By Carlye Malchuk Dash
The Huntsville/Lake of Bays Chamber of Commerce and the Huntsville Festival of the Arts are proposing a joint venture to run an information booth along Main Street during the summer and early fall. All they need is for the Town of Huntsville to build it.
“There is a void of information access on Main Street,” chamber general manager Kelly Haywood told the town’s finance administration committee on Jan. 22. “We would like to combine our efforts to operate and administrate, in every capacity, an information booth. We’re here today to ask the Town of Huntsville to consider constructing one.”
Under the proposal, the town would be responsible for construction, insurance and maintenance. The booth would be open on weekends only, from mid-May to the end of June and from early September to early October. During the summer months (July and August), the booth would be open seven days a week, nine hours a day every day except Sundays.
The proposal submitted to the committee included a number of suggested locations, such as in the old Huntsville Festival of the Arts booth location adjacent to the Royal Bank building, opposite the Pharmasave store, at the corner of Main and West streets, between the town hall and Trinity United Church, or somewhere on the Kent Park footprint.
Festival of the Arts general manager Rob Saunders told the committee that, from 1997 to 2004, when the festival ran a booth on Main Street, employees and volunteers were constantly inundated with questions about where to stay, where to eat and what’s happening around town. “When we moved to the theatre as kind of our main presentation point, we lost a lot of contact, we feel, and a lot of ability to get our message out,” said Saunders, adding that having Internet access at the new information booth could mean increased public access to festival ticket sales.
Councillor Mike Greaves told the committee that, while he agreed with the benefits of having such an information booth on the Main Street, he felt it would be a redundancy to put it “within eyeball distance of both the chamber of commerce and the theatre ticket sales office.”
He added, “I have some concern with the centrist attitude that the downtown is downtown Main Street . . . . There are other parts to this community and,if an information booth is to be provided by the town, then maybe (areas like King William Street or Commerce Park) should be offered an opportunity to discuss it.”
But, Huntsville mayor Claude Doughty suggested that, for an information booth to work, it should be where the greatest amount of pedestrian traffic can access it.
Haywood added that having a booth downtown would benefit all other areas of the community, since booth staff could direct tourists to other locations, like King William or Commerce Park, as well as Algonquin Park and Lake of Bays.
Doughty said he was excited about the opportunity, adding that he has been in discussions with a local contractor who is willing to construct the booth for free for the town. He said, with the donation, the total cost to the town would be around $5,000, and that the booth would be portable so that it could be moved if the location chosen was deemed unsuitable down the road.
“I think it would be a great initiative and it would really put a contact on the street that would continue to strengthen our downtown,” he said. “(Plus) if it were to increase our theatre occupancy by two or three per cent, which is more than reasonable, a lot of those dollars flow to us as well.”
Finance committee chair councillor Chris Zanetti suggested that the issue go to the next meeting of the town’s economic development committee, and that they bring a final cost and proposal to the next finance meeting in February.
