PANORA, Iowa, Jan. 2, 2002 – The 60-mile Root River State Trail system in southeast Minnesota has helped make tourism a 25 million dollar per year industry for rural Fillmore County there. And one night last week, a crowd of us here had a real look at how that’s happened. 

Julie Kiehne, executive director of the Chamber of Commerce in Lanesboro, Minnesota, was the guest speaker for the annual Chamber and economic development banquet in Panora, one of the towns on west central Iowa’s 56-mile Raccoon River Valley Trail. 

”Lanesboro is a town of 788 people, but on a busy weekend, we double or triple our population,” said Kiehne, who has been the Chamber executive for five years in the hub city on the Root River Trail. 

Her Chamber’s Visitors Center, which is trailside, has 10,000 people stop in annually for information. They printed and distributed 20,000 copies of a slick new promotional magazine this year, and are planning to do 35,000 next year. But ”the real key” to getting information out, Kiehne said, has been the Chamber’s site on the Internet www.lanesboro.com, which had 3.3 million visitors in 2004.

The Lanesboro Chamber, which has an annual budget of 100,000 dollars, spends 45,000 of it on marketing and promotion. That 45,000 comes from a three percent additional sales tax on visitor lodging in Lanesboro, and by state law, that three percent must be used for marketing. The Chamber also receives 25,000 dollars in member dues, and the other 30,000 comes from grant writing that Kiehne does and special events the organization sponsors. 

She said that Fillmore County sales tax statistics for 2003, the most recent year for which they were available, showed more than 4 million dollars was spent for lodging in the county and 11.2 million dollars for food and drink services. 

So are all these people coming to the area just to ride bikes on the Root River Trail? No, she said, ”it’s the variety of experiences we offer for the visitors that keeps them coming back.” That includes canoeing, kayaking and tubing on the beautiful Root River itself; a real variety of home-owned restaurants; excellent small hotels and B&Bs, also all home-owned, that offer a variety of accommodations and prices; a lively art scene including a cool gallery owned by a local non-profit group that shows and sells regional and local artists, and a professional theater that operates 11 months a year with two or more productions each week so you can see different plays on consecutive evenings. 

”There is a real interdependence among all our attractions,” Kiehne said. ”We do see that natural resources, historic preservation, the arts, recreation and tourism all go hand in hand.” For example, surveys have shown that for every dollars visitors spend on theater tickets, they spend six dollars elsewhere in the community, she said. 

All of this has developed since 1985 when the first segment of the new trail opened. The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources built and maintains the entire asphalt-surfaced trail, most of which is constructed on the former rail bed of the Milwaukee Railroad. It abandoned its tracks about the same time the farm crisis was erupting, and most of Lanesboro’s business district was boarded up in the early 1980s. Ditto for most of the other small towns in Fillmore County. 

It’s amazing to see how far its come in 20 years. 

One measure: Lanesboro now has 40 different overnight establishments offering 175 rooms. Another measure: An old brick schoolhouse on top of the hill in town had sat empty for 15 years; it is now being converted into 12 condos, the least expensive of which is more than 95,000 dollars, and three-fourths of the units have already been sold. Outside Magazine in August of 2004 named Lanesoboro one of its ”20 Best Dream Towns in America to live and play.” And dozens of people from across the U.S. have moved into the area with their families to start businesses catering to the tourists. 

”It was a huge investment by our state to build this trail,” Kiehne said, ”but in our area, it’s come back many-fold.” 

All of us in her Panora audience who are advocates for our Raccoon River Valley Trail were practically salivating. And we were thrilled to hear her say, after she had a quick look around our trail in the Panora area, ”You have some real possibilities here.” — Chuck Offenburger

Article Published: 01-02-2006