General notes:  Regarding the “Sandy Syndrome” issues that I brought up last month….I have spoken recently with the city manager and others on the planning/building side of the City.  I understand that we will begin to shift our focus to the handful of dilapidated, unmaintained properties around the City and what to do about them this summer.  I believe that the first step in dealing with “Sandy Syndrome” is to make sure that there is a functional price attached to failing to maintain your commercial property.  Paying the costs of catching up on maintenance in addition to annual property taxes might be enough to motivate these property owners to do something with their property rather than just sit and watch them disintegrate in the Oregon rain.  Whether they sell these properties to a speculator at a discount, tear them down and plant grass or fix them to minimum standards and develop them themselves, any of these solutions would be better than the disintegration path.  In any case, I believe this will be a good start, and I will be more than happy to help out in any way that I can.  If we maintain pressure on these properties to improve, I believe that the market will fix the rest (as in, if the only built properties left available by this time next year are SS properties, potential business owners will have to decide which is more appealing – overpaying significantly for a space, or building your own.  If the latter is more appealing, SS property owners will be stuck with failing buildings that they will have to maintain.  That means either lowering your price or being stuck with a big annual maintenance bill (on top of a big annual property tax bill) that will be rightly enforced by the City in some manner).

Commercial Properties (vacancies, new businesses, etc.): 

38250 Pioneer Blvd:  There has been a recent change in the development of this space.  The Boring area auto repair shop that had its eye on this space has since backed out.  Current plans are to develop this space into a place where people can bring their radio controlled cars in and run them on an actual track.  This business is a different one than Mad Dogz Hobby Shop, although one would assume that there are some business connections there between this company and Mad Dogz.  No word yet from Mr. Tolle about fiber and VOIP phones, although conversations between Brian and SandyNet continue.

Iris Healing Arts:  Heather Michét will be moving out of this property probably by the end of January.  Ms. Michét will be transferring the office portion of her business to her home here in Sandy, and is in the process of trying to find a space (again, here in Sandy) to practice her craft.  There are a number of local businesses she has been communicating with regarding a practitioner’s space, and I’m fairly certain she will be able to work out something with one of them very soon.  More to come…

Two Brother’s Mexican Restaurant:  I am beginning to become worried about the viability of this business.  I have attempted to eat lunch at this restaurant at least half a dozen times during the last month, but although the sign on the door states that the restaurant is open for business at 11am, the front door was locked on all occasions, whereas my arrival times were anywhere from 11:30am to 1pm.  This would seem to be a very bad sign for the continued viability of this business, yet the owner came in to City Hall today (1/13) and renewed his business license for 2014.  No idea what’s going on here.

I will attempt to make contact with the owner of this business in the next couple of weeks, but I have had communications issues with Angel in the past (his English comprehension is somewhat limited).  Councilor Gerberg – If you have any free time in the next couple of weeks, would you mind accompanying me to this restaurant for an appetizer or a cocktail (my treat, of course).  I’d like to see if there’s something we can do to help him.  If so, I’d like to try.  And if he does end up failing….well, let’s just say that we have some options there as well.  More to come….

Country Co. Insurance:  All work on this property is complete and this office officially opened for business on January 3. Have not heard yet whether or not there will be a ribbon-cutting for this business, as they have not joined the Chamber yet…

Sandy Vacuum property & Great Expectations property:  Carl Jacobs and his wife continue to work on these properties.  We haven’t heard much from them, although Mrs. Jacobs has applied for a few permits for the former Great Expectations site.  I will check in with both of them soon to see how things are progressing…

Bright Beginnings:  Sadly, this project will not go forward.  After doing their due diligence and working with the Building and Planning Departments on an almost daily basis, the owners of Bright Beginnings had a decision to make – move BB to a new location and make about $20,000 in upgrades for the new space, or sell the business.  After much discussion, the decision was made to sell the business to the assistant director of the pre-school instead.  That person was not in a financial position to a) buy the business, b) make all of the necessary upgrades to the new building, and c) move all of the operation in a matter of weeks.

