Business View Civil & Municipal | Volume 2, Issue 8

71 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 2, ISSUE 8 DEMING, NEW MEX I CO “Before COVID we had been doing an awesome job of filling the empty stores downtown and we had a lot of little businesses that were popping up, but once COVID hit, we lost a lot of them and now we’ve got to go back to the business of trying to get downtown built up again,” says Deming Mayor Benny Jasso. “Cassie works really hard with our business community and anybody that’s interested in opening a business, offering anything from trying to help them find a location to all the education around making sure they’re going to be able to open up and then be successful.” There are currently a few projects on the go in the downtown core to help spur new business, including work to redo the fronts of several buildings that offer historical value. Jasso shares, “Downtown is very important to us. It’s looking really nice down there and we are starting to again focus more on having events there so that we can showcase downtown. It’s been a lot of fun to do it.” Deming’s next major project is to help encourage small business in its west end through a business incubator. “We’ve gone about purchasing all the empty gas stations that were located on the west end of town when you come off the interstate and we are going to create an incubator that allows people to come in and set up a business,” Jasso says. “The anchor tenant is going to be a brewery that the city will actually own.” The hope is that the brewery will attract people to the market, who will then have the opportunity to browse eight other businesses at the same location. The market will be built as a container park using shipping containers as storefronts. “It’s a whole different concept,” says Jasso. “We’ve seen a couple of them and we’ve visited a couple sites and have worked with the architects and we have a relationship with the UNM School of Design and Woodbury School out of California. We’ve looked at a lot of different concepts and West Side Revitalization Project Mimbres Museum