The first visible sign of change will come Monday, as the red-shirted security guards begin to bicycle around the downtown area.

Within a few months, new trash receptacles might be placed downtown. Streetlights might be painted; new, decorative lighting could be installed.

All of it is window dressing, but an important precursor of things to come.

For five years, the James Street Improvement District has ridden herd over changes in northwest Lancaster. Now, at the request of Mayor Rick Gray, the JSID has moved into downtown Lancaster, combining with the Downtown Investment District in an effort to get center city ready for the massive convention center/hotel project underway at King and Queen streets.

One of the major criticisms of the hotel/convention center project, which is being developed by Penn Square Partners and the Lancaster County Convention Center Authority, respectively, is that you can't just plop a massive, $180 million facility into the middle of a downtown and expect it to work miracles. The groundwork must be laid: Streets have to be clean and safe; retailers have to be lured to town. "We have to get ready," Gray said. And until now, there really hasn't been much of a concerted effort to do this.

Enter the JSID, which began overseeing many of the DID's functions May 1. The small things are up first, but behind the scenes, the heavy lifting will soon begin, as officials work to lure new retailers to town and make sure the city has the viable mix it needs to impress conventioneers and everyone else.

"We're looking to move quickly in the next couple months to show people that there's momentum," said Lisa Riggs, JSID executive director.

Concern in Northwest

Initially, though, there was some concern that establishing momentum downtown might slow it in the northwest.

It was the success of the JSID, bolstered by funding from Franklin & Marshall College and Lancaster General Hospital and the success of Clipper Magazine Stadium, that interested Gray.

Commercial development had given northwest Lancaster the vibe of a place to be. New trash bins made the area cleaner. New coats of paint, on everything from light poles to the homes themselves, funded via a grant program, spruced up the neighborhoods.

That, thought Gray, was exactly what the downtown needed.

But some JSID board members feared that the organization might be spreading itself too thin. "It was a little intimidating at first," said Bob Messina, board president. Money was going to be an issue; how could the organization in effect double the size of its geographic reach on a limited budget?

Gray has beat the bushes and thinks he will be able to attract additional private funding for the joint venture. That will include the dissolution of the police contract with DID.

A separate DID levy on downtown businesses has been used, in part, to pay $90,000 yearly for expanded police services in the downtown area. Gray said the city, using some of the money available as a result of Lancaster General Hospital's decision to raise its in-lieu-of-tax payment from $300,000 annually to $1.2 million, will instead cover the cost of extra downtown patrols, freeing more money for the JSID's efforts.

Everyone involved takes pains to stipulate that "downtown" money won't be spent in the northwest, nor will the JSID's new downtown focus mean less time or money spent in the northwest.

But the DID, with its specific focus on cleanliness and safety, "would have been constrained a bit" if it tried to add intensive economic development to its plate, said DID board member Michael Abel of Abel/Savage Marketing. With the JSID's involvement, "the DID board saw something bigger and better coming out of this," Abel said.

The initial projects might seem trivial in the grand scheme of things, but Riggs said they will help convey an impression, as was the case in the northwest.

Trash cans are an example. "When your trash receptacles are old, brown and off their hinges, it tells you a lot" about a community. Same with the lampposts with peeling green paint; they might as well be a metaphor for the city itself.

These are the low-hanging fruit, Riggs said. Other changes will take more time, and could pay far bigger dividends.

For even as the painting and the patrolling take place, behind the scenes the JSID will be doing a comprehensive evaluation of the retail landscape downtown: what the city has; what it doesn't; what it needs to satisfy conventioneers and everyone else.

"If you own a property downtown, you need the income stream, and [if] you're not getting a lot of looks," Riggs said, you might be tempted to lease to the first tenant that comes along, regardless of the effect it has on the greater whole. The idea, she said, is to stimulate demand, to work with retailers who might be looking for a spot in a city such as Lancaster, to allow property owners to make better choices.

Already, Riggs said, the College Row and Champion Center developments along Harrisburg Pike have "started to change the way retailers are looking at this market." JSID's role, in effect, is to assemble "an investor prospectus on downtown."

"It's a much more coherent approach," said John Fry, F&M president. "There is a $180 million investment [in the convention center] to protect and preserve now, and the city needs to make sure the public environment is first-rate and create a climate for additional investment."

And yes, Gray agrees, such an effort should have begun years ago. "But for a long time, everybody's question was, 'Are you going to have a convention center and hotel?' " he said.

Because of the litigation and fiscal uncertainties surrounding the project, "no one was focusing on what we had to do to get ready for it to open." So he approached both boards, the JSID and DID, asking them help "get downtown ready for the biggest single economic development project we have ever had and maybe will ever have."
Penn Square Partners is a limited partnership consisting of general partners Penn Square General Corp., a High Industries affiliate, and Penn Square Ltd. LLC, an affiliate of Lancaster Newspapers Inc., publisher of the Sunday News, Intelligencer Journal and Lancaster New Era.