Letters

CRTA walls were lined with awards

Ed,

Congratulations to Clarence Valley Council (CVC) on receiving a Bronze-level award for “destination marketing” at the 2019 NSW Tourism Awards. After all, it’s only 6 years since CVC unceremoniously sacked the board of local business operators who had successfully and voluntarily managed the Clarence River Tourist Association (CRTA) for decades…..and replaced them with highly-paid council bureaucrats.

The walls of the South Grafton Visitor Information Centre were lined with Gold-level tourism awards that the CRTA won year after year at both Regional and State Award ceremonies. The South Grafton VIC was considered to be amongst the best in Australia and CRTA award entries were always prepared by staff, while CVC spends thousands of dollars of ratepayers money on consultants to prepare their tourism award entries in their desperate struggle for credibility.

That South Grafton VIC once marked a wonderful introduction for travellers to Grafton and the Clarence Valley with its beautiful pond and fountain, its flagpoles and the magnificent purpose-built VIC. Today it’s a sad sight with the pond a stinking cesspool and the building falling into decay right at the front door to Grafton. Rather than relocating council’s economic development & tourism staff to the VIC where they could continue to offer visitor information CVC would prefer to advertise this site at less than replacement value, allow it to become an eyesore and eventually cash in the assets created by so many good citizens.

CVC claim that travellers no longer use VICs.

In contrast, in the small village of Woodburn their council have just built a new VIC to assist the town when the highway bypasses it…….and it’s going gangbusters.

CVC quote Tourism Research Australia (TRA) figures with a 22% increase for this region for the year up to December 2018 as “on ground evidence that our strategies are working”. Never mind that TRA figures are calculated using a tiny telephone sample plus multiplier formulae (and they’re statistically invalid). Never mind that TRA figures are not a measure of council’s tourism strategies. Never mind that, if anything, TRA figures are a measurement of the marketing impact of every business and every citizen in the Clarence Valley and council’s contribution is scarcely a drop in this bucket.

A true measure of CVC tourism strategies would be if they would advise how many visitors use their substitute VICs at Grafton Gallery and Calypso Caravan Park compared to the old CRTA VICs at South Grafton and Ferry Park in Maclean; or would be if they properly tracked the true results of their marketing strategies in a statistically valid way and released the results (as the CRTA did); or would be if they attracted local business operators to financially contribute to their tourism marketing projects (at which the CRTA was so successful and CVC has been such a dismal failure).

No….CVC don’t do any of these things. They operate in an almost totally secret manner and local citizens, the media and even councillors battle to get any information from them. I’ve been advised, in writing, that I will receive no replies to my past, present or future tourism enquiries to CVC because I don’t support their tourism strategies. The last time I checked my council rates were paid up-to-date…..that is how this council treats its local citizens!

With CVC’s attitude to transparency and accountability we can only hope that there are a number of good citizens preparing to contest the local government elections next September with genuine council reform in mind and the last 10 years of CVC can become a distant memory.

Bill Day,

Palmers Channel

Former manager Clarence River Tourist Association & former Councillor Maclean Shire Council