Last week, we heard a report questioning whether the Adirondack North Country is welcoming to tourists of color, customers who are black, Hispanic and Asian.

It's a conversation sparked in part by the experience of Alvin Codner, a Florida man who had two troubling encounters while visiting the Park this summer. He has spoken out about being accosted by a white man in Ticonderoga who called him the N-word.

But long before this summer, groups in the Adirondacks - led by the Adirondack Diversity Advisory Council and church organizations - were asking big, complicated questions about how people of color experience our small towns.

Related stories: Are black visitors really welcome in the Adirondack Park? There is a growing consensus that we have a problem. We decided to check in with Jim McKenna, head of the Adirondack tourism marketing group called ROOST, based in Lake Placid.

Some Adirondack businesses get diversity, others not so much...

If you're going to grow your business, you're going to have to understand that we have to be a diverse community.

McKenna is one of the most influential voices in North Country tourism and he said the picture of diversity is mixed. Some parts of the industry get it and some don’t. "I think that some of the businesses in the Adirondacks, some of the larger businesses, they treat it as a normal customer no matter what their ethnic background is," McKenna said. But, he added, "That's not prevalent throughout the Park and I think it's our responsibility to try to put this into a dollars and cents perspective."

People of color, customers of color

Right now, a little more than one in ten visitors to the Park are people of color. That’s already enough to matter to a business’s bottom line. But America is changing, McKenna said. If the Adirondacks can’t appeal to that shifting, more diverse new community, he thinks we’ll be turning away a lot customers:

McKenna: The beginning of the Milennial generation is right there now. 43% of Millenials are not caucasian white. This is the market. It's not something that you don't have to be aware of and understand. If you're going to grow your business, you're going to have to understand that we have to be a diverse community. Mann: Do you think there is more training of staff, more education about how to be comfortable culturally with people coming through the door? McKenna: I think that's the number one thing we have to do. What our organization can do, we can get the business associations and the chambers together in our region, which we plan to do in late fall, and start talking these issues. The sooner we can get to that level and get the business community and the residents overall to understand and be accepting that [diversity] is reality now, I think we're going to be in a better position.

During our conversation, McKenna compared the discussion of diversity to the discussion of climate change that occurred in the Adirondack Park in the late 1990s. He predicted that there would be a learning curve as people grasp that changes are needed for the region's businesses to adapt.

"I think it's going to be easier and quicker to understand this because it's going to break down to dollars and cents."

According to a 2015 survey conducted of the Park, 86% of Adirondack visitors last year were white. Lake Placid was a bit more diverse, with caucasian visitors accounting for roughly 78%. In order to be competitive a decade in the future, McKenna said the portion of tourists who are black or Hispanic will need to double or triple. "I think we almost have to gear ourselves to look at the Millenial age group. They're really our customers for the future. We can see very specifically what the demographic and ethnic breakdown is of that age group in the United States and we're going to have to mirror that."

If McKenna is correct the audience for Adirondack tourism in just the next decade could be a third or forty percent people of color. Businesses that turn off or turn away that many customers, will struggle to survive.