The Woodstock Area Chamber of Commerce is reorganizing its board leadership and refocusing its core mission, even as the fate of the organization’s role in marketing and economic development in the local community hangs in the balance of ongoing discussions with municipal officials.
Loren Fisher, the newly named Chamber president and the proprietor of the Focus gallery in Woodstock Village, spoke on Monday about the changes taking place at the business association and the organization’s plans to reinvigorate its role and work in the community.
“Our focus is on making the Chamber more valuable to our members,” Fisher said. “We’re looking to expand marketing efforts, increase educational offerings, improve communication, and create more opportunities for members to connect, whether through business partnerships or casual monthly mixers.”
The Chamber’s future role in promoting area businesses, economic development initiatives, and tourism marketing has been the subject of considerable debate and public discussion at meetings of the Woodstock Selectboard and the outgoing Economic Development Commission (EDC) for the past year. The selectboard will hold yet another public discussion about all aspects of marketing Woodstock, its businesses and new business recruiting efforts, other economic development initiatives, and tourism at its next meeting on Thursday, June 26, at 6 p.m. at the Woodstock Town Hall. One of the issues at hand is which entity — the town or the Chamber — will oversee the municipality’s promotional efforts, particularly regarding the town’s marketing website and social media outreach activities moving forward, especially as Woodstock moves forward with plans to hire a full-time economic development director who’ll be based in Town Hall. That position is expected to be filled by summer’s end.
Marketing initiatives for Woodstock — including maintenance of the town’s promotional website and oversight of a contracted social media consultant — had been the joint purview of the Chamber and the EDC for the past eight years. The website URL, woodstockvt.com, is owned by the Chamber and has been under the business association’s control since the early 2000s. The continued operation of the website has been the subject of some contention between the town and the Chamber for months, especially as the effort to establish a full-time economic development office in Town Hall has heated up.
“We still haven’t heard anything definitive about the website at this juncture,” Fisher reported. “They are still rewriting the [Memorandum of Understanding] that was previously executed,” he added, referring to the selectboard and municipal manager Eric Duffy. “They’re not going to show it to us until they’ve decided what it should say. Presumably, that is going to be part of the discussion on Thursday night.”
The new executive officers of the Woodstock Area Chamber of Commerce include Fisher as president, Bruce Grosbety of the Woodstock Inn & Resort as vice president, Tambrey Vutech of Keller Williams Realty as secretary, and Allison Gaffney of Mascoma Bank as treasurer. Current and newly named members of the expanded board include Kimbel Biele of Elevation Clothing; Denel McIntyre, M&T Bank; David McKay, The Shire and Jackson House inns; Kim Smith of Scoops and 31 Central Street; and noted regional musician Jim Yeager.
For more on this, please see our June 26 edition of the Vermont Standard.
