Letter: Attend TDC meeting
Posted: July 9, 2013 - 3:11pm
By ED SLAVIN
St. Augustine
Editor: Come see the public Tourist Development Council (TDC) meeting at the County Administration Building July 15, 2013 at 1:30 p.m. Help encourage questions to TDC and Visitor and Convention Bureau (VCB) staff about open records, antitrust and civil rights concerns and spending 4 percent bed tax Category I funds.
VCB’s contract with St. Johns County expires September 30. Its contract must be subject to competitive bidding. VCB gets some $3.4 million in bed tax money this year. It’s our money – what is being done with it? Most is spent on advertising and ad agency commissions. VCB talks prices in meetings (under preliminary antitrust inquiry) and adamantly refuses to comply with public records requests.
VCB spends little on public relations and “friendraising.” The last New York Times travel section article devoted to St. Augustine was on Sept. 5, 2003. VCB’s ineffectual branding and marketing buys advertising in Reader’s Digest and Better Homes and Gardens, but eschews Miami, African-American and civil rights heritage tourists, GLBT and youth markets. Why? VCB’s dull brochure shows few black faces and no Native-Americans: it does not hail our city’s 450 years of cultural diversity. Enough.
Local residents have long been skeptical.
Ben and Jeanne Troemel wrote The Record (June 1, 1983) about “large and expensive billboards” extolling only beaches, asking “what unthinking committee or person” spent so much money on such a large and “worthless billboard.” Seeing billboards, with Ponce de Leon grasping a surfboard. Frances Neelands wrote the The Record (June 13, 1993) that they were “childish and non-creative … embarrassed to see such a billboard representing the oldest continous1y occupied city in the United States.” Agreed.
TDC must stand for “Times Demand Change.” What do you reckon?
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