 Now starting, all attendees are in listen-only mode. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the webinar for April 5th, 2018, Building Your Community's Tourism Strategy with Arby and Hux and Campgrounds. My name is Susan Lowe, and I am broadcasting from Victoria, which is in the unceded traditional territories of one of these people. It's the Songhees and Squimals. Thank you. I'm just going to look after some audio issues here. There we go. All right. There are two options for logging in. If you're trying to get your audio to work, if your computer is running a little bit slow, you can use the phone number that's on the audio panel. If you click over to phone call, it'll give you a phone number, an access code which gets you into this webinar, and a PIN number which identifies you uniquely as the person you registered as on the webinar. If you use someone else's link, there will be two of you on the webinar, and it gets confusing if we try to allow one of you to speak to ask a question or something like that. I'm just going to go over the control panel options for you in case you're new to the GoToWebinar platform. This is what you should be seeing, although it doesn't say BC Economic Atlas Webinar Test at the bottom. It has today's webinar title. The orange arrow lets you hide or unhide your control panel. The blue button lets you go full screen if you want to see us really big, and the raise hand button lets me see you want to ask a question. However, there are many of you and one of me, and today I have a tiny little screen, so what I would suggest you do is if you want to get our attention or ask a question of one of the panelists, type it into the enter a question for staff menu, and I will be working on getting to those questions and asking them in the Q&A session as we go along. Today's session is a little bit interactive. We have the ability to do polls, and that includes pop quizzes. So we have... I'm just going to try and pull up a poll here for giving you an opportunity to show us who you are, and this gives you practice filling out the poll questions. So what type of organization do you represent? Things are going a little slowly here because I only have one screen. So we're collecting up information about who you are and what kind of organization you come from. Not how many pets do you have. That'll have to be for another poll day. I usually leave these open for about 30 seconds. Some of them will in fact be pop quizzes about the content that you just heard. So don't forget to pay attention. Here we go. We are in 90% voted. We have fabulous voter turnout. Good for us. That's excellent. So we have... I'll close the poll now, and I will share the results with you. 50% of you are from local governments, 12% from First Nations or Indigenous organizations, 12% from Tourism Development Marketing Organizations, 8% from Economic Development Agencies or Chamber of Commerce, and 19% of you chose provincial government or other. We only have five options in each poll, so I had to group those together. So that's how a poll works. And we will be going to have a couple of those. So stay attentive as you're going to the webinar. So the objectives of today's webinar are... Here we go. I'll hide that and commence my screen sharing. Today, we want you to be able to articulate the value of RV parks and campsites to an overall tourism strategy for our community. And we have two examples, and we want you to be able to relate useful lessons from those examples to your own community context. Today's presenters, we have Don Ruckel from Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture. Next, we'll have Joss Penny from the BC Watchings and Campgrounds Association. And then our two community examples, we have Michael Bornowski from the District of Mission talking about the Stave West Recreation Area. And finally, we'll have Chris Bauer from Inkameep RV Park, which is owned by a Soyuz Indian Band. We're hoping he's going to be able to join us on the webinar. We're just having some technical challenges today. So I'm going to turn things over. Oh, Chris, you've managed to join us. Oh, yeah. No, I've been on for a little bit. Oh, that's fabulous. Great. Okay. So I'm going to turn things over to Don now for an introduction and to get us started with some information about Congress. Don, it is coming to you. She just has to do something on her screen here. There we go. Uh-oh, back. Okay, now do you have my full screen with the webcam at the side? Okay. Let me just fix that then. One moment, please. Oh, I don't think we have the webcam. So you're okay showing your slides. Okay. And the webinar thing at the side is fine. Yes. Okay. Excellent. Thanks so much, everybody, for joining us today. So my name is Don Ruckel. I'm a senior policy analyst within the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture. And I work with the BC RV and Campground Association, BC, sorry, Joss, BC Lodging and Campgrounds Association. And what we work towards is making sure that the RV and Campground sector is competitive in British Columbia. So as you all probably know, tourism is big business in BC. It's a very important economic driver. And for communities, it's a very important economic and community development tool. So it's growth is really fueled by having diverse, memorable, unique experiences and providing, you know, easy access, quality products, excellent service. And what we try to do in the province and to remain competitive is meet the visitor's evolving travel preferences. And part of that is RV and camping. So the tourism industry itself is a vast interwoven network of businesses, industry organizations, government agencies, and they're all working together to grow and sustain a dynamic industry. And this, of course, in turn stimulates our economy and creates jobs for British Columbians. So as such, it's a very key sector of our economy. And as we can see by the numbers you see on the screen, the numbers are compelling. If you look at the top, the revenue generated $17 billion, which is a 7.9% increase, 2015 to 2016 numbers. And this increases we're seeing year over year with anticipated growth of at least 5% whereas the general economy is sitting around three and a half. So the industry itself doing really, really well despite sluggish economy. You can also see that it is important to the business community and to communities themselves. So if you see by this, this is a poll that you're probably the active people are going to be very familiar with. This is a recent BC Chamber of Commerce survey. And it showed that nearly 90% of respondents say that BC's visitor economy is going to become more and more important over the next decade. That's that top line that you're looking at. And over half of the respondents pegged it as top in importance. And that's followed by clean energy, technology, health services, international trade. So you can see that communities are recognizing that this is a very important economic development tool. You're also probably familiar with the 2016 local economic development in BC survey. And tourism and cultural activities were ranked top as priority