Fort Frances reinventing itself.

• Author: Wareing, Andrew
• Position: Fort Frances Celebrates 100 Years - Beautification projects planned to enhance tourism

Fort Frances businesses are hoping to get a bigger piece of a very large tourism pie. Reinventing Fort Frances is a committee of local business people that has been endeavouring for nearly three years to come up with ways to attract more attention to the town from tourists who pass through the community, says committee chair Susan Bodnarchuk.

Approximately one million tourists pass through Fort Frances every year, most through the Canada/U.S. border crossing at Church Street and Central Avenue across the Rainy River.

The results of the committee's work, a number of proposals for local beautification, recreational facilities and improved services costing an estimated $50 million, were accepted by Fort Frances town council in April 2003.

"They (the committee) know that, of the million or so tourists who come through Fort Frances, there were only two or three per cent shopping downtown," says Glenn Witherspoon, mayor of Fort Frances. "They want to get that into double digits."

"We'd like to increase that by at least another 10 per cent," says Bodnarchuk. "If we could raise it that much, it would increase the town's tax base by another $119,000 and would add another 34 full-time jobs. And, as we add different attributes of the plan, it would continue to grow."

The initiative resulted in the pooling of the efforts of the entire town including town council, the local chamber of commerce and the Business Improvement Area (BIA), Bodnarchuk says. It was started by the local business women's network.

"(Kenora-Rainy River MP) Bob Nault challenged the (business women's) network to come up with ideas to enhance tourism as a second industry in the area," says Bodnarchuk. "There were originally three of us from the network who started throwing out ideas and concepts for the gateway area.

"We started with some concepts and some rough drawings and then we started to pull in other groups," Bodnarchuk says. "It's much different now than when, we started out."

The committee hired the services of architectural consultants Hilderman, Thomas, Frank and Cram from Winnipeg to come up with proposals for improvements.

"We're looking at doing it in phases over five to 10 years," she says. "What we're looking at in the early phases is right in the downtown gateway area. We've got a five or six block area here in the downtown that we've concentrated on."

Among the improvements planned include beautification projects to the international bridge and relocation of the...