Durham has many strengths, but for the last five years, one of them has not been collaboration. Lately, it's like agencies and groups hatch ideas believing they are in a vacuum. Without doing an analysis of what is already in play or working through groups charged with certain areas, people charge off and reinvent the wheel or, worse, get things so disjointed and convoluted that it bogs everything down just sorting it out.
It impacts DCVB because everyone these days straps "tourism" to the front of any effort to make something feasible, most often without ever checking with the organization charged with spearheading tourism development. They’ll sit right in front me in a meeting and do it, so I’m not sure it is intentional.
I'll use an example to try to explain the absurdity of this phenomenon. It would be like DCVB hearing from visitors that the roads need to be improved, so instead of calling the City or State, the Bureau just goes out and lets bids and starts laying pavement. We might do a pretty good job, but why create that kind of disjointed chaos and distract from our true mission?
I hope we get over it. It's not common to Durham, just the last five years.
No comments:
Post a Comment