 Welcome to our first Friday forum here. I'm Mark Smith, the chair of the Visit Advocacy for the Chewbacca County Chamber of Commerce, and I'd like to welcome all of you to our presentation today. If we could start off with a word of thanks to our sponsor, Prevea. Thank you for your time today. And thank you, too, for our venue, the ELTS Club, for doing another fine job today. Our presentation today is going to be about some of the future developments that are coming in our area. And we'll have a couple of speakers for you with a nice presentation. But I'd also like to point out that we have at least three members of our community that are here today as part of the audience who have special interest in development in Chewbacca and Chewbacca County. You might want to speak after the program with Mayor Mike Anterstein. Prevea from the Chewbacca County. Adam Payne, of course, our county commissioner. Thank you for being here. This is a very nice crowd, and it should be a very interesting presentation. I'd also like to point out the business advocacy committee members. If you would, please raise your hands. And after the presentation today, please come up to any one of us and provide us your comments, complaints, concerns, questions, especially suggestions for future programs that you'd like to hear about. We would love to hear your ideas. So with that, I'd like to introduce today Dave Hoffman. He's a manager at Chewbacca County. Dave, please. Thank you all for being here today to stop in here and burn, so we appreciate you coming by. Also, thank you to Betsy and everybody at the chamber, my home away from home. It's been a lot of time there, and it's been a great experience. When Jane talked to me a while back about doing the Friday forum, I said, so what's going on downtown? We hear all this stuff, and we're not really sure what's happening. You know, it comes out in a paper, but do you have anything to do with something that people don't know yet? And I said, oh yeah, yeah, I think we can handle that. So it's been a lot of work, a lot of effort put in on this, especially on the part of the city and the development department. So it's not often that we're able to look at a project and say something that's really going to be transformational to our downtown and our waterfront, and yet still keeping an icon, a shabuigan icon building intact. But we're able to do that, and right now I'd like to call him the director of city development, Chad Palsak. He's going to really get the ball rolling. I'm not one for podiums, so. Thank you, Dave, and thank you to the chamber. What we wanted to do is start out this presentation and follow up on this project that we worked really hard to get to. We're selling the building for a dollar, and everybody says why don't we always sell these buildings for $10 and the land for $20 and $1. But we're selling the building for a dollar. It's a national monument, and we're going to be using $5 million of your tax dollars towards incentivizing this company, which we've heard loud and clear that people have said over the years they want this company in this market, and we hear it and read about it in the newspaper. So we are proud to announce that the Olive Garden is getting to be the municipal armory. We thought since it was April Fool's we should start out with something on a good note, and we hear all the time about Olive Garden. And just to tell a little story about Olive Garden, I know we're at the Seton School with my good friend Henry Young doing a junior achievement activity, and there's a map laid out on the floor, and it's all mapped zone districts within the city, zoning districts. And the three third graders had done little buildings, and they were to go and push the buildings in the district where they thought it should go, and the lesson was learn where stuff should be and how to map and plan out a city. And at the end of the presentation, this little boy in the back who, you know, the Johnny in the back of the room who never really said much, raises his hand and the teacher says that there's anything else anybody would like to tell, asked Mr. Pellishek before he leaves, please let us know. And the little kid in the back of the room raises his hand and says, when are we getting into Olive Garden? At third grade. So we know that you guys are a famous, you like Olive Garden. We thought Olive Garden would be a great place in the historic armory. Well, moving on to some more up-to-date stuff that's more realistic. Today's agenda is really to talk about a number of initiatives that we've undertaken. New housing developments in the ArtSquare project, the Leavitt and Sheboygan concert series. Some new businesses coming to the downtown in particular in 2016. Some other citywide development, the trolley system, a downtown business retail recruitment strategy that's just been developed. And then at that point, I'll turn it over to Dave and he'll finish up the presentation with some stuff specific to Sheboygan Square in living urban spaces and downtown storefront beautification. So starting out, you've heard a lot about this initiative to get more housing in the downtown. So we are happy to say we've got a development agreement, we've got a developer on board, we've got approved plans for the former Boston Store property. So over here is the library and over here on the right side of the picture is the Art Center. This development will sit in the middle of the Boston Store property. The building, as you can see, is laid out on this north end of the property. This is 81 market rate unit apartments with 4,054 square feet of retail space on A Street, underground parking, one car per unit. 10.3 million project costs set to begin in June be completed in May of 2017. This is a combination of one and two-bedroom apartments with amenities. I'm not familiar with this but I guess people like you can have your dogs in here and you can have a dog wash in the basement and you can have bike storage in the basement and all of that kind of modern stuff with fitness centers. There's also a community room overlooking or recalling the Art Green or the Art Square at this stage. So this is a development plan. You may have seen this in the paper. This is proposed, kind of the layout and the area in the middle here is the community room and that's primarily going to be geared towards garage doors that will open and close to allow people that would rent that that are staying in this building to kind of participate in what's happening on what we're calling the Art Space or the Art Green which is the rest of the parcel. This is just an overall drawing of that so what this is going to look like is there's going to be some segregation of parking on the north side for some additional parking for surface for those units so that lot