Summing up the first quarter of this year is a full discussion involving affordable housing, housing mandates, homelessness, storm impacts, and budgets. All of these issues have a year’s worth of content and require dissection, but …
That herd of elephants meandering through the living room is State Street. This year, 2024, marks the fifth year of the current configuration of eight blocks of the downtown business corridor. The multi-year State Street Master Plan process continues, but the issues of consensus, execution, and financing are still undetermined. We are suffering from business vacancies which, to be fair, were occurring prior to COVID, but other business areas have since been recovering nicely.
Our downtown parking system is in the red, as the lack of traffic downtown is taking its toll. More fees are being considered, but that is not a viable solution for returning life back to the downtown businesses.