Main Street has broken the areas of interest down into four components, which I pretty much re-organize into three components. The idea of design could just as easily include the streetscape and façade into one group since they’re doing predominantly the same thing. Besides, very little was discussed on this topic. As far as this was concerned, only parking and signage on the freeway were discussed. Promotions and business development was the order of the day. Promotions :: Design (Streetscape, Façade) :: Business development
The arts community asked for more exposure on a higher level. They would like to move the Third Thursday Art Walk to a different day, such as “first Friday.” This is seen as a day when people are more likely to be out for pleasure and have more money. Everyone’s money is “gone by the third week.” Sharon Porter, of the Blue Turtle Gallery, wondered about where the people with the money are, such as professors and doctors. She said, “These are the people that have money, let’s shake it out.”
However, the business development people in the room quickly took over, noting that the art scene was great, but the service industries wanted to know how they are supposed to capitalize off ideas pitched toward retail industries. The one apartment overlap that seemed appreciated by all was the La Grande Scenic Bikeway. And an idea for having a bike and brew tour was perhaps the one useful, tanglible idea that came out to tie most everyone's interests into one event. The dry cleaner and another bar owner wanted to know if anything was being done to help off-Adams businesses. As far as they see things, they are “getting nothing from it” other than their parking spaces being taken up by people going to events on Adams. There was also the perception that “Main Street” is narrow focused and should be referred to more as “Downtown.” [Main Street is a umbrella organization that towns across America work under to help secure funding and such to progress with their goals. As far as I know the only way to change the name is to change the name of the national organization.]
There were wishes about wanting to build with the university that seemed to come with a lot of approving gestures. People also are heavily in favor of bringing in more tourism. One way was proposed to add more signage along the exits, but that brought on a deeper debate, “do we need signage or do we need an integral product first and foremost?”
In this discussion, the problem that everyone wanted to address was parking, specifically angle parking took up, in terms of time, most of the meeting with the same point being echoed by just about everyone in the room.
Jerry, the owner of Mt. Emily Ale House, hit the most important factors in one fell swoop of a speech. People seemed afraid to invest in the economic development model because they were being misled into seeing it as an added tax instead of being integral to building the community. It is easy for people to buy into that when a typical routine has been “building a portfolio for a few at the expense of the rest of us.” While that was not the nature of the last failed initiative, the mindset remains a majority feeling apparently. La Grande does need a diversity of opinions and a collaborative nature if we are ever to “attract businesses, fill the holes.” Mainly, La Grande needs to choose an identity and go with it. A dichotomy exists within our view of ourselves. We need a positive perspective, because that encourages good things to happen. And when good things happen, good things keep happening. This is a much more productive outlet than continuing to slam La Grande as having nothing going on [which kid yoshida has never done, by the way]. Above all, get out and participate. If you are not going to volunteer and help the changes, then you cannot complain. [Say it again and again Jerry!]
Al’s ideas followed everyone by echoing the need to keep people in downtown, that “every $1 spent here becomes $9 within a year. Where do you spend that?”
By the next meeting, set for October 15, 6:00pm, at the Ale House, people were asked to pick a committee and bring an idea for how to brand La Grande…
kid yoshida’s take on the various issues:
Yes a time like Friday evening is a bit more user friendly. But then again so would be Saturdays and Sundays, especially Saturdays during farmer’s market season is a huge downtown experience. Expanding upon things that already happen like that would be great. However, businesses in La Grande don’t seem to like to be open on the weekends, especially Sundays. Of course, there will be a dichotomy between the arts and retail industries. They are marketing to two entirely different aspects of life. Intermingling the two seems a bit counterproductive, people generally use an arts side of life to escape the business side of life. It is somewhat true that the arts type things are really focused on retail industry, since things that go on after 5:00pm (like the Art Walk) and things on the weekends do not include service businesses that operate on a M-F 9:00-5:00 schedule either.
On the topic of when people have money to spend, it is true that people tend to have more money at the beginning of the month. Yet, it is also true that people spend money based on what they know will be happening. I, for instance, budget how much I have to spend throughout the month and spend it according to what events are scheduled. It often happens that when events fall late in the month that I do not have money for them simply because I had no idea at the beginning of the month that about those events. There are only a few businesses that even seem to care about promoting events that they are going to have other than signs in their own windows, or random and scattered facebook posts. And the ones that do often don’t promote them until maybe a week before the event. Promotion and advertising are of the essence and people in LG are terrible at this aspect. The earlier the better! The Art Walk is well established and people know about that, but may there be other reasons why people don’t spend a lot then…? I am not of the opinion that an earlier in the month event like that would create more than a small percentage of extra revenue.
