Category: economy

The Real Problem…

I wonder what the real problem is. I was talking to a friend who lives a block away from the house where the shooting happened, and he said he thinks the real problem in Berlin is the landlords renting out slums and moving people up from Nashua and Manchester to where their welfare dollars go further. Actually, to be fair, he only mentioned the landlords as the problem, and I am filling in the blanks. That is one version of the problem, the one he sees, and by all accounts one others agree with.
But low valuation of the property could be the problem. If the properties weren’t essentially worthless it wouldn’t be worth it for people to rent them out for so little they would be enticing to no-income renters.
And the property is valued so low because industry has dried up and there are no more jobs. Unless a sustainable economic model develops nothing is ever going to change in Berlin.
But the jobs that were there aren’t ever coming back, as Norm Charest often points out, because the manufacturing sector has sailed far to the east, and as yet there is nothing to replace it. There are jobs here and there that may come back, but no large scale employer coming anytime soon.

I wonder what, really, is the problem. There’s a graduate fellowship in Illinois where they will pay for your masters degree if you will then go to a post-industrial community to address exactly that question. I wonder what it would take to get them to send one of their fellows to Berlin.
The city took down 92 Main St. and 844 Third Ave. in the last few weeks, and they have dozens more properties scheduled for demolition, but still the changes can’t come fast enough.

Berlin is racing toward its future with a boatload of assets, but with every step it gets jostled and risks spilling them all. One misstep could flatten it. It feels like the stakes rise the closer the city gets to evading failure.
The $4.3 million is working. It will be doing good for the community, even if that takes time to sink in. There are already several “happy little piles” around the city, including the one freebie on Mason Street. But then someone gets shot and dies in the street, and it’s hard to be reassured by the progress.

I’m waiting for the prison to open, for a biomass project to get going, for a few more of the buildings to be occupied and a few more of the relics to come down. Those are the steps it will take, tiptoeing around the end of industrial era, that will bring jobs back to Berlin.
And with the jobs will come the stores, and the property values as well. And rising property values rising will push out the property owners only looking to make a buck by moving people from south to north.

How long can the city hang on? It’s been fighting through the detritus left by the closing of the mill for the last several years, but it’s been fighting the slow death of the industry for decades. I don’t see residents giving up anytime soon.
The real problem is too complex for me. I report on the symptoms from time to time, but the root is still buried deep under the soil. As the only reporter for the Berlin Reporter it is beyond my capacity to get deep enough. I’ve discovered something about being a newsroom of one—you only have so many stories you get to. But in Berlin there is one story more pressing than all the rest, and it deserves individual attention: it is the real problem, which no one can explain, and it’s leaving kids dead on the streets. I wish I had the answer, but lacking that I wish I had time to delve into the question, because people are losing more than just sleep.

Facebook Questions

I posted video of the wall on Main Street coming down yesterday to the Berlin Reporter’s Facebook page. I thought people would be happy to see it coming down, but the comments were mixed. One person said they should start at one end of Main Street and continue to the other, and then go down Western Avenue.
I spent yesterday going in and talking to several of the store owners on Main Street about the Roger Brooks visit last week, and every one of them was positive about the outlook. They came out of that meeting with a real optimism. They didn’t share any of the Facebook community’s hard-edged views.
Berlin’s biggest battle is convincing the world it isn’t a dead city. It doesn’t need to work to draw people in, because if the stigma is gone they will come on their own. The Reporter’s Facebook page has fans from around the country—I would imagine they are Berliners who fled years ago. It’s interesting to see how their opinions about the community compare with mine. Theirs is a long view of Berlin’s history without the most recent context, and mine is the recent events without the baggage. The more time I spend there the more I find Berlin values its heritage and its history, even to the point it hurts the economy.
Roger Brooks made a comment that communities can’t hang their hats on their history when it comes to tourism. Berlin built an entire park to its past. Northern Forest Heritage Park is a symbol of pride but not a big tourist attraction.
Councilor David Poulin offered to buy all the paper featuring the city seal at the council meeting on Monday. Some people see the council’s decision to change it as an affront to the city’s history. In a place where everyone examines the past with such scrutiny, it’s hard to plot a course forward with confidence.

