Boosters see no humor in ‘Crawleigh’ moniker
(News and Observer – November 1, 2012)
The state Department of Transportation has agreed to scale back the humorous nickname awarded to the massive, three-year overhaul of Raleigh's southern Beltline, heeding concerns that the light-hearted handle lent the region a bad name.
Like the traffic snarl to come, DOT's response is stop-and-go: catering to worries about tourism while also honoring the 4,700-plus people who entered Raleigh's name-that-gridlock contest. They're not dropping Crawleigh, but they're not trumpeting it, either.
"We feel like we came up with a good happy medium," said Greer Beaty, DOT spokeswoman. "We will not brand the community."
At first, Crawleigh met with fanfare. "It's here!" read the title of a DOT press release sent by spokeswoman Leah Friedman in August.
"The name 'I-40/440 Rebuild Project' will no longer be uttered." The minutes from the September Board of Transportation meeting seemed to echo the excitement. "The Department will be looking for creative ways to incorporate this name into the communications about this important project."
But some of Raleigh's biggest boosters worried the image of a lagging, slow-moving city might stick, among them the Raleigh Convention and Visitors Bureau, the Regional Transportation Alliance and Raleigh Economic Development. "We just thought it really isn't the brand we wanted for the area," said Dennis Edwards, CEO of the Raleigh CVB.
Part of the problem with Crawleigh is it didn’t tell anyone what construction is happening where, said Joe Milazzo, executive director of Regional Transportation Alliance. Something like “I-440 Rebuild” would describe and locate the pain while pointing to the future.
By this week, official enthusiasm for Crawleigh had dimmed. "You never heard me say that word," DOT district engineer Wally Bowman told a business crowd during a meeting in Raleigh Tuesday. "It does have a negative connotation for tourism. ... We will call it the I-40 Reconstruction Project."
Beaty stressed that DOT has heard the business community's concerns. "We don't have a fancy Web page," she said. "There's no branding. There's no logo."