Igniting the wrong powderkeg

Make fun of the Coeur d'Alene urban renewal agency's new name all you want. You'll have plenty of company.

In the days since Lake City Development Corp's board of directors smacked their lips and signed a check for $29,000 to henceforth "ignite cda," the timbers of ridicule have burned hot and long. The morning after the controversial adoption, executive director of ignite cda Tony Berns and Eden Irgens, whose company Range NW cashed that $29,000 check, said they'd heard plenty of positives about the name change. Knowing that most people resist change even when it's clearly for the better, we'll leave the ignite cda torch-lighting activities to the harshest critics and focus on something else instead. Something called the big picture.

When LCDC's board is thinking about its image, it is thinking big - as in big bucks. In addition to paying Range $29,000 for ignite cda, it paid Robinson Research of Spokane $15,740 to do a 600-person phone survey. The phone survey said, not surprisingly, that most people don't know what the hell LCDC is or what it does. Somehow, doing business as ignite cda is going to help change that.

And yet the attempted image makeover isn't fully paid for yet. In addition to the $44,740 invested thus far, ignite cda's board has authorized another $54,269 for a "public education blast campaign" to inform you and your neighbors about the change. But all this expensive blasting and name changing misses the point.

LCDC/ignite cda has been in operation, making friends and enemies, since 1997. A name change and blast campaign isn't likely to alter residents' perception or suddenly pique interest where none existed before, no matter how much of other people's money the board spends. Urban renewal and tax increment financing don't make juicy headlines like dead falcons and living liars, and the ignite cda board should be OK with that.

The only thing that should matter to them is that they do great projects and they do them with complete transparency. That's the big picture the board is missing: They can't buy what they're after. They have to earn it.