Deer Lake -
Donnie O'Keefe says it's time more snowmobiling club volunteers got back to the reasons why they were formed in the first place - getting out and enjoying the great outdoors.
In recent years, clubs and their volunteer members have become stressed out about the pressures of maintaining groomed trails and, in more recent years, the selling of mandatory trail stickers.
While larger clubs, like the Western Sno-Riders, could more easily spread the work around, some of the smaller clubs have not fared as well. The result has been an inconsistent snowmobile trail product from region to region.
O'Keefe, who was hired as executive director of the Newfoundland and Labrador Snowmobile Federation (NLSF) in June, said the NLSF has lightened the burden of individual clubs by taking over full responsibility for trail grooming and trail stickers.
"In the past, half the money from trail stickers would go to the federation and the club would keep half and be expected to keep a $250,000 groomer going in terms of maintenance and repairs and, in some cases, a paid operator," said O'Keefe. "It came down to a numbers game. A club like the Western Sno-Riders, which sells something like 3,000 trail stickers, was able to handle it much better than some of the smaller clubs with smaller populations and fewer volunteers.
"A lot of these volunteers also were, and understandably so, not comfortable being responsible for handling some large quantities of money from trail sticker sales."
The system of grooming trail networks will now involve some overlap of resources within each club and all trails will be groomed by operators paid by the NLSF.
The sale of trail stickers, which had solely been done by about 45 volunteer vendors throughout each region, will now be mostly done online on the federation's website at www.nlsf.org. This coming season's trail passes will be available the first week of November and, by mid-November, the website will be advertising a select handful of local volunteer vendors where stickers will then be available.
More important than removing the stress and strain off volunteers and consolidating the federation's financial resources and grooming capabilities, O'Keefe said individual clubs will now be able to enjoy more snowmobiling activities.
"The clubs unanimously approved of this direction and 99 per cent welcomed it as an opportunity to be more sociable and do fund-raisers for different organizations and charities," he said. "It's time to put the fun back into this and do what clubs were meant to do when they got off the ground."
Riders should have some better trails and infrastructure to enjoy this coming winter too. The NLSF has access to $488,000 in federal funding to develop trails. For every dollar the federation spends, it gets a dollar in return from the national trails funding program. In conjunction with partners such as the provincial government and the Newfoundland T'Railway, the NLSF has done work in western Newfoundland on trails at Loggers School Road, in Bay St. George and the trail from Mount Moriah to Gallants, while there's a new bridge installed on the north shore of Deer Lake valued at $100,000.
