Low population, as we all know in Aroostook County, is the elephant on the sofa, and too often it seems that huge animal is invisible.
At a presentation at the Caribou Inn and Convention Center on Tuesday, Paul Ouimet, project manager for Destinations International, laid out the results of a survey about the current state of our tourism industry in Maine. With a specific focus on tourism in Aroostook County, Ouimet addressed about 20 or so representatives of community chambers of commerce, businesspeople and tourism development organizations. Following his presentation of the results, he provided the folks with a series of recommendations to help The County boost our tourism economy. Many of the recommendations were for communities with more than 250,000 people.
We have 70,000 people in all of Aroostook County.
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The County received low marks on community support for events that attract tourists, according to the survey. I tend to disagree with that assessment. Case in point, the Fort Kent Trail Committee develops local bicycle and walking trails and plans events to feature those trails. We have about 10 people in the group, which seems pretty sparse, but is more than 1 in 500 people for Fort Kent. If San Antonio, Texas, population 1.4 million, had 1 in 500 people join their trail committee, they’d have a coordinating group consisting of 2,800 people to plan and promote their marathons and poker runs.
Community support ain’t the problem. I’m just sayin’.
Ouimet recommended that Aroostook County should adopt a tax to create an iconic attraction that provides visitors with a unique, enjoyable and memorable experience. This makes sense if we had a tax base to draw upon. But we don’t, nor do we have the inclination to raise our taxes to fund that sort of effort.
Other folks at this meeting made observations that also caught my attention. Alain Ouellette of Northern Maine Development Commission mentioned our ATV and sled trail system is the best in the world. He’s right. Another man thought we needed to work along multiple tracks to attract tourists, such as a nature track, historical track, events track and cultural track. He’s also right. Lise Pelletier of the Acadian Archives noted that the interactions at the border crossings between Canadians and border protection personnel essentially cuts the attraction of anything in Aroostook County to zero because of the hassle of crossing into The County. This means that every other county can attract visitors from the center of a geographic circle, but we can only appeal to people south of us. She’s right too.
I walked away with a sense that we need to take into account our low population as we pursue the development of a tourist attraction that serves visitors of all ages and backgrounds with a unique, enjoyable and memorable experience. Otherwise we will be unable to avoid the dilution of our energy because of rivalries between towns whose citizens often feel separate from neighboring towns.
In order to do this, organizations like Aroostook County Tourism and NMDC need to pay attention to all of Aroostook, north and south, rather than just a few of the larger towns, and they need to work to establish sufficient and stable funding for signature events and attractions that feature a much larger geographic area. Our local civic leaders and business leaders, with support from our regional political leaders, must focus on the connections between our scattered communities and organizations, create tourist events and attractions that include and benefit multiple communities of all sizes, and transform the distance between our different Main Streets from a disadvantage into an advantage.
If we don’t, that elephant will continue to ruin the sofa for everyone.