CIRI Website
History
The region of the central Iron Range
has a rich history of community autonomy. To support that perspective,
state funding policies promote benefits to individual communities without
offering many incentives for regional planning efforts. While community
self-sufficiency is admirable, the goal of self-preservation at all costs is
not. Historically, Hibbing,
Chisholm, Buhl, Kinney and/or Balkan and Great Scott Townships would compete,
each staking out their position and grasping on to it, even though it lead to
economic losses for the region. Continued adversarial positioning and
competition among communities were allowing regional opportunities in the
central Iron Range to slip away without adequate
progress.
A pervasive shift in the area's economic climate brought about a sense of
urgency to see problems of individual communities as a regional concert.
In the fall of 1999, a group of business leaders from across the central Iron Range
met to explore the question, "How can we help shape the economic future of
the central Iron Range?" To step into the
future, the group had to shift its weight to the opposite foot and look at
things from a new perspective. This new perspective has become in what is
now called the Central Iron Range Initiative (CIRI).
