Part One: Visitors Center staff expresses frustration with council direction on Tourism

Near the end of a double-pronged Monday night, virtual work session focused largely on budgetary decisions related to proposed expenditures on a variety of fronts, including a joint purchase with the County of new meeting videotaping equipment and service contracts, some festering political discontent surfaced.

However, that discontent did directly follow the agenda’s final item, a PowerPoint presentation on the work of Town Visitors Center staff by one of those staffers, Customer Service Specialist Meghan Campbell.

What really went on inside the Visitors Center before its dual-pronged COVID/downsizing-looming closing – did anybody involved in endorsing a change bothers to ask? Royal Examiner File Photos/Roger Bianchini

That presentation skirted the still somewhat volatile politics of the sudden dismantling of much of the Town’s Tourism Department by Interim Town Manager Matt Tederick as part of his recommended downsizing of the town governmental function as part of both the coming Fiscal Year 2021 budget and the final five months of the current fiscal year budget.

Council and its appointed town manager came under scathing public criticism, much of it from tourism-related business owners, in the wake of the late January firings of key Tourism and Community Development staff, and a paring back of Visitors Center functions. However, Tederick cited specifics of Visitor Center operations, including perceived online marketing lapses and paraphernalia over-acquisitions to justify his cuts to the department.

Interim Town Manager Matt Tederick was grilled by citizens at a quickly arranged Q&A session at the Front Royal Brewery following the late January staff terminations and Tourism outsourcing recommendation. There were only about 8 confirmed COVID-19 cases in the U.S. at the time of that Jan. 30 meeting.

“As with any major decision in government, there has been a lot of talk around the budget and cuts to said budget. Along with these talks, some misinformation has been shared with both the council and the public about the Tourism Department and what we do down there at the Visitors Center. I’m here tonight to correct the misinformation,” Campbell said after thanking both council and Tederick for giving her the opportunity to address them at the request of Councilwoman Letasha Thompson.

In fact, as the interim town manager noted at the presentation’s outset, he would be the “clicker” of the PowerPoint slides for Campbell. The detail of that presentation and its occasional give and take punctuations are recorded in detail in the linked audio-visual recording, leading up to Campbell’s rather pointed closing comment.

“On a personal note, this has been a painful and often disheartening experience for those of us at the Visitor’s Center. Since the end of January and Felicia Hart’s termination, we were in limbo.

Often not knowing whether we would have a job the next day or not. And to make matters worse, in all the discussions … on tourism, both by the council and the tourism advisory board, no one aside from Letasha Thompson even attempted to speak with the employees of the Visitors Center, the very people who were doing the work that was being stopped,” Campbell pointed out.

Wonder where those pamphlets trumpeting the town and county’s tourism-friendly attractions came from? – But hard copy promo was not all the Tourism staff produced, one of them explained to council Monday.

She noted that the interim town manager had posed many questions regarding the Visitors Center and its operations to the joint Town-County Tourism Advisory Board that those members had not been able to answer.

“However, had the Visitors Center employees been present at those meetings, we would have been able to provide those answers as to where we were and where we were going.”

Following Campbell’s presentation, Tederick’s call for comments from council led to 15 seconds of silence, followed by Mayor Gene Tewalt’s noting that the Tourism presentation was the work session’s final order of business.

But the work session was far from over.

Part Two: Council expresses frustration with governor on continued COVID-19 closings