The city of Sisters has built a strong tourism base, from its acclaimed rodeo and quilt shows to its outdoor experiences. But Sisters also grapples with economic development and big challenges, from wildfires to housing shortages.
City officials are working on providing more affordable housing options for residents. And earlier this year, the Flat Fire burned about two miles northeast of the city. The blaze destroyed roughly 23,000 acres and five homes.
Scott Humpert is the executive director of Explore Sisters, an organization tasked with managing tourism in the city. He joins us with details of how Sisters is aiming to keep the industry sustainable in the region.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The city of Sisters has built a strong tourism base, from its acclaimed rodeo and quilt show to its proximity to outdoor adventure. It’s also grappling with challenges from wildfire to housing affordability. Scott Humpert is the executive director of Explore Sisters, which is focused on balancing the positive impacts of tourism with local livability and the stewardship of natural resources. Scott Humpert, welcome to the show.
Scott Humpert: Hi, Dave. Thanks for having me.
Miller: Yeah, thanks for joining us. When did Sisters start to become what people know it as today, with those Western facades?
Humpert: The Western facading actually started back in the 1970s, in most part thanks to the developer of Black Butte who wanted someplace, a community for their guests to be able to go, and that’s when it all kind of started. It just was a slow build over the last couple of decades. Tourism really took off in the last 15 years in Sisters, where we’ve grown from a town of about 1,000 people to about 3,700 today.
Miller: What does tourism mean for Sisters at this point?
Humpert: Tourism has really evolved. My organization is what’s called the DMO, a Destination Management Organization. In the past, we were really about marketing and filling hotel rooms, and that was kind of the name of the game. And in recent times, we’ve realized that there’s a bigger picture to this tourism thing, both good and bad.
The economic impacts are great, but we can also love places to death. So my job is to find that balance in there, and that is an extreme challenge. But I think it’s right to do by our community so that it’s a great place for our residents to live, but also a great place for our visitors to come and enjoy as well. And without that balance, I don’t think either one of those are going to thrive.
Miller: On the economic side, some areas in Oregon that are very tourist dependent also have difficulty paying for services that year-rounders and tourists rely on, like police and fire. How much does tourism put into local coffers?
Humpert: We are funded by a portion of a local lodging tax. So when a guest stays in a hotel, the local municipality, whether a city or county, collects that funds and then often a DMO or a Chamber of Commerce gets a percentage to kind of reinvest into the economic development side of things.
Here in Sisters, we collect about $1.1 to $1.2 million in that tax a year. Two-thirds of that stays with our city government, goes into the general fund and largely funds our local public safety. We received one-third to put back into that.
So tourism really is paying their fair share in terms of local livability. That looks different in different communities. Sometimes that’s supporting streets and parks, like I said, public safety and things that the residents really benefit from. And often, that’s an unknown part of the tourism story in local communities.
Miller: Travel Oregon does a resident sentiment survey broken up by region. It’s not so granular that we can say this is what folks in Sisters say, but in Central Oregon as a whole, people thought that the environmental, social and cultural impacts of tourism were more negative than positive. They saw the economic impacts as the opposite, as more positive than negative. What do you do with this information?
Humpert: Well, that was an interesting result from the survey. I think Central Oregon was the only region of the tourism regions, defined by Travel Oregon, in the state that did have that sentiment. And I think largely that’s fueled by the rate of growth that Central Oregon has experienced in the last couple of years, the impacts that COVID had and just the inability to keep up with the infrastructure with the number of people that are out here.
We’re a very popular tourist destination for outdoor recreation, and then when we see places like Smith Rock and other really popular places get loved to death … So figuring out how to manage all of that by diverting people to maybe lesser known trail systems or small rural communities, like Madras and Prineville, and the opportunities they have out there, rather than just put everything in Central Oregon on to Bend.
We’re actually doing a local resident sentiment survey through Oregon State University, that we should have the results of by the end of this year, to kind of put a microscope under our own community here in Sisters and see how that relates to the overall picture in Central Oregon.
Miller: That’s geography. I’m also wondering about time. The rodeo is in June. The quilt show is in July. The Folk Festival is after Labor Day – it’s in September. How do you spread out people in the rest of the year?
Humpert: A lot of what we do is still … We do a lot of marketing and promotions. We focus our investments in the shoulder, in the offseason: so that’s spring, fall, winter. We don’t do a lot of marketing in the summer. We have those big events which bring influxes of people throughout the summer, rodeos in June, quilt shows in July. We encourage new event development to happen in those offseasons. We have issues with weather, and in recent years, we’ve had issues with wildfire and smoke impacting outdoor events and that’s largely what we have capacity for.
So it’s really figuring out how to not only spread that out throughout the year, but also, now that we’re able to, through marketing, highly target our customers and our visitors, we’re looking for people that have a sustainable mindset, that are looking to take care of the places that they visit. [We’re looking for people] that do have that discretionary income to invest in experiences and go out to eat and shop in our stores, to provide that economic impact for our local businesses – which are all mostly independently owned and operated mom and pop type of businesses.
Miller: There was a groundbreaking in Sisters just last week for a new affordable housing complex. What is housing availability and affordability like right now? And we’ve got about a minute left.
Humpert: Yes. Affordability is a challenge. Sisters is not an inexpensive place to live. We are also a hospitality-based community, so we have a lot of service workers that work in our local businesses. And those two things don’t often match up. We have more inventory than we have in the last, probably, five years now, with a lot more multi-family units going up, several new developments. But Sisters is largely built out to its urban growth boundary. The city itself is looking to expand that. What does that mean for future affordable housing and the residents of the city? [We’re] trying to get our arms around the affordability of the community so we can maintain a positive experience for our residents, and then in turn, for our visitors.
But it is a challenge. I feel it personally too, having moved here a couple of years ago from the coast. It is a very big challenge when you have a family of five. And as a director of Explore Sisters, I felt it appropriate to live in the community that I’m serving. So we had to make some sacrifices to be able to afford to do that.
Miller: Scott, thanks very much.
Humpert: Yeah, you bet. Thanks for having me.
Miller: Scott Humpert is the executive director of Explore Sisters.
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