for economic development efforts only after business retention and expansion, which is always at the top. So you can see these are tourism, their products, the infrastructure that goes along with it, are top of mind for community and economic developers. So most communities have already adopted and incorporated tourism development into their community plans. Today what we want to specifically talk about is why the RV and camping sector is important to consider in that plan as well. So what we're seeing over at least the last decade is a significant rising in growth of this particular sector. And as an indication, ICBC shows us that over the last 10 years, there's been a 32% increase in the number of insured RVs. And how they do that is they just take a snapshot in the middle of July, which is a good way to look at it. However, what's happening in the province is that the number of campsites in BC has remained relatively static. There's not enough sites to meet the growing demand, especially in high season, especially in high demand areas. So what's the province doing to try to help support this sector? Because of course we want to meet this demand in order to be a competitive destination to all visitors in all markets. So what are we doing to help address this demand? Well, we work very closely, as we said, with the BC Lodging and Campgrounds Association, which represents the sector in our province, to try to see what we can do to help mitigate any barriers, et cetera. Over the past couple of years, the province in partnership with Destination British Columbia has been engaging in a destination development process. Many of you will be familiar with this. What we're doing is looking at what tourism needs in terms of infrastructure, product, destination development tools in order to be creating quality visitor experiences, developing a high standard of service and having the amenities in place to generate and sustain a competitive industry. So we're working with communities and stakeholders across the province to develop this. And RV and camping has definitely been considered in this process. The province at its end is investing almost $23 million in the next five years for camping expansion in BC parks and rec sites throughout the province. But even that does not begin to meet the demand that is out there. And also we support the industry by proclaiming RV and camping week in British Columbia. And this aligns with the Canadian RV and camping week, which is the week after the May long weekend. And that involves different campgrounds and dealerships across Canada offering specials, encouraging camping and also in support of Make-A-Wish Foundation. So that's some of the few things that we're doing to support that sector. And as I said, we work closely with the BC lodging and campgrounds association, helping to address those barriers. And they're great about talking to us about how we can support them. And so at this point, I'll pass it over to Josh Penney, who is executive director of the association. He can talk more about the trends and the value of the industry and why you would want to include that in your own development. Hey, thank you, Dawn. Is it over to me, Susan? Yeah. Oh, actually, I thought we might just do a little pop quiz and see how much people have been paying attention. How does that sound? I'm going to launch a poll here. Here's your pop quiz. How much provincial tax revenue came from tourism in BC based on, based on Dawn's presentation? We've got lots of different numbers here. Now, Dawn, I'm actually going to make you check the answers here. This is tricky because actually these were mostly numbers that came from your presentation. I think that was a tricky question. These were on the slides. All right. It's been 40 seconds now. I'll close it. Now, Dawn, do you remember the answer? The answer is 1.1 billion. There we go. 5% increase over last year. Yes. Yes. A lot of those other numbers came from other things like how much has contributed to GDP and things like that. And then 2.3 billion as I just threw that number in because it sounded like a nice round number. All right. We will move on now. And we'll have Joss Penny join us. Joss, I'm going to send a presentation over to you. Here we go. Is my screen showing? It is indeed. That's correct. That is reversed. Reversed. I knew it would be reversed. Folks, we're having a kind of technology today through and through. It seems all of us have been bitten. I'm not sure how I move it. You go up to the display settings and back where you were. Go to display settings and then it will let you reverse the display. Okay. No, it hasn't let me do it. Oh, no, wait. Don't stop there. Go to display settings. Top left. I don't see it. Over to the left. Your mouse is on the right. Oh, yeah. Display sending. Yeah. There we go. Keep bearing on. Yeah. As was introduced, I'm Joss Penney. I'm the executive director of the VC Lodging and Care Grounds Association. I'm really pleased to work with the ministry on trying to promote the RVing and Camping Sector. I'm also the chair of the Camping and RVing VC Coalition, which I'll explain a bit about as I go into the next slides. So I'm going to run through some information on who are the members of the RVing and Care Grounds Association. On who are the sector players in Campground and the RV sector. A little bit about the economic value of camping. Some market demand for camping. A little bit about segmentation of who the campers are. Some nights that are spent camping throughout British Columbia. Some of the equipment used. And then I'm going to talk a bit about some of the trends that we still see in camping. So you should now be on a slide that lists some of the key sector players. There are 1,500 market ready campgrounds in British Columbia, representing over 50,000 sites. They fall into the four main categories at the top of this slide, which is provincial parks. And there are about 340 provincial parks with about 55% of their camp sites being reservable. And they represent about 11,000 campgrounds, campsites, sorry. Privately operated campgrounds, which I include in that group, the municipal and first nations, because there isn't really a catchable for them. And we're talking about 500 campgrounds in that across British Columbia. We're representing about 30,000 sites. And then we've got national campgrounds, which are run by Parks Canada, of which we have 14 located in British Columbia, some of them being marine. And then we have recreation sites and trails, which are operated by the provincial government, but our partner with various groups, some of our first nations and some are charitable groups. Then the other part of the RV industry is made up of the RV rental fleet. Now, the RV rental fleet primarily rents 3,500 rentals between Calgary and Vancouver for the international market. And that represents about 5% of the total nights that camped were about 385,000 campsite nights. Then you've got the dealers, which everyone's probably familiar with, seeing all those dealers out and about there. They sell the equipment and they service the equipment. And then you've got retail. These are