Ramble On

Friday, July 24, 2009

The 2008 Plan, continued...

Over the next few days, blog posts continue with a summary of the 2008 Page County Strategic Economic Development Plan – looking first at the economic sectors highlighted here: tourism, agriculture, and industry.

Tourism is one economic driver that nobody seems to question in the County. I’ve heard estimates of the number of visitors at SNP as over a million, and a half million at Luray Caverns. The plan acknowledges this with the quote, “Just a few miles in any direction offers visitors a chance to enjoy the abundance of Page County’s natural resources and a range of recreational activities including camping, canoeing, cycling, fishing, golf, hiking, horseback riding, and photography.”

The plan summarizes the impact of tourism, noting expenditures of almost $51 million in 2007, employment of 654 people, and annual payroll of almost $11 million. An occupancy tax generates a budget that is used to promote tourism in the County, guided by the Chamber of Commerce’s Tourism Council. Mary and I have stopped by the visitors’ center and can vouch for how friendly and knowledgeable the staff is; these functions are imminently moving to the newly restored Luray train station which will further serve to make visits to the County memorable.

A new feature of the 2008 plan is a summary for each initiative, presented in something of a scorecard format; at least it is easily adaptable to results reporting in the next update. For each major section of the plan, there is a table that outlines objectives, assigns the lead role, sets a priority for each objective, identifies support roles, and lists resources.

There are four objectives for Tourism. The only “Priority A” objective here is:
“The Director of the Economic Development Department will work with the Executive Director of the Chamber to develop reporting formats for the marketing and financial updates that will be submitted to the Board of Supervisors on a regular basis.”

As I mentioned in past posts, I see the opportunities with tourism as low-hanging fruit in the overall context of economic development for Page County. There’s no question about the natural resources available, you have a solid base of visitors to work from, and you can easily monitor the impacts of improvement objectives.

If less than $200K in promotional funds is all it takes to maintain tourism traffic at 1.5 million visitors, tourism revenues at $51 million, and creating payroll of 654 employees, does adding $20K create the opportunity to increase everything by 10%? If that investment won't improve the statistics by 10%, how much will the impact be? If it only creates 10 more jobs, that still seems worthwhile.

Seems like an easy place to start to me.

We are headed out to the Hawksbill Cabin for the weekend (we have a Luray Wranglers game on tap – thanks for the recommendation, “posumcop” – next week’s posts will include a wrap up on those activities and continue with this review of the 2008 Economic Development Plan. The Agriculture sector is the one I will take a look at next.

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