Hello everyone.

My name is Joe, and I am the mayor of Pro Tem today.

I don't really know what I'm doing.

We're going to get through this together.

So you got it, Joe.

First up, I believe we have Mark Eklin with uh CVB to give us an update.

Thank you more.

Will you push the mic button on that microphone?

Thank you.

Such a rookie.

Mayor Pro Tem, Council members, thank you for this opportunity to present our fiscal year 2025 annual report.

I think Jody has got a pocket folder in front of each one of you.

On the left hand side is the PowerPoint slides I'm going to be going through.

And then on the other side is the 12 page, much more detailed annual report with that.

Here with me today, we've got a couple of board members.

Our vice president of the board, Arian Heddocks with uh Fox Creek Fundraising, and then Len Friedenbach, who is owner general manager of the country in and suite.

So uh representation of uh the board.

Do I have to kind of hold it for a period of time?

There we go.

I'll just ask you to advance the slides.

On the left hand side, you're seeing the rest of the board.

We have great representation of attractions, hotel years, restaurant uh owners, as well as our uh relationship with the city.

Ashley Cruz is that great liaison.

Uh Brian Shea maintains a liaison relationship with the Pottawatomie County Board of Supervisors.

On the right hand side is the rest of our team, and with me here today is director of marketing Craig Carlson, who just celebrated his first anniversary with us, and then the rest of our small but mighty team.

If you can go forward.

Technology is such a wonderful thing.

If you take out the uh power copy of the PowerPoint slides, I can kind of go through.

There we are.

Uh you've heard this many times before, but for those folks who have never heard a presentation from the CVB, I like to hit upon this because a lot of folks are probably going to think travel and tourism, what is Council Bluffs doing uh in that field.

And what we benefit from is that when we attract visitors to come to Council Bluffs, a visitor is defined as someone who's traveled at least 50 miles or farther from home to get to Council Bluffs or Pottawatomie County, and they represent new customers for local businesses because uh they're gonna stay undoubtedly at a hotel, go to a restaurant, do some retail shopping, and that starts to add up as I'm gonna talk about in a minute.

Virtually all those new customers become new taxpayers for local government because when they do stay overnight, they're gonna pay the 7% hotel motel tax, as well as the local option sales tax if they do any shopping.

And that equal equals a benefit when you combine those two things for all local residents.

Promoting local business, local government, and ultimately local residents really does a lot of good.

Uh, in terms of the value, if you don't mind going forward there, uh those new customers represent more than 336 million dollars in spending in 2023 according to tourism economics, the most recent information that we have available.

And in terms of those new taxpayers, uh we collected, and I say we, the city of Council Bluffs collected 3.184 million dollars in hotel motel tax from stays in many of our 2600 hotel guest rooms, and that's the uh fourth consecutive year that we've surpassed three million dollars.

And if you go to the next slide, kind of see where we've come from in the last 11 years.

Well, it wasn't a record-setting amount, it still exceeded 3.1 million, exceeded that amount that I believe was the budgeted amount by the finance department, and it really shows despite the effects of inflation, we still saw a healthy amount of travel to council bluffs.

The next slide, we talk a little bit about what the council bluff CVB uh has done in the last fiscal year, as we've done over the last five years, really leaned into digital marketing.

In the last two years, we've added winter into that mix because of the county's purchase of Crescent Hill at Hitchcock, formerly known as Mount Crescent.

And it gives us a way of attracting tourists when we need them the most.

That's when our occupancy at hotels is the lowest, as well as the average daily rate, which impacts hotel motel tax collections.

And some of the digital marketing that we did during those seasons is represented in the lower left-hand corner, uh, certainly promoting fun at Mount Crescent.

And what we saw year over year in terms of those digital ads creating 20% more in terms of impressions, uh meaning they got to more people uh than they did the year before.

And the effectiveness of that was that we saw growth of 21% in the number of clicks on those ads that go to unleashcb.com.

And I'll show you a little bit on this slide as to what we saw in terms of increase.

We saw an acceleration in terms of growth on the website, and virtually all of our messaging points back to unleashcb.com, which not only serves visitors but also locals.

And we saw double-digit growth over four of five metrics, between 26 to 16%.

And in that lower right-hand corner, you saw that our 16% growth in events meant that we reached an all-time high of 1,835 events on the website.

So if somebody says there's nothing going on in Council Bluffs in Potawatomi County, they don't know what they're talking about.

We also saw growth in followers of 5%, and as you can see on that banner ad, we really leaned into uh promoting live music.

Uh that's one of the message pillars that we maintain.

We don't go about this saying we have something for everyone.

We are very specific and intentional.

It's live music, it's railroad heritage, things along that nature.

And then we had big wins in sports and meetings.

You've heard me talk about the last couple of years that we landed the 2025 ABA or excuse me, ABI taking care of business conference that was held here on June 10th, 11th, and 12th.

This brought to Council Bluffs for the very first time in its 122-year history, more than 300 business leaders from across the state of Iowa.

And they didn't just see the inside of the Mid-America Center.

They got a chance to take some uh industry tours, a history tour, a public art tour, and had one of their evening functions at the Hoff Family Arts and Culture Center.