Council members, don't break your arms patting yourselves on the back. Destination Palo Alto may have been a good idea, but it cost too much for what it pulled in. Visitors come here for business or the university. It was not a huge success.

To the writers at the newspaper: The correct name of the CVB is the San Mateo COUNTY / Silicon Valley Convention and Visitors Bureau. The spelling of the CEO's last name is LeClair.

Only in Palo Alto can a city program lose money and it be hailed a "great success" by the people elected to provide oversight for the public's interests.

I applaud the City Council for starting the "Destination Palo Alto" program and I applaud them more for discontinuing the program. I think it's important to try new ideas and evaluate their usefulness. All too often governments start a costly program and then don't have the political will to end a program that doesn't work. Bravo.

Do I understand correctly that in the last two years our city spent $244,000 for Destination PA and received $187,000 last year and is estimating it will receive $225,000 this year? I don't understand how this can be a success - it seems to have lost money.

And for council members to say this is a good deal? I sincerely hope they don't fund more projects like that. We can't afford it.

Interesting idea. Didn't work out. Move on.

Clearly our council members are clueless. How can they laud this as a suceed? No wonder we are in financial difficulty. I expected more from the new council, but it is more of the usual self- congratulatory backslapping. Is our council as worthless as they appear

Our City Council are lousy business persons. It is scary how poorly they use the tax payers money. Unfortunately, they are in charge of a huge budget which they freely throw around without considering if they are getting the most for their money.

Just think how many road repairs and resurfacing projects they could have done with $240,000.

People, people, please. Let's look at the big picture. Think of all the revenue this effort generated OTHER than the hotel taxes. The CVB booked 9,900 rooms in one fiscal year and anticipates another 12,000 by June 30. Think of how much money those guests spent at Palo Alto businesses! That was one year's worth of sales effort by the CVB, who has a proven track record with San Mateo County. More hotel rooms and visitors with spending money will follow. This is the time for hotels, restaurants, and other tourism-related businesses to support the CVB's continued effort to promote the Palo Alto/Stanford area. As for the naysayers, what are YOU doing to help your city make money? What are YOU doing to help people keep their jobs and keep their businesses open? What are YOU doing to attract visitors and business travelers to your town? Because if they don't come, everyone loses one way or another regardless of whether you are a business owner, a homeowner or a renter.

I discourage people from staying in Palo Alto. If they have to come to Palo Alto, i encourage them to stay in Mountain View or Menlo Park.
Why? two reasons:

1) I am tired of the constant Stanford bashing by the PA city council. The constant whining about too much traffic, how Stanford is evil. How Stanford has to give Palo alto money and build housing and do this and do that in order to get anything approved.
If PA wants to benefit from their proximity to Stanford, which it does very nicely, then they should stop being so two-faced about it--bashing Stanford at every opportunity, while benefiting from the people who come her (as others have pointed out--people come here for Stanford and for business--not for the "tourist" attractions in town)

2) Since the mantra of the city should be "no new net car Trips" as a soon-to-be Assembly candidate always likes to say, then we should discourage people from coming to town. You cannot have it both ways--either you want the money and tax revenue and you put up with the traffic or you discourage people from coming to town.

>”The CVB booked 9,900 rooms in one fiscal year and anticipates another 12,000 by June 30.”

There is no way to know if those bookings were the result of Destination Palo Alto. From Palo Alto Weekly, 2/7/10:

“Susan Barnes, Palo Alto's manager for economic development, wrote in a new staff report that the analysis ‘did not identify any significant differences accounted for by either the presence or absence of a convention bureau, or the rate of transit-oriented tax.’"

> “Our City Council are lousy business persons.”

Or not very observant. From CMR:138:10 (prepared by Barnes) at Web Link

Return on investment is shown as “78% for 2009, including the dollars allocated to the Palo Alto Weekly ($25,000) and for the Visitor Center ($80,000). For 2010, the return on investment is projected at 94% (again including the Visitor Center costs)."

No one caught this glaring error, i.e., spending $240K and earning $173K does not give you a 78% ROI.

Pat--it looks like Larry Klein and gang were misled once again. They were probably told it was a 78% ROI and they believed it. Now when it is explained to them they will claim they were misled (like with the PACT scandal, the HSR vote, our crappy financial situation etc.)
Our council takes no responsibility for their actions.

Misled or not paying attention? Did they even read the report? It's a pretty obvious mistake, but the city manager signed off on it, so maybe that was enough for the council