Helping Small Business Grow in Elizabethton through Co.Starters

Small businesses are the backbone of any community and our country. This statement, I’m sure, comes with little surprise to most people. As a matter of fact, over half of the business in Carter County have less than 5 employees and just over 75 percent have less than 10 employees. We also estimate that just under 1 of every 4 workers employed in Carter County work for a small business with less than 10 employees. Imagine the impact if ¼ of the jobs in the county disappeared!

This is the reason small business and entrepreneurship development is such an important objective for our Department. Recently, we have partnered with the Northeast Tennessee Regional Economic Partnership (NeTREP) to bring a new offering for small businesses and entrepreneurs to Elizabethton – Co.Starters.

Co.Starters is a 9-week class targeted to help entrepreneurs take their business ideas and turn them into reality. This is a great opportunity for those who have been thinking about starting a business to get in and learn more about the process and how to be successful. Having been through a portion of this class before, it is also very beneficial for existing small business owners who are looking to improve their business or add in another product to their business.

The course will cover identifying your customer, dealing with competition, developing your messaging/marketing, determining your revenue stream, and identifying your startup needs and costs. The course can be intensive with weekly assignments and a lot of material that will be covered in the 9-weeks. You will also hear from existing successful small businesses and get advisement from business professionals regarding starting your small business. The best part is, once you’ve completed the course, you have the formula and materials to go on and continue to develop and improve your business or start another business over-and-over again.

The classes will be 3-hours long every Tuesday evening for 9-weeks. The classes will start February 12^th, but the registration deadline is Wednesday, February 6^th. The cost for the course is $90 (which is $10 per class) and is open to anyone who lives in or is wanting to start a business in Elizabethton, Carter County, Johnson County, Unicoi County, and Washington County. The course is limited to 12 participants on a first-come-first-serve basis. To learn more or register, visit www.Elizabethton.org/CoStarters.

The development of small business is the future for our community. As those small businesses grow, their success will become the success of our community. And remember to do your part, support our local, small businesses. Let’s talk about it!

Clearing the Air on Pub Bars

As I’m sure everyone in Elizabethton by this point knows, the City Council voted last week to approve pub bars as a new use in the city. There has been a lot of misinformation and miscommunication about what the regulations say and require of pub bars, so I want to take some time today to clarify these points.

The pub bar regulations that were passed last week were specifically tailored to regulate the type of establishment that City Council has desired to allow, while at the same time attempting to discourage the types of establishments people commonly think of when they hear “pub” or “bar.” First, pub bars (along with breweries and microbreweries) are required to provide food. They can be in the form of pre-prepared snacks or platters for purchase or freely available, but they must provide some food. The difference between this and a restaurant is that the primary purpose of the establishment is not to provide food.

There has also been some discussion regarding breweries and microbreweries confusing these issues. Breweries and microbreweries have been legal in the city for almost a year now and the regulations allow for them to have a tap room on-site. When crafting these regulations, we simply looked for similar uses of pub bars (in this case brewery and microbrewery tap rooms) and set a similar standard for them.

Next, in our definition of a pub bar, we require that 80 percent of the alcoholic beverages served must be from a microbrewery (a brewery that produces less than 15,000 barrels annually). This does two things. The first, is it encourages pub bar owners to purchase from small businesses in our region (all the microbreweries in our region produce under 15,000 barrels) where they can easily self-distribute to a local pub bar and, secondly, because craft beer is much more costly than high production domestic beer, it raises the sale price of the beer making the economics of drinking to the point of inebriation unappealing. This same logic has been used at local festivals that have started serving beer with no issues.

Fourthly is the issue of beer on sidewalks. While this was included in the regulations passed last week, there are strict requirements to serve on the sidewalks and in no case would someone walking down the street with a beer in-hand be allowed. The regulations allow for beer service so long as the business owner obtains a sidewalk encroachment permit and provides a barrier between where sidewalk pedestrians are and where beer service is allowed. Patrons of the pub bar will not be allowed to simply sit along the curb, walk down the street, or crowd the sidewalk with the beer in-hand.

