Monday, April 20, 2020
Since Sept 27, 1879
Retail $2.20 Home delivered from $1.40
THE INDEPENDENT VOICE OF MID CANTERBURY
A CENTURY OF SERVICE
FULL STORY
Delivery time P3
Buying local required P4
P2
An uncertain future By Sue Newman
sue.n@theguardian.co.nz
With its budget almost halved, Experience Mid Canterbury’s board is looking at a future where the district’s promotion will be pared back to bare bones. As part of their cost-cutting exercise to reduce the district’s planned rate increase to just 2.5 per cent, Ashburton’s district councillors decided to reduce the tourism organisation’s budget to just $195,000. And that has meant a total rethink of how that business operates in the foreseeable future as the impact of New Zealand’s Covid-19 closed borders hits home, said board chair James Urquhart. “You can’t argue with what the council has done. “It’s about doing the best by ratepayers,” he said. Board members met with staff from both the Ashburton office and the Methven i-SITE on Thursday to talk through the budget cuts and to ask for suggestions on how the business should be
reshaped within its pared-back budget. “Our operating costs are now clearly higher than our income so we need to have all ideas on the table for the way forward. And staff are coming up with ideas, with new ways of doing things,” Urquhart said. Potentially there could be redundancies as the organisation reshaped for a future where there were no international tourists in the short term, he said. “While we’re looking for all ideas we’re very much about on supporting our team as we go through this, that’s our biggest focus.” All options and ideas were on the table, he said. Board and staff will meet again this week to discuss options, but the timeframe for coming up with a workable plan for the future was quite short, Urquhart said. “This is about how EMC will look going forward. It’s like the stars have all aligned, but the wrong way round. Domestic tourism is all we’ll have and we
are looking at how to do this efficiently with the money we now have. We have to look at the money and see how it can be used the best way.” Experience Mid Canterbury was likely to emerge from this as a pared-back organisation, but it would still have a strong role to play in ensuring the district received its share of what was likely to be a growing domestic tourist market. Unlike many parts of New Zealand, Ashburton’s strongest market had always been the domestic market, but the loss of international tourists would still have a massive impact, Urquhart said. Government funding for the tourism industry in the new environment, however, was likely to be directed to regional tourism organisations rather than district organisations, he said, and that meant, while Mid Canterbury had always worked with the regional Canterbury organisation, the need to do this had increased. “We have to make sure our flag is getting waved.”
Local news for local people Mid Canterbury’s only locally-owned daily newspaper BE SAFE BE STRONG BE KIND Ph 03 307 7900 to subscribe!