First of three Health Corridor design workshops tonight

The next step in Coeur d’Alene’s potential future Health Corridor begins tonight.

The city’s urban renewal agency, ignite cda, has scheduled a three-night event tonight, Tuesday and Wednesday as it looks to gather as much community input as possible before it conducts an economic feasibility study.

The three workshops, called “charrettes” by the city, will focus on design options for the area. Organizers encourage the public to attend. Designers attending the meetings say they’ll use public input to refine and enhance designs, which they will then share at Wednesday’s meeting.

“We want to get as much input as we can from the public,” Ben Weymuth of T-O Engineers said in his June report to the city.

They will then develop from the workshops’ results the final plans. They will present both the final plans and the community’s input to the ignite cda board and the Coeur d’Alene City Council in August. The council will then use the master plan and feasibility study to determine if an urban renewal district should be created for the area.

Organizers will likely break attendees into teams during the three nights. In the daylight between workshops, teams of engineers will be working Tuesday and Wednesday to translate public input into potential designs.

“The design teams will be pretty heads-down each day,” Weymuth said. “We’ll be taking all that public input and seeing where we’re ending up at.”

Councilman Woody McEvers, for example, had a litany of questions after Weymuth’s June report he’d like answered.

“This is interesting,” he said to Weymuth, “because the only urban renewals we’ve had in the past have been kind of, ‘There’s nothing there.’ So do you design from scratch? How do you approach this where there’s buildings and streets and people and jobs? How do you come up with design? Are you wiping it clean and starting over?”

Weymuth’s answer illustrated the importance of public input in the process.

“We don’t know what it’s going to look like when it’s done,” he said, “so some of that I can’t answer. But it’s more a process of figuring out what is not working, along with what is working, and then ideas on what would make it better.”

The workshops will be held from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. on the second floor of the Edminster Student Union Building at North Idaho College.

For more information about the workshops or the Health Corridor, contact Stephanie Borders at 208-608-6635.