OSOYOOS TIMES-July 28, 2010

By Paul Everest – Osoyoos Times

The Town of Osoyoos, the Regional District Okanagan-Similkameen (RDOS) and the NK’MIP Resort Association expect to finalize an agreement with Destination Osoyoos (DO) next month for tourism marketing services.
The trio of partners signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) in January where they would contribute $150,000 worth of funding that DO will use to carry out marketing services for the entire Osoyoos area.
Through the agreement, the Town will contribute $72,876, the RDOS will contribute $12,000 and the resort association will contribute $15,124, with the remainder of the funding, a total of $50,000, coming from monies collected through the two-per-cent Additional Hotel Room Tax.
How much each partner contributes to the funding, at least when it comes to the Town and the resort association, was calculated by looking at how many hotel or resort beds each partner had within its area.
Derek Noske, a past-chair for DO who signed the MOU, said DO has been operating under the terms of the MOU while the details of the actual contract have been worked out over the past seven months.
He said the parties plan to meet in early August to finalize the contract and the reason it’s taken more than seven months to seal the deal was due to modifying some of the legal language contained in the agreement.
Noske added that it has been difficult to finalize the contract in the past month or two since many of the people who have to sign off on the document have been away at various times on summer vacations.
The DO board of directors is on board with the agreement, he said, and once it’s finalized, DO and the trio of partners will sit down in September to hammer out a three-year strategic business plan on how marketing activities will be carried out.
Noske said the plan will serve as DO’s “marching orders,” but DO will reserve the ability to give priority to any “special projects” that may come up after the plan is developed.
Mark Pendergraft, director for RDOS Area A, said there were one or two “sticklers” in the contract that the partners and DO have had to work on since the MOU was signed.
One example he mentioned was what the plan would be “if something happened and DO went bankrupt, who would be left holding the bag?”
Pendergraft added that he wasn’t sure how such a situation would be handled and the partners and DO were looking at how to address such a concern in the contract.
On July 8, the RDOS board of directors authorized Pendergraft and Bill Newell, the RDOS’s chief administrative officer, to finalize the agreement with DO.
Pendergraft said that will likely happen at the August meeting.
As for the Town’s role, Barry Romanko, Osoyoos chief administrative officer, said he could not comment on the ongoing contract negotiations when asked what details were still left to be worked out.
The previous contract between the Town and DO, where the Town contributed $226,000 to the organization to provide tourism marketing and economic development services, expired Dec. 31, 2009.
The Town has now hired a community development manager to handle economic development responsibilities.
In March, DO unveiled its new governance structure at the organization’s annual general meeting.
It was announced that “voter-stakeholders,” namely people already using DO’s programs and services whose primary income comes from the local tourism industry, will nominate and elect future DO boards, and appoint DO’s executive.
Jo Knight, who was named DO’s new executive director in February, said DO has not been idle in the past seven months since the MOU was signed.
In that time, she said, the organization has helped organize and host a number of conferences and delegations, including the Economic Development Association of British Columbia’s conference in June.
It also ran the annual Showcase Osoyoos event this winter, was a key partner in presenting the second annual Osoyoos Celebrity Wine Festival last month, helped the producers of The Big Year, filmed in Osoyoos in June, find accommodations and equipment and partnered with the Osoyoos Coyotes, sending out packages highlighting the community to 150 prospects invited to the team’s recruitment camp in April.
The contract between the partners and DO, once finalized, will be in effect for three years, terminating on Dec. 31, 2012.
It states that DO will provide the partners with a complete operations review of the organization’s activities before Oct. 31 of each year.
The contract also includes a clause that the partners and DO can agree to expand the range of services provided by the organization to include “new projects and programs and to increase the Annual Fee to pay for such new services.”
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