By DAVID BORAKS
DavidsonNews.net

How Davidson promotes its downtown and recruits businesses – a task once the work of a small merchants’ committee and now handled by a non-profit organization with a full-time director –  is about to evolve again.

How To Get A Guy To Text You Back Town officials on Thursday proposed a restructuring that will bring the director of the non-profit Downtown Davidson Inc. (DDI) into Town Hall as a full-fledged department head, reporting to Town Manager Leamon Brice. The restructuring also would try to refocus the town’s downtown efforts more toward economic development and restructuring, while trying to preserve current events and othe functions of DDI.

Mr. Brice unveiled the plan at DDI’s monthly meeting at Homewood Suites, which brought together about 20 board members, merchants and town officials.

The town plans to adopt the reporting shift immediately, but many other details of restructuring are still to be worked out, including the fate of the current nonprofit Downtown Davidson Inc., whether the town can take over insurance responsibility for DDI events and activities, who will be responsible for Concerts on the Green and other DDI events, and how the shuffling will affect Davidson Farmers Market, which currently operates as a unit of DDI.

DDI board members and merchants at the meeting raised no outright objections, though they did raise concerns about the plan. (See below.) Some wondered how the town planned to ensure that the director would continue to work for merchants, as well as town government priorities, and what might happen to DDI’s current organization and activities.

Mr. Brice said many of those questions remain to be answered. He asked Downtown Davidson members at Thursday’s meeting to join town officials on a “transition team” that will clarify the scope of the reorganization and ensure the changes continue to support merchants, existing programs and the broader goal of improving the local business climate.

“I hope you will perceive what I’m bringing as good news,” Mr. Brice said as he began speaking to the group. “I think what you’re going to see out of this today is a further commitment on behalf of the town to advance downtown.”

TOWN REFOCUSING

The move is part of a broader “refocusing” of priorities that grew out of the Town Board’s January planning retreat. At that retreat Town Board members discussed economic development and downtown at length, and they made the issues their top priority for 2009.

In his presentation Thursday, Mr. Brice showed a list of the board’s five main goals for the year, led by this one: “Improve, preserve and promote downtown as a mixed-use district and a destination.” The goals also included a related one: to “improve job opportunities in Davidson.”

“When we decided that our top priority was downtown, we started talking about what are we doing now to help downtown, we realized that we needed to devote more resources to downtown,” Mr. Brice said.

The new focus on economic development also comes amid an even broader multi-year effort by the town to shift its property tax base away from the current lopsided reliance on residential development. To do that, town officials say they need to work harder to recruit new commercial developments and businesses, and to make sure the infrastructure is in place to support them.

ALREADY TOWN EMPLOYEE

The town already pays the salary of Downtown Davidson Executive Director Sandy Lemons. Revenue comes from a tax surcharge on property owners within a “Municipal Services District” covering the downtown and South Main Street areas.

Commissioner Laurie Venzon, who is the Town Board’s representative to DDI, said board members agreed at their retreat that the town should devote more resources to economic development and downtown. Some of the discussion focused on the role and organization of DDI, which is supported by tax dollars, yet outside Town Hall.

“Right now DDI is the only organization where the town has a paid staff employee that is being managed by a group of volunteers. We realized that was unfair to ask of these business owners, of our residents, the people who are volunteering their time,” Ms. Venzon said after Thursday’s meeting. “One of the things that became very clear to us was that is (Mr. Brice’s) job to do and manage, and we needed to make sure that the director was under his responsibility.”

Ms. Venzon said the restructuring outlined Thursday “gives the Town Board the opportunity to hold him accountable for its goals, and what strategic direction we want to move in.”

Mr. Brice noted that the town already is involved in DDI (he sits on the board)  and supports downtown in other ways. It provides planning and design oversight for downtown, police and public works help with public events, and marketing and promotion. But “there’s not enough coordination,” Mr. Brice said, because Downtown Davidson is a separate entity.

Mayor John Woods also attended Thursday’s meeting, and told DDI members the town wants to “reinvigorate the efforts that you all are doing, to provide better support from the town level” for all the town’s business districts. “We feel working together, rather than in slightly separate organization … we can find a better way to make that work.”