behind the black pig will be modified down and the city will be making some improvements to this and continuing to operate this parking lot and they'll be paying a parking lease for these lots. This will be their primarily their front door so this circle here is their main entrance and drop off. This ramp is how you will get to the downstairs for the underground parking. The retail is over here on 8th Street and then you can kind of see the layout as one of the interesting things it spans between 7th and 8th Street so all the buildings if you look on an aerial map you've got all these buildings on 8th Street and you've got all these parking lots on the east side of it and you have all the parking so they're going to kind of change that a little bit and shape this up which we're excited about. So this is an artist rendering of what that will look like from 8th Street. This is the retail down here. This will be the public green space so in the master plan that the Sherbrook and Squared in the city did one of the big things that came out of it was this connectivity between the library and the art center. So you're going to see this development plan shortly of what's kind of being planned and how this space will be utilized but it's really about kind of incorporating this development this housing development into this green space and this art and culture area. So this is most of you in the audience may have participated in the Lebanon Concert Series it was the first year it was a great success. It's coming back this year. This was a start last year at the art center and then sometime sorry it's a little dark but sometime in the middle of the year we moved over to the Boston store. So the concerts are going to continue this year and I'm hearing a lot of comments like how are you going to do that with construction. Well the stage is going to move for a third time and hopefully it will get to its final location soon. It's going to move to the corner of New York and 7th Street and be opened up like to the northwest. The construction will be going on on the north side of the property the concerts will be going on the south side of the property the contractors already told us they're willing to stop early on Thursday nice to allow this to happen. So I think it should be a great family festival area with a lot of activity going on. What's going to happen after that is once the concerts are running between June middle of June and middle of August this year and the reason is is because in September the city will be coming in to do some public improvements of this property. So what you see here is the rest of the space this is the site plan for that and this is that development on the north side so the library is still on your left and art centers on the right this is New York the new New York Avenue on the south this is going to be basically treated almost like an amphitheater in a way it's not going to have a lot of grade but there will be these main walkways that will come through because what we're trying to get is the people from the library over to the front door of the art center and people's travel plans if we didn't put a sidewalk like this they would just walk across here anyway so we thought let's encourage them to do that so we've got kind of a pathway but these intermediate lines in here are actually raised walls that will come out of the ground and if you didn't come to the concert or to the venue for with a chair you could sit on a little ledge and then people could say if you had a chair you could sit in this green space but it's like a little raised wall ledge the other idea is that this underneath here as you can see in this image the stage that community art project collaboration project the mic stage will be incorporated into a larger stage and there will be some type of venue covering over the top of it and this depiction we're leaning towards the pathway of a kind of like a sales structure to tie into our waterfront this will be colored concrete down the middle here this whatever happened to my pointer okay here and then you can see there's about 400 people sitting, 400 people are in here in this rendering so there's plenty of space to do this our original plan was to have another building on this corner and after we sat down and looked and understood where this final housing development was going to be there wasn't a lot of space left so we made the decision, you know what let's just energize that space with public green space this is really integral to what's happening in that housing development and Oak Brook the developer has been really keen on making sure that this happens for their residents because that's kind of this whole thing is playing together what's nice about this, we just talked about this this morning, is this last row along here has a a higher raised wall and it's going to act almost as a natural fencing to keep people from just walking into the public the private area of the development there's a wall that's about 36 to 48 inches back here and people can sit on there during concert venues but they could, it also kind of creates a dividing line between these two so we are hoping that this project will start construction in September and then during the concert series this year the art center is going to do a crowdsourcing to name the space so that's why I don't know what this is called, we call it the art square for now but depending on what the public ultimately agrees to and what gets voted on under crowdsourcing and agreed upon and will name the space and then it'll be part of this overall plan so as I said the concert series will continue on Thursday night through this summer the space after that will be utilized for other cultural and civic events this arts and culture district that was one of the key pieces of the plan, the harbour center plan was to develop this arts and culture venue in the downtown we really see this space as aligning and bringing additional artists and additional venues and performances and stuff to it year round even in the winter there's some thoughts of maybe some ice skating and that kind of stuff if we can do it so we'll see where that goes, we haven't done a lot of PR on that because we don't want to build a schedule and then tell somebody oh if you can't do it because we're going to do construction so we're going to wait till next year and try to roll out more information on this so if you're involved with a civic organization out there that might have an interest in this space they can contact our office and we will help you through that process I've heard a lot about well why are we doing this here when we have Fountain Park down the other way Fountain Park is a great park I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it but there's a lot of venues