Oneida County Tourism Council seeks budget boost for mapping project

The Oneida County administration committee has kicked off its 2024 budget process by entertaining departmental budget proposals, and this past week the county’s tourism council came by with a 2024 request for $135,758.

That’s substantially more than last year’s $80,000 net tax levy, but $45,000 of that would represent a one-time expenditure for a trail fulfillment piece to obtain current maps of all Oneida County trails. 

Because it is a one-time expense, supervisors split the budget into two pieces, voting to send $90,758 to the October budget hearings for review, and sending the $45,000 line-item request for the trail project to the county’s capital improvement committee.

At the meeting, administration committee chairman Billy Fried expressed more than once his desire to see the budget request reduced. Over the years Fried has raised concerns about duplication of services in tourism — if there are any — and he says the complexity of funding mechanisms makes all the dollars difficult to follow.

“Sometimes over the years, I get kind of confused with funding sources coming from your towns, from the two different counties, and how we’re not making sure we’re making the best use of that pool of money,” Fried told members of the council, led by tourism council president Krystal Westfahl, who is also president of the Let’s Minocqua Visitors Bureau.

To make the point about complexity, one of the Oneida County tourism council members is the executive director of the Tomahawk chamber of commerce. Tomahawk is in Lincoln County, but Tomahawk chamber executive director Sherry Hulett explained that tourism is borderless in a way.

“Tourists don’t really look at boundaries and county lines,” Hulett said. “They will come up and go to this establishment, that establishment, and then cross over. So part of our businesses for Tomahawk, their actual mailing addresses are in Oneida County. So they don’t stop at that bridge on Hwy L and say, ‘oh, can’t go in there.’ They actually cross. So cross marketing and being a part of Oneida County tourism also helps the businesses that I represent that are in Oneida.”

Westfahl gave an overview of the tourism structure, saying that, while each town or area tourism entity works on behalf of that geographic community or communities, the county tourism council seeks to represent the entire county and level the playing field.

“So our council, we obviously are here specifically advocating for Oneida County,” Westfahl said. “We believe that a rising tide lifts all ships, and we are volunteers to that endeavor. We work with a marketing firm that helps us pull together all of those pieces to make sure that we are adequately expressing everything that’s happening in Oneida County as one level playing field.”

Westfahl said the council wants to make sure that visitors aren’t necessarily just coming to Minocqua — though she said she would welcome them — or any other one town, but that the council’s goal is have them across the county experiencing all that’s happening.

As for the budget, Westfahl explained more specifically what the council does with its money.

“So we have a wonderful website that we actually put a lot of our effort into, drive a lot of traffic back to, so that people are discovering all that’s happening here in Oneida County,” she said. “We are doing a bunch of stuff that’s more infrastructure work, looking at accessibility and trails and how we can get not just our visitors out there, but also our locals.”

With an aging population in Oneida County, Westfahl said the council is making sure that trails are accessible and are being expressed to the people who are already here. She also said many businesses participate.

“We want to make sure that we have a space for them as well that’s free to them,” she said. 

Westfahl said the council also does a lot of grants, many of which require local match dollars.

“So we’re looking for funding to help us do those grant matches,” she said. “We’re always working on some new things, like I was talking about the accessibility and trails. We’ve got new things coming up all the time.”

One is an ATV-UTV promotion, Westfahl said.

“We do regional things and other types of tourism and publicity across our entire region,” she said. 

Fried questions

Fried complimented the passion of the group for their work and said it was appreciated, but he also observed that the $135,758 request amounted to large increase over last year. He noted that much of the increase looked to be related to the grant engagement that Westfahl had mentioned, much of it requiring local match dollars.

Westfahl explained that traditionally those match requirements are dollar for dollar, though sometimes they vary.

“Sometimes we’ll get $20,000 and then that reduces obviously the amount of money that we’re asking for,” she said. “If they don’t want to fund us at the full $35,000, which is normally what we ask for. The funding that we traditionally match those grants for comes out of that obviously bigger budget. So if we don’t have the full amount then our marketing, advertising and promotional becomes shrunk down.”

One of the grants is a snowmobile JEM grant match for $4,500, but Fried observed that was but a small portion of about $40,000 the council is hoping to get for matching grants and said he would like more detail.

The biggest budget component, Westfahl said, was a trail fulfillment piece that she said they had been working on for a number of years. 

“That’s the $45,000 on that line item budget, and we’ve been working with a piece from 2016 that needs to be updated desperately,” she said. “We’ve been making it work, but it’s certainly not good enough.”

What it is, Westfahl explained, is that when somebody calls into the Oneida County phone number, or hotline, it is the piece that actually expresses what Oneida County is. It is also distributed around the state, Westfahl said.

“We just had trails in there from, again, 2016 that are outdated,” she said. “They need to be updated with the new information.”

Fried also questioned the complexity of funding streams, such as room tax revenue, but Westfahl stressed that those dollars must be used within the specific room tax zone — Minocqua, Woodruff, and Arbor Vitae are one such zone — and they must be used for advertising and promotion.