It is hard for people to move past what they know. Norm Charest is often saying the city needs to be looking for the next economy. But the city also has to keep from loosing what is valuable. Berlin isn’t the type of city where people become lost in the crowd. People greet each other by name, and they remember what street you live on and whether you were born there. As someone said to me yesterday, who is the most-loved person in Berlin? Bobbie Haggart. That kind of community is something residents don’t ever what to lose, and for good reason.
That is the image of the city Berlin needs to get out there. That is the city people need to be reminded of. It happened before, when the building collapsed on Mason and Pleasant Streets, that I noticed the perspective the rest of the state views Berlin through. I’m not sure how to fight that, but you have to.

I’m starting to understand why residents get so frustrated with the rest of the state. I posted that video yesterday thinking it was good news, which is how most people from Berlin feel, but the outside perspective twists that around and turns it against the city.
Berlin needs an action plan—a way to combat that negative perspective. Complaining about it doesn’t change anything, so the city needs to figure out what does. Maybe an NHPR underwriting campaign that says, “Berlin, New Hampshire: It’s not what you think.” Maybe Stacia Roberge’s idea about sending out odorless car fresheners labeled “Berlin, NH.”

The problem isn’t Berlin, it’s the Berlin in their heads. The Berlin I go to cares about community and the people in it. It is the type of place where people look out for one another. It is the kind of place people should love. That idea, however, hasn’t permeated the state. It is still recoiling from the old Berlin. I wonder just what the steps are to change that, and how the city can take the first one.

Just Grand

Roger Brooks has been in town talking about what Coös County needs to do to become a destination community. I sat in on the meeting at WMCC and was entertained and impressed. I did get the impression if he told some members of the community to jump off the Tondreau Peninsula, they would, but his ideas had merit.
One I liked in particular was the idea of a recessed piazza with sprinklers. In the summer it would be an attraction for families, and therefore businesses. It could also double as a performance venue or a space for art shows. And in the winter you could flood it and make a skating rink, he said, a la Rockefeller Center.
It could take the space of one of the vacant spaces in town. It could be a great addition to the community.
I was sitting right in front of several members of Berlin city staff at the meeting, and they were skeptical of some of the ideas floated by people. The encouraging thing was that Mr. Brooks shot down those ideas. His experience paralleled the experience of Berlin city staff. It seems everyone who knows how to run a city is on the same page.
He talked about making Berlin the urban center of Coös County. Other communities have their niches, he said, but none has the ability to be an urban center like Berlin.
So what would you like to see there? A music venue? Coffee shop? Performance space? I liked Robbie Munce’s wireless downtown.
It takes five years, at least, to transform a downtown, Mr. Brooks said. Good thing Berlin has already started.

By the way, I assume everyone knows, the wall is coming down brick by brick at 92 Main St. The city is on the rise.

No Council

Not enough councilors showed up for quorum tonight, so there was no meeting. There was some interesting discussion to be had, regarding the city deciding to borrow from Laconia Savings Bank instead of with the municipal bond bank, and priorities for the next budget cycle. Unfortunately no decisions could be made.
Tomorrow is the BIDPA meeting, and WREN is on the agenda. I’m interested to hear what the members who visited last week have to say to the rest of the board. I talked to one member who said they’d like to see WREN move in immediately, but they also don’t want to lose money on the building. It was an investment, after all.
But inviting WREN would also be an investment.

I spent the weekend going back and forth between Berlin and North Conway, much more so than I usually do. Normally I travel between Berlin and Glen and never make it down to the more sprawl-covered section of town. But this weekend, for some reason, I had to travel south, and what I noticed surprised me.
The distance from Boston or New York to North Conway in many ways is less than the distance from Glen to Berlin. It makes me laugh that all these people want to escape the city, and Conway and Bartlett are where they go. The area certainly has appeal for me, but it has nothing to do with escaping the rat-race. Car after car comes north, and they stop in Conway instead of continuing north.

