There are a lot of changes on the way for Woodlands County, especially from a financial standpoint.

The highly-publicized tax issues they faced over the last few years and the breakdown of agreements with the Town of Whitecourt have left the municipality shaken but not down for the count. During the Woodlands County council meeting on March 2, 2021, council voted in favour of starting corporate sponsorship, and the first recipient is Eastlink Park.

Mayor John Burrows is excited for what the future holds with this new funding model. “With corporate sponsorship, we don’t have to be on their board and have any liability. When you are a partner, your name is on the paperwork. With this model, we are not involved in the organization part of it. We are just supporting the activity and the community.”

Before this corporate funding model, organizations like Eastlink Park received Woodlands County funding through a joint agreement, Whitecourt Woodlands Tourism (WWT). The percentage-based funding changed based on need, and Mayor Burrows said it was hard to budget that way. Given the financial stress Woodlands County is under, he said that having stable funding was easiest. “This corporate sponsorship with Eastlink Park is for $25,000 a year for five years, from 2021 to 2025.” As part of the sponsorship, the terrain park will be named Woodlands County Terrain Park.

“The group at the hill has worked really hard to create a great thing for the area. Every time I go out there, there is something different or new. Visits are way up, and that is an indication of their success. We do not need politics to get in the way of that. This way, we will know exactly what our budget amount is each year. It’s a lot more stability for them and a lot more stability for us too,” said Mayor Burrows.

He said conversations around corporate sponsorship had popped up over the years as Woodlands County looked for better branding opportunities. No different than a corporation, or even the Town of Whitecourt for that matter, Woodlands County wants to showcase what it has to offer to the area and region. Proper branding can help forge new partnerships, grab new industries’ attention, and help bring about new opportunities. For a community, that could mean new businesses or new residents, which help grow it beyond what it is.

For economic development, WWT helped encourage area exploration with all kinds of events, including Party in the Park and support for Eastlink Park. The partnership saw both municipalities sharing a percentage of the yearly WWT budget, but Mayor Burrows said that the cost did not have the same impact on the county as it did for the town. “Say we draw in people to ski from other communities, there’s an economic development portion that the town is easily seeing back on that because they are selling gas, they are selling meals at restaurants, and people might stay overnight and do local shopping, which is great for Whitecourt businesses and the town, but for Woodlands County it was a straight expense without a means for return, so to speak. WWT had great potential, but it didn’t give Woodlands County what it was looking for.”

The change to corporate sponsorship, said Mayor Burrows, is an opportunity to support exactly what they want to. “I think there are things in the community that Woodlands County is going to feel that they should really get behind, and then there are things that the town will feel they should get behind. Let’s face it; we’re dealing with two different municipalities with different leadership, different decisions, different needs and different directions that they will want to go.”

Many changes are coming for both communities as they go through the arbitration process to create new agreements. “We want residents to know that just because something like WWT is done doesn’t mean we don’t support some of the same things that we supported through it. We see the benefit of organizations and how they support Woodlands County residents, and that’s why we want to support Eastlink Park,” explained Mayor Burrows.

In the future, he said the corporate sponsorship model could become the norm. “I think if we choose other projects that this is probably going to be the mechanism that they get funded through. We will have to see once we get another one of these under our belts, but this particular model looks like a good way forward.”

Mayor Burrows said that it was never Woodlands County’s intention to turn its back on the community or, in his words, be cheap or get out of giving support. “I think there was a certain inference that by terminating these agreements or wanting to renegotiate them that we were trying to get a free ride or something like that, and that’s not the case at all. We are just trying to get a fair shake and a better handle on our financing.”

People have remarked that Whitecourt and Woodlands County were the poster child for having agreements, and Mayor Burrows said that he agreed. He added that arbitration and the learning process would put the two municipalities back in a good place for other municipalities to learn from once again. “As a mechanic, I always used to stay away from the first make/model/year of a truck or car because it had a brand new transmission, engine and chassis. So that meant that there were little defects built into it, not by intention, but there were little things that needed to rear their heads through the vehicle’s use. By the fifth model in the line, you would have a really good vehicle. The little design flaws that are not intentional but show up, that is where we are at right now, with these agreements, and we are just trying to fix the design flaws.”

He said he likes the vehicle analogy because it does not point fingers at either side. “It’s not the Town’s fault, and it is not the County’s fault. It is not an individual councillor’s fault either. Like a vehicle, agreements also have a life limit, and you must replace it at some point,” said Mayor Burrows. “This corporate sponsorship with Eastlink Park is good news, and we are hopeful for the future.”