“So those funds are directly collected through hotels,” she said. “Those hotels then hand that money over to the towns. The towns hand that money over to the [room tax] commission and then the commission works with the tourism entity. So that’s how that room tax funding sort of recirculates and those dollars are specific to the advertisement and promotion of that town, or those towns, if you work together underneath a commission.”

Unlike Minocqua, Woodruff, and Arbor Vitae, Westfahl said, Three Lakes is only itself.

“Then it’s only promotion for Three Lakes and those hotels,” she said. “So it makes this little circle where you’re trying to regain those same visitors over and over again.”

But the county’s goal is to reach new voices, Westfahl said.

Fried countered that his goal was to get the council’s budget request down.

Again, the Minocqua supervisor said it was confusing trying to sort out the different tourism entities and where all the pieces fit in.

“I see these different entities operating under this entity, or maybe Oneida County Tourism isn’t the mothership, it’s just another ship in the fleet, I don’t know,” he said. “But there is overlap, especially I’m looking at you, we’ve worked together and we are working together on a lot of things. You’re Minocqua, but today you’re Oneida County Tourism.”

And that wasn’t all, Westfahl agreed, saying she’s also with the Northwoods of Wisconsin and she works with Travel Wisconsin. 

“So if you were going to look at it from a hierarchy, Travel Wisconsin is our mothership,” she said. “They’re the ones that are telling us how and why and where and who and where they’re going. Then we have a marketing consortium that’s seven counties across, they all work together to talk about the Northwoods of Wisconsin as a whole.”

Next it comes down to the counties, Westfahl said.

“Vilas and Oneida are two of the leading counties that have county funding and county support and drive tourism because that’s our industry in the Northwoods,” she said. “Then we come into the individual organizations. So that’s how that kind of hierarchy works and we all have a different language we’re speaking, so that we’re not all saying the exact same thing. Obviously Travel Wisconsin is Wisconsin tourism, and then it kind of bleeds down into those individual pieces and then our businesses ultimately then feed all of that information to us and then that goes back up the chain.”

Fried attempted to simplify his view of things. 

“Let’s say the mothership is doing a state bike trail, snowmobile trail and mapping everywhere, and now I’m sitting here four rounds below the mothership looking for funding,” he said. “Are we duplicating?”

Westfahl said that was exactly why directed marketing for the county was all important “because you can get lost in the wash.”

“So if Door County is doing a similar trail sequence, who’s got the most money behind it to speak the loudest?” she said. “And that’s I think what we are ultimately trying to get to is, we want to be able to speak at the same level as other counties in the state so that we’re able to pull them here and then individually we’re working to pull them into our communities.”

One-time expenses

Supervisor Steven Schreier said it appeared that some of the budget items, such as the trail fulfillment piece, were one-time expenses rather than yearly and ongoing.

Westfahl said the trail fulfillment piece could hopefully not need updating every year.

“We’ll probably ride with that for another who knows how many years,” she said. “It would be nice to be able to say every five years we’re going to update that travel piece so that we’ve got a new and fresh look. It’s too hard to do that at a county level and not understanding where that money is going to be coming from in the future to put us on a schedule like that.”

But Westfahl said the council would definitely not like to wait as long as it has since the last one got updated.

“So that would be a carry through over a period of time,” Schreier said. “We’re not seeing it as like a $45,000 ask every year.”

Westfahl agreed that it would be a one-time ask, and Schreier said he thought that maybe it belonged in the Capital Improvement Committee, or ARPA funding

“If you’re going to categorize it more as a one-time, let’s-get-this-trail-thing-updated sort of thing, I would see benefit in that,” he said. “I don’t know how the rest of the committee feels about it and I don’t know if there’s anything else you would identify as kind of a one-time thing that relates.”

Schreier said he, like Fried, would like to see more consistency in the year-to-year ask, which he said has usually been around $90,000, give or take, not $135,758 like this year.

“But if the majority of that ask really appears to be a one-time to get our trail stuff updated, then maybe fund that out of a source other than the general fund,” he said. “I like to think that’s where we normally fund the majority of these asks.”

Westfahl said in the future they could produce a year-over-year bottom-dollar request to maintain, and then the additional asks for projects that are being looked at. 

Fried made the motion to reduce the tourism council budget request by $45,000 to $90,758 and to forward it to the budget hearings, and he cautioned that there would be further review at that time.

“But I will tell you my concern when we next meet, I want you to identify that $40,000 you talk about for matching grants, which I want to know what’s on the table because if we’re starting to search for money, you know that this is one of the first areas I always look at and I want to know what we’d be sacrificing if we’re not able to fund you to what you’re requesting here today,” he said. 

“And the bigger picture is the unwinding of these different agencies, different things having some similarity of what they’re working on and the revenue, so that we’re maximizing the use of dollars that are out there and we don’t have duplication of trail maps, et cetera.”

Fried’s motion passed, and Schreier followed with a motion to consider ARPA funding for the new trail fulfillment piece and travel website as presented in the tourism council budget and forward it on to the CIP committee.

That motion passed as well. 

Richard Moore is the author of “Dark State” and may be reached at richardd3d.substack.com.