Someone at the WREN meeting used the word traffic combined with Berlin and I couldn’t hold in the laugh. There are seldom more than a dozen cars stopped at any light, and sometimes that’s in all directions. It is something out of a different era, and even the people living in it don’t realize it.
Even from Gorham to Berlin, the change is evident. Personally, while I love Libby’s, the White Mountain Cafe and some of the other stores and restaurants, the Burger King, Pizza Hut and McDonald’s leave a bit to be desired. Berlin is largely free of the McCulture spreading around the country, and it is better off for it.
I know a few people who bounce in and out of Berlin, spending both a significant amount of their time in the city and away. All of them have a positive perspective on the city. They look and see the things they are happy to see missing, not just the things they wish were there. And they see the new businesses on Main Street and they have hope that the parts they want can come without the parts they don’t.
People who never leave or never visit, however, are the ones who need convincing. Numerous people have said the attitude has to change in Berlin before it can change afar. But the people from afar need only to spend some time in Berlin to see how much of a treasure it is. They will be far easier to convince. It is the people that never leave and have grown accustomed to deriding the city that need the a reorientation.

It’s Just An Election…

A lot of people looking for a progressive Berlin are upset about the outcome of the election. I have to ask: Why?
Perhaps the candidate you wanted to win didn’t, but does that really matter? The city still has $4.3 million to take down or fix up dilapidated properties. It still has funky new stores opening on Main Street. It still has a brand new ATV trail, which people for years have been fighting for. The roof is still going up on Fagin’s Pub, and Tony’s Pizza is still newly opened. There is more good than bad going on in Berlin, and protesting effective democracy doesn’t seem to behoove people calling themselves “forward thinking.”
People came out to vote on the seventh: 40 percent of registered voters cast ballots. Paul Grenier’s message about jobs connected; many people have struggled in the last two years, more for reasons affecting the nation than what is going on in Berlin. I’ve heard numerous people say Berlin is turning around, and I don’t think changing a few councilors matters.
Honestly, I’m excited to see some of the faces that got elected to council get to work. Both Ryan Landry and Tim Cayer were appointed to their seats, and now they have the people’s support to back up their positions. Mr. Landry has a passion for Berlin, and I agree with Paul Grenier’s comment that he is a “rising star.” It was several months ago Mr. Landry was talking about being proactive with the property BIDPA acquired on Main Street, and here it is November and BIDPA is considering similar steps.
David Poulin is another person who I’m interested to see get to work. His speech at the debate was fiery and sharp, and he may come into city hall looking to push the progressive policies he espoused.
These people will be fighting for a progressive Berlin, and it’s likely it will continue to improve.

The council will be an interesting mix this session. Councilor Tom McCue will join the three councilors listed above to make a pretty united front. Councilors Lucie Remillard and Mark Evans will be swing voters on some issues, but the fact is I don’t know that Councilors-elect Bob Danderson and Mike Rozak are going to create a united front with Mayor-elect Grenier. On Laidlaw they have a consensus, but the fact is the city does not have much to do with that process for the foreseeable future. As everyone says, the ball is in Laidlaw’s court. The big issue before the council is keeping taxes down, which, quite frankly, every councilor seems committed to do. There are differences on how infrastructure spending will proceed, but in some ways the $4.5 million will already be spent by January. Capital improvements are going to move forward. If the $7 million TIGER grant comes through it will be even more sweeping improvements than residents imagine.

