Residents may voice their opinions on how the city’s Convention & Visitors Board of Commissioners is not publishing its meeting agendas and minutes by contacting their city council members through the city’s website.
A branch of the Columbus Consolidated Government appears to be in violation of a state law requiring it to publish its meeting agendas and minutes to its website for public viewing.
VisitColumbusGA is a false-front marketing pseudonym for the city’s Convention & Visitors Board of Commissioners, which is the entity responsible for the city’s failed tourism efforts. The government agency has no meeting agendas published on the city government’s website and hasn’t published its meetings’ minutes since May of this year.
While it is technically possible the agency has not met since May, that would be highly unlikely given the planning required to host the ICF Kayak World Cup event that just concluded. There is also no notice published on the agency’s website to indicate the board had deviated from its regular meeting schedule.
Although the government agency prefers to wrongfully refer to itself as a “local business,” it is in fact a bonafide subordinate branch of the Columbus Consolidated Government — though it appears to intentionally avoid that fact being prominently displayed to the public.
An example of the misleading labeling and lack of governmental disclosure is readily visible in the agency’s Facebook page. It is safe to assume that the government agency does in fact know it is not a “local business”:
The government agency was first formed through city ordinance number 80-51 on April 29, 1980. Thirty-seven years later, the board elected to “rebrand” the government agency as VisitColumbusGA through a vote on April 19, 2017. It has been operating “under-the-radar” and fronting itself to the public as a “local business” ever since.
It should be noted that the agency’s public-facing marketing website is not the location of where its minutes are published; the minutes can only be found buried deep within the “Boards” section of the Columbus Consolidated Website.
The public-facing marketing website has no public disclosure of the organization being a government agency whatsoever and does not contain any hyperlinks to the agency’s governmental archive of its minutes or meeting schedule.
According to Georgia Code § 50-14-1(e)(1), government agencies like VisitColumbusGA are required to publish their agendas well in advance of each meeting, though no agendas are published on its official government webpage whatsoever.
The same law’s following paragraph, Georgia Code § 50-14-1(e)(2)(A), also requires government agencies like VisitColumbusGA to publish a summary of what actually transpired at every meeting within two business days of the meeting’s adjournment, though the organization has no such summaries published on its official government webpage either.
Additionally, the subsequent paragraph of the same law, Georgia Code § 50-14-1(e)(2)(B), requires government agencies like VisitColumbusGA to publish their official meeting minutes by no later than its next regularly scheduled meeting, though VisitColumbusGA has not published its minutes since its meeting in May of this year.
The lack of compliance has left a four month gap of transparency for the public on what the city government’s tourism board has been up to while it prepared to host the 2022 ICF Kayak World Cup which just ended this past weekend on October 9, 2022.
VisitColumbusGA also failed to publish minutes from its June and July 2021 meetings, leaving an additional two-month gap of missing transparency. The missing minutes are indicated to exist, as they were mentioned during the August 2021 meeting and approved as a batch through a consent agenda. The missing minutes remain unpublished.
The August 2021 meeting discussed a large amount of funds received from the American Rescue Plan. According to the published minutes, the meeting discussed how that funding might be used to help fund VisitColumbusGA via the rest of the Columbus Consolidated Government.
The failure of the government agency to publish its required agendas and minutes raises speculation in the public eye about what the documents may contain. It also raises questions as to why the government agency chose to withhold the documents, knowing full-and-well it was required by law to publish them.
Board minutes published by VisitColumbusGA from a meeting held on April 20, 2022, discussed the organization’s receipt of $1.1 million from the American Rescue Plan. The minutes revealed that the Columbus Consolidated Government asked VisitColumbusGA to provide $75,000 of that federal funding to help the rest of CCG with its marketing efforts for the recent Kayak World Cup event that just took place in the city.
Peter Bowden, the President & CEO of the government agency known as VisitColumbusGA, denied the request of its superior governmental head, stating that VisitColumbusGA had already contributed $100,000 to the Kayak event’s marketing effort and that the remainder of the $1.1 million was already allocated or otherwise spent by the agency itself.
The April minutes made it clear that there was already a growing concern amongst various government agencies that the kayak event was to be a marketing failure, despite the agency’s allocation of more than $1.1 million in federal funding received purely for the city’s “tourism” efforts.
The disclosures further corroborate a leak by an Uptown Columbus employee in September which stated the event was expected to be a financial loss. Though the agencies may attempt to deny it for obvious marketing reasons, the public itself witnessed the lack of attendees and empty parking lots.
In spite of the state laws requiring it, no agendas, summaries, or minutes from subsequent meetings have been published to the government agency's website for further public inspection of the matter.
A total of ten violent shootings also rampaged through the city during the tourism-centric and expensive kayak event that presumably lost the city hundreds-of-thousands if not millions of taxpayers’ dollars.
Residents may voice their opinions on how the city’s Convention & Visitors Board of Commissioners is not publishing its meeting agendas and minutes by contacting their city council members through the city’s website.
Facts are stubborn things — and we’ll keep publishing them, whether city officials like them or not.
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