Civil Municipal View Feb2023

67 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 4, ISSUE 2 “One of the biggest initiatives that we’re going to be facing next year is on business attraction within the retail and commercial sectors that will support the new businesses coming in,” West continues. “We want to focus our marketing on the downtown area. We demolished almost 400,000 square feet of building(s) to try and bring in new space for commercial buildings. We’re having issues when we go after retail, especially chain- type retail because they’re looking at old data on websites which doesn’t support the numbers they think they need to attract business. They’re not calling us to get updated information. West highlights further that “were redoing our website so that a lot of the information on the city’s website is current. Over the last three years, we created $13 million worth of new payroll. So we need retailers; we need sit-down restaurants, clothing stores, house goods stores, and sporting goods stores. But they’re looking at the numbers and saying we don’t support their return.” “So, we are going to work with Main Street Ravenna, which is the downtown organization, to try and do a focused marketing to attract businesses and supply them with the updated information that they need to be able to come here.” While the downtown area received a $3 million facelift in the late 1990s, to restore and preserve the city’s architecture, history, and heritage, and the Neighborhood Development Services opened a $4.6 million movie theater in 2018, which helps draw more people downtown, Mayor Seman agrees that there is more improvement needed. “Downtown needs more nurturing,” he states. “ We’re constantly working on improving things. The downtown is heavily loaded with non-profits, being the county seat, and we’d like to see more retail there.” Meanwhile, there are always new items on the city’s agenda. “We just purchased the old high school [property],” Seman notes. “They built a new high school RAVENNA , OHIO here a few years ago and we tried to market the old one and there just wasn’t the interest there for what we wanted. So, we purchased it and we’re starting some preliminary work to develop a new safety building for police, fire, and city government. Both police and fire are housed in a very old building and we want to be prepared to make sure that they’re not overcrowded. It’s time for us to take this step.” The city is also working on converting some of its older housing stock from multi-family rental back to single-family ownership. Kohl notes that much of Ravenna’s housing stock consists of homes built prior to WWII, with just a few neighborhoods built in the 1970s and ‘80s. “We are concerned with the ratio of rental to privately owned housing,” says Seman. “This past year, we’ve been able to convert a significant number of homes from multi- family back to single-family. That’s one way