NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — Debra Teufel with the Hutchinson/Reno County Chamber of Commerce said the next step in the Downtown Master Plan process should be coming this week.
"The last year has been taking a look at our built assets," Teufel said. "We employed Olsson Studios to do that. Then, taking this really built structural environment, with a fairly good economy churning through it, and how do we optimize it and make it a well oiled machine? We had a Zoom call last week, where the city council and the planning commission got to visit with Olsson Studios. Ken Boone from Olsson gave a very short synopsis of where they have come so far with this plan they have drafted."
Teufel thought she might see the action steps from the plan as soon as Wednesday, so they can move to implementation in 2024.
"Then, you have to have someone, every day that wakes up and their job is to redevelop downtown and that they use this action plan as their steps to move forward," Teufel said. "That's what we'll be doing in 2024. We are very fortunate that, when we entered into this partnership for downtown about four and a half years ago, we said, okay, we will take on the promotion and marketing of downtown and kind of holding the glue together of the downtown Hutch revitalization partnership, but this still has to be a partnership with the city. In the initial years, there wasn't a lot of funding that came with that, but last year, we were able to get a commitment from the city for a half time downtown person and this year, in the city's budget, they have budgeted for us to have a full time person, whose job every day is to wake up thinking about downtown, so we have hired Sarah Diamond."
Diamond will officially be the full time Downtown Hutch manager in 2024.
"It was good to see, just those light bulb moments with city council last week," Teufel said. "They see their role as very important. I think part of this master plan is going to talk about some tools that we need to have in place to make sure we're ready for redevelopment. There's even been talk about a possible STAR bond project that could help with some just really catalyst projects in downtown. The STAR bond, we can talk about that more, it really has to attach itself to a significant tourism attraction."
As an example, STRATACA was part of a STAR bond project a few years ago. It wasn't clear as of this week what tourism project might qualify for those future funds.
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