Growing and stabilizing Durango’s tourism industry will be hard to do as the tourism budget faces cuts this year, a Durango Area Tourism Office official told La Plata County commissioners.
“Twenty years down the road, how resilient is the tourism industry?” DATO Executive Director Bob Kunkel asked commissioners. “We have a steady, reliable contributor to the local economy. It’s a good industry, but people choose to come here.”
Leisure tourism is volatile and disrupted by fires, mine spills, fuel prices and other economic factors, Kunkel said. To compete with other cities, La Plata County has to consider facilities that would attract “purpose” visitors.
“Fires, Gold King, fuel prices – you can choose to go someplace else based on those,” Kunkel said. “We need purposeful tourists that have to come here. After the Gold King spill, if they’re coming for a conference, they have to come here. If people are coming for a concert, they have to come here. Those things are long term. They’re pricey and facility-driven, but that will make us a 365-day, successful tourism industry.”
Kunkel reported that Durango and the county’s 2 percent lodgers tax, established in 1980, is not competing with the 6.6 percent national average.
“We have to address that at some point,” he said. “The city allocates about 68 percent of what is actually collected for tourism. It’s an ongoing issue. We used to get 93 percent.”
The Tourism Office is planning to reduce its 2016 budget by more than $160,000 compared with the current year. Marketing and advertising, as well as personnel funding, are taking the biggest hits.
On Tuesday, Kunkel told the Durango City Council changes may be made at the Santa Rita Park Visitors Center. Traffic at the center is half that of the downtown facility, so DATO is considering converting the Santa Rita location to an unstaffed, self-service center.
Its employees are paid $10 or $11 an hour and some have worked there 10 years or more. There is little turnover, and most employees are older, retired and lived in the community a long time.
“I don’t know if that’s the final decision, but it gets real hard when you’re cutting money,” Kunkel told the commission.
Commissioner Brad Blake asked what the county could do to help, which Kunkel said would be to include tourism in long-term planning.
The county is factoring tourism into its comprehensive plan.
jpace@durangoherald.com
