The Board of Directors of Visit San Luis Obispo County – formerly the Visitors and Conference Bureau – is beginning to explore new funding methods to create a more sustainable and predictable funding model and to break the organization’s annual cycle of fundraising. The goal is to deepen the pool of marketing dollars in order to put SLO County’s marketing efforts more in line with some of its tourism competitors. The organization has formed a taskforce representing nearly every community in the county to look at forming a new tourism business improvement district (BID) that would mirror the county lines and has the potential to raise $2.5 million (up from Visit San Luis Obispo County’s current total of $940,000).By comparison, Monterey County raises close to $8 million annually to attract visitors. The money will be raised through additional tax assessments that constituents – or lodging guests in this case – pay. All properties—from hotels to RV parks that pay transient occupancy tax within county borders – would potentially be members of this new BID, should there be enough interest to move forward with this initial concept. This potential county BID would be in addition to numerous individual community BIDs that currently exist, which bring in collectively close to $4.2 million annually by assessments on hotel bills typically ranging from 1 percent to 3 percent depending on the community. The taskforce will evaluate the structure of a potential BID and assessment. The total process is expected to take up to one year. A marketing plan on how the additional funds would be utilized is also planned for early 2014 to help communities understand the value of the additional assessment. Typically initiating formation of a BID in California requires submission of petitions from businesses which will pay at least 50 percent of the assessment followed by public hearings and the opportunity for protests.