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Tourist Development Council Board Meeting
Minutes – November 10, 2008
Ocean Center Board Room

Call to Order:
Chairman Frank Bruno called the meeting to order at 2:08pm.

Approval of Minutes of August 5, 2008 Meeting:
Motion to approve the minutes was made by Jim Bazemore and seconded by Cassandra Reynolds.

Status Report on Expansion:
George Recktenwald, Acting Ocean Center Director presented this report. Since the last meeting the following construction updates have occurred:

1. The exhibition hall received its temporary certificate of occupancy on time at the end of September. The Boat Show is scheduled in the next exhibit hall October 1-6.
2. The final punch list items are being performed in the meeting room areas and exhibit hall.
3. The kitchen expansion and renovations are complete.
4. The arena painting was completed on November 7th – 7 days ahead of schedule. They’re now moving to the mezzanine level walls, floors and ceilings. The floors will get an epoxy coating and the ceiling will be replaced. The old meeting rooms, the Ocean Board Room, Clyde Mann Suite and the Administrative Offices will be refurbished as the budget allows.
5. Grand Ballroom renovations are on schedule and should be complete by January 1st.
6. The A1A entrance and Echo Gallery is on schedule and should be complete by mid February.
7. The E-Zone project on Auditorium Blvd. (city project that is being managed by the county team) is on schedule and should be done by January 1st. Following that, and already some work has begun on Hollywood and Earl Street (more city projects) and they are scheduled to be complete by mid February.

We’ve been extremely busy at the Ocean Center. We’ve had three events to date in the new exhibit hall: the Boat Show, Home Show and the Portable Sanitation Association International. These events have all gone off very well, with just a few minor occurrences happening as we break in the new building. The compliments have been great from all of the exhibitors. One of the things with the new design is the exhibitors are able to set-up and break down in about half the time as before, so they are very happy with that.

About a $1 million dollars worth of furniture, fixtures and equipment have been ordered, so far about half of that has been delivered including our large stage.

New uniforms are being selected for our full-time and event staff employees.

We’re reviewing the staff structure and the positions we have now. We’re proceeding cautiously with filling only the positions we need until we get a handle on what our sales are going to be over the next couple of years.

Training is ongoing for all of our new systems both for the existing staff and the event staff. So that they get familiar with our operation, we’ve set up tours and training with the Daytona Beach Police Department and the Fire Department. This will take place the second half of this month and into December.

The camera installation in the garage has begun, all the hard wiring is complete and we are expecting the cameras to be delivered Thursday. We’ve gone out to a third party firm to review the elevators. They’ve come back with a much more thorough maintenance plan that’s being implemented as we speak. We’re also looking to add a new maintenance contract that will be hitting the street in January. We’ve added more signage in the garage, with more on the way.

We’ve reviewed our booking policy with several members and we think there’s been a big improvement, which allows more flexibility to book the best conventions and shows in the Ocean Center at the right time.

There will be a plaque dedication ceremony on Friday, December 12th at 9am for the new Beach Headquarters and at 10am for the Ocean Center. The public grand opening event will be held on February 22nd, the Showcase Dinner (Sinbad performing) is scheduled for February 28th, we are working on scheduling a concert (during this time period) and finally the Ocean Center, DBACVB and partners are putting together a FAM Tour for the week of April 20th, which will showcase Daytona Beach and the Ocean Center to meeting planners from all over.

Chairman Bruno and Mayor Ritchey recently met with Jim Dinneen and Jim Chisholm and they are continuing to work on the parking situation to get the right signage around the facility. George Recktenwald reported that the OC staff, in conjunction with the city, has been working on the parking situation as well. Because of all of the construction and everything that’s going on in this general area, we’ve recently started filming every event that is being held at the Peabody. We’re filming, reviewing and making changes based on what we observe.

Chairman Bruno commented that he thought we were doing a great job in the parking garage, with extra security and folks in golf carts helping patrons. A lot of people came up to him during the banquet he was attending and told him how impressed they were.

