This afternoon, Spartanburg County Council will be taking a look at the initiative being headed by Pacolet Mayor Elaine Harris to create a clear plan to encourage and foster tourism in the county. And thanks to the Spartanburg Herald-Journal‘s Jason Spencer, we even get a little preview of what the County will be hearing.
The group has 35 members and includes representatives from the county’s planning, and parks and recreation offices, transportation planners, the Spartanburg Area Chamber of Commerce and local small towns. They recently held two days’ worth of roundtable discussions on topics ranging from the arts and music to education to government and economic development.
“For me, what kept coming clear is that we just don’t know what we have here. We would never have to leave our county boundaries for wonderful things to do. They’re dotted all over this county,” Harris said. “This is my belief: We can be competitive with any tourism market.”
I’ll go so far as to say that Harris is absolutely right. There are many, many things about Spartanburg County that would be perfectly marketable tourist magnets if properly supported. And, if they had an open mind about how to achieve their goals, there are tons of relatively inexpensive things the County Council could do to develop the area as a place that’s friendly to tourists.
But I don’t want to give the impression that tourism is some kind of silver bullet for the area’s economic woes, however. For one thing, there are a lot of competitors for those tourist dollars, and some of the cities and counties in question have tourism programs that are decades ahead of any local initiatives. What’s more, as industrial jobs evaporate from the region, every half-informed county in the Southeast is eyeing tourism as a potential source of income.
And then there’s the financial side. In addition to investments in obvious things like signage (or, if you want to be all buzz-wordy, “wayfinding”), facilities and promotion, becoming a true tourist destination also involves things like job training. After all, if you want people coming back and recommending the Spartanburg County tourism experience to their friends, you need to teach your workers the fine art of commercial hospitality. (And given some of the needlessly rotten service I’ve gotten at places around here that could really benefit from tourism, this needs to be a high priority.)
And then there’s the matter of how to foster tourist-attractive, economically sustainable businesses in the first place, which touches on that ever-present need for there to be some kind of business incubator program. Until there is a tourism sector, it would really help if the County (and perhaps the City, if they could work together) could find a way to take a little pressure off of these businesses until the tourists they’re hoping to attract start showing up. Otherwise, odds are that you’ll have a lot of very promising businesses doing exactly what the County is asking them to and failing because no one knows about them yet.
If this plan is going to work at all, it’ll require a significant commitment of both time and money from Spartanburg County. It’ll require some lateral thinking as well. Take niche marketing, for example: Thanks to groups like Upstate Pride, for instance, there’s an increasingly visible LGBT community in Spartanburg County. Just imagine what could happen if the county tried to become the most LBGT-friendly tourist locale in the area. Sure, there’d be griping and protests for a while, but there’d also be lots of money from LGBT tourists who are looking for a friendly place to vacation.
Eco-tourism, pet-friendly tourism, historical tourism, cultural tourism … all of these are perfectly marketable ways of making people aware of Spartanburg. Even something like the Moonshiners’ Reunion or the Music Camp could become a massive tourist draw if properly supported by the County.
Each of these ideas are going to require time, money and risk by the County, and given how non-proactive they’ve been on things like zoning — something that would also help tourism and overall development by implementing consistent rules and basic protections — I’m skeptical of their ability to give it the resources it really needs to become a true economic engine for the area.
That said, it’s very encouraging to see Harris taking this project on. She clearly has the right attitude, and seems to be thinking creatively about how to approach the problem.
Steve Shanafelt
Tourism? Que?
It could happen. On a basic level, creating a tourism sector to the local economy shouldn’t be impossible. When you get down to it, it’s really just a matter of giving people a good reason to visit, making sure they don’t have a needlessly bad time when they do, and making sure there are places for them to spend their money while they’re in town. The more “local” those attractions (that is, the greater portion of the money that goes to locally owned businesses and into the local tax base), the better.
