The fourth time was the charm for the Haines Borough tourism department.
The Haines Borough Assembly last week approved the deparments’s request for a winter tourism study.
Mayor Stephanie Scott said the proposal was in its fourth incarnation . The proposal for a $30,000 study last came before the assembly in August, when leaders sent it back to the Tourism Advisory Board for refinement after expressing skepticism about the proposal’s ambiguity and high price tag.
The study will be performed by the Juneau-based McDowell Group. It will focus particularly on the heli-skiing market, according to the proposal.
Former tourism director Tanya Carlson spoke to the assembly last week about the new proposal, which had been further refined and developed to only focus on winter tourism instead of both winter and summer tourism.
Carlson said the study will consist of two parts: an economic impact analysis and a market assessment. The economic impact analysis will examine the current state of Haines tourism from Oct. 1 to April 10 – from the Alcan 200 to various school sports events – that bring people to town.
The analysis will focus on direct effects as well as the indirect “trickle-down” effects of these events and industries, including how many people are employed and where those employees spend their money.
The second part of the study is the market assessment, which “gives us basically a target moving forward,” Carlson said. That includes identifying what the borough should be doing to further promote winter tourism, such as creating more infrastructure.
That infrastructure could include a covered ice rink to bring hockey tournaments down from Whitehorse, or curling club events, Carlson said. It could also include marking and mapping cross-country ski trails so visitors can come here “and actually have something to utilize and not just go in the middle of nowhere.”
Assembly member George Campbell still had qualms about hiring an outside firm to conduct the study, asking Carlson whether it could be done by staff in-house.
“It’s very time consuming,” Carlson said. “In terms of the dollars you are going to spend hiring somebody to do it, it’ll probably be about equal. You also take the scientific aspect out of it. It becomes a biased survey if we do it.”