The Crookston Visitor’s Bureau (CVB) held its first meeting Thursday since its non-profit 501C6 status was awarded. The group elected their officers – Nell DeBoer will be the board chair, Vice-chair is Laurie Stahlecker, Jess Bengston is the treasurer, and Brooke Panzer will be the secretary.
DeBoer said there were many important topics to get through during the first meeting to get the CVB off and running. “We had our first, initial, official meeting, and Amy Finch (Crookston City Administrator) was there as well,” said DeBoer. “She wanted to sit it and kind of figure out what was going on. A lot of meat and potato things we had to get approved. Super excited to get through this process and get on to marketing the city as we want. That’s our main goal – to market Crookston and all the assets we have.”
Among those were continued updates to the agreement between the CVB and the City of Crookston. “We have a lot of things to go through,” said DeBoer. “We’ve gone through a lot to get where we are today. We’ve made a lot of revisions to the agreement between the city and the CVB for the administrative portion of it. And then, the bylaws had to be redone about three times. Eventually, we do want to hire a part-time tourism coordinator. We have the ways to do that. We just want to get everything as smooth as we can first and running well so that person succeeds.”
DeBoer added that Crookston City Councilman Joe Kresl had stepped forward to join the CVB while it gets started, replacing City Councilman Jake Fee, who lost his reelection bid Tuesday. DeBoer said it would be tough to have a liaison with the City Council be involved in the organization’s initial formation and startup and then have to change liaisons after two months. Kresl is the second City Council liaison, joining City Councilman Steve Erickson.
DeBoer also said the group is eager to get to marketing Crookston and providing new opportunities. But before that can get started, an outside group will be hired to reconcile the finances between the CVB and the Crookston Chamber from the past 24 months. “We’ve been here today looking at that,” said DeBoer. “There is a lot to go through. There has been $5,000 allocated for the Chamber/CVB audit. We are now at the point where we want to get moving forward. So, we’re going to have an outside company come in to do a reconciliation of the last 24 months of the old CVB to give to the new CVB. The city is going to pay for that.”
The CVB has also put together a video titled ‘Choose Crookston’ below –
[yotuwp type=”videos” id=”_Eoldw_fQJY” ]
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