While brushing up for our council presentation on Monday evening, I stumbled across this quote on the National Main Street Institute's website (click on the picture at left to go to their website).
"The Main Street approach is incremental; it is not designed
to produce immediate change. Because they often fail to address the underlying causes of commercial district decline, expensive improvements, such as pedestrian malls or sports arenas, do not always generate the desired economic results. In order to succeed, a long-term revitalization effort requires careful attention to every aspect of downtown — a process that takes time and requires leadership and local capacity building."
I took the liberty of italicizing the humdinger for Windsor. As a city, or more correctly as taxpayers, we just spent $65 million to build a new arena that, according to the wise folks at the National Main Street Institute, will not pull our city out of the tailspin economics we are experiencing. The recommendations of the Institute are a huge part of the platform that we are going to council with. According to the latest numbers, their member organizations are seeing a ROI of over $25 for every dollar invested in running the program initiatives. That is HUGE! That would mean that Windsor would have the potential to see $1.625 BILLION from investments into the city if we had invested the arena money in a program like this. Sure, it would take about 3 years to start seeing some real returns, escalating quickly over the next decade, but there is no silver bullet to the problems in Windsor.
Take a moment to look at the NMSI website. We hope that, after Monday night, council is going take this pattern of development and run with it.
