The Commonwealth has created the designation of Keystone Communities. To be eligible for grants, it is a good idea to have the plan and the designation. The designation gets you preferred status for grants. However, to have this status you need to hire someone to be your revitalization coordinator.

Raising the money to hire someone and moving forward with the initiative is a long process. I would like to put hiring a person and grants aside for a moment and discuss why it is important to have a keystone plan as the basis for your downtown revitalization.

A keystone plan reflects your communities desire to revitalize. By that, I mean that an outreach effort is conducted to ascertain the scope of the revitalization.  There is a need for the input by stakeholders in the community. The business owners, government officials, residents and property owners gather to develop goals and objectives relating to the revitalization.

The plan is based upon the Main Street four-point approach. Goals and objectives are based upon your desires to address the revitalization in areas of organization, design, promotion and economic restructuring. Sometimes, depending upon the situation, a community could look to include safe and clean as a fifth point. I included safe and clean in the Phoenixville plan because of the issues of aberrant behavior and issues relating to sanitation in the downtown.

For example, I found that one of the favorite things for a business owner or a person living above retail store on the main street to do is to dump their garbage in the street containers. A situation where the downtown seems inundated with litter is a clear sign that this kind of behavior is happening. Many may say what the problem is, but it needs to be addressed in a plan with specific remedies.

Keeping the downtown clean and free of litter could be a goal. The meat and potatoes of the plan (or the stuffed eggplant for the vegans) are the objectives that fall in behind the goal and make the plan operational. It is important to make realistic objectives in order to make the plan successful.

In some communities, there would be an immediate cry to have an anti-littering ordinance to “clean up” the downtown. Depending upon the community, that may be an option, but issues relating to hospitality practices, garbage collection and storage would not be applicable to such an ordinance. 

In order to get to the heart of the issues, all of the participants in the downtown need to be involved. The outreach effort needs to touch all stakeholders with an invitation to participate. It is through such outreach efforts that sooner or later someone will let it be known that the people on the second floor apartment are using the downtown cans as their personal garbage collection area. Solution identification is normally derived after there has been proper problem identification.

I have conducted many of these kinds of planning efforts, and I have heard one good comment spark an onslaught of participation that lead to a complete vetting of an issue. Input to the process is a key to creating a good plan. Well thought out objectives are the keys to a work plan. Developing a work plan and sticking to it is a key for a community to revitalize.

I remember in Phoenixville, having a ton of public meetings on the revitalization. Still after the work plan was implemented, people claimed to know nothing about it. There was one council meeting, two years later, when merchants started coming out of the woodwork complaining about the brick sidewalks being installed, which was a turning point. I had been in Phoenixville for about two months, and I had called a public meeting and we went over the goals and objectives in depth. It was February 11th 2004. Two years later, complaints started to emerge, lead by a merchant who claimed no one told him about the streetscape project. 

During the council meeting, the irate merchants talked about a “secret plan” and how no one knew what was going to happen to the streetscape. After he was done, I took the floor and presented a newspaper article from the Phoenix in which the merchants were quoted, and detailed a separate vote on the brick sidewalks, which was 70-0. I produced the written work plan, which was distributed to all of the merchants door to door. 

Seeking all the input, and getting all the ideas on paper and approved, clarifies what the intent and scope of the revitalization. It validates that there has been thoughtful input, and a record of process, and demonstrates that there is a method for the revitalization. A plan is the first thing and a Keystone Plan is vital to any Main Street effort in Pennsylvania.