A 2035 Trace!

I’ve traced a reminder on my 2035 Google calendar!

Yup, that’s a quarter of a century away, a few days after my daughter will have turned my current age and a few days before my youngest grandson will be on the “backside of 30,” With any luck I’ll be a week from my 87th birthday then and hopefully as spry as my Mom is at 82 today.

But I’ve traced my calendar for 8 am the morning of Thursday, July 1st that year out of curiosity to check back and see if the DCVB governing board, my employer until I retired back in 2009, will launch a tourism match grants program in 2035, the first year that funds eligible for that purpose will be available!

Community/Destination Marketing Organizations (DMO’s) are typically not grant agencies but in North Carolina, if the DMO receives 100% of the special tourism development tax, state policy permits up to 1/3rd to be use for tourism-related projects, other than community marketing, which is the stipulated use for no less than 2/3rds of the funds.

But not in Durham for two reasons:

• Because only 33%, not 100% of Durham’s special tourism tax is used for the purposes for which the tax was pioneered in 1982, those funds that do make their way to DCVB are restricted to “only” marketing Durham. Marketing activities are specifically defined in the legislation and do not include grants.

• Because to accommodate City and County officials and some Downtown interests, DCVB asked the General Assembly to waive the requirement to conform use of the special tourism development tax under state policy so that up to $1.4 million a year could be diverted to pay for the Durham Performing Arts Center. So the General Assembly further hardwired DCVB’s portion to only be used for marketing until 2035 when the theater is paid for and those funds revert to DCVB for their primary purpose (click on the image above to see detail.)

Of course, when the theater is paid for and those funds go to DCVB, there is no guarantee they will go to tourism matching grants. The Tourism Development Authority will have the discretion to use them to bring Durham marketing up to par other communities and/or for other tourism-related purposes (which could be tourism matching grants) including capital projects.

But if some of the funds are devoted to grants, DCVB is all set to go. Several years ago, Durham’s destination marketing organization took a tourism matching grants process developed by another community and updated it to best practice standards including both day-trip and overnight visitors.

The grants-centered “Durham Tourism-Project Development Fund” was adopted by DCVB’s Tourism Development Authority to be shelved but kept up-to-date in anticipation of the day eligible funds come to the Bureau in 2035.

In the meantime, currently 50% of the tourism development tax is retained in the City and County general funds with more than 30% of that portion technically eligible to be used for tourism matching grants. It isn’t identified as such but it may be that’s what is currently used by those local governments for grants to festivals and/or to close gaps for tourism-related facilities like the Convention Center, Museum of Life & Science, Durham Bulls Athletic Park and DPAC.

I hope so anyway.

15 Facts Illustrated About Inequality!

Yesterday, I spotted an infographic on the Objects In Repeat blog while searching for a study released by the Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality.

The Stanford Center had made 20 charts easily accessible from the  report.  But click below on Kristy Tillman’s inforgraphic on Objects In Repeat to see an example of how to make this information really pop.  I also just noticed she made Fast Company’s blog today as well.  (click on the graphic below to enlarge)

One that really grabbed me is in the lower, right corner.  A few years before I graduated from college in 1972, CEO pay was 39 times the average workers pay.  The year before I came to Durham, it was 191 times.  By the turn of the century, it was 1039 times.

Another part of the infographic illustrates that all of the discrepancy isn’t just due to an increase in CEO comp, a big part is the stagnation in overall income over the last several decades.

Fetzer’s Election Night Challenge Already A Distant Memory!

I’m probably not counted as one of Tom Fetzer’s friends.  Something about calling to ask his campaign to remove the signs they had planted two towns away and all over southern Durham when he ran successfully to be Mayor of Raleigh in the early ‘90s.

We did become acquainted over the years, typically whenever Raleigh went “big game hunting” and insisted on manipulating Durham into expensive schemes. But I thought Tom did an incredible job as chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party during the last election.

I had truly hoped his newly elected constituents would take heed to his wise and eloquent challenge the night their victories gave them control of both chambers in the General Assembly, “the tough job begins now, these people have to govern.”

