Humboldt County Evaluates New Tourism Strategy Amid Budget Constraints
Press release from the Humboldt County Visitors Bureau:
In June 2024, the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors extended the county’s contract with the Humboldt County Visitors Bureau (HCVB) through Dec. 31, 2024, and reallocated funds being spent on travel and tourism activities toward an in-depth marketing assessment to be conducted in collaboration with local cities, tourism districts and community partners.
“The HCVB has been the county’s designated destination marketing and management organization for decades, and the Board sincerely appreciates the work HCVB has done through the years to promote our beautiful county’s many attractions,” said Humboldt County Second District Supervisor and Chair of the Board Michelle Bushnell. “With the county’s current budget situation, it was time for us explore different ways to efficiently manage our travel and tourism marketing efforts.”
In December 2024, the County Administrative Office’s Economic Development Division issued a request for proposals for professional consulting services to research and analyze the county’s current marketing assets, efforts and regional tourism trends for the development of a comprehensive travel and tourism marketing strategy. Interested businesses, organizations and agencies, including the HCVB, were welcome to submit proposals. The submission deadline was Jan. 22. and proposals received will soon be evaluated.
“The Bureau will continue to promote the county to ensure it remains a premiere visitor destination. Revenue from tourists impacts the quality of life for every resident of the county,” said Ken Hamik, President of the HCVB’s Board of Directors. “Any reduction in revenue will hurt the numerous businesses and organizations throughout the county that rely on visitor spending to stay afloat. The bottom line is the quality of life for residents equals the quality of experience for the visitor.”
Tourism and travel-related spending supports a significant amount of local jobs and contributes to the county’s Transient Occupancy Tax (TOT), which along with sales taxes is one of the few local taxes generated by visitors living outside of Humboldt County. TOT funds are used to provide essential county services, and a portion of these funds are dedicated to support the local tourism economy.
According to a recent report prepared for Visit California, in 2023, travel-related spending in Humboldt County, including dollars spent in unincorporated Humboldt County and its seven incorporated cities, was approximately $479 million. These travel-related dollars spent supported approximately 5,600 local hospitality jobs.
The County of Humboldt’s Economic Development Division is dedicated to promoting economic stability and growth through the county’s efforts to develop a new travel and tourism marketing strategy.
The County of Humboldt extends its gratitude to the HCVB for their ongoing dedication to promoting the county and the North Coast as a top tourist destination.
The County of Humboldt and HCVB look forward to continuing to work on their shared goal to support the local tourism industry and those who work in this important sector.
For more information on the Humboldt County Visitors Bureau, please visit visitredwoods.com or contact Julie Benbow via email at j[email protected].
For more information on the County of Humboldt’s economic development efforts, visit gohumco.com.
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efforts to invite tourism ought include an awareness that public homelessness and loose mentally ill people retard the experience of the local and the tourist.
eureka, arcata and southern humboldt are well known for public uncontrolled barbarism
That will take more money than the HCVB has to work with.
I was thinking about an example of tax money that actually benefits tourist, and realized that the Volunteer Fire Service in Humboldt probably spends more time and money on helping tourists than the HCVB. I’d support canceling the Marketing BS and sending the 12% to the VFDs. Or maybe County Roads (not Public Works as a whole to go blow on the airport some more. Tourists don’t fly in to see the Federal Building of McKinleyville, they need to drive to see redwoods, and beaches.)
Tourists come to Humboldt for the Nature not Broadway. The nature is rural. Tourists get into car (and plane!) wrecks, and stranded on the lost Coast.
How ’bout, like twenty Bigfoot sightings in just a matter of a few days?!
I volunteer to see a couple.
>”These travel-related dollars spent supported approximately 5,600 local hospitality jobs. ”
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Eh ? Maybe 3 months of the year. Newsom/CARB doesn’t like citizens to travel anyway.
The goal is 15 minute cities… like North Korea !
Yep. 15 minute cities need to be built form new. Not remodeled 19th century frontier towns. Leave Eureka alone. Stop with the road paint. Remove the curbs.
I don’t think removing curbs and stopping road paint is a good idea for a town that has as many rollover accidents on a straightaway with a 35mph speed limit as eureka does.
Every tourist related business in NorCal wants a piece of the pie.
Have residents clean up the junk, wrecked cars, and debris from their property. Tourists don’t like to see the mess associated with homeless encampments.
