After some heated discussion, the Cook County/Grand Marais Joint Economic Development Authority (EDA) chose a domain name for its new website.
By a 3-2 vote, the board agreed to choose grandmaraiseda.org for the domain name for its economic development website.
Although the EDA has had a website, it had not been updated for many years. Last month the board voted to award a contract to Northern Wilds Media, Inc. to create and monitor a new website for the EDA.
Jim Boyd, a citizen-at-large who was on the selection committee to help select a new website designer, will assist the staff at Northern Wilds in creating new text for the site. Boyd is a Northern Wilds contributing writer and works as business outreach representative at Cook County Higher Education.
West End Cook County Commissioner and EDA member Bruce Martinson submitted five possible domain names and Grand Marais City Hall employee Tina Hanson submitted three choices for the board to select from.
Martinson’s submissions included: cookcountyeconomy.org (or com), northshoreplace.org, placetobe.org, extraordinarilynorth.org, and gonorthtowork.org.
Hanson submitted grandmaraiseda.org, ccmdevelopment.org, and ccmeda.org.
EDA board member Mike Littfin said that of all the choices the one that stood out to him was grandmaraiseda.org.
Martinson argued that that was unacceptable because it didn’t include the whole county in the name. But Littfin countered by saying that what mattered most was getting people to the site. When a person searching on his or her computer visited the website, they would then discover that the whole county was covered by the EDA.
Mark Sandbo, who earlier in the meeting was named new EDA board chair, also said that few counties have EDAs and that it was far more common for towns to have EDAs. “People looking for an EDA would probably start with the biggest town in the county and that’s Grand Marais,” said Sandbo.
But Martinson was adamant in his displeasure with the name, feeling that the West End and the rest of the county were being slighted. Hal Greenwood joined Martinson and said he didn’t like the name either, but the board had to select a name at this February 14 meeting and as Bob Spry said, “None of these are very good, but we need to pick one of them now.”
With that a vote was taken and Sandbo, Spry and Littfin voted yes while Martinson and Greenwood voted no to the new EDA domain name grandmaraiseda.org.
Martinson was unhappy with the name. Spry said to him, “If you can think of a better name, Bruce, we can always change it.”
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