Aldermen, Board of

The Great American Downtown made the following presentation before the Board of Aldermen on Tuesday, September 28, 2010 at 7:20 p.m. in the Aldermanic Chamber. President Brian S. McCarthy presided. Members of the Board of Aldermen in attendance: Alderman-at-Large Brian S. McCarthy, President Alderman-at-Large Ben Clemons, Vice President Alderman Kathy Vitale Alderman Arthur T. Craffey, Jr. Alderman-at-Large David W. Deane Alderman-at-Large Barbara Pressly Alderman Richard LaRose Alderman Michael J. Tabacsko Alderman Mary Ann Melizz-Golja Alderman Jeffrey T. Cox Alderman Diane Sheehan Alderman-at-Large Lori Wilshire Alderman Paul M. Chasse, Jr. Alderman Richard P. Flynn Alderman-at-Large Mark S. Cookson Her Honor Mayor Donnalee Lozeau and Corporation Counsel James M. McNamee were also in attendance. PRESENTATION Sue Butler, Great American Downtown Hi everyone. I know that there are a couple of new faces here this year. So I want to start by introducing myself. I’m Sue Butler. I’m the Executive Director of the Great American Downtown. I want to start off by saying thank you for having us. I will try to make this presentation quick because I know you have a meeting starting in 15 minutes. So, on behalf of the board of director, thank you for having us here today. I’d like to have all my board members stand and be acknowledged. We have Sherrilyn Alden Bellavance, and she’s our Board president. She’s an owner of Ancient Moon downtown. Mike O’Brien. He’s with the Nashua Fire Department. Don Warner from Bellavance Beverages. He’s also our second vice prudent. Tamie Johnson from Just Lights. She’s our secretary. Judy Bennett from So. NH Medical Center. Eason Sark from PSNH, and also our treasurer. And Chris Williams, of course, from the Nashua Chamber of Commerce. Thank you all for coming and thanks for your support tonight. One thing I just wanted to start off quickly – there always seems to be a lot of questions about how Great American Downtown is funded. Speaking in just sort of rough terms, without breaking it down to little pieces. We are funded approximately 60 percents by our events every year. Twenty percent of our funding comes from the city, 10 percent from our membership and then the other 10 percent comes from other sources like grants, and interest income, things like that. Of course many of you know who we are and what we do and our focus areas of being marketing communications, business and community event production, as well as communication projects. So, what are we focusing on? Well, of course, the Holiday Tree Lights are coming out soon. Those should actually be one in the next few weeks so we can start doing things for the year. I am very excited to announce that the Riverwalk construction has started. It took over three years to get this point. There were numerous battles permitting and funding and getting quotes and asbestos removal and all sorts of crazy stuff. But, we actually started about two weeks ago in the construction. It is slated to be finished the first week in November. You will all receive formal Our mission: Our focus areas: To provide coordination, 1. Marketing & collaboration and Communications partnerships that unify the 2. Business & community entire Nashua community event production around a common vision 3. Beautification for an attractive downtown that is vibrant, viable and truly reflects the character of our city. •Holiday tree lights •Construction of the RiverWalk near the Nashua Library •Work with the PLUS Company to clean sidewalks 2x/week during the summer •Downtown website (downtownnashua. org) •Bi-weekly e- newsletter •Downtown facebook page •Greater Nashua Shopping & Dining Guide •Downtown Nashua Dining Coupons •Main Street bridge banners •Spring Feast Week & Fall Feast Week •Farmers Markets •Taste of Downtown Nashua •Winter Holiday Stroll •Nashua’s BrewFest, ArtWalk Nashua, Festival of Trees City of Nashua Departments: 1. City Clerk 2. Community Development 2. Environmental Health 3. Economic Development 4. Fire 5. Parks and Recreation 6. Police 7. Solid Waste 8. Transit 9. Traffic 10. Street Streetscape (Parking – Sidewalks – Flowers – Garbage cans – Newspaper boxes - Benches) Public Safety (Lighting, Police presence) Economic Development (Bridge Street) Marketing (Comprehensive “whole city”) Events (More assistance – possibly more signature events) Great American Downtown greatly appreciates the support of the Mayor and the Board of Aldermen. We are excited to continue working with the City on projects that will encourage people to invest in downtown Nashua! Bd. of Aldermen – 09/28/10 Page 2 invitations. On November 5th, we’re going to have a ribbon cutting ceremony, so we’re really excited about that. That was a long time coming. Of course we work with the PLUS Company to clean the sidewalks approximately twice a week during the summer. Current Communications. We have a number of things that we work on, some new things that we added this year. Our downtown Nashua website has about 30,000 unique visitors a year. My goal is to get that up over 100,000 unique visitors. We hope to do this with our newly site which is coming out within the next few weeks. Part of that redesign is also some editing that allows our office to be more efficient. