No need to search for golden eggs

LEWISPORTE -

In the exercise of determining opportunities for Lewisporte, the possibilities presented by having the ocean at their doorstep is reinforcing the efforts that have been made in the development of the Lewisporte Marina and commercial port.

Just over a year ago the Lewisporte Area Economic Development Committee identified the need for a Business, Investment and Attraction Strategy as one of their initiatives.

The project was cost-shared between the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency,

Department of Innovation, Trade and Rural Development and the Town of Lewisporte. AMEC Earth and Environmental has produced a report that looks at the possibilities that the Development Committee identified for the community.

The process to get to the final report took part in two phases. Lewisporte Town manager and Development Committee member Perry Pond said the first phase was primarily a community profile where they looked at economics, human resources, labour, education and employment - standard components that determine where a community is with respect to adjacent communities in Newfoundland and Atlantic Canada.

The Development Committee also carried out the issue scoping session where they looked at various issues and some of the strengths and weaknesses and again put that all into context to have the community compared with communities of similar structure again.

Based on that the Development Committee came up with opportunities they felt were feasible to explore.

"We moved ahead and looked at distribution centre, marine tourism, retirement community, call centre, home-based business, cranberry production and processing and other small fruit production, greenhouse operations and wind-power generation," said Mr. Pond. "Those opportunities were realistic based on what we learned through the first phase."

AMEC took those initiatives and moved forward and put them in context in terms of what the likelihood of success and what the impacts of those opportunities would be.

Based on some of the AMEC conclusions and some of the identified weaknesses, Mr. Pond said the Development Committee decided to further hone in on the more realistic opportunities.

"We went into the next phase which was a more detailed analysis of those opportunities and we looked at distribution centre, home-based businesses, cranberry production and marine tourism," he said. "Basically what we have now is an action plan with respect to what we need to do to further advance those four opportunities."

The distribution centre primarily involves distribution related to the commercial port.

"It's more of what we've been doing for 60 years, continuing that and further expanding on that opportunity to Labrador and beyond," said Mr. Pond.

In terms of home-based business, Mr. Pond said Lewisporte has a significant home-based business population. He noted that goes hand-in-hand with the previous thought of a retirement community in the fact that you have people semi-retire from other places, move into Lewisporte but continue partially in a home-based business operation setting.

Mr. Pond said while cranberry production and processing is in its initial stages in this province, it is worth exploring locally.

"It's something that the province is moving forward on with their policy so we thought we'd take a closer look at that," he said.

The marine tourism priority is primarily related to recreational boating in Notre Dame Bay and the push has already been on for some time now to further develop this area.

AMEC has developed specific action plans for each of these priority areas detailing what the advantages and disadvantages are, what the risks are and how to advance on these possibilities.

"From a committee perspective there really wasn't a lot of surprises (in the report)," said Mr. Pond. "There are two potential pieces of opportunity we've always thought had potential based on our port identification work.

"That put us in a direction of commercial and recreational boating and this piece of work continues to push us in that direction - the opportunities are out there but we have to be realistic in what we can obtain. We have been given the opportunity to advance recreational boating and we realize that. This puts it all in perspective and gives us an action plan for the future."

Mr. Pond said sometimes people go into this process looking for a "golden egg", but what this process did was further enforce that Lewisporte already has two golden eggs - the port and marina.

"Our marina and Notre Dame Bay continue to be gems we can further advance. We already have taken active measures to move those forward," he said. "It sometimes takes someone from the outside looking in to put things in perspective for you and I think that's what they did.

"We've got the golden eggs, we just have to further advance what we have and I think that's worth the effort we went through in the last year to further recognize that. We're always looking for something else to move forward on to achieve objectives quicker - all this stuff is slow and doesn't happen overnight, so the fact that we've done a lengthy process and still come back to two opportunities which we've taken on without anyone telling us that we really needed to puts it into perspective. This reinforces that we have two great opportunities here in particular and we need to keep moving forward on those and we will obviously."

Mr. Pond said there has been constant work taking place over the last year with at least three or four opportunities where information is being supplied and conversations are taking place with companies and other consultants with respect to the commercial port.

"We're not going to come out and say who they are or what they are, but there's ongoing conversation and people are asking questions and we're supplying information almost on a constant basis - particularly over the last 12-13 months," he said. "Whether they will ever be realized, we don't know. Hopefully we might realize some of that some time in the future but we don't want to give anyone false hopes (by providing details).

Mr. Pond attributes the interest in the area to the promotional work that has taken place over the last two-three years to let people know where Lewisporte is and the opportunities that are present in terms of the commercial port and recreational boating.

"We are on the radar of people that we wouldn't expect to be if we didn't do the work," said Mr. Pond. "Some things happen by chance but others because we have been promoting ourselves as best we can and talking to the right people."

In terms of further developing the marina, just last week the provincial government invested $54,217 for infrastructure needs (see related press release on page 3B).

Also, a new board organization will be put in place over the coming months to manage the marina facility.

"We are trying to make that as seamless as possible in transition from Yacht Club exclusive management to this new board management and obviously there's going to have to be a period of transition between the two," said Mr. Pond.

He also noted that they are in the process of securing the last piece of funding ($50,000 total project) required to put together a long-term development and business plan for the marina. The hope is to put the terms of reference out in the next few weeks.

The Downtown Revitalization plan is also nearing completion within the next month or so. That will tie into the esthetics of the downtown area and tie into the marina as well.