Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Everybody, it is January 6 at 01:00 in the afternoon. This is the House Commerce and Economic Development Committee. We are joined this afternoon by Jack Lawson, who is the Vice President of Tourism and Marketing for And he is going to talk to us about the task force to look at a convention center for the state. Hey, everyone. Welcome.

[Jeff Lawson (Vice President of Tourism, Lake Champlain Chamber; Hello Burlington)]: Thank you for having me.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Do want us to introduce ourselves to you first? In

[Jeff Lawson (Vice President of Tourism, Lake Champlain Chamber; Hello Burlington)]: the interest of time, that's okay. I can figure it out online afterwards. So, yes, I am Jeff Lawson. I'm the vice president of tourism at the Lake Champlain Chamber. And in that capacity, I run the Hello Burlington Destination Marketing Initiative. Just for context, Hello Burlington is actually a regional initiative. We're not specific to the city of Burlington. So when I use that term, you can think of it as Greater Burlington. Technically speaking, we tend to define that as Chittenden County. It does ooze a little bit into Grand Isle and some other regions like that. Specifically, the reason we call it that is because that's what our market sees when they come visit. They consider Shelburne to be Burlington and Colchester to be Burlington and even South Euro to be Burlington. So we're flexible. We talk to the market. Yeah. Specific to our work, we do promote the region as a great place to live, work, and play. That involves leisure travel, business travel, developing citywide events, as well as promoting the place as a great place to live and work. Specific to the convention center conversation, there's kinda two avenues that we've been pursuing here. I I am cochair along with of the state's economic development department of the state task force on convention center and performing arts venues. As well on the Hello Burlington side, we've worked with a firm called Hunt and Partners out of Chicago to do a preliminary market feasibility study on a convention center in the Greater Burlington area. The conversations are probably gonna cross back and forth between those two avenues. There's obviously a lot of common ground, but every once in a while, it may need to clarify what's what just so people kind of understand. On the London Partners feasibility study piece, that is very specific to Greater Burlington. We did partner with Greater Burlington Industrial Corporation to fund that initial phase and also got some support from the state's economic development office on that. Most important probably to note too here is we do work with about fifteen, sixteen lodging properties in our neck of the woods throughout Chittenden County. It's really probably the first time that that many lodging properties have come together and shown real interest around this. Couple of factors making that happen in particular is the increase in room inventory in the Burlington area. Between '25 and the '27, we'll see about a 50% increase in room inventory in Downtown Burlington specifically. That doesn't include new properties coming in, in Winooski, about a 120 rooms with the Sugar House, Town Place Suites in 2025 in Williston, and some other properties that are in development. This is not the first time Burlington has considered a convention center. Once we got digging on it, we found this is actually the third time since 1994 that the region has actually taken a good look at whether they're ready to sustain something like this or not. I throw that out because a lot of people have mentioned to us that this seems like a pipe dream, and that's something we pulled out of thin air. And, in fact, now it's a very reasonable time for us to be considering an opportunity like this. Once downtown, in particular, has cracked that thousand hotel room threshold, infrastructure of this size becomes much more viable and much more feasible. For us as a region, we're already, like a lot of Vermont, a very, very strong weekend destination. We've had a tough year in 2025. I won't go into the details on that. But, overall, if you look over the last five, ten, twenty years, weekends take care of themselves in Chittenden County as they often do throughout the rest of the state. It's that Sunday night to Thursday night business that's a real opportunity for us. There's definitely shoulder seasons for us. We're more summer oriented than the rest of the state, which tends to to lean more toward winter. But we definitely see the middle of the week business travel as a big opportunity. So for us, as the DMO of the region, destination marketing organization of the region, the chance to be not just a strong leisure destination, but business travel destination at the same time is a particularly potent combination. What we have seen in in relation to specifically to Downtown Burlington, the consultants have come back and said, for the region, there's absolutely an opportunity here. They go through with their methodology, and they take a look at our region. How far are we? What's our airlift through BTV, lady BTV? They talk with scads of meeting planners based everywhere from Boston to Washington and Upstate New York to figure out what the market demand might be. Ask them very basic questions about if Burlington had something like