Lake Placid - Essex County Visitors Bureau has contracted with Egret Communications (www.egret.us) to guide a planning project designed to engineer future tourism for Essex County to meet the desires of communities and the tourism industry.

The goal of this planning project is to envision a sustainable tourism future for Essex County which will contribute economically to the people and communities of the county, which will help the county and its citizens realize important goals, and which will maintain the lifestyle and community character that is important to people living here.  The planning project will focus both on “dreaming” about a perfect tourism future and facing practical matters to make that a reality.  It will culminate in an action plan that is very specific, including designation of responsible parties and timetables for action.

This project is designed to build specific plans for five key destinations within Essex County:

1. North Elba
2. Wilmington
3. Schroon
4. Ticonderoga
5. Moriah

Each of those Essex County communities has its own unique set of community goals, needs, concerns, and tourism opportunities.  The experiences they offer match up best with various visitor profiles and the steps each needs to take to move toward success (on their own terms) vary by the circumstances unique to the community.  Each needs to have tourism engineered to circumstances and opportunities specific to the community.

Those five plans will be woven into an Essex County Destination Master Plan that integrates the specific needs, actions, and engineering in a comprehensive manner to ensure that:

1. each local destination makes its moves in a supportive environment, and
2. successes multiply beyond the boundaries of local communities.

The process of building a tourism master plan for Essex County is as important as having and using the plan itself.  That process needs to bring the various businesses, organizations, and governmental entities that have strong interests in the success, marketing, investment, development, growth, and management of tourism into a strong, more collaborative relationship.  All sides need to be heard in the process – and all sides need to feel they have been heard and are involved in collaboration.  The process itself will be designed to strengthen and restructure the partnership among all the players that guide, support, participate in, and benefit from Essex County’s tourism economy.

The planning process that Egret has outlined includes six crucial steps:

1. Assessment
2. Analysis
3. Designing the Future
4. Charting a Path
5. Integrating the five Destinations’ Plans
6. Unveiling the Master Plan

A tourism destination plan needs to be “owned” by the destination’s partners.  That is, Essex County’s citizens and tourism community should feel it is their plan; they should be determined to achieve its goals; and they should be committed to working to carry it through.  The collaborative process of building the plan will revitalize and reorganize the partnership among the tourism community, political leaders, citizens, resource managers and supporters in a way that achieves that goal.

Specifically, each of the five targeted communities needs to feel ownership of its plan – and to acknowledge that success of each community’s plan is also dependent on success at a county level.

A tourism destination plan needs to be based on good tourism sense.  Egret Communications will manage the process of creating the plan to balance between writing a plan that includes the dreams of Essex County’s destinations and tourism reality.  Egret will guide the process to make sure that goals and actions in the plan are reasonable and practical.  Each component of the plan will be there for a reason – a reason that makes sense to the host community and in the greater context of how tourism works.

The finished plan will be designed to work in a practical manner.  It will both embody the aspirations of each community and prescribe a set of actions that have a solid basis for success.  The plan will have timetables and responsibilities laid out clearly, so everyone can see what is to happen, when, and who is responsible for moving each action forward.

The process of building the destination master plan for Essex County, and the individual plans for each of the targeted communities will be conducted in a transparent manner.  Egret will be responsible for keeping each stage of the planning process on a dedicated web site at www.essextourismplan.com

The process itself is planned to last about eighteen months.  We anticipate an unveiling of the new Essex County Destination Master Plan in the fall of 2009.

Key Contacts

For the Lake Placid, Essex County Visitors Bureau

James McKenna

518-523-2445 extension 102

james@lakeplacid.com

Point Person for setting up meetings (for Lake Placid - Essex County Visitors Bureau)

Nancy Decker

518-962-4805
nancy@lakechamplainregion.com

For Egret Communications

Bob Harvey

417 683 6881

bobharvey@egret.us

www.egret.us

The planning process is supported economically by the Lake Placid - Essex County Visitors Bureau and the New York State Dept. of Environmental Conservation Adirondack Smart Growth Program.  The proposal for economic support was endorsed by each of the target communities and Essex County Government.