Lack of snow crippling to Katahdin Businesses hope grants for marketing can help

Thanks to a high school basketball tournament and snowmobilers, occupancy at the 80-room Econo Lodge Inn & Suites on Central Street in Millinocket was at about 80 percent Saturday. That’s good news to general manager Induy Patel.

“It will go higher as soon as school vacation week starts around February 8th or 10th, and it should continue right until the end of February and maybe into March,” Patel said Sunday. “Two factors: if the temperatures don’t go high [above freezing], and we need some more snow, 6 inches to a foot by the end of February.

“That will make this year’s winter successful,” Patel added.

What cannot be salvaged is winter 2006, Patel said, which ended Jan. 1 and almost entirely lacked the snowfall that is the lifeblood of the Katahdin region’s tourist economy.

“It won’t wipe out the losses of last year,” Patel said, during which the hotel had zero to 20 percent occupancy before two mid-January storms that dumped about a foot of snow in the Katahdin region.

The Millinocket Area Growth and Investment Council wants to change that.

MAGIC can’t wave its wand and make it snow, but it is working with its client towns, East Millinocket, Medway and Millinocket, to apply for a state Community Development Block Grant requesting $150,000 for small-business assistance in marketing, said Beth Mahoney, a project director at MAGIC.

Funded through the Maine Department of Economic and Community Development, the Community Enterprise Grant is designed to assist area micro-businesses in need of assistance due to the severe decrease in snowfall this winter, she said in a prepared statement.

“What I am hearing from businesses is that they need help marketing,” Mahoney said Sunday, “and we need to do some marketing in this area, anyway, so that is the approach I am taking.”

Mahoney wants to help businesses advertise themselves to build upon the town’s being ranked sixth among the Top 10 Hot U.S. Travel Destinations for 2007 by the travel Web site TripAdvisor.com in early November.

It was the only Maine or New England locale to make the list.

The Top 10 ranking, which was the site’s first such forecast, doesn’t mean that Millinocket draws as much traffic on the site as Paris, London, New York City, Orlando or even Bangor.

Millinocket was listed because the number of site visitors searching for the town, writing reviews of town destinations and conducting other site business has dramatically increased over the last quarter of 2006.

Besides the lack of snow in late 2006, Mahoney fears that more snow won’t be falling in the first quarter of 2007. Last year, the total snowfall was 48 inches, she said, and this year it has been 16.5 inches. The previous five-year snowfall amounts have been 80, 61, 73, 75, and 92 inches in 2000-2001.

“I just looked at the 10-day forecast and there’s no snow, and we’re going into February,” she said. “It’s not looking good.”

Most local businesses have been so hurt by the lack of snow that they can’t even afford to advertise on snowmobile maps, a staple of their advertising efforts, Mahoney said.

“I was talking to one business owner who told me last year he was down 50 percent of what he makes. In the winter this year he is down to a third,” she said. “It could be worse than last year if we lose this snow that’s here and don’t get any more.”

MAGIC will hold a public hearing on the grant at 10 a.m. Friday at Millinocket’s Town Hall. Business owners and residents are invited. To be eligible for these funds, business owners must operate a business of five employees or less including the business owner, Mahoney said.

The owner must qualify as having a low to moderate income. The method for determining this will be explained at the hearing. For example, a family of four people can earn as much as $38,950 gross income and be eligible, she said.

Businesses that need help, Mahoney said, also can seek assistance from Millinocket’s revolving loan fund or a similar fund offered by the Eastern Maine Development Corp., which is a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping businesses and communities in Eastern Maine grow.

The poor snowfall this winter, Patel said, shows that the area relies too heavily on Mother Nature for its tourist attractions, much the way that it is over-reliant upon its paper mills as a staple of its manufacturing economy.

He would love to see a substantial growth in the area’s ATV trail system, which is lacking, or diversification in the area’s entertainment infrastructure.

“These places further up from Bangor should have something more to offer to people,” Patel said.