Night Time Activity is Crucial to Active, Vibrant Downtown

I often talk about downtown Elizabethton in my column, but the reasoning is that there is so much potential to see it grow and prosper even more than it does now. Nightlife is one area where this is very true. Right now, many businesses close up shop around 5:00 or 6:00pm. While we certainly encourage our retail businesses to stay open until 6:00, restaurants and entertainment venues could benefit our downtown by staying open even later.

Having attractive businesses and establishments open at night helps create a social culture within our community. Humans are social creatures and we are drawn to social locations. Adding a nightlife atmosphere to our downtown will be attractive to others in and outside of our community. Now, when I say nightlife, what I am not suggesting is turning downtown into a huge block party every evening, but rather having entertainment and food places open and available after 6:00pm for people to get together, meet-up, or make new friends. Think more of the family-friendly nightlife of Kingsport or Bristol rather than the college night-life of Johnson City. You can enjoy a nice meal, watch a local band, and maybe get a cup of coffee or tea at the end of the evening all within close walking distance. Oh, and don’t forget to drop a dollar in the street performer’s violin case!

These types of nightlife activities also cultivate and encourage downtown placemaking. I’ve talked about placemaking before, but this is a multi-pronged approach to creating a public environment or space that promotes citizen’s happiness and well-being. There may be street vendors, street performers, or restaurants serving food to customers on the sidewalk, but all of these contribute to an energetic, vibrant, attractive space to simply visit and be a part of. Having options for citizens to stay local during a weekend evening out, or if you’re just looking for a change one weekday evening, helps our community, local businesses, local economy, and helps create a sense of place unique to our small city.  Having a downtown nightlife cultivates the placemaking concept in our downtown atmosphere.

Similar to placemaking, nightlife helps identify our downtown at a third place. A third place is somewhere you choose to be and desire to go. Unlike the first two places – home and work – a third place is somewhere unique to you, somewhere of your choosing that you desire to be a part of. As downtown nightlife grows, it starts to become that “place” people go. It becomes your “hang-out” location for you, your spouse, or your friends. Downtown Bristol has, in my opinion, excellently captured and identified itself as a third place.

The more activities we have downtown after 6:00pm, the more we will see our downtown revitalize. As energy builds, others (including developers) will want to be a part of the vibrancy and excitement. This all starts, however, with changes in city policies, businesses willing to make the change, and property owners willing to make the investment. One alone cannot have the impact needed, but working together we can make downtown what we desire. Let’s talk about it!

Getting Online is no Long Optional for Small Business

Each year we hear and see more and more people going online to purchase everyday products and holiday or specialty gifts. Online shopping has become so prevalent and important to businesses, that Cyber Monday is quickly closing in on Black Friday for holiday shopping. In fact, the number of online consumer sales grow by almost 3.5% to 4% every year. As customers’ demands and desires change, so must our small businesses. Having an online presence is no longer an option for a small business that plans to be around in 10-20 years – it is a requirement.

I have talked in the past about making sure your small businesses is listed on Google Maps and has a Facebook page. While these two things are important to help your small business effectively and successfully market itself, these have quickly become the standard. An online presence is becoming a must rather than a plus.

Fortunately, the demand for easy, user-friendly website design has created many new services that make creating a website for your small business as easy as designing a flyer in Microsoft Word. Some award winning options include Webs.com, Weebly.com, and Wix.com – don’t ask me why they all begin with “W”! All of these sites allow a small business to create a great looking website in a matter of a few hours with no previous programming or website design experience necessary. If you can use Microsoft Word, you can create a website for your small business. You can even sell your product on your website with all three of these services! The best part is you can create your website and sell the products online for less than $170 per year making these options hard to pass up.

Having an online presence also expands your customer base. No longer can you only sell to customers who live within driving distance of your business. You can now sell anywhere in the world!

The Tennessee Small Business Development Centers have a location at ETSU. They offer training and can help you in marketing your website as well as other online and web elements such as Google’s Ad Words, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. They can also help you decide what content to put on your website in order to make the biggest impact. They have helped many small businesses in Elizabethton such as Greg’s Pizza and all of this training and advice is absolutely free!

If your small business isn’t listed on Google Maps, you don’t have a Facebook page or a website, it’s time to get started! You could get your small business online in all three formats with no more of a time commitment than a Saturday afternoon. Contact me for help or assistance or feel free to contact the SBDC at ETSU directly. We want to see small businesses grow and succeed in our City and our County. Let’s talk about it!

