Stephanie Schoenrock

A tourism project that Visit Minot says out-performed expectations ended last December with money in the bank.

The Minot City Council approved a service agreement with Visit Minot Tuesday to enable the local convention and tourism organization to spend leftover money appropriated in January 2021 for the Tourism Recovery and Resilience Project. The city allocated the remaining $94,967 from the original $477,000 that had been set aside from the city’s economic development sales tax.

The Tourism Recovery and Resilience Project, which focused on sports tourism, sought to revive the tourism industry following the COVID-19 slowdown. The project promised $10 million in economic returns on the investment.

“We had an economic impact of over $13 million,” said Stephanie Schoenrock, executive director at Visit Minot. “We underspent and over-delivered. We try to do that every single day.”

The new agreement that runs through the end of this year is broader and doesn’t restrict spending to the original project goals. Schoenrock said the dollars would go to continue the tourism work already being done. Those include marketing and trade show efforts, sports events and convention services and maintaining a visitors center and website.

“The deliverables that we have proposed is what I can confidently say will be done in 2024,” Schoenrock said. The money will be distributed to Visit Minot based on reimbursement for expenditures, past or future, in 2024.

Schoenrock also presented data showing its visitor center has had people from 50 states, 23 countries and five Canadian provinces sign its guestbook. Twenty-eight percent of credit card spending in Minot comes from residents from outside of Ward County, she said.

Recent data acquired by the North Dakota Department of Commerce shows $320 million in visitor spending in Ward County in 2023, she said. Visitors are those living more than 50 miles outside of Minot who spend more than three hours in the community. The data also lists a tax savings of $962 per household because of the tourism dollars being spent, she said.