PORT ANGELES — The city will stick with what four council members called a tried-and-true agency to run its tourism marketing campaign and operate its visitor center.
The Port Angeles Regional Chamber of Commerce will continue in both roles, the City Council decided Tuesday night in split votes.
That means the center will remain on the first floor of the chamber’s headquarters, 121 E. Railroad Ave., near the Black Ball Ferry Line terminal.
The council rejected the Soroptimist-Jet Set service club’s bid to run the center in roughly one-third as much space in the Necessities & Temptations gift shop at 217 N. Laurel St., about a block away from the current center.
The council majority also turned down Laurel Black Design of Port Angeles and Vertigo Marketing of Bend, Ore., to market the city as a tourist destination.
Both issues split the council into 4-3 votes.
Council members Brad Collins, Dan Gase, Cherie Kidd and Mayor Dan Di Guilio backed the chamber for marketing services, with council members Sissi Bruch, Patrick Downie and Lee Whetham voting against it.
On the visitor center issue, Collins, Di Guilio, Whetham and Gase voted for the chamber, with Bruch, Downie and Kidd opposed.
Gase is a member and past president of the chamber. Gase said he had not discussed the issue with colleagues at the chamber.
The alternatives for both the visitor center and the marketing contract had been forwarded to the council as the top recommendations of the city Lodging Tax Advisory Committee.
The marketing contract is set at $175,000; the visitor center operation, $78,500.
The chamber must pare down its $83,000 proposal for the visitor center in negotiations with city staff to fit the allocation.
Other allocations
Other tourism appropriations the council passed Tuesday included:
■ Event grants, $70,000.
■ Juan de Fuca Foundation for the Arts, $70,000, including $10,000 the foundation can spend on an events tent to spread its annual festival, now centered at the Vern Burton Community Center, to the city’s new park on the waterfront.
■ City parks and recreation, $62,000.
■ Port Angeles Fine Arts Center, $26,300.
■ Olympic Peninsula Tourism Commission, $23,500.
■ Laurel Street improvement debt, $23,500.
■ Lodging tax administration, $1,500.
The money comes from the city’s 4 percent room tax on overnight establishments. These dollars can only be used for tourism-related efforts.
Necessities & Temptations, owned by former Councilwoman Edna Petersen, would have given the visitor center 509 square feet of space, compared with about 1,400 square feet in the Railroad Avenue building.
The Soroptimists would have run the center as a nonprofit corporation.
“It gets very crowded in there,” Downie said of the visitor center during the peak summer season.
“Continuity is a concern for me,” Di Guilio said, while calling the Soroptimist proposal “unique and interesting.”
He said he also was concerned that the chamber’s visitor center volunteers would not join the Soroptimist effort.
Gase said he had received “overwhelming” preference from his constituents to keep the center in its current location.
“Please keep it in a standalone place,” he quoted them as pleading.
He then said moving the center could give Necessities & Temptations a retailing advantage by attracting tourists.
Petersen, the gift boutique’s owner, said, “It’s been an interesting process, and council always has the right to do what they believe is in the best interest of everybody in the community.”
Even some of the chamber’s supporters backed it with a certain reluctance.
Downie deplored the process that he said left no time for him to meet face to face with representatives of Vertigo Marketing and Laurel Black Design or with Petersen and the Soroptimists.
Whetham called the decision “a step backward in time,” referring to the council’s dissatisfaction with the chamber’s accounting of its spending.
Di Guilio said Black had made a strong proposal but would have to start from scratch to take over marketing duties.
As for Vertigo, the four prevailing council members agreed the firm didn’t know Port Angeles well enough to market it effectively.
Bruch, while she opposed renewing the chamber’s hold on marketing tourism and greeting tourists, said she was reluctant to move the visitor center, although she and Di Guilio agreed it would be better located on a traffic artery like U.S. Highway 101.
Russ Veenema, the chamber’s executive director, said he and his board were “delighted” with the council’s twin decisions.
The city’s re-examination of both contracts, he said, came because “they wanted to make sure that the funds are being used by someone who is giving them a quality product and return on investment.
“I think our board of directors took [the challenge] well in stride.”
Veenema said the city’s hesitation about renewing the marketing contract was due to a lack of visibility of the work of providing information about the city and its surrounding area to potential tourists.
“Much of that work goes unheralded and unnoticed,” he said. “We need to highlight what we do a little bit more.”
Council members, he said, “don’t see the digital screens, the TV ads, the Facebook [posts]” that lure visitors to the area.
“We need to make sure we have an education process to work on the negative votes of the three members.”
Kidd said: “I really applaud the process. I think it sets a higher standard for us moving forward.”
Bruch said, “I’m hoping that this may inspire folks to say, ‘Hey, let’s try something a little different.’”
Gase said that, had the council had several months, not weeks, to award the contracts, the decision could have been different. Other members echoed his urging to start the process earlier next year.
In other action Tuesday, the council renewed the city’s contract with the Port Angeles Farmers Market; gave final acceptance to a Civic Field boiler replacement and an Ediz Hook erosion repair; accepted the donation of 4.15 acres of environmentally, undevelopable land on Tumwater Creek; agreed to replace the A Street substation transformer for $542,000; and wrote off $36,000 in small uncollectible utility accounts and about $400,000 in utility debts owed by the defunct KPly mill and bankrupt Peninsula Plywood mill.
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Reporter James Casey can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5074, or at jcasey@peninsuladailynews.com.