The election was a wake up call to progressively minded people. Berlin cannot afford to leave the laid-off mill worker behind. It can’t even afford to give the impression it is leaving the mill worker behind. “Vote Jobs” may be a hard promise to deliver, but over a two week campaign season it’s enticing rhetoric that finds support among people without jobs.
Mr. Grenier is in favor of both biomass projects, though he is more enthusiastic about Laidlaw than CPD. But neither plant will be operational before November 2011, when he will be up for reelection. The federal prison will open next fall and do good things for the economy, but many of the jobs won’t be for Berlin residents.
There is no easy answer. The long range view or the short range view—neither helps an unemployed worker tomorrow. But people and organizations within the city are taking steps to do something about the challenges Berlin faces, and they aren’t affected by council.
The Roger Brooks initiative, the Neighborhood Revitalization Program, the Neighborhood Stabilization Program, the RSA 155-B process, the new role BIDPA is developing for itself, the district heating plans, the 21/21 project—all of these are moving forward regardless of the electorate’s choices. Many of these have been supported by several councils, and they will continue to be supported in the future.
It is important for people who feel under-represented on the council to have a voice. Paul Grenier connected with people who are looking for short term gain. If he is able to deliver a substantial number of jobs by 2011 he will deserve reelection. If he can’t he will leave out-of-work voters feeling alienated, but that’s better than disregarding their votes today. Mr. Grenier clings to the city’s heritage, and he used it to rally support. And no one can deny on some topics he is right: the city can’t afford any more laid-off high school educated 50 year olds. What would they do for work next?
The current council didn’t disregard these voters, but they were unable to make them understand how the council’s long range plans benefited them.
David Bertrand had a hard time connecting with those voters, with his Ivy League education and his good job. I don’t know the demographics of Berlin, but it is likely there are more people who share Mr. Grenier’s background than Mr. Bertrand’s. Mr. Bertrand has great ideas for the city, but he needed to make better connections with the people he is trying to help to win. In the meantime, Mr. Grenier’s experience and rhetoric may have propelled him through this election, but his ability to deliver will likely make it a challenge to replicate his success in 2011.

Or, if things change fast enough in Berlin, he may be fine. The economy was bad in 2007, when Mr. Bertrand defeated Mr. Danderson resoundingly. It was still bad in 2009 when Mr. Grenier defeated Mr. Bertrand with similar numbers. If the economy rebounds before the next election Mr. Grenier will likely keep the seat. If not, the urge to toss the bastards out will probably sweep him aside, assuming someone decides to run against him. Regardless, however, Berlin’s fortune is changing.
Councilor Ron Goudreau said at Monday’s council meeting he’d like the city to have authority to fine property owners who don’t clean up after a fire. It would give them added incentive to get to work sooner, he said, and stop the problem so clearly illustrated on lower Main Street.
But fines don’t work, City Manager Pat MacQueen and Councilor McCue said, because all to often they are levied upon people who can’t pay. The city, in effect, is powerless in this case.
But at the same time it isn’t. When that $4.3 million makes its way through the city in the next two years it will change the face of Berlin. It will remove many of the buildings that stain city streets. It will push up the property values and make the city more inviting.
All the sudden, when a building burns down, the plot of land it used to sit on will be worth more than the cleanup. Land owners will have incentive to clean the property up, even if just to sell it. It won’t be worth it to walk away anymore, and the cleanups will take weeks or months instead of years.
And all this is because of the city, regardless of the council. Berlin is changing, no matter who wins office. Don’t worry about the direction of city because it’s already moving, and there is nothing that can get in its way.

WREN Migration

Members of Berlin Industrial Development and Park Authority met with the Women’s Rural Entrepreneurial Network last night. It was AWESOME!
Why? Because it was a group of beer-drinking men with wine-drinking women. Confident, capable, smart, funny, energetic, creative entrepreneurial wine-drinking women. Just the kind of women (and people) Berlin needs to kick start the next version of the city’s economy.
Berlin has those people now. I’ve said before, people like Andre Caron and Pam Laflamme fit into that category. So does Stacia Roberge, Sylvia Poulin, and Tim Cayer. David Poulin and Ryan Landry, along with Mr. Cayer and others are trying to bring this creativity to city government. There are people looking to create their own success in Berlin, thinking beyond the “mill mentality” and making things happen. But the fact is the city needs more people like them; it needs to figure out how to support and produce them.
WREN has amazing resources, which they said helped transform Bethlehem. They are resources that would give Berlin residents the tools to move into the 21st century, and help shake it lose from its industrial past.
(There will be an in depth report of the discussion that went on at WREN headquarters in next week’s Berlin Reporter.)
The members of BIDPA were receptive to a partnership with WREN, if unsure what they bring to the table. What I see BIDPA brings to the table is property. They could give WREN a building so they could open an operation in town, and the long term effects would far outweigh the monetary value of a property. There are problems with that, because then every non-profit in the city would approach BIDPA to give them a building, but few if any could do what WREN can for the Berlin’s economic future.
The discussion between these two groups was awkward and halting, but it was moving toward a shared goal—to bring entrepreneurialism to Berlin. The discussion lasted about an hour, but it was clear it could have gone on for days. Berlin is aching for this type of resource, and WREN needs to understand the challenge it’s looking at.
People who were trained to work in a mill can be trained to work for themselves, but they need to learn what it is they don’t know. This partnership would give people the tools to look outside the box, something they have never had to do.
Last week I heard a commentary on Marketplace from Charles Handy, the founder of the London Business School, about the new economy, and how people have to learn how to make their own work. They need to learn skills they can offer people that people will pay for, he said, because the time of employers taking care of everything is over. Berlin understands this better than most places, but its isolation keeps people from gaining the tools to reinvent themselves. The community college is a great resource, but if you can’t afford it what good is it?
Enter this new model, where training cost $40 instead of $4,000. There is opportunity here to build the 21st century workforce and mindset in Berlin, without abandoning those already there.
Mr. Handy learned these new skills at 49. He said you are never too old to reinvent yourself, which is something Berlin is hoping to prove. But it needs the energy, the creativity WREN can bring. It needs to figure out how to get WREN there, and sooner rather than later.

