Lexington, KY - If misery does indeed love company then South Limestone merchants have plenty of businesses to commiserate with around the country.
From D.C. to Milwaukee and Columbus to Knoxville, local merchants are feeling the pinch of infrastructure work either long-planned or kick-started by funding made available from the recent presidential stimulus package.
"We initially expected to have about a year to establish ourselves prior to them doing anything out front," said Brandon
Roethel, owner of Izzy's, an Italian restaurant on the inner city 2600 block of West State Street in Milwaukee. Roethel opened his eatery in late July, only to get word less than 20 days later from a pseudo-government official to expect his road to be closed in about a week.
"I was literally the only one to receive notice prior to it happening," Roethel told Business Lexington in a phone interview. "Everybody else was either informed by me or informed by contractors onsite after they had already started work. So that's what made it a real - I don't know the word - fiasco, I guess."
State Street stretches from an affluent area near the architecturally significant Milwaukee Art Museum on Lake Michigan west through the downtown area past the city's two arenas, its performing arts center, an engineering institute and a daily newspaper, and into a rundown and oft-avoided inner city neighborhood long infested with gang and drug activity - and starting in late July, Izzy's restaurant.
"It's difficult to get here the way it is. It's not the most highly sought-after area in Milwaukee, so it's a task to get people here in the first place, so to tell them they've got to walk through mud and muck and everything else kind of hinders them even further," he said.
Ten blocks of West State have been torn-up and traffic is down to one-way until the winter. His side of West State is the first to undergo street and sidewalk work; come spring, the other side will have its turn.
"According to them, they weren't able to plan. I literally received about a week's notice, a week-and-a-half that this was happeningÖ(I got an e-mail saying) the federal government got in contact with us and the project needs to be started this year or we won't receive federal funding. And this was the first stimulus money Milwaukee's received, so they wanted to get on top of it so they wouldn't lose stimulus money and have any further money questioned," Roethel said.
Two hundred miles down I-75 from Lexington, merchants on the 100 block of South Gay Street in downtown Knoxville haven't seen any traffic other than construction vehicles pass by since February, and they won't again until August. But passersby are left with no doubt that the street means business as a large red, black and orange banner greets them stating "WE ARE OPEN, Come Join the Block Party."
The banner, paid for by Knoxville's Central Business Improvement District, was an outcome of meetings with the block's merchants and displays designs for the new streetscape, as well as a categorized listing of every business on the block.
"The city has been very proactive," said Stanton Webster, general manager of Nama Sushi Bar at 135 South Gay. "Even before they started the program, we had some collaborative meetings where they brought all the business owners in this block in."
Stanton's restaurant on the cosmopolitan block containing high-density residential lofts, art galleries, creative industry, retail and dining has offered valet parking for its customers and other block-goers every night starting at 5 p.m. as the construction ends for the day.
Rick Emmett, Knoxville's urban growth manager, ensures project contractors leave room for the valets to operate nightly as well as maintaining sidewalks and a mid-block walkway to the other side of the street.
"What the city has done is assign somebody other than engineering, which would be me, to work with property owners to try to make sure their voices are heard," Emmett said. "I go to every construction meeting, every meeting with every subcontractor, the engineers, and try to keep impressing on folks how we're impacting those on the block. I go down there about every day or so and kind of check in to see where we are, see what's going on. I've got a blog also that's popular."
At presstime Emmett's blog, http://100blockconstructionknox.blogspot.com, had been updated 67 times in the 33 weeks construction had been underway. "People like the blog apparently," he said. "We weren't really sure, but what I was finding was I would go down the block and I would see various people down there, and I would have to say the same thing over and over again. And occasionally I'd forget and leave some part of it out. Just to get a message that is always the same, and while it is fresh on my mind (is hugely beneficial.)"
Emmett, a native of Middlesboro, graduated from the University of Kentucky in the 1970s and has been following the coverage of Lexington's South Limestone project and the associated strife with business owners along the corridor watching with alarm as their revenues plummet and clamoring for the city to add shifts and speed up completion.
