I guess that's why we had the open house last Saturday morning, because the first people who came in at 9 o'clock in the morning were the mayors, councillors, LSDs, and representatives from the area. We let them talk to industry. We had three industry representatives there: Southwestern, Apache, and Corridor. We had the government there, including Environment and the Department of Natural Resources.
This is something that we try to get out into the general public. When we were down in Arkansas, we saw the benefits of the areas down there. They were just opening up a brand new office down there. It was a “go green” office. We were there on Sunday and they were opening it up Monday morning. There were over 500 employees there with different areas of expertise. These are good paying jobs too.
Around the area you could see a lot of new houses going up and enerventures out in the rural part. Outside of Conway and outside of Little Rock you could see what had happened around that area because of that shale gas industry. They have 3,000 wells there, in the Arkansas area.
Obviously, there are other things that are attributed to the gas wells, as far as the shale gas goes, and the benefits are just overwhelming.
But at the end of the day, we just have to make sure that it's done right and done in the right way. Just one example: when we met with the governor on Sunday night, he was saying that in the educational system, where a lot of the money was put in, where they get the royalties from shale gas, they went from 40th to 6th in the 10-year program.
So we are trying to bring all the positive aspects back to the area in southern New Brunswick. Our biggest job is communication and educating the people on the benefits.