Looking Ahead to Our Community’s Vision for 2015

This is it, the last day of 2014. Now will begin the many articles and countdowns of the most popular songs, best places to travel, top movies, and a variety of other “best of” lists from 2014. I’ll focus on the city’s 2014 “top” list next week, but this week I want to look forward to 2015.

As we look ahead, many of us anticipate and imagine what will happen in 2015. Some set personal or business goals to achieve and others make resolutions in order to change something about themselves to be different a year from now.

The process many of us go through is visioning. We step back, evaluated where we are currently, determine the trend we’re moving in, and compare that with where we want to be. The hard part is figuring out how to get our business, finances, or ourselves to where we want them to be in a year’s time.

Just like with your personal fitness or finances, towns and cities must also go through this same process to be successful and achieve their goals.

Creating a vision on a city level is much more complex than a personal New Year’s resolution. It involves our appointed officials, our elected officials, and, most importantly, you, our citizens! Our goal is to create a community that you desire to live in.

A community vision brings everyone together and makes sure everyone is moving in the same direction, all striving to reach the same goals and vision. A community vision opens the doors to new ideas of what our community could be and can bring innovative solutions to our city's current problems. A community vision can create new, unknown partnerships between groups, both public and private in order to reach the shared vision. A community visions lays out a specific strategy with goals that can easily be followed and tracked.

These benefits help to create a successful community that you want to live in. Just like your personal goals, there will be hard times, difficult times, and times that you want to just give up, but pushing through and sticking with the vision will get us to the city everyone desires to have.

Creating your vision for the future of Elizabethton isn’t hard. Take a moment right now, imagine yourself holding the Elizabethton Star on December, 31st 2015. Looking at the front page, what do you believe three of those headlines should say? Jot those three headlines down and mail, email, or tell your elected and appointed officials in the city and the county what you think those three headlines should be! Our goal is to make those headlines realities. Let’s talk about it!

Can a High-Density Residential District Survive in Elizabethton

Everyday we hear more and more about how American’s are moving to cities and abandoning rural areas at a record pace; choosing the cities for their variety of amenities, restaurants, shopping opportunities, and bike and walk friendly neighborhoods.

Younger generations desiring to live in low maintenance housing close to a variety of urban amenities and nightlife. We are now hearing about the desire of baby-boomers to live in the similar areas with walkable access to shopping and restaurants as they age. As a professional urban planner, I hear about this at every conference and training session I go to. The question I always have is how can Elizabethton fit into these trends?

I see Elizabethton as a tweenage city – we’re not yet a “big” city, but we’re certainly not a small, rural town anymore. We’re big enough to offer an urban environment and benefits, but too small to provide “big” city life and city amenities. This makes fitting Elizabethton nicely into certain urban policies difficult at times.

Going back to my question, CAN Elizabethton fit into this trend of high-density housing with condominiums and walk-up town houses and make it sustainable?

Right now, the Regional Planning Commission has set a goal for this coming year to incentivize a high-density residential district within a three-minute walk time from downtown Elizabethton. Their ultimate goal is twofold – one, to increase the number of people within easy walking distance of downtown and, two, to encourage young families and young professional to live in Elizabethton.

Locating a large number of people near downtown will help improve the business environment in our downtown. If someone where a short walking distance from downtown, they would be more likely to patronize the retail businesses there or eat at the local restaurants there. Retail business thrives on proximity to population centers.

Encouraging the construction of low maintenance walk-up town houses or small condominium buildings is a trend that we are seeing national-wide with the millennial generation. People from this generation want to be close to restaurants, shopping districts, and places of employment. Creating such a district in Elizabethton could be a way to attract this generation to Elizabethton. They may be young families or young, single professionals, but either way this is a way to move them to Elizabethton and provide them with opportunities to start a business or firm.

So what are your thoughts on this? Would this type of housing arrangement be something you’re interested in? Let’s talk about it!

Start Your Own Business Without Starting From Scratch

No, this isn’t a get rich quick scheme, but it is a way to become your own boss using an already successful management and business operating system. It’s called franchising! The first thing many of you may think of when you hear this word is McDonalds or Subway. Yes, these are franchises, but there are many, many more franchises that you’ve never heard of or may not have even known.

As many of you may know from some of my past articles, supporting our local businesses is a major driver for local job creation and increasing sales tax revenue for your local schools and governments. While small local businesses have a slightly higher economic impact, franchises are local businesses too. Job creation can be just as strong and sales tax generation is the same as other local businesses.

