Editorial: Taking care of business

Chamber-VB join ?forces? It comes down ?to how you define it...|

“Consolidate”: To combine two or more things into a single more effective or coherent whole. - Dictionary.com.

Ah, how sweet. To “consolidate.” It’s like a soppy, warm, everlasting hug.

Oh, wait. Dictionary.com has a follow-up definition of “consolidate”… let’s see what it says. Whoa! “To discard the unused or unwanted items of, and organize the remaining.”

Hmm. Well, that’s a little different.

The reason these two definitions of “consolidate” should be of keen interest to more than just local etymologists is that they’re at the heart of the question currently being raised about whether two of the Valley’s most important economy driving organizations - the Sonoma Valley Visitors Bureau and the Sonoma Valley Chamber of Commerce – should operate under a single Chamber-led umbrella.

Whispers about combining the two business associations have been floating around ever since our highly regarded Visitors Bureau director Wendy Peterson announced she was stepping down after 15 years as Sonoma’s Welcomer-in-Chief, a tenure that saw the Sonoma Valley truly leap out of the bottle as a Wine Country destination with a national reputation. Several local business folk with consolidation on their minds recognized that if there was ever a logical time to consider pooling resources it was before the VB filled the open executive director’s position. (The whispers grew to full cocktail party conversation when we ran a story asking the very question on March 6.)

Now, there’s no denying the Chamber and VB are different beasts – a chamber of commerce typically looks internally, at how local businesses can network to become greater than the sum of their parts. A Visitors Bureau reaches out externally – to attract outside dollars to help pay for those aforementioned parts. Meanwhile, the ultimate goal is shared: a healthy and vibrant local economy.

Is Chamber-VB consolidation in Sonoma a good idea? Jury’s out. Some towns such as Healdsburg combine the two; others don’t. Few towns, however, have such out-of-towners potential as Sonoma.

Which is likely why officials from the Sonoma Valley Visitors Bureau have been relatively lukewarm about the whole suggestion of a Sonoma Valley Chamber of Visitors Bureau Commerce (I came up with that name, and expect full credit it if catches on). The VB’s growth potential is especially vast as we move further out of the recession and the bureau’s non-grape marketing innovations – Olive Season; the Girlfriends Getaway – have kept the tourism embers glowing during the slow months. The bureau’s Holidays in Sonoma Valley program helped land us on Travel + Leisure magazine’s top 25 “best towns for the holidays” list, a nationwide survey. Take that, Napa.

So who could blame Visitors Bureau officials from essentially saying – just let us keep putting “heads in beds”; that’s what we’re good at.

Still, members served by both associations continue to question whether there’s a redundancy in services – and whether there’s an opportunity to streamline some level of operations (if only to better streamline local and outside dollars into Sonoma’s economy).

It’s a discussion worth having, at the very least.

By the way, Dictionary.com offers a third definition of “consolidate,” for those keeping track at home: “To strengthen by rearranging the position of ground combat troops after a successful attack.”

We’ll lean toward the soppy, warm, everlasting hug, thank you very much.

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