Financial Report:
Donna DePeyster, Volusia County Finance Department, reviewed the Quarterly Financial Report (refer to pages 10-14 in Agenda Packet), which was distributed to the TDC Board Members. In this packet you have the financial report as of September 30, 2008. Fiscal year to date, our fund balance is $4,575M minus the $2,613M set aside to pay off the debt on the Ocean Center, which leaves a balance of $1,962M available for Ocean Center operations going forward into the new fiscal year. Please take note the resort tax accumulated through the end of the fiscal year was $7,567M. At the time this report was prepared, all of the numbers were not in. It’s up a little more than that, it’s actually closer to $7,666M, it is still off of projections but a little higher than what’s reported. Our total operating expenditures year to date are $4,247M. Gilly Aguiar asked if the delinquent taxes, unpaid from a number of properties, were paid how much would we be down for the month of September? Donna DePeyster did not know how much in delinquent taxes there were. Dave Byron said in August, collections were off by 27% and of that delinquents were 20% of the 27%. Jim Bazemore wanted to know of the uncollected taxes how much would be charged off? Donna would have to get that number from the Revenue Division. Lori Campbell Baker noted that the September figures were down by about 30%. She wanted to know what we needed to do from the Ocean Center’s side; from the CVB’s standpoint they’ve made some adjustments. George Recktenwald said the number one thing we will be doing is looking at our expenses, with no unnecessary expenditures being made. We are now in that window where it’s unlikely a convention will be booked in this next fiscal year. Per our booking policy we are in the timeframe where we can put in one night type of events (sporting, concerts, consumer shows, etc.). We’ll try and plug our holes (for this year) with those types of events.

Jim Maniak, Ocean Center Finance Officer, proceeded to give the parking garage report (page 14) that shows the budget and the actual expenses through September 30th. As Donna mentioned this is the end of the fiscal year, however as she’d also indicated these are still some of the preliminary numbers. We tried to close out as much as we can but there are still accruals that are going on right now at this time of year so probably in another month we should have the final number. The actual revenues are pretty close, within $10K. The $540K amount remaining is the amount that we did not receive but we anticipated to have in the budget. As compared to the end of last year, we are $100K behind. The last 4 months of the fiscal year (June-September) were all down compared to the prior year, probably in total about $150K. Looking at the expenses, George mentioned before about our contract labor and we’ve got a high number of contract labor at the garage with only 2 permanent employees. We have adjusted our use of contract labor at different times depending on what was happening at the Ocean Center and the surrounding area in cutting back staff. We’ve tried to hold the expenses down as much as possible. At the bottom of this report it’s showing that we have about $133K in positive cash flow, which is not true. What happened is we had to take into account our debt service and one of the things I did not take into account in doing this was the last payment that was due on October 1st but was paid September 30th. So you have to add that in, and with our accruals we may be down on a cash flow basis as much as $100K for this year. We do have approximately $500K in surplus that we’ll be getting into. As we are getting into the new fiscal year, we had Biketoberfest in the month of October and we did show that we’re approximately $10K ahead from a year ago. The other major event we had in October was the Home Show and we were down about $150. With a number of new events in this new fiscal year, hopefully they will pull us up again. Gilly Aguiar requested a column be added to this report showing the prior year for comparison. The budget for the garage in this fiscal year will be fairly close to last years budget with some line item changes.

Marketing and Sales Report:
Dave Byron presented the Marketing and Communications Update Report (page 15). He started out by saying the commitment from the County and the Ocean Center is that we will partner with the community to a degree greater than we ever have in the past. We have already started to reach out to a number of partnerships. We are all in this together and we are in this with your partnerships and your advice and your guidance along with lots of things we have going on.

The sales team has been extremely busy since the last TDC Meeting. Dave complimented Lori Hunter, Tim Buckley and Joey Yelvington, the three sales representatives at the Ocean Center, who are working very, very hard. No pressure on the sales team, of course with the economy the way it is. The sales efforts have been expanded considerably. What we’ve done is very similar to the way we handle the County Dept. of Economic Development and the County Airport. We’ve augmented the Ocean Center’s sales team with the County’s Marketing and Public Information staff (which is a 15 person staff). We are now meeting every Tuesday for 3 hours at the airport and we are adding into our sales efforts the County’s advertising and marketing agency (Lord & Lasker) and we have integrated into the Ocean Center, to some degree, Rick Michael at the Dept. of Economic Development and the Airport staff.

We have done a number of things since the last meeting. First of all we’ve completely revamped the sales approach we are taking. We now have a much bigger sales team and a much more comprehensive effort. Some of the things we’ve done are to develop weekly tracking reports that allow the team to prioritize their work for the week and to allow for the tracking of sales leads, follow-ups and closed business. Every week those reports are filed to me so that we know what our priorities are, what our goals and objectives for the week are and those goals and objectives are matched with the budget and with the objectives in the marketing plan.