But governing is not what many Republicans here and across the country are doing with the opportunity a 7% margin voters gave them in the last election.

If I were a cynic and not just an Independent, I’d say they obviously aren’t confident as a group that they will be in power long so they are trying to wreak as much havoc as possible while they can.

I’m not just talking about the US House vote to repeal healthcare legislation that was rejected by the Senate on February 2nd nor the bill four South Dakota legislators sponsored three days earlier to require all adults in that state to own a firearm and then backpedaling several days later as one sponsor claimed to a reporter that it was just a joke.

I wish the secret meetings in our legislature were joke, as well as the insane legislation proposed to strip local control of billboards and place North Carolina’s scenic fame behind seven blinking digital billboards per mile with trees swathed from the “public” roadsides to make sure your attention is drawn from one to the next.

Now a bill seeks to permit event ticket scalping and eliminate any protection for consumers that they are buying a ticket that actually exists let along many times its worth. Or congress members seeking to cut EPA’s funding so the environment is left defenseless to those eager to degrade it for a buck.

Or eliminating tens of thousands of jobs at a time when it will slow or postpone the recovery while refusing to address President Obama’s willingness to cut entitlements so they can gut environmental protection and pursue social agendas such as mural-gate or demonizing unions or taking away the right to restrict concealed weapons.

To quote Maureen Dowd, “Republicans talk fiscal policy but can’t resist social meddling.”

The kids in the candy store are looking at a big stomach ache if they aren’t following polls and trends like the analysis last week by Nate Silver illustrating that while Tea Party favorability remains as it has always been in the in the low 30s, the percentage of those unfavorable to the Tea Party, once below 20%, is now at 47% and climbing.

Doesn’t look like that enthusiasm gap that swept Republicans into power is holding.

I’m not sure but I’ll bet Tom is just shaking his head over the lost opportunity to truly govern.

As Dowd wrote a few days ago, “because Independent voters considered President Obama too partisan in his debut, they shifted their loyalties – and swept in one of the most ideological and partisan Republican caucuses in history.  Now Obama will get back some Independents because he seems reasonable by comparison.”

My 1966 Destiny And The Friend I Left Behind!

Maybe I was destined to attend the huge Idaho Falls High School my senior year. I had been born seventeen years earlier in that city of then 34,000 after my Mom went into labor and my Dad had to whisk her 50 miles south from our Henry’s Fork ranch on an extremely hot July afternoon because there was no hospital in nearby Ashton at that time.

I think I was meant to attend IFHS that year to prepare me for college the following year in many ways other than academics. That’s where I first took typing class to give me a way around the essential tremor that was already degrading my ability to handwrite.

I expanded beyond sports to hone a skill in forensics and I don’t mean the CSI kind. I mean the forensic art of competitive individual and team debate. Some call it advocacy forensics because you must learn to debate and refute both sides of an issue.

By the way, the debate topic nationwide in 1966 was:

Resolved: That the federal government should adopt a program of compulsory arbitration in labor management disputes in basic industries.

I think I may have also been destined to go to IFHS that last year to learn better how to deal with the large student body I was to encounter in college the next year. At well more than a thousand students, IF as it’s known was many times larger than any school I had previously attended and larger than the entire town near where I spent my early years.

But I’m sure I was also meant to go there to connect with Ronnie Park and we instantly became best friends. Ronnie was “cool” but not as in the typical “cool cliques” that had already hardened to much for anyone to crack in only a year.

We both drove old Chevy’s, mine a ‘57 and Ronnie’s a ‘55. When his ‘55 blew up, he was one of the first people in Idaho with a Datsun (today called Nissan.) That’s Ronnie in the photo to the left standing next to that car, which seemed pretty exotic at the time.

We both liked girls and rock and roll. I liked one girl in particular but Ron was more elusive. We traveled two hundred miles south to Farmington, Utah that summer to see The Rolling Stones and The Animals perform live at the Lagoon Amusement Park Patio Gardens to an audience of only a few thousand people.

