Tourism Commission withholds support of equity-based preservation plan

The Tourism Commission voted to not recommend the city’s proposed Equity-Based Preservation Plan to City Council, which is expected to consider the plan next month. The 5-4 vote, which failed because it didn’t have a majority of the 11-member body, takes away an expected piece of support for the plan that proponents said will help to promote tourism through preservation of historically important sites.

The decision to not recommend the plan was based on some commissioners’ view that the plan didn’t include empirical data showing the possible economic impact on tourism if it is implemented. There was also some concern that the implementation steps were unclear, as well as how the plan could make best use of the city’s Hotel Occupancy Tax revenue dedicated toward historic preservation.

“What I’m struggling to understand is its intersection between the heritage tourism funding, the 15 percent (of hotel tax funds) that are allocated for historic preservation,” said Commissioner Ed Bailey, who early in the meeting voiced support for the plan. “In a perfect world this process would help create better-focused decisions of which projects the grants are funding. This process would help narrow the needs.”

The plan outlined 14 goals organized into three themes: “What We Preserve,” “Who Preserves,” and “How We Preserve.”

Among the recommendations were: broadening the scope of what sites and stories are considered historically significant, engaging a wider array of people in preservation efforts, and improving the methods and tools used to preserve sites.

A key recommendation added during the public engagement process was the identification and support of heritage tourism sites, which Cara Bertron, program manager of the Planning Department, said would foster tourism and economic growth by preserving unique Austin landmarks.

Commissioner Greg Chanon used his questions for Bertron to continually raise his view that the plan lacked a strong link between historic preservation and increasing tourism throughout the area.

“It’s pretty vague about how it’s gonna support tourism, and I really just generally think it’s outside the scope of what we do,” Chanon said.

“One of the requirements using (hotel) tax for preservation is it’s gotta have a tourism component to it. I’m just concerned about saying we think this is a great plan that we haven’t really seen.”

Bertron made the case that the plan, which was crafted over three years after roughly 2,500 pieces of community input, was designed to let City Council play a large role in its implementation, including identifying any additional funding sources needed to complete its full scope.

“There are recommendations that if implemented or when implemented can move forward including more proactive outreach to potential historic property owners, more engagement around historic preservation, including the heritage tourism grant, more demonstration of interpretation that could lead to additional grant proposals or more focused grant proposals,” she said. “I don’t think the plan itself specifically says make these, make changes X, Y, Z. It doesn’t say that. It is a citywide plan that is very broad.”

Chair Daniel Ronan, who voted in favor of the recommendation, said the plan would provide some needed guidance for the city’s use of historic preservation grants that are funded via hotel taxes.

“This document is in support of preservation writ large and as the body that oversees (hotel) taxes, or rather recommends to Council ways to improve the allocation of (hotel) taxes for expenses such as use of historic preservation funds, this equity-based preservation plan helps to provide a context in which we can actually talk about those investments,” he said. “Before this, it’s really just been the city spending the money, but there’s no sort of guiding document that’s more thematic in approach that talks about its broader value.”

Photo by Larry D. Moore, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Austin Monitor’s work is made possible by donations from the community. Though our reporting covers donors from time to time, we are careful to keep business and editorial efforts separate while maintaining transparency. A complete list of donors is available here, and our code of ethics is explained here.