Oconee County needs Main Street tourism support

I just came back from a meeting, not one publicized in the newspapers, but an important one none-the-less. This meeting was at the new remote location of the Welcome Center on Nancy Drive in a building leased for the next decade from the Chamber of Commerce. Ever since the Welcome Center moved to there from the old Eagle Tavern site, tourism has suffered dramatically in our county.

Members of the historic sites and tourism committee received Anita Ford's graduate thesis on the marketing and structure of Oconee County's pathetic tourism attempts. Anita does as much as she can, with an able staff of one in Ginny McCown, with almost no significant advertising budget and now well off the beaten path of Main Street. We need to promote Oconee County in creative and original manners to as wide a audience around the world as possible. We do get a story here and an ad there, but we need some big government budgets to really make Oconee County, Georgia known around the world. We will be on the back panel of the next official state of Georgia map for 2006.

It is time to welcome the Welcome Center back to main street in Watkinsville. We need the builder and development communities to come together to plan and develop some office space either behind Eagle Tavern or elsewhere on Main Street with immediate accessibility for Oconee County's number one tourism attraction. There is talk that the Plum Creek facility is losing tenant and the county wants to rent or lease that facility next door to Eagle Tavern.