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An Article form: The Southeast Sun Online Edition
Jul 29 2009 12:00AM By Melissa Braun Sun Staff Writer
Alabama generates approximately $9.6 billion in revenue through tourism annually and the Enterprise Chamber of Commerce wants to do its part in drawing some of the money to the area.
“We have been really working hard for the last couple of years trying to prepare for a lot of changes in our tourism opportunities and challenges that we see coming in the next couple of years,” said Enterprise Chamber of Commerce Director Phil Thomas. “For one thing, we are getting a whole lot more hotels. We have seven right now in the city.
In a couple of years we will have 11 or 12. Plus, they will be building three at Fort Rucker. Our hotel rooms are going to double and possibly triple in the next two to three years.”
Though the creation of new businesses in Enterprise is an indicator of economic growth, action is needed to ensure the growth occurs.
“That is a great thing, but also if we don’t do something proactively to try to recruit more visitors to come to our city, we are going to be taking the same number of people that we have and spreading them between two or three times as many hotel rooms. That means the hotels suffer and their occupancy rate goes down. We don’t want that to happen. We want to keep those occupancy rates up,” Thomas explained.
Making tourism a top priority in Enterprise is one way to do so.
In order to get ahead of the curve, chamber members are working to draw tourism to the area through a chamber tourism committee.
“We have seen firsthand what tourism can do in Enterprise,” Thomas said, recalling the thousands of people who gathered in the city last month for the BamaJam Music and Arts Festival.
The single event grossed $5.8 million in revenue and generated an estimated $30 million in economic impact throughout the area.
“We estimate that it created about 107 new, permanent jobs. There is a formula for figuring out ‘x’ number of tourism dollars means one new job.
You plug those figures in and you are looking at least 107 permanent new jobs,” said Thomas. “We are not talking about temporary jobs at the site.
We are talking about 100 new jobs or more that were created in the community that will be permanent jobs because of that one event.”
The event also generated $350,000 in sales tax revenues alone.
Of the $350,000, Enterprise received an estimated $84,000 and Coffee County received approximately $56,000.
“Just that one event is a good indicator of what you can do with tourism,” Thomas said.
Tourism can be so much more than festivals and vacations, however.
“They are a key factor in attracting visitors to our community because so much of what tourism now is not just mom and dad putting the kids in the station wagon and heading down to the beach for two weeks or going to Disney World. What tourism has become now is a weekend thing,” he said. “That is what tourism dollars are becoming. You don’t necessarily have to have a beach, mountain or theme park anymore.”
The Enterprise Chamber of Commerce is looking to capitalize on assets the city currently has to attract visitors to the area.
A key player in the plan is the Enterprise Department of Parks and Recreation.
Thomas said tourism encompasses family trips as children travel throughout the state to play in sports tournaments ––tournaments such as the Dixie Youth World Series currently held in Enterprise.
“Parks and Recreation wants to get their facilities to the point where they can go out and bid on more of these kinds of tournaments. They have two coming up this month.
We want to get our facilities to the point where we can go out and have a lot of those tournaments,” Thomas said.
The chamber is also looking to capitalize on the city’s future assets.
“What we see as a great potential that we have got now is that not only will we have more hotel rooms coming in, we also have venues coming that we haven’t had before,” he said.
With the completion of the Enterprise Civic Center on the horizon and Enterprise High School not far behind, Thomas said both offer the chamber tourism committee tools for recruiting visitors to the area.
“Right now we don’t have a meeting place that will seat more than about 100 people. In about a month we are going to have a meeting place that seats 1,500 people, the civic center.
We can do banquets there. We are going to do our chamber banquet there this fall,” he said. “That gives us a great facility to go out and brag about and say we want to bring your tradeshow here, we want to bring your banquet here or we want to bring your reunion here.
That is a great opportunity for us.”
EHS, currently under construction, will also house a 2,000-seat auditorium that will be used as a performing arts venue.
“We are going to have a tremendous increase in facilities within our community within a year or two. We are going to see a complete makeover in the type of facilities we have for visitors,” Thomas said. “Our focus or goal is not necessarily to go out and get people to go on vacation in Enterprise.
We are going to get them to come here and do their next business meeting. Fort Rucker has about 25 flight classes a year that come back for reunions.
We want to recruit them to come and do that reunion in Enterprise. It is a real chance or opportunity we have in the next year or two to really get ahead of this curve and generate some real economic impact for our community.”
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