Business View Civil Municipal June 2023

126 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 4, ISSUE 6 he continues. “We work with utilities to ensure that we have adequate capacity to serve future areas of the city – whether that’s for industrial or residential. In 2003, the city purchased 60 acres of land for future manufacturing and industrial development. In doing so, we also installed streets, infrastructure and fiber to accommodate future growth. We take on those projects that spur development and business growth.” During the COVID-19 pandemic, the City of Neenah, like many others across the country, had to confront the potentially damaging ripple effects of closing businesses and attendant job losses. “When COVID hit, we worked with our local and regional partners to see what we could do to provide businesses with the resources they may need,” Schmidt recounts. “We created a directory of roughly 400 small businesses within Neenah and began to reach out to them. Are they laying people off? Do they have to close down because of statewide protocols? One of the creative ideas the city implemented -- with the lockdowns and prohibitions against going into public spaces such as restaurants -- was a modification to a local ordinance that made it easy for local businesses to either expand outside, like in a parking lot, or for downtown businesses, on the sidewalk. This is something that our council supported, and it worked very well. Another effort on our part was to communicate with these businesses to get them the resources they needed. For example, Winnebago County created a business loan program, but not a lot of businesses knew about it. We wanted to be the conduit between available resources and these businesses.” Also helping to spur Neenah’s development and business growth through both good times and bad is Future Neenah, a non-profit, civic organization, originally incorporated in 1983 by some local community members to foster improvements in Neenah’s central city district to help make it a more vibrant, appealing, and economically viable destination. “Because of their forethought, downtown Neenah became a launching pad for success,” says Sara Hanneman, Assistant Executive Director for Future Neenah. The nascent group worked to install street-scaping downtown, i.e. benches and lampposts; they recruited new businesses; and they worked with local property owners to obtain master leases. “After they achieved that success in the central city, they had a choice to disband or carry on to encompass the entire community.” Luckily for one and all, Future Neenah decided to move ahead. Today, the organization’s portfolio includes economic development, community partnerships, and community events. “We’re sort of a cross between a chamber of commerce and a visitor’s bureau,” Hanneman quips. In 2001, business and property owners in downtown Neenah petitioned the city to create a business improvement district (BID), under the Wisconsin Act 184, wherein municipalities are authorized to create such districts upon the request of local stakeholders. The city-created BID is administered as a cooperative partnership between the City of Neenah and Future Neenah. Its goal is to protect public and private