this, would you consider Burlington as a destination? The number they come up with over the last ten years is about 60,000,000 in business lost. That's all kind of hard to measure because you don't know how many people would have submitted a request for proposal to Burlington if they knew that we had infrastructure that could hold a larger conference. But it is a big number for us for sure and one that we felt merited further exploration for sure. We're not really site specific yet. This first phase of the London partner study was really aimed at figuring out if we built something, would they come? Not even so much what would we build specifically, though they did give us some glimpses of what they might suggest in further phases. And also not a site selection process. They didn't dial in and say, hey, you should be right here. This is the spot for you. I will say there are some very, very obvious candidates in terms of commercial lots and buildings. And I can answer specific questions on that if you have them. But we felt strongly enough and consulting partners felt strongly enough with the conclusion of phase one that we're embarking on phase two probably in the next few months and are passing the hat to figure out where we can get some more additional funding to move that one forward. That phase two is really a deeper financial modeling look where they'll take a ten to fifteen year span, say, okay. Here's a rough end of what it might cost to build something like this. And something like this will be more set in stone if it's a 250 room property, a 300 room property, x amount of square foot for exhibition, for ballroom general assembly, x number of breakout rooms kind of thing. Ballpark on what that would cost, ten to fifteen year look at, Okay, what are the financial implications here? How much business could you feasibly bring in? What would the tax revenue implications be thereof? What would the employment implications be thereof? So a lot more hard data to come back in phase number two. On the task force side, we basically started that process with the idea of large convening infrastructure, regardless of what that convening was for, whether it was for a convention, a business meeting, a gathering for a public performing arts type of venue, even dabbled with ideas about, okay, what about an arena or a soccer stadium? We just won a national championship. What what are the things we share there? What quickly became apparent with that task force is those do share one thing, and that's a funding mechanism. They don't share a lot of characteristics after that. Convention center is very much business travel. People wanna get in. They wanna get out. Now I think Greater Burlington has a lot to offer travelers who might stay for the weekend if they're there on a Thursday night. Put that off to the side. Typically, it's a hit and run transaction. If anyone's been to a conference, you kinda wanna get to that thing as fast as you can and get out of there as fast as you can and don't linger. Performing Arts Center is much more leisure travel oriented. People are much more apt to go on an adventure. They're not in a big hurry. They're happy to drive to the Northeast Kingdom if no accounts playing up there and spend a couple nights. It's a much more flexible model. Back to the funding mechanism, however, what we really concluded is is that's really the common ground for large infrastructure like that. Further, without the county governance that our counterparts in other states have, it gets very, very tricky for any one municipality to basically embark on an endeavor of that scale. Even Burlington is our biggest city doesn't have the population base. It doesn't have the financial cloud to tackle a convention center of the scale that we're talking about. Without county governance, we would need to have the state get involved in some way, shape, manner, or form. And the same would go for a larger scale performing arts venue, an arena of any scale, a stadium of any scale. All of our counterparts and I'll point to a couple quick easy examples. Explore Asheville in North Carolina. That's not Asheville. That's Buncombe County, North Carolina. You know? What's the destination Madison in Wisconsin. That's not Madison. That's Dane County, the entire county. So they can they can tax. They can bond infrastructure at a county wide level that enables them the much deeper budgets, bigger budgets that we have, not just for marketing, but also for the development of infrastructure like convention centers. So that's kind of the thing that we walked out of. The task force was kind of our primary conclusion there. And at this point, I've talked long enough. I feel like I don't I'm not sure if I've covered everything I wanted to get out, but sort of talking too much. Is there something I'm forgetting? Meetings for phase two? That's right. That's right. I don't know if you have seen it, but there the interim report did come out in November for the state task force. And I think it's November 2026. We'll have another final report issued out from that. I know there have been questions about I think we're only allowed to meet six times, and I don't know that we solved that here, but we're meeting more than six times. I hope that's okay. We figured it's just it's a big conversation that takes a lot of dialogue back and forth, and we're typically meeting on a monthly cadence at this point in time.

