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    Followup Interview with Department of Public Service on Downtown Patio Issues – Part 1

    Last week, issues between Downtown businesses and The Columbus Department of Public Service came to a boil at a meeting where some heated words were exchanged. Small business owners on Gay Street want to see friendlier practices within the Department and modernized city code that allows them to continue to bring life and vitality back Downtown.

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    We recently sat down with several officials within the Columbus Department of Public Service to hear more about what is being addressed, why things have unfolded in the way that they have, and what sort of changes we can be seeing in the near future. Below is the transcript of the interview conducted with Public Information Office Assistant Director Rick Tilton, Division of Planning & Operations Administrator Patti Austin and Division of Mobility Options Administrator Randy Bowman.

    Walker Evans: To start, can you give us a quick general overview of what’s happened since Monday’s meeting?

    Rick Tilton: Sure. You were at the meeting on Monday, and we think we had a great discussion. The businesspeople gave us some valuable information that we needed to hear. We are going to move forward working with them. We are going to be forming a committee. Patti can talk more about that. We’re going to be  looking at the code. As Director Kelsey said on Monday, it’s a fractured code. You have us, and you also have the Departments of Safety, Health and Code Enforcement. We are probably looking at setting something up similar to a “one-stop-shop”. Patti has had discussions with several business owners this week. She had a discussion with Chad McCoury of J. Gumbo’s, and a discussion with Elizabeth Lessner of The Betty’s Family of Restaurants. Patti, Director Kelsey and I met with Ms. Lessner and her brother Tim Lessner a couple of days ago, it was a very good meeting, a very informative meeting, and very enlightening meeting. I think we are making some progress here.

    Patti Austin: I’ve also spoken to Don Steer from Plaintain Café and Mark Ballard from Sugardaddy’s. Basically what we heard from everyone is that they all want to follow the rules. They want to be in compliance. They understand that some of these are federal laws that we can’t do anything about. But they are small business people. They’re not big businesses with attorneys and engineers that know the code inside and out. They don’t know how to follow the rules in a lot of situations. The traditional situation that our guys have seen for years is that the big businesses that come in; they don’t want to be dictated to, they want to tell us what they are going to do and then we react to it. So our guys kind of got into that mode of ‘you submit something, we’ll react to it.’ Well, these small business owners need us to help them and say ‘you can do A, B, or C and then you’ll be in compliance’. It was really a learning curve for our staff and it’s a customer service issue with our staff that really has to be addressed. For example, after Monday’s meeting I took Chad from J.Gumbo’s upstairs and said, ‘okay, I can see you’ve got maybe five different options. You could do A, B, C, D, E. What do you want to do’. He said he wasn’t sure, and wanted to go back and look at it. I said ‘okay, I’ll stop by tomorrow, is 4 o’clock okay?’ So I took his drawing up there at 4 o’clock, he made a decision, I marked it up on a drawing, he signed it, I signed it, and we were done. That’s all he wanted. But our guys just aren’t in that mode of thinking that way. So that’s a customer service issue.

    The second issue is there are code changes. So much of ours is dictated by the Americans with Disabilities Act. But there’s process changes that can make the process go a lot smoother. Like Rick said, I use the example of a special event. If you wanted a special event in the city of Columbus, you have to go to Recs & Parks and get a block party permit, you probably would have to come to us to bag meters and get a permit on that. You might have to go to the Health Department to get a permit for the dining. You might have to go to the license section of Safety to get a permit. If you are running a special event, you’re not going to know you have to go to four or five different places. It really needs to be consolidated into one area. We’ve done that with our bigger permits. Our permits for actual buildings. We need to start now, thinking on all of our permits. How do we consolidate them to make it as easy for the customers as possible.

    And then if there are code changes that need to be made. We can do that as part of this too and update our code. The Mayor’s vision is that we have a vibrant Downtown and our codes don’t always support that. So we can make changes in that area. We are working with Safety on the Pearl Market issue on that regard.

    Walker Evans: One of the resolutions that came out of the Monday meeting was the formation of a subcommittee to review some of the code, policy and procedures. Can you talk a bit about when that’s expected to be up and running, who is going to be on that and what sort of change they can effect?

