Ely Chamber leader retires amid lodging-tax dispute over tourism dollars

The Ely Chamber of Commerce has lost the executive director who led it through the city’s most bitter fight over tourism dollars, a dispute that left the Chamber, VisitEly and the City of Ely jockeying for control of a key funding stream.

Eva Sebesta’s last day was Monday, April 27, after eight years as the Chamber’s leader and 11 years with the local business organizations. The Chamber board said in a May 8 letter to members that its employment relationship with Sebesta had ended. Sebesta later described the move as her retirement and said she had been thinking about it for a couple of years.

Her departure lands after months of tension over lodging-tax proceeds and the future of tourism promotion in Ely, a gateway community for the Boundary Waters area where every visitor dollar can ripple through hotels, outfitters and downtown businesses. The fight drew in the Ely City Council, the Ely Area Lodging Tax Joint Powers Board, state tourism officials and business owners who packed meetings and challenged whether the city and Chamber were following Minnesota law.

At the center of the conflict was whether lodging-tax dollars could help staff the new trailhead building on Ely’s west end or whether the money had to stay focused on marketing through VisitEly, also known as the Ely Tourism Bureau. Minnesota Statute 469.190 requires 95 percent of lodging-tax proceeds to fund a local convention or tourism bureau for marketing and promotion, and state tourism officials argued the city and Chamber’s proposed uses did not meet that standard.

The Ely Chamber itself created the Ely Area Tourism Bureau in 1986 to serve as the designated tourism bureau, and the politics grew more complicated because the bureau’s board is made up largely of lodging owners and outfitters, the same broad base that supports much of the Chamber. That overlap helped turn a funding fight into a broader test of who speaks for Ely’s tourism economy.

The Chamber’s role was especially controversial because it sought lodging-tax money for trailhead operations, putting it in direct competition with VisitEly for the same pot of cash. A late-2025 proposal would have cut VisitEly’s requested $315,000 to about $210,000, while sending roughly $20,000 to the city for trailhead utilities and up to $53,000 to the Chamber for visitor-center staffing.

That split did not hold. After dueling legal opinions, public meetings and the resignation of VisitEly director Abby Dare, the joint powers board voted May 19-20 to make VisitEly whole at its full $315,000 request and also fund the Chamber and city for trailhead operations. The final vote may have quieted the immediate budget crisis, but it did not erase the larger question of whether Ely’s tourism system is being reset or only patched together after a damaging split.