Lee Bosco, Roberta Lockwood Named to Top Positions

By John Emerson
SULLIVAN COUNTY — July 11, 2000 -- If information is indeed the currency of the modern age, Sullivan County has two new bankers at the helm of the most frequently used information resources.
Lee Bosco, the county’s new Director of Public Information, started his new job yesterday with little flurry and no fanfare. He brought with him a new vision for the office of public information.
“I’m a very lucky guy, and this is a great opportunity for me,” Bosco said. “I’ve always felt that one of the jobs of the public information office should be to make the government more accessible to the people that it serves. I see a large part of my role as a conduit between the legislature and the public and also between the public and the legislature.”
A retired member of the Navy, Bosco originally came to Sullivan County several years ago as a reporter covering county government. His 20-year stint in the Navy included a multi-year assignment as a Navy Seal and as a writer and photographer for military publications.
Earlier this year, he won a first place award for spot news photography from the New York Press Association for a picture he took as a freelance photographer for the Sullivan County Democrat.
Roberta Lockwood, the new president of the Sullivan County Visitors Association, said she is still in the middle of taking inventory of all the assets she has available to her as the person primarily responsible for promoting the county’s tourism industry. She took over the job on June 15 and is still in the process of moving here from upstate.
“Right now, I’m putting the pieces of the team together,” she said. “I want to take advantage of everything that’s out there. There’s a lot of untapped potential here, and I’m here to learn how to tap into all of them.”
Lockwood came to the position from the Empire State Development Corp., where she was the assistant deputy commissioner for marketing, advertising and tourism. Before that, she was regional tourism director for the Leatherstocking region in central New York State.
“She’s extremely knowledgeable and has a lot of experience in tourism promotion,” said Bill Sipos, a member of the visitors association’s board of directors. “She’s dissecting everything that we’ve been doing and is working hard to get the county back on the right track.”
Lockwood said one of the first things she is doing is expanding the county’s 800-number service by bringing it back into the office.
Recently, the telephone was answered by an outside organization and primarily used for individual inquiries from people who wanted to know about the area.
“By bringing it back in-house, we’re going to be able to expand the uses of the 800 line,” she said. “We’re going to have the opportunity to deal directly with groups and meeting planners, which are important elements.”