McEUEN: It's OK to dream

Take a deep breath, friends and neighbors. Boaters will not have to drive halfway around the lake to put their boats in the water. American Legion Baseball will not have to play their home games in a vacant lot. Sherman Avenue will not become a ghost town of boarded up businesses. In short, the sky is not falling. It's only a little winter snow.

McEuen Park, in its current state, is a nice collection of baseball parks, picnic areas, parking lot and boat launch. Walk down to the park on a Tuesday afternoon or a Saturday evening, and most of the time the park is almost empty. Yes, the parking lot is busy and there are baseball games most nights in the summer. But it's fair to ask, "Could it be more?"

The remodeling plan for McEuen Field is a dream, imagined by some very creative, intelligent, hard-working people. It imagines a park that invites the community and our visitors into one of Coeur d'Alene's most precious treasures. It proposes a park that opens this treasure to a wide range of activities for all ages. It attempts to integrate our "central park" with our downtown, our "nature preserve" (Tubbs Hill) and our lake. Like most dreams, it is ambitious, possibly unrealistic and unaffordable, but maybe not.

When the plan was presented this past month, I heard the presenters and designers say it was intended to be a starting point for discussion, not the end. As I've read the heated rhetoric in the news articles and the letters to the editor, I've been a little surprised at the dire predictions of everything from unemployment to bankruptcy, the threats to fire public employees and the quick use of all capital letters and multiple exclamation marks.

Change is not easy for everyone. But if some or all of the plan ever makes the big leap from dream to reality, I am confident - no, certain - that there still will be plenty of baseball parks in Coeur d'Alene, boaters will still have a boat launch close to downtown, and we will not buy more changes than we can afford. And I am hopeful that there will be more opportunities for more of us to spend more time in our park. In the meantime, walk down to the park, take a deep breath and dream a little.

STEVE SHARP

Coeur d'Alene