Latest Valley Slight: Too Few Dollars to Promote Tourism

On the face of it, bringing more camera-toting, boutique-shopping, restaurant-dining, hotel-sleeping, wallet-bearing tourists to the San Fernando Valley is a worthy goal. It’s a good thing, everyone agrees.

And that’s about where the agreement ends.

Attracting more tourists takes marketing dollars and lots of them. To spend dollars on the Valley you’d have to take them from somewhere else.

The target currently in the cross hairs is the Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau, the membership-driven, city-supported agency that is charged with luring in tourists from Oshkosh, Osaka or Oslo.

For years, the bureau has been the subject of scorn by Valley boosters for producing tourist guide brochures that did not pay enough attention to the Valley. For the record, the bureau, which pretty much maintains a sun-sea-and-stars approach to promoting the region, doesn’t pay much attention to the Eastside either. But the last time I checked, Boyle Heights wasn’t threatening to secede.

That’s what makes this struggle over scarce resources different.

The continuing effort to bring more marketing dollars to the Valley is part cat fight and part high-minded appeal to fairness, with a “winner-takes-all” threat in the background.

It’s a business issue laced with political implications.

And though it’s already been voted down once by a divided City Council, it’s not going away.

Last week, after enjoying a brief lunch with Valley business leaders, Mayor Richard Riordan fielded the question again, this time from the affable and persuasive Bill Allen, whose Economic Alliance of the San Fernando Valley launched the “Valley of the Stars” campaign to boost the image of the Valley.

The Alliance also has helped to jump-start the once-moribund San Fernando Valley Conference and Visitors Bureau. Allen hopes to use the newly revived agency to market the Valley “proactively.”

That takes money.

The Valley generates up to $14 million annually in hotel “bed tax” funds, Allen said, and he’d like a $500,000 rebate so the Valley can conduct its own self-focused marketing push.

Some of the money collected citywide through the “transient occupancy tax,” about $14 million of it, goes to support the convention bureau. Almost all the rest goes into the city’s general fund, the same cash bucket that ultimately brings you safer streets with fewer potholes. The Valley doesn’t have enough of those either, but that’s another column.

Allen sees money spent on Valley-boosting as “an appropriate investment on the part of the city of Los Angeles in its own economic development.

“There’s a return available to them from this,” he said in an interview, noting that citywide, the hotel tax brings in more than $90 million.

In response to Allen’s request for a chunk of cash from the city, Riordan joked: “I think they [the bureau] can cut their budget down, as long as you promise not to secede.”

The line drew a laugh.

It wasn’t the first time, and won’t be the last, that a separate Valley PR campaign has been linked to discussions/jokes/fears about a separate Valleyville.

Bob Scott, vice chairman of the Valley Industry and Commerce Assn. and one of the strongest backers of a cityhood study, noted that a municipal Valley would keep all of its tax dollars, a prospect clearly not lost on Riordan.

Later, Riordan’s spokesman, Deane Leavenworth, said the mayor’s office will look hard at the bureau’s budget “to make sure that it is providing services equitably across the city.”

Therein lies the dilemma. How do you pull out funds for the Valley without also apportioning a share to promote more of the Eastside mercados and the shops of the South Bay? And, in doing so, do you weaken the whole?

Allen thinks that “if there are areas that have as much potential as we do for marketing, and can build a board of tourism professionals,” they should step forward.

Most parts of the region with the political clout and capital of the Valley are already represented in the bureau’s publications.

Before we go on, let’s pause for a moment of full disclosure. Before joining the Valley edition staff, I worked in a now-defunct arm of The Times that, under contract with the convention bureau, created some of the publications that were deemed to have severe Valley deficits. One of my closest friends, a longtime Valleyite, was the editor.

So I’m not exactly a disinterested third party. But we were merely hired hands. The real decisions were made by the bureau, which is at once a political body, beholden to its members, and the painter of the portrait of L.A. shown to the world.

It’s hard to serve two masters and admittedly, in some years, the bureau fell short. To make amends, the current issue of Destination L.A., the bureau’s signature tourist guide, is chock-a-block with Valley references and complete with a Valley-specific section.

We’ll charitably assume the bureau finally recognized the untapped tourism possibilities of the Valley and was not the least bit swayed by the fear of lost funding.

Not to say such a loss would be welcome. The possibility troubles Michael Collins, executive vice president of the bureau, who says he doesn’t oppose a separate Valley marketing effort as long as the money comes from somewhere else and the Valley doesn’t target the bureau’s audience.

In the next breath, though, he speaks of balkanization, adding that if you take a chunk out of the regional marketing effort for a Valley-specific campaign, “you begin to create a logic that if it can happen in the San Fernando Valley, you can do the same thing in another part of the city and another.”

In early January, Allen plans to present a proposal to the city to demonstrate that the Valley can work effectively with the convention bureau and “not compete against other parts of L.A.”

David Iwata, a consultant with the Valley conference bureau, said that can be done by marketing the Valley to would-be tourists in not-too-distant areas like Northern California or Phoenix.

That answers the concerns about competition, but there’s still that money thing.

And there’s still the fundamental question of how do you effectively market the whole without ignoring some of the parts. One way to start, which the bureau has belatedly done, is to seek input from voices throughout the region.

Nature abhors a vacuum. So apparently, does the marketing world.

Had the L.A. convention bureau been marketing the Valley effectively all along, secessionists wouldn’t have yet another thing to view as a Valley slight, and I would have had to find something else to write about.