Thank you, Mr. Speaker. This is an interesting situation. As we all know in this House, for many of us that follow this file very closely, with the construction of the Inuvik to Tuktoyaktuk Highway, it's brought an enormous amount of people up to the Member's riding. I think the big challenge around the community has been, and I have been up there quite a bit and talked to residents in that area, the amount of influx of people was overwhelming for the community for the most part. We had over 5,000 people, I believe, that came there this summer.
We have had a number of meetings with the community leading up to this for a number of years. We have assisted them with development plans on how they want to address some of these things. You know, we have committed to doing certain things with them. We are trying to do a way-side pull-out right now along the ITH. It's one of the funding things that we are looking at, and we are working with hunters and trappers on that to try to resolve which place they actually wanted. There were three places put forward, and I think we have it narrowed down to two of them.
We committed another amount of funding, somewhere around $42,000, to complete a feasibility study to advance a cultural centre, but I think what we need to do with the community going forward is we need to get back in there and have a conversation of what happened this year with the amount of people that were there, what kind of needs that need to be put into place. A lot of this stuff needs to be entrepreneur-driven. The Government of Northwest Territories cannot do everything for everyone. There's a lot of opportunity around tourism and things going forward. I have had a number of discussions with people around the RV park for Tuktoyaktuk. I have had people come to me and say they wanted to do it, and then they come back and say they didn't want to do it. Then someone else has come to me, and they want to do it. The hamlet was into these discussions, and then they have called off those discussions.
As of late, I have sat down with the mayor, when I had an opportunity on a trip to Inuvik, and had those discussions. We will certainly continue to have those discussions on what we need to address. It's a different situation because most communities are struggling. How are we going to be able to change our economy? We are in a situation in Tuktoyaktuk that there's almost an overwhelming opportunity.