that go on there anyway the farmers market lobster boil earthfest just to name a few of these events that will happen those will continue to happen there and these two will kind of coincide together we see this as the new upcoming millennial space and young professional space so in 2017-2018 our friends at the John McClure Art Center are going to roll out a public art project yet to be developed but it's something around playable art structures and sculptures and that kind of stuff in this green space to really kind of leverage this area so we really look as planners and our friends at the square as this is being the arts hub of our downtown and everything kind of rolling out from that area I think there's enough to do at Fountain Park it's just that Fountain Park in my mind is a couple blocks off of where the key is and where the interest is and I think with housing and bringing in potentially another 160 or so people living in this area this is a great venue so I think both of these can coincide together with the William Pops concerts and all of those other venues can continue to still happen at Fountain Park and this space can be energized as well so we also have another development down on South A Street that is crossed from the chamber that was originally started as a cement project cement is now backed away from it and it's a group out of Milwaukee called LCM funds that's looking to build 91 market rate apartments there with rooftop decks and penthouse suites one to three bedrooms a project of about 15 million they're having underground parking as well in a fitness room media room and other amenities you may have seen this in the newspaper this is the artist's rendering it's been modified a little bit they're planning to break ground in June or July they should be coming through the planning commission in the next couple of weeks to get approval on all of this but this is another venue of trying to fill in those downtown housing needs that we've been hearing about so the Chewain County Economic Development Studies said that there was the need for 300 new apartments in the downtown we're getting close to that with these two developments will be at about 172 we're in a final negotiations to develop this as South Pierce so Blue Harbor is over here the river is here, all the parcels outlined in orange so we'll admit that we should be coming out with soon I can't give you a lot of information because we're not at the end yet but we're looking at energizing these middle spaces where they've historically been green grasses green grass in here and doing some additional development here that will augment what we have going on in the other parts of the downtown so stay tuned to that we also have our friends Steven Reed-Schmidt they purchased the former Sheboygan Senior Community Center and they're under construction on dorm style housing in that facility first phase is coming up here real quick to be done on May 15th of 149 beds in Phase 2 115 beds sometime in September so this is the building this is another venue to add some additional housing and we're excited about the tenetry and that's proposed for this development as well we have an approval of plans for a I'm sorry the title is a little bit off on this but anyway this is the new shanty in the downtown so on the former mucky duck property on the riverfront Parker Johns will be opening up a barbecue and pizza joint these are the drawings of what that shanty is going to look like there's going to be a two floor dining facility with second floor and then they're going to be opening up these doors to the patio overlooking the lake river in the lake this project is planning to break run in June we have two new businesses opening in downtown that have recently been approved the art and soul is the former june's property it's been bought by a local investment group and they're in the process of renovating it as we speak into a design and consignment shop for local artists to display and sell their artwork they'll also be providing a place for a classroom space so this is this project as well as the board and brush which was approved on tuesday night at the planning commission is going into the former being a litches property which is south of the old wisconsin bank and trust kind of across from the conna lodge it's a retail art studio with instructional woodworking workshops they serve mult beverages and they do classes and then the last business as you know is speckers and the former highland house is being converted and opening in may so this is an artist this is an architect rendering of what june's is going to look like so they're going to be combining those two spaces and they're going to keep some of the old june's feel to that but they're going to be turning it in really into an art studio that I think is a debt of need in this community of allowing spaces for artists to be able to sell their works and not have to have their own store front this is the board and brush julie is the owner she owns seven or eight of these locations across the state she just opened in illinois and in texas so this is this pinterest thing that my wife always tells me about where you go in and do your do signs that like she said at planning commission that you really want to hang on the wall and you just don't put in the closet that you do stuff on weathered boards and stuff like that that shows that is your name and different signs and stuff and you print it and you do the woodworking and all that stuff right in the store while you get to drink a multi-beverage as part of it and they do classes and all this good stuff so julie is a entrepreneur the owner she found us she came in she's really excited about what's happening in the downtown she's really excited about the arts and culture and all of that kind of stuff so I think it'll be a great addition she's hoping to be open by the beginning of June and this is one of those things that I have to point out that hasn't been in the newspaper yet so you haven't read about it moving on to other citywide developments this was in the newspaper last week we've got a development agreement into the council this is taylor drive I-43 up to up on the north here would be the holiday and express wal-mart and then the start of our business center here railroad tracks that go out to the power plant there's a fair field in and suites proposed here of about 120 to 160 rooms it's yet to be determined what they're going to build but they're planning on building about a 5.5 million dollar hotel on this property the plan was to build a second hotel a courtyard these are both myriad products as we don't have myriad products in our market there's some wetland issues they're doing with on this side and if they can overcome those in 2018 2019 they'd break ground on the