Is our city led by Luddites?

Our so-called city leaders and LCDC are showing small town, good old days thinking in the extreme. All this fussing about McEuen Field is only rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic!

Leadership is not about trivial projects. True leadership moves ahead with progress that benefits the entire population of Coeur d'Alene. We need to throw out the whole McEuen Field issue.

Let's spend our tax dollars on making Coeur d'Alene a wired city. That is progress that is in tune with the 21st Century. Wired cities are the wave of the future. A wired city will boost business, business start ups, increase access to jobs and occupations, increase the desirability of Coeur d'Alene to high-tech business looking to get out of high tax, over-regulated areas (California, Seattle, Portland, et al) and provide a larger tax base for the fripperies that our current city leaders so value.

Did you notice that one of the major factors in improving education statewide was online classes, distance learning, and statewide access of our students to the best teachers? Guess what? That's just a small part of the benefits when you live in a wired city.

President Obama's team proposed $6 billion in grants for broadband infrastructure as part of the economic stimulus package. The funds are intended to "provide business and job opportunities ... with benefits to e-commerce, education and health care" in under-served areas, according to the bill. While I have little use for most of our president's programs, this one is in line with the future of successful cities ... those with true visionary leaders.

"Investing in broadband will have an impact on jobs, education, health care, and carbon emissions," says John Davies, vice president of Intel's World Ahead Program, which promotes technology access and education. So expect the next year or two to bring vast changes to all American cities, whatever their "wired" rank.

High broadband demand and use creates a highly educated, relatively higher-income population. In Raleigh, N.C., regular folks can exploit these resources. The city's downtown is covered by a wi-fi network that is free to users. That benefits the greater number of residents.

In Tacoma they are installing 700 miles of fiber optic cable within every single right of way. Fiber optics carry digital information at the speed of light over extremely long distances. Tacoma's system has attracted competition and hundreds of millions of dollars in private investments. Tacoma residents enjoy lightning-fast, reliable access to the Internet, data transport, cable television, and wireless connections. This unites residents with the local community and the world in an instant.

Success in today's E-commerce world requires smart communities that are wired. Major cities are already on the information highway. The smaller cities that new economy entrepreneurs aggressively seek out need to be plugged in to ensure their future.

The wired city strategy works. Cornwall, Ontario's textile-manufacturing base collapsed in the mid-1990s. This city of 47,000 people took bold steps to turn around its fortunes by transforming itself into a wired city. Thanks to local leadership and community commitment, its efforts are about to pay off with the expected announcement of a large telecommunications equipment manufacturer moving into a vacant jeans factory.

In 1997, Cornwall's mayor read forecasts of a surge of 30,000 high-tech jobs in the region over the next five years. So they set up community stakeholder meetings. Then they lobbied telecom suppliers to cut the cost of a high-bandwidth Internet link. The city contributed $50,000 to a computer lab at St. Lawrence College that gave more people the proper skills. People here are excited about being a 'smart city' because it belongs to them."

To put that into perspective, it's less than the cost of one of those fountains that are proposed for the McEuen redo. And the wired city approach pays, whereas a fountain costs ... and costs.

That's just the beginning. When a wired infrastructure is in place local people and institutions start finding opportunities to use it for business, public services, health care, and education.

This brings opportunities in the form of business incubators and innovation centers. These provide startup companies with access to business development services that make the start-ups investment-ready. When start-ups succeed, everyone wins. Entrepreneurs and their backers are rewarded. Incubator-backers plow their earnings back into the community. The bottom line results are more good jobs.

Denver, Phoenix, and Bentonville, Ark. - Walmart's corporate home - are wired and economically sophisticated communities. Fifty years ago, no one would put a multinational corporation in Bentonville when it could be in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles. But changes in technology have leveled the playing field in terms of what cities can do.

The large cities of New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago built networks and survive. Cities like Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh didn't and now they are poor and barely hanging on.

Smaller wired towns, that were essentially insignificant 50 years ago, have emerged as major economic centers.

In the next 50 years, an important factor in local economies may shift to one based on the environmental sustainability. A wired city the size of Coeur d'Alene could be a continuing success model.

It's time our leaders quit using our money to build monuments to nothing and begin using our money to build a future for the citizens and children of Coeur d'Alene.

It's time our City Council, NIC, and school districts 270 and 271 get together, get involved, drop the petty stuff, and get this city wired.

Vern Westgate is a Hayden resident.