Should the name BlaineCounty be changed to Sun ValleyCounty?
At least one county commissioner wants to know what other people think.
To that end, the newspaper’s online Web poll this week asks just that and we encourage people to weigh in by going to www.mtexpress.com and voting. The results will be reported in next week’s paper.
A name change might be good if it increases awareness of the area as a mountain resort and if it reduces parochialism.
There was no lack of thought in creating the name Sun Valley for the resort started by Averell Harriman in 1936. Skiing was a new sport to America when the resort opened with a new-fangled gizmo called the ski lift that had been developed from hooks used to hoist giant bunches of bananas from ships.
The name Sun Valley conjured up images of warm days surrounding a very cold sport—and the area has lived up to the name ever since.
With the anemic economy and a tiny marketing budget, people are trying to come up with new ways to put Sun Valley more firmly on the skiing/boarding map. A name change that better reflects what happens here might be just the ticket.
Commissioner Larry Schoen says the area is known as Sun Valley to the outside world and the name BlaineCounty isn’t widely recognized.
As for bringing local residents together, that may be tougher. Despite the fact that the cities of Sun Valley, Ketchum, Hailey, Bellevue and Carey are all located in the same county, it often looks as though they are on different planets with names like Not Sun Valley or Not Ketchum or Not the NorthCounty. The near-motto repeated in every city in the county is “We’re not like those (fill in the blank) people.”
The rampant parochialism is really quite remarkable given that the bulk of the county’s population lives within the same 15-mile corridor. It’s also remarkable given that economics and geography link everyone in the county. Even in the agricultural south, many households depend on work in the north’s tourist economy.
One of the greatest challenges for local elected officials is to bring together the disparate attitudes of their constituents. Whether a name change would work enough subconscious magic to bring people together is an open question.
The area’s name has changed before. It has been part of AlturasCounty, LoganCounty and finally BlaineCounty, the latter named for James G. Blaine, a famous Republican senator from Maine and secretary of State under President James A. Garfield. Historians say he may never have set foot in his namesake county.
So, readers should weigh in on whether it’s time for a name change.
