HANCOCK COUNTY — With travel restrictions in place, tourism has come virtually to a halt worldwide — and that means an uncertain future for the Hancock County Tourism Commission, which promotes the county as a destination but also makes its money from visits to local hotels.
The pandemic is expected to have a lasting impact on the commission’s sole source of funding — a 5% tax visitors pay when they stay at hotels. With travel restrictions in place, hotels are mostly empty.
“We are going to see a dramatic reduction in that income for 2020,” Amanda Everidge, president of the board, said at a meeting last week.
In light of uncertain finances, the board has decided not to accept grant applications and also will suspend payment on a number of grants it approved in early March, just before pandemic restrictions hit. Those included grants to Brandywine Community Church, the Hancock Health Foundation and the James Whitcomb Riley Boyhood Home and Museum and have not yet been paid.
“(The grant recipients) understand the necessity to do this, and in fact some of the events have already been canceled,” board member Bob Mattsey said.
The board will discuss which grants it may be able to pay in the future, and members said they would want to support the organizations they already had voted to fund.
Another issue is what should be done if the monthly revenue from the hotel tax is no longer sufficient to pay the salary of the tourism commission’s only paid employee, executive director Brigette Cook Jones.
Everidge proposed a resolution that would ask the Hancock County treasurer to continue paying Jones out of tourism commission funds not normally earmarked for her salary.
Jones’ salary for 2020 is $57,707, according to Hancock County’s salary ordinance.
Board member George Langston said it might be a better solution to furlough Jones but continue to pay her medical insurance.
“We cannot recover the money, it is gone, if we pay her out of the money we use to fund our programs with,” Langston said.
Other members said it was important to continue paying Jones, who is working from home, so that some of the commission’s activities, as well as planning for the future, could continue.
“Not having an executive director is not a solution,” Mattsey said.
The board agreed to vote on the issue at a later date.
The board also plans to talk with some entities it has contracts with about reducing its payments for the time being. Those include marketing firm Truly360, which it is paying for Google search optimization and other services; and the state Stellar Communities grant for Fortville, Greenfield, and Hancock County, which the commission pledged to pay $25,000 toward per year from 2018 to 2022.
“I just don’t think we should pay (Stellar) this year,” Mattsey said.
Mattsey presented the board with a budget outlining what the commission’s finances would look like if it received zero revenue from the hotel tax for the rest of 2020 — a projection he said was an unlikely but necessary to explore as a worst-case scenario. The projection also assumed no money would be spent on non-mandatory expenses like advertising for the rest of 2020.
The Commission would end 2020 with a balance of $382,403 and, assuming more normal spending and revenue for that year, end 2021 with a balance of $118,447. Either would be its lowest balance in years. It started 2020 with $491,615 in the bank.
Overall, however, members agreed the commission likely has enough money to come out of the other side of the COVID-19 crisis.
“It’s good to be conservative and to be cautiously optimistic,” Everidge said.