ADVANTAGES

Having the Downtown Davidson director in Town Hall would give Ms. Lemons a seat at regular department-head meetings, and allow for closer supervision, to ensure that the town meets its goals.

Ms. Lemons will now report directly Mr. Brice, as other department heads do. “It’s not fair to ask a group of volunteers (the DDI board) to manage a full-time employee and do all the things around that that you should do, and also run a business,” Mr. Brice said. “The town can do that.”

The change also would allow for better coordination between Downtown Davidson events and other town departments, he said. And although not originally a goal, it also could save money, including $4,800 a year in rent the organization now spends for her downtown office in the BB&T building.

The issue of how a downtown organization works with the town to help merchants has been a recurring theme over the years. Some property owners were critical when the town first adopted the MSD, or special taxation district, several years ago. Mr. Brice suggested that this restructuring addresses some of those concerns.

“If you were here when we put into place the MSD, I caught more grief about that because a lot of the (property) owners said, ‘All you’re going to do is create an event planner. You’re not going to do anything that helps us,” Mr. Brice recalled. “My argument at that time is that the promotions will help you … that it will make a difference. We’ve done that. Now we need to move on to a next step.”

Ms. Lemons was involved in the discussions at the Town Board’s January retreat and has been working with town officials since then to plot the restructuring. She said Thursday that she is “very encouraged by the direction of the Town Board,” especially the decision to make downtown its top 2009 priority. Of the reorganization, Ms. Lemons said, “The way I see it is that we’re still all moving forward and still working together.”

MERCHANTS’ CONCERNS

Budd Berro, a Davidson resident and volunteer president of Downtown Davidson Inc., said at the beginning of Thursday’s meeting that there’s a rationale for the town to step in with this plan. “The town is a major stakeholder of DDI, flowing MSD tax dollars to us … obviously they have a huge interest in what happens,” he said.

But he also said it will be important as the restructuring proceeds not to lose sight of both DDI’s staff and the work DDI is already doing to help its constituents – the merchants and taxpayers. He warned there may be “governance issues” because DDI is currently organized as an independent non-profit organization.

“It’s important for the town to keep in mind the responsibilities of DDI as a non-profit, and to ensure that whatever change is made, it will not lose site of that constituency,” Mr. Berro said.

“For this to work, it’s got to show that it’s providing as much – if not more – support for the constituents of downtown, the property owners, the business owners, the merchants. That’s important and we can’t afford to lose that,” he said. “One of the keys in any kind of restructuring is to pay attention to what’s going on so that you end up with a better product and don’t end up losing things along the way.”

Megan Blackwell, of the Village Store on Main Street, was worried that merchants could lose something if the executive director of DDI is “sucked into the town side” by being moved to Town Hall. The concern, Ms. Blackwell said, is that the director will be “a town employee working on things that the town is already involved in, like sidewalks and heavy duty town things, (and) that it’ll be difficult (for merchants) to track where this person’s time is spent.”

Karen Toney, manager of the Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream on Main Street, has been involved in merchant activities for years. She echoed Ms. Blackwell’s concerns. The old merchant committee “was created out of a need for the street-level focus,” she said. “The town has other responsibilities. Are we not going to get lost in this mix?”

Mr. Brice said there have been “a lot of fits and starts” over the years to address the needs of merchants. He argued that efforts really began to work when the town stepped in to create the special tax district and hired the first executive director, Kate MacIntyre. He also noted that both he and the Town Board have made downtown and business recruiting a priority this year.

SEEKING STATE HELP

As Downtown Davidson is restructured, the town is also planning to seek assistance with both promotion and economic restructuring by filing another application to join the N.C. Department of Commerce’s Main Street program, which provides resources and technical assistance to downtowns.

The town applied once before, in 2007, but was not accepted. With this restructuring, the Davidson plans to re-apply.

Mr. Brice said the Main Street program focuses on four key areas: promotion, organization, economic restructuring and design. Its goals, according to the program website, are to help towns “recognize and preserve their historic fabric, and, using local resources, build on their unique characteristics to create vibrant central business districts that meet the needs of today’s communities.”

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