Lastly, the City Council will be passing next month an ordinance amendment that will require pub bars to not provide service after 11:00pm. Currently, other establishments serving alcohol can serve later than 11:00pm. This will help ensure that pub bars do not become establishments open all hours of the night or become endless drinking establishments. We encourage our downtown businesses to stay open after 5:00pm, but staying open after 11:30pm or midnight is probably not something we want in our downtown. This will help ensure these businesses stay open late enough to provide a venue for those who desire it, but not stay all night.

City Council and city staff have put a lot of research, review, and have had many discussions with officials from Johnson City, Erwin, and even a few small towns in southwest Virginia regarding the impacts of tap rooms, breweries, and pub bars on their communities. There may be some who are upset and some who are happy, but in either case please do not think that City Council or city staff took the crafting and passage of these regulations lightly. We have worked together to craft regulations that we believe will achieve responsible establishments for our citizens who wish to partake of these types of beverages. Let’s talk about it!

Bringing Main Street to Downtown Elizabethton

You may have heard more recently about the national Main Street Program. This is a program founded by the National Trust for Historic Preservation as a way to help historic downtowns and commercial neighborhoods revitalize. The program has been used across the county with much greater success than most other revitalization program. As a matter of fact, there are over 1,600 current Main Street communities nation-wide, 34 Main Street cities in Tennessee, and 58 Downtown cities (Main Street’s program for smaller towns) in Tennessee.
 The Main Street program helps communities organize and develop a community vision for their downtown. This is essential to ensure that we make sure we’re moving our downtown in a consistent direction forward. The program also looks at market capacity. What types of businesses do we need that would do well in the Elizabethton market. That information is then used to help develop a realistic vision for the future of the downtown and to help recruit new businesses to downtown.
 The program then utilizes the community vision and market information to help transform a downtown. During the transformation phase (which is never-ending), the program utilizes four areas of focus to ensure that community goals and the vision are being accomplished – economic vitality, design, promotion, and organization. Commonly, each of these four points have their own sub-committee of the larger Main Street board which oversees the program. Each of these sub-committees would contribute to the vision by focusing on their point. As time moves on and each of these points gain a clearer focus, and downtown development will begin to improve.
 A working committee of people with a range of ages made up of city councilmen, downtown businesses, downtown property owners, and chamber of commerce representatives, have been working and considering options for downtown revitalization and enhancing our downtown to take it to “the next level.” The committee has heard from some national and state speakers on the topic, visited other communities to see what they’re doing, and studied options that the State of Tennessee has to offer.
 At this point, they are considering recommending that Elizabethton become a Main Street community but are still looking for input. They’ll be holding a public meeting Wednesday, November 7^th at 5:30pm and another on Thursday, November 8^th at 8:00am at the Coffee Company to present this idea and gather input from the community to see if there is enough support locally.
 Elizabethton becoming a Main Street community brings a lot of positives for our downtown, but there are also some challenges. The Main Street program requires a full-time staff person, funding, volunteers, and, most importantly, downtown business and community support! This is not a program that the city can just create, and the success will happen. The most successful programs are usually independent of city government with their own funding sources and volunteers. In short, the most successful programs involve you. The program will not be successful if citizens who want to see success in downtown do not participate, attend meetings, and volunteer for events. We all have busy lives, but volunteering on the board or sub-committee for a few hours a month or giving your time to a downtown summer event is the only way success will happen. Are you in? Let’s talk about it!

It's Time to Bring Main Street back to Elizabethton

You may have read a month ago about a meeting with the National Main Street and Tennessee Main Street Directors here in Elizabethton. This was the first meeting of a group of folks comprised of downtown businesses and significant stakeholders. We currently have this small group looking at the benefits, ramifications, and costs associated with bringing Elizabethton back into the Main Street program (we were once members back in the 90s) to help make downtown more cohesive and attractive for new business.

