Council to end funding for Visit Ballarat

THE future of Visit Ballarat, recently rebranded to Made of Ballarat, is unclear after Ballarat council made the decision to end the organisation’s funding.

The tourism body was set up in 2012 following a decision by the then council and is currently paid for by the municipality to the tune of $2.7 million a year.

Mayor Cr. Samantha McIntosh said the decision was based around value for money.

“We’ve done quite a bit of work looking at other models around the state and around the country and we can see that there’s a significant amount of money that we’re putting into tourism,” she said.

“Compared to the return it’s not necessarily as good as some of the others, or what we would like to see. It’s really important that we get the best results for our rate payers.

Ms McIntosh said the move was about streamlining the way the city is marketed.

“I’ve been here across three different council terms and seen this delivered in different ways, internally and externally. What we’re seeing with that external deliver is an extra layer of expense, a duplication of services and a duplication of staff, without out seeing that duplication of result.

“If the tourism numbers were going up in a great manner, I guess we would be looking at it differently, but we’re not seeing that.

“We believe that [tourism] shouldn’t be siloed in one area… it should be part of everything that we’re doing as a city.”

The move by the City of Ballarat puts at risk several jobs at Visit Ballarat, with the council seeking to readvertise some positions and make new hires within existing departments including economic development, Creative Cities and the events team.

Tourism and marketing of the city will be coordinated by a newly created position, similar to how the Creative Cities Strategy is currently delivered.

Volunteers roles and the tourism hub at the town hall will remain largely unchanged.

“They will absolutely continue,” Cr McIntosh said.

The funding agreement between the city and Visit Ballarat still had about 12 months to run before renewal, but the municipality will look to exercise early termination clauses in the contract.

City of Ballarat CEO Justine Linley said that money would not stop flowing to the tourism body, rather, “It’ll be by discussion and negotiation with Visit Ballarat.”

Visit Ballarat currently employs about 16 people and the organisation’s board chair, Paul Armstrong, said he was “disappointed” by the move.

“Obviously we’re very disappointed but we respect the fact that the council has the right to do that. They are out main supporter,” he said.

“They seem to feel that the best approach for them is to spread tourism across several pillars.

“We felt over the last 12 months we’d made some significant changes. Some of us are relatively new to the board and were put in place at the annual general meeting late last year. Only this morning [Tuesday] we’d finalised our five-year strategic plan, which we’d put a lot of time and effort into. So we were ready to go for the next step.”

As Visit Ballarat is an independent association, there is scope for the organisation to keep operating.

Mr Armstrong said that’s something that would need to be decided in the future.

“I’ve organised a meeting for early next week to see if we continue on, primarily, a smaller, member-based organisation,” he said.

“Our main concern at the moment is just to make sure our staff, members and industry are made aware of everything and that there’s potential to transition to some of the staff into the new structures put together by council.”