“Get Millard on the Map!”
Brandi Roberts literally gave that name to a project description she wrote. She did so because a recreation map the state published “several years ago” “didn’t have anything to do with Millard County.”
“That is not OK,” Roberts said.
It appears that will change soon, as Roberts’ Great Basin National Heritage Area and Millard County Tourism is beginning its largest collaborative project to date, Roberts told the Chronicle Progress. It’s possible due to a $49,500 grant the GBNHA Roberts got for it as its executive director, as a result of her project description. About 60.6 percent of those funds will go towards Tourism’s printing and publishing costs, Tourism Director Deb Haveron said.
“We haven’t really done a whole lot (together) to date, so it is kind of a new (collaboration),” Roberts said. “This is kind of the first real big project we are working on together.”
“It’s all good news,” Roberts later said, later citing the GBNHA’s efforts to counter a perception “nationally and maybe internationally” that “there is nothing (in the region) worth saving or preserving.”
Printing and publication costs for marketing, perhaps “the next spring’s printing,” will be covered by the $30,000. A key link made possible through the monies has come in a marketing position to work exclusively to promote the county, Roberts and Haveron confirmed. (Millard is part of the GBNHA, but for its work generally, the area also includes White Pine County, Nev.)
Haveron welcomes the help, as she must put priority on being a Millard County Justice Court judge. She is even not going to a tourism conference in October, but is sending three individuals on her board. The tourism director for 11 years, Haveron has been “managing the budgets” for the county’s general tourism, race track and ATV jamboree.
“It (will) be great to have that person,” she said, remarking that the division’s books need to be updated, brochures need to be ensured to be “stocked up somewhere” and that “those darn websites have to be updated.”
Haveron later said that the next task for the marketing person will indeed be to “get (Tourism’s) website updated.”
“It’s been five or six years,” she said. “It seemed like yesterday and it’s been like five years.”
“I’m excited to get going with (the hiree),” Haveron said.
A “phone-based digital passport” will also figure into the campaign. Users can stamp places and events listed on the passport when they attend, but instead of doing it the traditional way, on paper, they will simply click on their phone. About $10,000 will go towards that, which will be matched by the state of Nevada, Roberts said.
The passport will take “several months” to “get up and going,” said Roberts, who anticipates that it will “be live” “sometimes in late winter or early spring” – the next travel season.
Roberts is also glad that Denys Koyle, one of the founding members of the GBNHA, who lived in Snake Valley and owns the Border Inn on the Utah-Nevada border, recently joined the Millard County Tourism board, Roberts said.
“That was a connection we didn’t have before,” Roberts remarked. “We now have this former board member … on that board.”
Koyle was a board member of the Great Basin Heritage Area Partnership.
In the project description, Roberts told the Utah Division of Tourism, which provided the grant, that the entities will market museums, “rock hounding,” the Pahvant Valley Heritage Trail, the west desert, OHV/ ATV trails, camping and heritage festivals.
The target market will be millennials, “passport people,” “visitors who have ‘already done’ the ‘Mighty 5’ (Utah national parks) and/or are seeking ‘undiscovered’ destinations” and “Nevada travelers,” with a plan to “engage” its target markets through developing and promoting the Great Basin STAMPede digital passport, traditional advertising and “dedicated staff” for outreach, networking and social media, Roberts wrote in the project description.
Roberts has also been in talks with Millard County Commissioner Dean Draper, the commission liaison to the heritage area.
As designated by Congress, four members of the GNBHA’s board of directors, which total 10 individuals, are in Millard County: Abe Johnson of Fillmore; Ron Draper of Delta; Scott Bassett of Delta and Kirk Memmott of Scipio, Roberts said.
Other projects that have linked the two, though not of this magnitude, include the GBNHA giving grants to the county for the Topaz Museum and to Fillmore for the Territorial Statehouse State Park Museum, the Old Capitol Storytelling Festival “and a lot of smaller things to different entities throughout Millard County,” Roberts said.
“We’ve been working with Millard County from the beginning, since we were founded,” Roberts added. “And a lot of those projects we have helped fund, Millard County Tourism has helped fund.”
The GBNHA, one of 49 national heritage areas overseen by the National Park Service, “is one of the last places in the U.S.” that has a “landscape untouched and still in its very natural setting,” Roberts said.
Additionally, Roberts described the agriculture in Millard County as “the way of life (in Millard) in a remote and unspoiled landscape.”
“And so there (are) sites all over the heritage area that we think that people should go visit and know about,” Roberts said, then pointing to “historical sites and museums” like the Topaz Museum and also mountain bike riding and hiking.
“Our goal, our over-arching goal, is to do things that preserve kind of what life is like here, but also do things that help make it economically feasible for people to live here,” Roberts said.
As a result, the GBNHA is “kind of at the nexus of, like, tourism and economic development and historic preservation.” That means the heritage area funds projects “that kind of bring all of those things together,” Roberts said.
The GBNHA has a “tourism element” “because the visitors bring money,” Roberts added.