I bet half the ”tourist” are here to look for a new place to move.
Why?
“Transient Occupancy Tax (TOT), which along with sales taxes is one of the few local taxes generated by visitors living outside of Humboldt County.”
Ok that is kind of a misinterpretation, or a misrepresentation. That TOT is paid by BUSINESSES that rent to tourists, and locals.
1) The TOT is 12%of an overnight rental’s price. So it’s felt like a fake-out charge to the guest.
On the phone,”The room is $200″
At the front desk, time to pay,” the charge is $224″. To the tourist it’s just a more expensive accomodation.
It is essentially a 12%tax on tourist businesses. How much goes back to HELPING tourist businesses, where tourists go, like Rural Humboldt?
2) A fair amount of TOT is paid by locals renting a room in town. How many of you have had a doctor’s appointment at 7:00am, and live two hrs from Broadway? The tax isn’t collected from tourists, but local business. The tax isn’t limited to tourists visiting.
3) do Air BNBs pay 12%? Those are probably the preferred rentals nowadays.
If you run a tourist business you get sent a quarterly bill to pay 12%of your revenue. Helps tourism?
Registered Airbnbs pay transient taxes to the County. Non-registered Airbnbs do not. Feel free to report illegal Airbnbs in your neighborhood; that will help the Co. collect taxes.
I thought it was less than four units exempt, but could be wrong.
They did add trailer parks like KOAs which, close to 101, might be used more by out of area construction workers or displaced fire refugees.
TOT is NOT a tax on the business – it is a tax paid by the guest, not the business.
How does the tourist remit their tax?
At the front desk. It is money a visitor pays that does not go to a tourism business. Has the Visitor’s Bureau increased gross revenue to match?
The County receives more for each rental night than the person cleaning the toilet. Tell me how that supports the “5,600 jobs”.
Thanks for confirming my point – the TOT is a tax paid by the room guest – it is collected by the business but is not paid from the business proceeds.
Whether the HCVB supports businesses or jobs depends – are they bringing more tourists to the area or not?
Pretend you are driving from LA to Portland, and detour through 101. You decide to spend the night at the Best Western on Broadway; Without consulting with the Humboldt County Visitors’ Bureau ahead of time. You saw Return of the Jedi when you were 12.
The next morning, do you feel like you spent $180, or $201.60?
The business feels like they’re starting with $180. Or actually less after the credit card processing fees. The cleaning lady feels like she got 45 minutes into busting out your room, so maybe $15.
And let’s pretend you own a hotel somewhere off Broadway.
After the TOT on your gross, you are also paying property tax AND sales tax on your TP, and pillow cases and water heaters. Fuel taxes, and maybe, if you’re lucky State, and Federal income taxes.
But that’s all payed by the tourist, right?
Umm. Fuck what the tourists want. They don’t have to dwell in this economic quagmire year round.
Tourists don’t “want” the Visitor’s Bureau. They don’t want to pay an extra 12%.
You don’t either.
You’re free to move somewhere more to your liking.
I’ll take a tourist going out of their way to enjoy the beauty this place has to offer over a local who goes out of their way to disparage this wonderful part of the world.
“economic quagmire”
A polite way to say cesspool…not to mention the fully dilapidated infrastructure, widespread street drug dealing and usage, homelessness, abundant criminality, poverty in every direction, largely inaccesible heathcare whose quality is often inferior at best, a poorly skilled workforce, a region of California with among the state’s highest suicidality and domestic violence rates, consistently inept local government, ad nauseum. Of course, your mileage may vary as it seems to for D’Tucker Jebs who wrote below: “…this wonderful part of the world.”
I agree 100% with you
So i guess they gave up on all the billions from weed tax.
They threw in the towel on that revenue when they waived the weed tax for the “mom and pop” drug dealers in the region.
And now they (supes) are going after the STR (short term rental) providers in the same fashion…making them get permit$, register as a business, etc etc…same playbook, different game…we’ve given them thousand$ in T.O.T monies for doing NOTHING! We stopped playing this game…
The real revenue was created by those Mom and Pops, and spent once a week on groceries, building supplies, hotels, cars and trucks, and property. 10-15 years ago on any given night, probably 25%of hotel rooms were booked by weed buyers.
The change is not so much the County’s fault, (partially, they got caught up in greedy over expectation too)but the State over permitting weed acreage. Humboldt could have spent the years after 2016 fighting FOR Humboldt County instead of extorting the last cash in local circulation.
