The focus section inside today’s edition of the Vancouver Business Journal is for the first time dedicated to tourism and hospitality in the region. Recognizing the various business sectors that are driven in part or in total by tourism, it is time we acknowledge how significant this sector is and can be going forward.
Since becoming the center of commerce for the region in the mid 1840’s, people have been coming to Southwest Washington, mostly for work. First came the trappers and Hudson’s Bay Co., then the wartime Kaiser Shipyard workers and later the hi-tech workforce of the 1980s, led by Techtronix and HP. Only in the last 20 or 25 years has there been a concerted effort to build a base of tourism, and build it has.
According to Visit Vancouver USA, a nonprofit focused on tourism in the region, Clark County tourism is in fact big business. On its website, the nonprofit states: “In 2014, tourism in Clark County continued to be an economic driver and showed an increase in visitor spending and tourism jobs. Visitors to Clark County spent more than $481 million at local businesses and generated more than $41 million in local and state taxes… more than 4,200 jobs in Clark County are related to the tourism industry.” If these figures belonged to a single employer, it would easily qualify as one of the two largest employers in the county and potentially the single largest tax payer.
What continues to be troubling is this sector is growing in spite of us. It isn’t growing because we had a vision of becoming a tourism destination with attractions like a micro-brewers’ mecca or the next Walla Walla or Willamette valley. One Place Across Time, in the late 1990’s, came close to being the conscious driver around tourism, when a group saw history as the magnet. Their effort resulted in the formation of the Fort Vancouver National Historic Trust. Beyond that effort, there really hasn’t been a collective and purposeful commitment to grow tourism as a sector.
If we were being purposeful, we would have a collective vision for the county which would cite tourism (as well as other sectors we believe desirable) as a sector we believe can grow and add to our region’s vitality. If that were the case then we’d expect jurisdictions to provide policy to support tourism growth. However, when you look at some of the statutes in place across local jurisdictions, they are very restrictive to certain tourism-oriented groups like wineries and micro-breweries (a few recent changes to statutes notwithstanding).
A year ago, I wrote in this column about becoming known as a community that only says “No!” We believe tourism is among those business sectors we should include in any discussion about what our community should be known for. Here is a business sector that is, by its very nature, distributed around the region. So as it grows, it doesn’t concentrate the need for resources and infrastructure all in one area. While attracting visitors to the area, tourism has the added advantage of adding amenities for the locals and indirectly giving others, including other companies, a reason to locate here.
If we think tourism is what we can become known for, then as a business community we need to consider the long term needs to accommodate that growth and work with the jurisdictions to make it easier to locate, grow and expand those businesses.
