Boat club gets award
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- March
- 16
More than 3,200 people got off boats that docked at the Cold Spring Boat Club last year. Once on land, many of them spent their money in restaurants, shops and other businesses.
The leaders of the club thought that was worth some recognition and suggested that members write in the club’s name on the Cold Spring Area Chamber of Commerce’s awards ballot. The drive paid off this week when the club, with more than 170 votes, received the Innovation in Business Award.
The award is for the business or nonprofit group that brings tourist traffic to the Philipstown area.
Thomas McKiernan, the commodore of the club, said folks that dock their boats there are asked to fill out slips indicating how many people are on their vessel and what they plan to do. The slips showed there were 1,021 dockings with 3,215 people.
According to their slips, the visitors planned to buy 1,880 lunches and 1,257 dinners, he said. The slips also showed that 2,178 people planned to shop, he said.
As McKiernan pointed out, there’s no way to tell precisely how much money the visitors contributed to the local economy. But common-sense estimates of how much each spent on their meals and shopping would indicate their spending ran well into the tens of thousands of dollars.
In fact, McKiernan said his figures may understate the club’s impact by about 10 percent. That’s because it’s likely that some visitors did not fill out the slips, he said.
The club, started 53 years ago, has about 160 members and maintains 76 boat slips, according to is Web site. It is run by its members.
The chamber gave its Katie O’Donnell Award of Excellence to the Guinan family, which owns Guinan’s, a bar and convenience store at the Garrison train station. John Guinan, the son of the man for whom the business is named, was among the family members on hand to receive the award even though he recently underwent an operation for brain surgery.
This entry was posted
on Friday, March 16th, 2007 at 3:28 pm by Allan Drury.
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