Logan downtown businesses alerted of changes
The hiring of Bob Marcolese as Logan’s downtown manager helped get plans for the revitalization of downtown Logan in motion. Now those plans are starting to materialize.
The Logan Downtown Alliance held a Call to Action meeting for all Logan downtown property owners and business managers Thursday. The meeting provided an opportunity for downtown business people to hear about the changes coming to the downtown area, including parking improvements, street cleanups and new building facades.
“In one year, this won’t be Baghdad, but you’re going to see a lot of dust,” Marcolese said. “I bet you in five years some of your friends and relatives won’t even know that they came back to this place. That’s a promise to you.”
Marcolese addressed any individuals who were skeptical that changes would actually come to downtown.
“If you don’t think we’re serious about this, we are,” he said.
The first changes that will be seen are cleaner streets, Marcolese said. He said extra cleanup could be done by individual businesses.
“If some windows need to be washed and cleaned while this is going on, if some awnings need to be washed and cleaned, that would be kind of neat,” he said.
Aside from cleaner streets, the next major change residents will see in downtown is a more efficient parking system.
“Did you know we were complaining about parking since 1988?” Marcolese asked. “You have the full support of solving the problem of parking once and for all.”
The downtown alliance is working closely with Sgt. Pat Wolcott of the Logan City Police Department to develop a more efficient way of managing parking downtown and creating more spaces to alleviate demand, Marcolese said.
Wolcott said he recently counted the number of parking stalls available from 600 North to 200 North and from 100 West to 100 East. He said he counted 1,258 stalls in the area.
“Right now there’s 2,962 people demanding parking from 1,258 stalls,” Wolcott said. “Is it going to create problems. Is it going to create a challenge? Yes.”
Installing parking meters downtown or altering the time limits on free parking are two possible solutions to alleviate the problem, Wolcott said. In the next two years, extra parking lots will also be made available after the demolition of the Cache County Jail and First District Courthouse.
Validated parking is also something users of downtown businesses will see in the near future, Wolcott said.
“If someone comes down and spends an hour or sometime in there you should be able to give them a validation sticker so there’s no penalty for doing business downtown,” he said.
In the past, downtown shoppers have parked their vehicles in a stall longer than the posted time limit and have received $15 parking tickets from the Logan Parking Authority. Wolcott said he is seeing fewer than a dozen parking tickets a week in the parking lot behind The Emporium, which isn’t a large problem, he said. Motorists are currently allowed to park for three hours in that lot without penalty.
“There is a proposal that’s been brought before the city of limiting that down to two hours,” Wolcott said. “What we have now is a situation where some employees are just moving their cars around in the lots, and that has not created the turnover that we like to see in the three-hour zone.”
Moving to a validated parking system and adjusting the time limit to two hours would alleviate the issue of not having validated parking, Wolcott said.
He stressed the importance of everything the Logan Downtown Alliance is building toward.
“There is nothing more important to Logan, to this community, to its neighbors, than what we set out to do today,” he said.
Aside from the physical changes downtown will see in the coming months, Marcolese said there are things business owners can do to improve community relations, especially when there are major events in town like the Festival of the American West.
“When we have special events that come into town, it might not be a bad idea to stay open late,” he said. “If we all became unified and stayed open until eight or nine on weekends, we’re in retail, let’s work some retail hours.”
Marcolese said businesses could stay open later if for no other reason than to get more business.
“Why would you pass up some sales by closing up early?” he said.
–str@cc.usu.edu