the other companies that are heavily involved in camping. It could be cabalas, sporting stores, Walmart, Canadian Tire, Mountain Equipment Corp. Those types of players. And then you've got some ancillary services, which are probably not so familiar with. Those are the players that are offering RV insurance. It's ICBC, sorry, RV storage. It's ICBC with insurance. It's municipalities, garages and other places with sanitums. And then you've got the final sector, which is manufacturing. Most of which isn't manufactured in BC, but it's people like Coleman, Northern Light, Winnebago, Airstream, etc. I'm going to go a little bit in the economic value similar to what Dawn did. But what you can see in the top table here now is the summary for Canada, the total impact of the camping industry. It's broken down from a survey that was done in 2015 by the Canadian Camping and RVing Council. And they looked at four areas, RV and camping retail activities, RV manufacturing, travel expenditures, which is really the recreation campsite rentals, food and beverage, and the in-community expenditures and other expenses which are insurance, maintenance, storage of RV units. Overall, in 2014, the camping industry had a total tax reach of more than $1 million, which was previously reported. It employed about 60,000 people Canada-wide, of which 7,200 of those are located in British Columbia. And the GDP in BC for that year was around $606 million. So BC Camping and RVing market demand primarily comes from three short-haul markets. What you're seeing here is the results of a study that we did with destination British Columbia and Align Consulting where we're benchmarking some of the people that come to Google and we interviewed an end figure of 500 for BC, 500 for Alberta and 500 for Washington. And then we extrapolated how that would look. So what you can see of the short-haul market study, there are about 2 million campers that are likely to camp in British Columbia in the next two years. So there's significant demand from that. There's a significant demand followed by Alberta 31%, Washington State 26%. Bear in mind this is just our short-haul markets and I've already mentioned in a slide before that we had 385,000 nights from international travelers and we have rest of Canada and rest of USA which would probably make up another 5-6% of the market camping. So what's this group sort of segmented down? How many households there are? And sort of what is the demographic and psychographic characteristics of the people that are coming camping? And what you can see here is broken down into four empty nest explorers which equated to approximately 319,000 households in British Columbia, affluent adventurers, 276,000 households in British Columbia, millennial couples, about 144,000 households in British Columbia. So the market size is pretty significant for those that are likely to camp or RV. We also asked in the same study what sort of nights are spent camping so we had a distribution of how they're sort of camping. And you can see it's pretty even some people who don't have a lot of experience in camping. So what's the market size of the city? It's pretty even. Some people want to three nights only going up to 31 nights at 18% of the sample. Other studies are consistently shown that campers take an average of four camping trips a year. So that's why you're getting these larger numbers of 8 to 14 and 15 to 30. These are those people that are likely taking more than four to five trips in a year. Taking the 1,500 camp grounds with the 50,000 campsites that are available overnight. That's about 4.4 million nights that are housed between the main camping season of May to October. These people are citing the top reasons for getting away to enjoy nature. The tenters have more emphasis on nature than RVers. They're more interested in the social aspect of the camping and RVing. And the most popular activities are hiking or walking. They choose campgrounds based on the appearance, environmental cleanliness and the price. And they're all, and I repeat all, seeking Wi-Fi even though they're looking to get away from nature. Equipment used for camping and RVing I threw this slide in quickly so you could see the distribution. Overall the most popular camping equipment is still the tent or tent trailer. And then about half of the campers use RVs or go cabin camping. Some of the trends, what are the trends and why are we looking at developing campgrounds or sustaining the existing campgrounds that are there. It's been widely reported in the press in 2016 and 17 that there have been shortage of overnight campgrounds and campsites in the peak seasons of July and August. Many British Columbians cannot book sites at BC parks or private sector campgrounds during those peak times. Some of this is going to be addressed with the government's announcement of expanding the number of rec sites and the number of sites in BC parks but I mean the rest of these trends will speak to what's really happening and driving more demand. Redevelopment potential private campgrounds and RV parks are being targeted for redevelopment because for uses that satisfy investment opportunity. There's two reasons mainly for this one a lot of the ones are seeing urban encroachment and so therefore the land is more valuable to be redeveloped as affordable housing or other types of housing and the second one is the aging infrastructure of the campgrounds is making them less desirable to sell as going concerns and so they're being redeveloped instead. Business diversification in the private sector and the RV park operators are actually diversifying their business to make their campgrounds more sustainable income wise year-round. We're seeing more winter rentals, we're seeing year-round seasonal rentals we're seeing a move towards glamping, putting in high intents, a trail is no templates for people to rent because they have a higher yield. A trend that wasn't known 10 years ago is the increase of the lifestyle interest from millennial campers. Millennial campers are looking at RVing in particular as a lifestyle choice. Some of them are choosing to live in their RV year-round and the prime reason for them being able to camp more is that technology allows them to be able to get out of their own usual environment. We're in the tsunami of baby boomers retiring and taking up RVing in large numbers and that's going to continue for a number of years. Technology is also enabling more demand. There are some services that are sort of opening up RV rentals. RV easy and outdoorsy are the two that I've put there on the screen. Those are renting privately owned RVs that were previously stored for large number of days during the camping season, putting more people on the road and creating campsite demand. That kind of concludes my presentation so I'm going to hand it back to you, Susan. Thanks very much, Joss. I'm just going to take control back here and going in we have as always we have a pop quiz question and then I've got a couple of questions from our audience to ask you, Joss, before we carry on. So the first one here is your pop quiz. We looked at the segments of the