As long as the cities are overhauling the Sun Valley-Ketchum Chamber & Visitors Bureau and putting a new marketing board in charge of all operations, the cities should ensure that the meetings of the new board are open to the public.
The change is long overdue.
The new board is a creation of Ketchum and Sun Valley with members appointed by the two cities. As such, it should be subject to the provisions of the Idaho Open Meeting and Public Records laws.
The cities want to fund the activities of the new marketing board with around $800,000 of local-option sales tax receipts. This is 27 percent of the estimated $3 million total collected annually. The board may also get $275,000 from the Idaho Travel Council, money derived from a state lodging tax.
A publicly appointed board that spends public money needs public scrutiny.
Spending money on marketing is no different than spending money on a local bus system. The Mountain Rides board, which is structured like the new marketing board and receives local-option tax revenues, holds its meetings in public. The chamber made a mistake when it failed to open its board meetings to the public—or even to its own members. The argument against openness was the standard one about board members' not being able to speak candidly in public.
Discomfited board members aside, public meetings would have gone a long way toward dispelling misunderstandings about how marketing money was spent.
Decisions about marketing took place behind closed doors and the public—including the city councils—seemed to be in the dark despite public quarterly reports by the chamber director to the city councils complete with Powerpoint lists and charts that showed where and how marketing funds were spent.
There was famously little discussion by public officials about these presentations.
Perhaps the councils and the chamber were victims of Powerpoint's numbing power. It has been criticized by no less than U.S. military commanders as making consumers of the medium stupid because it makes fuzzy, meaningless bullet points look like something important.
The New York Times reported that senior military officers say the program is handy when the goal is not to impart information. They called 25-minute Powerpoint presentations for reporters "hypnotizing chickens."
In Ketchum and Sun Valley, the chickens have snapped out of their stupor. They should stay awake and open up the meetings of the new marketing board to comply with the law, ensure accountability and allow the public to see how and where the money is spent.
