BLOG: How Can We Help Downtown Businesses

At Tuesday night’s meeting, the city council unanimously voted to replace the gravel parking lot at the corner of University Drive and North Street with an expanded Kitty Pozer Park, much to the dismay of many business owners who are concerned that losing those spaces will impact their business.  As the council members spoke, they each voiced their concerns for the viability of downtown businesses, despite their vote on the parking lot.  They all also suggested a couple ideas to help attract customers downtown.  Some were more concrete than others.  Here are a few of them…

• Create a task force to examine parking and other issues that impact businesses (Greenfield)
• More events, such as a restaurant week (Drummond, Silverthorne)
• Look at redeveloping Courthouse Plaza to bring an anchor and other uses (Meyer)
• Expedite a traffic study to examine how traffic volume is impacting downtown businesses (Schmidt)
• Think about how we can get pass-through traffic to stop and patronize businesses (Stombres)

In addition, city staff presented a few concepts for adding deck parking on city owned parcels, though their feasibility was questionable.

What do you think?  Are these ideas that would help downtown businesses?  Are they even plausible? 

have focused on adding more on-street parking.  I think that is another partial solution.  What are some others?