second hotel but either this fall or early spring they'll be breaking ground for sure on this first fair field in and suites the development agreement is that the city has to extend some sanitary sewer and do some median cuts on taylor drive to make that deal happen but it sounds pretty good and thank you here's a kudos to mayor manorstein thank you for him and his wife because they made the context of this developer to local establishment when they're having dinner one time hey we do business recruitment whatever we have to this is the tiles off again off the chart but anyway the downtown trolley service so we we talked a lot about connecting the downtown and how to do that and we've heard that we should build a bridge we should build a bridge well it's 5 million dollars to build a bridge and there's a lot of issues with that so we thought well what can we do in the meantime so Derek mink and I got together the transit director and said how can we you know try to accomplish this with little to no effort so we developed this downtown trolley service that really runs between the downtown riverfront south pier and the marina provides service memorial day to labor day since it's federally funded there was this clause that they had a minimum fee so you can write all day for a dollar last year the service saw about 1600 participants which was up from about 800 the year before so it's building which we're excited about the hope is that after we after a few years of doing this we can hopefully get to sunday service that's a little bit more challenging in the fact that of union issues and some of that stuff but I think there's a way of working through that because it would be ideal to have this thing run on sundays right now it only runs six days a week and sundays would be another day to capture a lot of our guests that are in the market we started out with a wrapped bus and you may see this one driving around this was really geared towards shabuagan squared and kind of what we have here making memories in the square was the tagline on this bus which has free wifi and visitor guides and all that good stuff on the inside of it we're in discussions with the city of green bay to hopefully purchase the old town trolleys and these are sitting in a garage up in green bay and they serviced the stadium and so they moved a lot of people around and they bought some new ones and they said they would be willing to sell three of these two working and one not working to the city for a nominal fee and what we would like to do is get these on the road and get these to become the trolley so we can start branding around that and actually have trolley stop signs trolley stops and trolley in different areas they have wood seats in them and they're kind of great for kids and all of that stuff so we're hoping that by middle of summer if the federal transportation administration decides to work with us that we can get these buses here and on the route and use those as a dedicated trolley in the downtown to be a little bit more a little bit more commemorative towards this trolley idea we've heard a lot about retail we need more retail the problem we had before that is anybody that's in the retail recruitment market knows that a retailer typically takes a point on a map and says okay if I go there and I draw a circle around it how many households in disposable income can I draw into that area unfortunately downtown Cheboygan doesn't get anything from Lake Michigan although Lake Michigan is a great asset for tourism marketing it's not that great of an asset for economic development recruitment because there's no incomes coming from that direction so we think that by building this housing and changing our downtown and bringing in new incomes and new people that the time is right for retail so we partnered with the Cheboygan squared business improvement district and came up with a five step plan as to how we're going to accomplish this so we have an intern from Lakeland college who is finishing a database on a Google platform of all the buildings in the entire district including Michigan and Indiana as well as A Street the central commercial with square footages, owners rent price, pictures, contact information who's in there now what's upstairs, is there vacancies a huge database of all these properties because one of the things we've struggled with over the years is we get people that call up looking for space and we don't have it at our fingertips to give them locations to go to so we've developed this database which you'll see be enrolled on real soon finishing up in the next couple of weeks and be available on all the different websites as a place for people to go to look for rental information we've developed a list of about 25 to 30 retailers that we think we should target now we're really being cognizant of the fact of the retailers we have so we had a meeting yesterday and Jane Davis Wood from Relish says it's pretty fun to be able to pick our neighbors so we're picking businesses that augment what we have and don't compete against it and what the plan is is to finish developing a retail recruitment brochure which is a 12 page document of why you would want to open your business in downtown Shebauligan and then we're hiring a semi-retired retailer to go out and do a grassroots effort to recruit businesses so this lady's been in retail for 30 years her husband is a retired banker and they're going to go out and talk to businesses of different communities and different places that we've talked to and see if they would be interested in opening up a second or third location in our market and do this downtown retail recruitment brochure and then guiding them towards where to find space and how to work through the process to make it as easy as possible so we're hoping to get about this doesn't happen overnight I had a laugh last week I did a presentation to the St. Dominic's they called them the coffee clutch ladies there was 80 ladies in that group and they're like well how many are you going to get in one year because you have to get at least 10 or 15 well retail recruitment if anybody's in that area it doesn't happen overnight so if we're successful in one, two, three new businesses over the course of the couple years we're doing very well one of the challenges I think we're going to have is you hear a lot about we have a lot of vacancies downtown really there aren't a lot of vacancies downtown we've got a lot of professional services and other type of non-retailers on the first floor which when a group of us took a ride went over to Holland Michigan last year and toured Muskegon Holland and Grand Haven one of the things we noticed is that their downtowns were thriving with the fact that they had only retailers on their first floor they had no service