Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 9, 1993 TAG: 9301090087
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-5 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: DUBLIN LENGTH: Medium
TOURISM GROUP CONTINUES ACCREDITATION WORK
New River Valley HOSTS has elected officers for 1993, with Peter Huber, assistant Pulaski County administrator, succeeding Dublin Comfort Inn Manager Kevin Meadows as president.John Sankey of Blacksburg is the new vice president; Gary Elander, administrator for the town of Dublin, will be secretary; and Layne Burcham, with NationsBank in Pulaski, treasurer. Mildred Laine will continue as director of the visitors center, which opened at the Comfort Inn in April 1991.
HOSTS is five months into an 18-month program to qualify for state accreditation as a tourism destination. It recently completed a comprehensive survey of all tourist-related businesses in the New River Valley, Bob Thomas reported at the organizational meeting Thursday night.
"That survey was done by a class in tourism at Virginia Tech," said Thomas, chairman of the committee working on regional certification by the state. "We will use that to figure out how we are going to market the region as an entity."
But if the region is serious about tourism, he said, it will have to provide funds for a tourism organization paralleling the New River Valley Alliance established when the region secured a similar state accreditation as being ready for industrial development.
Thomas said the two organizations should be separate and distinct, each with its own director, but that they might share office space and staff.
Businesses that deal with tourism also must contribute to the tourism program "if we intend for it to be a real development tool for our area," he said, or local governments will be reluctant to do so.
"It can't all be done by volunteers as it is now," he said. Businesses who are HOSTS members provide volunteers to staff the visitors center seven days a week.
Meadows, the outgoing president, said HOSTS has come a long way since it started about three months into 1991.
"I don't think we had any idea that we'd be at the place where we're at now in two years," he said.
It started as Pulaski County HOSTS and expanded to cover the New River Valley when the local governments of Pulaski, Floyd, Giles and Montgomery counties, the city of Radford and the six chambers of commerce in those localities went together to enter the new state tourism accreditation program.
Meadows predicted that the New River Valley will become one of the first regions in the state to earn this accreditation.
"We always need more members. We always need more volunteers," he said. "But we're headed in the right direction. . . . We're doing what we started out to do."
Huber, Thomas, Elander, Mark Wigginton and Dave Hart of Pulaski and Richard Johnson, Claytor Lake State Park superintendent, were voted as board members to serve through 1993.
Voted onto the board through 1994 were Joanne Bell, Charles Cook and Bill Hubble, Dublin; Gene Nuckols and Burcham, Pulaski; and, through 1995, Charlie Whitescarver and Deborah Brown, Radford; Bill O'Neill, Blacksburg; Lori Leonard, Christiansburg; Wayne Quesenberry, Pulaski; Debbie Lineweaver, New River Community College; and Meadows.
Appointed to the HOSTS board from the various chambers were Marty Gordon, Radford; Buzz Scanland, Giles County; Kathy Mantz, Christiansburg/Montgomery County; Ben Crawford, Pulaski County; Janice Yearout-Patton, Floyd County; and Sankey.