Berlin, Berlin and Istanbul

A lot of my time in Berlin is spent in the car since the Reporter has no dedicated office here. As a result I listen to a lot of NHPR. Today the news was consistently about Berlin, Germany, and the fall of the Berlin wall. The wall fell twenty years ago today (I was eight), but it still affects the people who lived through the transition.
I can’t remember the exact quote, but the NPR newscaster paraphrased Secretary of State Hillary Clinton saying Berlin has to remember its past while pursuing a new future.
The debates that have raged lately in Berlin, N.H., have carried the same rhetoric. I spoke to Paul Grenier last night about the election, and he said one of the things motivated him most was the council’s decision to change the city seal. He said in the past that the seal was a tie to the city’s heritage, and the council disrespected that heritage when they voted to change it.
David Bertrand argued the council was not disrespecting the city’s past but instead was looking to the city’s future. The stack on the city seal was a reminder of the old Berlin, and this administration is one looking to create the new Berlin.
Remember your past while pursuing a new future. What does that mean? How carefully do you have to tread on the past to keep from desecrating it? What should be the litmus test for “progress,” and how much of a loss of heritage is acceptable?
There is bound to be change. On another program today, I heard a story about in Istanbul how middle class people are displacing the poor. They are moving into the city and taking over neighborhoods, pushing out people who have lived there all their lives. The picture of progress is good for some, but for others represents the loss of the community they knew.
Berlin is launching into a balancing act. It needs to embrace change, because the economic base the city relied on for a century isn’t coming back, and it also needs to remember its heritage to a sufficient degree that residents don’t get offended. History can become a problem when too much pride is attached to it, but at the same time it shouldn’t be dropped without consideration. Add to this that many residents are reluctant to face the challenging times they live in, as evidenced by the recent election, and elected officials will have to tread carefully.
Mr. Grenier drew an ominous picture of the Berlin economy, one that I think ignores many positives, but the picture connected with many residents. They, like him, may pine for when the mill was spewing yellow dust on the city and there were more jobs that there were working adults. Those residents may be tough to bring into a discussion about the changing economy, and they may not be open to changing the image of a city they grew up in.
How do you preserve a community that is wasting away? What changes do you make? The people who stay behind might be the most stubborn ones; how do you get them on board with those changes?
These questions, I think, are why the election went the way it did. The current council was proactive, and they worked with a long-range plan in mind. There isn’t much they could do about the world economy, but they suffered the consequences nonetheless.
They got caught off kilter on this tenuous path of heritage, future and change, at least according to the voters. I’m not sure what sticking to the path looks like, because my heritage is much different than Berlin’s. I am interested to see what the new council brings to the table, and how the electorate responds to their attempt to walk the line. They gave Mr. Bertrand two years to fulfill his promises, and when they weren’t to voters’ expectations they tossed him out. Mr. Grenier needs to deliver jobs in his two years, or he’ll face the same fate. Two years is not a lot of time to affect change in municipal government; I’ll be interested the see how he does.

