Village of Weston
WESTON, WI (WSAU) — Another local municipality is taking a look at their agreement with the Wausau Convention and Visitors Bureau following accusations of mishandling funds and underwhelming performance.
Trustees in the Village of West met in closed session at the end of Monday’s regular board meeting where they were briefed on the situation. Village President Mark Maloney says when they emerged, no action was taken but they will continue to keep an eye on things.
“Right now we are involved. We are under contract until the end of the year,” said Maloney. “We are just going day-by-day,” he added.
When asked if the Village had any specific grievance against the CVB, Maloney played it safe by saying he wouldn’t comment at this time.
He added that no further comment would be given, but that the matter would continue to be discussed over the next few weeks.
In recent weeks the CVB has been accused of mishandling room tax dollars that were collected by the online hotel site Expedia. They were to remit a percentage of those dollars directly to municipalities such as the City of Wausau. But instead, those dollars were funneled to the CVB.
The accusations were the subject of a heated exchange between Wausau Finance Committee Chair Lisa Rasmussen and CVB Director Dick Barrett.
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Rasmussen accused Barrett of not cooperating when collecting the room tax money. “There was no call by you to say, ‘Hey Maryanne (City Finance Director Maryanne Groat), guess what? You might have some room tax coming your way that you’ve not collected.’
“There was no such call. There was no collaboration. There was no outreach to the city to say, ‘City, heads up you may have money coming.’ We would have collected it ourselves. Or there was no outreach to say, ‘City would you like me to do this for you’.”
Barrett explained that when he spoke with Expedia, he gave the company contacts to local municipalities. In giving those contacts to Expedia Barrett said he didn’t think that the company would use CVB for collecting the room tax money.
“He in turn sent us the check. I thought those checks were going to be written to the city, not to me. I shouldn’t say to me but to the Convention and Visitors Bureau. We took care of it and every penny was hand delivered by me with an explanation of what happened. We assisted in getting those dollars to you and you recieved every single penny.”
In the case of Rothschild, officials voted to terminate their one-year contract with the CVB before these accusations came to light. Administrator Gary Olsen said that was due to the Village feeling like the Bureau was not holding up their end of the agreement.
In a recent interview with WSAU News for a Mayor’s Monday segment, Olsen would not elaborate on what those shortcomings were. He only confirmed that the action was taken before other municipalities like Wausau brought their grievances forward and before a Marathon County Sheriff’s Office investigation that cleared the CVB of any wrongdoing, calling the matter a lack of communication between the parties.
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