LaSalle is dipping into reserves to cover the financial losses from a lego exhibit event hosted at the town's event centre earlier this year.
According to a staff report presented to council this month, the town is out about $140,000 after hosting Sean Kenney's Animal Super Powers Exhibit from late January to early April.
"I'm not going to sit here and say $140,000 isn't a lot of money because I do realize it is," says LaSalle mayor Crystal Meloche. "I mean you want to see something balance out where you had a zero at the end of the day but really when we look at what was spent and what we received, we did really well in ticket sales, we did really well in sponsorships. The area that we weren't successful was the government grant and that's really put us in the situation we're in."
Speaking on AM800's The Morning Drive, mayor Meloche says the event itself was a huge success.
"We had wonderful attendance," she says. "We had 20,000 people come and see it and a lot of those people aren't even from the Town of LaSalle, aren't from southwestern Ontario, some came from the U.S. A lot of people who visited had never been to the event centre before."
Meloche says the economic impact for the event was over $400,000.
"We also know we were able to employee 21 people, part time jobs during that time," says Meloche. "We also know that our businesses on Front Road told us that they saw an increase in business during that time and two of our local businesses actually got to be onsite during the event and sell food and beverage which also increased their businesses."
She says at the end of the day, the exhibit wasn't successful when it came to the 'grant portion.'
"We have to look at kind of the big picture of this whole thing which is, it's going to come at a cost but everything you do in a municipality comes at a cost," she says. "The Strawberry Festival is no different."
Council voted to take the funds from its Tax Stabilization Reserve and Festival Reserve.
According to the town's website, the event showcased larger-than-life sculptures of creatures.
The website goes on to say, "the sculptures and exhibits in Animal Super Powers explore the evolutionary, biological, and environmental reasons for amazing animal adaptations such as shapeshifting, super-strength, echolocation, and limb regeneration and asks guests to imagine themselves with the same abilities."