Some thoughts ...

Use political grassroots organization principles for documenting the LEW region, informing its residents about the positives of regionalism, selling the LEW to outsiders, and possibly raising money to fund programs and/or small business incubators.

Tools

• Monthly or bi-monthly or quarterly meetups (face-to-face networking) at the community or zip code level.
• Annual regional summit.
• Small online donations ($100 or less) to fund the annual summit or small business programs. Introducing money, however, could be problematic.
  • Accountability.
  • Fairness in how its distributed across the region.
• Feet on the street - visiting businesses, organizations, etc. personally.
• Web site - blog/wiki - for creating and organizing content, discussions, scheduling, alerting, etc.
  • Only costs incurred:
    • $10/month hosting fee.
    • Approx $35/year for domain name registration.
    • Technical expertise to design, program, and maintain site would be volunteered.
• Mashups.
  • Combine data with maps, such as showing all the brownfields, vacant buildings, etc. available in the region. Map real estate information.

Documenting the region

Brake the process down to the zip code level. Every zip code would be covered. At least one person would be assigned to document one zip code. If more than person wants to cover a zip code, fine. The individuals should coordinate their efforts to maximize their time. If a person wants to cover more than one zip code, that's acceptable too. But no zip code should go undocumented. And each zip code area needs to be thoroughly documented.

The documentation for each zip would include :

• Neighborhoods
• Businesses
• Religious institutions
• Parks
• Hospitals
• Non-profit orgs
• Schools
• Events/festivals
• Vacant buildings and lots
• And anything else deemed important or interesting.

Upload photos and videos to sharing sites like flickr and YouTube. The images and photos can be imported into the LEW blog/wiki Web site mentioned above.

Include everyone

Employ ideas from Wisdom of the Crowds : Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations.

Input is needed from a wide variety of people, including:

• Business owners
• Artists
• Religious leaders
• Historians
• Educators
• Laborers
• Technologists
• Environmentalists
  • Need to be good stewards of the environment
  • Cannot develop every square inch of land in the name of improving the region
  • Strike a balance between new development and preserving habitat
    • Reuse existing property and vacant buildings
    • Buy land to be preserved for nature
      • If a wetland or a woodlot is destroyed by a developer, then that developer must buy land of at least equal size or value elsewhere in the region that gets handed over to a preservation group so that it's preserved from development. 50 acres destroyed here by a developer, then 50 or 100 acres saved elsewhere by the same developer.

Buy local

Philosophy

The concept of "buy local" cannot be an extremist viewpoint, otherwise it could deter outside investment. Chain stores are a fact of life, but it seems the small, local, independent business owners are disappearing from our landscape.

People will say it's about price competition. If a local business cannot offer goods or services at a reasonable price, then customers will go to a chain that can.

Much like development vs the environment, a balance needs to be created between the chain stores and local business owners. Otherwise, our region will continue to lose its identity, and we end up looking like every other Sprawlsville in the country.

BALLE

Business Alliance for Local Living Economies

Web site for BALLE is http://www.livingeconomies.org

Ann Arbor has a chapter called Think Local First. Toledo is forming a chapter. More are needed in the region, and they need to communicate with each other as part of this Lake Erie West region.

A solution could be as simple as informing the public as to who the local businesses are. Chain store names are easier for us to remember and recognize. We see their stores in other communities, and we may see their ads on TV or in magazines. It's easy and convenient for us to think only about chain stores. It's less to remember. Shopping a big chain store could mean fewer trips or stops with our automobile.

The public needs to be educated on why it's important to buy from local businesses at least sometimes by comparing the amount of money that remains in the region when buying from a local business versus a chain. Track the life of the "dollar" when its spent at a local business versus a chain store.

Westgate case study

We need someone or some group to produce a report detailing the life of the Westgate shopping area.

• List all the businesses that have existed at some point in Westgate and what they did.
• For the ones that closed, give reasons why.
• Document changes in that area: neighborhoods, other businesses, traffic, etc.

Westgate is interesting because it's a great example of reuse. Instead of abandoning the shopping area and building on farmland, the owners decided to start over on the same property.

The new Westgate development, however, may have underachieved when it comes to supporting local businesses. A couple local businesses that were in the old Westgate will remain in the new development, but many of the old local businesses were priced out of the new Westgate.

Why didn't the Westgate owners, Abbell Credit Corporation, offer the local businesses a reduced lease rate for the first year, maybe at the same rate they paid in the old development, and then incrementally increase their lease rate over a three-year period until the local businesses were paying the same rate as a new tenant? In other words, give the old tenants a chance to survive in the new development. If they cannot survive, then a new tenant, probably a chain, would easily take their place.

New developments should not live 100% by the phrase "Whatever the market will bear." That's fine for bringing in chains, but why not give the local business owners a chance to see what they can do by either offering temporarily reduced lease rates or by allowing the local business owners to defer full payments until a later time, dependent upon the local business's success? If taxpayer-funded incentives are given to developers, then developers need to give some consideration to supporting our local businesses.

Urban planning

February 2007 Toledo Talk thread : Insights Into A Lively Downtown.

Small and large communities need to focus on their historic downtown areas and not only on continuing to spread outward. Communities in the Lake Erie West region should share with each other the ideas that have and have not worked for them when it comes to redeveloping their downtowns. They should share their visions and future plans for their downtowns.

We should encourage residents to take day trips to other communities in the region. Once a month or once a quarter, a person could spend a day or half a day in a town that person rarely visits or maybe has never visited.

This is where documenting the region at the zip code level and storing that info on a Web site can help. It can promote communities. Such information can cause interest in other communities among the LEW residents. A Monroe resident could spend a Saturday afternoon visiting Bowling Green and vise versa.