The Spokane Valley Tourism Promotion Area Commission held a regular meeting on April 16, 2026, at 10:00 a.m. at Spokane Valley City Hall. The meeting included an administrative report, financial update, and two presentations: a Q1 update from Spokane Sports on the cross-country course and a marketing update from agency 116 & West. No public comments were received.
Okay, I think we have people here and on Zoom and 10 o'clock. So we can call the meeting to order. And I think we're starting with uh any public comments. No one signed up via Zoom. Okay. Next item, we have Mike here with an administrative report. Yeah, so uh good morning, Chair and Commissioners. Uh Mike Basinger, community and economic development director. As you know, um yesterday was Leslie's last day. So I am jumping in. She tried to get me up to speed before she left. Uh, we'll definitely miss Leslie. So, and I really appreciate all she's done. So I'm hopefully you guys felt the same way. She's been pretty instrumental in putting the TPA together, especially when it got broke. Uh establishing our own TPA here in the Valley. Leslie was tromping around to all the hotels and talking to people and trying to get people excited about the idea of putting one together. And she's been super passionate about it all along. So she's definitely going to be missed. Um, jumping right into the administrative report. We do have some tough news. Uh revenue collection is down a bit in January and February. Um, even though more people stayed in our hotels this February, we're up about 1.1%. We actually brought in less money than last year. Uh, you know, and this is because room rates dropped to an average of about $88 a night. Um, Spokane Hotels saw essentially the same thing. More people stayed in their rooms, but because they dropped their prices, you know, six percent, their total revenue still fell. So um, Sarah Farr will provide more details relating to TPA collections after my report. So um marketing and website, you'll find the latest Discover the Valley website stats in your packet. Jessica from 16 West is on the agenda later to give you a full marketing update. Um so she'll handle any specific questions you might have about those numbers. And then opportunity fund update. We're still uh waiting to get our opportunity fund changes in front of council. They've been buried in work lately. This is primarily due to the work that I haven't, you know, doing for our periodic update of our conference of plan, which essentially we have meetings for the various elements of the conference of plan. We broke it up into three meetings, but on those nights, that's the only topic they're hearing. And it was on purpose, just because it's complicated subject matter, and we wanted to make sure that we could uh get the input we needed to move this process forward, which is adoption in December of uh this year. So a lot of work. Not that everybody's that interested in the periodic update, but it is the city's vision. It does have components of tourism and economic development built into it. Uh so it is something that actually guides our council in terms of where their priorities might sit. So they adopt those policies and goals, and it actually is something we can reference back to and say, hey, remember through our periodic update, which is our 20-year plan, um, the city really sees a vision in supporting economic development and continuing those efforts. So that's been taking a lot of time. So but that being said, we do have an administrative report. Actually, I take that back. I was able to get them to do a first reading on April 28th. And then I believe the second reading is on May 5th. What I mean by that is normally we do three touches, but because um Leslie was in front of them talking about the opportunity fund, we're able to use that as an administrative report. So hopefully we'll reduce that down to two touches. I am pretty certain council's on board understands it.