Thunder Bay CEDC Survey
by Scott A. Sumner
Thunder Bay Business
What’s on the minds of the business community of Thunder Bay? How can things improve? That’s the goal of the CEDC with their Business Retention Expansion intuitive ( BRE). “ This is the part of our BRE initiative where we try to get out and meet as many businesses as possible, introduce ourselves, meet the owner and find out their issues and concerns and any questions they might have. We get them to complete a survey that takes 7 to 10 minutes on line when they have free time. Local business drives the local economy and we want to be able to help them,” said Ian Sgambelluri, Development Officer, CEDC. “ Our purpose is to take factual numbers to the City Council- concrete evidence we can present to the city. If many business have the same issues we can get that across.”
“ We have been at it for 2 months now and have about 80 completed surveys. You can start to see some trends and focus on them. There is no guide line as to who we call on. We want to call on all businesses anywhere from 1 or 2 person firms to the Bombardiers or Buchannans of the world. We have set November 30th as a completion date and we will present the data to the city after that.” notes Ian.
Gino Pradal is the President of Louis Pradal and Sons Limited, a general contracting firm in Thunder Bay which has about 10 employees. Gino with his brother Loris Pradal are equal partners in the company which does general contracting andcarpentry work and have a millwork operation. Jeff Pradal is an estimator with the firm. Louis Pradal and Sons Limited started in 1972 and was incorporated in 1977 so have operated for 36 years. They started in the residential field doing houses and then apartment buildings construction and slowly moved into industrial work for customers like Bowater.
“ We do commercial industrial and some new buildings on a smaller scale.With our millwork packages we do pretty well and work for other local contractors like Gateway or Tom Jones.We have been very lucky and quite busy in the last few years,” said Gino Pradal. “ I don’t feel it
is a great economy here, is very competitive and there could be a lot more work out there. Thunder Bay is not a growing community although the last few years have been pretty good for construction. We are quite satisfied with the work, right now although 2009 is being painted gloom and doom. Thunder Bay has a lot of good tradespeople and can do a lot of good work. Our guys like to stay in town.”“ I think the survey the CEDC are doing it is a very good thing and
long overdue. I don't know whether it has been done on such a large scale ever before in Thunder Bay. If they find a number of people having the same issues the CEDC can be a conduit to present to the council.” said Jeff Pradal.
The CEDC operates independent of council and report to it’s own board.
If you would like to be part of this survey contact Ian at 625-3965