population. I believe this was in Joss's presentation. That's how I got it. So which are the following or not one of the demographic profiles that you might find in your campground? This one should be fairly straightforward and easy although I think everyone desires to be a gorgeous glamper perhaps but I had to throw this one in just for a bit of pop quiz fun because things should be fun. So the I'm going to close the poll now. The correct answer is gorgeous glamper although they exist are not one of the demographic profiles that was defined in the research on the demographics of campers in BC. I've got a couple of other questions to ask before we go on Joss, I'm curious to know if stats by season are available so to compare winter and off season versus summer high season camping? The short answer is no. I mean we only began a winter camping campaign last year so we only have one year's worth of knowledge as to how that's going and we had about 150 odd campgrounds both BC parks and private sector campgrounds that were participating. Camping and RV in coalition has a research budget and I certainly can make sure that that question is asked in next year's survey. Great. Okay and any good BC examples of farm experiences for camping? Are you mean like agritourism? I think what the question was talking about was when people are invited to stay on farms and experience the farm environment so maybe helping out with farm tasks and things like that. There are a number of people that are in agritourism but I mean with regards to the farm experiences I mean they usually with the agritourism as most of the developers know is 10 sites or less so primarily they're not in some of them are in the overnight business so I don't actually have an examples of that I mean I know some people that are working orchards that do allow people to camp in them but they don't actually have them working on the farm so I'm not really sure if that's really a trend that's big or something that's happening. Okay well maybe looking into the agritourism part of things is another way of finding resources for that. Someone else widely asked if we're going to have access to your presentation notes because there was a lot of stats in there so people know we'll be posting those presentations with the recording of this webinar. It takes me about a week to put things together and get them up on our economic development portal. We also have the now I'm going to take a hope here that the handouts section of this webinar platform is working today. We have two handouts that should be available on your control panel if you click on it. We've loaded in the 2015 economic impact of camping report that's a nationwide report and also an RV park development checklist that might get or be useful to you in developing it. Oh we have one more question here. Is it possible to get stats on the tourist traffic through the Hyder border crossing? And how do you get that information? And I'm going to just Yeah I'm just going to Hi, yeah destination British Columbia I believe collects stats on border crossings and you know what I'm not sure if they're the actual source but they do monitor stats on border crossings. I don't know about if they're broken down per border crossing but whoever the question was from please email me and I can see if I can follow up on some numbers for you. Okay and the just to make it easier the email address is justyourname.dawndwn.reco your last name r-u-e-c-k-l adgov.dc.ca Just awesome thanks Okay great alright we're going to move on now and we have Michael Boronowski from the District of Mission who's going to be talking about the State West Recreation Area I'm going to just hand things over to Michael here Thank you and I am just trying to make sure that I'm showing the right thing There we go How does that look for everybody? Are you seeing my presentation now? We are Thank you Excellent Before I begin I need to acknowledge that Mission is on the unceded ancestral lands of the Stolo people that includes the Quantland, LaCountland, Matsquee and Scalitz Nations and we work very closely with the Quantland Nation especially on the State West Forest and Recreation Area project increasingly on forestry and cultural activities throughout the District given that this is located in what they consider the heart of their traditional territory so that's just important for me to mention before we begin I am here to talk about the State West Forest and Recreation Area I'm happy to take any and all questions at the end this is going to be a little less data heavy and a little more sort of feely in and maybe based on values in a little early stage so bear with me through that I appreciate your patience here What I'd like to talk about is essentially the importance of building partnerships and trying to do something in a bit of a different way in developing outdoor recreation, tourism education and then protecting, preserving cultural use and heritage sites as a way forward both for economic development but also for social development across our communities I'm going to talk a little bit about the State West story our goals and strategies and then get to where we stand today where is State West you may not know where mission is we are a what many consider small but about 40,000 people on the North Shore of the Fraser River about 60 kilometers from Vancouver State West is located on the western shoreline of the Stave Reservoir and it is half of our tree farm about 50 square kilometers mission is one of the two municipalities that operates our own forestry enterprise and has a tree farm license we've done that since 1958 so we are having 60th anniversary this year and that has been a significant economic driver for our community for many years and it's allowed us to do things like work as a forestry enterprise work within our tree farm to develop hiking trails like you see here on the screen all across mission we're really lucky to work in partnership with the Fraser Valley Mountain Bike Association and our parks and recreation department and we have fabulous networks of trails whenever we do citizen satisfaction surveys business recruitment retention strategy surveys one of the major drivers that bring people to this city is the community feel but number one or two always on that list and it bumps up and down is the proximity and the availability of outdoor natural experiences it's why people move here to live and why people are increasingly bringing businesses here professionals now live out in the valley because they can afford to and they still get all of those amenities the Stave West area can look exactly like this picture which is from Stave West it also can look like this it's been known as the Wild West we had an issue I moved to the Fraser Valley four years ago when I moved here my first trip looked a lot like these magazine pictures my first trip up the Florence Lake Forest Service Road into Stave West look a lot like this we have what I would call you know very gently reckless and or had reckless and dangerous shooting here are another couple examples and you can see it was pretty significant is still in some parts pretty