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Sunday, September 27, 2009
Creative Extras A Distraction
In the past year, Santa Fe has spent almost a half-million dollars boosting its international designation as a Creative City and promoting "creative tourism." Some of that money came from state and private sources, but at least two-thirds of it came from the city's own budget.
What did Santa Fe taxpayers get for their money? Not much.
For example, the city paid contractors $10,000 to design a new Web site, www.santafecreativetourism.org. That total included an initial list of possible links for the site at a cost of $2,500.
That's pretty pricey for a Web site that turns out to be remarkably unsophisticated — even amateurish. A number of the links don't work. (The ongoing chore of updating the list has been taken over by a city intern.)
The site is also boring — no surprise that it has generated exactly two blog comments in the six months or more it's been up and running. Worse yet, both are postings from the one city councilor who has made creative tourism her pet cause.
But worst of all, the new creative tourism site's main feature appears to be a rehash of the city-hosted Conference on Creative Tourism, which cost $446,000, and is now ancient history — it took place an entire year ago.
The conference, obviously, has been the biggest single item in the city's creativity budget. About 400 people, from 15 different countries, attended to talk about things like how to be a creative tourism entrepreneur and what the future for creative tourism cities might hold. They got to sample Santa Fe's high-end cuisine at a special tasting and toured Rancho de las Golondrinas. The city also spent an additional $14,000 with a local publisher to print an expensive book, released this month, that like the Web site, is a rehash of the year-old conference.
The point of the conference and related hoopla, according to city officials, was to build on Santa Fe's designation in 2004 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as a "Creative City," most notably for folk art and design.
Creative tourism, for the uninitiated, is travel "directed toward an engaged and authentic experience, with participative learning in the arts, heritage or special character of a place." Translated, we'd guess that means people would visit Santa Fe to learn how to make red and green chile, see the Spanish and Indian Markets, learn to make folk art at markets or museum workshops, or even just to sample the Santa Fe Fiesta.
The problem is, tourists have been coming to Santa Fe for years — long before the UNESCO designation and the contemporary fuss over "creative tourism" — to do those very things. They also attend our music festivals, explore our public lands and engage in other forms of "participative learning" — taking in an archaeology lecture series at one of the upscale hotels, for example, or attending a Great Books seminar at St. John's College.
A second point: For the past decade and more, these tourists increasingly have come from all over the world.
In other words, people already know about us and they know why we're special. So it shouldn't take a $450,000 conference to promote Santa Fe to foreign visitors or, really, anybody else.
Moreover, by sponsoring Web sites and books with outdated content and less than breathtaking design, the city has actually detracted from Santa Fe's established image as a highly creative place.
The UNESCO designation was a nice honor for the city, and all by itself should give a boost to the city's tourism economy. And we understand the need to promote that economy — the recent economic downturn has shown us how trouble in one area of the economy can ripple across the whole.
City officials are also right to point out that the honor carries some financial obligations, like attending Creative Cities network meetings. With a dozen-and-a-half UNESCO designated Creative Cities scattered around the globe, those obligations aren't going to be exactly cheap.
But city officials should quit spending money on "creative" extras until they can get them right.
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