After about a year as an affiliate member of the Main Street Saskatchewan Program, Humboldt is one of two communities that were accepted at the accredited level this year.
The proposal was put forward by the Business Improvement District (BID) along with numerous letters of support from other businesses and individuals in the community.
“This year, we applied to become an accredited member and that allows you to get access to different levels of funding,” said Dean Hergott, chair of the BID. “The primary funding is to do your facilitation with the community and come up with a plan on what it is we want to do in the downtown core.”
Along with the various provincial resources that are now at their disposal, the BID will also be given $25,000 from the province in matched funds. Of the other $25,000 that the BID has to procure, half will come from them and the other half will come from the City. For this next year, that money will be primarily for the “visioning process,” which is the community engagement that will take place in order to set priorities.
The application package included the BID’s work, their focus, what they would like to accomplish, and the City’s more long-term improvements. However none of the priorities will be known until after the BID gets feedback from the community. While they are always looking for comments and responses, formal consultations likely won’t begin until next spring. According to Hergott however, it’s likely that the next area of focus will be on infrastructure and other serious projects.
“I don’t know that we have specific priorities yet other than the things you see every other city do … but now we’re at the point where all that low hanging fruit has been somewhat picked,” he said. “Let’s get the community together because we’re really going to start changing things. The next step is probably infrastructure; that might involve traffic flow, parking and those types of things.”
Last year, the City went through a number of meetings and consultations in order to develop the Our Humboldt plan. It was during that process that the City discovered that the community recognized the downtown core as being important. Since that discovery, this new process will be aimed at focusing what people want to see done in the downtown first.
“In the Our Humboldt plan, one of the top key priorities that came out of that more community based plan was ensure the continued success and revitalization of the downtown. So this is actually just taking it to the next step,” said Jennifer Hoesgen on behalf of the City. “Let’s put some actual targets on what that means to the community and how we plan to accomplish that.”
The accredited membership is only given to two communities each year. In order for one to obtain it and the grant, they would show that there is administrative support in place to handle the Main Street approach. So far, the BID is undertaking the task along with aid from the City until that aid is no longer required.
“For the first year, the City will be providing in kind some personnel to support the BID’s development in the accredited process,” said Hoesgen. “As they move forward, the City’s contribution will move more into the public realm and into more of the public works development.”
The application package also included reports on where the City is at already for Main Street focus, what’s been done already, how ready the community is, and some budgets for what might happen. There were also current pictures of the city and the aforementioned letters of support.
“Not all the letters of support came from downtown businesses,” said Hergott. “(The other businesses) are recognizing the downtown as the cultural heart of any community. That’s the big thing they talk about; pedestrian access and all that.”
Now that they’ve reached the accredited membership for the provincial Main Street program, the BID will have to use the Main Street “four point approach.” This approach includes organization, promotion, design, and economic restructuring. They will have to do community enhancement through events (such as Streetfest), increase capacity of local volunteers, and heritage restoration of historic buildings, which is more of a long-term process.
“We’ll be working in conjunction with the Main Street program; taking it and filtering it into Humboldt in a way that really works well for our community,” said Hoesgen. “Part of the visioning thing is to develop design guidelines for the downtown. So as a community, we need to figure out what those design guidelines are for the downtown and then any restorations that people want to do to historic buildings would then be guided by those design guidelines.”
According to both Hoesgen and Hergott, the historic restoration would be the most challenging aspect of the Main Street approach because it’s both technical and financially demanding. Once those guidelines are in place, however, they’ll be able to start looking at projects that property owners want to get help on restoring. Regardless, projects like that are still far into the future at this early stage.
In the meantime, the BID is taking small steps with events such as the upcoming Streetfest and getting more local volunteers on board with the Main Street project. Anyone with input or who would like to volunteer his or her time should get in touch with either Hergott or Alfred Washburn, director of the BID. Next year, people should look out for updates on the consultation process.
“The only thing that is within a certain time frame is the visioning,” said Hoesgen. “The grant is a one time matching grant to get the visioning done because everything comes off of that.”