Berlin is like a thousand communities around the country and around the world, all trying to find the right path forward. I hear fiery election rhetoric and read the online mudslinging and I get pessimistic, but then I take a ride into the city. I talk to people on the streets and in the businesses, and I watch the progress every day. It brings back my confidence for the future. Berlin too alive to pin down. It has too much passion and too many people who care to continue to wane. I realize the debates online and in city hall are between people for whom the city drives them. They will continue to boil over, and in so doing they will restore life to Berlin. That ride into the city is a rejuvenating experience for me, a validating one. It reminds me of why I love to report from Berlin, and what I know its future can be. I know not everyone sees it, but its there. Just walk downtown and you’ll see.

So Unique, In So Many Ways

The roof of a building at the corner of Pleasant Street and Mason Street collapsed yesterday. The public works director, fire chief and code enforcement officer assessed the structure and declared it unsafe. They called the company demolishing the southern burnt out building on Main Street and asked if they could use the excavator for a few minutes. The excavator drove up Main Street, demolished the building with the faulty roof, and then drove back down Main Street to finish its job there.

By lunchtime it was over.

Around that time the news director for NHPR sent me an email asking if I wanted to do a 45 second piece on the building collapse for the night’s newscast. He closed the email with, “Not a good sign for that tourist destination,” a reference to the story I did last week. In most circumstances it would be true, but he didn’t understand Berlin. I don’t understand Berlin either, but I am familiar enough with the city that my gut reaction to the situation was it was positive.

I first learned of the roof collapse on Twitter, from pictures posted by Katie Paine and others. The first thing I did was shoot off an email to city staff to ask if I’d missed a property scheduled for demolition. I even posted a note on Twitter congratulating Housing Coordinator Andre Caron for taking down another one. It wasn’t until I got an email back that I found out it wasn’t planned.

I told NHPR I would happily do the story, but I wasn’t going to take the angle it was a bad thing for the city. He was reacting as anyone would—it’s hard to imagine a building collapsing is a good thing—but I explained that things are different in Berlin.
That the city doesn’t have to pay to tear down the building is a good thing. That the city didn’t have to go through the RSA 155-B process is a good thing. That the city was able to reduce it’s excess properties by one is a good thing. From the point of view of the city, if all the vacant buildings could spontaneously give way without hurting anyone it would be a huge relief.
But think about that if you aren’t from Berlin. Think about that if you live in a city with too few properties. I have heard numerous complaints about how the southern part of the state ignores and denigrates the North Country. I don’t think that’s true; I think they simply don’t understand it.

When StoryCorps came to Berlin NHPR announced the dates it would be there and told people to sign up online. I did a story on the StoryCorps coming to the city for the Reporter, so I called NHPR to see how things were going. The woman I talked to said they weren’t getting a lot of people signing up and they didn’t understand why not. I told her they need a phone number in addition to the website because a lot of the people they were trying to reach aren’t on the Internet. When I saw her at the opening she thanked me for helping them connect with residents, something they hadn’t been effective at before.

Last night at city hall, as the election results were coming in, people were speaking in French. That is a wonderful piece of heritage I hope Berlin never loses, though it is doubtlessly difficult to preserve today. It is a facet of the community I notice all the time, and it’s something that makes me smile, simply because its a mystery to me.

To the rest of the state, all of Berlin speaks French, and it isn’t something they understand. In a lot of ways non-industrial economic development stopped south of the notches. A city so rooted in its traditions and its heritage is not something a society of transients is familiar with. What might make perfect sense anywhere else in the state is turned on its head in Berlin. It is a city unlike any other.

The news director asked me if I really thought it was worth the time to report the story of the building, seeing as people in Berlin didn’t see it as a disaster. Yes, I said, it is worth reporting, but not because a building collapsed. It’s news because it isn’t a disaster. It’s news because as the city fights its way out of the economic malaise it has been in for the last several decades it creates situations that defy rationality. It’s news because people are happy to see one more building go down, because it signals the rebirth of the city. It’s news because the rest of the state doesn’t understand this, and because they don’t understand they don’t know what to think of the city.

