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The Visitors & Convention Bureau, more than $100,000 in debt, folds and closes its welcome center. The board chairman says bad publicity is to blame.
By JAMES THORNER
© St. Petersburg Times, published February 7, 2001
After four years in business, the debt-ridden Pasco Visitors & Convention Bureau has folded and closed its welcome center along Interstate 75 in Wesley Chapel.
In a letter that reached county commissioners Tuesday, VCB executive board chairman Frank Starkey blamed the press for questioning the credibility of his organization.
The negative publicity, including stories in the Times about the September dismissal of former executive director Richard Kyle, made the VCB a "political liability" for the county, Starkey said.
The VCB was more than $100,000 in debt and was seeking an infusion of cash from taxpayers. Advertisers who were supposed to pay the welcome center's expenses steered clear after the bad publicity, Starkey said.
"What hurt us is that we were still being characterized as the organization that Richard Kyle ran," Starkey said Tuesday.
The VCB formed in 1997 as an offshoot of the West Pasco Chamber of Commerce. Under Kyle's leadership, the visitors bureau spent two years financing and building the welcome center, which opened on Valentine's Day last year.
The $100,000 center drew about 9,000 people with ads and brochures about nature tours, antiques districts, parks and other Pasco attractions.
About a month after opening day, Kyle came to the county's taxpayer-funded Tourist Development Council with a request for $29,000. He said he needed the money to cover construction-cost overruns at the welcome center.
Months of investigations by the county's budget office, which ended last week, discovered only about $9,000 in cost overruns. The remaining money appears to have paid for non-construction expenses, county budget director Mike Nurrenbrock said.
The accounting discrepancies left county commissioners cool about funding the VCB with tax dollars.
"It was one individual who sent them down a slippery slope to financial instability," Commission Chairman Steve Simon said Tuesday after hearing about the dissolution of the VCB.
Kyle could not be reached for comment. VCB board members said they decided to cut their losses and not delve more deeply into Kyle's accounting practices.
"We could spend a lot of time and a lot of energy just trying to figure out if Richard did anything wrong," Starkey said. "But we're never going to get the money back."
Starkey still hopes to sell the welcome center, a modular home, before it faces foreclosure and repossession. Prospective buyers include HCL Hotels Inc., the parent company of Master's Inn, the Wesley Chapel motel that leases the lot to the center.
The remaining staffer at the center, former Central Pasco Chamber of Commerce director Marjorie Walsh, will lose her job.
Despite criticism that the center was a mistake and that Pasco has too few tourist sites to justify the investment, Starkey says the concept was good.
He called county commissioners' refusal to pull the center out of its financial hot water a "big missed opportunity."
"That's a small-minded way of looking at the world," Starkey said. "If Pasco didn't have anything to offer, we wouldn't have the kind of growth we have. People are dying to live here."