Members of the Emporia Main Street board met Wednesday morning with a Kansas Main Street official to discuss setting the organization’s goals for the next five years.
Main Street has been in the goal-setting process for some time, gathering information from members and the community through online and paper surveys, said Casey Woods, executive director. Wednesday’s meeting included Jeanne Stinson, Main Street state coordinator.
“Today’s meeting was a board version of that goal-setting,” Woods said. “Between talking to all of our members and the community and the board, we’ll come up with a list of benchmark goals that the staff and organization have to complete over the next five years.”
Through the surveys, Woods said Main Street has been getting a lot of feedback about what people in the community think about the organization’s direction.
“We’ve tried over the past year to create a close enough relationship with all of our members that they feel comfortable telling us what they really think we need to work on, and with community members we’ve tried to do the same thing,” he said.
The goal-setting process will last at least another month, and the five-year vision will be discussed at Main Street’s annual meeting in June or July. For now, the groundwork for moving ahead has been laid.
“This early in the process we’ve talked about bringing on different partners to make more assets available to businesses,” Woods said. “We really want to concentrate on taking our existing businesses and growing them, transitioning businesses that are at that point in a business life span where they want to transition and then continuing to work with people to make sure they can enter into different businesses.”
Beyond that, the organization is also encouraging downtown property owners to renovate their upper stories and to redevelop in other ways.
“We’re working hard to make sure that the structure and the aesthetics of the town are really where they need to be to inspire some community pride,” Woods said.
reddog (K. B. Thomas Jr.) says...
One of the things Mr. Woods needs to do is attend the meetings of the committee on tourism to make sure downtown is represented. It seems to me that Northwest Emporia is the main focal point with the Chamber of Commerce leading the way and I'm on the committee and this is being promoted, without public input.
March 19, 2010 at 1:14 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
methusla (anonymous) says...
I am wondering if the Emporia Main Street board has been keeping up with the economic problems that Emporia, and the rest of the Country has been experiencing these last few years.
Do they realize that jobs have been lost, sales tax revenues, etc. are down, and that this means that all businesses are experiencing a decrease in business and sales ? And yet they are asking that those businesses are managing to, just survive downtown, to step up and spend money they may not have or be able to afford, to renovate, remodel, upgrade or repair, etc.
If the Main Street board is so concerned about the " Downtown" , then why the extreme effort to develop to the Northwest ?
Lets face facts. The Downtown has pretty much been a forgotten area of Emporia for quite some time now, as has other areas of Emporia. And the reason is..because these are not the areas that the socially elite or the elitepower base of Emporia live or shop or thinking about saving , they are only concerned about their particular areas of Emporia, that are of interest to them. All they can do is complain, put-down and degrade the rest. And this is what is causing the decline of " Downtown Emporia " and other areas. You must remember one thing. It takes money to renovate, remodel, rebuild, upgrade, repair etc., your business, home, auto, anylthing..money that perhaps not all of us/you may have or can afford to " borrow " to do so, especially, now, in these times.
March 19, 2010 at 8:42 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )