by Max Marbut
Staff Writer
Citing its budget, Visit Jacksonville eliminated two positions Monday, terminating the roles of Vice President of Tourism and Marketing Mya Surrency and Director of Corporate Communications Lyndsay Rossman.
“Mya and Lyndsay served us very well,” said Visit Jacksonville President and CEO Daniel O’Byrne.
The marketing organization is contracted by the Duval County Tourist Development Council to promote and secure business and leisure tourism in North Florida.
It is funded through bed tax revenue and partnership agreements with local businesses.
“We’re like a lot of organizations and the City. We’re going through preparation to present a budget to the TDC and ultimately, to the City Council,” O’Byrne said Thursday.
Visit Jacksonville has 20 people on the payroll following the departure of Surrency and Rossman.
“They’re trying to get their budget in line and they were forced to make staff changes. I hate to see it. They’ve lost two strong anchors,” said Tourist Development Council member Fred Pozin.
The communications and public relations activities at Visit Jacksonville have been assumed by The Dalton Agency through a contract with Visit Jacksonville to provide advertising production and placement services.
O’Byrne said he’s evaluating how Visit Jacksonville can be more effective generating room nights and therefore bed tax revenue.
“We’re scrubbing the financials and looking for efficiency,” he said.
O’Byrne, who inherited Visit Jacksonville’s 2010-11 budget when he took the job in November, said the payroll reduction represents “real savings.”
While he wouldn’t quantify a specific amount, he characterized the payroll reduction as “in six figures.”
He said there “may be some more payroll savings, but not at this level” before the next quarterly meeting of the Tourist Development Council Aug. 3, when Visit Jacksonville’s 2011-12 proposed budget must be submitted.
“I don’t think we’re done yet,” said O’Byrne.
At the council’s meeting May 19, Visit Jacksonville asked for additional funding for advertising and marketing.
O’Byrne asked for $219,000 for the marketing fund plan plus $100,000 from the Convention Grant Fund for a 90-day sales campaign and a $200,000 Business Development Fund to expedite Visit Jacksonville’s ongoing marketing effort to increase hotel occupancy and room rates in Duval County.
The commission voted to approve the request, but not before O’Byrne was questioned about why Visit Jacksonville was over its staff salary budget by $50,000.
Pozin asked why the organization was “so weighted on payroll costs that you don’t have money to spend on marketing.”
O’Byrne said payroll represented about $1 million of Visit Jacksonville’s $3.2 million budget for 2010-11.
“We’ll have a chance to address those issues next fiscal year,” he said.
Surrency said Thursday her position was eliminated in a corporate restructure and that she was “actively looking for a new opportunity.”
Rossman said she wasn’t sure of her next step.
O’Byrne moved into Visit Jacksonville’s top executive post Nov. 8. In April, he hired Dennis Tracy for the newly created position of senior vice president of destination sales and marketing.
The two had worked together at the Little Rock Convention and Visitor’s Bureau, where O’Byrne was CEO before being recruited to Jacksonville to succeed John Reyes.
Reyes resigned from Visit Jacksonville in March 2010 to become president and CEO of the Monterey Convention & Visitors Bureau in California.
Tracy served as director of sales and marketing in Little Rock.
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