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Tourists haven’t stopped coming to Northeast Pennsylvania, but state money that helps the agencies that promote the region soon will.
Gov. Tom Corbett’s recently proposed $27.3 billion general fund budget decreases spending by $866 million, or 3.1 percent, and resets spending at approximately 2008-09 levels. Among the hardest hit are the state’s 49 tourism and marketing promotion agencies that are facing a budget that calls for their allocations to be eliminated.
The loss will hurt but it won’t put any area tourist promotion agencies, or TPAs, out of business.
“We were prepared for that,” said Janet Hall, the director of sales and marketing for the Luzerne County Convention & Visitors Bureau. The agency received $25,000 this fiscal year from the state’s Department of Economic and Community Development’s tourism promotion budget.
That total has been decreasing steadily since 2007, when the county’s TPA received $125,000 from the state. But as state budgets have gotten tighter, tourism has been among the areas former Gov. Ed Rendell and new Gov. Corbett have taken the surgical knife to.
“It’s been on a fairly precipitous downward glide path,” said Carl Wilgus, the executive director of the Pocono Mountains Visitors Bureau, which is the TPA for Monroe, Wayne, Pike and Carbon counties. That agency received $1.8 million in 2007-08 from the state. For the 2010-11 fiscal year it was allocated $223,000. In July, if the proposed budget is approved as is, it will get nothing.
“Right now it’s not looking promising,” Wilgus said. He said that his organization, like others across the state, have been operating with tighter budgets and have been lucky to see the state funding offset by rising revenues from the hotel room tax each TPA is permitted to implement with the host county’s approval. The Pocono Mountain Visitors Bureau collects three percent from each hotel room stay, good enough to account for a majority of its $5.5 million budget this year.
But Wilgus said losing $223,000, even though it’s just a small percentage of its overall budget, will still mean a cutback in printing, trade show attendance and outside contracts.
“It won’t be any one program that we’ll whack but we’ll whittle around a couple of areas,” Wilgus said. Employees, which number 23 and have already seen their ranks cut by one-third over the past three years, will not be reduced any further.
Wilgus said that as tourism promotion executive he laments the loss of funding in what’s always been an ultra-competitive industry. But as a taxpayer, “I don’t want to keep seeing more taxes. At some point we have to get our fiscal house in order.”
Hall said that in Luzerne County, an increase in room occupancy numbers would help offset the loss since the agency gets 20 percent of the 5 percent hotel room tax. That total is expected to account for $404,000 of the TPA’s $557,285 budget this year.
Like Wilgus, she said the complete elimination of state funding was not a surprise, nor will it put the agency on its deathbed.
“It’s disappointing, but it’s not devastating,” Hall said.