DATE: Wednesday, November 26, 1997          TAG: 9711260656

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA 

SOURCE: BY LANE DeGREGORY, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: MANTEO                            LENGTH:   68 lines

GIVING DARE COUNTY TOURISM A BOOST TOURIST BUREAU'S NEW DIRECTOR HOPES TO ATTRACT MORE BUS TOURS, CONVENTIONS.

Bringing more bus tours to the Outer Banks, convincing convention organizers to host meetings here in the off-season and touting barrier island vacations on television all are on the itinerary of Dare County's new tourist bureau director.

Carolyn McCormick, a 35-year-old Chicago native, moved into her Manteo office Monday.

This week, she will begin meeting with her 15-person staff to talk about ways to attract more visitors to the area.

``Hopefully, we'll have a problem with too many tourists. That's what we want,'' McCormick said Tuesday. ``We don't really need to do a whole lot to get people here for the summer. It seems those peak weeks already are filling up. But we haven't even scratched the surface yet in attracting the group tour and state meeting markets for the shoulder seasons.''

The former Managing Director of Culture and Leisure Services for Lubbock, Texas, McCormick said she has had a lifelong dream of living near an ocean. She saw a job posting for Dare County's tourist bureau director on the Internet and immediately applied. Although she had never visited the barrier island beaches before arriving for an interview last month, she said as soon as she smelled the sea she knew she wanted to stay.

``Lubbock wasn't what I wanted - where I wanted to be,'' she said. ``I did everything I thought I could do there. There are so many opportunities here as well as the chance to enjoy a better quality of life.''

Besides overseeing the tourist bureau's full-time staff, McCormick will supervise 20 seasonal employees who run the Outer Banks visitor centers during the summer. She will report to the 13-member Dare County Tourism Board. And she will control a $1.3 million annual operating budget funded entirely by taxes on tourism.

McCormick will earn $77,000 annually - about $12,000 more than former tourist bureau director Alvah Ward Jr., who resigned in June.

``We liked her forthrightness, her experience with working with boards and her enthusiasm,'' Dare County Tourism Board Chair Renee Cahoon said of McCormick. ``We thought she could bring us to the next level - and carry Dare County's tourism market into the 21st century. She combined everything we were looking for with herbackground in administration and marketing.''

Before leading Lubbock's convention center, libraries, coliseum, parks and arts efforts, McCormick served as deputy director of tourism and film development for the state of Indiana. Her experience with the 300,000-square-foot Texas civic center has shown her that the Outer Banks ``doesn't really have adequate meeting space to solicit large state or even regional meetings and conventions,'' she said. ``So I advocate looking at that market and getting additional meeting space for the area.

``It could be ideal to have a hotel come in here and build that space,'' McCormick said. ``But we need to have the whole community behind such an effort. I'll definitely be exploring that option.''

Other areas McCormick plans to pursue include soliciting major corporations to buy beach vacation packages as incentives for their employees, filming television ads to air in markets within driving distance of Dare County and pushing eco-tour and history-type trips for the off-seasons.

``You've got a lot of diversity here to attract a wide range of visitors,'' McCormick said. ``There's lighthouses, fishing, watersports on the beach - and a small town feeling in Manteo. Shopping looks to have popped up quite a bit. And golfing is emerging.

What we need to do is promote fun on all levels, for everyone in the family.''

McCormick is married to Dr. Mark Somma, a political science professor at California State-Fresno. She said he hopes to find a job closer to her new Nags Head home soon. The couple has two daughters who moved with their mom to the Outer Banks.

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