March TBID Board Meeting Minutes March 7, 2013 MSO Hub Conference Room Present: Matthew Doucette, Shannon Brilz, Dan Carlino, Steve Rossiter, Marti Rehbien, Kimberly Best, Kerry Crocker, Jon Bernthal, Kate Leonberger, Lucy Weeder, Anna Sain, Barb Neilan, Mary Holmes and Sage Grendahl. Absent: Meeting called to order: 3:35 p.m. Approval of Minutes Sage Grendahl noted she had Kim Sawyer down twice as an attendee. She ll correct that. Lucy Weeder motioned to approve the minutes. Jon Bernthal seconded and all Regular Business TBID Financials Sage Grendahl stated that Barb Neilan, Jim Galipeau and her met with the chief accountant for the City to make sure everything is on track for the audit we will have next year. She stated we will need to switch to an accrual accounting process. Additionally, we need to look into if there is a potential conflict of interest with Anderson ZurMuehlen compiling the TBID fee, since they will be doing the audit. Jon Bernthal motioned to approve the financials. Lucy Weeder seconded and all Board Vacancies Dan Carlino stated we have two vacancies. Kimberly Best has an interest in reapplying. It was asked if folks outside of the boundary can be on the board. They can t, because they are considered voluntary partners. 1
Fee Increase Dan Carlino stated Barb Neilan, Mary Holmes and Jon Bernthal went to the Council Committee meeting. Jon said the City Council would like to see us get all the hoteliers on board as the other Montana communities have. They asked when we were going to get the 60% of square footage of the boundary committed. They are extremely supportive of us. March 25 is the public hearing for the fee increase. We just need one person present at the meeting. Dan will attend. Increased collections will begin April 1 and go from $1 to $2. Dan thanked Marti Rehbein for helping with the process. Group Pick-up Mary Holmes stated the organization has 30 days to get the paperwork back in. Mary did ask the TBID hotels about the success of these events. These numbers do not reflect numbers outside the room block. Jon Bernthal also mentioned that they may have stayed at non-tbid hotels, which we still need to take into account. Mary has the economic impact calculator from DMAI to start processing this information. Montana Taekwondo ($1,700) They picked up 25 hotel room nights through the TBID hotels. The turn out for this event drew more participants than anticipated. Kim Sawyer had told Mary that they gave a lot of recognition to the TBID hotels by announcing them at the event. Big Sky Documentary Film Festival ($10,000) They picked up a 164 reported rooms nights. One hotel offered a really special rate, so it received a majority of the pickup. Montana Volleyball Academy ($4,300) They picked up 21 room nights from TBID hotels. In addition, there were 20 room nights that went to a non-tbid hotel. This event ended up competing with other tournaments, so attendance wasn t as high as anticipated. Rail Jam is this week, so we don t have any data. 2
Dan Carlino commended Mary for making sure that these groups have the TBID hotels listed on their websites. It ll be interesting to get all of the final data in. Sport Commission Brad Murphy stated that the Sports Commission met on the 28 th. The bids for 2015 have to be in by April 1, 2013. Basketball Girls Class C, Class A Basketball Boys Class C, Class A Basketball Combined Class AA, Class B State Choral will be hosted by the University. That will bring in 1900 students and 500 teachers. October 2014. State Cross Country 2014 State Swim meeting 2015 State Speech and Drama Meet Loyola doesn t want to host it for Class A and B, because they have been doing it for 30 years. The only way we will get these bids if we $0 bid these tournaments. The Montana High School Association doesn t pay to host these. Mary Holmes and Brad met with Hamilton to be the backup for the boys combined basketball tournaments if we get the Big Sky Tournament. The Adams Center fees are a bit higher because of union labor and parking fees. The estimate is $22,000, which was estimated to be high. The Adams Center won t ask for that whole amount, because they recognize that they are a community player too. Brad would probably ask for half of this amount. This does not include the rental fee. They have to get athletic directors to commit to the events before they can bid on it. They have 882 rooms blocked for the Big Sky Conference just for the teams. We haven t had a high school basketball tournament here since 2004. 3
If we get the Class B tournaments, there would be between three to four thousand attendees and five to six thousand attendees for a championship game. It was discussed for next year we create a line item for MHSA. The Sports Commission is asking to not use the grant process in place, so they can get the bids in on time. The board feels like this is different than other groups asking for funding. There is no risk with these events. The participants will show. Jon Bernthal motioned to support these MHSA applications and requisite funding up to $11,000 per event bid contingent upon approval. Lucy Weeder seconded and all Another initiative is to meet regarding the high school championship football game. It would be ideal to have it rotate between Bozeman and Missoula in November offsetting the community where the Cat/Griz game is held. Steve Rossiter mentioned that the 2015 Aviation Conference will be decided on April 27 in Helena. It is usually held the last few days of February or early March. He s anticipating 1,000 to 1,500 room nights. Mary Holmes can contact all the hoteliers for Steve and give a presentation in Helena to current attendees. Barb Neilan stated the Social Media Tourism Symposium would be held in November 2013. We have made it into the first round and are up against 12 other communities. This process is similar to a Sweet 16 voting. There are three voting times. Voting kicks off March 12-14. We are going out to all the downtown business, our partners, different events, etc to get votes. We will be handing out business cards, table tents and fliers that have the QR code on them. Kate Leonberger asked Barb to share the impact of this event. Barb stated the conference was in El Paso last year. They had 232 attendees and generated 6,678 tweets that reached 962,900 people for 10.7 million impressions. You can t buy the PR for this conference. We really need your help in getting the vote. Please follow us on Facebook and Twitter to get this stuff out. Marti Rehbein offered to get this out at the next Council meeting. Press releases will be going out and info sent to 4
the Regions/CVBs. We are possibly buying a banner ad in the Missoulian for the days of voting. It was recommended to put it online with a direct link. The next rounds of voting are reduced time wise. The second round is 24 hours and the third round is 12 hours. It was suggested that if someone votes on time, we need to get them to sign up for email reminders for future rounds of voting We had to create a social media campaign around this and submit a one-page RFP to make it in the Sweet 16. Announcements and Public Comment Public Comment Anna Sain stated that there are now direct flights to Atlanta. Flights are once a week and seasonally. We need to target our marketing efforts there. Brad Murphy reported there is the Great Rocky Mountain Outdoor Show and the Forester s Ball is happening in the same weekend. Next Meeting: April 11, 2013 at 3:30 p.m. Adjournment The meeting adjourned at 4:24 p.m. 5