By: Donovan W. Mann – [email protected]
Dakota City, IA – The regional tourism industry president is urging the rural regions of the Iowa to push back against larger city take overs.
During the most recent meeting of the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors they heard from the President of the Western Iowa Tourism Region Andy Milam. During is allotted time of the agenda he spoke passionately about the value of tourism in Iowa, especially in the rural areas.
He says tourism is important to areas like Humboldt because it creates interest from nonresidents in the area. When a visitor comes to a small city like Humboldt and stays for a short while it can create further interest to return to the area or even a desire to move to the area. Milam says when a city focus a lot on its economic development by doing large scale downtown revitalization projects or building new facilities like a recreation center it can help create further interest. However if nonresidents don’t see them they don’t serve their full purpose of bringing people in.
He says that there are two types of entities in the industry for Iowa. The first is known as a Convention Based Bureau (CBB), which are the larger cities that can host larger events. The second type is the attraction based, which is the smaller more rural areas and Humboldt with attractions like the Frank Gotch statue falls in this category.
Milam has two primary concerns he wanted to bring to the supervisors attention. The first is that all of Iowa is bad at promoting tourism. The state currently ranks 42 in the country in tourism, which is really out of 48 states because two don’t promote tourism at all. The second issue is that the CBB’s are attempting to take over the industry in the state. He says that despite 74 of Iowa’s county’s being opposed the larger cities are attempting to form a new Iowa tourism organization known as the Iowa Travel Industry Partners (ITIP). Under this group all tourism funds would get controlled and distributed by the larger cities. He says rural Iowa will be the losers under this system.
Milam says the eastern region has already approved ITIP but the central and western regions are strongly opposed. He will continue to talk with the states head of tourism and work with local economic developers to improve the value of tourism in the rural communities.
The supervisors expressed their appreciation for Milam bringing the issues to their attention and asked he keep them informed going forward.