Northern Utah civic leaders are organizing their efforts to make sure local residents are not left out of the 2002 Winter Olympic experience.
"We want to have our own events, our own volunteers. We want to have an experience for our citizens who don't want to go to Salt Lake and fight the traffic to attend the events down there," Camille Cain said.Cain is chairwoman of Northern Utah 2002. The group has been meeting since September with community leaders from Davis, Weber, Morgan, Box Elder and Cache counties.
Its goal is to organize and coordinate Olympic plans among all northern Utah entities in advance of the 2002 Winter Games.
Its leaders plan to meet in the next few months with each county's council of governments, whose membership is largely comprised of mayors, and explain Northern Utah 2002's mission.
The next step, Cain said, will be to hold public meetings, probably starting in the late spring or early summer.
"We want a lot of public involvement," Barbara McConvill said. She is director of sales for The Chamber Ogden-Weber's convention and visitors bureau.
Cain said the Salt Lake Organizing Committee's main job is to put on the Games, leaving groups like Northern Utah 2002 the chance to focus on other things like "helping people enjoy the Games, celebrate them, learning something about the Olympics and community pride.
"We want people to experience it from that perspective."
Bob Hunter, community affairs director for the Salt Lake Organizing Committee, said Northern Utah 2002 is one of about three or four such groups that SLOC anticipates working with in coordinating Games-related issues and events.
"We expect to deal with working groups in each one of the areas where we have venues, and I don't know of a better way to organize than Northern Utah 2002 has," Hunter said.
"We appreciate them forming this consortium," Hunter said, "because we have very limited staff and this gives us an opportunity to meet with people in a forum and do a lot of communicating."