ANALYSIS: For the new Greater Trail Arts and Heritage Plan, the name is only the beginning of the problem
By Adrian Barnes
The problems with a commissioned planning document presented to local arts groups last week start with the document's title. Greater Trail: A Cultural Plan For Arts and Heritage. Hmm. In a plan asking local communities to spend lots of money to increase tourism visits through promoting arts and heritage, the giant elephant in the room that no one associated with the report wants to acknowledge is the word 'Trail'.
Trail is known far and wide, and often affectionately, as a smelter town. A lead smelter town. Not as a tourism destination. Any questions from the floor? Call it the Home of the Champions all you want, but people don't vacation in smelter towns. Sorry, Trail.
So right off the bat, there's a massive problem here, one that the consultants who wrote this thing up knew about (in fact, I told them about it myself at the Rossland community consultation meeting) but delicately declined to address for some reason (HINT: the report was mostly financed by the Trail and District Arts Council).
Quoth the consultants, “a Greater Trail region re-branding project is recommended”. You or I might think that a name for the thing one was writing a report about would be part of the report itself, but what do you or I know? All I know is that it's probably not smart to bite the hand of the giant elephant that feeds you, especially if you have hopes of being paid more than peanuts to run the proposed re-branding project.
Okay, now that we've found our feet, let's look at the report in a little more detail.
“The success of a Greater Trail arts and heritage master plan will require the coordinated, consistent, and long term commitment of all parties engaged in governance.” I laughed out loud at this part. I'm still chuckling now, albeit with bitter tears in my eyes. Does anyone really expect Trail and Rossland to cooperate fruitfully on such a project at this point in history? Especially when one town is already a tourism destination and the other is a...smelter town? Does anyone involved in the crafting of this report know anything about the three S's: schools, sewage, and swimming pools?
Despite these problems, the utopian authors of this document recommend “integration of marketing efforts for all the Greater Trail promotional pillars and delivery to destination markets through one tourism-focused regional organization”. Hmm...another South Kootenay organization that, like the school board, will be heavily-weighted in Trail's favour. Sounds like fun! Next thing you know Trail will be lobbying to have the Rossland Mining Museum shut and our ore samples bussed down the hill to the Trail Museum. You think I'm joking? You really think I'm joking?
The nuts and bolts of this plan seem to involve, aside from a hell of a lot more expensive 'planning', the idea that we “upgrade museums both physically and operationally, build [ing] authentic heritage products/programs to equal the strength of sports and recreation, [and promoting] the heritage theme with one regional voice”.
One voice! We Are The Kootenays, We Are the World!
As for money, well, how about a cool $400 000 to set things up? Of course, the newly-minted Greater Trail Arts and Heritage Organization will “coordinate the activities of consultants working on approved planning projects. These projects are estimated to need $180,000 over five years.” $180 000 more in consulting fees!
And where will we get this money? Selling farm eggs on the street? Selling the family cow? Charging for slides down the new arena roof in winter? And what will this plan get us once it's funded? Surely it will take hundreds or even thousands of new tourists per year to pay for all these initial and ongoing costs? Well, the report doesn't actually say. “Community animation and involvement, improved facilities, increased numbers of visitors enjoying longer stays and every residents’ pride in Greater Trail and its heritage are the paybacks.”
Perhaps we'll build our economies by visiting each other's museums every day, except that Trail will probably charge us triple to visit theirs. Also, see how the 'rewards' (Club Z, anyone?) are couched mostly in terms of intangibles? Perhaps, you muse, we'll need yet another report to figure out how this will all pay off. Funny you should mention that...
“The feasibility studies referred to in the business concept need to include economic impact analysis as part of their scopes of work.” More studies! More consultants! I'd have thought, naïve hick that I am, that the economic benefits of a proposed plan would be....included in the plan. Otherwise, how would we know that it's a good plan? Before deciding to implement it?
But, once more, that just goes to show how little I know!
Let's be real. People come to Rossland to ski, golf, and mountain bike. Some people visit the museum when they're in the area, but almost no one plans their vacation around it. People visit Trail to see family and for sports events: it's not a tourism destination and never will be. This report contains no realistic projections as to how the cities will recoup their investments. How many visitors a year would it take to break even? The report doesn't say.
Are there thousands of tourists out there in Paris and New York waiting for the news that Greater Trail museums have been expanded to revise their vacation plans? 'Screw Tahiti, I'm off to see Trail's expanded museum?' Maybe! But maybe not. There's nothing wrong with considering an upgrade of our museums, but to do so in the context of this expensive and silly plan seems a sort of fiscal hari kiri.
As for promotion of all this, it turns out that “the web is a good opportunity for targeted marketing of arts and heritage”. Well, ain't that something! I never knowed that! Not nohow!
The impetus behind this whole desperate enterprise is Trail's desire to re-brand itself as something other than a smelter town (which is what it is! A smelter town! And there's nothing wrong with that, Trail! We love you for who you are!).
If this is a problem for Trail, it's not one likely to be solved so long as Teck looms over Bay Avenue. And that's not a bad thing, in my humble opinion. Not every town is set up to be a tourist destination. Trail has plenty going for it, but becoming a tourism mecca may not, realistically-speaking, be a part of its future. That said, if Trail wants to spend its money on plastic surgery and life coaching, that's Trail's business.
But for Rossland to allow itself to be dragged into a deal like this would be sheer idiocy.
What Rossland might gain by attaching itself to a non-tourism destination like Trail is completely beyond me. The only good likely to come of this plan is the fattening of consultants' wallets.
That said, we ignore this report at our collective peril. Ignore the Plan and “things will remain as they are and slowly atrophy over time.” That sounds terrible, like spending the last thirty years of one's life in a nursing home watching Cheers reruns while eating stale, dry crackers.
I'm not saying there are no good ideas in the plan: the proposed linking of Silver City and Golden City days as pan-Trail/Rossland celebrations is interesting given that Trail and Rossland do share a lot of history and heritage. But we don't need consultants and big budgets to do that. Just common sense and volunteers.
When plans like this get going, they develop their own inertia. I just hope Rossland isn't going to get itself mixed up in this silliness any more deeply than it already is.
The report is attached to this article.
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| Trail_Final_Report.pdf | 914.2 KB |