There are many benefits to starting a franchised business locally including bulk purchasing power, having a pre-determined business and marketing plan, a successfully proven system of operation, national or regional brand awareness, and support from a corporate entity; the major downsides being additional licensing fees and less flexibility in operations.

Some can be home-based or brick-and-mortar in a commercial district and startup costs for franchises can vary greatly $50,000 to $250,000 to $500,000 to $1 million depending on the type of franchise you are interested in. Franchises also cover a wide variety of industries including vending machines, handyman services, health and fitness services, ice cream restaurants, home-healthcare services, restaurants, consulting services…well, you get the idea.

According to the Small Business Administration, franchises can be great for those of you who have a skill and have been downsized, have always wanted to start your own business, or those of you who simply want to provide a source of income for your children. To learn more about franchising, visit the Small Business Administration’s website (www.sba.gov) and type in ‘Franchise’ in the search box.

As we look to create a friendly business environment in Elizabethton, business start-up through franchising should most certainly be part of our growth. Because of their brand recognition, people have grown to trust franchise’s names and can sometime help other local business grow. So going into the new year, think about the opportunities to support local business or start your own local business and help make Elizabethton and Carter County a great place to do local business. Let’s talk about it!

Is it time for a Community Asset Inventory?

Although, I’m not originally from Elizabethton, I have come to admire this community a great deal. I remember moving here as a young college student and thinking, there is just so much to do! Being from Ohio’s rural breadbasket there was little else to do other than go to a corn maze or canoe along our dirty, flat rivers.

But here in Elizabethton, we have great community and state parks to visit, different hiking opportunities every weekend, clear, pristine rivers for rafting or fishing, intriguing historic sites that actually have significance in our nation’s history, unique small mountain towns just waiting to put their character on display, gorgeous mountain vistas, beautiful lakes nestled between mountain ridges…well, I could go on and on, but you get the idea. These are the things my family love to see and experience when they come for a visit and I always enjoy the look on their face when they see it for the first time.

In business, the term ‘asset’ has a meaning that is recognizable to anyone that has taken a basic accounting class. In simple terms, an asset is anything that can be controlled to produce value or has a positive economic value of the entity. Each community has its own set of assets that are utilized to make the community better. Do we know what Elizabethton’s are?

There are so many assets in our community that I think many of us (including myself from time-to-time) forget about these opportunities that many travel to come see. We talk a lot, these days, about the benefits tourism can have on our community. It touches every aspect of our community’s decisions. Tourism is nothing more than having a specific set of resources and turning those resources into assets – something that can be controlled to produce value to our community.

It’s time for our community to inventory our community’s resources and create a unified plan to turn those resources into community assets. Tourism is just one set of resources that can be turned into an asset; there are many others ranging from our workforce’s specific skill set, to a niche business type specifically found in Elizabethton. What other resources should we be looking to turn into a community asset? Let’s talk about it!

Next Steps for Improving the Business Environment in Downtown

Downtown serves as a link to the rest of the community. It serves as our link to our past, our future, our retail desires, our culture, and our identity. Thanks to our City Council, the City has been working hard to invest money in downtown by improving crosswalks at intersections, implementing traffic calming techniques, repairing the Elk Avenue canopies, and building a public entertainment venue in Downtown.

All of these investments show the dedication that your local government has in ensuring that our identity, our past, and our culture is carried into the future. The next step is much larger and is required in order for downtown to succeed – the property owners and businesses.

When I first started in my job, I visited many different successful downtowns and neighborhoods and asked about their revitalization efforts. From Chattanooga, to Cincinnati, from Franklin, Tennessee, to Greenville, South Carolina, I noticed the story always began the same – with the downtown businesses or downtown property owners. They were the ones who took control of their downtowns and set the vision for what they wanted it to be by the time their kids graduated High School.

While I certainly understand the lack of capital that many of our property owners have, there are some limited resources such as the Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credit, which had been used in numerous other cities for building rehabilitations. Another tool that commonly implemented was a Central Business Improvement District.

A Central Business Improvement District is a type of overlay district created in order to make direct improvements within that district. A special assessment would be made annually with the money generated being invested directly back into the district. A board made up of property owners within that district would determine how and when the money would be reinvested into the district. As one downtown property owner put it, it’s like a homeowners association for downtown.

This is a great tool that we believe could be a catalyst to make our downtown standout in the Tri-Cities area. The key is for each downtown property owner to agree and do their part to make the small, annual investment in order to create a better environment to do business downtown. We are waiting and willing to explore these opportunities with you, but downtown property owners must be the ones to initiate the process. Let’s talk about it!