After a brief hiatus, Owensboro’s We Are Downtown group is getting back together.
The organization — comprised of business owners, property owners and those who simply want to see downtown Owensboro succeed — met up last week for the first time in two years.
“We’ve all been talking about it for several months now. We knew we needed to get the group back together,” said Debi Ford, owner of Simply Chic Home Accents and former chairperson for the group. “There are so many new businesses downtown, and we want to make sure we’re all on the same page.”
In the past, We Are Downtown worked together to address issues and submit recommendations to city and county commissioners regarding downtown Owensboro. The organization would often come up with ideas for events, such as the downtown holiday stroll, and work with local government leaders to bring those ideas to life.
Ford said We Are Owensboro decided two years ago to let the City of Owensboro take the reins due to financial and insurance-related burdens the group couldn’t cover. Unfortunately, activity and interest in the group fizzled out shortly thereafter. Now, they’ve got the ball rolling again.
“We need to take it back,” Ford said.
The organization will have to figure out how to promote downtown Owensboro through funding means of their own, which is something Ford and her team are in talks about right now. The organization is not a nonprofit, and funding is key, Ford said.
The most important thing about the group, according to Ford, is its ability to promote downtown Owensboro — its growth, its new breweries and bars, its increasing retail and restaurant numbers — to as many people as possible.
“We want to promote downtown at the local and state level because Owensboro is on the map now,” Ford said. “We want to throw our ideas in and make sure we’re doing everything we need to do and get our voice out there.”
Ford said We Are Downtown hopes to bring back past events, such as the holiday stroll and the downtown scavenger hunt, as those events increased foot traffic and gave residents a reason to explore and realize what downtown Owensboro had to offer.
“If they didn’t know we were here, they knew it after that,” she said.
We Are Downtown plans to meet once a month as they work to get all the logistics figured out and officers voted in. Some of the issues the group has already discussed include a lack of parking, the cleanliness and safety of the two downtown parking garages, and signage promoting the downtown area.
As mentioned by Ford, downtown Owensboro has come a long, long way in the last five years. Smothers Park, the Owensboro Convention Center and the two riverfront hotels are just a few of the highlights that are starting to turn heads from those who live outside of Owensboro.
But that momentum needs to keep going in order to make downtown Owensboro a true success story.
“It’s amazing. People are wanting to visit Owensboro now. We keep getting more and more businesses here,” Ford said. “There are some empty buildings available that are privately owned, so there’s not much we can do about that. But we’d love to see someone in all of them.”