significant however we've been very lucky to work with the regional district and the province to manage target shooting and have created regional buffers that ban target shooting from 400 meters of any forest service road and within mission we also brought in bylaws that regulate and limit where you can shoot what where hunting can occur in season and so we've seen a real shift in terms of the activity in Stave West but all this misuse really created the germ of an idea and that was how do we transform what is a sustainably managed forestry operation into that plus a destination for family friendly outdoor recreation how do we then combine that with tourism and bring people for outdoor recreation from outside of mission and then building on that how do we start to layer in education and place-based learning and so you know over the past I would say 10 years we have progressively done layers of research and planning and that started with recreational opportunities a feasibility analysis I feasibility study on the potential for a Tim Horton Children's Foundation camp they still have a license of occupation at one of the lakes in the Stave West area and then through a master plan and that master plan included significant public engagement and a planning team with representatives from the District of Mission Council the Quantlin First Nation including Council and the director of their business group the Provincial Government and then user groups including Foreal Drive Association Community Futures Economic Development our Chamber of Commerce Fraser Valley Mountain Bike Association and others as we talked about whether it was user groups or economic development so many lenses that master plan was adopted in 2015 and we're now into I guess we're entering our third year of implementation it's been very exciting over those years we've done a few things we've continued to do planning so we've done designs for campgrounds three of which should be opening this year we've continued to work with the province and with the Quantlin Nation around Sayers Lake Campground which was open and has seen improvements and enhancements and then we've worked on further studies on what are the opportunities in terms of outdoor recreation how do we layer in RV camping along with the more rustic tent camping that you see happening in some of the forest rec sites that the province will build and then have hosting contracts with and on top of all of this recreation we've really focused on developing educational partnerships and activities with students specifically from BCIT and we've developed a bit of an outdoor learning alliance around Stave West and the benefit here has been not only to our forest enterprise or to say sustainable resource management students who engage there but those students have also helped us design campgrounds that are now being built. Design trail networks where we're now doing the arc work to prove out these trail networks and starting to actually flag these and so we're finding the opportunity for mission is to improve community health to improve the health of our forest and develop recreation opportunities by engaging with educational institutes around the Stave West project and it's been just phenomenally rewarding. So I'm going to move into a bit now a bit more about where we are today. This map now before you shows locations for our eight new potential camp sites within the Stave West forest and recreation area. It's also home to the Zajac Ranch for children. We have a license of occupation in the north corner around Pine Lake for the Tim Horton's Children's Foundation camp. We've also more recently been approached by a cancer camp for kids foundation who are looking to create a permanent home for a kids cancer camp in British Columbia and it's adjacent to Raleigh Lake. Now we're lucky in terms of there being an abundance of lakes and really interesting terrain. There's some additional challenges because we do have active forestry in the region at all times so it is not a pristine back country environment but it really is an enjoyable rustic front country environment where people can get in with easy vehicle access currently all the way up to the Zajac Ranch and our Cursley Creek campground that is opening this season. So the new campgrounds we built this season include a Rock Creek campground which is at about 7.5 km mark on the Florence Lake Forest Service Road leaves Dutney and it is the busiest forest service road in British Columbia but this Rock Creek campground is a motorized focus campground or focus for motorized users so larger sites, some group sites, RV use is one of the primary RV campers for our target audience and we built into this campground with Ministry of Forest a staging area loading and unloading area and it is designed around having families, individuals who are coming up with RVs or with trailers and unloading whether those are off-road trucks or quads dirt bikes and then using those to access some of the old decommissioned logging roads in the area working currently to try to find a way to move ahead with the Foreal Drive Association to create a bit of a training loop so we can do safe driver training rescue and recovery training with the Foreal Drive Association at that campsite bring some value add to it just past that is a Curzley Creek campsite right on the shore of the Stave Lake and adjacent to the Zajek Ranch for Children and that is an equestrian themed campsite with the additional design consideration of all along the shoreline we've been we've worked with the Ministry of Forest and Lands Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development to design campsites with a little larger footprint and additional buffers so that as we look down the road to bringing more glamping and more RV or semi-permanent structures there are some really unique campsites on the shoreline of the Stave Reservoir and then the Sayers Lake Campground and Rocky Point Campground Sayers Lake is currently just completing a management agreement to get a host in there for this season and Rocky Point we're undertaking archaeology analysis and there are some really fascinating, fascinating historical concerns as this really has been inhabited territory and important territory for 10,000 plus years I had mentioned the Stave West Outdoor Learning Alliance only because I think in addition to our collaboration and relationship or partnership that we are developing with the Quantlin Nation as a local government developing partnerships and formalizing agreements with educational institutes and with school districts is I think crucial to moving a really complex project like this forward. We've worked with the University of the Fraser Valley and BCIT as our primary post-secondaries mission public school district and then the Zajak Ranch for Children as a facilities partner in just establishing that we do agree to work together as an Outdoor Learning Alliance to advance place based and outdoor learning specifically within the forest. We're very excited just last year Zajak Ranch we're able to open an Aboriginal Arts and Culture Building we are having a stakeholders group