The future of Tyra the Tyrannosaurus is still up in the air, but that’s not stopping her from leaving a big footprint in Drumheller’s upcoming civic election.
AJ Frey, a local businessman who drummed up a 25,000-name petition to try to keep the 25-metre-high tourist attraction from extinction, is running for town council.
And he says Tyra is running with him on the ballot.
“Whether she does become an election issue or not I’m going to make her one,” Frey said in an interview. “I felt like that kind of gave me a little bit of an edge because people will know right away, [saying] ‘Oh, that’s the dinosaur guy.”‘
Frey hopes to leverage Tyra to send a message that residents need more of a voice on how broader issues in the community are handled.
“The town needs to do a better job of doing a back-and-forth with the locals than they currently do,” he said.
Voting is set for Oct. 20, which will predate an ongoing engineering report on what to do with Tyra.
She is an iconic structure that, for a quarter-century, has dominated the skyline of the dinosaur-themed town, located in rich Badlands dinosaur bone territory northeast of Calgary.
Tyra hosts 150,000 visitors a year, serving as the backdrop to hundreds of thousands of photos and selfies.
Tourists can climb 106 stairs through Tyra’s innards to stand inside her mouth and look down. A nearby ice cream stand offers fossils, T-shirts and dino toys.
The town of 8,400 bills itself as the dinosaur capital of the world. Home to the famed Royal Tyrrell Museum, the community also has statues of dinosaurs that look like they crawled out of a Flintstones cartoon.
Tyra’s future was cast into doubt in March, when the Drumheller and District Chamber of Commerce, which owns the attraction, said the structure was to be dismantled when the lease runs out in 2029.
The announcement resulted in a public outcry, including Frey’s petition, calling for her to be spared. Town councillors demanded meetings with the chamber and Travel Drumheller.
An engineering study is now underway to see how much work — and money — it will cost to refurbish the aging icon.
Lana Phillips, the current Drumheller chamber president, is one of three candidates seeking the position of mayor. In an interview, Phillips said Tyra is certainly part of the election debate.
“I think there are important issues in our community, and I hope we focus on the breadth of them and those that impact our daily lives. Certainly there will be folks that bring [Tyra] to the table,” she said.
“I think the reality is it is a community asset that holds memory for everyone. I believe that the next step is working with partners, the valuation of options and using solid data to get to the decision.”
The current Drumheller mayor, Heather Colberg, is not running again and will be out of office when the engineering report is expected to be delivered Nov. 1.
Colberg called it a frustrating piece of unfinished work.
“I absolutely have worked all the efforts I could to get it resolved before I left but, unfortunately, I don’t have control of the engineering study so we have to just trust that as soon as it’s ready they will release it to the town,” she said in an interview.
She said as a citizen she will still stump for Tyra.
“I’m not going to give up on letting a few select people think that they have control of something that’s important to the valley,” she said.
“You can’t be known as the dinosaur capital of the world’s largest dinosaur and just take the dinosaur down.”
