Uptown Businesses wants what the downtown has already got – with a twist.
The Uptown New West Business Association has presented the city with a proposal to establish a business improvement area that would help fund street beautification, on-street activity, marketing and promotion, and outreach to some community groups. Its vision is to create a vibrant, pedestrian-oriented commercial district that serves local citizens and attracts visitors from throughout the region.
Bart Slotman, a member of the steering committee that considered the idea, said the average retailer, with 20 feet of storefront, would pay $386 annually into the Uptown New Westminster Business Improvement Area.
“There’s an awful lot of benefit the average retailer gets for $35 a month,” he told The Record. “There’s three street events, there’s the décor part of it with banners, baskets, Christmas lights and all those things. There’s the common promotion activities we want to do to draw more people to the uptown area, and for advertising the area. There’s also an outreach component to this – we want to partner with other community groups and see if there are ways we can support other groups, but do it in a way that is mutually beneficial.”
Slotman cited programs that employ people at risk of homelessness or with mental disabilities to do street cleaning and creating new items from street banners as potential examples of community outreach initiatives.
The Uptown Property Group, which owns several buildings in the area, has paid for baskets, banners and street décor in front of its properties.
“You can really see the benefit of it. You can really pull an area together and make it stronger,” said Slotman, vice president of the Uptown Property Group. “The BIA would actually enable the uptown area to do a lot more of that. I think it would create a stronger identity and create a stronger retail district.”
The establishment of an Uptown New Westminster Business Improvement Area would generate revenue to help fund initiatives in an area bordered by Fifth Street and Eighth Street and Fifth Avenue and Eighth Avenue.
“We are not talking about a lot of money,” Slotman said. “Those dollars will stretch a long ways and make the area a lot stronger.”
Several property owners and businesses were part of the steering committee that considered the possibility of creating a business improvement area.
“It was very much driven from the retail business perspective,” Slotman said. “We know there is good buy-in. There will always be a few people who say nay to something like that. There are always some naysayers. We have done quite a bit of research, talked to lots of people and we know that the support is there.”
The City of New Westminster would collect a levy from property owners in the Uptown New Westminster Business Improvement Area. The Uptown New Westminster BIA would not have an office or staff, as a different model is being proposed from what exists in the downtown.
“This is purely a funding mechanism. One-hundred per cent of the funds go directly into those programs,” Slotman said. “It’s not a layer of management or administration where the money is spent. It goes directly to programs. A lot of businesses, once they started understanding that, there was a lot of support for the overall concept of a BIA.”
On Jan. 20, New Westminster city council received a report about the establishment of an Uptown New Westminster Business Improvement Area and gave three readings to a bylaw. Council also directed staff to undertake a public process, as required by the Community Charter, to allow affected property owners to petition against the initiative.
A staff report states that council may proceed with the initiative unless there is sufficient petition against it by property owners. It’s anticipated the BIA would be established effective July 1.
According to Slotman, the BIA would not only help fund initiatives in the commercial area but also expand them and distribute the costs equitably.
“If you look at it historically, when we first did the Christmas lights it was just in front of Westminster Centre. We paid for them. We had a lot of people call us and say, ‘hey, how come you got the lights and we didn’t?' The answer to that is we paid and you didn’t pay for it. A lot of people from the other blocks have been calling us and saying ‘we want that too,’” he said. “I think the BIA would be a mechanism where we could pay for all of that.”
Slotman also believes the boundaries of the proposed business improvement area could be extended in the future, once property owners in other parts of the uptown see the benefit of the BIA.
“What we want to do is get this BIA established, let it prove itself, all the things it can do. What I am hoping for is eventually a year or two years down the road the people in the other blocks see the benefit of it and want to be part of it,” he said. “We see it as a future expansion. We know with the folks in those blocks they are a bit more skeptical. I think we have to prove ourselves first before we get their support. We did not want to impose it on blocks where the support currently isn’t there. That’s not what we want to do.”
