The Valdez Tourism Task Force met on March 18, 2026, to act on a postponed recommendation for the management structure of a future tourism marketing organization, approve a feedback survey for local businesses, and discuss immediate next steps for supporting the 2026 tourism season. The meeting included detailed discussion of legal structures, financial obligations, and staffing needs.
Okay. So has anyone ever heard of a component unit? But that's just a term in kind of the government accounting standards of something that is controlled by the city, but is a separate legal entity. So the museum's an example of that. What other ones do we have in our budget? The hospital. So the um the answer or the question wasn't answered about whether some could be elected by the membership and uh there and the rest by the city council. So that's a deal breaker. It's however you guys set it up. However, you want to structure it. You mean the the organization I want to say the sky's the limit, but it darn near. So is it basically kind of the structure we had before, but just with a city council oversight? At the top level, yeah. Okay. What was there? And this are the top two that everyone answered in their survey as being the top two. Um basically the crux of it if it is a quasi public corporation, is that the city would just be able to have an ability to impose will on the organization in one of these ways. Um the ways were being able to remove an appointed member of the organization's governing board, so that um or being able to modify um or or approve the budget of the organization. Um makes sense anyway. Um and kind of happens anyway. Um the ability to modify or approve rate or fee changes, so that's not you know applicable here. Uh, ability to veto overrule or modify decisions, it didn't sound like that was something this group was interested in. Um, and then the ability to um appoint, hire, uh, reassign or dismiss people responsible for day-to-day operations of the organization. So that's one that was not discussed by this group either. So my in my interpretation of this, if if you were to go this route, the two that would be applicable would be um a billion point members the order, governing board. Um, and that could be a multi-step process where you all vote and make a recommendation to council and they ratify that. Um then maybe it's a knee-jerk reaction, but it would be E. So in light of current circumstances, in the event that uh an executive director or something resigned or there was nobody, then the corporate board could appoint an interim for a period of time while the board were able to get their ducks in a row and and hire someone, those would be situations, and again, the the definition and specificity of that could be set up in the bylaws. It's it's quite broad as far as I see it, but those would be the two areas that would have some value in light of current circumstances, and then obviously as at least mentioned the budget. We're already kind of doing that, and so I think if you just formalize that, then it really puts it puts that organization into this bucket anyway, because it's it's an OR on those. It's it's not any combination. So I think the reality is that if we were to continue in our current operations, we probably check these boxes by laws tweaks. So essentially the kind of same as it was before, city input, and we have to redo the bylaws. Is this a just a retrofit of the current bylaws we have now or just reverse starting slate? So then, for example, if we wanted to put in the bylaws, like if we're gonna hire a new ED, which eventually we'd have to do that, um it could be put in this that the city is going to have a hand in that hiring process, it's not just president, whatever. Um that should be in the bylaws? Um I was the last person we hired, we went out to a firm. They do a good job. They do a very good job. It was expensive. Um but the the kind of the nice thing is there's people on the board that obviously aren't necessarily in hospitality but have other broad reaching skill sets. It'd be nice to have someone that can kind of be there to piggyback, like, oh, I like this about this person, just kind of there's some blind spots, obviously, that us hospitality folk have that maybe like someone in extraction or someone in oil or someone in what have you can help fill that gap a little bit, which I you know that's kind of the thing when I sat in the first meeting. Like, I'd really like to have some city involved in this just for that exact reason that uh you know there's a lot of strong people on there that I think could be helpful for us. Would that person be a city employee? Well, it'd be a board member or a city council member, correct? The way I understand it. You mean an exercise now or had power it's written, yeah. Yeah, yeah, I think you could set up however you want. Yeah, you can structure it how however you want, and I think um, and Samantha, maybe you can touch on Samantha and Colleen and I had a a quick touch base before Colleen left town. Um, and one of the things we kind of talked about is next step.