City Center Partnership holds fifth annual meeting
By John Temple Ligon
Temple@TheColumbiaStar.com

Terry Brown, CEO of Edens & Avant, speaks at the fifth annual meeting of CCP.

Matt Kennell, executive director of the City Center Partnership (CCP), welcomed the members to their fifth annual meeting at the Columbia Marriott. All told, the CCP's business improvement district (BID) has 347 property-owning members, who tax themselves to support the BID.

Kennell early on thanked the three sponsors of the meeting: Marriott Hotel, First Citizens Bank, and Edens & Avant.

Jim Apple, chairman of CCP and CEO of First Citizens Bank, thanked Columbia City Council for recently voting to authorize the BID for another five years. He cited works-in-progress such as the Keenan Fountain on the plaza in front of the Columbia Museum of Art, the Bethel AME Church's conversion into a cultural center, the second phase of Main Street cosmetic improvements, and the conversion of the Palmetto Building into a Sheraton Hotel.

The year's completed projects worth noting included the return of the Marriott Hotel, the occupancy of 1520 Main Street condominiums and Barringer Building apartments, the pocket park next to Tapp's, and two major high-rises, the Meridian Building and the headquarters for First Citizens Bank.

Don Bomer, manager at the Marriott, received the Order of the Magnolia for his accomplishments and contributions in the past year.

Frank Lourie of Lourie's was recognized as a Main Street stalwart.

The main speaker for the occasion was Terry Brown, CEO of Edens & Avant. With over 170 shopping centers, Edens & Avant has regional offices in Boston, Washington, Atlanta, Miami, besides the corporate headquarters in Columbia. Other offices are located in Charlotte, Orlando, Cleveland, Richmond, and Jackson, Miss.

Brown began by projecting the American population gain in the next 25 years, 70 million. For the sub-section of the country called the Piedmont, an area running from Birmingham through Atlanta and the western Carolinas, terminating in western Virginia, Brown predicted 7 million more people in 25 years, to include 3.1 million new homes and 3.4 million new jobs. Columbia was seen on the edge of the Piedmont population projection.

Brown lamented the lack of retail and entertainment on Columbia's Main Street and compared it to what is found in Greenville and Chattanooga and Gainesville, three comparable cities with three more successful downtowns.

Downtown Greenville has 60 restaurants, 45 new ones since 1992. Chattanooga's downtown has done so well its mayor took the gains as political momentum and won a seat in the U.S. Senate. Gainesville spurred extraordinary private investment to include 24 buildings by one person.

Brown showed demographic depiction charts, and Columbia came out ahead of each of the three success stories in per capita income and the like. In other words, Columbia's Main Street has no excuses. But it has no leadership with vision, apparently.

Ten obstacles are in the way for Main Street to take off: (1) challenging economics of small-scale retail; (2) lack of declared focus or priorities with maybe too many competing projects under way; (3) population base too small; (4) downtown Columbia fails to form an ideal merchandising mix such as Washington's Georgetown; (5) no merchandising plan leaves Main Street with incoherent mix; (6) not enough vibrant public spaces; (7) lack of customer-oriented parking accommodation (valet parking, for instance) exacerbates the parking problem and its system of penalties; (8) downtown is too intermittent, too interrupted, like the locations of the library and the post office, both cut off from Main Street by Assembly Street; (9) lack of coherent directional signage; (10) capital or lack thereof, and the best form of public assistance, tax-increment financing (TIF), is currently the center of a $6 million argument between the city and the county.

In the state of California, there are 133 deals supported by $3.3 billion in tax-increment financing.

Brown concluded by saying the obvious once more: Downtown Columbia is missing a thriving retail component.