After 2 Years of Trying, Tourism Commission Gives Up

After trying for nearly 20 months to pull together support for a countywide tourism plan, the Ventura County Gold Coast Commission on Tourism has fallen apart.

Formed in 1986 by the county Board of Supervisors, the 12-member commission announced last week that it will disband, thwarted by the refusal of most cities to help fund a $78,000 marketing study on the subject.

“We’ve been sitting around for two years having meetings, and we’re nowhere,” Russ Smith, executive director of the City of Ventura’s Visitors and Convention Bureau, said at last Thursday’s commission meeting. “We’re right back where we started.”

Such frustrations, say commission members, are indicative of the many hurdles they face in trying to propel Ventura County out of the farm leagues of tourism.

Although the commission next month will recommend the formation of a new agency to develop a countywide promotional campaign, tourism officials say they are still battling resistance that ranges from no-growth sentiments to the lack of a commercial airport to the limited horizons of some city governments.

Despite a tourist economy that generated $316 million countywide in 1985, the last year for which figures are available, the absence of a coordinated effort has caused the county to fall far short of its potential as an eventual tourist mecca, tourism officials say.

“We’ve got to get rid of a lot of our parochial thinking and start working together,” said Rob Varley, executive director of the Oxnard Convention and Visitors Bureau. “We’re just babes in tourism, right now.”

As far as some city officials are concerned, however, refusing to fund a tourism study was less parochial than it was practical.

“The city has very few tourist attractions and motels,” said Larry Davis, Camarillo’s assistant city manager. “We didn’t see that we would derive any benefit from participating.”

Similarly in Thousand Oaks, city officials were concerned that, because of the tag “Gold Coast,” any endeavors might disproportionately benefit the coastal cities, particularly Ventura and Oxnard.

“It seemed like it was more a western Ventura kind of deal,” said Ed Johnduff, Thousand Oaks’ economic development coordinator. “The Gold Coast aspect is more related to where the ocean is than over the hill here in the Conejo Valley.”

And in Ojai, city officials were not sure that curbing tourism in its infancy was such a bad idea in the first place.

“We are struggling to handle the tourists we already have,” Ojai City Manager Geoff Grote said. “There’s just been no consensus reached in this community as to whether we want to solicit more tourists or not.”

For those in the tourism business, however, the increasing competitiveness of the convention and visitor trade has added urgency to the formation of a coordinated, countywide plan.

As an indication of the growing demands to organize, the number of local tourism bureaus in the state has grown from 26 to 41 in the last five years, according to figures from the Western Assn. of Convention and Visitor Bureaus.

“You have to be a little more aggressive and a little sharper than your next-door neighbor,” said Dan Ellsworth, executive director of the Newport Beach Conference and Visitors Bureau, an agency that was revamped two months ago and given a $550,000 infusion. “Otherwise, you will lose.”

Like boosters in Newport Beach, those in Ventura County have set their sights primarily on the greater Los Angeles market, from weekend visitors who might tour the Channel Islands National Park to shoppers who might drive from the San Fernando Valley to the regional mall in Thousand Oaks.

“We have to learn to crawl before we can walk,” Varley said.

The competition closest to home is some of the stiffest. In Santa Barbara, the Conference and Visitors Bureau spent about $800,000 last year in its effort to lure an estimated 5 million tourists, many of whom likely pass through Ventura County without even stopping, local officials say.

In comparison, the Oxnard tourism bureau has an annual budget of $356,000 and Ventura receives $300,000, both of which, like the other bureaus, are funded by their cities’ hotel tax.

While the combined budgets of Oxnard and Ventura begin to approach that of their neighbor to the north, Santa Barbara enjoys certain advantages that ensure the city will retain its status as an acknowledged tourist mecca, say tourist leaders there.

Its name is known throughout the world, conveying images of a lush seaside playground for the rich. The presidential ranch is in the hills nearby, and a soap opera dubbed “Santa Barbara” titillates viewers with the impossible troubles suffered by the rich and the very rich.

“It’s become a part of American imagery,” said John Epstein, a spokesman in the Santa Barbara tourism bureau. “Santa Barbara has become a synonym for the real good life.”

If Ventura County is Santa Barbara’s slightly plainer sister, many merchants say that local attractions need all the more support.

“I wish the townspeople would care enough about what they have in their own town to promote it,” said Cindy Maley, marketing manager for Santa Paula’s Glen Tavern Inn, a 76-year-old national landmark. “We could use a boost.”

“I think we have to be more conscious of what we have here and support it,” agreed Karin Jensen, owner of the Island Hunter Book Store at the Ventura Harbor. “We’re not just orange groves and avocados and oil anymore.”