For those who are unfamiliar with the program, the Main Street program is a nation-wide program that helps communities revitalize their downtowns and other commercial districts using a four-point approach -- economic vitality, design, promotion, and organization. A committee is assigned to each of these four "pillars" as they are called. The committee is charged with working within the district to promote and develop their specific pillar. Additionally, a Main Street Director (paid position) must also be appointed to oversee the organization and implement the four pillars within the downtown district. The best way to describe this program is to use the idea of a mall. A mall is essentially a commercial "district" comprising of many separate and privately-owned businesses. Just like a mall has a company that manages the design or look, economic balance, and promotion and public perception of the mall, so too is the role of the Main Street Director and the Main Street board.

The Main Street program is a proven model that has been used across the country by hundreds of city and communities. The best part is the same model is proven for both small cities such as Jonesborough and larger cities like Murfreesboro or Kingsport. Because of the hundreds of cities that utilize the program nation-wide, joining the Main Street program gives us access to all those communities to discover what works and what doesn't work without having to try and find out ourselves. A small benefit of becoming a Main Street community is being able to obtain additional grants for downtown programs.

For Elizabethton, becoming a Main Street community provides an outlet for interested citizens to get involved in the success of downtown, a point person for downtown businesses wanting to develop a new festival or promotional event, and a group solely dedicated to seeing downtown grow and succeed. Just as successful malls have great management companies, the same applies to great downtowns. As our group moves forward to consider bringing this program to Elizabethton, we ask for your support and your involvement. After all, it's your downtown. Let's talk about it!

Steps to Creating a Revitalized Downtown

Downtown redevelopment/revitalization has been a hot topic in Elizabethton since I’ve been doing planning in Elizabethton – 9 years. I have talked extensively about the different aspects or steps we need to take, but not a lot about the big picture plan. How do we even get to the point of talking about creating housing for downtown, or recruiting new businesses when we don’t even have buildings ready to be renovated? Let’s look at that today.

One of the first steps we need to take is to develop a unified vision for downtown. Ideally this would be in the form of a plan, but simply writing some goals or characteristics down about the image we all have in our heads is enough to get started. As a part of this step, we must ensure that the City Council, Planning Commission, Business Owners, Property Owners, and our citizens all (or mostly) agree on what that image looks like so that we can move forward.

After we’ve developed the “picture” for downtown, we need to organize. Structure and groups of the different stakeholders need to be created or encouraged. There is a lot of work that will need to be done in the aesthetics, economy, and property development in downtown and it’s something that no one interest group can do solo.

Somewhat simultaneous with the previous action, all parties must work to save and improve the quality of our downtown buildings. It is hard to recruit a new business or start-up business to purchase or lease a building that has a leaky roof, old carpets, outdated electrical, etc. After all, downtown building owners are realistically competing against clean, newer, plain-vanilla-shell spaces on the west side of the city. This can be very expensive and will likely require incentives and assistance for building owners, but the payoff could be great.

The next two steps – pedestrian friendliness and placemaking – are somewhat the same. There is a saying used in the urban planning world that if you want a street to be friendly for pedestrians, design it so a 7-year-old or 70-year-old can comfortably walk across by themselves. Sure, it is not exactly a scientific formula, but we need to evaluate our roads in downtown against this concept. Would you allow your 7-year-old to cross the 3 lanes of Elk Avenue traffic by themselves in downtown? Placemaking similarly encourages pedestrians and people to congregate and often improve the aesthetics and usability of an area.

Lastly, successfully completing the previous steps will result in higher demand for businesses and ultimately housing. We need to ensure quality housing options are available in and immediately around the downtown area. This could include condos, townhouses, single-family homes, or apartments, but a good mix is optimal. This will help generate additional pedestrian activity in downtown and additional revenues for the businesses there.

