PORT ANGELES — City officials will negotiate a new, three-year visitor center management contract with the Port Angeles Regional Chamber of Commerce after the City Council agreed on a split vote to proceed.
The panel voted 4-2 Tuesday to hammer out details of an agreement after council members Lee Whetham and Sissi Bruch expressed concerns about the pact’s three-year duration, the facility’s hours of operation and the absence of visitor center amenities on U.S. Highway 101, the main artery into the city.
Bruch and Whetham voted against the proposal, while Mayor Dan Di Guilio and council members Dan Gase, Cherie Kidd and Brad Collins favored it.
Deputy Mayor Patrick Downie was on vacation.
The chamber was the lone applicant for visitor center management.
The city Lodging Tax Advisory Committee, chaired by Kidd, agreed last week to recommend a three-year, $75,000-a-year extension for 2016-18 to the chamber’s existing one-year, $78,500 contract for 2015.
It also discussed items to be negotiated: hours of operation, use of the www.portangeles.org Web domain name, a special focus on the visitor map and coordination with upcoming marketing contracts.
The chamber runs the facility in the heart of downtown at 121 E. Railroad Ave., near Black Ball Ferry Line’s MV Coho terminal.
Location
“I do have concerns about the location of the visitor center,” Di Guilio said Wednesday.
Chamber President Jim Moran, who attended the meeting, said Wednesday that the chamber board considered an alternative location to the present site, which the organization shares with the Port Angeles Downtown Association.
“We felt that the current location, with the relationship we have developed with the downtown association, and the moving in and sharing support — that overrode a possibility of going to an alternative location,” Moran said.
He said the visitor center is not always staffed at night for the last incoming sailing of the Coho.
“As darkness comes, our volunteers are very reluctant to be in that area at night because of safety issues,” Moran said.
“We basically wanted a three-year contract out of this,” he added. “That was realistically the bottom line for us.”
Kidd noted that visitor center operations and tourism marketing, both handled by the chamber, were split into two functions in 2014.
Running well
“Things are running well,” Kidd said. “Another location is something we can absolutely add in the future.”
Collins added that the newly employed request-for-proposal process is intensive to go through every year.
“Continuity is a good thing,” he added.
Whetham said the proposal did not address his concerns about lodging taxes being committed too far into the future, saying more should be done to address visitor access to information about the area.
“Let’s cover two of the three exits out of town,” he said, referring to Highway 101 access to the city east and west of town.
Bruch said there were not enough details in the chamber’s proposal to make a decision and that she was concerned about the chamber owning the domain name www.portangeles.org. Concerns have been expressed that the city should own the domain name.
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Senior Staff Writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5060, or at pgottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.
