The Gadfly is a series of letters offering commentary on local issues and published in the Warrensburg Gazette.

Well, I should have known better. The Greater Warrensburg Area Chamber of Commerce and Visitor Center (GWACC&VC) finally got around to responding to my Sunshine Law request for certain documents related to the tourism tax. They insisted on charging for the privilege of obtaining copies of the documents to provide to the public, although some turned out to be barely-relevant and others, such as meeting minutes, didn’t say very much.

So far, they’ve violated two provisions of the Sunshine Law. The law (RSMo 610.023.3) requires them to make the records available by the end of the third working day following the date they received the request. They received it on Tuesday, June 26th, which meant they should have had the documents available by quitting time on the 29th. Their response that they wouldn’t have the documents available until July 13th wasn’t postmarked until July 5th. The second violation is that they failed to provide, upon my request, written certification that the cost of reproducing the documents was reasonable, as required by RSMo 610.026.1.1.

Now as to the contents of the documents provided:
• I requested minutes of all Advisory Board meetings since last August. If the documents are to be believed, either the Advisory Board responsible for oversight of the expenditure of over $50,000 in tax dollars has not met since January, or not all the minutes were provided. According to the minutes, the ex-officio member from the City staff continues to ignore those few meetings that were held. Minutes don’t comply with RSMo 610.020.6.
• I requested copies of all marketing plans since the initiation of the tax; it appears that the initial and only marketing plan was written for the 1999-2000 year and had no specific strategies.
• I asked for budget documents and expense records; I was provided a spreadsheet showing expenses by general account categories without any background information – and several accounts didn’t even add up! I’m having trouble reconciling their lodging tax income report with the City’s summary report. In addition, the budget documents totally fail to account for the $23,106 carry over previously reported from their fiscal year ending in September 1999.
• I asked for cooperative marketing documents and got lots of extraneous pages and nothing to show if the projects did any good. Actually, tourism tax revenues (thus lodging establishment revenues) began to decline about the time the two projects went into effect!

I’ll take a closer look at the documents and report on them in the future. Meanwhile, I’ll post data and analysis as I find it at www.olddrum.net/tourtax. And, I’ll be going back to them for more data – but this time I’ll make sure I examine the paperwork before I pay them for copies!