:: suzanne yada ::

By Suzanne Yada
Editor, Explore Central Valley Downtowns

Ask Kelly Hauert about her vision for downtown Visalia. Go ahead. Ask. She’ll tell you straight up that she doesn’t have one, doesn’t need one and will never need one.

Fine for the rest of us to say, but coming from the freshly hired CEO of the Downtown Visalians and Alliance? The city must be doomed.

“Downtown belongs to the community, not me,” Hauert says pointedly. “If it’s my vision and my plan, what do I need the board of directors and the community for?”

Hauert speaks with an energy that bubbles over to everyone within earshot of her office, which is plunked in the center of Church Street and certainly within earshot of a swarm of people. Her vigor is contagious, and Hauert fully realizes the effect.

“A lot of the time I go to work in downtown revitalization, I’ve been asked to because of my energy. It creates excitement with people who are already excited,” she says.

Perhaps there’s a reason the people in Visalia were already jazzed – it could have been left over from Hauert’s previous stint as the executive director of the alliance from 1997 to 2005. She and Visalia parted on friendly terms.

“I didn’t leave because there was anything wrong or bad, it’s just after I’ve been here for seven years, it was time for someone else to come in with fresh eyes.”

But Hauert didn’t know that in three years’ time, those fresh eyes would be her own.

“So I was in Arizona, minding my own business, and I get this call,” she says with a laugh. It was the Downtown Visalians and Alliance on the other line. Jan Minami had recently resigned her executive director position, and now the alliance was looking for a chief executive officer to fill her spot. Hauert felt honored Visalia thought of her.

“I’m excited to be back and get that phone call, it’s the highest compliment,” says Hauert, who took the position Aug. 15. “I’m walking into a very, very committed group of community members. All they were looking for was organization management and a few more ideas.”

Funding growth

A couple of ideas Hauert has been kicking around with the groups involve strategies on pumping new life into an anemic economy.

“Business owners say the economy will go back up. Property will go back up too. But what we’re going to do is make that happen a lot faster,” she says. “We can do nothing if it will happen, but our job is to create. We’re going to be an economic machine.”

An important tool for keeping the downtown machine churning is known as the Property and Business Improvement District, which collects cash from downtown property owners for maintaining buildings and developing infrastructure. Every year the PBID raised $425,000 for things such as business development, administration, safety programs and cleaning, Hauert says.

But there’s a sunset clause built in with every PBID, giving a specific timeline for the funds to be collected and used.

“This [current] district will be up in 2 years,” Hauert says. “We’re in the midst of getting ready to go in front of the property owners to see if they want another district.”

The “creative class”

PBIDs are not the only tool Hauert plans on using to keep downtown thriving. The secret to a long-lasting downtown district, Hauert says, is working with the younger “creative class,” a term coined by Dr. Richard Florida to describe a type of knowledge worker whose creative skills are an economic boon.

Hauert says the creative class is asking for things like walkable, eco-friendly environments where they can live, work, play and shop in the same neighborhood.

And catering to the creative class has broad support in the downtown community.

“Whenever I mention it to people [in Visalia], I was expecting a big question mark from them. But instead I see a lot of nodding heads,” Hauert says. “They get it.”

The younger generations bring new challenges and demands, Hauert says, and it’s important to figure out new ways to lure them out of their rooms.

“Shopping for the creative class means you can sit in your jammies and order anything you want anywhere in the world. So what’s going to excite people and get them downtown?” she asks.

Plenty of hypotheses abound, and Hauert rattles off a few: Networking opportunities, social opportunities, participating in the local community, even exercise. But she emphasizes that it’s not up to her to concoct a plan for the youth of Visalia. She’d rather hear it in their own words.

“It’s not going to be enough for 40-, 50-, 60-year old people to decide what will be good for them,” Hauert says. “It’s going to be incumbent upon us to engage people in their teens, 20s and 30s to tell us how to create the downtown they will incorporate. If we’re going to sit around and do what us old people think, we’re not going to hit the mark.”

What’s changed in three years?

Though Hauert hasn’t been gone long, plenty has changed. Her first days on the job have been spent trying to familiarize herself with all the new businesses and owners downtown, and getting reacquainted with the duties of her job.

“What I was really afraid of is that when I came back, people would expect that I would pick it up just like that, and it takes time,” Hauert says. “There’s just so much that needs to be done, but everyone’s been wonderful and understanding.”

She even ran across some changes downtown she never thought would happen.

“That Plunkett Coin Co. clock? I’d bet five thousand dollars that clock would never be fixed. And to my surprise, it works! And the storefront had been refurbished,” she says excitedly.

But some things remain the same.

“It’s hard for me to walk down the street – I know a lot of the people here,” she says. “I once went down the street to visit one merchant, and I didn’t get back to the office for two hours. And out of it came a prospect for a new business.”

With someone so entrenched in the downtown scene, how does Hauert spend her time away from work?

“I play golf, I hang out with my dog, and then I come back downtown,” she says. “I like it here, it’s a fun place.”

There’s one marked difference from her former home in Kingman, Ariz.

“I’m finally going to have some good food,” she says, laughing.

This article was published Sept. 12, 2008, in Explore Central Valley Downtowns, a quarterly publication inserted into the Visalia Times-Delta.