Pache.co Information Technologies

CASPER, Wyo. — The Casper City Council has historically offered organizations that bring events into the community the opportunity to receive financial support through a program known as “Community Promotions.” In recent years, the city council has offered support with a total value of $25,000 per year through the program.

Most of the support the city has provided to organizations bringing in events has come in the form of waiving fees to rent city facilities and waiving fees for city services. Only a small percentage of the overall $25,000 has been provided to community organizations in the form of cash.

The city council on Tuesday, February 8 discussed a concept to partner with Visit Casper on the “Community Promotions” program. Under the new partnership, Visit Casper, which controls local lodging tax revenues, would provide any cash support to organizations while the city would continue to offer opportunities to waive facility rental fees and costs for other city services.

Both the city council and Visit Casper would appoint representatives to a review board that would consider requests for support from organizations bringing events into the community. That review board would make recommendations to meet cash funding requests to Visit Casper and would make recommendations for in-kind and facility requests to the city council.

City Manager Carter Napier told the city council on Tuesday that partnering with Visit Casper to handle community promotions could have the benefit of adding more expertise into the process to determine which organizations should receive support. The new process would also save the full council’s time by tasking the new review board with the duty to research and consider requests.

Council member Amber Pollock said that the idea for the new partnership came out of discussions that happened when the city council was considering Community Promotions requests in 2021. She said that the process seemed to duplicate some efforts that Visit Casper was already handling in terms of offering support to organizations bringing events into the community.

Visit Casper CEO and Natrona County Commissioner Brook Kaufman told the council that Visit Casper allocates about $200,000 per year in lodging tax revenues to support organizations that are bringing events into the community. She said that the main criterion Visit Casper looks at is whether the event being proposed will drive overnight stays in the community.

Kaufman added that much of the funding support Visit Casper offers goes toward helping organizations pay fees to rent city facilities, pointing to AAU Volleyball and Basketball tournaments held at the Casper Recreation Center. She said that Visit Casper typically writes checks for $10,000 to the Rec Center for AAU tournaments.

“We typically give grant money to offset venue costs in the city,” she said.

Kaufman added that there may be synergistic opportunities to make resources go farther if Visit Casper and the city cooperate on the process to consider requests to provide support to organizations bringing events into the community.

Council member Kyle Gamroth expressed hesitation as to whether the city council should be providing any type of support on Community Promotions when the city is already struggling to find money to fund a variety of needs and is already spending around $3 million per year to subsidize facilities such as the Rec Center, the Ford Wyoming Center and Hogadon Basin Ski Area.

Kaufman said that Visit Casper has historically seen value in providing contributions to organizations that bring in tournaments as these can generate significant economic impact for the Casper area by driving spending on things such as hotel stays, dining and shopping. She pointed to the example of AAU tournaments, which can bring in hundreds of families and which generate an estimated $900,000 per event in economic impact.

She said that some of the tournaments would likely not happen if organizations were not able to get some support from Visit Casper and/or the city.

Gamroth asked whether Visit Casper has any criteria for determining whether an organization needs funding in order to make an event happen, saying that some organizations see substantial profits from hosting tournaments or events. He questioned whether the city should waive facility or other service fees if an event is generating substantial profit for an organization.

Kaufman said that Visit Casper does look at profit and loss data from organizations that it supports with lodging tax dollars, noting again that Visit Casper’s decision-making process is tied to whether an event will drive overnight stays in the community.

Pollock said that partnering with Visit Casper would help the city council better quantify what impact offering Community Promotions support adds and whether offering that support is helping achieve goals the council wants to see through the program. She noted that Visit Casper has access to analytic tools that the city council doesn’t that could help gauge if Community Promotions dollars “are being useful for our community or if they are really not.”

Napier added that the new partnership between the city and Visit Casper could also help clarify the role that Advance Casper plays in the community, noting that he has had discussions with Kaufman and Advance Casper CEO Justin Farley.

Drawing a distinction between economic development and economic impact, Napier said that the goal would be for Advance Casper to focus solely on economic development efforts while Visit Casper and the city’s new partnership would handle economic impact efforts.

Mayor Ray Pacheco said that he has been involved in the Community Promotions process for eight years and that he thinks the proposed new process in partnership with Visit Casper seems like a smarter way to make use of city assets: “I think this is a much better way to do this.”

Pollock said that she thinks there needs to be some discussion about the difference in hard costs for the city between waiving facility fees versus waiving fees for other city services to help drive decisions about how much of those types of support the city council wants to make available through the new process.

Napier noted that the Community Promotions program has historically waived 50% of facility and in-kind costs. He said that costs such as staff overtime or direct purchases of materials needed to provide services for events are examples of the type of costs he is most concerned about as waiving fees for these types of services are hard costs the city would not otherwise incur. He said that while the council didn’t need to make an immediate decision about how much hard cost is comfortable incurring via the new Community Promotions partnership, direction from council on such questions is eventually needed as the city council works to adopt a new budget.

Council member Bruce Knell said that he understands organizations may need an initial subsidy in order to provide cash flow to make an event happen, but that once a profit is generated, that should be shared back with the city. Council member Steve Cathey likewise said he would like to see a clawback mechanism asking profitable event organizers to share some of those revenues back.

Kaufman said that there will be lessons that can be learned during the first year of the new partnership, and if it turns out that every organization receiving support is turning a substantial profit, adjustments will need to happen.

Vice Mayor Steve Freel said that he wants to be careful about being overly strict in the amount of support made available to organizations looking to bring events into Casper as the community could stand to lose substantial economic impact if organizations turn to other communities that offer more generous support to make events happen.

Knell said he agreed that a too-stringent process could cause Casper to lose events to communities like Cheyenne or Gillette.

The council gave its support in a straw poll at the end of Tuesday’s discussion for moving forward with the new Community Promotions partnership between the city and Visit Casper. Napier asked that the council give further thought to rules it wants to see written into the new partnership program and added that the first year is likely to be approached as a pilot year that can be adjusted in the future based on lessons learned.