Leonard Honeyman Photo
Along with the flowers, the coming of spring means tourism ads are sprouting, on TV, in newspapers, on the web. Gov. Arnold Schwartzenegger and other Hollywood types inviting us to California. An ad for South Carolina pops up as your Free-cell game loads. Virginia is for lovers. I Love New York, with or without the cast from “A Chorus Line.”
This spring, there’s not a peep from Connecticut.
Many states have millions of dollars in their tourism budgets. California, for example, spent more than $11 million last year just to promote summer tourism.
Not Connecticut.
A recent New York Times travel show had 225 small ads from tourism destinations from Argentina to Turkey, plus 59 ads promoting U.S. destinations. The only Connecticut representation: Foxwoods casinos and Metro North Railroad.
In Connecticut, the entire statewide tourism budget for this year is – wait for it – a single dollar. Last year, it was $4.5 million.
In addition, the state has reduced the number of tourism regions the state is divided into from five to three last year and drastically cut the budgets of those regions.
In the year ending last June, the former South Central Region, which included New Haven, had a budget of $855,000 to service 19 cities and towns. This year, New Haven is part of the 65-town Central Region, which has a budget of $650,000, said Virginia Kozlowski.
Kozlowski ran the New Haven Convention and Visitor’s Bureau (CVB) — until the state eliminated it on Dec. 31.
Kozlowski has moved from heading the convention and visitor group in a 5,000-square-foot office on Orange Street square feet to heading the Regional Growth Partnership, the marketing arm of the South Central Council of Governments, in 1,500 square feet carved out of the Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce on the 10th floor of 900 Chapel St. From that perch, she and marketing manager Barbara Malmberg (pictured behind her in the above photo) continue fighting for Greater New Haven’s share of the tourism dollar amid the state’ s pullback.
Kozlowski argued the state’s tourism-budget cut cost the state millions in potential tax revenue, since every dollar spent to promote tourism brings $9.30 in tax revenue. The $4.5 million brought in nearly $42 million in state sales, hotel and other taxes, money the state is in danger of losing.
California’s tourism industry Web page claims that state realizes $27 in taxes for each dollar spent on tourism.
So now Kozlowski is working with the local tourism industry to pick up the slack and try to help boost the economy during a recession.
The state is in the midst of a nasty budget crisis, with Comptroller Nancy Wyman announcing this year’s state’s deficit remains at $371 million (as of April 1), after losing nearly $1 billion in the fiscal year that ended last summer.
“Governor [M. Jodi] Rell is committed to funding tourism initiatives as much as she can within the current budget constraints Connecticut faces,” said Rell spokesman Adam Liegeot. “If the legislature can find $4.5 million in alternative cuts to the budget, Governor Rell is willing to consider them.”
The effects of the $4.5 million cut are already being felt, Kozlowski said. The state will not issue a vacation guide this year and will use last year’s edition until it runs out. The state’s travel website offers the 2009 guide, but Kozlowski said it offers no way to request mailed copies. Kozlowski said the state’s welcome centers will be closed, although copies of the state guide may be available at rest stops and restaurants.
The omnibus organizations are not the only ones to suffer from the state’s budget cuts. Some of New Haven’s signature groups, such as the organization that puts on the Pilot Pen Tennis Tournament, shown, are grappling with government funding cutbacks.
State aid for New Haven’s International Festival of Arts and Ideas, which Executive Director Mary Lou Aleskie has said brings in groups and attendees from all over the world, was cut from $950,000 in fiscal 2008 to $812,000 this year. the festival isn’t sure it’s even getting that money a couple of months before the it kicks off, according to Anne Worcester, the head of Market New Haven, the other major group besides Kozlowski’s promoting regional tourism.
The Shubert Theater’s aid was cut from $475,000 to nearly $244,000.
These cuts are part of a more than 57 percent reduction in arts and tourism-related state funding, from $28.3 million in fiscal 2009 to $12.1 million in fiscal year 2011.
“The brand will continue to exist,” Kozlowski said of Greater New Haven’s tourism marketing effort.
