NIPAWIN — The Nipawin Chamber of Commerce ended their financial year in December with more than $3,200 in the black.
“This was our first time doing the budget without any funding from the town in terms of visitor services, so we did have to definitely made some changes,” said Marlon Zacharias, the chamber’s president. “Thankfully for the chamber, we did a lot to increase our funding through promotions and vents. Probably our biggest example now is our sports and leisure show.”
The 2018 year had the chamber see around $107,000 in revenue and $103,000 in expenses. They also ended the year with $103,000 in net assets, an increase of around $10,000.
Zacharias described their financial state as “really good”.
“We’re moving forward, we’re not foreseeing any shortfalls at all.”
This was discussed at the Nipawin Chamber of Commerce annual general meeting on May 23.
Vistor services
The 2019 year will be the first that the chamber is not responsible for visitor services after that role was taken over by the town.
In the meeting it was stated that being responsible for visitor services was a financial burden for the chamber. The chamber had received $14,000 from the town per year to run the services.
“Our budget was always balanced, but what was happening was we were having to cut a lot of places and use funding from other programs to help cover the loss visitor services was incurring,” Zacharias said.
Currently the chamber is now in negotiations with the town about the future of their location. The building the chamber traditionally used belongs to thm, but the land belongs to the town.
“We are in communication with the town, trying to sell them the building,” Zacharias said. “We do see it as the best option.”
Other options included moving the building, but that would incur a cost to move, as well as the chamber building has become associated with visitor services.
“For us to move the building onto a new location, we would still have that visitors services look and it would make it hard to make ourselves separate ourselves from that. By selling the building to the town it will give us an opportunity to actually potentially move closer to our business core, downtown.”
Constitutional changes
At the annual general meeting, the chamber’s members voted to dissolve as a federally registered board of trade.
More than two decades ago, being a board of trade was required to receive grants from the federal government. That is no longer the case.
As well, being a provincially registered chamber of commerce and a federally registered board of trade conflicts with provincial and federal legislation
“We discussed it amongst the board and got some recommendations from the Saskatchewan Chamber and a few other people including our lawyers. The best thing to do was get rid of our board of trade.”
Zacharias said this will have no impact on the role the chamber plays in the community.
At the meeting the chamber also edited their constitution to set up new procedure should the chamber ever dissolve.
The procedure used to transfer the chamber’s assets to the Town of Nipawin. Now their assets would be transferred to the Saskatchewan Chamber, which would hold the money in trust so that it’s available for anybody that wanted to restart the Nipawin chamber in the future.
At the time of the chamber dissolving, all grants given by the chamber would stop.
“At the board level we thought we may want to continue that, just to keep the chamber alive in Nipawin, but it was decided that because it would slowly eat away at the funding that we would freeze that.”
Zacharias said there has never been a concern that the chamber was in a bad financial situation, they just wanted to prepare for the worst case scenario to make sure the chamber was taken care of.
