4.2c Business Improvement District

With residents, developers, and artists accounted for, the final group in need of support in the Village are business owners. These players benefit most directly from improvements to local streetscaping and public realm improvements on Pendleton Street -the dominant corridor in the entire area. As such, they may be best suited to help fund additional capital improvements to the commercial district through the expansion of their business association into a Business Improvement District (BID).

A BID has a specific geographic boundary, and is usually administered by a non-profit organization, which represents the district’s members. BIDs are designed to collect small annual fees from each property in the district over a period of time, such as 10 years, which are then leveraged against government grants, private donations, and more to create a budget for street improvements, facade renovation, marketing/branding, hosting local events, wayfinding improvements, or whichever services or benefits are defined as important to those within the BID’s boundaries.

Overall, BIDs allow their members to independently organize, forging a deeper sense of community, and enable the improvement of aspects within the district that businesses would like to see changed. Better yet, the presence of a BID does not reduce the obligations of the local government in the area, so it is simply a useful tool for allocating special additional investments and accelerating implementation without interrupting civic services. In the Village, a BID might be most useful for managing the maintenance of public spaces, funding the acquisition of street furniture, paying for the creation of wayfinding signs, and for issuing grants to cover event permitting within the area.

Though transforming the still-developing business association into an organization fullyfledged enough to support a BID may seem challenging, its actions could be conducted over time, first agreeing on an annual fee and linear fee formula that increases with profits, and following that with later decisions on spending priorities, which should be coordinated with the city.