Tourism arm a failure?

The county had planned, Grover said, to use the majority of that surplus for prepayment of outstanding bonds.

Also troubling the commission chairman is transient room tax receipts that he says are at the same level as 1999, despite about a 30 percent increase in businesses in Utah County during that time.

"I've just reached the conclusion that this is a failure," Grover said. "The way it's being run now, it's just eating up more and more money. . . . It's obviously not working very well."

The Utah Valley Convention and Visitors Bureau contends that 1999 was a "spike year" in which hotels in the county reported a large increase in occupancy.

During a presentation to Utah County commissioners last month, UVCVB officials reported an 8.7 percent increase in transient room tax receipts through September from the same period in 2004.

"Since the privatization, we've had continued steady increase in (transient room tax)," UVCVB president and CEO Joel M. Racker said Tuesday.

Racker said he was first made aware of Grover's concerns with the bureau's progress during Tuesday morning's Utah County Commission meeting.

"I didn't know they were measuring our results today with 1999," he said. "I got here in 2003, so that's really what I've been keeping track of, the past three years. And we have had significant steady increase each year — 2004 over 2003, 2005 over 2004."

Racker said the additional funding is needed to build on that upward trend.

"I realize that we have an aggressive budget," he said. "We're asking for additional funding to help us continue the momentum and get the effort going. Fortunately, two of the commissioners agreed with us and voted in favor of this."

The UVCVB's 2006 business plan calls for continued marketing of Utah Valley as a leisure and business travel destination. Its goals also include an increased effort in out-of-state and regional marketing and the utilization of online tools — namely its Web site, www.utahvalley.org — to increase the bureau's effectiveness.

Racker said the UVCVB will also increase its focus on establishing public-private partnerships between the bureau and area businesses. That, too, was a topic of criticism from Grover.

"Their approach is failing," Grover said. "They were going to go out and get all of this private money through partnerships. You can look through the numbers, there's basically zero. After three years, they've come up with no private partnerships."

Racker agrees that partnerships are needed but said saying there have been none is inaccurate.