Bingo hall closure a blow to charities

With news the Fort Frances Bingo Hall will be closing its doors Dec. 31, the charitable groups which have been running fundraiser bingos there for years will suffer if an alternative can’t be found.
“It’s going to affect us greatly. I don’t know how we’re going to meet our budgets,” said Paul Bock, chair of the “Fun in the Sun” committee, which uses bingos as a major part of its fundraising for Canada Day events here.
“At one time, it accounted for 100 percent of our funding,” he noted. “We’ve adjusted by doing more raffles, like the NHL raffle we have out there right now.
“[But] I don’t know if there’s any way, logistically, we can do enough fundraising to do what we want to for ‘Fun in the Sun’ other than at the bingo hall,” Bock warned.
“I suspect there’s other clubs in the same boat as us.”
Bock did concede “some fundraising is better than no fundraising,” and is hopeful an alternative to bingos can be arranged for everyone’s sake.
“As long as we can find a way to do some fundraising, whatever that is,” stressed Bock. “We’ve got to figure out a way to do it.
“Otherwise, we’ll have to cancel the ‘Fun in the Sun’ event, the fireworks, all that fun stuff. It’s going to have a great effect on us for sure.”
“We’ve seen our [bingo] revenue go down a bit in the last little while,” said Dave Ogilvie of the Muskie Touchdown Club, which also relies on bingos for fundraising.
“This will put a small hole in our fundraising efforts,” he added. “We’ll have to deal with it and see where we can go from there, but it’s going to affect us.”
Besides bingo, the Touchdown Club’s other sources of revenue include the Muskie discount cards and various raffles.
“I guess we’ll have to find fundraising somewhere else,” echoed Dorie Barker of the Muskie Girls’ Red Line Club, who also noted that revenues from bingos have been going down in the past two years.
“It’s money that’s going to have to be made up for,” she stressed.
Much of the Red Line Club’s revenues comes from raffles, corporate sponsorships, season ticket sales, and the annual tea, but the loss of the bingo revenue may have to be made up for through players’ parents, Barker warned.
“It’s a really sad thing for us. All of the charities really rely on it [Bingos],” said Denise Audette, executive director of the Fort Frances Volunteer Bureau and also a board member of the Fort Frances Bingo Association.
She noted the association and charities will have to work to come up with another way to generate that income.
News that the bingo hall would be closing—after only re-opening at its new location on McIrvine Road this past July—came last week.
“We were really shocked. We weren’t expecting it,” said Linda Larocque, vice-president of the Fort Frances Bingo Association, who got an e-mail last Thursday regarding the closure.
A letter was sent out to bingo hall employees and the local bingo association stating:
“As of Dec. 31, 2006, 800438 Ontario Limited, operating as the Fort Frances Bingo Hall, will be closing its operations. Therefore, there will be a matinee at Dec. 31, 2006 at which all the provincial pots must go.
“We’d like to thank all our customers over the years for their loyalty and support,” it added.
Larocque stressed the letter was sent out from the bingo hall owners (Philip Furtney of St. Marys and Gordon Paget of Niagara on the Lake), and was not a decision of the bingo association.
Larocque said the reason given for the closure was “economic difficulties” as the number of bingo players has dwindled since the province-wide smoking ban came into effect May 31.
“The bingo hall re-opened on July 21. The first little while it was fine,” she noted, adding patrons could smoke outside the facility.
“We did try to accommodate the players by giving them more intermissions,” added Larocque. “But the decline is due to them not being able to smoke.”
Larocque said 20 local charities will be affected by the closure as these groups use bingos as their primary means of fundraising. These range from the Fort Frances Aquanauts and FFHS band to the Fort Frances Volunteer Bureau and Legion Ladies’ Auxiliary.
As such, Larocque said the bingo association immediately jumped into action in response to the grim news.
“We are looking into different avenues for doing our own bingos. We’re pursuing different avenues for the new year,” she noted.
“Now, whether it will be small little bingos, we’re not sure,” Larocque added. “But we do know the association is very much alive and will be trying our very best to get something going in the new year.”
Larocque said a meeting will be held in early January with the various charities involved to discuss the future of bingo here.
“We’re really, really hoping that we’ll still have the support of all our customers in the new year,” she remarked. “There will definitely be something in January, a bingo of some form. We’re not exactly sure where yet.
“We have to keep things going. There’s a lot of groups that need the bingos to survive,” she stressed. “It will be really, really sad if we can’t get something going in the new year to keep generating that revenue for them.
“It may not be the same amount of money, but it will be some.”
Larocque noted the Bingo association has been in contact with the Town of Fort Frances, and is hopeful the town will help them with licensing in the new year so they can get restarted with bingos promptly.
The bingo hall employs about 12 staff.