But it isn’t news that can fit into a 45 second spot. It isn’t a story easily told in a few short sentences. It is a story that goes back a century, and it is a story that happened just yesterday. I watch it unfold, and most of it I can’t put into the newspaper. It is more broad, more emotive and more powerful than I can capture in print. It is truly a spectacular transformation, one residents have been yearning for for generations. Berlin is shedding its skin, growing into a new self even it doesn’t understand. I will never be able to finish telling that story.

But I will continue to try.

Berlin in the News

And no, it has nothing to do with fires. Or the election, Laidlaw, CPD or anything else particularly controversial.

Here’s the ATV story I did for NHPR. I put it to some photos I had, though only one of them is actually from reporting the story. Blogger doesn’t just let me upload MP3s to the site, so I had to make it a movie. Enjoy!

Update: Here’s a link to the story on NHPR. The transcript mixes up east and west, but I caught it while recording it and got it right for the story.

Update: Here’s the video organizers shot of taking the trail through town. It’s about four and a half miles, and it takes about 15 minutes. It will open Saturday.

A New Set of Positives

This week, though the election is hot news, is not about the election for me. Since my paper comes out Wednesday I’ve got to search around for stories other than the biggest one in the city. I fell like I’m breathing fresh air for the first time in a while, not mired in the combative discussions that have engulfed the city for the last few weeks. And when I look around I remember why I have hope for Berlin.
The election has been rough on Berlin. People are choosing sides and lashing out along ideological and issue-based lines. I talked to several people today who said this election has been relatively mild by Berlin standards, which continues to amaze me, but apparently Berlin had some rough races in its past.
So while I talked to people today about the election, most of the time was spent looking for unrelated stories. What I found were more of the positive stories I’d been telling before. I strayed from those stories to report on the election, PUC hearings and Laidlaw investors, but when I returned to Main Street they were easy to find.
Like what? Like the burned out buildings are being torn down. It is like a breath of fresh air sweeping through the whole downtown. They are coming down one at a time, but they are certainly coming down. The retail establishments are letting out a sigh, finally free of a yoke. The Berlin Wall will soon be down.
The ATV trail opens next weekend. That is another reason to be happy. Years of efforts by multiple councils have gone into this project, and it’s finally coming to fruition.
SaVoir Flare will open next week, giving me one more place to shop for my wife. I already love Hall of Greetings, Rumorz and Maureen’s, and this gives me one more place to go. I’ll likely buy all of her holiday gifts in Berlin this year.
I noticed another store opening soon: Kate’s Place. Anyone know anything about it?
I ran into Dana Willis, one of the men developing the Notre Dame school, emptying out one of the buildings on Main Street. He’s got a project he wants to put in there, though he said he isn’t ready to release the details. But any development on Main Street by someone like Mr. Willis is welcome. It’s one more building without posters in the windows.
Speaking of Mr. Willis, how about Notre Dame? The site is cleaned up, and the air quality tests were just the other day. The city invested $300,000, and Mr. Willis and his partner are going to invest another $4 million. He expects somewhere near 100 jobs at the assisted living facility that goes there. Those are jobs Berlin could use, and that WMCC can prepare people for.
I also heard there is an art gallery/coffee shop opening on Main Street. Hallelujah. I hope they put in wireless. The proprietor was talking about it briefly today, and I didn’t get the specifics, but again, it’s one more business on Main Street.
And the city got another $500,000 for the Neighborhood Revitalization Program. It will allow them to assist at least 35 homeowners with renovation, though Housing Coordinator Andre Caron said last time they did 34 homes with $350,000. The majority of that money goes to local tradespeople; more jobs for Berlin.
That money, combined with other funds, means Mr. Caron has something like $5 million to spend in the next 24 months to revive the city’s housing stock.
Honestly, the sun was shining today and the future looks bright for Berlin. There has been a lot of negative talk due to the municipal election, but I got out today to see what the people were saying, and the one’s I’m talking to are optimistic. I got caught up in the pace of the moment too, viewing the election as a life or death battle. But it’s not. The city has life, and no one can stamp it out. It has people working to make it better. It has passionate people right where it needs it. It has the tools to move forward. I’m glad I got to see that again today, and I hope everyone else notices it too.