Stores that feature items that are beyond the budget of most of us lower-wage earners, would sensibly want to target those with more discretionary income. My first reaction is that people that have a lot of money typically have a lot of money for one reason: they are not fond of parting with their money. It is a tougher battle to extract cash from people that shelter themselves away, but I am not sure Main Street can accomplish these more detailed tasks, nor should they be expected to.
I see Main Street as an entity to stir up the public interest. I do not see it as an entity to solve all the problems that each individual business owner needs to take upon themselves to figure out how to sell to people. Yes, it’s hard to sell water to a poor fisherman. That’s where the merchant’s own ingenuity comes into play. Main Street can tell the merchant what to expect and work to bring people in, which is sort of setting the table. For instance, Main Street can do a promotion to set up a fisherman’s conference (disregarding for a moment that there is no place in downtown for them to stay or convene, the options are pretty much in Island City.) Main Street can tell the bottled water salesman to get ready and be prepared for fisherman coming to town. From there, however, it is up to the salesman to work his own magic in unloading his product.
If there could be a doctor’s conference across the street from Blue Turtle or if Blue Turtle could have a more mobile version to hit up places like Nightingale on campus or at least dispense flyers or some such thing as that might be a place to start. A similar issue happened with the insurance salesman who doesn't see much benefit in working with Halloween because it does nothing to sell his business. The point to these scenarios is that, in the end, it is mainly the job of the merchant to make the move with the aide of Main Street. There are numerous ideas that need to be thought about, but specifics I believe belong to the merchant alone.
The second aspect here is that a lot of merchants in La Grande seem to focus on people they expect to have money (ie, older, wealthier, etc.) even though such populations may be more frugal with the resources they have. One thing most merchants in La Grande (except for maybe the Maridell Center or Tropical Swirlz) do not do is target kids, teenagers, younger adults. It might seem odd at first glance, but these are the people that are most free with the cash in their pockets. Businesses need to be finding out what these kids like and want. Any successful business model seems to have in common that they are in tune with younger generations. Even if you are not selling specifically to a younger generation, bring in tune with a different crowd can only be good business savvy. To have the ability to adapt to a multitude of different clientele is a skill that not every businessman possesses. It is easy to get stuck in the ruts of the things we have been doing all along. Adapting is key to survival.
Think about it this way. I go see live music often, at least once a week. I like singer-songwriter, acoustic folk and country-ish types of music and such, but after a certain point when that is all there is in La Grande, it gets pretty old. The day before this meeting, I went a concert at Riveria Center that had one rock band and three metal bands. That concert blew me away. And my favorite bands there were the youngest, and local bands. Neither had much to sell, but I bought what was available. It’s not like it would have been the best concert ever, but I am pretty sure I haven’t been to a metal concert in almost 20 years. So even at amateur levels it sounds pretty damn good when I am deprived of it for so long. Why wouldn’t club owners want to get more diverse things like in town? Or the city in general? It stirs up the interest. I know different things like that metal concert happen sometimes, but they are pretty infrequent and, again, not all that well advertised, only really word of mouth.
A primary thing to understand is that kids typically have their fingers on the pulse of what is hot. Not to follow that lead seems foolish to me, no matter which business you operate. If kids go places, their parents usually know about it. And the more their parents know about it, the more it gets talked about, frequented, the less effort advertising and promoting takes, etc. It’s a pretty cyclical thing really. Once the best model is in place, it almost runs itself. But it starts with fresh ideas and different ways of living. Talking to kids at the high school and university and incorporating them more into the Main Street “scene” is essential.
Let’s say you sell insurance, could you market a way for a 17-year-old to get a better deal buying directly from you than attaching to the Progressive plan their parents use? Maybe that is or isn’t much reality, but at some level there is a way to get through. If you run a bar, maybe the kids won’t be old enough to come into your bar, but soon enough they will be. And their friends might already be. The more adapting and accommodating people are, the more accepted they are from the other side. I don’t see many instances, if any, of where La Grande has this figured out.
If anyone ever has the true answer to accomplishing a collaboration with EOU, then they will be a savior for sure. The downtown should be agressive in pursuing an collaboration with EOU. If downtown owners expect EOU to come to them, they are pretty shortsighted. EOU has no reason to come downtown, other than to occasionally get something different to eat. They have all the facilities. Downtown has nothing.
