Adding income to our local communities and county by John Dersham

Many people may not think much about the financial attributes of an event like the ARPA District II regional swim meet we had here last Thursday through Saturday. If you did not have a family member or friend in the competition perhaps the event did not come to mind at all. The truth is whenever we have an event that brings in people from outside of our area they are bringing dollars they earned in a different economy and spending it in ours. The swim meet had a couple thousand people here for this three day event. Many of them stayed overnight which helped keep our hotels, campgrounds and other lodging facilities busy. These visitors went to restaurants, attractions and they shopped and bought gas for their cars.

Greg Conkle, Executive Director of Fort Payne Parks and Recreation and his staff along with help of the city of Fort Payne Police and Fire Departments did a great job at hosting a well planned and very well executed event. All of our public properties downtown, at the public swimming pool and all Parks and Recreation properties where neat, clean, mowed, trimmed and presented to our visitors in a first class fashion. I know our visitors had a great time here. Events like this and other tourism related functions like festivals, summer camps, attractions, B&B’s, campgrounds, cabins, N.E Agri Business Center and parks bring a constant flow of tourists throughout our county. The fact that tourism has stayed up during our down economy has helped our cities, and county keep our tax revenue high enough that our area has not seen the financial crisis that many areas have. This is especially true since our unemployment has been higher than the national average most of the time during this downturn. Our success at using tourism as an economic development tool has worked very well. I am fortunate here at DeKalb Tourism that we have public officials at all levels in our cities and county that understand tourism and its great economic benefits. There are some other benefits to tourism that you may have not thought about. Tourism cannot be outsourced to another state or another country, tourists rarely are involved in crimes and tourists do not require city or county money for city and county services like schooling, trash pickup or other maintenance related costs incurred to local governments by residents.

Thanks again to everyone involved in planning and implementing functions like the swim meet that bring people to our area that helps support our local economy.