SEQUIM — This coming Monday, Sequim was to welcome a new tourism coordinator: someone to tell the world about this place where lavender scents the air, the Olympic Discovery Trail winds through forests filled with birdsong and where the sun bursts out in mid-February, as it did this week.
But even after 10 applications were submitted to the Sequim Marketing Action Committee — the panel charged with recommending the best candidate to the Sequim City Council — no name is being sent to the council for approval.
‘Didn’t meet goals’
The marketing panel, known as SMAC, manages Sequim’s lodging-tax revenues, which totaled $150,779 in 2009. It held a lengthy meeting last Monday, having planned to pick the new tourism promoter.
But “the proposals submitted didn’t meet the goals SMAC set, in all areas,” committee member Vickie Maples said after the meeting.
The applications for the tourism coordinator contract, which was to pay $18,000 for the year, came from around the county and across the West.
Marny Hannan, former executive director of the Sequim Dungeness Valley Chamber of Commerce; lavender farmer and designer Magdalena Bassett; singer-songwriter Kate Lily Souza; environmental activist Andrew Shogren; Jan Doutre of Sequim; Cheryl Smith of Port Angeles; Dianne Knox of Sequim; and Jamie Blattstein of The North End Creative in Tacoma each drew up proposals, and artist and tour-company owner Linda Silvas submitted a joint application together with Susan Davis, founder of Sequim’s new Center of Infinite Reflections.
The most far-flung applicant was Claudia Vecchio, a former Ohio state tourism director who is now a partner at Destination Integration in Addison, Texas.
Now, instead of selecting an applicant, Sequim’s marketing committee will go to City Hall with a couple of requests.
Split job
They’re based on the committee’s decision during its Monday meeting that the tourism coordinator job should be split in two, with one entity performing administrative work and another devoted to creative marketing and strategic planning.
First, Maples said, the committee will discuss with City Manager Steve Burkett whether city staff can take over the administrative part of the tourism coordinator job.
Those duties include processing the applications for the city’s tourism enhancement grants, which are funded by Sequim’s 4 percent tax on hotel and motel stays.
This year, $5,000 in enhancement grants are to be awarded, Maples said, and already the first one, for the maximum allowable $1,000, is earmarked for the 2010 Olympic Peninsula Birdfest (www.OlympicBirdfest.org), an annual festival that features field trips, tours and other birding-related activities in and around Sequim on April 9, 10 and 11.
Grant applications
For now, Sequim City Clerk Karen Kuznek-Reese is managing the tourism enhancement grant applications. She can be reached at City Hall at 360-683-4139.
Since SMAC also wants to hire a destination marketing firm to create a strategic plan for promoting Sequim, it will ask the City Council to authorize yet another request for proposals, Maples said.
Sequim needs an expert or several to find new, free ways to bring travelers here, the committee decided.
And when it comes to creating a strategic plan, “we don’t know what we don’t know,” said Erik Erichsen, the council’s liaison with the marketing committee.
“We need to get off the dime and do something,” he added.
The soonest the City Council could approve a fresh request for proposals would be during its meeting at 7 p.m. Monday in the Sequim Transit Center, 190 W. Cedar St.
Maples couldn’t estimate how long it will take to gather and review proposals and didn’t say how the $18,000 in compensation for the tourism promotion contractor would be divided.
Do without
She said only the administrative and the strategic tasks should be separate, and Sequim will have to do without a destination marketer for a while.
Patricia McCauley of InsideOut Solutions, a Sequim marketing company, was the tourism coordinator for a decade before she retired from the position last April.
Maples took over the job after that, but since she’s also the executive director of the Sequim Dungeness Valley Chamber of Commerce, the chamber board voted to have her concentrate on that full-time position and let go of the tourism-promotion tasks.
In the interim, the administrative tasks have fallen to Kuznek-Reese, who’s philosophical about the added workload.
“It keeps life interesting,” she said.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladaily news.com.
