In the eyes of Jim Bowman, Moline's downtown is full of "sales waiting to happen." With the Mark of the Quad Cities and various John Deere-related tourist destinations, the city's downtown should be thriving. But even though it's had lots of big-ticket development over the past decade-plus, the city has struggled to translate its River Drive success to the south, into the city's "old" downtown, across the railroad tracks on Fifth and Sixth avenues.

In June, for instance, the Komen Quad Cities Race for the Cure brought 10,000 people to the John Deere Commons. "They were here and left," said Bowman, who is the city's new assistant city administrator for economic development, at a recent meeting of the Main Street Coordinating Committee.

But as last month's meeting shows, things are changing in Moline. It appears that the days of multiple organizations with similar purposes working separately are gone, along with a reliance only on major projects to spur economic development. Not only that, but the big-ticket items are starting to come through, as well; the first phase of the long-promised Bass Street Landing project is under construction, and the east side of the downtown is expected to get a major boost with a new Western Illinois University campus.

And at the center of it are the City of Moline and Bowman, who are showing a new level of activity in the city's downtown, from helping to coordinate the area's many stakeholders - the Property Owners Group, Renew Moline, and the Moline Centre Development Corporation - to buying property to making a monetary commitment to hiring a full-time administrator for a private downtown group.

"There is a desire by the City of Moline to bring those organizations closer together," Bowman said. "I think our commitment to downtown has increased."

The City Takes the Lead

When asked initially about why things are coming together right now in Moline, Bowman joked that it was because of him. He started his job in February, with his position essentially swallowing the duties of Economic Development Director Nancy Mulcahy and Planning Director Scott Harrington, who both left Moline city government. In addition to those departures, City Administrator Dale Iman took another job and has not yet been replaced.

But before leaving, Iman and the city's economic-development staff had already started to recognize that the city might need to take a more active role in guiding downtown's economic development. "Dale Iman was really putting a lot of that in place," Bowman said. "Dale saw the opportunity."

Those involved in Moline's downtown stress that the city hasn't been sitting idle over the past decade. "It's a matter of evolution and time," Bowman said. "Certain things had to happen in proper order."

That's the long view, that following the economic downtown of the 1980s, commitments from Montgomery Elevator/Kone and Deere & Company set the stage for future development, including the Mark and the John Deere Commons. Those, in turn, were building blocks for what's going on now.

But the fact remains that Moline downtown interests have been waiting for several years for somebody to take the lead on development outside of major projects such as Bass Street Landing.

"We've been talking about getting focused on Fifth Avenue for literally five years," said Chris Barnard, owner of Blackhawk Travel, as well as three other downtown Moline storefronts.

The challenge in Moline has been that while there are many civic organizations with an interest in downtown revitalization - Renew Moline, the Property Owners Group, and the Moline Centre Development Corporation - no group took the reins. "There hasn't been effective collaboration," Bowman said.

So Bowman has taken the lead on transforming the Moline Centre Development Corporation into a "Main Street" organization. The Main Street approach - which Rock Island has used for years - focuses on incremental development and transforming aged downtowns in four areas: design, organization, promotion, and economic restructuring. Part of the plan is to brand downtown Moline as the place for fine dining.

The Main Street system has been effective in smaller communities around the country. And the approach has been on the agenda in Moline for a long time. "We didn't have the funding to hire a Main Street manager," said Beth Lagomarcino, co-owner of Lagomarcino's and a member of the Main Street committee.

Rick Anderson, executive vice president of Renew Moline, said the approach has "always been recommended" - including as part of the Moline Centre Plan - but "it wasn't one of the recommendations that had a priority."

It does now. The Moline Centre Development Corporation (MCDC) hired the Development Association of Rock Island (DARI) for $7,200 to create an organizational plan based on the Main Street system. (See "Renaissance Rock Island Branches Out," River Cities' Reader Issue 477, May 19-25, 2004.) Dan Carmody, president of DARI, is scheduled to present findings to downtown stakeholders at a meeting on July 29.

The existing groups will still be around. (Although Anderson is retiring in the next few months, Renew Moline will continue, he said.) But the plan is to transform the MCDC into the city's Main Street program. The City of Moline has pledged between $50,000 and $75,000 a year to hire a full-time director for the organization. Bowman hopes to seat a new board of directors soon, and to have a director hired in August. "We're minimizing the risk and demonstrating our commitment by writing a check," he said.

It will be critical, Bowman said, that the new board have people with passion and a shared vision of what downtown Moline can be. That's been a problem in the past, he said: "Not everybody has embraced the same vision with the same level of passion." That has included having property owners who haven't developed or improved their buildings, leading to many vacant storefronts.

"You needed some changeover in building ownership," Lagomarcino said. That's happened in the past three years, she said, resulting in new "old downtown" storefront occupants, such as the Bier Stube, La Flama, and the Zone in the past eight months.

"You're starting to get some things happening," Barnard said. He added that current downtown property owners such as Dieter Rebitzer, who developed the current Bier Stube site with two partners, have "aggressive plans" for the area.

"We want to get the downtown area going again," Rebitzer said. "It's a great place to be."

