A Sensible Plan for Closing Main Street
First published July 2006, HB Independent.
Let's be logical about this.
The Ad-Hoc Committee instigated by the City Council who authorized staff time for the study, is charged with looking into a potential plan for closure.
My question is why are we wasting staff time on these endless meetings? How much money does that represent?
The Downtown BID members would oppose the temporary test plan as initially proposed by the city because it would shut down the streets on the busiest days of the week, and if it failed it would be at great cost to downtown merchants.
Let's be clear, in the summer there are no problems with getting people to come downtown, on weekdays or weekends.
Second, although there are less people in the winter months on weekends, weekends all year long are busy.
Third, the month of December is THE busiest month of all for the retail stores downtown and that spills over into the restaurants. Staff was surprised to hear this.
So downtown is doing good business for the 92 days of summer from June1 to Aug. 31, for the 31 days of December, and for 36 weekends or 108 days in the winter months. (Friday, Saturday and Sunday.) The grand total of days we're doing well downtown is 231 days a year.
Admittedly we could use some help on the 134 week days of the remaining Winter months.
These would also represent the best days to test closing the street, because it would be easy for downtown businesses to judge whether or not the closure was bringing more people downtown.
Therefore, several BID board members and myself believe that we should close the street on Tuesday nights from 3PM to 10PM, hire entertainment, have a block party, and see if people will come downtown. The test period would be September through November.
If that proved successful, beginning in January through May, we would close the street on Tuesdays and Thursdays for the same time period, provide entertainment and see if that proved successful in getting people downtown on two nights of the week.
If it did, we could close the streets in the summer months on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday nights for the same time period, provide entertainment and see if that is successful.
This is a real plan for closing Main Street. Easy and simple.
The city needs to listen more carefully to its residents, businesses and neighborhoods when making decisions that affect our lives and livelihoods. Dialogue must start at the beginning of the process, not the end.
We would have saved a lot of time and a lot of money.
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