Energy Unlimited LLC:  These folks have finally decided that they no longer need their 5,000 square foot office space, and will close their doors on Pioneer to become a home-based business operating out of the owner’s home in Estacada.  This doesn’t really come as a huge surprise to the ED office, as they never really used more than a quarter of their office space and the principals of the business were hardly ever there.  I don’t think that there’s anything that we as a city could have done to prevent this – rather, this move was probably inevitable at some point.  The silver lining to this cloud is that we now have some prime retail space open in the middle of the downtown business district.  My guess is that this space will not be vacant for very long…

Sandy Main Street:  We are at a transition point for Sandy Main Street at the moment.  All of our events for the year are complete, and we have a couple of months before we have to start planning for First Friday again.  Therefore, we are spending our time at SMS reaching out to local businesses and organizing for the future.  Here’s what we’re currently working on:

• Aubrey has taken the lead on a new project suggested by former SMS head George Hoyt – trying to put together a restaurant promotion for the downtown area for spring 2014.  Unfortunately, the first round of business outreach meetings with said restaurants are not going as well as we anticipated.  Most of the restaurants are only mildly interested in a promotional event – and that is only if they don’t have to discount anything on their menu or pay for anything…period.  We initially wanted to do a monthly promotion that would take place in February, March, and April, but due to the unbridled enthusiasm we have felt from the restaurants, we are now looking at a Valentine’s Day event only.
• We have begun planning for a downtown visioning event to take place sometime during the spring, probably in April.   The idea is to bring in all of the stakeholders in the downtown area (business owners, property owners, the Chamber, folks living in the residential area, the school district, the City (staff and electeds), the churches and other non-profits, etc.) and discuss how we would like Sandy to look 10, 20, 30 years in the future.  What kinds of businesses would they like us to pursue?  How will fiber effect commerce downtown?  What changes does the City and the SD anticipate in that time frame?  Hopefully we will distill questions like this down to the essence of what the community would like to see in the future regarding the downtown core.
• The biggest problem we are facing as an organization right now is the dysfunction of our committees.  We have two active committees: the Promotion Committee (which has been doing a fairly good job) and the ED Committee (which is a mess).  According to the state and national Main Street organizations, we need to make sure that the committee members on our Promotion Committee actually do a fair amount of the work involved, which they have unfortunately been pushing off onto staff to do.  We also need to do a complete revamping of the ED Committee to eliminate members that don’t show up to the meetings (about 60% of them), and to get them to commit to a little work as well.  In addition, neither of these committees have had a chairperson until recently.  Carl Exner has volunteered to chair the ED Committee (thanks again, Carl), and promises to have a full agenda ready for us next time we meet.  We are searching for a chair for the Promotion Committee and will shortly infuse that body with a little bit of new blood as well.  Work here is ongoing…

ED Committee:  There is no ED Committee meeting scheduled in January – I simply have nothing at the moment for them to discuss.  It is very likely that this committee will ramp up in February again, as I intend to ask them for their input regarding how to approach marketing fiber to the community.  Need to get some more information from the SandyNet boys first though.

Project work: 

• The Mayor’s “Business-Friendly” Task Force – Our second meeting in December was instructional.  I developed the first two volumes for the “How to Open a Business in Sandy” guide and presented what I had accomplished so far.  The task force has instructed me to reduce the amount of prose involved in this guide and try to get our message across with the fewest number of words possible.  Next meeting will be on Wednesday, January 29^th.  I will attempt to complete this guide by then if possible as instructed by the task force, but my workload of late has increased quite a bit due to end-of-year reporting and other project work, as well as an abnormal amount of business movement (closures, moving locations, desire to move locations, new business openings, posting newly vacant properties, etc.)  In order to complete this guide by the 29^th and not ignore my other responsibilities, it is likely that I will have to work a fair bit of overtime.  I will discuss with the city manager prior to doing so to make sure that this is not a problem.

Conferences/training:  No training or conferences in the month of December.  [Next conference for me will probably be the OCCMA Spring Conference at Skamania Lodge in late March of 2014.]