or no professional office or anything like that so that's really where we need to get to we need to educate our business building owners our investors, our developers, everybody downtown that we need retailers on the first floor and we need those offices on the second floor so we don't have a retailer here and another one six blocks over we've got 15 retailers all in a row where somebody could just walk and go to multiple different shops so that's a part of this whole recruitment strategy is to start educating our owners of business buildings downtown and try to encourage them to not just fill it with anybody but you know work with us because we're hoping to get some success out of retailers somebody said to me the other day why don't you guys just hire an outside firm to do, a national firm to do this well the problem is the fact that we're not going to get national retailers in downtown Sheboygan there's just not enough traffic to do that so I get a kick out of when we post something new and there's the comments on the Sheboygan press website and they say why aren't we getting an old Navy board, why aren't we getting a high end business we're not going to see those businesses downtown we need boutique style businesses so the only way to get to the boutique style business is not through a national recruiter but through a grassroots efforts and that's really what we feel is the best route we have successfully started out in step 5 with what we call the last few years a developer summit this originally started out as an activity of tourism we invited all of the local realtors on a two day experience of our market and explained what was going on our quality of life aspects of the downtown what we had we had about 25 or so if I recall 90% of the people on the bus were all locals 90% of the retailers said they weren't even at half of the places we went to and we only went to like Bucorn Gardens, Mearn Center and those places so that led us to believe we've educated our local people now we should invite some people from the outside so we partnered with Sheboygan Square the city and the Sheboygan County Chamber and the EDC and did a developer summit and the first two years we invited in developers and brokers from the outside and they could stay overnight at Blue Harbor we had rented a trolley, we took them around to all these different assets showed them our opportunities in our market and I really believe that that's where we are today in the new development is because Oakbrook the developer at Boston Star was on that Trolley was on that ride the developer on South A Street was on that area, some of these smaller ones have been on that participated so they were exposed to what our market is and there are a lot of times there's this negative perception if you turn on the radio station in Appleton or the radio station in Milwaukee and stuff all the time about Sheboygan when we finally brought these people here and brought these developers and brokers out of Milwaukee and Appleton and Green Bay and showed them what we have they were like wow we never knew you guys had this kind of stuff and they were more interested in developing here so this year we decided to change that a little bit and we're going to do a retailer summit so we're hoping that the people that we start contacting up here we've got some key businesses that we're going to be going after that will really fit in well we're hoping that by doing this on a Monday we can encourage those same people to come here and experience what we have and maybe seal the deal a little bit better and give them that flavor of what's going on in this market so this is kind of infinite stages of a retailer's downtown retail strategy but I think it's very doable I think we've got the right people at the table and I think we can see some successes in the next few years this is the cover up that retail recruitment for sure it's in final stages to be printed but it's really about telling our story that we're a growing emerging creating market you know we I don't know the last time I asked somebody this the other day when was the last time you saw 30 million dollars of new investment in downtown Sheboygan in one year it's been a long time so this is really changing the market and this new housing is going to change the market and we need to be prepared for that we hear about a downtown grocery store all the time when are you going to get a downtown grocery store I think we can go out there now and try to market for a downtown grocery store with the fact of having people to live downtown the problem with a downtown grocery store and I've talked to a couple larger grocery store people is the fact that they again look at the incomes and they say it's not going to be as cheap as the big box stores because we just won't be buying in that quantity and knowing some of the Sheboyganites and it's no it's nothing bad to say but they go for the cheapest bargain so they would drive across town to say five cents versus going to this downtown grocery store so it's really about trying to find a mix of market that would work for this area that would be both cost-effective and cost-functional for the developer broker of that and the city as a whole so we're working on that we're well aware of that we understand that we've done a market study to see what the incomes are they didn't support them three or four years ago we're hoping to get that market study updated and maybe go out and talk to some other venues to see if we can get that filled I know we've got good side grocery a little bit but I think there's enough to do a little bit more than that as well so we'll maybe report back in next year what's happening on where we are with the downtown grocery store so at this stage I'd like to turn it over to Dave he's going to finish up some specific projects that have been worked on in the downtown and then after Dave is done we would be happy to answer any further questions thank you chair okay we're running a little bit on time so I don't really want to get too far into what a business improvement district is but please anybody who here today that does not know what Cheboygan squared is please raise your hand everybody knows what it is back at 13 is when we started to get together a group of let's just call it the executive committee there was some money left over in the reserves to look at having a plan moving forward in the history of the bid it was kind of we did a lot of marketing, promotion, events co-op marketing if you will for the members of the bid and everybody would get on board with that and we got a group of people together and say well we've got some money left over maybe we need something to help us plot the future ahead so in the beginning of 13 we got together and we chose a company called Veerbeker