[Austin Davis (Lake Champlain Chamber)]: Yeah. Go ahead, Anna.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Can you

[Emily Carris Duncan (Member)]: explain more about this conversation about the county governance email that would help this process?

[Jeff Lawson (Vice President of Tourism, Lake Champlain Chamber; Hello Burlington)]: Yeah. So for example, all of my counterparts in different destinations around the country, what we laugh about it at a conference is that they wrangle elected officials. They work with the county commission, and they talk about what are we gonna do to fund the tourism industry in order to drive tax revenue. So they work with kind of a fixed body on I don't wanna call it predictable because it's politics. But me, on the other hand, I wrangle hoteliers. Hello, Burlington is is basically a voluntary participation initiative. All of the hotels that we work with, which is about 16 now, recognize the value of marketing and sales for the region, and they recognize the place needs to be promoted. But it gets a little tricky when you get that big and you're wrangling they may be collaborators, but they're also competitors. So there can be a little bit of a lot of internal politics there. There's also a lot of turnover. You know, that that industry rotates quickly. So you every time there's a change in management or ownership, you gotta get out the dog and pony show, head over there, and hopefully keep them within the fold.

[Emily Carris Duncan (Member)]: And an

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: important piece, Emily, is they're putting money into destination. So it's like they're acting themselves. Yeah.

[Jeff Lawson (Vice President of Tourism, Lake Champlain Chamber; Hello Burlington)]: So at a county level, we can just they can implement the tax. And typically, what happens in other places when you implement the lodging tax, rooms tax, hotel tax, whatever you wanna call it, a portion of that is taken and allocated for marketing and sales. We don't do that here in Vermont at the state level. I don't think there's any local municipality that funds tourism in the state of Vermont. I think Manchester might give some money annually. But when you have that county governance, you can go to one body, and you can convince that body that free marketing and sales is a really good thing because the visitors are actually paying for it and it's a lot easier to manage. I say that now.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: That's the

[Emily Carris Duncan (Member)]: point. I'm the study committee for county governance. So it is that means I mean, a lot of the conversation is around emergency services, but I come from an arts background. So I think about community development. I think there's a we do leave a lot of money on the table

[Jeff Lawson (Vice President of Tourism, Lake Champlain Chamber; Hello Burlington)]: We do.

[Emily Carris Duncan (Member)]: Of our proxy structure.

[Jeff Lawson (Vice President of Tourism, Lake Champlain Chamber; Hello Burlington)]: Yeah, we have a great group of core hotels that we work with. If we were to be working with a county commission, our budget would double overnight with the same fees attached. And there'd be a lot less time wasted bringing up the dog and pony show to convince people. Yeah, that's a good point.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Sean, I

[Austin Davis (Lake Champlain Chamber)]: have a question. Right back to you.

[Jonathan Cooper (Member)]: Yes, thank you very much. Can you hear me okay?

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Yes.

[Jonathan Cooper (Member)]: Awesome. So this actually pertains to the same issue that was just being discussed. Madison, Wisconsin and Asheville, North Carolina were sort of used as examples. I think Buncombe County is about twice the population of Chittenden County and even more so in Dane County. Are these comps coming from the hunting group, or are there other municipalities that are a little closer to the scale of the somewhat unusual smallness of our state's biggest city? But are those comps being explored for perhaps other municipalities that and county sort of alignments that are a little closer to the Burlington Chittenden scale.

[Jeff Lawson (Vice President of Tourism, Lake Champlain Chamber; Hello Burlington)]: Yeah. They they did give us some comparisons. I do wanna point out that the comparisons I just made were really around funding mechanism, not so much for the convention center infrastructure itself. But they did give us a series of comparisons. Utah Valley Convention Center out in Provo popped out as one where we are there's quite a bit of alignment between our population size, for example. A little bit less so around the number of hotel rooms. But they did try to give us some comparisons there that rolled out those parameters that would need to be in place from transportation and airlift, hotel room inventory, population size, tax base kind of thing.