We’re implementing a new computer program for the sales team that’s linked between the sales team members. We’re inputting some 25,000 prospects, leads and clients into that data base and then prioritizing them based on the revenue they generate to the Ocean Center and the community based on how relevant they are as prospects. We’re grouping them by the market categories so that we can prioritize and be absolutely the most efficient and most effective in use of time to make sure that we are going after clients that will pay dividends.

We have created a master calendar spreadsheet that shows booked business by the day, month and by the year. This allows us to look, at any point in time, how we are doing. One of the goals for 2009 will be to take those weak spots in the calendar of booked business so that we can target one day, two day revenue generating events to make sure we stay on track with our revenue projections and where we need to be to make us successful. Generally speaking, the way I see 2009 as far as booked business; I feel we’re very close to meeting the revenue projections we established some months ago. As for 2010, we’re doing okay, we have a lot of work to do. I think with the new approach we are taking along with our partnerships, there’s every reason to believe, despite the economy, we’ll do well in 2010. As you know it takes many years to bring some of these big time conventions to the Ocean Center. We really do have a lot of work to do for 2011 and beyond.

We’ve developed a complete new marketing plan for the Ocean Center. The goals for this plan are very obvious, we need to generate economic prosperity for the community and obviously we want to generate sufficient revenue for the Ocean Center. The plan is still very much a work in progress, what it does not include is the task assignments. We’ve developed about 125 task assignments that will be added into this plan in the very immediate future. We took the marketing plans from the DBACVB, Ocean Center and Dept. of Economic Development and integrated the goals and objectives as well as added many new elements. We’ve divided the marketing plan into marketing activities, sales activities and communications/public relations activities. We further define those elements into local and out of county. Then we add further focus by defining our market segments, which are the same as the DBACVB.

Those market segments are:
1. SMERF market – social military, education, religious and fraternal conventions
2. Associations market – national, regional and state
3. Competitive Arts market
4. Corporate market
5. Healthcare market
6. Consumer shows market

This marketing plan is a work in progress and will be a document we will continue to update. We have an advertising element in the plan. The County Council has approved a $400K co-op advertising opportunity; $200K from the Ocean Center and $200K from the DBACVB. We are working with the CVB on our schedule of trade shows and exhibitions that will be attended by our staff, many of those will be joint efforts between the county, CVB and area hotels. We will continue to review this plan and provide you with updates at the quarterly TDC Meetings.

We have analyzed in great detail the list of tradeshows our sales staff will be attending. We’ve looked at the plan for the DBACVB and we’ve integrated our efforts with that as well as added some additional shows for the Ocean Center staff this year. We’ve had quite a bit of discussion as to how we could make our tradeshow participation more effective. One of the elements you’ll see in your packet is a series of postcards that will be used to generate pre-show interest and also used as a tool to book appointments before we even get to the show. We will be updating our tradeshow booth next year. We’ll be working closely with the DBACVB to see what we can do to make sure that the tradeshow booth and tradeshow attendance is as effective as it can be. In addition to the $400K co-op with the DBACVB, our advertising agent, Mike Jiloty with Lord & Lasker has identified a whole list of other advertising opportunities for this year for the Ocean Center and we are planning to review these opportunities as early as next week. You’ll also notice a new very colorful full page ad we’ve developed and we’re running to advertise the event calendar.

Under the way of communications, we have completely re-done and expanded the contact list. We now have a list that contains around 500 local, regional and national contacts, which include magazines, tradeshow planners and a wide variety of contacts. They are hearing from us at least weekly starting a couple of weeks ago. We’re using this list for a new electronic newsletter that is being produced every other week. It’s very similar to the weekly communication that many of you may receive from the Department of Economic Development. We have developed an extensive list of news releases. The goal is to send out a minimum of 2 releases a month, we’re far exceeding that right now. I’m pleased to tell you that last week alone we had 6 contacts from national trade publications, which we are following up with interviews and so forth. We’ve really started to see an increase in the amount of interest.

We’ve put a lot more emphasis these days on partnerships. We’re working very closely with the DBACVB, and we’ll be reaching out very shortly to the West Volusia CVB and the New Smyrna CVB. One of the goals of the County Council, and the council has made this very clear, is that this is a countywide facility. We are one county, one community and our marketing efforts will certainly focus on a countywide basis and all of the assets we have to sell (i.e., Ocean Center, Airport, Beach, Economic Development program, etc.).

