Will $200,000 help lure firms to Main St. in Salt Lake?

Those historic buildings on Salt Lake City’s Main Street are scaring businesspeople away, David Oka says. The city’s Redevelopment
Agency chief has an idea to lure would-be shopkeepers into his downtown: a monetary carrot.

By Diane Urbani
Deseret News staff writer

The RDA can now pay for studies to determine what kinds of seismic upgrades and other renovations are needed on particular buildings,
thanks to a $200,000 newly approved allocation. The Salt Lake City Council, acting as the RDA board, agreed with Oka that retailers eyeing
Main Street needed such an incentive.

"Each study would cost between $20,000 and $30,000," Oka said, and "$30,000 would make my life very easy" by helping bring tenants
into Main’s many vacant storefronts.
Since Oka took his city job seven months ago, he’s looked for novel ways of ministering to Main’s ills. As stores closed and Olympic
tenants skipped town, he talked with scores of retailers.

"A lot of them wouldn’t even look at Main Street," fearing prohibitive renovation bills that would mount even before they moved in. The
unknown is what keeps them from considering a Main space, Oka said.
An RDA-funded study would only outline any work that needs to be done on a particular structure. The upgrading itself would have to be
paid for by the tenant or by the landlord. And the projected costs might deter a would-be retailer, Oka acknowledged. "But we have to do this
in incremental steps" toward filling the many holes on Main. A possible tenant need only send a letter of interest in a Main Street building in
order to have the RDA conduct a study of the structure’s fitness.

Oka said he’s close to signing leases with two restaurateurs who want spaces on Main Street. And Urban Barber, a men’s salon with
massage and fitness services, will open soon in the Judge building. "I just started calling (possible tenants). Out of every hundred calls, I get
maybe four or five who are interested in downtown Salt Lake."

A perceived parking shortage is another old problem plaguing Main Street, and it remains the same except for one small alteration. The
Downtown Alliance and Salt Lake City Corp. still haven’t been able to establish a uniform parking validation program in which shoppers could
enjoy free parking, whichever lot they use. Merchants and the owners of parking garages along Main "couldn’t come to an agreement," Oka
said. But the city put in some free two-hour parking where there once was none along 300 South, a k a Broadway. Last month that street was
restriped to provide some 120 diagonal spaces down its middle, from 200 East to 400 West. "The Broadway median parking experiment is
seeing considerable success," Oka said. "But the jury is still out."

City Council chairman Dave Buhler asked whether the two-hour limit on the new spaces was being enforced. He was assured that car
wheels are marked and tickets written for those who stay too long.
Providing free parking downtown "could have been the smartest thing we could have done in the past 20 years" to lure shoppers, he said.

Instead, the city has paid tens of thousands for consultants and studies of Main Street’s troubles. Every study has said that parking is plentiful
on and around Main. Still, people can’t seem to find it, so they’ve stayed away, spurring cafes and shops to depart from the downtown core.

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