by Bill Fontana
Over the last several editions of this series we have talked about the “pandemic time” providing an opportunity for your local revitalization organization to undertake a review and/or update of your organization’s strategic plan. This would include reviewing your vision statement, making sure your vision statement included your transformative strategies, and reviewing an updating your vision/transformative strategies associated five-year plan. We also stated that this was great time for you, your board and your committees to get educated on those trends that may, or may not, impact your strategic plan coming out of the pandemic. In most of these articles we linked strategic thinking with a strategic plan.
But in this article, we want to shift focus a bit and move from strategic plans to strategic actions. Not everything that we do strategically has to be plan focused. In fact, there are many important strategic actions, as opposed to day-to-day - or tactical – actions that we should be thinking about. There are many strategic actions that should, or must, be taken to ensure the success of your revitalization effort. In this article I want to talk about two of these strategic actions and provide a concrete example or each.
The first strategic action that you should consider is development, or expansion, of the database that serves as the measure of success for your revitalization effort. As I hope we all know by now, long-term, strategic outcomes are all about effectuating change – there is some factor we want to increase, decrease, maintain, establish or eliminate. But unless we know where we are today, there is no way to really know if we have met the goal of increasing, decreasing, maintaining, etc., that particular factor. Think of the goal of reducing crime in your district. If you don’t know what the crime rate is today, there is no way to know if you have reduced the crime rate in a year.
Recently the PDC staff, through its subsidiary Keystone CORE Services (KCS) has been assisting Oil City with the development of a blighted property inventory (BPI) in that city’s Historic South Side neighborhood. The study conducted involved a building-by-building evaluation of blighting factors in the 230+ properties in the district. Using the International Property Maintenance Code- 2015 Edition, each property was rated on a scale from 5 to 1 (5 being little or no deterioration and 1 being dilapidated) across seventy-five structural elements including yards, foundations, exterior walls, door, windows, roofs, etc. The result was a quantified blight rating for each property and an overall blight index for the neighborhood as a whole. The study will allow the decision-makers in Oil City to determine what tactical actions they can take to better address the strategic goal of reducing blight in the neighborhood. As it turns out, while there are numerous properties that exhibit evidence of significant deterioration, much of that deterioration is cosmetic – porches, stairways, decks, chipping and peeling paint, etc., and could be addressed by a well-designed Elm Street-type rehabilitation program. By the same token, should the City decide to take more aggressive action in the neighborhood in pursuit of some other development goal, the BPI would provide an indicator as to which properties should be addressed first. And then five years or so down the road, a follow up BPI survey of the neighborhood would allow the community to determine the quantifiable improvement made in the neighborhood by comparing the future, 2026 BPI index with the 2021 BPI index, thereby demonstrating the benefit to the neighborhood, and the municipality, in very demonstrative, quantifiable terms – E.g. a 25% reduction in blight.
The second strategic action which you should consider in the near future is a review of your municipality’s zoning ordinance. There are few components of a comprehensive revitalization strategy that can do more to derail your organization’s effort than an “unfriendly” zoning ordinance. And while we understand that the local revitalization organization has no power to change the zoning ordinance, they certainly have the ability to review the current zoning and recommend amendments to the municipality that would support the attainment on the vision and associated transformative strategies. This is also a very real reason for the local municipality to be in agreement with the vision and transformative strategies adopted by the revitalization organization. Once again, PDC staff worked with the board and staff of Downtown Shenandoah Inc. (DSI), to develop a series of proposed zoning amendments. As I am sure many of you know by now, DSI has spent the last few years creating and working on implementing a transformative strategy to establish a portion of the Shenandoah business district as an entrepreneurial hub for the greater northern Schuylkill County region. The heart of this transformative strategy is the construction of an “innovation and event center” on Main Street in downtown Shenandoah. But more than just constructing a new building, Shenandoah is interested in creating the “entrepreneurial eco-system” that would compliment the new building. A review of the current zoning ordinance showed that the definitions, permitted uses, etc., had no mention of things such as coworking space, business incubators, makerspace, artist live-work space, etc. In addition, many of the social network components of a successful entrepreneurial eco-system such as micro-breweries, micro-distilleries, out-door dining regulations and other critical zoning-related standards and controls were absent. With help from PDC staff, a series of proposed amendments have been drafted and are in the process of being submitted to the Borough of Shenandoah for review. The amendments are not likely to have any immediate, short-term (tactical) impact, but over time, as the new innovation and event center comes on-line, the potential to establish Shenandoah as a true hub of entrepreneurship increases substantially.
So, now is a really good time to begin to address these strategic actions. Assuming that the current trends of the pandemic hold and/or improve, by the time the fall gets here, we will be back to dealing much more with the day-to-day actions of planning and implementing special events, operating façade programs, assisting with filling up vacancies, etc. The opportunity to take some of these strategic actions, while not lost, will be diminished. Do yourself a favor and take some time during the last few months of the pandemic to take some of these strategic actions.