Business View Magazine | April 2019

119 of the things that sets us apart from towns our size is that we are out-of-the-box thinkers,” she avers. “We’re innovative and we have some consistency in our purpose. So, there’s a lot of art involved, and diversity, and interesting nuances that distinguish our downtown from anywhere elsen, including our historic build- ings. It’s about using our unique assets,” Metz shared. “We are strategic in developing and convincing them to develop, a unique, distinc- tive destination. This work and method is also intended to help attract and keep millennials and post millennials, a rather significant group of people that are attracted to downtown liv- ing and represent our future. “When we applied for the streetscape project with the U.S. DOT for the TIGER grant, they put a lot of priority on not only being innova- tive, but environmentally conscious,” she adds. “So, we created our project with that in mind. We’ve used materials with staying power that are energy efficient and aid in environmental quality, such as pervious materials where ap- proved. In addition, all the materials that are used in this grant funded project are signifi- cantly made in the USA and meet requirements of FTA’s Buy America Policy. We had a lot of antiquated infrastructure underground when we did the streetscape project. So, it was not only an aesthetically, aboveground streetscape project, but a complete infrastructure replace- ment project intended to get us through the next hundred years.” “A lot of this revitalization in the downtown has been very inspiring,” says Goldsboro’s Travel & Tourism Director, Ashlin Glatthar, “and we’re beginning to catch on how important it is to create demand, not just from locals but for people to come and spend and create tax revenue. Two main things have come about in the last couple of years. We opened a conven- tion center called the Maxwell Center, which was, technically, a county project, but the