And Bowman is supplying urgency from the city side. He seems to want to ensure that all parties recognize that things aren't just going to stay the same. Bowman quoted something a representative of Deere & Company said at a recent downtown meeting: "The train's about to leave the station. ... Those of you that want to get on board, we welcome you. But we're not going to wait."

Bowman said it's important to show all the stakeholders what can happen. "Let's see results," he said. "The sooner the better."

Barnard called Bowman "a get-things-done kind of guy. He knows how to put the packages together."

"Jim understood that there needed to be a different approach applied to the traditional downtown," Carmody said. Main Street "is a very different approach than Moline has had in the John Deere Commons area."

The Main Street Coordinating Committee has already revised the city's façade program, doubling to 50 percent the amount of improvement cost that a property owner can get in a forgivable loan. The program will have $137,000 available this fiscal year, and roughly $100,000 next year. "We tried to make it as user-friendly as possible," said one member of the group that revised the program.

"We hope to participate in that ourselves," Lagomarcino said.

The group has also made plans to upgrade the plaza in the "historic block" on River Drive between 15th and 16th streets, making it more appealing to pedestrians and more suitable to live music and special events.

Bowman also said it's important for the new Main Street organization to establish an office by rehabilitating a property in need. One person on the Main Street Coordinating Committee suggested a leapfrog approach, with the revitalization group fixing up an office, using it for a time, and then handing it over to a new tenant. (One possible location mentioned at a Main Street meeting was the Fannie May Candies store at 1532 Fifth Avenue.) The aim is to lead by example.

Bigger Fish

Bowman and the city have pushed the Main Street approach to the forefront, and that will address the incremental component that's been missing in Moline.

The city isn't ignoring the larger picture, though, and has taken a more active role in shaping downtown through bigger projects.

The city currently has $1 million in its budget to buy property using Tax Increment Financing funds. Already, the city has bought two parcels of land in the 19th Street/Fifth Avenue area - one last week at 1919 Fifth Avenue - and is negotiating with another property owner, Mike's Automotive at 428 19th Street. "It's an eyesore. It needs to be cleaned up," Bowman said. He added that the city will help the business re-locate to another site downtown.

Bowman would not say whether the city would use eminent domain to acquire properties it wants to see developed, but he didn't rule it out. Of the property the city has purchased so far, he said, "We bought it for market value."

He said that the city's involvement in property acquisition is "capturing the attention of developers. It boils down to a matter of control."

Bowman stressed that the city does not want to develop the land it's buying. "We want to be in the land-transfer business," he said. The goal for this particular area on the east of downtown is to make it a technology corridor, capitalizing on the area's good connectivity and the existing Deere & Company technology center. Another benefit would be to make the downtown gateway more attractive, "a better atmosphere for Deere & Company and their customers. What we're trying to do is retain their business."

This technology corridor would augment the new development on the eastern edge of downtown, including a Western Illinois University campus and Bass Street Landing.

Deere & Company last year donated land to Western Illinois University for its Quad Cities riverfront campus, and it could mean between 600 and 800 full-time jobs and 5,000 students, Bowman said. He called getting Western Illinois on the Moline riverfront "a century decision."

Western Illinois University President Al Goldfarb told the River Cities' Reader that the university received $200,000 at the end of the last fiscal year for planning work and $300,000 in the just-passed state budget for additional Quad Cities faculty. "It's very clear we have strong support from the governor and the legislature," Goldfarb said.

The university is hoping to get $1.5 million in the fall veto session for design and planning. If that money comes through, he said, Western will be able to establish a timetable and cost estimates for the full project. Goldfarb said the first phase of construction would probably cost $10.5 million. "It will all depend on when we can get the architectural and engineering money," he said.

Also critical will be Bass Street Landing, which has been in the works for years, but with no significant progress until this year.

In 2001, plans called for the entire project to be finished by 2003. (See "The Next Big Thing," River Cities' Reader Issue 328, June 20-26, 2001.) But that timeframe - in which commercial, recreation, parking, and residential components were to be built in a short period of time - fell through. Anderson said a lack of interest by developers in the condominium portion of the project forced a "re-examination of the whole plan. ... It became obvious that Bass Street Landing needed to be phased in."

The three phases now include the under-construction River Station - with a restaurant and retail space on the first floor, office space on the second floor, and apartments on the third floor - a hotel, and condominiums.

Construction on the River Station is now expected to be finished in October, with the opening of the Blue Ribbon chophouse on the first floor that same month. Construction on a 140-room inn is expected to get started this fall, Anderson said. "They would really like to be open this spring," he said.

Although all the new hotel isn't quite a "done deal" yet, Anderson said, everybody expects it to go forward. The condominiums remain the big question mark. There's no timeline for them yet, and it's possible that as development continues on the Moline riverfront, the residential component could be altered or sacrificed to something else.

What Moline has slowly realized is that Bass Street Landing - or the Mark, or any other major project - is not the magic bullet that will suddenly revitalize Moline's old downtown. The city's involvement appears to have translated lots of talk into action. "Moline has an awful lot of momentum downtown," Bowman said.

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