The Vandalia City Council held a study session on May 4, 2026 at 5:15 PM to receive presentations and discuss several operational and capital items. No public comments were heard. The session previewed agenda items for the regular council meeting later that evening, with councilmembers raising questions and providing directional feedback.
All right, it is 5 15, so we're gonna go ahead and get started with this evening's study session. Uh the first item uh we have a presentation from the Dayton uh Tourism Academy. So I'd like to invite uh Director John Oney and Vice President Kathy Peterson to the podium. All right, thank you everyone. Good afternoon. Um council members, mayor, thank you for having us today to talk a little bit about Destination Dayton and our tourism academy. But uh, before I turn the mic over to uh the real star here, uh Kathy, I do want to set the table a little bit about just kind of talking about um what Destination Dayton does, uh, why we do what we do and what we produce. So uh we'll just hop right into it. Next slide, please. Um so when we talk about DMOs, you'll hear DMOs, you'll hear CVBs, uh, destination marketing organizations or convention and uh visitors' bureaus. Uh we're sort of that hybrid, uh, but we kind of like uh to lean towards the DMO because we're really talking about marketing the region versus just one particular space. So uh we promote cities, regions, our goal is to attract visitors, produce overnight stays. I think you all have been through this before, uh, but we really want to talk about selling the the space and selling the place, um, and we do that through a variety of ways, a variety of channels, and the third point here economic impact generation, I think is probably our most important result that we have, and uh we'll talk more about that in the coming slides. So, next slide. So, this slide, I I'd love to steal a good slide when I see one. Um, this one has been in our industry for a very, very long time. I'm not sure if anyone in this room has seen it, but it's kind of become our our industry's mantra, and it it's the community vitality wheel. Has anyone seen this before? Anyone all right? So this is great. Uh so we always talk about visitation and what we do on the tourism side as the first date to economic development. And so how this wheel works is if you built a place where people want to visit, then you will have built a place where people want to live. And then the wheel goes to the right. If you build a place where people want to live, you build a place where people want to work. And then if you build a place where people want to work, then you will build a place where people want to invest in. And then if you build the place where people want to invest in, then you've built a place where people want to visit. So it's that full circle moment of what we do. So everything we do at the DMO level, we try to make sure we're hitting on all of these quadrants because we really do feel like we've all gone to a new destination for the first time. And when you get off the plane, you get out of the car, you come out of the hotel room for the first time, and you walk downtown, you kind of feel like, wow, you know what? I'd love to live here. So that's the sort of feeling we want to kind of interject uh on our visitors. Next slide. So why we do what we do, again, all about economic impact. We threw some uh numbers together from our most recent study in 2024. Um, destination Dayton is is pivotable is pivotal in making this happen. I like to talk about direct impact spending. 1.6 billion dollars were generated here as part of this result from all kinds of events, and that is money that is we talk about good money. That's money from outside the region coming in and being directly infused into our economy. So we love that. Um these numbers also produce 22 just north of 22,000 jobs, and one of the best parts of this number of this slide is it's it saves our taxpayers and our residents some dollars. So uh this study uh it produces uh 761 dollars in savings per household. Next slide. And then we try to narrow it down a little bit and just talked about what we did in last year in 2025. I think this is really incredible. And and this is this is not me talking, this is the staff that has done this, and and they've laid the groundwork over the years to get to these numbers. So I think this is important. Um Destination Dayton hosted 86 events in 2025. It brought in 460,000 visitors or attendees. That's that's incredible. I don't know how many times that's gonna fill Buckeye Stadium or whatever.