How, he pressed his colleagues to consider, do we keep the two organizations from competing for the leadership and the same membership? They were both in the business of business, after all, and conflicts could arise.

“One thing we didn’t want to happen is to have the agencies competing for members,” says Knox.

The strategy implemented, and apparently forgotten in the years since, has resulted in a pause, if not an outright stalemate, in the progress toward an interlocal agreement over the governance of Visit Lake Norman (VLN) between the three north Mecklenburg towns and the current VLN Board of Directors.

Hours before the Huntersville and Cornelius town boards were set to consider an interlocal agreement nearly two weeks ago, it was pulled from their agendas when a new draft arrived that afternoon, one that precluded the towns’ influence in the naming of VLN’s nine representatives on the board. Under the draft agreement, the towns would produce nine representatives to an 18-member board and VLN would name its own. But a late change, which VLN board members characterized as an oversight on the previous draft, removed the towns’ influence over VLN’s nine board members.

“They already get their nine, why would we want them to have a say in who our nine are?” says one current VLN board member.

Behind the scenes, though, was a discovery by the towns’ attorneys that a provision in the Visit Lake Norman Articles of Incorporation provides the Lake Norman Chamber with veto power over major decisions, and restructuring of the VLN Board of Directors certainly qualifies. That development brought the whole process to a screeching halt, and signs indicate it may not be restarted anytime soon as both parties exercise their own leverage.

Discussions continued into this week about how to govern the agency, which is fully funded through the towns, by taxes collected at hotels and restaurants. Prior to 2002, a portion of only the hotel/motel taxes collected locally was returned to the towns for the purpose of promoting tourism, but all of the one percent prepared meals taxes collected for that purpose went to Charlotte to help fund major capital projects such as the Charlotte Convention Center.

The Lake Norman Chamber lobbied the state to return half of the prepared meals taxes to the towns in which they are generated, a portion of that to be dedicated to create a local convention and visitors bureau — Visit Lake Norman — to, as Knox puts it, “Put heads in beds and butts in seats.”

Previously, a visitors center was operated by the Chamber out of its own offices in Cornelius, and the Chamber received direct funding from the towns, via the accommodations taxes, to operate it. The Chamber saw the need to spin off a CVB as a separate operation and, as VLN was being created, Knox recalls, the Chamber leadership had more on its mind than two agencies competing for the same membership.

“The thinking was we needed to maintain some level of ultimate control so that it doesn’t get completely hijacked, because even back then — and I am very supportive of all the towns in general — there was a lot of pressure to keep taxes low and there has been pressure over the years to use the money for things that are a real stretch to call them tourism related,” says Knox.

Fast forward to this past February when a surprise task force was named by the mayors of Cornelius, Huntersville and Davidson to study the current state of affairs of north Mecklenburg’s efforts to draw tourism — and how the tourism money is spent. The move resulted in the swift reaction of the hospitality industry that landed the whole matter in the North Carolina General Assembly. The towns had funded VLN with tourism tax dollars at levels of 28 percent of hotel/motel taxes and 25 percent of prepared meals taxes remanded locally, about $480,000 total this past fiscal year.

Speaker of the House Thom Tillis of Cornelius ushered legislation — which was unanimously approved in both houses of the legislature — codifying the funding at the historical percentages. Tillis also asked all parties to come together and create a new interlocal agreement by July 18, the date both Cornelius and Huntersville would have voted to adopt one.

In the process of negotiations, the towns discovered they had leverage, because House Bill 508 didn’t spell out a payment schedule. In effect, the towns could hold their payments to Visit Lake Norman until June 30, 2012, the end of the current fiscal year.

Just as VLN officials appeared to cede to the town’s advantage and accept the split of power on its board of directors, attorneys for the towns reportedly discovered that the Lake Norman Chamber had even more leverage over the composition of the board ... veto power.

And by all accounts, the Chamber doesn’t appear to be willing to give that up. Officials from both sides are remaining mum on the issue as talks continue, but Knox, who is years removed from any official involvement in either the Chamber or VLN boards, says this issue was among those on the minds of Chamber officials a decade ago.

“We set it up as an independent organization, but not completely because (the function of a CVB) was part the Chamber all along,” says Knox. “Our feeling as we set up the bylaws is we wanted to make sure it didn’t get over-politicized — which we weren’t completely successful with — but we still have a bit of control over that entity.”

How much of that control the Chamber exercises remains to be seen, but it can, if it chooses, use it to influence not only the composition of the board of directors, but decisions that it makes. And if the stalemate continues, future options could include legal or further legislative action. The spirit and intent of House Bill 508, says one official close to the negotiations, is for Visit Lake Norman to be paid its share of the tourism tax dollars, interlocal agreement notwithstanding. The towns, meanwhile, have the current letter of the law to go by.

It’s not the harmony Knox says he and his board were hoping to foster when Visit Lake Norman was created.

“Trying to create a situation where (the towns and Visit Lake Norman) are all singing off the same sheet of music is a challenge as it is,” Knox says. “Maybe we created too much harmony among the towns because they have a common enemy in the Chamber. We have bent over backwards to stand up straight and keep this at arm’s length.”