The City of Owensboro approved a municipal order Tuesday for A+ Leadership, LLC to study economic growth in downtown Owensboro and make recommendations to facilitate continued downtown development. This $80,000, one-year contract is something Mayor Tom Watson believes will pay off, as the local consulting company determines Owensboro’s next best move for downtown development and livability.
A+ Leadership offers consulting and strategic planning and is owned by former City Commissioner David Johnson and former Downtown Development Director Fred Reeves.
Watson said the City hired the local consulting company to develop a strategic initiative to help Owensboro’s downtown progress and livability plan move forward. Currently, City officials do not have the time or means to move forward with the plan, Watson said, so the need for a professional consulting company was dire.
“In January of this year, I made a big part of my state of the City [speech] to do everything we could to begin the process of completing the three-legged stool. With downtown, it’s density and population, residency and activity. After 11 months, I can pretty much say that we haven’t done a thing except move a couple pieces of property around to try and begin that process of concentrating on the downtown development.”
After the idea to hire a consulting company was brought to Watson, it didn’t take long for him to see the benefits in hiring the same company who’d spearheaded much of the City’s 2018 OBKY project, focusing on numerous downtown initiatives — many of which have come to fruition.
“One of the members is a former City commissioner and the other is a former downtown development revitalization director. This is going to put the [focus] on them to think about what we could do to finish out this project downtown,” Watson said.
Watson made an example of Louisville’s 4th Street Live! — a public event he said was popular during its first two years only to cool down dramatically after — saying he didn’t want downtown Owensboro to succumb to a similar fate with its downtown progress.
“The people that were downtown that they thought were going to supplement the 4th Street Live project would go home after work — they’d go to soccer, baseball, football, whatever it was and the numbers just started to dwindle,” he said. “This is not unique to 4th Street Live. A lot of times, when downtown development is done, it does very well in the day during work hours, but people go home. But the thought is — can we get folks to live downtown?”
Watson said the City didn’t have the extra staff to work on the downtown project full-time as all department heads were constantly working.
“We hire consultants quite often at City Hall when we don’t have enough employees or talent to manage this function,” he said. “I have confidence in these two gentlemen who are Owensboro people all the way to the end.”
Private consultants will be able to accomplish things elected officials can’t, such as pushing things through without a vote of approval and offering more cadence toward projects they feel will succeed, Watson said.
With 14 empty buildings downtown and a handful of city commissioners and a mayor who only work part-time for the City of Owensboro, Watson said he had full faith in A+ Leadership to see the City’s plan through, and to target the demographics needed to make downtown Owensboro thrive — namely, the millennial generation, he said.
“Millenials, as a general rule, don’t want to buy a big house — they want 1,000 or 1,200 square feet. They’re not interested in buying a lot of cars. They want to park it once and walk the rest of the evening,” he said. “So that’s what we’re looking for. We’re going to have some condos — not like the Enclave — but condos and then some brownstones. It’s a plan that can happen, but we just need some group working with the Chamber of Commerce and the EDC (Economic Development Corporation), and we’ll be monitoring it.”