[Jonathan Cooper (Member)]: In that example, in Utah Valley, was there a similar county governance? I'm sort of wondering if we're able to also consider examples where a tax structure that does not exist in the state right now is adequate for the purposes of the comparable municipality.

[Jeff Lawson (Vice President of Tourism, Lake Champlain Chamber; Hello Burlington)]: I'd have to I'd have to dig in a little bit to give you that intel on the Utah Valley Convention Center specifically, But I'd be really surprised if there isn't county governance involved somewhat in their funding mechanism. That's really the norm and the standard that we've seen across North America. Should I turn all the way around?

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: You don't have to. Sorry. John just had a large addition to his family, and so he's joining us remotely. Gotcha, gotcha. While they grow a little. Other questions?

[Jeff Lawson (Vice President of Tourism, Lake Champlain Chamber; Hello Burlington)]: Before, too, I should point out, we're happy to share the London market feasibility study with the committee, if that would be helpful. Just let me Is

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: what was presented at the hello bridge?

[Emily Carris Duncan (Member)]: Yes. It's

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: a great I think we've got a solid list.

[Jeff Lawson (Vice President of Tourism, Lake Champlain Chamber; Hello Burlington)]: We consider it kind of public information at this point in time.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Yeah. So I I just wanted to bring the attend to your attention. I mean, we do have Honsai County government, the RDCs Yep. And the RPCs. Is there any ideas, any thoughts about working with them to come up with a way to fund this, to sponsor this, to Mhmm. You know, I'm just why not use resources we already have? Is there something we can do as lawmakers that can help cement that partnership? That's a good question.

[Jeff Lawson (Vice President of Tourism, Lake Champlain Chamber; Hello Burlington)]: I mean, to be perfectly honest with you, I'm a marketing guy. And getting into funding mechanisms is definitely probably not gonna be above my pay grade much longer, but it's definitely not my native habitat. I think we could certainly and then Charlie Baker, for example, has been on our task force and has participated in that actively. In terms of a funding mechanism, they might give suggestions, but it wouldn't be a fast track lever that they could somehow pull unless they can tax at a county level and implement that tax quickly, if that makes sense. But it certainly is worthwhile to involve them in any planning process around that.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: So, very interesting stuff. So, we don't have kindergarten. Well, we do, but it's not really well suited for this kind of thing. We do have some sort of we have some types of sort of special districts. The only way I'm thinking of is our solid waste district where, you know, I remember being part of that decided and we needed a district because county's idol couldn't couldn't support that, created all the special needs. Not that the Soccer Race District would do for this, but I'm wondering if that kind of has been explored if there's any merit to it?

[Jeff Lawson (Vice President of Tourism, Lake Champlain Chamber; Hello Burlington)]: Hasn't really been explored in-depth just yet, but I think at this point in time, the approach we're taking is there aren't many ideas that don't have merit. Way we're configured, we're going to have to be agile, and we're going to have to be creative to how we figure this out. We have started looking into what other what private public partnerships are out there. They do seem to be fairly uncommon, but I think there are a couple out there. We want to dig into that a little bit. I think probably the the the trickiest part of all of this is that convention centers really don't make money themselves. They're they're loss leaders. They're tax revenue drivers. Some entity has to kinda hold the bag on an annual loss in order that all those hotel rooms get filled. The ensuing secondary spend in the restaurants and with the retailers and the area attractions unfolds and happens. And that's probably where we're gonna have some bumps in that road, trying to find out who's going to be that entity.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: I think that's where my question was going. What I understand from all the presentations is, and the report, there is a market is missing, or there's a market need that we are not meeting that need in the state today. So there's an opportunity that we are missing for bringing in revenue. We don't have the typical ways to raise revenue for this construction that has been used in other parts of this country. So the question is, we have a market need, we don't have the money to build the structure, and what do we do now? It's what I'm hearing from

