Inuvik RCMP and Town officials are asking anyone who may have information on who broke into and robbed the Inuvik Welcoming Centre overnight between June 28 and 29 to come forward.
RCMP say they responded to a call at 8:15 a.m. to Inuvik’s new tourism information centre after staff arrived in the morning to discover a window and door had been smashed. A sum of cash and electronic equipment was also taken by the burglars.
“Today’s damage was significant,” said Tourism and Economic Development director Jackie Challis. “That was a huge mess to clean this morning but they obviously went through the glass to get in.”
Challis noted this was the most recent incident involving vandalism at the centre, which was also damaged the night before by someone who broke tables and chairs, threw food and drink on the walls, damaged electrical panels, ripped cables out of the wall and left human feces for the town staff to find. Human feces has also been found nearly weekly underneath the Inuvik Special Events Pavilion.
The improvements to Chief Jim Koe Park have cost $395,580 to date. Public Works director Richard Campbell estimated the damage done to the office would cost the town at least $7,000 to repair.
Vandalism has been so frequent at Chief Jim Koe Park this summer the town is now planning to put a security gate on both sides of the office.
“It’s just sad that we have to do that because our intention is so that it’s like a open space and visitors can come and go and residents could come and go,” said Challis. “We didn’t want to have gates across our welcome centre.”
She added the RCMP have received surveillance footage from surrounding buildings and were analyzing it for any information. She said she wasn’t concerned about safety at the Welcoming Centre, as the town has a policy that two employees are on staff at any time.
However, she said the ongoing damage to the building was a black eye on a town reliant on tourism for its economy.
“We have visitors coming in and it’s like, Oh, what happened here?” said Challis. “We don’t want that to be the face of Inuvik.”
Anyone with information about this break and enter or other acts of vandalism is asked to call Inuvik RCMP at 777-1111, contact Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477 nwtnutips.com, (click on “submit a web tip”) or text: “nwtnutips” plus your message to 274637.