A smaller pool of money might be available to community groups that sponsor community events in 2010 and beyond.

Members of the city's Tourism Promotion Committee on Wednesday discussed taking on a bigger leadership role in helping to market the community outside the area and decreasing its annual contributions to various community events.

Each year, the Tourism Promotion Committee divvies up about $100,000 collected from a city hotel room tax.

"I think that a lot of this money should be going toward marketing. Some of these community events are nice, but if they are really nice and people want them, why are people not stepping up to help pay for them?" said Rick Roesler, the hotel industry representative on the committee.

Over the last decade, the Tourism Promotion fund has contributed money to 30 to 40 community organizations and events each year, including the Portage Area Chamber of Commerce. This year, community groups asked for about $185,000 in funding for event costs, marketing and subsidization.

The committee has about $120,000 to spend.

Common Council member Addie Tamboli, a member of the committee, said Wednesday that the marketing money could be used better by marketing Portage as a whole rather than each community event individually.

"If we can spend our dollars in the same way with consistency, it is going to have more impact than if you shotgun," Tamboli said.

"It is like Vegas," Tamboli continued. "You don't see a lot of individual ads for individual places. It is just 'Vegas is a fun place to go to,' and they all prosper because they get people there."

In recent years, since Mayor Ken Jahn's election, the Tourism Promotion Committee has tried to direct its money to events that generate overnight stays in community hotels - which would feed back into the fund.

Last year, the committee pushed for an increase in the hotel room tax, and the Common Council approved a 1 percent tax increase. Despite the increase, the tax is generating about the same amount of revenue as it did in the previous year.

Wednesday's meeting started with the idea that the panel would have to make some tough decisions about how to divide the fund among those that requested money.

The committee's new direction might have made the pool of money available to community groups putting on events in 2010 smaller than when the meeting started.

Members of the committee suggested that groups were going to have to find other ways to support their events.

"This community is going to have to start getting behind what they want to keep - plain and simple," Tamboli said.

The Tourism Promotion Committee is expected to finalize its 2010 budget in the next two weeks prior to the passage of the overall city budget, which is expected to come near the end of the month.