As you are aware, visitors to Burnett County have made a substantial impact in many ways. Our purpose today is to introduce a program that will expand tourism's positive economic impact to more days of the week. All businesses and most wage earners in Burnett County are either directly or indirectly affected by tourism expenditures. Increasing visitor revenues, benefits not only the businesses who are selling directly to the visitors, it serves to improve wages, provide better shopping choices close to home and also increases tax contributions. Taxes are not necessarily a bad word when someone else is helping foot the bill for improved local services such as roads, fire and police, water, etc.
Tourism is essentially an export commodity, as visitor dollars come from outside of the area.
A dollar spent by a visitor in one place is spent and re-spent throughout the community, multiplying and broadening the scope of its original impact. More and more people gain more and more money. The actual worth of that outside dollar is usually multiplied by a factor of 1.5 to 2 times in a community such as this. Once we accept this opportunity, we can see that everyone stands to benefit from visitors, and therefore has a stake in contributing to a program designed to bring in visitors at specific periods of the year and times of the week. Like every project that involves a good number of great people, to be effective, this program will require the cooperation between businesses, organizations, attractions, UW-EX, local and state government and the people who represent these entities.