As it stands, an estimated 1 to 2 million tourists a year visit the county, from conventioneers in Oxnard and Ventura to sightseers wandering the quaint downtown of Santa Paula to out-of-town drivers winding their way up the scenic highways to Ojai.

But, officials point out, that only keeps the county’s tourism economy plugging along at a modest rate.

While 83% of Oxnard’s hotel rooms are filled in the summer, the year-round occupancy rate in Ventura’s and Oxnard’s hotels still averages about 56%, according to industry figures from the Los Angeles certified public accounting firm of Pannell Kerr Forster.

Half an hour away in Santa Barbara, officials there say, occupancy rates vary from 70% to 83% year-round.

In addition, the firm that built and, until recently, operated the 50-shop Ventura Harbor Village has declared bankruptcy, and the adjacent Harbortown Hotel, which is not part of the Harbor Village complex, has been run by a court-appointed receiver while its owners sort out financial and legal disputes.

“Three hotels opened at the same time in an area that probably did not need that many hotel rooms,” said Allen Wallace, general manager of the Doubletree Hotel at Ventura, which took over the financially troubled property from Sheraton on Oct. 20. “It takes a while for an area to absorb those hotel rooms and bring the occupancy back up.”

Because of a wide range of new tourist-related projects being planned for Ventura County, a coordinated countywide effort is all the more indispensable, Varley said.

Developments in County

Those developments include the marina and resort complex planned for Ormond Beach in Oxnard, the 100,000-square-foot exhibition and conference facility scheduled for construction at the fairgrounds in Ventura, the $30-million Ronald Reagan Presidential Library proposed near Simi Valley and the Happy Camp frontier-theme campground and amusement area to be developed near Moorpark.

“We need to start realizing that we’re all going after the same piece of pie,” Varley said. “Without a unified effort, we’re just floundering around.”

One of the key obstacles, said Varley and his colleagues, is the lack of a major commercial airport to service the county.

In Oxnard, Varley said, 29 conventions or conferences that could have brought an estimated $4 million in business bypassed the city last year because organizers said there was no convenient air service. In Ventura, where such precise figures are not tabulated, Smith estimated that losses, likewise, ran into the millions.

The Ventura County Economic Development Assn. recently hired a consulting firm to gauge the demand and level of support for a new airport, but for many county administrators the 1982 public outcry against such a project is still fresh in their minds.

“The opposition was overwhelming,” said Jim O’Neill, administrator of the county’s Department of Airports. “Somebody has to prove there is a demand.”

Another problem facing the county’s tourism effort is money. Although hotel tax revenues have been steadily rising, operating budgets for the Ventura and Oxnard convention and visitors bureaus do not afford them all the advantages of their competitors.

Last week, after interviewing Varley and Smith, attempts to reach their Santa Barbara counterpart, Ron McGurer, were unsuccessful because he was in London to promote the city at an international travel show. His director of tourism was also unavailable; a conference of 15,000 Japanese travel agents in Tokyo had called her away.

Perhaps the most challenging hurdle county leaders must surmount is the ambivalence of residents and merchants toward the new vision of Ventura County as a tourist mecca.

Like so many other recent changes that have sent spasms of growing pains throughout the county, the Gold Coast commission’s tourism effort has been stymied by the transition from old to new. Communities are experiencing profound identity crises as they struggle with the pressures of explosive growth.

“It’s the old saying, ‘You are what you think you are,’ ” said Fred Buenger, a commission member and owner of the Coast Chandlery at Channel Islands Harbor. “If you think you’re a farming community, you’re going to be that, regardless of the natural resources around you.

“We need to decide what we are before we can become it. And I don’t think we’ve decided yet what we want to be.”

Local leaders hope that the answer will lie in the proposed Ventura County Tourism Council, a new agency that would promote the area under the auspices of the county Economic Development Assn.

To form the council, Gold Coast commissioners are asking the county to transfer the $26,000 it had pledged toward the stalled marketing study to the new promotional campaign.

Last week, however, the county liaison between the commission and the Board of Supervisors said that more information on the new campaign would be needed to earn his recommendation.

As a preliminary proposal, Varley has suggested sending a county representative to travel shows throughout Orange and Los Angeles counties, develop a countywide visitor guide and coordinate an advertising campaign. Only cities wishing to participate would have to contribute to the project, he said.

That proposal and the disbanding of the Gold Coast commission are expected to be reviewed at the commission’s Jan. 7 meeting.

Until then, Ventura County will continue to draw tourists who will be more impressed by the scenic beauty of the area than the wranglings over how best to promote it.

“We’re just delighted to be here,” said Beulah Benedict, of Mountain View, Wyo., who, along with her husband, Harlan, were taken to the Ventura Harbor recently by some friends they were visiting in Riverside.

“In Wyoming, all we have is lots of sagebrush and sagebrush and sagebrush,” she said.