Sweet Success

June ended with a bang yesterday. The Greenbelt Brochure is alive! The reception, reactions and reviews of the brochure far exceeded my most optimistic expectations. It's a truly great product and it created a "Dear Diary Day" yesterday. Why?

Well, my interest in this brochure actually began almost FIVE YEARS ago! This hasn't been a flash-in-the-pan project. It's taken a huge amount of time and effort. It's actually one of the reasons I sought to get appointed to the City's Parks & Recreation Commission. I was appointed in January 2009 and immediately began working toward the creation of what would culminate in this brochure.

This brochure is the result of over 15 months of diligent dedication and just plain hard work on the part of many people. It's been a team effort all the way. I am very proud to see the germ of an idea almost five years old finally take flight.

In the convoluted and often confusing political climate of city government, good ideas don't always necessarily find their way to daylight. Things change, ideas get diluted, energy ebbs and some fine projects falter along the way. This brochure project could have easily succumbed to such a demise. It's fate hung by a thread several times. Looking back it's easy to see how this project could have wound up in the dust bin of good ideas. That's why it's so special to see this brochure out on the ground circulating along the Greenbelt. It's akin to watching that white baseball sail high, long and far over the centerfield fence.

Not only is this brochure good, it's REALLY good. Even though a lot of people chewed in it during the past year and even though it went through a lot of permutations, it somehow survived the "committee process" intact and worthwhile.
At one time, there was an actual, genuine full bore attack on the little brochure. A local lobbying group leveled both barrels at it an unloaded some stinging verbal buckshot. Flack also came from a local historian. The project flew in sketchy skies for awhile and somehow landed on both feet. That's the type of background that makes this success so sweet.

It would take a lot more words than this blog post to describe the daunting and devilish details of this project. We'll spare you from descriptions of all the potholes, roadblocks, odd circumstances and other dangerous detours that plagued this project. We don't have time to write a book. But trust me, it was arduous and often frustrating and perplexing and the light at the end of the tunnel never seemed to be getting any closer. There were at least two times I figured someone had turned off the light at the end of the tunnel and that the project was DOA. That's what made yesterday such a Dear Diary Day. When you have a lot of spirit invested in a project, let's face it, you get attached to that project and you want to see it fly free and live a full life. To see the brochure out on the ground yesterday was very emotional for me and it definitely showed in my EEE blog post last night (EEE= Excessive Evening Exuberance).

To hear the absolutely over-the-top verbal excitement from hotel front desk clerks about this product made the success all that sweeter. It would be hard for me to imagine comments more effusively positive than the ones I heard yesterday. Even though I had postulated that this would be a likely outcome of the brochure, I honestly had no idea whether my theory would be true. To hear and see such reactions was vindication of beliefs formed almost five years ago when I first visualized the concept of such a product. Although I am only one player on the team, I feel my "at bat" contributed to the team's success and I feel the entire team deserves credit for "knocking one out of the park." It's an awesome feeling.

Now, bear in mind here that we aren't talking about something huge and grandiose. Nope, this little brochure actually fits in your shirt pocket (assuming you have a shirt pocket). It's simply a single sheet of paper printed on both sides and cleverly folded down to something slightly larger than a credit card! It's small size belies the value of its content. That's the beauty of this gem. It's a great little diamond for one of the crown jewels of the city--The Snake River Greenbelt.

Copies of the Greenbelt brochure are flying off the front desks of the motels and hotels along the river's West Bank. I've taken it upon myself to keep those hospitality properties restocked over the July 4th weekend. to facilitate that activity, I created a blog yesterday. You can read a little more about the Team Members and who funded the project and how to download a 3.5 meg PDF file of the brochure here: http://ifgreenbelt.blogspot.com Last night's EEE Blog post has been moved off to the companion site for this blog. It's been retitled "Centerfield Fence."

Oh, and by the way, I actually have my name on the product! Look in the far lower right of the right hand map on Page 2. In a city with such a great history as Idaho Falls, it's truly humbling to have my name printed on something so unique. As I said in that EEE blog post last night--yesterday was a really special day for me. I'll remember is forever.

Cheers, jp