meeting in there looking forward to more and more educational programming happening in there over the coming years and our biggest concern in all of this is to reduce that dangerous and illegal activity that I talked about the shooting we have had a lot of sort of drunk rowdy behavior stemming primarily from the mud bogging activities out on the foreshore flats. We've worked with the RCMP to increase our patrols as a municipality to fund that to the tune of about $80,000 to $100,000 per year in terms of overtime initiatives as the dangerous and illegal activity has dropped that expense directly to the city is dropping and we're currently working in collaboration with the RCMP Ministry of Forest Conservation Officer Service and others to develop a more coordinated approach so that's not all happening on the back of the local RCMP detachment and our biggest one of our biggest challenges right now is reconciling that the picture you see above me is the picture you see atop on this screen is the foreshore of Stave Lake and you can see where it might be, it is an area that is flooded and then there's water drawn down because it's a man-made reservoir you can see where really really heavy four-wheel drive use and off-road vehicle use has caused some pretty significant habitat at least environmental degradation we have a really very active group who calls this Dirt Church and then we have a really fantastic group many of whom are part of Dirt Church who are part of the four-wheel drive association who do phenomenal cleanup so we have a really engaged community some of the activity is technically illegal some of it is horrific if you really care about archaeology and environmental concerns but how our big work now is how do we continue to improve and advance our work with user groups including off-roaders to respect the natural and heritage values while respecting what is a very popular and economically valuable activity just probably a really big challenge that I think there's mentioning what you see here we installed this last year with Artisan Log Homes here from Artisan is in the middle of there with his hand up they are our first corporate sponsor which is really interesting so they donate time and labor and built the structures for our new entry signs what used to look a bit like a prison camp because at one time was the entrance to a prison camp is starting to look very nice but this picture really highlights the individuals and partnerships that we've built and you know in here we see ministry staff foresters educators and local government people as well as stakeholders we're all working together on developing outdoor recreation and tourism not just as an economic driver but also to support the health of our community the protection of heritage and natural resources and then to provide opportunities for education and training and I think that holistic approach will really serve us well over the long term with that I've sort of outlined where we're at and what we're doing with Stave West and I'm open to any questions and I'll just hand this back or wait for it to be handed back I'll click stop showing screen and hand back control thank you okay thanks very much Michael that was really interesting it's fascinating to see how it has evolved and how many partners are required to make that happen we do have of course a comprehension pop quiz for you if you've been paying attention this one should be also fairly straightforward I'm going to put the poll up down let you vote which of the following is a feature that was introduced in the Stave West recreation area in 2017 I'll let it say open for about 30 seconds here I have a sneaking suspicion based on the results that have been coming in so far that we're going to have 100% correct answers on this oh we're going to we have some divergence we've only got 45% of you who voted so those of you who have stepped away and are working on checking your emails or writing an email you're eating your lunch this is a good time to come back and vote in the pop quiz Susan that's Don I just wanted to make a comment I love the presentation in the way Stave Lake has things coming together and I just wanted to make a point that this is in a sense what Stave Lake is doing is a really a microcosm of the provincial destination development process you have an incredibly collaborative process looking for the long-term planning and future of the destination and the key elements there not only is the economic or valuable economic driver recognized but it's all about environmental sustainability and preservation it's about community and social development it's about a long-term vision and how the visitor can contribute to the long-term vision of the destination that's really what the provincial destination development process is drawing those parallels there thank you very much I would say thank you for that it wasn't intentional at the beginning but then members of the Stave West leadership team have been involved in those regional and provincial destination development initiatives throughout the years we continue to be and what we're working on is trying to make sure that everything we do is a demonstration project and it's been really recognized by Aboriginal tourism BC as a provincial demonstration project of what really is possible and I have to raise my hands and thanks to the Quantlin Nation especially for being willing to continually return to the table and work collaboratively and openly towards these initiatives there certainly are roadblocks especially when you're working with many levels of government policy is not great at facilitating development it's great at really measuring progress and we've made very significant progress I think because of that open collaboration with the nation with other nations and with user groups as well as with the provincial government Michael I've got one question for you from one of our audience members how much of an economic benefit does the mud bulging provide there are I have a one prepared by the four wheel drive association that I should have brought up that I should have brought up so directly to mission it is not phenomenal economic driver specifically in stave west the reason I make that the reason I state that is we know through vehicle surveys that we've done although I haven't done one in the last two years we know from visitor surveys that we've done that about 70% of the visitors come from outside of the district of mission and your primary if you're coming from outside of the district and typically from Metro Vancouver so primarily you know those people are or our visitors aren't coming into downtown mission before heading back west and north into stave west and so you know we're at a point where we're really building foundations that we can then scaffold services and scaffold economic development on top of where currently we had where previously we had unregulated and unmanaged camping in the forest we had conditions that weren't safe for the foresters working in the forest now we have campgrounds we can start to do user and visitor management and we can start to scaffold economic development including