Like any story that delves into the complexity of living in a tourist town that gets a lot of attention—and many subsequent transplants—last week’s story, “Unsolicited Accolades” elicited a lot of commentary. Following “Outside” magazine’s designation of Bend as the “Best Multisport Town” in the United States, we sought to ask locals what they thought.
Among the comments we received on the story, some stood out:
Doug Cristafir said:
“I do believe Bend can pull it off in actually morphing into something new and better version of a tourist planet…we have the creative class to do it, but so far not the political imagination to pull it off. I hear visitors all the time wishing they could find a way to live here as they drool at the lifestyle.”
Laurel Brauns said:
“Ecotourism is a beautiful movement that insists that tourism benefit the local people and the environment, instead of allowing the place to fall victim to the forces of capitalism. The problem is, this requires a lot more work and intentional planning and decision-making than our egregiously underpaid City Council has time for.”
Our current city leaders maintain that there’s little to be done to stop a tourist influx. Indeed, as Visit Bend’s Kevney Dugan pointed out in the article, most of the tourists who come here don’t find out about Bend through a magazine article; they find out from their family members and through word of mouth. Visit Bend takes a lot of flack for being the agency responsible for marketing our region to the world, but at the end of the day, they’re a marketing agency, not responsible for the decision-making about how our city is run.
So who is responsible? City leaders, of course—and it’s strong leadership that could help ease the ongoing tension between residents and the people whose job it is to market our region to visitors.
Take Brauns’ suggestion about ecotourism. What is ecotourism, anyway?
The International Ecotourism Society’s Principles of Ecotourism include the following tenets:
- Minimize physical, social, behavioral, and psychological impacts.
- Build environmental and cultural awareness and respect.
- Provide positive experiences for both visitors and hosts.
- Provide direct financial benefits for conservation.
- Generate financial benefits for both local people and private industry.
- Deliver memorable interpretative experiences to visitors that help raise sensitivity to host countries’ political, environmental, and social climates.
- Design, construct and operate low-impact facilities.
- Recognize the rights and spiritual beliefs of the Indigenous People in your community and work in partnership with them to create empowerment.
How are we doing on these, Bend? Are we minimizing social impacts? Are we providing positive experiences for both visitors and hosts? While the agency tasked with promoting Bend has some role in these missives, it’s ultimately a city leader’s job to recognize these challenges and to create a vision for how to address them.
Bend is and will continue to be a place that people visit and fall in love with. The weather and the scenery are going to bring people here, marketing or magazine stories or not. But what we do to manage that and make it positive for “both visitors and hosts” is always the perennial question. To answer it, let’s start by changing the city charter to allow for a directly-elected mayor who can lead the movement.
This article appears in Jul 12-19, 2017.
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Dear Bend Source
Thank you from the bottom of my heart for digging into ecotourism a bit and publishing this piece. I know that, ultimately, naked bike riding is a sexier story, but I’ll take this 5×10 inch section of ink any day over a cup of coffee.
Some more thoughts from my obsessive research:
Visit Bend is an easy target, but ultimately they are empowered by the City who hires them and approves their budget every year. An important nuance here is that there was a state law passed in 2003 that froze the current percentage that cities were using to divide up the transient room tax collections. In Bend, that was around 70% to the City, 30% to tourism promotion. The law also demands that for any new increase in the transient room tax, 70% must go to tourism promotion, and only 30% to the City. So when the community voted in 2013 here in Bend to increase the tax by 1.4%, we were ultimately handing over a ton more money to Visit Bend with that increase. This is how partially how the monster is created, because more promotion leads to more visitors, and thus more revenue for promotion on and on.
While as Dugan says, the word is out about Bend, and most are ultimately coming here because of word of mouth (he’s probably right according to the surveys), yet it is still rubbing salt on a hemorrhaging wound to blast out 2 million dollars worth of advertisements a year selling the town, and I suspect the majority of full-time residents would prefer we discontinue this practice, or compromise and cut it in half. While dedicating 7% of their overall budget to cultural tourism is really awesome, let it not distract us from the fact that VB has become an incredibly powerful force that has changed the face of this town with almost no oversight from the City other than rubber-stamping their $3M budget. Personally, I love them as people, and think they have high integrity and passion, so this is not an attack on them, but instead an opportunity to open the conversation about changing how the TRT is spent.
This TRT money does not all have to go to Visit Bend, though from an administrative perspective, it’s much easier for the City to give VB all of it, and let them deal with it.
So what are the options?
Lobby to change the law at a state level so that we can change the % of TRT we can use for city projects, like much needed affordable housing projects, or we can get creative with the language of the law:
According to the state, the money has to go to “tourism promotion,” (it’s pretty obvious what that is) or “tourism-related facilities.” Now here is where it could get interesting. ORS 320.300 defines this as “other improved real property that has a useful life of 10 or more years and has a substantial purpose of supporting tourism or supporting tourism activities.”
A high-speed train that goes up to Mt. Bachelor or circles the Cascade Lakes Highway? A museum dedicated to Native American culture? Converting an old warehouse into artist/music studios open to tourists?
The law also states that the money can go towards “conducting strategic planning and research necessary to stimulate future tourism development.” So what if Visit Bend, or some other non-profit entity funded with TRT, decided that Bend could be on the map as a destination for those interested in sustainability? They could start a program incentivizing tourism related businesses to use solar power and electric vehicles, and reduce water consumption on and on. Instead of a “get f-ed up beyond belief on area microbrews” tour, there could be a “sustainability in the high desert” tour.
Affordable housing is directly related to the sustainability of our community, and the reason I feel like the City and tourism stakeholders need to take a lot more responsibility for this issue is because it was government policy in the form of supporting tourism promotion that has largely made Bend too expensive for the middle and working class.
On January 30, Paris tripled is surtax on second homes, from 20% of the standard to 60%. Obviously this isn’t Europe, and here in little old Bend, we get away with paying a little more than 1%. Think of what even .5% increase on second homes would do, though, for affordable housing, and the City’s budget in general. (There could be exemptions for second homes used as long-term rentals, etc.) What voting Bend resident would be against this? Well, besides members of the Central Oregon Association of Realtors who think they run the town at this point.
The City’s Affordable Housing Manager, Jim Long is quoted numerous times saying we are in a crisis, but the few million he has to play with every year from the 1/3 of 1% Building Permits tax isn’t doing much more than providing some decent public relations stories that Bend is “leading the State” in supporting affordable housing initiatives. Companies like Pacific Crest, and non-profs like Housing Works and Habitat for Humanity are to be congratulated for the incredible hoops they jump through to make their projects a reality. I would love to see our community support them, and support what Long is trying to do, in a more substantial way.
I’m 100% behind our community having an elected mayor, but before we do that, we should take Portland’s lead and adopt campaign finance reform, otherwise the real estate interests have a good chance of buying the election, like in the 2016 City Council elections when the Central Oregon Association of Realtors gave $30,000 to Moseley, $15,000 to Livingston and $2,000 to Russells campaign.