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to pay a web designer every time we need to make a change. It also doesn’t make a lot a sense to use antiquated programs that takes us a long time to edit the site. So we want to be able to get quickly on and quickly off. When we have new staff or interns, be able to train them very quickly on these programs. Still our top visitors to the site are Nashua and Manchester. Our most popular pages are our business directory and calendar. Our e-newsletter we’re up to 1,700 subscribers. We won an award last year because of the numbers of people that actually open our website. We have these statistics that are going to used for contacts. They run the statistics on whether it’s a non-profit or for profit. They track the amount of people that you send to, the amount of people that actually open your site, the amount of people who click on your site. We were recognized as being a leader in actually having people read our information. So we are really excited about that because we tried very, very hard to make every e-newsletter interesting and different. These e-newsletters focus on downtown business events, promotions, and more. I’m not sure how many of you currently get that e- newsletter. If you are interested, please just let me know. I’d be happy to add you to the list. We send it out every two weeks, and we don’t share your email address with anyone. Downtown Dining Coupons. This is a new program we started this year. We’re working with area hotels to recruit conference guests into our downtown restaurants. I’ve also worked alongside the economic development office as well as the transit department to try to utilize the trolleys to capture those conference guests at the hotels. It seems to be working quite well. We’re working out the bugs, but there are a lot of people who are staying in hotels and they are willing to visit businesses close to the hotels, and downtown is such a unique special part of our city. We really want to be grabbing those people – thousands upon thousands of people come here for conferences. We, of course, have a downtown facebook page. We use that the way we use our e-newsletter. We can update that frequently so when we have information going out we do daily postings or weekly on the facebook page. Main Street Banners. I don’t know if any of you have noticed, but there’s not longer any big banner going across Main Street. That’s because of some construction issue. I guess a long time ago when the poles went in they weren’t put in properly. Over the years there’s been more concern with someone getting injured. Because of the size of the banner, even with it being made with a mesh material, we were still afraid that it was going to be ripped down so the alternative that we came up with was smaller banners alongside the bridge. As you can see the Taste of Downtown Nashua banner that’s there, currently the Art-Walk banner is there also. So, other organizations can use to promote their events. The last thing we have is the dining and shopping guide. We have 50,000 of these that we distribute every year. They are distributed at area hotels, five different visitor centers, the Manchester‐Boston Regional airport, City Hall, Library, apartment complexes, and we have new ones coming out next week. So keep your eyes peeled for that. We just added an arts and entertainment page to the guide. And that is actually made at no cost to our office. Bd. of Aldermen – 09/28/10 Page 3 Our Events! As you know that’s what we’re most well know for. We bring tens of thousands of people downtown every year. Last year, we added two dining events call Spring Feast Week and Fall Feast Week. Fall Feast Week is coming up on October 18th. If you’re not familiar with that event it’s a week long event of discount dining. We have 15 restaurants participating in that event this year. We’re really excited. We partner with Bellavance Beverage Company, and they also do some beer, wine tasting throughout the week. We also run two Farmers Markets – one at City Hall on Fridays, one on Main Street Bridge on Sundays. Those are going on very well, and we are very excited about being able to host those downtown. The Taste of Downtown – We just celebrated our 16th or 17th year last summer. It was a great event, once again. We had the most restaurants that have ever participated. We had 29 restaurants doing the event. And, our Winter Holiday Stroll is coming up on the 27th. We’re really excited for that. We’re booking all the entertainment and partnering up with some new organizations to try to enhance different parts of the stroll. One of our goals is to – of course this is a free community event – but to keep it exciting so that people will continue to come down. We see a minimum of 20,000 people that evening and it is the busiest dining and shop night of the entire year. It’s a very important event for our businesses downtown. Some of you may have heard that recently we have partnered with the city with the latest endeavor of the BrewFest which went really well. It was about 1 ½ week ago. I think about 400 people came out to the event. The parks department did a phenomenal job – very organized, very professional. ArtWalk Nashua is coming up this weekend. We’re working with them on that. And, the Festival of Trees. That’s another event that’s coming in November that we are working on. It’s a week long event in the downtown business. What we do with these groups is we help them with advertising and marketing. We help them with communications, permits, licensing and insurance and sometimes hands-on work. I worked at the BrewFest a week and a half ago and so did my husband. He wasn’t expecting that one. So that’s something that we’re looking to do more moving forward – working with more organizations that either currently have events so we can enhance them or want to bring e vents that need helps from an organization that already knows how to do that. I think it’s really important for me to recognize our city partners. It’s just not during the stroll that we actually work with all of these departments. It’s all year long. There’s always a