When you go on an important business trip or head for a special event like a wedding or a graduation, you try to look your best. You want to look your best because how you look is the first impression that people will have of you. And, similarly, when someone is coming to your home for the first time, you dust and clean and polish and tidy it up, because, as we learned in an old shampoo commercial from a few years ago, you never have a second chance to make a first impression. A friend and I were dining in a westside restaurant recently. Nothing wrong with any of that, but there is a certain sameness about it.
People expect the outskirts to be like the outskirts of any town.
But that's not the case with downtown. People form first impressions of a community by what they see downtown. So it's important to make sure that the downtown area doesn't have dirty fingernails. Information gleaned from that meeting will be used by a citizens committee to develop themes for downtown redevelopment. Once those themes are established, strategies will be formed to accomplish the redevelopment.