Town, County appear on track toward outsourced Tourism function

The newly formed County-Town Tourism Committee comprised of two representatives from each municipality’s elected body met for the first time, Thursday afternoon, June 4. While the site was the conference room on the second floor of the Front Royal Town Hall, the majority of participants, including several members of the Joint Town-County Tourism Advisory Committee comprised of interested local business people, were logged in remotely in the virtual broadcast meeting.

In a technological first for Town WebEx broadcasts, there was a visual component to both the base site and the remotely connected participants, making it easier to keep track of who was speaking and where from.

A shot of the Town Hall conference room with committee members Cullers and Gillespie present, and a PowerPoint slide in the upper right corner. Save the interim town manager, all other participants were logged in remotely. Royal Examiner Photos/Roger Bianchini

Representing the County were South River’s Cheryl Cullers and North River’s Delores Oates. On the Town side were Gary Gillespie and Letasha Thompson, the latter for whom Mayor Gene Tewalt had to battle town council to get appointed. As Royal Examiner reported in the story “Mayor, Meza spar over committee appointment powers – Mayor by legal TKO” a number of Thompson’s colleagues appeared to believe her more proactive role in contacting Town Tourism and Visitor Center personnel in the wake of the firing of the Town Tourism Department’s driving force, Community Development Director Felicia Hart and the initiative to outsource Town Tourism marketing, disqualified her from appointment to the committee.

Thompson countered those arguments by saying she remained open to all suggested options for moving forward on Tourism, rather than simply being a champion of in-house Tourism and the Visitors Center’s current personnel and operational model because she had bothered to inquire how those operations and personnel previously and currently function.

Gayle and Nellie have been back at work in the Visitors Center, though on reduced hours as the Town moves toward Phase 2 of pandemic reopenings. Their and other current staff and volunteers’ long-term prospects remain up in the air.

And along with all present, Thompson did not voice objection to Oates early observation that of five operational models presented in mid-May by Tourism Advisory Committee Vice-Chair Kerry Barnhart, she had dismissed the first, the In-House model, because the Town had begun dismantling it as not optimally functional.

However, during the ensuing discussion in which Barnhart was queried as to her thoughts on the best path forward for Tourism promotion for Warren County and Front Royal, the possibility of a contracted marketing company utilizing some existing local tourism staff was noted.

That could be an important variable as an evolving consensus seemed to be to move away from the In-House model short-term to what is Option 3A in Barnhart’s list, “Fully Contracted Out”, with an eventual move to 3B, “Fully Contracted Out with Committee Leadership”.

One downside Barnhart noted of the “In-House” model was that as a governmental department, Tourism sometimes gets forgotten amidst the municipal bureaucracy.

The phased-in plan appeared favored as Gillespie reasoned because 3A appeared achievable more quickly than 3B. The outsourced “with Committee Leadership” would involve a third party, potentially an EDA, Chamber of Commerce, something like the existing Joint Tourism Advisory Committee of involved and impacted locals, or another contracted private entity to take on oversight and management responsibilities.

PowerPoint representations of favored Options 3A and 3B. The initial discussion indicates a possible move to 3A, later transitioned to 3B.

As noted in our story “County could bypass Town in ‘CARES’ funding – but doesn’t intend to …” both Barnhart and County rep Oates, the latter who took on a moderating role at the meeting, commented on the danger of ongoing conflicting ideas or non-communication between multiple involved entities with a common and overlapping tourism agenda.

Barnhart has pointed to the Tourism leadership role the now-fired Felicia Hart served to the Tourism Advisory Committee, even calling Hart the Town’s “Tourism Director” though her official title was “Community Development Director”. And she has pointed to the huge gap Hart’s unannounced departure initially left in the advisory committee’s function.

“Interestingly, the other entities I talked to, surprisingly all of them had that same struggle. There’s a city and there’s a county in almost every situation. And they need to work together on it. And all of them talked about things that they did, and one of them is joint visioning, joint planning, and joint performance … and I think that is what is really needed here,” Barnhart told the new Town-County Joint Tourism Committee at its inaugural meeting.

Kerry Barnhart explained that her inquiries indicated that multiple-municipality tourism promotion often encounters the type of communication and goal-setting dysfunction this community has experienced – and that must be overcome for successful tourism marketing, she said.

As Barnhart concluded that observation, Interim Town Manager Matt Tederick, who was present at the Town Hall site with committee members Gillespie and Cullers, joined the conversation.

“Kerry, just to give you some information regarding your question or statement as it relates to the funding and the trust as it relates to the Town of Front Royal spending the money appropriately; in my conversations with the finance director – because he’s going to be hereafter I’m gone with his institutional knowledge – as we interpret 3A (“Fully Contracted Out”) and how I believe some council members interpret 3A, the Town is only going to serve as a fiduciary agent. Meaning the actual recommendation on spending the money is going to come from the Joint Tourism Committee … and basically the Town is writing checks based upon the direction of the joint tourism committee,” Tederick explained, adding, “Now, happy to make that different but that’s how we interpreted to alleviate any concerns about, you know, just trust issues or whatever the case is, that’s how we interpreted 3A.”

“Yea, it’s almost there, but really 3A takes some leadership management responsibility (by) the Town, so it’s not just, ‘Here are the dollars.’ Three-B gets into more of a board that is very heavily in making those leadership and management decisions. They’re managing that function … not only for dollar purposes but for management,” Barnhart elaborated on the models she developed.

An outsourcing path forward – with strict guidelines, appears in the making.

In the 3A model, the advisory committee has a reduced function, performing “staff work” and being responsible to “the town manager or whoever that entity is that the contractor is accountable to, but they are not managing them. So, the town manager has both the fiduciary and management leadership responsibility for that contractor. So, they are making the final call to spend the money,” Barnhart concluded of her 3A “Fully Contracted Out” model.

Some form of outsourcing was the model Tederick was recommending at the time of Hart’s firing and the reduction of the in-house Town Tourism function in late January, early February.

Hear, and see, this varied and broad discussion of a path forward out of the combined upheaval of the sudden decapitation of the Town’s Tourism function, followed closely by the onset of the COVID-19 Coronavirus pandemic restrictions on travel, business, and governmental operations, in this virtual recording: