Business View Magazine | April 2020

259 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE APRIL 2020 POPLAR BLUFF , MI SSOUR I crossing.” BVM: Can you talk about Poplar Bluff’s downtown and any new developments on the horizon there? Halter: “Our only local brewery is downtown, we’ve got a coffee shop down there, and a really nice skateboard park. And we received private donations for a downtown dog park. The city is building a new city hall; we have the old historic Rogers Theatre, which just received over $300,000 in grants to rehab that facility. It mainly does plays and music and old classic films. Our major anchor in downtown is our Black River Coliseum, which is a community center that holds about 5,000 people; they do rodeos, concerts, sporting events, and conventions. “We’ve implemented some major events that draw large crowds. We have an Iron Horse Festival every year that draws almost 10,000 people, which is pretty big for a town that’s only 17,000. We have the BBQ Street Wars, and they just recently improved the Farmers Market downtown to where they have an enclosed facility. In the past, it was just an open-air pavilion. Now, they’ve enclosed it so they can prolong the season. “We got that downtown area designated as one of the three Opportunity Zones in our county, and we currently have an investment group looking at doing some things there. In fact, one of our major investors in the Opportunity Zone is a younger gentleman who loves this community and wants to see great things happen in the downtown. We do have some infrastructure grants from the Delta Regional Authority to do some work on the sidewalks, and we have adopted some ordinances for mixed-use so that people can live above their business. Everybody has big box stores and everyone is shopping online now. But, if we can create some sort of uniqueness to our downtown, we think people