The most important thing we need to keep in mind during all of this, is that revitalization won’t happen overnight, but over multiple years or even a decade. Asheville has been working on their downtown since the 70s, Jonesborough since the 80s, Greenville, SC since the 70s, Johnson City since the 90s. Small and sustainable incremental change, I believe, will prove to be best for downtown and best for the city overall. The important part is that we start. Let’s talk about it!

2018 Planning Preview

As we start a new year, it reminds to look forward and set goals for the next 12 months. There are a variety of projects the Planning Commission and our Department have been working on towards the end of last year that will culminate in 2018.

The first project that will probably see completion is the Major Thoroughfare Plan. The Planning Commission started the project towards the middle of last year and gathered a lot of public input on the proposals. Along with the adoption of this plan will come the implementation portion which calls for new roadway designs, Milligan Highway improvements, and the new Southside Road improvement between Mary Patton Highway and US 19E.

The other project that you may begin to hear about is the Land Use Plan. The Planning Commission has been calling for a new Land Use Plan for the city for the past 4 years and we are now reaching the point where we can dedicate the time to undertaking such a project. The Land Use Plan will provide guidance to the Commission, city staff, and to other departments in the city about what types of land-uses or development should be located where in the city and the planning region in the county. This allows utilities to prepare the appropriate infrastructure in different areas and guides the Commission when a rezoning or development request comes before them. The Plan will also provide guidance for changes to the City’s development regulations such as parking requirements, aesthetic requirements, and setback and building height requirements.

Additionally, our department has been working on three different economic development initiatives that we anticipate implementing this year. The first and certainly most talked about is the Tax Increment Financing Redevelopment Plan for West Elk Avenue. In partnership with the County, we anticipate this initiative will be fully implemented in late winter or early spring opening up opportunities for redevelopment in the area behind Walmart and around the Bemberg Building.

We have also been working on the implementation of a new downtown loan program in order to help small businesses and building owners make improvements to their buildings with low interest loans. We hope that this will encourage new businesses to move or start up in downtown and improve the quality of the buildings that are currently in downtown.

Similarly, we are also working on two new entrepreneurship programs that we also hope to implement one early in 2018 and the other in summer of 2018. Both of these programs are geared to help local small businesses get started, be successful long-term, and help provide guidance and assistance in obtaining capital needed. These programs could also drive new small businesses into downtown and elsewhere around the city.

2018 is already shaping up to be a busy year, but many of the initiatives and activities that we will be undertaking are and have been needed in our community. We are excited and looking forward to measuring where we stand as a department and a city at the end of 2018. And, most importantly, we believe these activities will help enhance Elizabethton and make it more like a community you want to live in. Let’s talk about it!

Shopping Local for the Holiday benefits our Community

Well, it’s that time of year, yet again. All the hustle and bustle to attend various open houses, get to the next shopping destination, and making sure you’re home in time to hide the gifts from your spouse or kids. It seems like it comes faster and faster with each year! As you do your shopping this year, I want to encourage you to do it with intention – intention to support your community by shopping locally.

Shopping locally helps support our school systems. Many people may not be aware of this, but every time you make a purchase in Elizabethton, a portion of the sales tax goes directly into an account that is dedicated for city schools capital improvements. Many of the recent improvements at East Side and West Side Elementary schools were paid for out of funds from these sales taxes. Additionally, whenever the city schools borrow money against this sales tax revenue, a portion also goes to the county school system. So, when you make a purchase big or small in Elizabethton, you are helping to support and create a better education system in Elizabethton and Carter County.

Shopping locally and especially small helps support Elizabethton and Carter County’s local economy. When you shop at a small business in Elizabethton a larger percentage of the money you spend stays in our community and, kind of like at a bank, grows and generates additional income for others in our community. When you spend 100 dollars, 48 dollars stay in Elizabethton if it was spent at a small business, 14 dollars stay in Elizabethton if it was spent at a local business, 1 dollar stays in Elizabethton if it was purchased online and shipped to Elizabethton, and 0 dollars stay in Elizabethton if you make the purchase in Johnson City, Bristol, Kingsport, or Knoxville. Shopping with small, local businesses encourages new small businesses to open and small businesses are more likely to support community events and organizations like a little league team and the Covered Bridge Festival.

