of the bureau’s budget. Gerard said Champaign must move forward in tourism and find new alternatives to promote itself to the global community.
“We’re dealing with a variety of online resources — Orbitz, Expedia, other travel websites — we now compete with, we need to reinvent ourselves and our current system,” Gerard said.
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He added that solely relying on visitors attending Illinois football games and visiting the University cannot be an option. He said he hopes feedback from Tuesday’s meeting will help the city figure out what to do next.
“If we want to put Champaign tax dollars in the investment, we want to know there will be a positive return in it for us,” Gerard said.
If the bureau were to close, the aftermath would have a domino effect in the community, said council member at-large Tom Bruno. He said a visitor’s bureau can only survive with the help of the entire community. Without it, Bruno predicted there would be less financial benefit for Champaign, less advertising of the area’s attractions and less lower-income employment important to the tourism industry, such as cooks and hotel maids.
“It’s the little things that drive tourism,” Bruno said. “People driving by Illinois could decide to eat lunch at Bloomington-Normal instead of Champaign-Urbana.”
Multifamily recycling fees are also up for discussion. The main proposal of the report is recommending the exemption of nonprofit agencies from the city’s multifamily recycling fees. This would be achieved by offering an exchange of services instead of payment.
These in-kind services would include advertisement for the city’s recycling program through various methods, said Angela Adams, city recycling coordinator. Such a move would help agencies save on city fees; the fees range from $1.30 to $2.60 per unit.
