A proposed $16 million investment by a British development firm is opening up new tourism and event hosting opportunities for the Town of Smooth Rock Falls.
Still reeling from the withdrawal of Tembec in 2005, the town is due to see the construction of a new hotel, nursing home and restaurant within the next two years courtesy of Nightingale Premier Inc.
The company, which has built and managed nine nursing homes in Great Britain, recently completed its first project in the province with a nursing home in Pickering.
Though financing details have not yet been revealed, construction on the 60-unit nursing home is slated to begin later this year, with hotel construction beginning by early 2008. Both are expected to be completed within a 12-month period.
This newly proposed move would add 100 new hotel rooms and 75 jobs to the sleepy town of 1,300, whose sole 29-room hotel has been insufficient to help drive tourism efforts, says Bob Cheetham, economic development officer for Smooth Rock Falls.
"We've been held back by our lack of accommodation space in the past," Cheetham says.
"It's difficult to try and push for tourism or big events when you only have 29 units in the whole town. This changes all of that, and definitely helps us in terms of economic diversification as we start to push for conferences and trade shows and such."
As an example of the challenges the town currently faces in terms of event organization, Cheetham points to the "Smooth Truck Fest," an annual three-day event held in the fall. To accommodate the estimated 2,000 people that are expected to attend, officials are being forced to establish a temporary trailer park, a situation Cheetham admits to be less than ideal.
The new hotel units will also allow the town to promote itself as an opportunity for big-city dwellers to recharge their internal batteries. Located on the Mattagami River and nestled among the sprawling forest, Smooth Rock Falls will be leveraging its natural strengths as the hotel nears completion.
"We haven't marketed that aspect of our community very much thus far, so it's definitely going to become part of a broader strategy, and the river in particular," Cheetham says. "We're looking for a piece of that broader tourism package, and there are already an awful lot of Europeans with camps out this way, so we think we might be able to tap into that a little as well."
Having met with Nightingale Premier president Dr. Ravindra Sondhi in Pickering after the completion of the company's new nursing home last fall, Cheetham invited him to visit Smooth Rock Falls as a potential place to build another.
After noting the town's low real estate costs, its location on the Trans-Canada Highway as well as the Mattagami River, and its proximity to a variety of wilderness offerings, Sondhi committed to the larger project.
While this meshed with the town's intentions to somehow improve its prospects for tourism, the mayor is quick to point out how Smooth Rock Falls is not scrambling for random economic opportunities.
"We're not just grabbing blindly at anything that comes our way," Mayor Kevin Somer says. "We need to do what makes sense for what we got."
Although some naysayers have commented on how the construction of a 100-room hotel in a town the size of Smooth Rock Falls is doomed for failure, Somer says this defeatist attitude is counterproductive to real progress.
"It really is a case of 'if you build it, they will come.' We just have to make sure we properly leverage this opportunity."
