Business View City & Municipal | August 2022

115 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 3, ISSUE 7 entrepreneurs through MKF properties. The HUB innovation centre will focus on entrepreneurs who want to take their idea or business to the next level. It is scheduled to go live this summer in the former opera house in downtown Rutland. The historic downtown serves as a core area for community events and is almost completely occupied with retail shops and restaurants. While the city looks into drastically changing the streetscapes in the downtown core to be more walkable, bikeable, and allow for patios and a more visually appealing and user- friendly experience, property owners are taking advantage of incentives to renovate and turn upper levels into apartments. One such owner, Green Mountain Power, renovated what was once a blighted and unoccupied retail space and turned it into their Green Mountain Power Energy Innovation Centre. About a decade ago, when the power company took over the area, they brokered a deal with the city to locate a portion of their state-wide operations in Rutland. Allaire admits, “It was quite a major event to tell you the truth. Some of the operations for the whole state are located in Rutland, so we’re very pleased about that. Green Mountain Power have been great partners with the City of Rutland. I meet with the CEO on a regular basis, and she’s promised that going forward Rutland will be a center of activity for their company and for their employees.” Green Mountain Power is also continuing to work towards making the city a hub for green energy through solar power. Allaire notes, “Certainly they are very aggressive in their trying to move away from fossil fuels and move into the green energy sector. I think that’s really our main thrust as a city going forward in that area. We’re pretty proud of that. They did a wonderful job of remediating some contamination issues that were going on with that building and really retrofitting it into a state-of-the art modern workplace. Now, it is actually going to be converted once again into the future home for the Wonderfeet Kids’ Museum – with interactive RUTLAND , VERMONT