Main Street program meet held in Chelan

Colfax's Unified Executive Director Valoree Gregory last week attended the sixth annual Revitalize WA Preservation and Main Street conference in Chelan. The program, put on by the Washington Trust for Historic Preservation and the Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation, was attended by Washington's 32 Main Street communities and several others.

“It was good. There were lots of people; I didn't realize it was that big,” Gregory reported. “There were communities trying to become part of the Main Street program, and lots of people from all over the state of Washington and even Oregon.”

Gregory said more than 400 people attended the three-day conference April 25-27. She said it included break-out workshops and classes. One of the programs was Main Street 101, which was a required workshop for all new communities to the Main Street program. Colfax earned the Main Street designation in December 2015.

“They told us what we needed to do and all the reports we need to hand in,” Gregory said.

Gregory told the Gazette a quarterly report is due, and “it's quite extensive.” She said it includes documenting all of the businesses on Main Street, the number of employees in each business and the number of apartments on Main Street and how many occupants are in each, as well as if any are vacant, among other things.

“It's good for us to know that information, but it is pretty time consuming,” Gregory said. “It's a lot of work. It's not as easy as people think it is, but we're hoping it pays off for Colfax.”

Gregory said she had the opportunity to interact with other communities in the Main Street program and get ideas from them.

“I talked to some other communities that do First Fridays, and we're going to do First Thursdays,” she said. “They gave me some ideas, and said to just keep it simple and fun for people and don't overwhelm your volunteers.”

The First Thursday program will be a once-a-month program on the First Thursday of every month designed to get people downtown and shopping locally.

Gregory said there was also a program that taught about “events that just suck the life out of you.”

“They said, if you don't have to have an auction, don't,” she said.

She said a lot of the programs focused on the revitalization of downtown buildings and information about grants and matching funds. She said Colfax got a mention for one of its programs.

“'Ghost towns happen when you don't shop local' was one of the pictures on the screen,” Gregory said, noting the St. Ignatius haunted hunts were mentioned and that the community continues to play off that event. “One person said, 'I wish I had an abandoned hospital.' All the creative things we're doing were kind of mentioned, too.”

Gregory said she was surprised by some of the communities involved in the Main Street program.

“We were one of the smaller towns,” she said. “I had assumed they were all small towns, and that's not true.”

She said Seattle and Tacoma are listed as Main Street communities, and learning this helped her to realize that many of the towns and cities in the program face different struggles.

“We have way different challenges than a town that sits on a lake,” she said. “But a lot of communities would love to be positioned where we are, too, having 10,000 cars coming through every day. They have different challenges, too.”

Gregory said one thing she noted in her evaluation of the conference that would be useful for future conferences would be to have workshops split by population size of the Main Street communities.

“I noted in the evaluation that it would be useful to have a workshop for towns of 5,000 or less,” she said.

The next Main Street conference Gregory will attend is scheduled for July in Port Townsend. She said that meeting is specifically just for Main Street communities, so only 32 communities will be there this time. Main Street conferences, she said, are held quarterly, so she has three more to attend this year. She said the conferences will allow ideas to continue to flow for Colfax.