One strategy is the “pay to play” model where private companies will partner with the region to market it. For example, the Mystic Region has partnered with the casinos and the Mystic Seaport and aquarium to market that region.
The New Haven area will be represented in a May 23 publication that will be distributed in Northern New Jersey, Long Island and Westchester.
A travel newspaper editor and owner who ran the New Haven CVB in the 1990s said the state’s “scorched-earth policy” will make it difficult to recruit private-sector partners in advertising the state as a travel destination and the state would do well “to find another place to cut $4 or $5 million.”
Mark Cestari, who also was instrumental with Jeff Wack in advocating for Tweed-New Haven Airport in the late 1980s and early 1990s, said every state is under tremendous fiscal pressure. “The prudent thing to do in these times is to have a least a skeletal tourism marketing and infrastructure. To not be able to maintain at least a base line presence, ultimately the private sector will drop out.” He agreed with Kozlowski that the state’s lack of funding will cost more than it saves, “because money spent here is other people’s money.”
Cestari (pictured), who left New Haven in the early 1990s to run the Providence convention and visitor operation, said he was back in New Haven last fall was impressed by “a tremendous transformation.”
The city and state have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to make the city “an emerging destination.” For the state to “dump it [the convention bureau] in with Hartford shows a lack of commitment that will put off the private sector,” he predicted.
“Were not talking about tourism as [centering on] beaches and theme parks, but New Haven’s architecture, history and Yale, with its Woolsey Hall [pictured]. If I were running a tourism-related business in Connecticut, I would ask ‘Why am I here?’” he said.
If Kozlowski’s group wants to offer its own publications at the rest stops, such as the one north on Interstate 91 in Wallingford, it must take them there themselves, she said. The state Tourism Division will, however, have three employees on the payroll, mostly to maintain the state’s website. That site’s outdated: It features the former five tourism region; the New Haven site one is sent to still talks about the Convention and Visitors Bureau and how there is no budget for mailing out material.
One of the strategies being planned is urging tourists to use Connecticut as a base while traveling to such sites as the Basketball Hall of Fame in southern Massachusetts and Newport, R.I. Easy highway access as well as train transportation make day trips possible from Connecticut to Boston and New York.
Kozlowski argued that the lack of state funds will hurt in the long run long after the state budget woes have ceased.
“The state has made a huge investment since early 1990s. We are going to lose so much of this investment,” she said. “The money that it will take to get those consumers back will be huge.”
Market New Haven and the Regional Growth Partnership are marketing New Haven, but with different audiences. Market New Haven is seeking to attract visitors from a radius of about 50 miles; the RGP is casting its net much farther.
Market New Haven still has money to promote the region thanks to bedrock funding from Yale, Yale-New Haven Hospital, the city, the Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce and downtown businesses, Worcester said. She has a $1.1 million budget that she spends for nine months of advertising and a year of public relations promoting such sites as the Grove Street cemetery.
But although the arts festival is a little more than two months away, Executive Director Aleskie still does not know how much, if any, of the $812,000 in state funds she has been promised will arrive, Worcester said. “It’s safe to say that she is squeezing every drop out of every dollar in her budget.”
Aleskie said in a telephone interview that she has received only $590,000 of the $812,000 she was due for the 2009 festival. Since the festival takes place in June and the state does not disburse funds until October, Aleskie said she knows he has to advance the funds and wait for reimbursement, but cannot cover her contracts if those funds are late or don’t come at all.
“The fact that we have not received our April payment for 2009 is beginning to be concerning,” she said.
The festival has some working reserve funds and a line of credit at a bank, but “we expect our funds to be replenished. If those don’t come on time, we can’t pay our vendors.”
She said the festival is lucky to have “some very understanding creditors.”
Aleskie said she understands the state is hurting and has cut her staff 30 percent to reflect the 30 percent cut in state payments. She called the festival a regional economic engine, generating more than $21 million last year, not counting the enhancement of the state’s reputation as a tourism destination.
“I have a contract with the state to put on a festival that generates $21 million. If I don’t get funds, I cannot fulfill my obligations in my contract,” she said.