Published June 2001

Tourism, economic growth top Edmonds’ agenda

By Kimberly Hilden
Herald Business Journal Assistant Editor

The Greater Edmonds Chamber of Commerce is an organization in constant motion.

Last month, there was the Edmonds in Bloom Spring Festival, in which the 300-member chamber was involved.

This month, the chamber is busy planning for the Taste of Edmonds, an annual weekend festival in August that brings in almost 60 percent of the chamber’s funding.

“It’s a little risky,” Executive Director Shari Nault said about the chamber’s reliance on that one event. As a consequence, the chamber is developing another fund-raising project, a classic car show with a '50s flavor scheduled for September.

That’s not the only project the chamber is working on.

Recently, the Edmonds chamber, staffed by Nault and Office Manager Jan Vance and led by a 16-member board of directors, began working with the city to review codes and ordinances to see if any need to be revised or if permitting processes can be made more fluid.

And the chamber is looking at the type of businesses it would like to invite to Edmonds, a community covering 9 square miles with a population of 38,610, according to 1999 official estimates.

“We don’t have a lot of land, really, to do development in, so we do have to be fairly selective,” said Nault, who became only the third paid executive director in the chamber’s 94-year history when she was hired in 1999.

Another aspect the chamber must take into account is preservation of the downtown’s “essence”: the quaint shops, the view corridors, the visitor-friendly atmosphere the merchants have cultivated and the multitude of flowers maintained by the city’s “extensive flower program,” she said.

“People come to Edmonds because of Edmonds,” Nault said about the city that has been voted “Western Washington’s Friendliest Town” by KING-TV’s “Evening Magazine” Visitors Poll for the past nine years. “That kind of places us in the market as that ‘beautiful community in bloom by the sea,’ ” she said.

This year alone, the chamber will advertise those amenities in 50,000 rack cards, which will be companion pieces to ads placed in travel publications.

The chamber holds its membership luncheons on the fourth Thursday of each month at the Edmonds Yacht Club. Sign-in begins at 11:30 a.m.

For more information about the chamber, call 425-670-1496, send e-mail to chamberofcommerce@edmondswa.com or visit the chamber’s Web site, www.edmondswa.com.

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