Downtown Moncton Centreville Inc released their first ‘State of the Downtown‘ report today, which is an overview of the economic details of the downtown core.
Outgoing President Derek Martin says for years they were focused on getting the Downtown Centre approved, which they recently achieved.
“Moving forward we have a lot of more projects, but we’re looking at growing downtown as a whole, at this point we had a catalyst that helps us,” says Martin. “We see that in the results, we see the buzz, the optics, the perception is that people are moving downtown, people want to work downtown.”
He says the report gave them scientific facts allowing them to “make smarter decisions, speak to the community, business owners, people living downtown and then we can see what’s next as far as any specific item they want in those very general terms.”
Martin adds they spent quite a lot of time and energy focusing on getting approval for the Downtown Events Centre, and now that that’s been achieved, they’re continuing with their mandate to provide a safe, clean downtown core.
“Our job is going to become more important as we, let’s say, have 10x growth, and people walking up and down the streets, we have that much more stuff to keep clean,” says Martin. “There’s a basics [that] we have to maintain that’ll grow tremendously, but on top of that we also want to entice more businesses coming downtown.”
Incoming President Jim Dixon says they’re looking at potentially expanding the borders of the Business Improvement Area, as well as continuing to work on improving St. George Street.
