Building to offer state-of-the-art conference services

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A ribbon-cutting ceremony opened the doors of a new business centre in Siksika on Sept. 26.

The single floor, 23,000 sq. ft. brick building will house more than 40 offices with a state-of-the-art technology conference centre.

Carlin Big Snake, vice-president of Siksika Resource Development, said the grand opening for the centre was impressive, with 400 guests attending.

The goal for the business centre is to offer conference facilities for the community so that the members wouldn't have to leave the reserve for such gatherings. Big Snake is hoping that the community will be able to save in hotel and other costs that would be spent if attending conferences out of the territory.

He said the community has to start thinking about the younger generation and start to keep the money in the community, instead of it going elsewhere.

"In some cases we were spending thousands of dollars to attend conferences in other communities. By saving these costs, we will reinvest these dollars into our own conference centre. We have to leave some money behind for the younger guys. We have to have an economic base here that we could use. All other First Nations communities all go to a city to utilize the conference facilities there when holding their meetings because most of the time they do not have the space to accommodate large groups of people, and if you start counting the amount of money each individual spends, you can imagine the money leaking out of the community," he said.

The business centre is situated directly east of the community off Highway 901.

"It was more of a strategic location for the building, because one of the bigger projects that we are looking at is having an industrial park in our community and that industrial park area is where this building is located. It is also located right off of the TransCanada Highway, and the CPR railway mainline, which goes all across Canada, runs right through the proposed industrial area. In the next year or two directly behind this building there will be an industrial park that will hold our distribution centre, our manufacturing companies and so forth, depending on what proposals come in. We think that this is prime location and that is what they say in business that the most important part of a business is location, location, and location," he said.

The building is divided into two areas, one for the offices occupied by Siksika Resource Development, Ltd., the business arm for Siksika Nation, and the other area houses the conference centre.

Big Snake said the conference area would be open to anyone on or off the reserve.

The community began to plan for the business centre back in 2000, he said, mainly because the community was growing in business ventures and that the old administration building had employees sharing offices.

"I guess that posed a concern for us, and it went into discussion about how we needed a conference centre because we were utilizing a lot of conference centres in Calgary, and it just kind of went from there. The business centre is there for our own membership to use, and it is also open up to the outside, whether it is provincially, municipality or whomever. This building will also create opportunities for our local First Nation members and we are also looking at charging rent for the conference facilities," he said.

Big Snake said that there are approximately 20 people who work in the new building, including the accounts department and executive staff.

The conference room is designed to hold six conferences simultaneously. The room can hold up to 400 people, and a semi-commercial kitchen can provide meals and refreshments.

"It is pretty well a state-of-the-art building. We are still putting in some stuff in the building and video conferencing in each room. It is pretty high-tech, and you can bring in your laptop if you need to access your e-mail and hook up to a wireless system. Separate meeting rooms are also available, and a computer oom," he said.

"I did not expect that many people to show as much interest in our building but we are getting a lot of people using our conference centre. It's been occupied every week since it opened. We had a few companies who came in from outside the community to utilize the conference centre. I guess the word is getting out there," he said.

Dal McCloy, the project manager and designer of PM Associates, the building's contractor, said that he felt very good working on the building.

"The project went well. There was a lot of local employment, a lot of people worked on it. Everything went very well, very smooth, excellent. Everyone we worked with, both with the First Nations people and the contractors and all the suppliers and everything, it was good."