Six months ago "Friends of the St. Clair River" entered a contest to receive a grant that will help them to take the steps necessary to remove the St. Clair River from the government's list of "Areas of Concern". Hence the project name: "Remediating the St Clair River Area of Concern". Since our daughter Erin sits on the board of "Friends of the St. Clair River" she was active in soliciting votes for the project.
In the months leading up to April 30th (final date) contest close we were leading the pack of contestants with a tidy margin of several thousand votes. In the last week or so of the contest, things changed for the worse. Our project dropped to third position behind a project to preserve the Wolverine in Alberta, and "Scrap-It", an automobile recycling initiative in British Columbia.
In the last few days, desperate emails from Erin and her friends encouraging support and the ever increasing lead by the others made it look like there was little hope of winning. I sent out a dozen or so "appeals" to my friends and I must have not been alone because amazingly the vote gap began to narrow. Encouraged by this I sent another 20 or so emails to everyone I could think of that might care about the St Clair River.
As it came down to the last 5 minutes on Monday night, Erin and Jake sent this email:
"To help everyone do this in less than 2 minutes (it's the last day, and the top 3 are all within just a few people's votes!!) follow these steps:... (Website and instructions to vote)
As of this writing St Clair is behind by 180 votes. Each person gets 50 votes so we need 4 people more.
It looks now like we have won the $100,000 but the officials have warned against publishing the results until an audit is done. The results will be made official by the end of May.
Thanks to all that supported this worthy cause. What an amazing race. It just proves -
Your Vote Does Count!
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