Secure the knowledge

Correction: The print version of this story said the DMO Interim board terminated the County’s tourism marketing staff. They did not. Sorry.

Hints of spring are colouring a landscape grayed by the residue of winter. Fragile shoots poke out of dirt frozen and snow-covered just weeks ago. And the light of a longer day ushers us outdoors. To linger in the return of the sun. Meanwhile, clusters of bachelorettes have begun to emerge from isolation. Their tiaras and sparkles clash with woollen overcoats and heavy sweaters as the weather offers double-digit temperatures along with dustings of snow. Such are the trade-offs when eager to avoid the Prince-Edward-County-getaway-with-my-girls-weekend-before-I-wed rush.

Signals that another tourism season is upon us.

This season will see the advent of a Destination Marketing Organization (DMO) in Prince Edward County. It is a brand-new group tasked with marketing and promoting County tourism. It will also manage visitor services and work to mitigate the pointer edges of this economic sector on residents and the environment. It is a non-profit entity and is supposed to operate at an arm’s length from Shire Hall and Council.

That is the idea. But the new DMO faces a terrifyingly daunting challenge of getting this organization off the ground and satisfying the myriad competing interests of stakeholders, residents, regulating agencies, the province, and a Council in an election year. The track record of governing newly formed organizations is not encouraging. Consider the troubled path of The County in the decade after amalgamation, the hospital corporation, as well as a long string of tourism and economic marketing orgs. It isn’t encouraging.

Consider too that another group, StayPEC, had been working diligently for several years to serve as the DMO with the support and encouragement of Shire Hall, only to be spurned at the altar.

There is no alternative despite the challenges that lay ahead and the likely failures and restarts that are bound to define this organization in its early years. It must move forward, even if it fails a few times. And it likely will.

But here’s the kicker. The folks who have written and developed the County’s award-winning Tourism Management Plan—hammered out with much gnashing of teeth and a few tears—are out. Their position with the County is being terminated.

The thinking behind this decision is that the new DMO board will want to hire its own staff—that they will eschew the knowledge and experience of the folks who have done this job, in this community, over what has surely been the most challenging period in the County’s history of accommodating visitors, all for the sake of a fresh start. It’s a bad plan and must be sorted. Soon.

The DMO is funded by half of the net proceeds from the Municipal Accommodation Tax collected since February last year. (The other half goes directly to the County’s general revenue as set out in provincial legislation.) The portion dedicated to tourism marketing must be used for tourism marketing. Yet, this fresh stream of revenue is coveted by every moving part in Prince Edward County. The lineup of asks and demands for funding outside the DMO window is forming. It is not a stretch to predict that in the very near future, most anything the County or its agencies do, from dock replacement and pothole repair to wastewater pump requisitions, will be repackaged as tourism promotion to carve an extra piece of this juicy roasted chicken.

The fiduciary responsibility alone—that is, ensuring the funds are managed effectively while balancing the legislative dictates, the interests of those who collect and remit it along with the queue of external demands are fearsome. Herding the stakeholder cats—each fiercely independent and strong-willed business owners—will be astonishingly hard.

Getting consensus on the smallest and most insignificant decisions will prove wrenching. The initial board is likely to be a meatgrinder spitting out directors like a confetti cannon in the early going.

In this context—the DMO is starting from scratch. No legacy knowledge. All the tourism marketing institutional memory is being flushed away. All the experience. All the relationships. Gone. It makes no sense.

It will be hard enough for the DMO to find its way in the first few years—it will need the insight of existing staff to ensure the existential matters don’t derail the org before it gets going. Critically the tourism sector needs this continuity—or risk seeing it collapse into a finger-pointing nightmare. And Council needs to know that tourism marketing and promotion won’t lurch in some wacky new direction.

All this argues for the folks who have been responsible for tourism marketing to continue to do so. At some future day, the DMO will be sturdy enough to make its own determination of staffing roles and purposes. There will be plenty of time to sort through whether existing staff are meeting these objectives.

Springtime is about renewal. It is about building on past seasons. It is not about starting from zero.