We were Beatles and Beach Boys fans but the edginess of The Stones and The Animals formed the perfect soundtrack to a year when war and protest filled our living rooms and the draft loomed ahead.

Ronnie and I made several college visits together including the University of Idaho, Utah State University and Idaho State University. We had planned to visit the University of Wyoming over in Laramie but the engine in my ‘57 Chevy blew up and we had to be towed home.

That summer before college we worked together up in the 3-million-acre Caribou-Targhee National Forest, near my birthplace and ancestral ranch, fighting that year’s huge outbreak of Mountain Pine Beetles by spraying the soon-to-be banned DDT straight up into huge Lodgepole Pines in that nook between Yellowstone Park and the Idaho side of the Teton Mountains.

When we got back to IF, our paths parted as suddenly as they had crossed when I was lucky enough to get into Brigham Young University down in Provo, Utah where I wouldn’t be admitted by today’s academic standards, but managed to graduate magna cum laude. Ronnie headed to ISU in Pocatello.

I probably wouldn’t have adjusted to going to school with 20,000 other students at BYU had it not been for that year at IFHS. A lot of kids had difficulty making the adjustment to schools that large including one of my much brighter cousins. Enrollment at BYU had doubled in size over the six years prior to my freshman year and continued to rapidly grow before leveling out a little more than 20 years later at 32,000+.

Ten years after Ronnie and I parted ways, I was living and working in Spokane, Washington when I received a clipping from the Idaho Falls Post-Register anonymously in the mail, maybe from that former girl friend. Under what seemed like a huge headline, “Ronnie Park Found Dead,” the article reported that he had been living in Ucon, a little town north of Idaho Falls on US 20 leading back north to our ranch, and working nearby.

He had killed himself with a 20-gauge shotgun, leaving a widow named Dianna. It confirmed he had attended ISU and served four and half years in the Idaho National Guard.

It hit me hard and still does with more than a little guilt that we hadn’t stayed in touch, that I wasn’t there to dissipate the unfathomable anger and despair that can motivate suicide.

I passed on the 10-year reunion for the IF Class of ‘66 held a few months later and I have not attended any since.

Last week marked the anniversary of when I received that clipping the week after Ronnie’s death.

R.I.P my friend.

The Tyranny Of 30 People In Orange T-Shirts

A local elected official was overheard dismissing the fact shown in scientific surveys that more than 95% of Durham residents agree or strongly agree that “community appearance” should be a high community priority by stating that “no irate people are calling elected officials about appearance.”

Too many of our elected officials today fall into this trap.  I often joke that it seems to only take 30 people showing up in “orange” t-shirts to run something through many city council or county commission meetings these days and especially, I guess, if they happen to be angry or fearful about something.

Officials need to remember that mad is just a form of being sad and sad is a form of mad.   Often there are far greater numbers of people expressing their anger through sadness and dismay than by being mad.  Anger does not equate to activism.

Long before tea partiers we seemed to have turned far too many  elected officials at all levels into adrenalin junkies.  Some now feel disrespected if you don’t call them at home at night as though that were a litmus test that something is “really” important.

The breakdown of representative democracy is when it isn’t representative, when it is hijacked by irate minorities with only anecdotes for backup, when leadership is substituted for short-term, pay-back or back-room agendas.

During my the nearly-four-decade-long career in community/destination marketing from which I retired back in 2009, I was primarily in what Peter Sandman terms the “calm down” business, but I balanced it the many times when I shifted into what he terms the “outrage business,” especially when Durham was being treated unfairly or when fear or money co-opted others from speaking up.

The difference is that I always had data and information to back up the outrage.  As a friend of mine noted some years ago when a $40 million decision was transacted in her community without so much as a public hearing or needs assessment, that “far too many decisions today are made with one piece of paper as backup while others languish with a file cabinets full of back up.”

Elected leaders, public servants and business leaders need to spend more time “listening” to data and information including scientific, generalizable opinion and break loose from the tyranny of back-room push and shove artists or late night telephone lobbying and yes, 30 people showing up in orange t-shirts.

Unless they also produce some sound, generalizable, scientific research data as back up.