Chamber wants Heritage Festival to survive

Glenn Cundari accepts his Betty Alcorn Memorial award at Thursday's Chamber meeting

Chamber President Mark King says he wouldn’t want to venture a guess of the loss the business community would feel if the festival no longer existed.

He made the comments during the final meeting of the last regular meeting of the 2006 North Bay & District Chamber of Commerce board meeting Thursday.

King and many others around the table said the Festival is too important to just let the city can it and that the chamber needs to do something about it.

“I think it is high time that the hospitality industry steps up to the plate,” states King.

“Sure it would be a huge issue, I think a lot of families plan family events around the Heritage Festival because there is so much going on around the city… a lot of kids come home. It’s a big period of time in the community and as John Strang said it’s a quality of life that we’re looking at here, and what cost do we put on that? But again of course, we need the business community to step up,” he says.

“I guess you have to look at the overall effect of the Heritage Festival to our complete community, I don’t think $600,000 is a lot of money when you actually look at the fact that there’s probably ninety thousand people that come any given year to the Festival. How much money is actually brought into the community and what the effect is there?”

Having said that, King also understands that there has to be changes so that the taxpayer is not on the hook for any overruns on the budget. He thinks the Destination Marketing Fund is a viable way for the hospitality industry to become involved and keep the festival running.

“I certainly appreciate the position city council is in because it’s well documented where some $600,000 in tax payers money has been used over the years to basically prop up the Heritage Festival.”

“Basically (DMF) it’s a room tax and there’s room inside the tax system to allow hotels to collect extra money,” he explains.

“What I proposed here tonight was, if in fact there was a short fall as far as the Heritage (festival) fund was concerned, and you know we looked at a hundred thousand dollars. I think the numbers in the first year would probably be somewhere in the 150 to 200 thousand dollars in revenue that would be generated from that fund, and that could be used to shore up any short fall that occurs because of overruns in the Heritage Festival.”

“So it’s kind of a win-win situation because you have the hospitality industry basically helping to keep the Heritage Festival going and at the same time it takes city hall off the hook, because all tax payers aren’t prepared to allow their tax dollars to be used to shore up and event like that.”

The Chamber then moved into a short meeting of the 2007 board to appoint an executive where King was acclaimed president for a second term.

Rounding out the 2007 North Bay & District Chamber of Commerce executive:
1st Vice: Glenn Cundari
2nd Vice Ralph Celentano
3rd Vice John Strang
Treasurer: Rick Evans
Past President: Derek Shogren

The 2007 board and executive will be sworn in at the next meeting in January.