By Brady Lang

Second Annual BOB Awards night a success

Sep 20, 2018 | 10:42 AM

The second annual BOB awards were held last night at the Gold Eagle Casino Event Centre.

The Best of the Best in the Battlefords gathered and were honoured in over 200 categories with a red carpet, dinner while Nic Franscoo MC’d and honoured all the award winners through the night. This year saw a considerable incline in voting and nominations.

Kelly Bitner of battlefordsNOW said having the community come together to celebrate the local excellence was great to see.

“I think it was awesome,” he said. “I think it’s a great thing to have that many people in the community to come out and get recognition for the great job they’re doing. As businesses and as individuals.”

The idea of the BOB awards is still new, and fresh in the community. But moving into the second year, Bitner said you could really see the community and morale for the awards grow even in such a small timeframe.

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“Just more people are getting involved with it,” he said. “Last year we had about 1,500 nominations. This year it was up more than 13,000. As for votes go, way more people were voting. Last year we had around 50,000. This year, 170,000 votes were cast.”

The community pride shone brightly throughout the evening, with many of the award winners there to receive their awards and continue to show their Battlefords community pride. Bitner said the pride for peoples’ businesses, as well as individual successes shows how great the community really is.

“The people that were there were there because they’re proud to receive those awards,” he said. “I think that’s the biggest thing, the whole point of the awards is to have community pride, and to have people be able to puff out their chest and say ‘Yeah, I am the best.’ The fact that it is voted on by people is what makes it so special.”

Moving forward into year three, battlefordsNOW is excited to grow the awards and the nominations, and Bitner has a certain ideology when looking at the 2019 version of the awards.

“It’s going to be bigger and better next year,” he said. “It gets better every year.”

For award winners that weren’t able to attend, the awards are available at the station.

brady.lang@jpbg.ca

Twitter: @BradyLangCJNB