out of Madison and they came in and did our market survey and really looked in-depth at our downtown, our riverfront and our south pier and came up with a master plan and that was adopted in early 14 and we moved ahead with it and this is the three there are many main topics that we wanted to cover but these are the three major ones that came out of that analysis and of course Chad talked a lot about the housing development the need for 300 additional housing units and we're getting pretty close to that we needed to connect the three areas the bid is very we have one of the largest bids in the state as far as, you know, square mileage and it's not really connected well as Chad mentioned we don't have a bridge so south pier is a bit disconnected from riverfront and downtown so we really needed to stress connecting the three together and making people understand that it's all kind of kind of a part of a whole and of course at that point we were still called Harper Center the other thing they realized right off the bat that we've got a world-class art center we've got a fantastic library we got the state-of-the-art theater in the Wiles Center the John Michael Kohler Art Center and Me Public Library and yet we had this huge building standing in the way of linking the three together even though they're actually less than a block apart so they said, you know, we really got to look, we got to focus on how we can connect these and really play up the arts and culture district when I first got hired the first conference I ever went to was put on by the Wisconsin Downtown Action Council in Appleton and that whole conference was about utilizing and maximizing your arts and culture district in your downtown and you know I kind of filed that away and thought, well I don't know if I'll ever get to use that and a couple years later here we are. So how are we going to accomplish what the master plan has directed us to do the city then did adopt that in early 14 and we kind of struggled a little bit with it in the beginning to switch over from the old bid which was as I mentioned kind of directed toward marketing and promotion and into just really getting into the master plan. So we established four new committees. Actually the operations on connectivity committee was up and running in actually late 14, early 15. The other three are pretty much new as of this year so that operations on connectivity committee is really the nuts and bolts committee that these are the people that figure out how we're going to do stuff and what we're going to spend our money on so they've been working already for over a year so it makes sense that they actually are pushing the train right now. Our promotions and cross marketing, that's kind of what the marketing turned into. Our executive committee is kind of the president, the vice president myself, the treasurer who's kind of and on chat we're kind of putting together, making sure the other committees are kind of on the track to keep moving forward. And the business development committee, this is where the retail strategy is coming from and it's got a lot of big members on it that no retail better than myself or some of the other members. So between the connectivity committee and the city development staff we came up with a plan. One of the things that the master plan showed us is that you want your downtown to be clean, you want it to be attractive, you want it to be walkable and you want it to be safe. And these are things that we looked at our downtown and we really needed to work on it. And we looked at certain areas downtown and saw some opportunity to do something to make an impact, especially visually, without spending too much money. And we focused in on five locations and three of them we're going to be working on, you will actually see some development there this year. And the five that we focused on on the library plaza, the water feature, the fountain, the alley between Blackpig and Ehrman's Jewry, the alley between US Bank and Subway and the alley between Mavericks and the former dirties office. So those are the areas that we thought we could do a lot of upgrade for not a lot of money. And the first three we're actually going to really get into this year. Here is the locations and those three that I talked about. Number one is the library plaza. Number two is the water feature. Number four is the alley near Blackpig. Some additional ones then that little alcoole next to the wild center. That's number three, kind of a dead space in there. Number five is actually the, this, whoops Number five would be the alley next to US Bank. Number six is actually the alley between Bacona Lodge and GM's. Number seven is the empty space where weavers used to be in between Mavericks and the dirties building, that one we've got on our list. And number eight is the alley that's right adjacent to Stefano, Traderia Stefano. So those we're going to be getting to in the future. But okay, this is the water feature as it exists today. As you can see, it's pleasant enough. It is kind of stark. There's a lot of straight angles. Of course, it was built before ADA, so there's really no, there's not a lot of handrails there. There's a lot of steps to get down there. When it was first built, it was considered kind of dangerous. Swimming is not actually allowed in there and unfortunately, kids to go in there. Anyway, it's not all that inviting and quite frankly, it's underutilized. So we thought, what could we do to get this to be more of a focal point? Chad and I attended a conference and they said people are always attracted to water. They want to be near the water. And yet, why doesn't this work? So we're going to make an attempt to make it work and make it much more inviting. Of course, you're going to see a lot of this downtown and this is going to make a big visual impact. A lot of flowers. We're going to be putting in flowers along the vertical structures there. Hopefully even some more on the wall next to Wisconsin Avenue. We're going to be putting in some picnic tables. These are kind of those composite kind of plastic picnic tables. They'll be actually permanent with umbrellas. And hopefully, we can get more people with the project going on across the street. There may be a restaurant in there. They can take their food over and enjoy the water. One of the other things we're doing is as you know, we had the Christmas light show there this last year and it really went over quite well. It's not really the time of year to be sitting out at the water feature, but we did have music. We tried to play the music along with the moving lights. So we decided well, this would be a great opportunity to have music there all year round. So we're going to be putting up some more powerful wireless speakers up there. We're going to