Chamber and tourism should unite

Here’s a modest proposal.

It’s something that has occurred to me before, but I found myself thinking about it about a week or so ago during the Jay County Chamber of Commerce Jay County Community Awards.

Like most organizations of its type, the chamber often finds itself in need of reliable revenue. Events like the community awards banquet are, at least in part, fundraisers.

The chamber could raise dues, but that would be counterproductive. After all, for the chamber to operate most effectively it needs to have as many business members as possible. Boost the dues, and you lose the little guys, the small, mom and pop businesses that the chamber most wants to help.

Meanwhile, there’s another organization doing chamber-like functions that has the most reliable revenue stream imaginable: tax dollars.

I’m talking about Jay County Visitors and Tourism Bureau. Its revenue stream comes from innkeeper’s taxes paid by folks who spend nights in local hotels and motels.

You don’t pay it. I don’t pay it. Visitors pay it.

When the tourism bureau was launched, that made sense. It was a countywide approach to countywide promotion of tourism.

Besides, at that point, there was no Jay County Chamber of Commerce.

There was the Portland Area Chamber of Commerce. There was the Dunkirk Chamber of Commerce. There was the Redkey Chamber of Commerce. And there were businesses that banded together now and then in Pennville and Bryant, usually around local festivals.

The late Vicki Tague’s greatest accomplishment was to corral all those community boosters together into a single, county chamber of commerce.

From the outset, revenue to support the venture was a problem.

A huge gap existed between what Portland chamber members paid in terms of dues and what businesses in Dunkirk and Redkey were prepared to pay.

Somehow, Vicki managed to pull it together.

But I’ll always believe an opportunity was missed.

It was all a matter of timing.

The tourism bureau had been put in place before Vicki was able to bring all those communities together under one chamber umbrella.

So here’s my modest proposal: Fold the tourism bureau’s tent and have Jay County Chamber of Commerce contract with the county to provide tourism and promotion services.

Those services would be completely in line with the chamber’s mission, and there would undoubtedly be economies of scale if the chamber simply added tourism to its other roles as an advocate for business and a catalyst for retail promotion.

With the benefit of the innkeeper’s tax revenue stream, the countywide chamber could make sure its dues structure was affordable to every enterprise in the county, widening its base while making chamber membership easy and attractive.

Freed of the emphasis on fundraising, the chamber would be able to focus on the work at hand, promoting businesses, boosting tourism, service as an advocate for business in the public sector and charting an agenda for the county’s future.

OK, I know that like most “modest proposals” this one will find plenty of opponents.

But, just for the record, I think it makes a great deal of sense.