Under the 2013 draft budget, there’s the possibility of the City of Whitewater increasing the contribution for Downtown Whitewater, Inc., to compensate for the loss of funding via Tax Incremental District 4.
While I’d surely rather the city didn’t prop up businesses, and I’d rather it didn’t fund just one area at that, I candidly think additional funding for the next year is necessary until a combination of zoning and enforcement changes takes hold.
(There’s no good reason whatever to support even temporary funding for a large corporation – that’s not implicated here. These are small merchants.)
If the downtown goes under, the gaping hole will take years to fill, and would make any mere marketing effort on behalf of the city impossible to succeed.
The Importance of a Downtown. Our city has a small downtown, with another retail district on the west beyond the university. There were plans for residential expansion elsewhere (via the Bridge to Nowhere, a local monument to bad planning), but it’s really these two areas for retail.
Here’s Whitewater’s challenge: she’ll attract no one if the downtown goes under. I’ve traveled about this last year, through Wisconsin and places far beyond, but I’ve not once seen a successful small town without a thriving district of quaint shops.
If anyone else has, I’d be happy to hear of it. There are suburbs, naturally, without identifiable downtowns, but I’ve never seen a successful rural community without one. Struggling, half-dead communities, surely; successful vibrant ones, not yet.
Our downtown survived the last recession (no small feat), but it’s hardly thriving. It took considerable work to keep it going even as it is.
The Futility of Marketing (without a Thriving Downtown). You may have seen a marketing video, in the syle of a school’s NCAA promotional announcement, encouraging prospective newcomers to Choose Whitewater. It’s hard to over-emphasize how backwards it is to tout the features of a city if the city’s downtown descends into rows of empty storefronts and discarded beer bottles. One block from Main Street, on Center, we’ve problems even now.
No one will choose this city from a video over his or her personal impressions on a visit. No one will choose this city on a guided tour over his or her own explorations. People who think otherwise are mistaken. The best a marketing effort can do is encourage a visit, and (it’s to be hoped) bolster a positive impression a visitor has after his or her own explorations.
No one will choose from a video, story, or pamphlet alone.
The Longterm Solution. A combination of zoning changes and enforcement changes (different but complementary actions) can lift this city far beyond any marketing effort. Just as the best policy is a sound argument, so the best marketing is an open, dynamic city.
Unfortunately, the benefits of that approach will not take hold by January 2013. The zoning re-write is still in process, and improvements and modernization of enforcement policy will take hold gradually.
When those changes do take hold — and through strenuous promotion of actual policy improvements they will – we’ll have a thriving downtown without the need for municpal subsidies. The City of Whitewater should look ahead, and tentatively propose a tapering level of municipal funding for out years.
Who should promote and advertise these genuine improvements? It should be the business people and city officials who have benefitted from the changes or are responsible for enforcing them. A merchant considering a town cares little what someone unconnected to his immediate work thinks about something – he or she cares about the disposition and policies of those who will be directly connected to his or her own work.
In this way, the best advocates will be those who can say that they’ve made zoning or enforcement better, show how that’s been useful to actual merchants, and how it can be helpful to new ones.
Funding Downtown Whitewater in 2013 to include replacement funding lost via TID 4 is a reasonable bridge toward a place of reformed regulations and requirements.
One might even consider it, just perhaps, a Bridge to Somewhere.
Tomorrow: About funding for the Generac Bus.