Dream Teams by Shane Snow

Author:Shane Snow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-06-05T04:00:00+00:00

6.

The last thing the world heard about Winooski after President Carter ordered the kibosh on Mark Tigan’s dome . . . was nothing.

The news correspondents drove back home. The bags of mail from dome lovers stopped coming. The First International Dome Symposium became the last International Dome Symposium. The only thing left of the Winooski Dome was the occasional aside in a magazine story or blog post saying, “Remember the time those crazy Vermonters wanted to build that crazy dome?”

But it turns out that when we dig a little deeper, we learn something even crazier:

That dome that was never built helped save Winooski.

When HUD assistant secretary Embry called Tigan to relay the bad news that the dome was through, he called with another proposal.

“We can’t give you the grant for the dome,” Embry told him. But he knew about Burlington’s proposal to build a hydroelectric plant on the river. What if he gave some federal funding to Winooski to build a hydro plant on a different part of the river that could power the area without ruining Winooski’s downtown?

The enthusiasm around the dome—inventors and politicians flying in to talk about it—had ignited the town and its supporters, key among them Embry. “It demonstrated that we’re willing to try things outside the box,” Tigan said. With his dome, Tigan was looking at Winooski’s challenges from far outside the normal range of solutions on Problem Mountain. He was so far out, in fact, that when people looked in his direction—when they started considering his far-fetched plan—it became easier for them to consider other mountain peaks hiding in the fog, from a hydroelectric plant downstream to various other projects. The dome had sparked their curiosity.

“Maybe it’s not a vision of the dome, but it’s a vision that these mills could be rehabbed. It’s a vision that we could fill an industrial park,” Tigan said. Ideas that had before gone unconsidered were not so easily dismissed anymore. “All of the sudden we were sledding downhill.”

They built the hydroelectric plant, which helped Winooski save on its heating costs without ruining downtown or causing a war with Burlington. They used some of the HUD funding to convert the old factories into energy-efficient office spaces that helped attract local businesses to the town. Tigan took a bus full of townspeople up to Montreal to tell small businesses there about how great and inexpensive the new Winooski was and convinced several to open up shop there.

Even though the dome was a rather extreme—we might even say awful—idea, it ended up being useful after all. Considering such a radical idea opened Winooski and its supporters (like HUD) up to considering more workable solutions to its problems that might not have happened otherwise.

Over the course of the next couple years, unemployment in Winooski went from 15 percent to 7 percent.

And when Mark Tigan left in 1982 for his next job in Santa Monica, Winooski named a street after him.

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