As you know, we’re part of a marketing alliance with the Ocean Walk Village consortium. We’re now on a regular meeting schedule with the Alliance which includes partners in the immediate Ocean Center footprint. In addition, we’ve developed an informal partnership, this Marketing and Sales Report cont’d:
under the direction of County Manager Dinneen, that includes the DBACVB, some of the larger hotels in the area and the Hotel Motel Association. One of the initial tasks for this group was to review the Ocean Center’s booking policy to ensure it has adequate flexibility to ensure success in these difficult times. These partners are very satisfied with the policy. The next task for this group is to review our new marketing plan. When the review of the marketing plan is complete, we’ll roll up our sleeves to see if we can come up with some joint marketing/promotion opportunities.

A couple of other key partners for the Ocean Center are our own Economic Development Department and our Airport. We’re going to develop a pilot program to target medical associations in the Washington, DC area. If we can get medical tradeshows at the Ocean Center the Dept. of Economic Development can talk with the CEO’s of those companies to get them to move their companies here. If we can get the synergy going and all working together, we believe that we can be very successful in spite of some really tough economic times.

We’ve been working with the DBACVB and the Hilton, and are planning a major FAM tour the week of April 20th. We’re also planning to host several familiarization tours for targeted convention industry trade publications and event planners throughout the year, which gives us a tremendous opportunity to showcase the Ocean Center and the entire community.

The Ocean Center’s website (oceancenter.com) has been completely redone and features comprehensive, up-to-date information on the center. Dave Byron then introduced Vickie Pleus with Volusia County Community Information to walk the group through some of the main features of the website. Vickie asked the group to peruse the website and get back to either her or Dave with any suggestions or comments.

Lori Campbell Baker commented that the website looked great and much more user friendly. She suggested that we do a little tag line (for searches) that says we are a convention facility.

Gilly Aguiar commented that Dave Byron did a great job and was a great organizer. He agreed with Dave regarding the community involvement situation where we are all partners and the synergy being so important. Gilly requested a copy of both Dave and George’s “cheat sheets”, which will be sent to all board members.

Dave Byron said we are a couple of months away, however once the building is photo ready on the outside, the photography will be updated on the website.

Chair Frank Bruno then asked for comments from the public. Tim Stockman said that the site looked great and we did a really good job with the update. He was concerned that their hotels were not included on the website. Dave Byron suggested they talk about the available opportunities after the meeting. Big John wanted to know if we had considered privatization. Chair Bruno, answered as far as privatization, we’ve already addressed that as a county and we are not looking at private management for the Ocean Center. We are trying to bring a new director on board, if at all possible, by the end of the year.

Update from Partners:
Hotel/Motel Partners
• Bob Davis was out of town

CVB/Ad Authority
• Sharon Mock congratulated Dave Byron on a great job with the marketing plan and website in a short amount of time.

West Volusia
• No update

SE Volusia
• Gilly Aguiar has been asked by their CVB to report updates to them.

Old Business:
Tim Stockman reported that the Development Sub Committee met for their 2nd meeting and had a pretty good turnout with 9pp in attendance, which was up from 4pp at their 1st meeting. Representatives from the City of Daytona Beach included Hardy Smith and Cheryl Harrison Lee. The committee was able to discuss (with city reps) the various roadblocks developers encounter in development procedures. Mr. Smith also spoke in great detail about plans for the 16 block entertainment zone around the Ocean Center. Tim is hoping to have Jim Chisholm at the next meeting to bring the entertainment zone plan to them so they can take a look at it. Frank Bruno noted that he, Mayor Glenn Ritchey, Jim Chisholm and Jim Dinneen have been meeting on a regular basis as well.

Chair Bruno informed the group that a committee had been formed to include Glenn Ritchey, Lisa Ford Williams and himself to solicit sponsorships for the public grand opening as well as the marketing event dinner. The money will come from private contributions and there will be no tax dollars used. There will be some bed tax dollars associated with the marketing only, not as far as the events.

New Business:
No new business.

Public Participation:
Dave Byron wanted to amplify on what Frank Bruno said about the grand opening. He thought it was important for the group to hear it the same way as it was discussed by the County Council. The grand opening of the Ocean Center was thoroughly discussed by the County Council before moving forward with the plans that we have today. It is very important to remember a couple of things; the grand opening is for the citizens of Volusia County and that is taking place on February 22nd. The event that Frank Bruno is soliciting corporate sponsorships for is primarily a marketing event. The idea of doing this (and this is what the council agreed to do) is that we have a once in a lifetime opportunity to showcase this beautiful new Ocean Center and gather the publicity and the excitement through the gala marketing event. So please think about the gala event as a marketing event as opposed to just a celebration. It will be a celebration but it’s really a marketing opportunity.

The Tourism Consortium Meeting will be held in the room next door.

Meeting was adjourned at 3:22p.

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