Living in an onion

Press, 8 May 1980, Page 20

Living in an onion

From the “Economist,” London

Residents of the unstately town of Winooski in northern Vermont in the Northeast United States, want to go Kubla Khan one better. They are asking the Federal Government for $55,000 to study a proposal to en-' close Winooski’s entire 800 acres under a gigantic dome. This money is the eye-catch-ing part of a much larger request for $3.4M which would go mostly for reconverting old homes. The dome is the brainchild of Mr Mark Tigan, the town’s community development director. One of the most successful local grantsmen in the country,. Mt Tigan has already managed to get almost $3O million for Winooski in federal grants during the past 15' years. For a town of 7000 (its name is the local Indian word for “onion”), that is no mean achievement. Supporters of the “onion dome” argue that it would free summers of pigeons and winters of snow and road salt. It would give winter warmth to Winooskians too poor to fly to Florida, they say, and would give the Montreal Expos team a convenient northern site for baseball training. Once up, the dome would draw scientists of all stripes to ■ study everything from wind currents to the morale of Winooskians living under a bell-jar. Pessimists worry about the humidity, the air quality, how to clean the

windows and the effects of several feet of snow. Seizing on the attention paid to Mr Tigan’s proposal, officials at St Michael’s College in Winooski decided to sponsor an international symposium last month. The venerable inventor of the geodesic dome, Mr Buckminster Fuller, flew up from Brazil to hail the proposal as “an extraordinary state-

ment of a community that is thinking of going into environmental control.”

At tire symposium, federal housing officials were less enthusiastic. They told Winooskians that the proposals would cost five times the estimated $55,006. Undeterred, Mr Tigan simply reapplied for the additional money. '