Carmel begins to grapple with the question of how to manage tourism in the small city.

Pam Marino here, after spending a couple of hours last night with more than 150 Carmelites gathered inside Carpenter Hall at the Sunset Center to talk about tourism. The town hall organized by the Carmel Residents Association, Visit Carmel and the Carmel Chamber of Commerce was part of an effort by their task force to develop a visitor management plan.

“Is this the hottest ticket in town?” quipped Cathy Ritter of Better Destinations, the consultant hired to assist the task force. Her firm has developed similar plans for dozens of destinations, including Hawaii, Lake Tahoe and Vail.

That plan, dubbed the “Experience Management Plan for Carmel-by-the-Sea,” is being financed in part by the nearly $293,000 the Carmel City Council approved in July as the city’s contribution to See Monterey. The council nearly withheld the money in June but relented after Rob O’Keefe, president and CEO of the visitors bureau, promised the management plan. 

Ritter began work a month ago and has already interviewed over 20 people individually to get a better understanding of the overtourism challenges. She told the crowd that the only solutions that work come from the community, which was why they held the town hall last night. 

Reminding the audience that tiny Carmel with only about 3,100 residents depends on visitor spending to bolster the city’s budget, Ritter soon asked how tourism makes life better in Carmel.

Using a tool that allowed audience members to report their answers via a smartphone or tablet, the words that came up included “revenue,” “diversity” and “vibrancy,” as well as comments about bringing interesting people to town and an array of restaurants. 

Eventually Ritter got to the challenges of tourism, and one of the top responses was parking, followed closely by traffic, crowds, trash, safety and noise. 

One woman who spoke up noted that Carmel was being “loved to death, and that’s a bummer.”

The sentiment over whether to introduce paid parking has been negative in the past, but like the opinion on addresses, that may be shifting. There appeared to be some in the crowd who would favor it as a way to control the flow of traffic in town.

There were people in the audience who remained staunchly against any marketing of Carmel. Ritter replied to one such suggestion: “If you only use social media, are those the people you want to come here? You market to the people you want.”

In other words, the people who will stay in hotels will stay longer and spend more than someone just in town for a day to get their Instagram shots and leave. (See Bixby Bridge.)

Ritter had a cautionary tale to tell, of how in 1993 Colorado nixed its marketing budget of $12 million. The state lost $1 billion in visitor spending the first year, $2 billion the next. Marketing resumed and it took more than 20 years to work revenues back up.

People are going to keep coming to Carmel whether residents like it or not. Residents and leaders are now at a pivotal point where they either figure out how to manage it, or it continues to be loved to death.

The process to develop a plan continues with a resident survey from Aug. 28 to Sept. 21, followed by another town hall on Oct. 8. A draft plan is scheduled for release in November.