Shopping local helps support our city and our county. When you shop local, the city receives a portion of that sale in the form of sales tax which is used to pay for better roads, police and fire services, and funds our schools. But the other side of this is that it encourages new businesses to locate in Elizabethton. If our Peebles and Burkes had some of the highest sales in East Tennessee, this would pique the interest of other clothing retailers and stores like Ross or Marshalls may be interested in coming to Elizabethton to take some profit from the stores we currently have. This means more sales tax for Elizabethton, more variety of stores for our citizens, and more property taxes coming to Elizabethton and Carter County meaning our residence aren’t required to shoulder as much of the tax burden.

We estimate that Elizabethton and Carter County loose over 120 million dollars of retail sales per year; that’s 11 million dollars in sales tax to Elizabethton and Carter County. Now, I’m not naive enough to believe that we will completely capture ALL the retail sales for our citizens, but even a small fraction of that 11 million dollars in sales tax revenue could mean the difference between a property tax increase or not. This holiday season shop small local businesses first, chain local businesses second, and other businesses in Johnson City or Bristol third. Let’s talk about it!

Downtown Development Pattern Produces Best ROI for Taxes - Part 2

Last week we talked about the return on investment cities see from downtown style development patterns verses modern development patterns. This week, I want to look at why this is the case and what are the implications of changing our regulations to encourage this development pattern.

So why is it that a downtown development style has a higher tax assessment per acre value that other commercial developments. One big issue is parking. Downtown style development has shared parking areas either on-street or in public owned off-street lots. By itself, the Walmart building may have a somewhat comparable assessment value to a single-story building in downtown, but when we spread that value out over its entire parking lot (which adds little or no value to the property) it substantially decreases Walmart’s per acre assessment value.

Another reason is density. If we split each of Walmart’s departments up into a store in downtown, combined, all the stores would not equal the same acreage that Walmart currently occupies. That’s because some may utilize a second floor for shopping, storage, or offices and there would not be as much space made available for large areas of displays (think of the bakery section at Walmart and how much space it takes up verses a downtown bakery you’ve been in before). This allows more stores and shops to locate in an acre of downtown style development than that of our modern style of development.

One last reason is mixed land uses. In most North American cities and towns, we separate the land uses – residential over here, shopping over there, and offices somewhere in between. But in downtown style developments we take advantage of the height to put multiple uses in one building, such as a store on the first floor, a law office on the second floor, and condos or apartments on the third and fourth floor make the land the building sits on worth more and therefore more money for the building owner and a higher tax assessment for the city.

So what benefits could our community see if we focused more on this older style of development. First would be lower taxes. If we can increase the tax assessment on a piece of property already in the city limits without having to expand the police or fire service, build new roads, add a new garbage route, etc, then that means the expenses are split more ways meaning no tax increases or even lower taxes.

Another is more jobs. We all know that small businesses are collectively the largest employer in the nation and in almost any local economy. More mixed-use, downtown style development would provide the opportunity for new innovative businesses to start and be successful. It could also mean newer small businesses that might locate in the first floor of buildings which will result in more jobs being created. This is a process that won’t happen over night, but over a 10 or 20-year period we will see more small businesses and jobs being created. The best part is we can look to communities who have implemented these types of development policies to see the benefits.

Traditional, downtown pattern of development is a more sustainable type of development that can help put Elizabethton on a path to fiscal success. Now, no-one is suggesting that everyone live downtown on the third floor, but there are people interested in this type of living and from study after study, case after case, we only have benefits to reap. Is it time for us to reevaluate and alter our regulations? Let’s talk about it!