[Jeff Lawson (Vice President of Tourism, Lake Champlain Chamber; Hello Burlington)]: Yeah, I think that's a pretty fair analysis. I think there is the question mark around capital for construction and then another smaller question mark around funding for ongoing maintenance and marketing and promotion. That smaller question mark is a lot easier for us to solve. But it's that first question of that lump sum of money to build something. Where is that actually going to come from? And I don't have a great answer for that just yet. But I do think we've pretty well spelled out that there is an opportunity here and there is a need. In terms of the opportunity side, we look at things like the University of Vermont or Beta Technologies and say, we should be having every single electric aviation conference on the East Coast in Burlington, Vermont. We should be synonymous with that industry as their conference destination. Same goes for the academic stuff at UVM. We're just starting to basically reap the benefits of having planted some seeds up there with them. So they know when you have the annual conference of Dean of Fine Art Colleges that we can host that now. And we have the partnerships to roll that out. We are starting to bump into scale and size, and that's where the convention centerpiece comes in. And in fact, it is probably important to point out a lot of this whole conversation started around Vermont Captive Insurance Association, where their annual meeting is held at one of our partner properties in South Burlington. It's probably the biggest business meeting in the state. I think it's 1,200 attendees for three days. And despite being at the largest venue in the state, it's just been bursting at the seams. And so they actually reached out through economic development to say, well, can we start a process here? At the same time, some of our private hoteliers said, we're just about ready to cross the thousand hotel room threshold. Let's talk about a convention center. So yeah, I think the opportunity's on the other side of this gap, it's the how do we get across the gap is really the question.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: And can you just back up a little bit more and talk about why the Burlington area in Vermont?

[Jeff Lawson (Vice President of Tourism, Lake Champlain Chamber; Hello Burlington)]: Yeah, that's a really, really important question. I think at the end of the day, and I should say before I say anything more, the task force, the state task force came to that conclusion after looking over the factors, talking to experts in the field of meeting planners. What are you really looking for? And airlift and hotel density come in as maybe not the top two, probably prices top the the top one. But you gotta have access. People have to be able to get there easily and get out of there easily, and you have to have enough hotel rooms.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: People walkability was in the top four as well.

[Jeff Lawson (Vice President of Tourism, Lake Champlain Chamber; Hello Burlington)]: Yeah. And the walkability factor is something that makes Downtown Burlington uniquely positioned to benefit here. The consulting firm, not the task force stuff, but the London Partners firm made it very clear saying, you know, a lot of towns that approach us for this kind of work don't have your leisure demand. They're not seeing 60%, 75% occupancy annually across the year, which is why they call us. You guys already are. What we can't do for them is build in walkability. Usually, want us to build a building, and we can do that. We can design that and make it up to spec for whatever the right meetings or conferences are going to be. What we can't do for them is create that walkability experience for attendees so that the attendees actually want to come and be in that place rather than somewhere in the middle of nowhere. And they said, you know, in Downtown Burlington, you've got the airlift, you've got the hotel room density, you've got the lake right there, and then you've got the Church Street marketplace all within walking distance. And and those last two factors are the things that we cannot help destinations with. The fact that you have that already means you're, like, thirty, forty, fifty years in front of some of your competitors who are starting to build out walkable downtowns today.

[Austin Davis (Lake Champlain Chamber)]: Any more question?

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: I didn't go over my sweet tea.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Is there any economic basis to think that there could be tiers? I mean, we're talking about the critical mass that exists already in the winter. For example, what about the Rutland Killington area with the new village they're building, and there's a very active airport committee now looking up starting to kick some rocks there. Yeah. Leaks and recruits demand. Clearly, you're not going to draw in the same large group, but you are going to have

