There wasn't a big crowd for Roger Brooks' “Destination Development” presentation at Campbell's Centennial Room Wednesday night, mostly elected city officials, chamber and HDCA officials were in attendance. And that's too bad, for it was an interesting two hours of ideas and suggestions to improve downtown and what both the public sector and the business community needs to do to make that happen. Brooks is the founder and CEO of the Destination Development Association. There's too much to squeeze into the couple of minutes here, so here's one startling item of research Brooks shared:
Aside from a couple of restaurants and bars downtown, the answer would be “no.” HDCA Executive Director Aimee Sheridan highlighted that 70 percent statistic when KOZI spoke with her yesterday; she was asked what can be done to fix that:
And Sheridan said it would probably take her a couple of weeks just to process everything from Wednesday night's presentation.
Brooks related story after story of downtown districts that had been transformed; Afterward, Brooks was asked to rate Chelan on a scale of one to ten compared with the downtowns he talked about:
Brooks' presentation was sponsored by the city, the chamber, Visit Chelan County and the Chelan Douglas Regional Airport Authority.