Business View Magazine | November 2019

287 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE NOVEMBER 2019 GA INESV I LLE , GEORGI A and Economic Development Director, Rusty Ligon. “It’s approximately 50 acres in size. Back in the 1990s, one of the things that helped revitalize our downtown was some streetscaping around the historic downtown square and that led to a revitalization of businesses moving in. We have since done additional streetscaping projects since the ‘90s; we just wrapped one up and are about to start another set of projects that will address the streetscaping there.” Sheppard adds, “We have a large streetscaping project that’s doing two of our main roads in our downtown, and we are widening our sidewalks by about nine additional feet. We worked with some of our downtown business owners and asked them what their priorities were and what they wanted to see in the streetscaping and a lot of them said outdoor space and sidewalk space for cafés were more important to them than parking. So, we’re redoing our streetscaping, taking up some parallel parking spaces to make more room for activity downtown.”