As for the subject of extracting tourist dollars, this is a slippery slope and La Grande is sliding down the wrong side fast with their lack of identity. La Grande is a niche market and would likewise have to target niche tourists. If you are going after tourists that have lots of money, where will they stay, where will their events be hosted? There is no infrastructure because La Grande has never been that kind of town. La Grande is not Walla Walla, or even Joseph for that matter. If you could get someone like Marcus Whitman to put in a high rise hotel somewhere like where the old Blockbuster building is that would be a perfect start to building an infrastructure. Maybe turn Sac Annex, or some of it, back in hotel rooms. Baker has Geiser Grande, Wildhorse has a resort hotel, there is no place at all, and as such, no reason whatsoever for someone to stay in La Grande. The decision that was made to tear down the historic hotel or hotels that once stood where those Wells Fargo and US Bank reside in ever so hideous buildings was a death sentence. If those buildings so needed to be torn down, they should have been replaced by something more luxurious like what had been there before.
However, they were not because La Grande is not that kind of town. Trying to make La Grande into another Walla Walla is an uphill battle because it doesn’t have the same history. The tourist industry, if there is to be one, needs to capitalize on the agricultural roots of the valley. That is the best hope, although it is sad to say that is a very specific market of tourists and most people passing through from Boise to Portland will not be interested in it.
There does at the very least, as Jerry pointed out, need to be an anchor tenant and an identity to pull people into La Grande. Like Pendleton has the Round-Up, Joseph has the Wallowas…what does La Grande have? For that matter, La Grande doesn’t even have a rodeo at all! That is embarrassing from an outside perspective considering that even Haines, Elgin and Union have rodeos. The fight for tourist money is going to be tough because there are years of failed decision making to correct. Not that it can’t be done, but it will take a lot of capital, for one, and some very inventive ideas that can merge natural/scenic landscapes and agrarian roots with something that everyday people can identify with. The idea of having a couple more breweries in town was a decent pitch. To manage to create two more breweries that would be significantly better than the ones already in the region would obviously take a lot of finesse and sweet talking in pulling some people in from Portland or somewhere like that. I think there could be so many better ideas out there, but that is one that could provide anchor tenants and a La Grande identity to put on a billboard for 500 miles of I-84. Certainly that was the only thing close to a true answer presented at this meeting. Still, La Grande would have to go back to the issue of where people will stay…
As far as signage and getting people off the interstate. Phew! Coming from Boise there is almost no reason to stop. There are only two exits and neither one are very inviting. The first follows a rest stop and it is less appealing than the rest stop itself. It is a truck stop and has no visible way to tell that there is any more of a town beyond. The second exit has a host of fast food chains and the majority of hotel rooms available in town. That’s not much of a reason to stop when billboards have already been encouraging the traveler to push on to Wildhorse. And even if they do stop, good luck getting them into downtown. They have the most essential things a traveler needs right there. The best exit of all doesn’t even have a turn off . If a driver decides that they want to stop in LG when driving by the fairgrounds, they need to go all the way to Perry or Hilgard.
Coming from the other direction, the first exit is at least quite inviting and is the best way to lure people into La Grande. With a proper metal sculpture or something like what was discussed then it becomes even more inviting. The approach up through the woods and the view with the descent back into downtown is the sexiest spot in the entire town. That’s what got me here for the first time. For the signage issue and things along the freeway, that is the main place to start, getting people coming from the west. However, the infrastructure is going to take several years to build before these are relevant points.
As for the beating a dead horse issue, yes, angle parking is a good idea for sure. But at the same time, it is a short-term solution. It would also require making the sidewalks smaller, particularly on the Red Cross side of Adams down to Joe Beans and taking out the turn lanes. And taking out the turn lane in front of City Hall probably needs to happen anyway. I signed the form to back the demand for angle parking, but in truth the biggest issue of the meeting had zero importance for me. I drive only in my work car and don’t even like to do it then. I live in downtown just so I can walk everywhere and if my car had any value I would have sold it a long time ago. The point here is that most downtowns are not known for their ease of accessibility anyway, so I am not sure what is the fuss is over all of this. There are far more pressing things that need to be addressed, such as once La Grande has angled parking and brings in some anchor tenants and a reason for people to come here, then where is all that influx of traffic going to park? There is enough parking made better by the angled idea, but that expands by about what, 50%? Meaning that 50 or so spaces from Island Ave to 4th Street will become about 75 spaces. That works well for the people who live here, but not once you have people wanting to spend vacations here.
La Grande needs to not worry about petty things right now. I think it was optimistic for La Grande to be placed in a tier 2 of Main Street organizations. The reality of the situation is that is only determined by the funds available and interest in moving forward. The reality of the differing ideas, however, makes La Grande function as a tier one. We have no infrastructure for anything people want to do and people going too many different directions. People need to agree on one way to go and take off, support the efforts to build something to support those ideas and then start worrying about how to draw people in and how to market products and that kind of thing. There is years of work to do to correct years of bad decisions. That is not meant to discourage, but to be a sobering reality that nothing should be expected to change with the blooms of next spring.
No comments:
Post a Comment