It appears that a number of things have not gone well for the Pennsylvania Main Street program the last few years. Severe budget cuts and the loss of a designated specific line item in the Commonwealth budget have hurt the program. The number of Main Street programs across the state decrease annually, as local budgets shrink along with the Commonwealth’s budget.

To complicate the system, the designation of Keystone Community Programs have lagged along with awarding almost 30 million dollars in designated program funding allotment. At a recent regional meeting of Main Street Managers, there was discussion concerning what qualified as funds that were matched to count as statistical evidence for success (Commonwealth dollars leveraged). It became evident as we discussed the low performance levels of the communities that there was no money awarded in the last few years needed to create a match.

A lot of “Catch 22”s are starting to come together, as the program appears headed for extinction. The Main Street Program is a process and is normally looked at in 5-year periods for stated goals and objectives. Each year the project is adjusted to make the goals and the objectives more relevant to where the committee progressed in the revitalization process. The program cannot be “turned off” and then “turned on” a couple of years later. One year builds on the year before to implement a four-point strategy that has proven to be effective in revitalizing downtowns nationally.

The elimination of administrative funds has been particularly detrimental to attempts for the community to save some of the programs. There may be a ray of sunlight on that issue because when researched it came to everyone’s attention that the Main Street law and the Elm Street law both provide for administrative funding to be awarded annually.

The Keystone Communities program tied program grants to a community that developed a Keystone Community plan, become designated and received program project grants. The qualifications for the program were onerous because there was a five-year funding requirement to go along with the five-year goals and objectives. In many cases boroughs cannot commit money past the annual budget. This requirement for five years of administrative funding and (as I understand it) no administrative dollars, as a part of the grant budget, made it difficult to finance a program. In other words to have access to the bricks and mortar money, the person that is hired by the community as a main street manager needs to be fully paid by the local community.

What was interesting was there were guidelines saying that a main street manager could be a 65 percent employee and could be the code enforcement official. That means the 65 percent of the employee time should be allotted to the main street activity. This enables a community to get access to the project grants. If this is not complicated enough… it appears that communities that have no plan but have a project are now getting funding. While the main street programs are out seeking to document their existence to enable them to get a designation that appears was late in coming for many communities, others get communities project funding. 

Another program that was cut was the Community Revitalization Program (CRP). This was known as WAM’s in the past, but the last iteration was CRP money. This is legislatively designated dollars to communities. Some people said the allocation was too political but from what I saw in most cases, it went for projects in the community that could supply a match. This program helped those seeking to do a single project that fell short on the cash requirements.

The main street project money seems to have replaced the CRP funding. Although some communities seek to follow the process, they now have to compete on a merit basis for the money that is allocated for main street revitalization processes. This is a good technical explanation of what is occurring, but the long and the short of it is that it really is not an advantage to go through the main street process, and it appears it is better just operate as a program out there looking for money.

This is the perfect storm to eliminate the program. I believe the program has merit as it has shown to work in the past with towns like Allentown, Phoenixville, Lewisburg, Brookville among others. I think it is worth the time to explain to legislators the value of the program.

I mentioned a couple of months ago in this column that the main street managers are forming a committee to try to draw attention to the fact that the program is dying. Main Street has been a vital part of the Commonwealth’s economic development strategy since the early ‘80s and has provided results. There is a need to continue the program at funding levels that exceed what was allocated this year. 

Barry Cassidy is a freelance grant and economic development consultant. He can be reached at barrycassidy@comcast.net.