be cranking up, quite frankly, a little bit of classical music there. So you'll be hearing that as you're walking downtown. And perhaps it'll make some of the this has become a quite frankly become a hangout spot for some of the kids in town. And quite frankly, the sometimes their language isn't too good and some people are intimidated by that. So we thought by playing the type of music that they may want to move somewhere else. Opera. I'm thinking opera. Also, also the water feature really, you know, this thing on the corner right here, this oops, I'm sorry. Okay. That's how it looks right now on the corner of Wisconsin in eighth. So when you pull up to the corner, even if you're standing there, you really can't see the water feature. There's some birch trees there and some of the shrubs that are their perennials, they're too big. You can't see through them. It's actually not very safe there to turn. So what we thought we would do is pull those out and put in once again perennials, but a little bit lower, some very nice flowering bushes so you've got a better view of the water feature. I mean, that's where we spend the millions of dollars. Let's at least have a look at it. The library plaza concrete jungle. I mean it's just completely concrete and there's a new event that goes on there called Chalk It Up. It's the chalk art show where we get kids in and we get actual artists and do chalk art and I'm a judge for that and it is just excruciatingly warm and bright. It's very, very bright when the sun is all full blast, so what we thought we would do is to soften that up again, once again more flowers and we're going to put some turf in there. I don't think we're going to actually take the concrete out, right Chad? We're just going to put the turf over the top. Astroturf over the top. Astroturf, yes. So as you can see some more planters, the city has already purchased some planters. We're going to have quite a bit of flowers there and we're going to purchase some of the games that are popular now like Ladder toss, Bean Bag, Bachi Ball, No Beer Pump, not this one. This is an example of the alley, this is the alley between Big and Herman's Jewelers and it's never going to be a place where people are going to comfortably sit down because this is like our little Chicago here. This is a wind tunnel and I mean it really gets windy in there and it doesn't even have to be that windy in general but when it goes down between these two big buildings it gets kind of crazy. But we thought we could make it a lot more attractive just by putting in some more flowers so I think we've got a lot of pieces in here and our signage, our branding signage for Sheboygan Square and for not a lot of money we're making that a lot more attractive also we are putting some benches in there more toward the A Street site. This is the other alley we spoke of between Subway and the bank. Once again the art part of that we're hoping that the Art Center or ours in general we can commission them some art to be painted on these walls because some of these older brick buildings are really really dark and that one is in particular but as you can see once again the flowers are really going to make things a little more attractive. One of the things that we started with the water feature with the Christmas lights is using lighting as art and with the cost of LEDs and the cost to buy them coming way down and of course energy consumption is just really really like less than one through the cost of incandescence and you can do so much with LED lighting. Any LED light typically you've got a whole range of colors that you can use with that so we're going to do probably not this year yet but next year is you'll see some of the alleys and in particular these here which I call used car lab lights strung in between the buildings we can hook those up to the existing lighting and just brighten up those alleys and then sometime in the future we hope to get more of artist design and we have a local guy marked me and that's doing that so this one down here is kind of interesting this is the projection type lighting so you can project images up on the sides of the building and talk to the guys over at George Michaels they've got that huge wall and we can put the projector on the account of ours so look for something to happen there more public art for these spaces this is great here these are yeah pool noodles not too expensive but it looks kind of cool I mean there's a lot of things you can do and we've got so many creative people here in Sheboygan so I'm really looking forward to these spaces really looking a lot different I think you'll see a lot of change in the downtown and it's going to the bottom line is it's going to get more people downtown also as I mentioned before we have some issues with shade in some parts of the bid so we're looking at different types of shade structures you saw the one that there probably will be over the stage at the new art square this is an example of some other things you can do so it makes the shade part even part of the art so we're looking at those too in the future and last but not least this is the thing I've been working on quite a bit for the last couple months the Sheboygan square is going to be purchasing pots actual flower pots for any and all of the businesses in the bid that are interested in having them and they're a pretty good size these are large pots and we're going to have them planted with flowers all they have to do is water them and dead head them and take care of them for the summer so we plan to have those out in front of the stores by end of May beginning of June so you're going to see a big impact throughout especially the downtown because that's where the most impact will be the riverfront south pier kind of have a lot of plants already but you'll be seeing this starting in June so that's going to be a lot of fun and Dave Yes and I are going to be up on a truck hauling all the flowers all through the downtown it should be a blast also we're going to continue with some of you notice we had baskets in the middle of the block and then of course we have the large cement pots on the corners and with the help of the town and country garden club they help us every year with that so that is it time for questions I'll chat back up letter rip art square area there's a one building on the south west corner of that space I don't remember the exterior the back and the side of that building being aesthetically pleasing what's going to happen with that they're working on a facade renovation after the blossom store was taken down exposed that side particularly that north elevation so they're in plans to do something and they're going to have to cover it over with something and then the thought was is the art center may do some type of