What makes your town unique?

Recently I wrote about the importance of strategic planning for northern municipalities and DSSABs (the new governance bodies for unorganized areas).
Unless we make plans locally, higher levels of government will make them for us. They are farther away, and will impose general solutions that often don’t suite diverse situations.
Given fiscal constraints, can your municipality afford the cost of strategic planning? I have three answers to that:
1. You can’t afford not to because that cost is greater;
2. Yes, if your plan identifies savings or revenues greater than the planning cost; and
3. Yes!
Regarding answer #2. All the commercial enterprises whose strategic plans I have helped facilitate realized financial gains many times greater than the planning cost.
That includes executive time, consultant fees, and meeting place cost.
Answer #3 is based on experience with outside funding. Englehart recently applied for a FedNor grant for up to 90 percent of the cost. Their strategic planning dates are two days each in late May and late June.
The key to acceptance of their funding proposal is the demonstration that the plan will contribute significantly to new economic development in the area.
No problem. Surely every municipality and region wants to be economically diversified and secure. Economic health and social health usually reinforce each other.
In the past, many northern towns depended on a major resource-based industry, with some spin-off businesses and the basic local services. As forest products employment declined and mines closed, government agency work filled some of the gap.
Many of those services are now centralized and reduced. Resource-based industries are still the core of our northern economy but the employment and the taxes they contribute are reduced.
So now what?
Alternate uses of the forest resource include chemical extraction for industrial and medical applications. But that will only escalate if such chemicals replace others that are more costly.
Clean water, fresh air, and gorgeous nature scenery also are our special assets. Those invite eco-tourism, hunting, fishing, camping, boating, skiing, and much more.
In trying to draw tourists, northern communities will either compete or collaborate. I believe the former will cause many to fail but the latter is much harder.
Even collaboration requires each northern town to offer something unique. If foreign visitors are to “drop big bucks” in more than one spot, we must provide many unusual, delightful experiences. It won’t do for every town to have similar waterfront developments, golf courses, and summer festivals.
Those are good for all but not enough for tourists.
The big challenges is for each town to offer something very special, for which many foreigners will be happy to stay and pay at least overnight.
Atikokan may become the “canoe capital of Canada.” There is not yet clarity on what that might mean, and how to make that a strong attraction of real economic gain.
A good strategic plan can develop that idea–or throw it out in favour of a better one.
What will make your town unique, attractive to local citizens and well-heeled world travellers? Start thinking, talking, listening, planning.
Linda Wiens is president of Quetico Centre, Northwestern Ontario’s premier conference facility and leadership development enterprise.