An image from a “teaser” billboard forming part of the Hershey Harrisburg Regional Visitors Bureau’s fall and holiday marketing campaign for the city.
A breakthrough in the standoff over a marketing plan for Harrisburg may be on the horizon, as representatives of a regional tourism bureau sat down last Friday with Mayor Eric Papenfuse to consider a proposal on how to spend city marketing dollars for the next four years.
Mary Smith, director of the Hershey Harrisburg Regional Visitors Bureau, and David Black, vice-chairman of the bureau’s board, left the meeting “feeling very positive about the conversation,” said Rick Dunlap, a bureau spokesman.
The mayor’s proposal is for a four-year agreement at $178,000 per year to fund two full-time city positions—a marketing director and a web content manager—as well as $80,000 in ads promoting festivals and other city events each year.
Under the agreement, the bureau, which is charged with marketing the area to business and leisure travelers, would pay these costs out of its portion of a county hotel tax earmarked for promoting the city.
“It was one of the most reasonable proposals the mayor has made in the 15 months we’ve been negotiating,” Dunlap said. He added, however, that the bureau was not done with discussions and had set no deadline for accepting or rejecting the proposal. “It’s still a negotiation, and there will be things we’ll be asking for in return,” he said.
The proposal represents a counter-offer of sorts to a $179,000 campaign the bureau launched this month, which the mayor critiqued as ineffective. Though the bureau appears committed to its current campaign, with a second stage set to launch in early November, the mayor’s proposal, if accepted, would make up the bulk of city marketing efforts in future years.
The proposal is “one which incorporates the city’s needs and one in which the money I think would be much better spent,” Papenfuse said. The agreement would also leave around $100,000 in hotel taxes unused each year, which the mayor said could be spent with input from a rebuilt committee of city and bureau representatives.
Papenfuse said he developed the proposal with city staff after the Dauphin County commissioners asked him last week to suggest an alternative spending plan. “Capacity-wise, this is what the city needs. Marketing-wise, this is what the city needs,” he said. “If the city were truly to promote tourism, this is what we need.”
Papenfuse and the bureau have been locked in a stalemate since July 2014, when the mayor asked it to freeze spending on city promotions until a dispute over the National Civil War Museum could be resolved.
The museum, which was opened in Harrisburg’s Reservoir Park in 2001, receives around $300,000 each year from the city’s share of hotel taxes, covering a major part of its $1 million annual budget.
Papenfuse would like to see that subsidy ended so that the money can be spent promoting other city attractions, though he said his latest proposal was not contingent on an agreement over the museum.
The bureau partly broke the stalemate earlier this month when it launched an initial “teaser” stage of a $179,000 campaign to market the city this fall and through the holidays. Papenfuse attacked the move, saying the bureau acted without input from the city and betrayed its agreement to freeze spending during negotiations.
But the bureau said that after months of stalling it had no choice but to move forward with a campaign. “We finally decided that, under state law, the bureau is the legal steward of the money and would be held accountable,” Dunlap said.
Noting the summer season had already come and gone without a city marketing plan, Dunlap said his agency was guided by a quote attributed to P.T. Barnum: “Without promotion something terrible happens…Nothing!”
