Consultants employed to enhance enterprise districts

Evanston’s Metropolis Council this week voted to spend $245,000 on consultants to develop an enchancment technique and implementation plan for the town’s 10 enterprise districts.

Ten metropolis workers members and enterprise district leaders reviewed proposals from 5 corporations that responded to the town’s request for proposals and beneficial Philadelphia-based Interface Studio, LLC for the undertaking.

Half of the undertaking price is to be lined by American Rescue Plan Act funds, the remainder from the town’s 5 energetic tax increment financing districts.

Financial Growth Supervisor Paul Zalmezak says Interface will perform “a extremely centered, neighborhood engagement and enterprise district market evaluation to enhance the standard and mixture of retail, meals and leisure choices” within the 10 enterprise districts.

These districts, he says, have seen the COVID-19 pandemic irritate present challenges together with competitors from on-line retailers, costly rents and property taxes and parking challenges.

He says the undertaking ought to develop a blueprint for tactics to implement new initiatives or improve present methods to assist with fast financial restoration and “put together us for future success.”

Interface would be the lead agency for a group that may also embody MJB Consultants, a retail planning and actual property consultancy; Ninigret Companions, an financial consulting agency, and All Collectively, a place-based artistic company that has finished some tasks for Downtown Evanston in recent times.

A presentation from Interface says the consultants’ “collective roles are to grasp the boundaries to funding, progress and alter in Evanston’s enterprise districts right this moment and push the undertaking stakeholders to assume in another way about the way forward for these areas.”

The proposal envisions a seven-month course of from Might by November that may contain focus teams, neighborhood conversations, an interactive digital workshop and neighborhood survey to develop a market plan for the enterprise districts.

The proposal, beneficial by the town’s Financial Growth Committee, was authorised with out dialogue Monday evening on the Metropolis Council’s consent agenda.