Dive site help

[tpscuba]

I e-mailed Jason back around the 1st if March with e-mail addresses for state, county and local IRRRB to be contacted in support for funding for the dive sites going in at Lake Ore-be-Gone. Just wondering if anyone did anything and if they heard back.
If you need the adresses go to the IRRRB web board for the commissioners address, St. Louis County web site for the commersions address (Keith Nelson) and the state web site for Rukvenia and Tomassoni's address and even the governors address.
We greatly appreciate the help. I seems the second part of the grant is sitting on the table in limbo.
Heres what I wrote
Dear Govenor: I am a scuba diver and a business owner on the Iron Range. We are now working on a project that will bring and has brought tourists to the Gilbert area. The city owns and has developed an old mine adjacent to the city for camping, swimming, and fishing. The project we are working on is to make this recreational area like the one in Pennsylvania (Dutch Springs)
We have introduced dive sites underwater for the enjoyment of scuba divers. This is a very worth while project espicially if you look at what projects of this sort has done in other areas. Some of the things we have put down are training platforms for scuba shops to use for training and they are coming from as far as Mpls. to use these to train on. We also put down some old mining equipment to dive on. We are now helping the city of Gilbert to expand this concept. They have applied for a grant for this project and the county recreation board, seeing its potential has given $15,000.00 of the $30,000.00 needed. IRRRB and Mine Recliamation has the other half before them. Being that this is seasonal and that we are projecting a completion date of no latter than July 15th 2005 pending on funding. We are have aquired the items to be put in and they are almost ready for placement by mid June. Items to go in on this project are airplanes, helicopters, school buse and 2 more training platforms due to the increase of training going on. According to the grant request the direct economic bentifit to the area is $75,000.00, and the indirect benifit (based on a conservative multiplier of 2.5) is $187,000.00. Based on comparable dive sites the economic impact could be up to 4 million upon full development and marketing of the Lake Ore-Be-Gone dive sites.
We have been published in a few dive magazines and have had divers contact us and come to dive from as far as California, Neveda, New York and Florida to name a few. We even had the movie crew that was up here want to get wet just to experience diving under the ice.
The second part of the grant presented to IRRRB and Mine Recliamation is the deciding factor for the completion of this project. This part of the project is Phase 2, the first phase started back in 1997 and grants were applied for but never quite made it. We turned to the local community and with help from local businesses, and the cities of Virginia and Gilbert we were able to complete it in 2000.
I feel that this has great potential and are asking if your office could look into and maybe even help speed up the proccess to see this happen in the time line we gave the City of Gilbert and the St. Louis County Commissioners Board.
Also when we do do this we would like if at all possible that the Govenor be present for the event. Like I said we are targeting mid June.

Thank you for your time