Conventional wisdom has it that San Angelo is a great place to meet
"Got another one!" my friend Kimberly Torres wrote me last month.
The sales manager for the Convention and Visitors Bureau, Kimberly was sharing the good news that the Academy for Teachers of Young Children had chosen to bring its annual conference to the McNease Convention Center in July 2013 — and July 2014.
San Angelo is reeling in conventions with greater frequency these days (five in recent weeks), thanks in large measure to the hustle of the CVB staff, with whom we partner in the recruiting and servicing of conferences, conventions and meetings.
Before exploring how we do that, a little background about our partnership:
The city contracts with the CVB to market San Angelo to tourists, conventions, conferences and meeting planners, all of whom inject out-of-town dollars into the local economy. To fund its efforts, the CVB receives 47 percent of the city's 7 percent hotel occupancy tax. (The state also collects a 6 percent hotel tax.)
The city's Civic Events Division receives 48 percent of the tax to help subsidize the maintenance and operation of municipal facilities that help attract visitors, including Foster Communications Coliseum, the Convention Center, City Auditorium and the RiverStage.
The San Angelo Cultural Affairs Council receives the remaining 5 percent to support the local arts.
Under Texas law, the hotel occupancy tax can be used for such efforts — so long as they yield visitors' heads in local hotel beds.
The CVB takes the lead in marketing San Angelo (and, often, our municipally owned facilities) to organizations hunting for places to host meetings, conferences, conventions, events and sporting competitions (think softball tournaments and the like).
Under the direction of CVB Vice President Pamela Miller, Kimberly and Jenni Hutchison, CVB director of sales and servicing, beat the bushes looking for groups that are looking for places to have events.
Recently, they have wooed the state associations of pork producers (it's bringing its 2012 and '13 convention to San Angelo), postal supervisors (coming in 2013), taxidermists (2012), and newspaper editors, wildlife managers and conservationists, the county Extension agents, cotton ginners, and vocational agriculture teachers. (We also landed a regional Catholic youth conference in 2012 that will be huge!
San Angelo Newspaper - News
Kimberly and I teamed to bring a quarterly meeting of the Associated Press Managing Editors (the state newspaper editors organization) to San Angelo so we could show off our community in a pitch to land the state convention in 2013.
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An Interview with Ben Montgomery of the Tampa Bay Times ...
Our off-season interview series continues with Ben Montgomery . He's an award winning, Pulitzer Prize finalist staff writer for the Tampa Bay Times. No one does long form non-fiction better. Like the interview from October with his colleague Michael Kruse, this has very little to do with sports and nothing to do with baseball. We have some of the best journalistic minds in the industry working in our back yard, it'd be a shame not to take advantage of that. We discuss his career, his thoughts on the current state of media, what he would change about sports and much more. Enjoy.
Erik Hahmann: I'll start you off like I did your buddy and co-worker Michael Kruse, how did you come to work for the Times? (give a little of your background if you could)
Ben Montgomery: I was kind of aimless in college. I wanted initially to study ag business or vet medicine and go back to Oklahoma to help my brother and granddad run the family farm. "No," said my wife, who is much smarter than me, and somehow I found journalism. We graduated in 2000 and borrowed my dad's pickup and snaked from Russellville, Ark., to Watertown, N.Y., trying to find me a newspaper job. My resume was crap - some part-time work for the Russellville Courier and the Arkansas Fish and Wildlife Magazine . Somehow I got an offer from the San Angelo (Texas) Standard Times , a beautiful little paper in West Texas, where they let me write about a high-profile crook. Within a year, the Times Herald-Record in Middletown, N.Y., called and I moved up and quickly came to understand that I wanted to do stories, not articles. And it seemed like the best place to do that was at the St. Pete Times ; they were doing the best work in the business. I sent a few resumes down but I couldn't get much traction. Then the Tampa Tribune offered me a job and I took it thinking I'd try to beat the Times every day, thinking maybe they'd notice.