Fighting Drug Addiction in Elizabethton

Elizabethton and Carter County has a problem – a drug problem. Now, I’m not telling you anything new, but the reality is that it affects our whole community not just the families of those addicted. But first off, let’s talk about drug addiction. According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), drug addiction is a brain disease (emphasis on disease). Drug addiction actually changes the brain’s “structure and how it works.” Similar to heart disease, you can never truly be “cured” of drug addiction, but it can be treated to help prevent a relapse from occurring, just like treatment can help prevent another heart attack from occurring for those with heart disease.

The first and probably easiest step to healing our community’s drug problem is to prevent it from happening in the first place. This has to start at a young age. As the NIH states, “if we can prevent young people from experimenting with drugs, we can prevent drug addiction.” In a National Survey on Drug Use and Health from 2011 and 2012, significant increases for first-time drug users started at age 12 and didn’t significantly drop until age 25. More importantly, over 8% of first-time drug use fell between the ages of 14 to 20. This means a drug addicted adult has likely started using before they graduated high school making college or any other post-high school training an uphill battle for them. This sets up a future workforce will little or no skills for us as a community to market and recruit new businesses to provide new job opportunities.

According to the NIH, “risk of drug abuse increases greatly during times of transition.” For an adult this could be a recent divorce, being laid off or fired from a job, or the death of a parent or loved one. If this is a family, friend, or even a neighbor, step-up and offer to help! Support them during this time of transition and keep a keen eye out for signs of drug use.

Teen and adult resources are available here in our local community via the Carter County Drug Prevention Coalition (CCDPC) (www.CarterCountyDrugPrevention.org). In addition, the Elizabethton Police Department provides officers and support to the Drug Enforcement Administration Taskforce and assigns an officer working with the Sheriff’s Department locally to investigate and break-up drug supply circles. We must understand that the solution to our drug problem is a multi-pronged approach. The Police alone, CCDPC alone, city government alone, and major employers alone cannot solve the problem. It requires all of us as family members, friends, neighbors, or church family to solve this problem.

Drug addiction and abuse in Elizabethton affects us all. When it comes to creating more jobs, recruiting new businesses, and attracting tourists in and to our community our reputation precedes us. Word of mouth travels fast in business circles. Wouldn’t it be a shame to discover a business decided to located elsewhere because one business told them, “Don’t go there! It will take you forever to hire. People can’t even past drug tests.” To my knowledge, this hasn’t happened yet but I do know our industries and businesses are aware of this problem and it could easily lead to this type of comment. What steps can you personally take in our community, at your church, or in your neighborhood to help prevent and treat drug addiction? Let’s talk about it!

The Way Forward for Downtown Revitalization

Downtown revitalization has been a popular topic since I first started working for the city back in 2006. Since 2006, downtowns have become even more popular destinations as we are now seeing people living in them. But here in Elizabethton we have some large hurdles to jump before we will likely see the full revitalization of our downtown.

Unlike many other smaller cities, Elizabethton, luckily, has never really seen drastic inactivity in our downtown. Sure, businesses come and businesses go, but all-in-all our downtown isn’t starting from a bad place. We also see some activity still occurring. The Downtown Business Association had committed to improving the two walkways in our downtown. Additionally, the city and the Elizabethton Community Foundation have partnered to renovate the old Bonnie Kate Theater providing variety and entertainment to our downtown. But as I mentioned earlier, we still have a way to go.

There really are a few key elements that are critical to successful downtown revitalization projects. The first is the image of downtown. Often, this is one of the most important catalysts. For our downtown this means development façade improvement programs to fix up and improve the looks of our buildings in downtown. This also means streetscape improvements with tree-lined streets and beautification projects.

We also must nurture the quality of downtown placemaking. We must make downtown a destination and a place people desire to go and visit, whether they intend to make a purchase or not. Put simply, a place you would like to go and simply “hang-out” on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon. Common placemaking elements include sidewalk cafes where you can enjoy a cup of coffee or a beer and people watch. Public art in and around downtown that you can visit and admire. These are not new things. These are techniques old cities such as New York City, London, Rome, and Washington D.C. have been using for years!

These things can be done and countless case-studies have proven this to be true in both big cities and small towns! It does, however, require investment. Investment by the city government, investment by business owners, and investment by property owners. The city can only go so far and only do so much. Downtown properties owners must be champions wanting to see these improvements and improve or sell downtown properties so others may make the investment. Downtown businesses must be willing to tolerate the growing pains of revitalization which may mean a downtown under construction or turbulence business environment as kinks are worked out. In the end it will all be worth it.

The key to downtown revitalization is that we must start with the end in mind. It will be expensive; there will be trying times, but no one else is going to do it for us. If we want it, we must commit to doing it. In the end I am confident that we will see a positive return on our investment. Let’s talk about it!