Community Spotlight: Main Street America’s Field Team Gets Back on the Road

After over a year of being grounded at her home office in New Hampshire, Main Street America’s Senior Director of Revitalization Programs and long-time Road Warrior Kathy La Plante finally got back on the road to visit Main Street communities in May. Through a partnership with Main Street Iowa, Kathy has visited 18 Main Street communities across the state and will visit all 55 Main Street Iowa communities between this year and next year. These visits will give Accredited Main Street Iowa programs the opportunity to celebrate and evaluate their progress and determine what they need to continue improving their downtowns in recovery. Keep reading to learn more about what Kathy has experienced in her visits so far, how the downtowns have been impacted by COVID, and other highlights from the field. 

A Day in the Life

Kathy typically starts her day in a new Iowa Main Street community at 8am by hosting meetings with a wide group of Main Street stakeholders. She gathers with Main Street committees to get a sense of the community’s overarching downtown strategy and speaks with board leadership, city officials, and other elected leaders to get a range of perspectives on the program. After lunch with the Main Street program’s Executive Director, Kathy gets a tour of the downtown to see the Main Street for herself and meet local business owners. After a final meeting with the Executive Director, Kathy quickly gathers her thoughts and reports out her observations and recommendations to the Board of Directors at the end of day. By 6pm, Kathy is on her way to the next town to start the process all over again. 

While each visit is differs depending on the community, Kathy focuses her work around identifying challenges and technical assistance opportunities to help the Main Street programs progress, as well as developing and fine-tuning programming around their Transformation Strategies and the Four Points of the Main Street Approach. For many communities in Iowa, Kathy helped communities think through how to expand programming related to outdoor recreation or determining how an agriculture strategy fits into economic vitality, design, organization, and promotions efforts.

Other typical areas of focus are creating volunteer engagement and fundraising plans, as well as ensuring a program’s committees, working groups, board, and staff have a shared understanding of the Main Street’s strategy. In most cases, Kathy said that Main Street programs need to focus on the Organization Point, with fundraising, volunteer development and public relations, as COVID cancelled many programs’ special events and fundraisers. Kathy also works closely with Main Street Boards to ensure they have a succession plan in place, job descriptions, and other resources to help strengthen the group. 

Main Street Successes During COVID

Kathy approached her visits with a mixture of “excitement and nerves” after a year of only seeing communities through Zoom calls. She wasn’t sure what she would encounter in her first few tours of 2021, but she was happy to find that only a few of the communities she visited had lost businesses. In fact, most downtowns were struggling to find locations to place the growing number of small and micro-businesses. In Main Street Waterloo, for example, 16 businesses have opened downtown since the pandemic. 

The success of local small businesses continued to impress Kathy in her visits. In one of the first communities Kathy toured, she found out that sales tax revenues more than doubled in just the fourth quarter. Some retailers in town said 2020 was one of their best years yet. She even found that some Main Street programs had excess funds in their budgets, which allowed them to work with local governments and other partners to underwrite gift card programs, issue grants, and provide other monetary support to small businesses. 

“We always say that Main Street organizations are things that will get downtowns through the hard times, and 2020 was the perfect case of that. We did all we could do support businesses and communities through hard times, and it paid off,” Kathy said.

River Towns, Pop-Up Boutiques, and Snaking Alleys: Highlights from Across the State

From checking out unique shops in Elkader (including a spa with an infrared sauna!) to exploring a street in Mt. Vernon that closes for sledding in the winter, Kathy got to experience a variety of Main Street communities. “These towns all have their own unique assets, and you can find something very individualized and different from any other community at each place. That’s what I really enjoy about these visits,” Kathy said. 

In Mason City, Kathy visited a struggling shopping mall at the edge of downtown that’s trying to connect to the district by building an outdoor stage facing the Main Street’s plaza. The mall has already turned a former department store into an arena with an ice-skating rink, and they’re building an indoor space where they can host other events. 

Kathy also enjoyed checking out Iowa’s Mississippi River towns, like Dubuque, Keokuk, Burlington, and Lansing. While flooding can be a challenge for these towns, Kathy was impressed by environmental innovations demonstrated in West Union: to avoid rainwater running off into a nearby creek and increasing the risk of flooding, their downtown streets are made up of porous pavers so the water gets absorbed into the ground. The downtown also implemented a unique geothermal heating and cooling project in their district to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Kathy toured a range of properties that were rehabbed thanks to Main Street Iowa’s Challenge Grant program for brick-and-mortar building projects downtown. In Snake Alley in Burlington, Kathy saw lots of great preservation projects, upper-story rehabs, and unique retail shops. This winding alley was named the #1 Odd Spot in Ripley's Guide to the Curious Corners of America. One of the main highlights was a pop-up dog boutique in the upper mezzanine level of a coffee shop called Wiggle Butts…a store for mutts! 

“I loved being back in the communities and seeing people face-to-face. It’s fun getting an in-depth knowledge of these communities that I wouldn’t have known otherwise.”

Interested in taking your commercial district revitalization program to the next level? Email us at mainstreet@savingplaces.org to explore how our team can be of support in your efforts.