Picture this:
You arrive at the airport in Regina, you have a desire to explore southeastern Saskatchewan either for business or pleasure. You reach for a copy of this summer’s official South Saskatchewan Vacation Guide and begin to thumb through it.
You need to go to Weyburn. Good enough. There are a couple of pages in the guide that describe what is found there, along with a half-dozen colourful photographs. No need to Google anything. It’s right there. So are pages filled with information about the delights of visiting Carnduff, Kipling, Midale, Wawota, Redvers, Carlyle, Stoughton and Arcola.
Unless you knew better, this guide will do nothing to direct you to Estevan. It does not exist as far as the South Saskatchewan Vacation Guide is concerned.
No mention of Affinity Place, Woodlawn, Boundary Dam, the leisure centre, EMS, Souris Valley Theatre or Museum or EAGM. No word about the Energy City ball parks, soccer pitches, football fields, cultural and recreational pursuits or public parks.
There is one small paragraph stating Estevan is home to a large power plant, thereby proving that we do, in fact, exist.
So how did this ball get dropped?
We don’t know.
Some things are lost in translation. We suspect, that in this case, there was something lost in transition.
Several months ago, swooping changes were announced … changes that called for the city’s economic development and tourism portfolios to swing over from the chamber of commerce to city hall.
From what we understand at this stage, the transition is still happening, in slow motion.
We’re not in any position to point fingers, since we really don’t know where the holdup was.
When the chamber lost their executive director, it took them the better part of a year to find a replacement. Much of that delay we assume, was due to the dramatic overhaul and change in the chamber’s mandate.
Who was in charge of the budget? Who was charged with the tourism and economic development files while the slow-mo changeover was meandering along to some sense of finality? It meandered to the point that the prime time to get aboard the vacation-season promotion train was missed. That train left the station, information centres, bus stations, airports and hospitality facilities a few months ago. Estevan was not aboard, and that’s a shame.
If our city missed the tourism boat and bus by such a wide margin, it makes us wonder how the economic development file has been faring during the transition phase. Have there been missed opportunities thanks to uncertainty as to who was going to cover for whom and when?
We can only hope that with an executive director now in place at the C of C and with a promise of some certainty returning to these two vital cogs in our business wheelhouses at city hall, our community will be able to get back to the business of doing business and that we won’t be lost to the outside world when our leadership teams perform our future transitions.
