March 31, 2008 at 08:33:04

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Private Bureaucracy Threatens Missouri / Kansas History

By clint lacy (about the author)     Page 2 of 2 page(s)

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Douglas County Administrator Craig Weinaug said he did not know the specifics behind the dismissal. But he said county commissioners had expressed concerns to the museum board of directors, which is an independent organization that receives about $135,000 in county funding on an annual basis. Weinaug said the county has challenged the group to find revenue sources other than tax dollars.

“Watkins has made several efforts to do that in the past, but their success has been somewhat limited,” Weinaug said. “The County Commission has expressed significant concern that they need to do a better job with that.”

Maybe the reasons for Phipps dismissal were financial after all. It is not a foregone conclusion to believe, al least based on the lack of financial support for Freedom's Frontier National Heritage Area, the Douglas County Historical Society along with Destination Management, a private entity that has taken the place of Lawrence Convention and Visitors Bureau is siphoning off funds from wherever they can get them, to qualify for the $10,000,000 that the federal government has promised the heritage area over a 15 year period.

Also no surprise is the fact that Destination Management Inc. is under the leadership of Judy Billings, who was the former director of the Lawrence Convention and Visitors Bureau.

According to the February 17th, 2008 issue of the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper:

"Change, even when it’s for the better, often is difficult. The changes that are occurring in the organization and leadership of Douglas County’s historical tourism efforts are bound to cause some hard feelings, but they have a strong chance, in the long run, of making this area’s wonderful history more accessible to visitors and a bigger draw for tourism.

At the center of the changes is the new Destination Management Inc., under the leadership of Judy Billings, the long-time director of the Lawrence Convention and Visitors Bureau. The first shifts took place several months ago when DMI formed and took over the operation of the visitor’s bureau from the Lawrence Chamber of Commerce. At the same time, DMI formalized its leadership role with the Freedom’s Frontier National Heritage Area.

The goal of this transition was to put Lawrence and Billings at the center of developing the new heritage area and to coordinate that project with other historical tourism efforts in the county. Those pushing the reorganization said putting the heritage area management under the local chamber of commerce wouldn’t be acceptable to others involved in the project, which includes 41 counties in Kansas and Missouri."

Which proves what the I have been writing about on the Freedom's Fraud website for quite sometime; the fact that a national heritage area that was created and passed in congress , spearheaded by Republican Senators Sam Brownback and Jim Talent, is based out of and centered in Lawrence, Kansas.

With the creation of this heritage area comes many questions regarding property rights and how the controversial history of the Missouri / Kansas border area will be presented.

The fact that the Freedom's Frontier National Heritage Area is based out of Lawrence , Kansas , makes it very questionable that the area's Civil War history will be presented in an objective , or even accurate manner and you can bet that the with the Freedom's Frontier National Heritage Area headquartered in Lawrence, the true history of Missouri will not be told.

It seems that the folks at Destination Management will stop at nothing to scrounge up enough money to qualify for federal funding. The dismissal of Rebecca Phipps is proof of enough for me.

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