One thing I’d look at if I were in the county’s position is creating a support and promotion system for local crafters and visual artists. HUB-BUB alone has demonstrated many times that there’s a wealth of local craftspeople, and with a small investment the county could start using those crafts and — this is the marketing bit — the CULTURE of those crafts to make it seem like Spartanburg crafts are something truly desirable. But the demand has to be created and the crafters (early on at least) supported to at least some degree.
The same is true of local music, although I tend to see this as a City issue rather than a County one. There’s tons of local music, and some of it is great, but no one is hearing about it because no one in a position to promote it (and profit from it) appears to have any faith in it.
Yet, just look at the economic opportunities that are being missed when something like Jazz on the Square happens. People — local tourists, in essence — show up downtown, maybe they eat somewhere, but in general there’s no place for them to spend their money downtown in the evenings. No late-night cafes, few stores, and nothing for someone who really liked that band and is suddenly in the mood to browse some jazz albums. There’s not even a good place to hang-out after the show unless you want to go to a bar.
Money CAN’T get into downtown if there’s no place for people to spend it, and as long as the rents are prohibitively high there’s little incentive for any small start-up business to take the risk in trying to tap into this pool of potential customers that the City has provided. The people are here — just look at the crowds — and it’s not that they don’t have a few bucks each to contribute to the local economy. It’s just that there’s not a cohesive plan for bringing everyone together.
Which brings us to the Downtown Master Plan. It needs to pass.
I can speak to at least one place that keeps track of out-of-town visitors to Spartanburg. The local history room at the library keeps statistics of the in-county and out-of-county visitors each month. 75 patrons from outside of Spartanburg County visited in October, and many of them ask for places to visit and restaurants to patronize. Add to that the 270 in-county patrons who also visited last month.
Thousands of families have flowed through Spartanburg since the 1700s, and as the premier research institution in the area, the library attracts lots of folks interested in heritage tourism. Genealogy is a popular and growing hobby, especially among retirees who have money to spend. This is a facet of local tourism that is already happening and has room to grow.
Steve, I’d love to see Spartanburg develop a distinct craftsman culture. There is certainly the talent here. Come to Hub-Bub’s BYOA on Dec. 5th to see the volume of the artists and craftsmen already living and working here!
I recently retired to Spartanburg from Florida. I am amazed how many historical sights there are in the county. I pulled up the list of places on the Register of Historic Places and have driven to see the majority of them. I just wish there were more detailed information. Example: Glenn Springs shows so many locations on the historic website but try finding the majority of them. There isn’t even a marker to show where the hotel was once standing. A missed opportunity for attracting historic buffs.
Steve said
“But I don’t want to give the impression that tourism is some kind of silver bullet for the area’s economic woes, however. For one thing, there are a lot of competitors for those tourist dollars, and some of the cities and counties in question have tourism programs that are decades ahead of any local initiatives. What’s more, as industrial jobs evaporate from the region, every half-informed county in the Southeast is eyeing tourism as a potential source of income.”
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That’s it in a nutshell.
I see developing tourism as one part of a much, much larger long-term plan that needs to happen at the City and County level. To make it work here, we’re talking millions of dollars in investment over at least a decade. I’d argue it’s worth the risk, but only as one piece of a puzzle that includes: investment in technology infrastructure; attracting smaller, sustainable businesses (rather than hoping to land a factory); making it as easy as humanly possible to start businesses here in the first place; giving some support to innovative local businesses that could bring regional money into the area (the next RJ Rockers, basically); making quality-of-life issues a priority (again, to make the area attractive to new businesses); creating some means of exporting talent and resources we already have (the HC Farmers’ Market is a simple example of this); and, something that tends to get overlooked, creating a local PR machine to tell people all over the region that Spartanburg is the place to invest your money because … well … look at all the cool stuff that’s happening here.
I think all of this can be done without it being a shell game, but there’s no way around it costing taxpayer money and taking year before we see any concrete returns.But, done correctly, the risk can be spread around and the money can be used on relatively safe bets.