Those who read the Crookston Times Guestbook already know Part IV of “My Vision for Crookston.” And that is BRING MORE PEOPLE DOWNTOWN! In other words, let’s develop what we already have: a beautiful downtown, made so by the vision of the community leaders of the mid-80’s and with help from Minnesota Department of Economic Development Small Cities Grant. Don’t forget the promoters of the Red Lake River goes way back to the mid eighties also! Gene Miller was deeply involved then. He started the movement to restore our river to recreational status.
Do you remember some of those folks? Chuck Hiller, Henry Gredvig, Hilkey, and Ray Ecklund were some that I knew. And by the way isn’t that how the sidewalk pavers got funded? Not through highway 2 improvements, but through that first block grant. It was a grant to the City to fix up downtown and was set up as an interest buy-down grant and a 5% loan program. The loans got paid back and reused through a revolving loan fund that was made just for downtown improvements. They had some money in the fund and they spent it on the pavers. Was all the money used up then? I thought these funds would revolve for quite some time and be available into 2011 or 2012?? Anyway, the loans and the pavers eventually got paid back through tax assessments downtown. How that happened I don’t know. Oh well, one more lost tool to use on downtown buildings. But I digress.
Here’s the gist of my letter on the guestbook, with a few improvements:
The problem downtown is not the older buildings, the vacant buildings, or the image; those are just symptoms of the problem. It is the LACK of “people traffic” downtown. There are not enough customers to buy and therefore pay to repair the buildings, whether they are new or old! There are only two ways to fix that problem. One is through tourism and events, (on Crazy Days, the Brenda Nordlum & Kay’s Attic Rummage Sale made more money than in one month of being open daily!) Another is through housing downtown. For only $4,000, We could get Artspace here to develop the Fournet Building, or the former Villa St. Vincent building into housing for artists! We can encourage UMC to develop downtown housing! Think, for a moment, if their $10 million new student housing could have been created in one of our vacant buildings!! The quick rent up of Central Square is proof.
IMHO, everyone here and their friends and relatives needs to write, email, or call their Ward leader, cc the Mayor, and Dan Johanneck, that tourism and housing downtown needs to be tops on their to-do list, its time for a new block grant, and tell them not to divert us by thinking about tearing out those beautiful pavers: they were put in with state and federal money and paid for by all the businesses downtown! Write today!
