After more than a year of wrangling, a new Jackson County tourism authority was finally created this week, its board members officially named, and formal marching orders handed down.

The overhaul of tourism operations in Jackson County are intended to bring a new approach to tourism marketing and promotions, and hopefully increase tourism. Past tourism marketing efforts were stymied by turf wars and duplication of efforts by similar agencies.

Maggie Valley is trying to figure out what exactly it wants to be.

Maggie once reigned supreme in the mountain tourist trade, witnessed by the row of restaurants, bars, hotels and gift shops that line the valley’s main drag.

A festering disagreement over how to overhaul Jackson County’s tourism agency is coming to an end, but some lodging owners who have resisted the changes aren’t happy about it.

A tourism task force in Jackson County has spent several months formulating a major overhaul of the county’s tourism agency, but the recommendations seem to be dead-on-arrival now that they’ve landed at the county commissioners’ doorstep.

As Maggie Valley business owners and leaders look toward the town’s future, it is unclear how large a role town leaders realistically expect the amusement park Ghost Town in the Sky to play.

Maggie cheered when Ghost Town in the Sky reopened this summer, but with only a small portion of the rides and attractions up and running, the real potential of the amusement park to lure hordes of tourists back to the struggling town hasn’t been realized overnight.

After rescuing the shuttered park from foreclosure earlier this year, Ghost Town’s new owner Alaska Presley has been slowly whittling away at a laundry list of projects she hopes to complete before it closes down for the winter and reopens next spring.

It’s noon on a Wednesday and Scott Peterson already has beer on the mind.

The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians is planning a $92-million adventure park, which is expected to attract families to Cherokee and open up a new source of revenue for the tribe.

Tribal council last week approved the idea in a 9-to-2 vote.

A task force charged with creating guidelines for a joint Jackson County Tourism Development Authority is still struggling to figure out exactly how everything will work — and the deadline for making recommendations to the county leadership is drawing nearer.

Jackson County has two tourism agencies — one for the county as a whole and one for Cashiers — that oversee room tax money collected from overnight visitors by the lodging industry. Whether to merge the two entities has been a point of contention since last year.

Many counties are seeing an increase in tourism-related spending this year, but most have still not bounced back to their pre-recession numbers.

The only real way for counties to measure how many tourists are stopping in their towns is through its occupancy tax revenues — that is the amount of tax revenue it receives from visitors who stay overnight in a hotel. Though even that can be slightly misleading, since people may take a daytrip somewhere and then return home at night.