FVA seeks city’s help: Asks committee to overrule BCTF
April 26, 2012 at 2:06 am in The Jamestown Sun
The manager’s position at the Frontier Village may be the topic of a special meeting of the Jamestown City Council next week. Charlie Tanata, president of the Frontier Village Association, asked the Finance and Legal Committee to restore funding for the position during its regular meeting Wednesday.
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I thought the city council said when they approved funds for the Frontier Village for construction projects in early April that they approving those funds was going to be a one-time deal. Now another situation that the FVA board doesn’t agreed with so they are asking the city council to override the Tourism Board for additional money again. I hope the city council members read their own minutes of their meeting to make this decision quick and to the point, deal with and correct your own problems. The city council created the process for tourism funds in the city, let’s hope they allow it to work.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
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The issue is that Tourism has a power hungry person in charge who still thinks they should purchase the former library. So they seem to be bullying their way. It would be best to starve them all and restart all of the organizations with new people, including the tourism board.
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Mr. Griffin,
You are correct that the Jamestown City Council did approve the construction funds for the Frontier Village Association to remodel the Eldridge Town Hall building which is from a fund called “Visitor’s Capital Construction”. This fund is 20% of the restaurant tax in Jamestown. This percentage is set in Jamestown Ordinance. The fund is ultimately controlled by the City Council as all fund requests are approved in the city’s annual budget. The City Council did outline a process for requests from this fund: The Site Advisory Board (different from the Buffalo City Tourism Foundation Board) made up of representatives from each tourist site (Frontier Village, National Buffalo Museum, Fort Seward, Stutsman County Museum and The Arts Center) meet annually prior to the City Council Budget meetings to make a recommendation of how the funds should be used for the following year. Last year Frontier Village did not participate in the Site Advisory Board. Since that time the Frontier Village Board membership has changed and that is why the City Council made a one time exception to the Site Advisory Board Process. It was clear that the Frontier Village would be expected to participate in the process in the future to recieve funds from the Visitor’s Capital Construction Fund.
The funding for the Frontier Village Manager is a Buffalo City Tourism Foundation grant request. The Buffalo City Tourism Foundation is funded through 40% of the restaurant, 100% of the lodging tax and $75,000 for grants from Jamestown Stutsman Development Corporation and additional funds for operating expenses from the Jamestown Stutsman Development Corporation (which is funded by 1/2% sales tax and a county mill levy). The Buffalo City Tourism Foundation is a non-profit organization with a contract between the City of Jamestown, Stutsman County and the Jamestown Stutsman Development Corporation to allocate and utilize the dollars listed above to promote tourism in Jamestown and Stutsman County.
The City’s legal Counsel, Ken Dalsted will provide the City Council with an opinion on whether the City Council has the authority under that contract to intervene in this situation with the grant request for the Frontier Village manager. The City Council did not vote to intervene, but did request the opinion on whether intervention was legal. I said at this meeting that it was not responsible to talk about this issue without proper meeting notification (Buffalo City Tourism representatives were not present) nor without the proper investigation of the legal obligations by both Buffalo City Tourism Foundation and the elected representatives of the tax payers (Jamestown City Council).
The City Council will have to meet again to take any action, but as I mentioned, not until the proper information and organization representatives are gathered.
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There sure is a lot of taxpayer money being wasted by funding these organizations. There has to be a better way to utilize our money.
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Mayor,
The BCTF has their reason(s) for the decision not to fund the manager’s position at the Frontier Village. Have you asked them what those reason(s) are?
What I see is a board that did not like a previous decision of BCTF get the city council to override that capitol construction funding request, now they don’t like another decision of BCTF’s so they again are asking the city council to override that. Regardless of which pots of funding we are talking about, it falls back to the Village Board wanting the city to override any decision to their favor. Regardless if it is legal to override BCTF, why would you, as a council, want to open a can of worms to this decision making process? “The Buffalo City Tourism Foundation is a non-profit organization with a contract between the City of Jamestown, Stutsman County and the Jamestown Stutsman Development Corporation to allocate and utilize the dollars to promote tourism in Jamestown and Stutsman County” (as stated above). Let them do their job as outlined in their contract.
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