7.4. EDSR 12-21-2020 - Laserfiche WebLink

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SUMMARY OF RESEARCH AND RECOMMENDED STRATEGIES EDA STRATEGIC PLAN 31 To bring more information and insight to this question, the consultant team reached out to Paul Erickson, the founder and longstanding former Executive Director of the Minnesota Sports Center in Blaine, to get his perspective and insights on the potential of sports tourism in Elk River. (Mr. Erickson has also consulted with other cities in Minnesota concerning about their potential for attracting sports tourism, and worked with them on developing the organizational infrastructure for doing that.) We provided him with our research on the inventory of Elk River sports venues and how that compares with neighboring cities. Mr. Erickson provided the following observations. • Elk River has a good reputation as a quality growing community with many new facilities. • Elk River has an excellent reputation in producing certain quality sports programs, including ice hockey. • Elk River has a limited history of creating and hosting large amateur sports events. • Of the top eight amateur sports, it appears that the Elk River region may only have multiple fields to support major softball and baseball events. (Note that stand-alone 4 field softball complexes and 2-sheet ice arena complexes are fairly commonplace in Minnesota.) • Due to Elk River’s proximity to the Twin Cities region, most sports visitors from the metro area would not stay overnight in a local hotel and may not eat any meals in Elk River restaurants. Economic Impact from sports is derived primarily from overnight stays and restaurants. Given these observations, there doesn’t seem to be a high likelihood of achieving a significantly greater economic impact from sports tourism. Having said that, there is certainly value in a set of activities that may require a lower level of effort. Those include using the events at Elk River’s premier facilities as a marketing focus for the City, and exploring ways of cross-marketing city restaurants, stores and events to the users of the City’s sports venues. Mountain biking tourism. The tourism potential of mountain biking in Elk River is subject to many of the same considerations as sports tourism. There is no disputing that Elk River has high quality trails for mountain biking. But major mountain biking events are limited. The Minnesota Mountain Bike Series, for example, consists of ten events in ten different cities. It would certainly benefit Elk River to be on that circuit as often as possible, but it doesn’t appear that there are many such large-scale events for the state’s mountain bike community. Moreover, the tourism benefit of attracting mountain bike visitors to Elk River is limited by the same expectation as sports tourists—that most visitors will not combine their visit with an overnight stay in Elk River. The economic development opportunity seems to be in marketing the quality of the trails in Elk River, and in publicizing any major events that happen locally. ERX tourism. ERX is a known tourist attraction with a steady stream of events. Undoubtedly some the event attendees are staying overnight in Elk River, although again most will not. There is an economic benefit to capitalizing on ERX events by drawing