By EDWARD HUSAR

Herald-Whig Staff Writer

The Quincy Convention and Visitors Bureau is thinking about severing its relationship with the Quincy Civic Center Authority and becoming a more independent agency.

The bureau's governing board sent a letter to the Civic Center Authority earlier this month stating its desire to terminate the interagency agreement between the two organizations.

The bureau has even talked about moving its headquarters out of the Oakley-Lindsay Center and into the Villa Kathrine, which functions as the city's Tourist Information Center. Some QCVB members feel the agency lacks "visibility" inside the OLC.

However, bureau Chairman Charlie Doan met privately Wednesday morning with several members of the Civic Center Authority and said he was having a change of heart and didn't want to terminate the agreement. The bureau's board still must act on Doan's recommendation.

"It remains to be seen if the executive director (Holly Cain) and the other board members

support Charlie in his efforts to rescind that action, which we hope they will. But we'll have to wait and see," said Civic Center Authority member Hubert Staff, who is chairman of the agency's Finance Committee.

The tenuous status of the relationship between the two organizations is causing a major complication in the Civic Center Authority's budgeting plans for next year.

At Wednesday's Civic Center Authority meeting, Staff announced plans to help fund maintenance and operational costs for the Oakley-Lindsay Center by reducing the Convention and Visitors Bureau's funding by about $30,000 in next year's budget.

Some members of the bureau board don't like that idea. Joe Wand, vice chairman, believes the tourism agency is entitled to its full share of revenue generated by the city's hotel-motel tax.

"They are taking another $30,000 from tourism to help operate the OLC," Wand told The Herald-Whig. "It's a major cut in our budget."

Staff defended the proposed budgetary arrangement.

"It's not a fairness issue," he said. "It's a matter of trying to make both of these things work -- tourism and the operation of the Oakley-Lindsay Center."

During his budget presentation, Staff noted that the Civic Center Authority is tentatively forecasting expenses of $1.47 million for the fiscal year that begins May 1. That's $44,413 more than the authority's projected income.

But Staff said the Finance Committee will whittle the deficit so a balanced budget can be presented at the April meeting.

As part of the budget, the authority, which controls spending of revenue generated by the city's hotel-motel tax, is changing some of the accounting procedures for money that goes to the Quincy Convention and Visitors Bureau.

For example, the bureau traditionally has paid a third of the OLC executive director's salary and 30 percent of the administrative assistant's salary, a total of about $40,000 this year. Staff is proposing that the bureau no longer make these payments to the OLC, but he wants to reduce the amount of hotel-motel tax revenue going to the bureau by a proportionate amount to "net out" these expenses.

In addition, Staff proposes reducing the amount of money sent to the bureau even more -- by about $30,000 -- to help cover rising costs for OLC maintenance.

Staff is asking that the net allocation be reduced to about $81,000 next year, enough to qualify the bureau for a full matching grant from the state.

"We haven't finalized it," he said. "We're in discussions right now with QCVB as to what the relationship and the services will be for this coming year."

He said maintenance costs on the 13-year-old building are rising. In addition, the OLC is expecting to pay about $17,000 more in bond payments this coming year for the civic center's construction, and this obligation will jump by $13,000 more the next year.

The tentative Civic Center Authority budget also calls for giving 3 percent cost-of-living pay raises and 3 percent bonuses to nine full-time employees.

"That bonus will be dependent upon certain measures of success that will be developed," he said.

-- ehusar@whig.com/221-3378