The Spokane Regional Convention and Visitors Bureau will seek to appoint a blue ribbon committee of board members and other business leaders to help it address long-range funding issues.

Separately, the CVB and the Greater Hartford (Conn.) Convention and Visitors Bureau will open a joint office in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 2 to go after meeting business there.

The blue ribbon panel would serve in an advisory capacity and "validate third-party evidence justifying a long-range funding plan for the CVB," says a plan, titled the Spokane County Strategic Tourism Plan, that the organization's board adopted recently.

"I'm going to ask some very important people in our community to meet maybe once a year" on the panel, says Harry Sladich, the CVB's president and CEO. The agency hasn't begun recruiting members for the panel yet, but would release the members' names after the panel is formed, he says.

"I'm going to ask them, No. 1, 'Where else should we go for money?'" Sladich says. "The bed tax will only take us so far. I can't raid the pots of the other organizations" that receive tourism-related money, he says.

"No. 2, if elected officials are beginning to pull back on our funding, I'm going to use the members of the blue ribbon panel to call the officials up and say, 'What are you thinking?'" rather than calling them himself.

Under the tourism plan, the CVB will work to increase its annual operating budget to $4 million by 2014 from $3.1 million now, Sladich says.

He says the CVB's budget will have to grow over time to improve its marketing of Spokane County as a destination for visitors and meetings. He says the CVB has been achieving its goals, with visitor spending rising in 2008 to $832.5 million, from $805.4 million in 2007, and direct tax receipts generated by travel spending maintaining their level of $61.9 million in 2008 despite the recession. Meanwhile, travel industry employment here remained at 10,110 employees.

To build on those numbers, he says, "You need more money to say 'Spokane, Wash.,'" in a more far-reaching way. "Seattle has a $12 million budget, although they have a lot more rooms than we do. Boise has my budget, and it's a smaller community."

It will cost the CVB about $80,000 a year to support the Washington, D.C., office, which will be located at 1715 15th St. NW and will be staffed by Karen Staples, of the Hartford CVB, Sladich says.

"We flew her out here so our hotel partners could meet her," he says. "They love her. They love her contacts."

Staples has worked in the nation's capital for the Hartford CVB for about three years, says Keith Backsen, the Spokane CVB's director of sales. The Spokane and Hartford agencies plus the Greater Madison (Wis.) Convention and Visitors Bureau have been working together through an alliance so they can afford to compete against destinations such as Chicago, Las Vegas, and Orlando, Fla., for events that move to different locations across the country, Sladich and Backsen say.

The new strategic tourism plan includes other board-related goals, including developing the board's monthly meeting agenda so that it engages and involves the board.

The problem, Sladich says, is that the agency isn't taking advantage of the leadership and strategic-planning ability of board members, who run businesses and could help the agency set its direction for the future.

"They come. We report. They listen. They leave," Sladich says. "We're not asking for their advice," and that's a mistake, he says.

In a third board-related goal, the plan calls for setting up a board committee that would determine the best long-range nominating process to ensure the attraction of the "best and brightest" members of Spokane's business community to serve on the board, Sladich says. "People are busy," and it's hard for them to serve, but the CVB isn't even asking top executives here what their community-service obligations are, when those obligations might end, and whether they might be willing to serve on the board when they complete their other obligations, he says.