And 2030 powers on

I attended the Cd'A 2030 launch event last night, and was a little disappointed in the turnout. One nice surprise is the number of young people there - it's great to see the 20-somethings come and support the growth of their town.Steve Wilson from the Chamber of Commerce was the emcee for the night, and he did a great job. There were about five other presenters throughout the evening. Probably the most interesting part was looking at the projected population growth for 2030. Good ol' Coeur d'Alene is definitely growing fast - I don't know if I'm ready for 65,000+ people to live within city limits, but it's going to happen so we better prepare for it.Charles Buck from the UI also presented, along with other committee members throughout the night. They threw out a bunch of statistics and survey results. I guess the University of Idaho Social Science Research Unit contacted about 3,000 greater Coeur d'Alene residents for a telephone  survey as part of the visioning process.Side note: If you want some stats about Kootenai County check out the Kootenai County Indicators site. Very interesting for any factoid lovers out there.This survey was an intense 15-minute long phone interview. I wasn't contacted to be part of the survey, but I'd love to hear from any of you who were. I found it pretty interesting that on one survey question, residents stated that the best thing about Cd'A is it's natural beauty and closeness to nature. Yet on another question people valued investing in environmental protection low on their priority list.Another thing I found interesting is that a good portion of survey takers stated the worst part about Cd'A is the lack of diverse jobs and low pay. It's going to take a great deal of population growth to bring in more job opportunities and that is something people didn't want to see (the population growth, that is). When I pointed this out to Kyle he also noted that one reason our environment is so beautiful is because we don't have large factories and big business to create air pollution and eat up a lot of our "empty space."Just some things to think about.Overall it was a good start to introducing the community to the project and getting us excited about it. There are some workshops this week that I would encourage you all to attend if you want to learn more. They are posted on CDA2030.org. There's also a half-day summit on Saturday, November 16 which I will be attending.Hope to see you all there!Andy