Board approves one-year contract

The Travel and Tourism Board approved offering a renewed one-year contract to Cowgirl Consulting to the tune of $42,500, a five percent increase according to state park superintendent Kevin Skates.

Also, the board approved giving $1,000 to the Smoking Waters Golf Tournament for their advertising.

“They bring a lot of tourists in,” Skates said.

He said the tournament brought in approximately 120 golfers last year. Amanda Moeller explained that most of these people stayed the night after the tournament, many because they decided to celebrate after golfing.

The board also approved giving the Greater Learning Foundation $4,000 as part of their annual budget. However, the approval brought forth some questions about how hard it is to judge what events bring in tourists.

Currently, the Travel and Tourism Board has no way of finding definitive numbers on how many people are staying the night in town due to events.

“We don’t know, we really don’t know,” board member Ernest Cummings said.

Board members discussed different ways that the board could go about collecting some type of numbers on visiting tourists.

One idea is to ask the hotel and motel owners to submit their residency data so the board can tell when events bring in tourists.

“We gotta have everyone giving us the numbers,” Cummings said.

But some board members pointed out that owners might not want to share that information.

Still, Dan Moriarity said some is better than none.

“If we got half of them we’d still be further ahead than we are now,” Moriarity said.

If that method failed, board members also discussed pulling numbers from the state park bathhouse, Wyoming Dinosaur Center and the Chamber of Commerce.

In addition, the board discussed the 3-on-3-basketball tournament at the end of May. According to Moeller, there are currently 18 teams signed up to play.

“That’s more than usual from the same time out,” Moeller said, explaining that at this rate the town should have more participants than last year.

A bit of old tension took control of the room at one point as Barb Heinze asked why the Thermopolis web sites are so different.

Thermopolis.com and ThermopolisChamber.org were the sites talked about, and Heinze said the Thermopolis.com web site has information that is no longer correct. “The information on the .com site is not the same as the .org site,” Heinze said.

Moeller explained that the two sites are separate because one offers every business to tourists, and the other aims to promote the chamber members.

Additionally, Moeller said the site is outdated due to a possible hacker who took over the site recently.

Still, the board said they will update the web site soon as well as work with the chamber of commerce if needed.