Saturday's chocolate festival at the Bel Air National Guard Armory will provide a sweet topping for the Downtown Revitalization Alliance's efforts to keep Main Street vibrant.
The festival is one of many programs the alliance has organized to improve and bring businesses to downtown Bel Air, and those efforts are paying off in four recent start-ups: Sean Bolan's Irish Pub and Restaurant, Main Street Cigar Co., Carried Away Gourmet and Prime Time Jewelry.
And these projects aren't all that the alliance has in store. There are other festivals, building facade improvements and proposals to deal with parking issues.
"[The effort] involves other businesses being attracted to Bel Air. It involves a huge crowd seeing the town, and hopefully liking the town and its people," said Jim Welch, downtown manager of Bel Air.
"What we saw when we evaluated Bel Air was that it was really dominated by office and government uses," said Craig Ward, president of the alliance. "It would be more exciting if there were more restaurants and special retail, more reasons for people to be in town after 5 o'clock."
"Probably 75 percent of what's happening downtown is still office and financial entities," Welch said. "We have a goal that if the empty spaces are filled with restaurants and entertainment, the ratio will reach 70-30."
The problem isn't lack of interest by small-business owners, it's lack of space, Ward said. "Availability of space is tight; there are not many vacancies," he said.
The Board of Education is planning to construct a new office building in an empty lot on Courtland Street across from the public parking garage to replace its aging headquarters on East Gordon Street.
That construction might be just the right opportunity for the revitalization alliance. The Board of Education leases three offices on Main Street, and they will be vacated when the new building opens. "The old Board of Education building will open about 20,000 square feet of space on Main Street, a real opportunity to provide business locations," Ward said.
"It is a revitalization effort because we have buildings, we have streets," Welch said. "We want to restructure what's here, we look at what the property owners want and need, and we help them fill a vacancy.
"We're specifically looking for restaurants, and we have been fortunate in that they seem to be looking for us," Welch said.