Many have expressed dissatisfaction with the city's communication about the timing and extent of the project - or as they see it, lack thereof.
"It's almost exactly the same," he said about the Limestone and Gay Street projects. "I read the account there in the paper, I copied that and took it down and shared it with our contractors (as an example) of what might have been if we'd not done what I felt was a pretty good job of communicating with property owners and businesses on the block before we ever started the project.
"We had a series of public meetings beforehand working with the property owners, trying to find out what their concerns were going to be so we could address them on the front end," he noted. Emmett has found similarities with what he addressed in Knoxville showing up in media reports about South Limestone. "It's the same issues: it's delivery, it's getting customers in there, it's letting others know that businesses are still open. It looks like total destruction down there, but we're working (and the public knows that)."
Webster took over at Nama shortly before the construction on his block began, but he attended information meetings leading up to the closure just as others at his restaurant had prior to his arrival.
"It's tough any time you have to shutdown a street for an extended period of time, but to get the improvements accomplished, pretty much this is what had to happen. But they've done an admirable job keeping us all in the loop on it," he said.
The 100 block of Gay Street had two different levels of road and sidewalks, one built on pillars 10 to 15 feet on top of the other, according to Emmett.
"Once they started pulling the asphalt back, I think they wish they found this much stuff in (Al Capone's) tomb," Webster, the restaurateur, said. "Every day comes another eight challenges, and they've handled it great. It's a tough project to see happen on one hand, but the finish line gets closer every day, and in terms of knowing what's going on, I have zero complaints."
Webster estimates a 10 to 15 percent drop off in business since the work began. But to try to prevent a more serious decline in business, Emmett helped pull together advertisements as the work got underway. "The folks on the block at least know we're trying to let people know they're open.
"The first couple weeks we had ads on radio and TV, we were constantly running ads that construction has started but businesses are still open, come down and visit these businessesÖ we're probably going to have to do that again around the Christmas season," Emmett said.
Keeping in mind the needs of the businesses and large number of residents on the block, Emmett said his crews work six days a week from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. The city also hosts an event called First Friday on Gay Street and the nearby Market Square, which attracts thousands to the area and reminds citizens business is still going on in the 100 block. Emmett said he also looked at keeping one side open, as is being done in Milwaukee, but quickly realized that would double the amount of time it took the project to get done.
Milwaukee's Roethel didn't quite see the same olive branch extended his way. In fact, he had to trim the branches that the city did offer.
Roethel's council representative offered him use of a city lot one block away from his restaurant for patrons to park in, but that was "really a whole other story. It was basically vacant for the last 17 years. I went in there and spent three days and about $500, besides labor, to cut down trees, remove anything from syringes to crackpipes to booze bottles Ö and then I was presented with a lease by the city that they wanted me to pay $50 a month and hold insurance on it and yada, yada, yada, which I kind of thought was a joke. So, at this point I haven't signed any lease and we're just using the parking lot via the alderman's permission," he said.
"I looked at that and said, 'That's a joke, guys.' I already spent my money there, cleaned the place up and I was actually told by the city that there wasn't trees out there and they didn't know what I was talking about."
But Roethel said he's been optimistic about the project, especially since local media coverage of his situation has led local business organizations to have him cater lunches and meetings. "It's, to a degree, made up for the foot traffic we've lost. But I can definitely say without that support we would probably be closing during construction, to be honest with you."
Webster said the Knoxville officials have gone the extra mile, but probably needed to, considering the risks of this project. "This has been a project that was on the books in the previous administration of the city, and it just kind of kept getting pushed back and pushed back. And the current administration was the first administration that had the heart for this kind of project and felt like they could pull it off and not get run out of town."
That feeling may have been lingering from an early project just up the street. "We did have a similar experience here years ago," Emmett said. "Ten years ago we shut down a block of downtown on Gay Street, the 500 block actually, and every single business closed. It was shutdown for about a year, and so we learned then that you can't just start construction, ignore everything and expect it all to go on."