Park visits down

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MARQUETTE - Though Marquette's Tourist Park is seeing big crowds for this weekend's Hiawatha Music Festival, the attendance at the city-owned park for the rest of the summer is a question mark.

According to Parks and Recreation Director Hugh Leslie, summer tourism at the city's parks and beaches is significantly down.

"For the first time in as long as I can remember - and I've been here 10 years now - Tourist Park campground was not at 100 percent occupancy over the Fourth of July weekend," Leslie said. "That is stunning to me."

Leslie compared attendance at the city's parks and marinas for most summers to a bell curve - with Memorial Day and Labor day representing either end and the Fourth of July representing the large hump in the middle.

This summer, he said, looks a little different with a peak on the Fourth of July and numbers dramatically decreasing afterward.

Transient numbers at Marquette's marinas are down, Leslie said, and fuel sales at the marinas are down 50 to 60 percent from normal.

To stem revenue losses, the parks department is sending employees home early on days where business is slow.

In the case of inclement weather or approaching inclement weather, the department closes the beaches.

"If we're 50 percent sure the weather's not going to get better, we're going to close the beaches and it's to try and save that labor cost because it's not being offset by the revenue," Leslie said.

Marquette isn't the only area affected. Patrick Gariepy, concessionaire at Munising's Tourist Park said numbers were down. He didn't know how much but guessed "a small percent."

At the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore-Hiawatha National Forest Visitor Center in Munising, Autumn Jauck, visitor services specialist, said the center saw 600 less people in June compared to a year previous.

"Visitation is noticeably down," she said, but added that numbers are above where they were in 2006.

Tom Nemacheck, executive director of the U.P. Travel and Recreation Association, said numbers are likely to be down across the U.P.

"Mackinac Bridge crossings in June were down over 11 percent compared to last year. That's huge ... that's roughly 47,000 less vehicles crossed in the month of June than a year ago," Nemacheck said.

He said the low number of bridge crossings was a direct reflection of the poor economy in lower Michigan and high gas prices. In contrast, he said crossings from the Wisconsin border have been slightly up so far.

"About 10 years ago we started to get more serious about trying to pull people in from out of state and so we're seeing some benefit of that but its still not enough to make up for those tremendous losses from lower Michigan," he said.