Cloquet deserves praise for ‘getting connected’

Talk about it

Kudos to Cloquet officials for kicking their website phobia.

Well, maybe it wasn’t actually a phobia, although Cloquet City Administrator Brian Fritsinger admitted in 2008 there were few in city hall who would call themselves Internet-savvy.

“We’re not exactly cutting-edge,” he said at the time.

Yet, they’ve bitten the bullet after years of hemming and hawing, and the city now sports a website that went live in recent weeks.

While it’s still in the testing phase and certain sections of www.ci.cloquet.mn.us are still under construction, the site is – without a doubt – easy to navigate and chock full of useful information.

The fact that a wealth of information is there should come as little surprise to anyone who’s tried to glean information on paper from city officials. Meeting agendas and packets providing supplementary materials are thorough, easy-to-read and abundantly available to anyone willing to physically go to city hall.

At long last, the data is available at the click of a mouse.

The one minor inconvenience of playing the waiting game is that the resulting domain name is a bit cumbersome and relatively easy to forget.

But, that’s quickly remedied by the bookmark feature. And you’ll want to bookmark it, as city employees are currently in training to learn how to keep it updated.

Now that the city has merged onto the information superhighway, there’s no telling where they’ll venture off to next.

Twitter? Facebook?

We’d “like” it if they did.

– Lisa Baumann

Tags: opinion, editorials, cloquet