Speaker numbers apply only to this recording.
The Tourism Committee met on October 1, 2026 at noon to review discretionary expenditures of room tax dollars for the 2027 budget. The meeting included discussion on revenue trends, marketing strategies, grant programs, and future needs. A quorum was present. Committee members introduced themselves to new administrator Sue Keppi.
Cool. So now you're good to go. Okay. So I've got noon, and we will call the meeting to order a roll call. Actually, I don't have an actual list of folks. Yeah. So let's actually for this roll call, let's go around the room and introduce ourselves. This is Sue Keppi, our new admin, and she's still getting to know everyone. So that would be helpful in her note taking. So, Paul, would you like to go ahead and get started as our chair? Paul Hoffman, that's called RuinCode. That's perfect. Um Amy Meyer with the Manitow County Historical Society. Haley Remel with Farm Wisconsin Discovery Center. And your fellow city of that as well. Chad Harrington from Honor Film Force. Kevin Cullen with the Wisconsin Maritimes. And then the two who are absent right now is uh Jackie Salazo from Holiday Inn and Samantha Hamill from Pine River Dairy. And then the mayor um is not going to be at this meeting. Um so if they hop in, Sue, I'll show you how to do that in Granicus in the notes tomorrow. So with that, I believe we we have two absolutes. We do have a quorum. Um next item of business is the approval of minutes that was in your packet. So we could just take a really quick look at those and maybe a minute and we'll see if we can get an approval on that. I'll make a motion to approve the minutes from all in favor? Opposed. The minutes are approved. Uh on to item four, the discussion and action items, review discretionary expenditures of room tax dollars with a 2027 budget. I'm going to defer to Courtney. All right. So I'll start by kind of just reiterating the information I sent over via email. So this is our first time doing this with the new board. Um, and per the guidelines that were drafted for this particular board, um, it kind of outline what this second meeting of the year. I know we had a kickoff one, so really this is our third meeting of the year. Um, but that the second meeting of the year would focus on making recommendations to the room tax commission who does oversee uh the tourism budget of what sh discretionary discretionary expenditures. It is such a mouthful of just consonants and vowels I normally don't say um what they should could be spending that money on in the next year's budget. So um background, this is something that we're kind of working on right now um across the board. So standing committees, um next week, the first week of August at their regular meetings. So I mean personnel, finance, public safety, parks and rec, one item on their budget or on their um agenda for next week, most of them meet um, is discussing with the standing committee council members um anything that should be looked at or on a particular department's budget. Um, because right now we just got the budget memo last week, um, and we're working on crafting those, and they'll be due to the May um finance and the mayor on August 21st. Um, so this is a practice that really everyone is doing right now. So um this kind of takes that for our department. Um, like I mentioned in the email, um, on average in the last few years budgets, um, we've had anywhere from like five to twelve thousand dollars, especially being a new department. Um we wanted to be able to take opportunities that were presented to ourselves during the year.