providing services and goods to visitors like the four wheel drivers off-roaders you know they're expensive and so there is an economic there is economic activity related to four wheel drive use we haven't quantified what it is within the district of mission knowing that the most significant contingent of those visitors are coming from outside the district and then leaving the district and not doing extended stays so it's one of those opportunities that we need to delve into more figuring out how do we what's the potential for extending the length of stay and what's the value there if we can start to deliver goods and services built around that extended stay okay and I have one more quick question that I want a quick answer to because then we've got to make time for Chris before everyone has to go back can you estimate the district of mission investment in state west yeah certainly I can I would estimate we've been in the implementation phase years I would estimate the cost of implementation to us and that it would be in the total of around $300,000 over four years now that includes engineering designs consultant work survey expenses costs of hiring summer students working collaboratively to get us to where we are plus some investment in actual road building to improve entry ways to our entry points there's also been a few million dollars invested from the province and from other sources whether that's through ministry of forest lands natural resource operations and rural development or ministry of transportation for road upgrades because this was a forestry road and it's now been upgraded to I think about the 10 kilometer mark to a pretty good standard where if you have a Honda Civic and a tent in the back you can get up to the first three campgrounds without any problem perfect, that covers me alright, thanks Michael we're going to move on now to Chris Bauer from the Soyuz Indian Bam and in coming out of the park so I'm just going to let the screen controls open to Chris it is coming your way I'll show my screen yes can you see my screen yes we see your whole presentation there we go we've got it going great everybody was looking ahead okay thank you I'm Chris Bauer I'm the business development officer for the Soyuz Indian Bam and we've been working for the Soyuz Indian Bam actually since 1996 and then back in 1997 I was given the task to help build up the Inkeny campground in RV park so I was hoping I was going to be able to give you kind of a snapshot on what's happening here and what the economic impact is for the local communities that are close by now to give you an idea the Inkeny campground RV park is located at Inkeny Resort we have 226 villas and suites we have a winery we have a cultural center we have a nine hole golf course and we have 380 campsites okay so to give you an idea of the layout of the campground we have it sits on 40 acres other than the 380 sites we have 155 sites that are open for the winter and what we do is we actually charge even though the band owns this business we do an annual lease paid to the OAB administration and throughout the years we've been able now to build it up to 7.2 million dollars in infrastructure and we're running an annual revenue of 3 million dollars now that's and then after that we're doing one million dollars in annual profits and that's of course after amortization also our lease payment now let's see they give you an idea of that community impact with being open year round that gives us the 12 months of business and during the summer time that's the peak time when the dollars are coming in and we can do up to about 1500 people per night during the summer season in the spring and fall it's actually when we start to get a lot of our international travelers and also a lot of the empty nesters those explorers are coming during that season so that kind of fills off in the spring and fall during the winter time there's a very large snowbird market and we're running out of about 250 people per night that are within the campground we've been running up to 100% occupies during the winter time now with being up to 150 150 people per night in the summer season we have 15 year round employees but then we have another 15 full time seasonal employed so our annual payroll is running at 730,000 now with all this we've calculated what the economic impact to the local community is at 19.2 million annually now that could be a little bit of a lower estimate I have to have our economists to come and take a look at our numbers and I'm expecting is actually over 20 million want to show that on the screen now what's happening is we're getting we're trending with the RVers when I first started in 97 there is a lot of people that were tenting they would have small units they would start building up from there but within the last 20 years now the units are getting larger the vehicles that they're pulling there's people with 60-80 thousand dollar trucks pulling 80-150 thousand dollar trailers then we have motorhomes reaching up to the cost of 1.5 million 1.8 million dollars so we have a different clientele that's been coming to our RV park so we're seeing a big impact with the hardware stores supply stores that support the RV park restaurants and food outlets the grocery stores because we're focusing on getting people to stay past the 2-4 days stays we're really focused to help drive them staying a week to 2 weeks during the winter time of course they're staying throughout the whole winter but our real main focus is to do that and our average stay is about 4 nights the wineries golf courses cultural center boat rentals and attractions they're feeding off our 1500 campers that have during the summer time notice that there's a big spend that's happening at that end and we also have a gas station and when we built the gas station Petro Canada that we had built we put diesel at every tank we laid out the parking lot so we'd be able to handle the large units to be able to come in and we've been very successful in that it's actually increased the amount of fuel sales within the town of Asoyas and one of that reason is because they have those large tanks that they do a major focus on building now I just kind of gave you a quick overview and I was hoping that I could open it up for questions yeah absolutely we're happy to have questions from people and I've got something oh we just had someone had to run and saying thank you very much to all the presenters facilitators thank you very much Krista but she has left so does anyone else have any questions? We have quite a few people still here on the presentation so feel free to write in a question or at this point I can actually see your hands because I'm looking there so if you want to raise your hand and then I can unmute your line and you can ask a question and not have to type it in I don't actually have a pop quiz for Krista's presentation alas I ran out of steam on my pop quiz creation but I actually have some polls I'm going to ask one of my poll questions here for people who are on the line does your community have a tourism development strategy and if so does it include RV and camping so I'm opening