 - The Riverton City Council approved almost $80,000 in Tourism Asset Development grants this week, pledging funds to more than a dozen community organizations to promote tourism and events in the city.){kind=link}
(Riverton, WY) – The Riverton City Council approved almost $80,000 in Tourism Asset Development grants this week, pledging funds to more than a dozen community organizations to promote tourism and events in the city.
The Riverton Chamber of Commerce was awarded the largest grant this week, at $25,000, while the Riverton Rendezvous Committee received $10,000 and the Riverton Depot Foundation received $9,500.
Other TAD grant recipients included:
- Fremont County Air Service Team: $7,500
- Fremont County Fair: $5,000
- Rendezvous City Beef Round-up: $5,000
- Riverton Youth Soccer Association: $5,000
- Riverton Raiders: $4,000
- Rocky Mountain Rebels summer and winter car shows: $4,000
- 1838 Rendezvous Association: $2,000
- Riverton AutoCross: $1,000
- CATS Museum: $500
- Riverton Museum: $500
The council also set aside $7,000 in a “new opportunity fund” for future projects.
Difficult decision
Councilmembers Mike Bailey, Karla Borders and Karen Johnson were on the committee that reviewed the TAD grant applications and made the funding recommendations that the council approved this week.
Borders said the decision was “really tough,” because the city received almost $178,000 in requests from 19 organizations but only had “about $86,000 to work with.”
Mayor Tim Hancock agreed that it can be challenging to “figure out where (the money) is going to actually best benefit the community.”
“That’s where it gets difficult,” he said. “But it’s tax dollars, (and) that’s important. It’s tax dollars that are meant to be spent in a very specific way, in terms of ensuring that we’ve got tourism coming to Riverton.”
The Wind River Visitors Council established the TAD program to help Fremont County communities individually promote their towns and cities, staff said in a memo to the council this week.
The TAD program receives 25 percent of the total annual revenue generated by Fremont County’s lodging tax, and funds are allocated to towns and cities based on the percentage breakdown of where lodging tax revenues were generated during the previous year, according to the memo.
“Each community will utilize these funds to help them grow their tourism economies by investing in new or expanding existing tourism related services, events, improvements, signage, facilities, attractions, points of interest and promotional activities,” WRVC’s TAD policy document states. “The goal is to increase visitor spending by encouraging visitors to stay longer in Fremont County.”
For more information, call the City of Riverton at (307) 856-2227.