June 13, 2013
The South Burnett Tourism Association will seek input from tourism operators and interested regional groups over coming weeks about what its role and objectives should be.
At the SBTA’s meeting held at Captains Paddock Vineyard in Booie on Wednesday night, the 31 people in attendance were briefed by President Bernie Cooper on what had been happening since the election of the new executive in April.
Mr Cooper said that he and fellow SBTA executive members Michael Beohm (Vice-President), Graham Archdall (Treasurer) and Shona Divljak (Secretary) had been looking at the group’s costs, membership structure, meeting schedule, communication methods and aims.
He said the SBTA currently has 66 members – 59 are individual tourist businesses and the rest are industry groups or festival committees.
The executive had also worked out that it costs about $2400 per year to run the SBTA.
So they proposed the SBTA offer memberships at $50 per annum for tourist businesses and $75 per annum for groups, with memberships running from July 1 to June 30 each year.
At this rate, the organisation would only need about 50 financial members to remain viable, Mr Cooper said.
And by making annual membership inexpensive, he hoped it would also encourage many new members to join.
When this new fee structure was put to a vote it was passed almost unanimously.
Mr Cooper then opened discussion about how often and where future meetings should be held, saying the pattern for many years had been to meet every two months at different venues in the region.
The meeting voted 20 to 10 to continue with the practice of meeting bi-monthly at different venues between Blackbutt and Kilkivan, with any member able to offer their venue as a meeting location.
Mr Cooper said that when the executive turned to consider the SBTA’s original aims and objectives they found that some were dated and some were “simply impossible to achieve”.
This being so, he thought the reinvigoration and reinvention the organisation was currently undergoing it might be a good time to draw up a more practical set of aims and objectives for the group, but that it would be best if these came from the members themselves.
He said one aim he favoured was that the SBTA should become a project-driven organisation that created and then successfully delivered tourism-related projects which helped grow tourism within the region.
“We would naturally start small,” he said.
“But over time an organisation with a successful track record of completing projects could attract very significant funding to do very big things in our region. So that’s an aim I’d like to see the SBTA adopt myself.
“But of course, it’s up to our members to decide what they want their tourism association to do.”
Mr Cooper said the way the SBTA would gather input on this would be to send out a very brief email survey over the next few weeks and report the results back to the next meeting so that a final set of aims and objectives could be put together.
The meeting also viewed a slideshow which outlined recent promotional activities carried out by the Southern Queensland Country Regional Tourism Board and heard a short presentation from SBTA Treasurer Graham Archdall about the newly launched South Burnett Directions.
The meeting concluded with an open invitation to everyone in attendance to get involved with the”South Burnett On Show” October long weekend promotion that was begun by the South Burnett Wine Industry Association last year.
The group’s next meeting will be held on Wednesday August 14 at the Burnett Business Centre at 67 Fitzroy Street, Nanango, at 6:30pm.
- Related article: Bold New Vision For Tourism