[Jeff Lawson (Vice President of Tourism, Lake Champlain Chamber; Hello Burlington)]: that winter emphasis, and there's some other advantages I to mean, have to think the folks that are developing Killington at this point in time, I don't know much about that project. But if they're putting in hotels, they're thinking about meeting space. To your point about the resort thing, that may be more of what we call incentive and corporate meetings, where it's like a board of 15 to 20 people who come in and are willing to pay $304,105 $100 per room per night because they're the board. For us, it's a little bit of a different animal where we're looking more for associations. That VCIA, I would like that one, and I want 35 other VCAS scale events across the calendar year. We're not basically, there is a range of opportunity is one way of saying it. I think the key takeaway, whatever funding mechanism could be developed could apply to any of them. It could also apply to a performing arts venue or a soccer specific stadium for Vermont Green. I'm just going say that a few more times to get it into the or an arena, for example, anything like that. It's that funding mechanism piece that we are bumping up into now.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Emily? I

[Emily Carris Duncan (Member)]: want to go back to the marketing conversation. So this leads me into conversations around tips and chip and those sorts of things, which all the research that I was doing, marketing became this critical component that by the end of the time, it wasn't being well paid attention to. So the ones that failed didn't have that built up demand. So I'm curious from your marketing background, we talked about this with

[Jeff Lawson (Vice President of Tourism, Lake Champlain Chamber; Hello Burlington)]: the county wide stuff, but it does provide me to think about how we're marketing and how we also are interlinking our regions as we market towards. Yeah. I think for us, as a state that relies on tourism more than 47 other states, that's a mission critical thing to be thinking about, particularly with an aging workforce and brain drain and some of the chronic stuff that we've been facing across my lifetime anyway. Figuring out how to create the connective tissue between the tourism industry, which we tend to think of as somebody's vacation, and these other critical destination specific initiatives of bringing people in to live and work, can pay really, really big dividends in the end. It takes a lot of funding and a lot of strategy work to make that happen. We've definitely seen an explosion of marketing promotion in the pandemic. Everybody got a really stark look for one year of what their cash registers looked like without visitors and put in a great deal of money. And even VDTM's budget increased significantly during that window of time. I'd encourage all of you to look into some of the documentation they've developed, in particular the two tourism economic impact studies from 2023 and 2024. Very, very valuable to truly understand the breadth and depth of visitor impact on the state's coffers, and also some of the destination management work they've been doing, developing documents that we've never had. Again, for a state that is in the top three that need tourism more than any others to never even have had a destination management plan until 2025, kinda shows some anemic funding levels that are that could be problematic. And I believe they'll be going back to facing what their budget was in 2019, which I think was $3,000,000 which is, frankly, I'm not sure. I won't say anything more about that, but that's not a feasible amount of money for them to do the work that's necessary, Let alone create that connective tissue into talent attraction, workforce development, all those other pieces.

[Emily Carris Duncan (Member)]: Yeah, and then, yeah.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Thank you. You're welcome. Anyone have anything else? Austin, do you have anything you want to add?

[Austin Davis (Lake Champlain Chamber)]: Other than that, I'm just here if folks want to continue the conversation, we can use me as a conduit to Jeff and my folks like working, maybe we'd love to

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: live consistently on this. And for the record?

[Austin Davis (Lake Champlain Chamber)]: For the record, Austin Davis, director of the Paraclope Champs. You.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: And I'm on the task force in Boston, and also, funnel questions to me if I can be in touch. Well, thank you so much, Benjamin.

[Jeff Lawson (Vice President of Tourism, Lake Champlain Chamber; Hello Burlington)]: Thank you

[Unidentified Committee Member]: all very much.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: We really appreciate it, and we look forward to more conversations about it.

[Jeff Lawson (Vice President of Tourism, Lake Champlain Chamber; Hello Burlington)]: Absolutely. In terms of the Hunting report, how do I not just see it?

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Okay, great. Anna Grace is our

[Anna Grace (Committee Assistant)]: we make sure that the

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: whole committee gets it, and

[Emily Carris Duncan (Member)]: it gets posted Great, on our website as

[Jeff Lawson (Vice President of Tourism, Lake Champlain Chamber; Hello Burlington)]: thanks again. Thank you.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Thank you. Right, folks, we have a break now until two, so we