Supporters of an economically vibrant community of Manson appeared before the Chelan County Commissioners Monday to state their case for financial support for the Manson Chamber of Commerce.
The Manson Chamber of Commerce applied for a portion of $240,000 of hotel-motel tax revenues allocated for 2025 to reinvest in marketing the town to tourists.
The Manson group dispelled misinformation about the chamber's future, in light of Manson recently being named as an affiliate member to the Washington State Main Street program. Eventually Manson may benefit after applying for Main Street grants and other promotional programs, but Manson chamber Executive Director Timi Starkweather says that may take 12-18 months.
"The purpose of the Manson Chamber of Commerce is to bring economic development and support to the Manson community, by, one, creating events to facilitate tourism; money from outside our region to our member businesses," Chamber President Bill Swayne told the commissioners.
"As the chamber, we will be assisting and look forward to helping to develop our downtown Manson core in an effort to create a place that will compliment, not replace, the Chamber of commerce efforts, and increase our visibility in the Lake Chelan Valley to benefit all of our members in the community," said Swayne. "In this effort we are forming a new organization that will be called the Historic Manson Main Street Association."
"To be clear, this is a new entity which will work in collaboration with the Manson Chamber of Commerce, and there are no plans for closure or transition from one to the other," Swayne exclaimed.
"Main Street is exactly that, it's main street," Starkweather added. "It's not the outlying areas and the businesses that we support there."
At the recommendation of the county's Lodging Tax Advisory Committee (LTAC), the commissioners decided to give the chamber $88,000 from an LTAC reserve account.
"I don't think the expectation is ever that you're supposed to market without help from lodging taxes," said commissioner Tiffany Gering, a member of LTAC. "We have to make so many cuts from over a million dollars in asks, to really look long and hard at these applications and say which ones do we know puts heads in beds, because that's the number one criteria."
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