question about something, and I have to say we have a really phenomenal city employees. They are jus so helpful and such great attitudes. We’re really lucky to have these people. I know it’s not often that they get recognized for that so we do try at the end of every year to send them letters and say thank you. Thank their supervisors because often it’s just complaints from people around the city. I think it is important to say thank you because there’s a lot of people who are very dedicated and very passionate, and we certainly appreciate their help. So what do we have coming up in downtown? Greater American Down as I mentioned has always been known as an advanced organization. Our business plan that we created about two years that we continually update. We really want to be able to represent all of downtown’s interest. Our hope is to continue doing things like enhancing these partnerships that we started doing this year with other groups. We also want to work with the city and other community partners to tackle issues such as economic development, public safety, communications, streetscape, and providing educational programs for merchants to help them prosper. We certainly don’t have the money and the staff to Bd. of Aldermen – 09/28/10 Page 4 spearhead a lot of these things. There are other people, such as economic development, they are in a much better position to go ahead with that. We’d love to have seat at the table and represent downtown and work together. As a team, we’re much stronger together. The last thing I’d like to say is thank you. As I mentioned before, because of this relationship that we have with the city, with the aldermen, with the mayor’s office and then all the city departments, it just makes our job a whole lot easier. Even though we are technically a private organization, I don’t feel like we get treated that way. We get treated like we are a part of the city. It’s very nice to know that when there’s a tree that needs to be trimmed or something that we need help with, I can call someone right up and they take care of it right away. We are truly appreciative of that. And we’re truly appreciative of your continued financial support as well. It’s a very important to our budget. I hope that when you watch presentations like this, and you read the paper, and you see the things that we do throughout the year, that you think that this is a worthwhile investment and something that you would like to continue in the future. Alderman Sheehan We had Bridge Street and Economic Development as a bullet point. Could you elaborate a little bit there? Sue Butler I know that some of you have that on your radar. It’s not a project that we are spearheading. We sat and we’ve met with some of the people who are talking about the Bridge Street mixed use development that’s down there – given some of our insights, shared some of our contact information for businesses that need to do some more research. They had a whole slew of experts working on that. Tom Gagliani from the Mayor’s Office is really spearheading that. He’s working with Chris Williams through the Chamber , and we’re just kind of doing our part because even though I think it’s almost a mile out of downtown, the whole group’s project is they are trying to tie the whole thing in with downtown. So it is important that we’re sitting at the table. So I think it is just important to recognize that. I think that area is so in need of make-over. Whatever happens there, I hope what they are planning to do happens there is going to effect everything around it . It’s only going to be better. I’m very impressed with that group. You may be wondering all the players at the table, all the surrounding property owners have talked to them about what they would like to do with their businesses and what is the most realistic thing to put in there and not to create an island and just fix this one little place up and not think about how it affects everything else. They are the same businesses that are 20 feet down the road. I just get very excited when I hear more about what they are planning down there. I just wanted to put that on the radar. Alderman Pressly Have you prioritized your projects? Sue Butler The events are still at the top of our priority. A lot of it kind of depends on funding. Where we are right now is we are running a very efficient office. We’re running in the black, and we do utilize interns. We brought in a part-time person just to help us out because this is a very busy time of year for us. Planning the stroll and fall feast week and watching the website and doing a downtown dine all at the same time. Some of that is going to depend on funding. If we’re able to make more money at the stroll, if I can afford another staff person, then we’ll be able to delve more into some of those projects. The priority is still going to be events because that’s something that I know that we can handle right now. But other things are a very close second. With the communications projects, we Bd. of Aldermen – 09/28/10 Page 5 want to be working with the parks department and the street department and transit to work on the sidewalks. What can we do? Can we fundraise to get new benches put in? Those kind of small items. But yes, events and marketing are the number one things that we can work on. I’ve been approached by a lot of people. How many (inaudible) do we have? If we had a few more staff, it’s a very time consuming process. It does require fundraising just to purchase the advertising and all the printing. It’s very hard to try to put an event without any expenses going into it. President McCarthy declared the presentation closed at 7:39 p.m. Attest: Patricia Piecuch, Deputy City Clerk