Business View Magazine | April 2019

116 promotion, and preservation activities. With the city becoming a Main Street Community in 1984, and creating a department to emphasize downtown development in 1993, the commer- cial core of the city languished for years. “When I first started in 1999, downtown was about 80 percent vacant,” Metz recounts. “There was not much going on here. The few businesses that existed shut down at 5PM. There was no night life; there was only one restaurant and it was struggling. In 2006, we were able to garner the support of the City Council to invest in our first Comprehensive Master Plan. That plan was intended to identify strengths and weaknesses and prioritize pub- lic sector investments that we felt would spur private investment and the revitalization of downtown to the vision that we had adopted for it. In 2007, that plan was adopted after a lot of public and citizen involvement. We then created renderings of downtown based on the Master Plan to try and depict the vision that we had. This helped us articulate what we were working to achieve.” “Our office is in charge of selling that vision and trying to secure private investment,” Metz GOLDSBORO, NORTH CAROLINA