Carmel takes a look at how much money to give to its Chamber of Commerce.

For the past several years, the Carmel City Council has routinely included a $40,000 placeholder in its annual budget for the Carmel Chamber of Commerce. The idea is to promote the city’s commercial interests to thousands of residents, tourists and prospective business owners. Some years the council awarded as much as $57,000; the average over seven years is $35,000.

But when the 2017-18 provisional budget was presented to the council May 9, the line item for the chamber: zero.

In a curious exchange with a tense twist, Councilmember Bobby Richards pressed City Administrator Chip Rerig during the council meeting for an explanation why.

Rerig said the chamber hadn’t submitted a request. “We need to know what the recipe is for what the chamber wants to do with the money,” he said.

“So it was staff’s decision to not put it in there?” Richards asked.

“That was my decision, absolutely, sir,” Rerig replied.

Six days later, Richards is holding office hours across the street from a popular community gathering spot, the Carmel Post Office. He unfolds a small folding table that looks like a mini ironing board, smooths a navy tablecloth on top and lays out the proposed budget and a list of capital improvement projects.

“I was surprised there wasn’t a placeholder [for the chamber],” Richards says. Rerig dismisses it as a timing problem; he says he received a draft letter outlining a request for $55,000 on May 11, two days after the meeting. When council considers the budget next on May 23, Rerig says he will seek the council’s direction on how much to allocate to the chamber.

It’s not the first time there have been questions about city money going to the chamber. Last year, the council gave $55,000, but not without first demanding certain services, like listing every Carmel business – even nonmembers – on the chamber’s website, providing educational seminars for business owners, and welcoming new business owners to the city.

Ben Beesley, president of the chamber board, says the organization is doing everything the council asked, including going out to meet new business owners, which he and Rerig do together every Friday. The money the city chips in helps defray the chamber’s costs, like the $140,000 it spends annually on a visitor’s center in Carmel Plaza. Beesley says the center greeted nearly 15,500 visitors from Oct. 1, 2016-March 31, 2017, a 22-percent increase since moving from the Eastwood building by the Hog’s Breath Inn on San Carlos Street. The chamber’s total budget for 2017 is $613,420.

Meanwhile, chamber CEO Monta Potter is retiring after 14 years, and the board is interviewing replacements. Beesley expects to announce a new CEO within two weeks.