ARICHAT: Richmond County’s two largest business development groups are concerned that delays in launching a county-wide tourism strategy could negatively impact tourism prospects and potentially hamper a major façade and streetscape program taking shape in Isle Madame.
In late November, Richmond Municipal Council unanimously voted to defer discussions on the tourism initiative to a future date, pending a meeting between officials with the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA), Warden Brian Marchand, a second member of council and a municipal staff member. The vote came six months after council voted to allocate $4.4 million in federal and municipal funds towards the municipality’s new tourism strategy.
While members of the Isle Madame Tourism and Trade Association (IMTTA) subsequently appeared before council’s December Committee-of-the-Whole meeting to thank the municipality for its support, including $10,000 in municipal funding officially approved last spring, IMTTA chair Lisa Boudreau is warning that officials with ACOA have told her group that delays in spending the $2.2 million in federal funds allocated for the Richmond tourism strategy could have an impact on ACOA’s participation in the next two stages of the façade and streetscape initiative.
“We were very surprised – we didn’t believe that this was a condition placed on this particular project,” Boudreau told The Reporter, adding that these warnings emerged when the association approached ACOA to assist the IMTTA in hiring a proponent to act as a formal administrator for the façade project.
“We can’t hire someone – we, ourselves, don’t have the funds to pay them. So we have to know for sure that ACOA is on board…When we asked that, that’s when the comments [began] of ‘we’d have to see where Richmond is moving forward with the tourism strategy to be able to be certain that ACOA would actually fund the façade, it’s not a given.’”
Boudreau suggested that this response from ACOA came as a surprise both to the municipality, including Warden Brian Marchand, and to the IMTTA itself.
“This [façade] application is totally separate from the Richmond tourism strategy,” Boudreau declared.
“[The IMTTA] took this on, on their own, as a need that had been identified and as a project that we wanted to work on to better improve the conditions and give back to those retailers in the area that were tourism-driven or were servicing the tourism industry.”
While the IMTTA is continuing to work with ACOA and the municipality to launch the fifth and sixth stages of the Isle Madame façade and streetscape effort, Boudreau and her group are also meeting with the tourism committee for the St. Peter’s Economic Development Organization (SPEDO) in the hopes of re-launching the county-wide tourism strategy.
“We feel that what is good for one part of the county is good for the county as a whole,” Boudreau said of the joint effort.
Sherry MacLeod, SPEDO’s acting tourism committee chair, echoed these sentiments as she expressed concern over the delays in launching construction on Canal Landing, a new interpretive centre slated to take shape near the St. Peter’s Canal National Historic Site.
“We were all on board, everything was happening, and then all of a sudden, I think council got afraid to spend any money and pulled the carpet out from under us,” MacLeod remarked, adding that as many as five jobs were connected to the launch of the new tourism infrastructure for St. Peter’s.
“If we don’t do this, we’re basically years behind. We’ve worked on this for three years, and basically, it’s ‘Hold on, we’re not going forward.’ It was quite a surprise and it took the wind out of our sails, because we thought we were doing something productive and getting ahead of the game.”