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Grand County commissioners press tourism board on big jump in executive director pay and contract scope
Summary
Commissioners probed a proposed expansion of the Grand County Tourism Board executive director contract — from an administrator role to a $180,000-a-year executive-director contract plus a $130,000-a-year public-relations contract — and asked for clearer scope, dates and budget alignment; the board paused final signatures and asked staff to return revised contracts.
The Grand County Board of County Commissioners spent a large portion of its Aug. 27 meeting questioning a proposed restructuring and pay increase for the county's tourism administration. County Manager Moyer presented a proposed executive-director contract with Org/OAR Communications that staff said would total about $180,000 plus $30,000 in expenses annually for 2024, while a separate public-relations contract would run about $80,000 plus $50,000 in expenses per year.
"We were feeling... we weren't getting exactly what we needed from the marketing company," Cheryl Spezia, a member of the Grand County Tourism Board, told commissioners. She said the tourism board shifted an 'administrator' role into a broader executive-director position to add leadership on marketing, sales and data analysis, and that the move had produced positive interim results. "We felt extremely positive of where the results were going," she said.
Several commissioners said the proposed increase — for an annualized combined county commitment in 2024 approaching the high hundreds of thousands of dollars when both contracts were counted together — looked large and needed clearer justification. One commissioner said the math initially presented made the compensation appear far higher on a per-hour basis until the numbers were recalculated; another asked how many full-time equivalents the contract represented. "If it's still just one person and it's a 100k increase… is it two people now?" a commissioner asked.
Tourism board members and contractors replied that the executive-director contract covers multiple staff (the contractor would provide an ED plus two supporting staff) and absorbs prior volunteer administrative work now being paid. Ron Ellis, representing the tourism board, said the board had voted unanimously to support the change after seeing results and that the board planned to issue a new RFP as the marketing firm's contract nears its end.
The county manager recommended the board direct staff and legal to correct ambiguous contract language and return the contracts to the BOCC with explicit annualized figures and matching 2024/2025 budget entries. The board agreed to revisit the contracts next week with clarified numbers and dates; no contract signatures were finalized at the meeting.
