Coeur D’Alene Hopes Hired Help Can Aid Downtown Long-Running Task Turned Over To Consultant

Seven years ago the city of Coeur d’Alene started to give downtown a face lift. It moved some brick. Nailed down some benches. Moved back curbs. But all those improvements left city officials scratching their heads, wondering what to do next.

“We started with the hardware, the bricks and the mortar things years ago,” city administrator Ken Thompson said. “Now we need to take a look at the economics of it.”

The next step was put in place this week. The City Council hired a Virginia-based consultant to tell them what would make downtown Coeur d’Alene a thriving area.

Taxpayers will pay $45,000 for Hyett-Palma of Alexandria, Va., to do a market study of downtown and draft a plan of action before the end of the year.

“In the past, the work done told the community what to do rather than how to do it,” said Doyle Hyett, the firm’s chairman. “They don’t want another plan. They want us to put together another aggressive plan of action.”

That action must be done before the end of the year so the city can qualify for state tax incentives, which would freeze the tax base of any downtown property. Any increases on property tax values in downtown would go to the city to help pay for improvements, city administrator Ken Thompson said.

The consultant may say downtown needs a parking garage, and that would require money. This tax program, called Revenue Allocation Financing, would give the city those dollars, he said.

“We can’t go head to head with shopping malls. They’re different,” Thompson said. “We don’t know what our niche will be. That’s why we went to an adviser.”

Last month, business and city officials formed the Lake City Coalition, a nonprofit group that would bring together groups to study downtown Coeur d’Alene.

“We knew we couldn’t do it on our own,” said Nancy Sue Wallace, the group’s co-chair and president of the City Council. “Look at downtown, we have a lot of empty store fronts.”

Hiring a consultant is good news for downtown business merchants such as Patrick Jones, who owns Harvey’s clothing store and other downtown property.

“It will be interesting to hear what an expert says what’s working in other downtowns our size,” Jones said. And with the city paying the bill for a market researcher, it helps those small businesses. “We are not a huge property owner, so we don’t have our own market research.”

, DataTimes