You might want to look up what a “billion” is. Check out the County budget. I doubt Humboldt has a liquid Billion dollars between all of us! Especially if we exclude a couple families like the Snyders or Arkleys.
You can have tourism, you can have irrational climate policies, both you can’t have both.
You can use words smartly.
You can make wild associations.
You cannot do both.
There.
You’re welcome.
He did. Man caused climate change is a scheme and fraud perpetuated by the devious Democrat Party and mimicked by millions of their lemmings. Give it up, it’s over. That all went away the second the popular vote of the American people said no more, Trump is President. Perhaps Europe would be a good place for all the climate change Democrats to export themselves to, preferably France where speedos are cool along with tattoos of 50$ stick figure nude women on their bicep while pushing around Tahitian children to not speak their native language on that colonial island. Gross. There, fixed it for you.
Please elaborate on ur comment. What are trying to communicate?
I woukd put any development funds for the region laser focused on development of local industry well before tourism.
There isn’t any future ‘expansion/development of local industry’.
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No logging – lumber mills (Greenies/Feds + Increased Automation.)
No fishing (Pacific Marine Fisheries Commission/Californika.)
No dope (Price collapse… head to Oklahoma ! This is a hideous place to grow dope.)
Limited Dairy/Beef (Only in the river bottoms and ranches in the hills.)
No fish farm (Greenies, Company appears to have collapsed ?)
No offshore wind farm. (Appears to have economically collapsed… Government money will continue to be expended on it.)
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Only thing might be exporting gravel if the coastal rivers are dredged out to historic depths. Maybe 100 jobs or so.
We win, yay for us.
Forestry is doing just fine. All the Earth Firsters moved on to protesting windmills off Kennebunkport and Stinson Beach while cactus sitting in Joshua Tree to ensure the illegals don’t cut them down for a warming fire.
Was posting… ‘industries with no room for job expansion’.
Do trees keep growing? There is plenty of room for expansion in the forest industry. Combined with fuel reduction projects on a landscape scale, the future is looking more than bright. Plus, the forestry profession will be one of the last impacted by robot future. Robots have a hard time walking on 90% slopes through windfall and cliffs. Hence, mills from Washington moving here. Why would that be? Is that an expansion or retraction?
Good shilling for the American Forest and Paper Association (trade and lobbying arm of this country’s forest products industry) and its local members operating in Del Norte, Humboldt, Mendocino, and Trinity counties. The post above could even double as a press release.
The Nordic Aquafarms project is still a go. https://www.fishfarmingexpert.com/california-nordic-aquafarms/land-based-fish-farmer-makes-progress-in-california/1766876
As is the offshore wind project and marine terminal project. https://calmatters.org/environment/2025/01/trump-order-ban-offshore-wind-california/
Dunno on those.
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Existing offshore wind leases are not safe from future actions by the new administration. Trump ordered “a comprehensive review” of “terminating or amending” offshore wind leases and ordered his agencies to identify “any legal basis” for eliminating them.
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Fish plant. Scaled down size of production. New target is to raise ‘Yellowtail Kingfish’. See if it happens. (I don’t think so.)
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A lot better than raising salmon. One fertile egg gets through those filters and it’s game over for our local salmon populations. Much smarter to raise a fish that would die in the ocean around here in order to minimize potential accidents.
Dead in the salt water.
Things die.
gives me an idea for a new movie: well paid govt employee shits his california king bed and you the poor plebe need to come clean it. any aspiring scriptwriters?
This plan for tourism is shit. These supers underestimated where humboldt money came from. Duh.. are they kidding or are they really this dumb? You have really screwed humboldt. Wow legalize weed and you morons shut us down legalized jobs and city idiots. Stay out of our government if this crap is all you can do.
I just drove back from roseberg or yesterday and humboldt is a blight. The only place doing well is eureka arcata ,mckinleyville. And they are hurting to. This these stupid supervisors fault 150%. Thanks for the illegal raids and fines. You guys are seriously stupid.
smh. Not one hotel overlooking the marina or bay. New hotels look out over dump and blight. Eureka is an eye sore, no way around it. 25% of all buildings in Eureka area should be condemned. People homes and yards look absolutely horrendous. Who in their right mind would come back after one visit?. I think not, this area needs to do so much better