art, you know, public art project on that venue as part of this once this construction is done and it's on my folks yeah okay so it's in the works that we could even get it flat and we could do some net projection stuff on it yeah yes when is the Olive Garden Oaks Nail? soon talk to the mayor after the meeting yes, there's no volunteer to run it you showed a lot of funky type art maybe being like mural type things and I just caution you because it looks so dated haven't there been any thought to like a wall dog type project that they didn't implement? they'll start out being dated but they're classy, they look nice we've talked a lot about that and we don't want to be, I mean they have it, we don't want to be like Plymouth and the art center this movement at the art center this different type of involving the community and connecting the community to that is really the role that we're probably going to continue to go this is kind of plays into that whole Sheboygan project that they did a few years ago on a lot of public buildings so I think what we want to do is we want to create a space which we've heard from people that have traveled here wow, I would have never expected to see that here in Sheboygan we wanted to be kind of that eye opener thing we could just paint the history of our community on the side of the buildings but we felt we didn't want to take away from Plymouth and we wanted something different as a retailer in the downtown area some of the difficulties that we have is our customers are limited to our parking, what are we going to do about meters because that is a huge barrier to getting people to come shop downtown meters are not going away because if meters go away then the businesses are going to pay a huge parking assessment so right now the meters, realistically the public probably doesn't know that they collect about $180,000 a year towards the upkeep of the downtown and a lot of what's happening downtown particularly keeping weeds down planters, snow plowing all of that is being handled by the parking utility and that is what's keeping the cost down from turning around and selling that to the your business location is on Michigan which is a little bit different isn't it? My business isn't located anywhere on Michigan but thanks for saying that Chad I don't know where the you know we there's issues there's pros and cons to it and we've vetted this strongly Dave had a committee on parking and you know if we take out all the meters I can tell you what's going to happen all the business owners and their employees are going to park all day downtown and you're going to have more of a problem at least now you get turnover my issue is the time the two hours I know you're not a woman but we go shopping for a little bit longer than two hours we park our car when we're shopping and we're going down two hours is used up really fast now we have to go walk all the back down I'm going to leave it's an issue and maybe some of them can maybe we can look at some of those I mean in the lot behind the black pig there's going to be eight hour parking back there so you can pay and park in those off-street lots and the idea is to get the turnover because we hear that in a lot of places two hours is too long and we want 15 minutes and we get requests all the time from businesses for 15 minute parking so it's it's not an easy you can't please everybody with it it's not an easy just pull out all the meters or keep all the meters and we deal with this every day here's it every day and we try to accommodate most of the businesses but it's a challenge I'll get that instead of taking a lot of money and whatever what about having them available for cars we're working we're looking at so we there's a there's an app where you can pay and go on your phone and pay right from it to the meter and we looked at that we don't the city where we have to get our behind the scenes technology up to snuff to be able to do that which we're our IT department is working aggressively on so hopefully soon we can implement some of that it's more about and millennials don't carry change we understand that the mayor always says if you don't have parking meters put them in if you got them take them off do you have a top five list of the type of boutique stores you're trying to bring into downtown that you could share I don't know that we want to share it right now but we do have a mix of men's women's children's clothing and shoes and you know just some other things that we think are lacking but at this stage I don't think we are ready to share that information my daughter was she went to stuff for retail management and so I called her up and she didn't know she knows more big box but she didn't give us a few leads of some interesting stuff what I can mention we haven't really done yet but it's called primp are you aware of that one they're located in small towns that are near metropolitan areas or they're they're not really a mall store but they're the kind that would fit very well and it's really kind of the trend so that's the kind that we're that's what we're looking for and we've got some in close markets nearby that you know we think would benefit from opening up the second or third location yes with all the musication on 8th street how are you addressing a small number of businesses that are sort of attracting and maintaining an undesirable element that's hanging out around on 8th street classical music opera we understand that and any community is obviously going to have some of those concerns and I'm hoping that we just can't tell somebody they can't open their business because there's going to be riffraff hanging at it there's ways of dealing with it and I think by getting I really believe by building more people and having more people on the streets and more stuff going on those people are not going to want to be in the limelight anymore and it's going to push them to go other places we had a problem a few years ago with some benches and those types of things and we've relocated the benches and did some different things so as we see where these are we'll try to address it to the best that we can we've asked other communities how they have handled things like that and it's kind of not a heavy hand what happened at the library is a lot of these guys are in the library so Garrett Erickson over there hired some private security and got those people out of the library because people were intimidated unfortunately now they hang outside the library but people that are doing unsavory things want to be around other unsavory things doer people so if we get those people to go somewhere else they will be filled in with people that we want it's a slow process I realize anything exactly what you're talking about but it's still a free country so we'll work on it