CITY OVERVIEW

Meet Me in Medina!

7 Continued from page 8 quintessential old fashioned small town. “The Square itself, with those historic buildings, is such a draw,” he said. “It’s kind of like a Hallmark postcard. The events and activities on the square and throughout the eight-block historic area keep the town vibrant and are very helpful to our business community. If an event brings in 10,000 or 15,000 people, they have to eat somewhere. They’re going to get a coffee or a soda somewhere.”

A proposed downtown hotel could help to encourage guests to spend more time in Medina, Hanwell said. “It would be nice to have a hotel because of all the events we have here,” he said. “Instead of people coming just one day for an event, they could actually spend the night and visit Castle Noel, go to Root Candle and see some of the shops in town. We have more than 300 weddings a year on Public Square. People come for the ceremony, but then they leave because there’s not a place to stay. Our thinking is with this hotel that they could be here the night before for the rehearsal and patronize our local businesses.”

One of the city’s popular annual events is Main Street Medina’s Candlelight Walk — a three-day event that kicks off the holiday season. “We light the tree on Friday evening, then everybody enjoys the holiday music,” he said. “On Saturday night we have a parade that delivers Santa Downtown. Then we have fireworks synchronized to Christmas music over the top of the court houses on the east side.”

Public Square also is a strong center for business activity, Hanwell notes, adding that there is always a demand for commercial space downtown, but for the past 12 years we've been at nearly full capacity.

Community Oriented Government

Hanwell said the philosophy of “community oriented government” has helped to make residents happy and proud of their town. “City employees don’t say ‘that’s not my job’ when we see something that needs to be done,” the mayor insists. “If there is a problem, it’s everybody’s responsibility to fix it. If there is a defect in the street for example, it doesn’t matter whether somebody from the Parks Department or a clerk at City Hall spots it—it’s all of our responsibility to get it reported and get it corrected before somebody damages a tire. The goal is to make sure that even small problems are fixed promptly so that the city always looks well kept, clean and pretty. When I was with the police department [including almost 13 years as chief], we called it a community oriented policing model. We’ve adopted that into our community oriented government model.”

A similar concept brings efficiency to the local business community, Hanwell said.

“Anytime a new business is looking to come to town we do what’s called a pre-development meeting,” he explained. “We bring all our department heads in, the utilities, and the county economic development people for one meeting so the business people don’t have to come back 15 times talking to different groups. It makes things easier for them. The head of real estate for Meijer told us he’s been in multiple states and has never seen a city as responsive as we are.”