that up right now Susan it's Dawn again while they're polling Krista really appreciate that and one of the things I truly appreciated was the numbers regarding local economic impact that's some of the stuff that's really difficult in RV and camping is getting some good stats on those impacts but what we're finding is that some of the assumptions that have been made about campers in RV are just aren't the reality anymore as you said the daily spend is going up they don't just sit on the beach and eat hot dogs it's way different they like to bring their home with them when they travel their RV but they're out there experiencing doing spending and taking advantage of the tourism offerings in the community so I'm really glad that you guys are doing some work in that area and increasing that awareness about that particular market we're even noticing with the snowbird market we're even noticing an increased spend there as well the snowbirds that are coming they're we first started out a lot of those snowbirds it was trying to find the cheapest way to stay within the area now it's going to it's more of a lifestyle it's an experience why they'll come for the RV and you know they spend time in the clubhouse they're out in the community spending at least two to three times during the week out eating in restaurants they're quoting groups of 30 to 40 people and make reservations throughout the town so that's a lot of the feedback we've been getting back from the community so we've got a couple of questions in here from Roxanne not sure if her community's tourism development plan has RV and camping in it but she's going to check and that is exactly what we want to be doing after this webinar here's that question related to the upcoming I think this is probably probably a good question for Dawn to answer related to the upcoming announcement of 22.9 million into provincial campgrounds and some of that will be allocated to northern BC and are there any upcoming grant opportunities for northern campgrounds the BC parks and the money that's being spent on campsite development is partly BC parks which is the Ministry of Environment and it's partly rec sites and trails which is under the Ministry of Ports lands and natural resource operations and rural development so that figure of 23 million that piece if you look at the parks Canada website they have done that you can see the plan and I believe I may be a bit challenged on this but I believe it also includes what is going to be invested in rec sites and trails but they do have that development plan on the BC parks website and you can find it there great thank you here's a question for Chris do you encounter any major operational challenges in the summer or any other season like hiring staff for instance or other things that's actually a big issue so what we're working on we're very fortunate is a lot of our BAM members like to work at the RV park so and something that we've done to help with that challenge is because we actually have quite a few jobs is that we're hiring students so during the summer time it's a perfect opportunity to hire kids that are 14 years old and older and people coming back from university so we've been able to fill a lot of those positions during that seasonal time during the winter spring and fall we're not having a problem filling it for the employees so that's where we've done our focus what we're doing also is we're branding and staff housing that we're working on with the town of Ossoia so the surrounding resorts so they kind of fill in so we're working on that issue because that is something that's happening especially in the Okinawa great thank you for the answer so we have the results back 40% of our response are working on building their tourism development plan right now and 27% we don't have a tourism development plan that I'm aware of you know there's a number of people who aren't working in communities right now so the question doesn't really apply to me or they don't know I have one more question and then we're going to move on to the closing part of the webinar is there any talk about adjusting the campground or RV reservation process to give priority for the first 30 days after reservations are available to BC residents and then the next 30 days to Canadian residents Don I don't know if that's a tourism question or another ministry question but can you take a stab at it or possibly direct us to who could answer the question I am not intimately familiar with the reservation system but I believe that is managed through BC parks and the Ministry of Environment I know that they had revamped that reservation system and that new parameters were being introduced this year so I cannot answer that question but I think that would be one for the Ministry of Environment and BC parks Thanks very much we have reached almost the end of our presentation time I want to say a big thank you to our presenters Don, Joss, Michael and Chris thank you so much this was a very interesting webinar to listen to next webinar coming up it's only a week from today it's called the more we get together innovation spaces and we're going to be talking about co-working spaces fabrication spaces innovation centers and the idea that if we put people in proximity to each other working together that makes the difference sound here so that is coming up there's a link there on your screen to register for that and we're hearing about innovation spaces that are in Kalimps and Kelowna but I know there's a lot of other spaces being created so if you know of an innovation space and you want to share an example or some wisdom then join in on this webinar so some of you hopefully are now getting our invitations via the our online webinar service if you're not, if you heard about this from somebody else here's a little link here you can go online and sign yourself up for our invitation list and we have one more thing our tech dev 101 workshops they are introducing tech and innovation basics and we've delivered four of them so far through the province they're generating very interesting dialogue we had them in Kasselgar, Cranbrook Port Alberni and Campbell River and there's more coming up in the spring and happy to book these in your community for the fall our facilitators come to you we just ask you to help us get a venue and lunch and help us invite the right people so right after this webinar you'll get a link to a feedback survey it'll also get emailed to you in about an hour after the webinar because I really want your responses the recording and as well the presentation slides will be posted to our economic development portal site in about a week and you can go there and download these as well as the handouts that are here and also find out how to register for our next webinar that takes it to the end of our session thank you very much to everyone for joining us to the 26 attendees that stayed right until the end go and get yourself a cookie and I will see you again next week for Innovation Spaces I'm going to close the webinar now and it just turns everything off it can be somewhat alarming so get ready, here we go thanks very much for attending