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City's Business Leaders Launch Downtown Association
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – Organizers of a new group formed to promote the interest of the city’s resurgent central business district say their aim isn’t to point fingers but to work with city government to boost downtown.
The misconception exists that the city is responsible for everything, said Richard Hahn, president of Keynote Media Group and a member of the steering committee for the newly formed Downtown Business Alliance of Youngstown, or DBAY. “”It’s our job to do our part to help city government help us,” he remarked.
Organized as a committee of Youngstown CityScape, DBAY officially launched Thursday at a news conference at V2 Wine Bar and Trattoria, which opened in the restored Federal Building in October 2011. The restaurant is among the new businesses that represent the “changing nature” of the downtown area, Hahn said.
“We’ve been at this job for 16 years. We’ve cared about how our city looks, what businesses we attract, for all of these years,” said Sharon Letson, Youngstown CityScape executive director and another steering committee member. “And this next venture, this downtown business association, is important, we believe, to all of us.”
According to Hahn, the primary goals of the Downtown Business Alliance is to act as a conduit with City Hall and to market the downtown. Past marketing efforts have been short lived, he noted. “What we ought to do is be able to put something together that is able to be long term,” and to market the downtown not just locally but regionally and nationally as well, he remarked.
The association's other objectives include the retention and attraction of businesses in downtown, improving quality of life for downtown residents, workers and visitors, and providing a forum for downtown stakeholders to identify public issues of concern.
“Downtown is no longer what it was 20 years ago or even three years ago” due to the investments of developers such as Federal Building owner Dominic Gatta III and Dominic Marchionda, who acquired and redeveloped the Erie Terminal Building for apartments, Jacob Harver of the Lemon Grove and Phil Kidd of Youngstown Nation, Hahn said. “These are people who have put a lot of money and effort [into downtown] and put their professional lives on the line,” he said.
People are coming from around the world to the Youngstown Business Incubator, the new National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Center and Turning Technologies, he added. “We want to put on the best possible face that we can for these people,” he said.
A forum on downtown’s future conducted last year at the Oh Wow! The Roger & Gloria Jones Children’s Center for Science & Technology revealed that downtown stakeholders were optimistic about the downtown but more needed to be done to encourage that. According to Hahn, 100% of the respondents at the meeting said downtown is headed in the right direction, 87% were optimistic about its future and 81% said the business climate was getting better. Among the same group, 90% said not enough was being done to promote downtown, and 77% rated city government’s response to concerns as fair or poor.
DBAY is “really not about pointing fingers. It’s really about coming up with solutions together” to address even issues like garbage, Letson said. “We’ve gone from having to empty garbage cans once a week to on the weekends they are overflowing,” she pointed out.
Membership rates for the organization are structured to be “very attractive so anybody can join,” Hahn said. Annual membership tiers range from $50 at the stakeholder level to $100 at the visionary level.
Hahn said the people involved with forming the group to date have “major stakes” in the downtown community. Steering committee members include Gatta, Richard Mills, president of Ohio One Corp., which owns several buildings downtown, Ronald Cornell Faniro, president of Faniro Architects, Lemon Grove owner Jacob Harver and Oh Wow!’s executive director, Suzanne Barbati.
“I’d like to see a more vibrant city. I’d like to see economic development occur here because of our work and because we’re improving the city environment. There’s now a collaborative that’ll be established with the city,” Faniro said. “As opposed to two sides of the fence there’ll be no fence. Everybody’s in it together.”
“It’s clear we’re all in this together. We all need one another to continue to move forward in the correct way,” Letson said.
A changed media narrative for downtown is one of the factors that will help this effort to succeed where past downtown effort haven’t, Mills said. “Before I think the citizens of Youngstown were our own worst enemy. Everybody was negative,” he said. “Now that the media has put a positive spin on the new developments downtown, it seems to be changing the public perception of downtown.”
DBAY has the potential of being “a really good organization” that starts with a core of people who “really care” about the city and downtown, Gatta observed.
“I hope it helps continue the growth that we’ve experienced so far. In a short amount of time, really since the end of 2009, just our block alone has gotten a significant facelift,” he said. Such a group would have been good to go to for advice a few years ago when he started work on the Federal Building, he added.
Copyright 2013 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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