A long-standing organization that helped bring together tourists and Georgian Bay businesses together has disbanded after a lack of funding from participating municipalities.
The South Georgian Bay Tourism Association recently closed out their operations.
The organization, which worked on behalf of Meaford, The Town of the Blue Mountains, Collingwood, Clearview, and Wasaga Beach had celebrated its 45th anniversary last year.
SGBT’s board was made of six industry representatives, and another five from the member municipalities. Former Chairperson Valerie O’Brien says that the members from municipalities resigned all at once, upon notice that the member municipalities would no longer be providing funding to the association.
“The association shifted and started to do as much as they could in the digital world to support visitors, but also maintaining an email for visitors to reach out, and a phone number. So we’re not aware that the municipalities themselves have those resources for visitors, and that is something that is an important questions to ask each municipality how they will service visitors,” said O’Brien.
She says that the remaining members of the board had successfully shifted focus in the past, and that closing down operations was something that the remaining board members tried to avoid.
O’Brien says that they had just welcomed new members ahead of the plug being pulled on operations.
“From the time that we were informed that the municipal board members were resigning, the remaining industry representatives stayed on the board. Some of them were very new into those positions, so this was quite a surprise for them to join the organization with an understanding that they were continuing a strong legacy,” she said in an interview with Bayshore News. “So we did everything we could, we leveraged the relatively small amount of funding we received this year from the Town of Collingwood and the Town of the Blue Mountains, as well as our reserves from maintaining very tight fiscal budgets over the last four years that I’ve been in involved with the organization.”
Part of the reasoning that municipalities pulled their support is related to some member towns implementing, or considering implementing, Municipal Accommodations Tax levies, which would have changed the funding for SGBT’s operations. The MAT would be a tax levied on short-term accommodations, and split between the host municipality and local tourism service providers.
This would have been a change from previous funding for the association, which was given funding directly from Collingwood. The Town of the Blue Mountains, Meaford, Clearview, and Wasaga Beach.
“Certainly, we were well aware of conversations about implementing a Municipal Accommodation Tax, and had actually been working with staff in Collingwood and Town of the Blue Mountains on that project, so to speak. But we really weren’t aware that we would no longer be receiving annual funding that they have been committing to for several decades.”
O’Brien said that with SGBT ceasing operations, it puts more work on visitors to the region, which could in turn mean that they would miss out on everything that a town has to offer.
“There is certainly a lot more onus on the visitor to seek out the information. We saw our role as being the group that could pull businesses together – collaboration for tourism initiatives, and help moving people around the region when they’re here, so if they’re visiting Blue Mountain Resort or Wasaga Beach, for example, we would have opportunities and marketing that might encourage them to go a little further afield. Maybe head into Meaford, maybe head into Creemore for an event, or different events that were happening in and around Clearview and throughout the whole Georgian Bay region.”
She added, “We’re not aware of any programs that are available at a municipal level to support tourism businesses, nor to support visitors to the region. South Georgian Bay Tourism really had an excellent weekly or bi-weekly e-news newsletter that it sent out. It’s social media accounts were very well followed, and the website was a great resource of information for visitors to the area.”