    Patti Austin: We don’t have the list finalized yet for who is going to be on it. But it is going to be a mixture of business owners and other interests from our two busiest commercial districts – Gay Street Downtown and the Short North area. It will also be other business interests and some city people like the Building and Zoning Director and some people like that. Safety Director, Public Service Director. Mark’s charge to me is to have the first meeting pretty shortly after Labor Day weekend. That’s what I’m aiming for, is to communicate with businesses, find out what participation level they want, who they want on the committee as far as their liaisons, and get the first committee meeting up and running shortly after Labor Day. We hope that it’s a very short process. We’re talking 60-90 days.

    Walker Evans: Will that committee be reviewing internal policy or the city code itself?

    Patti Austin: Both. All of it.

    Walker Evans: At the meeting on Monday, Chad mentioned that when he worked with another partner to get the Gahanna J.Gumbo’s location open that their Department of Public Service greeted them with open arms, and did everything in their power to get them up and running as soon as possible. Does the Columbus Department of Public Service see itself in competition with our suburban counterparts? And do you think there are any ways to interact with the suburban areas and find out what best practices they are using to attract and help small businesses?

    Patti Austin: We are going to benchmark a lot of communities. To a certain extent, sometimes it’s unfair to benchmark us against the suburbs. I like Chad’s example and I think there’s a lot we can learn from that specific example. But just by our size, sometimes we’re a little bit different. So I really prefer to benchmark us against other cities of our size that also have vibrant Downtowns. The Chicagos, the New Yorks. Even Cleveland and Cincinnati. We are going to start that benchmarking exercise probably on Monday. We’re going to talk about what questions and what research we’re going to do. And we’re going to have our right-of-way staff doing a lot of that research in the upcoming weeks.

    Walker Evans: That makes total sense for the sake of benchmarking, but I have to wonder from a local businessperson’s perspective… if someone is thinking of expanding their business in the region, would they want to do it within the City of Columbus, or would they want to do it in Dublin or Grandview or Gahanna or Bexley if there is a more welcoming and easier environment there. It really doesn’t matter to them what the best practice in Chicago is.

    Patti Austin: And that’s where our process changes are going to come in. I think people will see a lot more welcoming of an environment once we get the process changes in. One of the big changes we made, which was very similar to what Chad talked about in Gahanna; for bigger developments that are not downtown, that have a site plan and they have to do parking and all of that kind of stuff, is before the developer even starts, we bring them into a meeting with everybody who could ever comment on their project. And they bring what they’ve got as far as their idea of their project. And then everybody goes around the room and says, okay, when you do it, consider this, when you do it, consider this. It gives the person a bunch of feedback, it makes the approval process quicker because they’ve asked all of the questions up front. We hope to get to that same point with the small businesses downtown. When they are actually starting to look at a space, we meet with them and say, okay, consider this, consider this, consider this and we’ll help you walk through it. So that is going to be part of this process that we’re developing.

    Walker Evans: One of the biggest disincentives to setting up a business Downtown when comparing options to opening a suburban location is the legacy infrastructure issues with older buildings. If you’re trying to open in a 100-year-old building that maybe hasn’t been inhabited in twenty years, it’s very difficult and very expensive to bring it up to code. Especially when compared to a new strip mall location that is brand new and ready to open. Additionally, suburban development is many times completely done as private property, so if you want to build a patio in a strip mall, it’s most likely not in the public right of way. Does the Department of Public Service have any thoughts on how to counterbalance those issues, and maybe make it a little more accommodating for Downtown development versus suburban development?

    Rick Tilton: It is a challenge. There are other issues that come into the realm of code enforcement which is the Department of Development that we have no jurisdiction over. And I know that as we look over all of these different codes, the goal is to be more user friendly. But from our piece of the equation, we want to make it as easy as possible in the right-of-way portion of it. We want to encourage business to come Downtown. We want them to work with us, work with the Development Department, work with Public Safety if needed, and work with Health if needed, to bring that building up to code. On the sidewalk right-of-way portion, we’ll be right there trying to make it easier to move Downtown.

    Patti Austin: It’s definitely an interesting question. It’s a multi-jurisdictional issue. We really need to talk with Building and Zoning about this, we need to talk with Housing about this, and I think it’s worth mentioning to them and having that conversation.

    Randy Bowman: I think one of the differences between getting dining in a strip mall versus getting dining on a public sidewalk is that we would be the landlord for the public sidewalk Downtown. We would be the one that’s giving the business permission to do that. Despite the fact that we’re a bigger city — I used to work for Hillard and Dublin, so I’ve seen it from the suburban perspective — I think that because we’re government, there is always going to be a certain additional level of complexity, if you will, compared to the private sector. That’s because of transparency, government funds, open records law, and all of the things that are required of a government. So I think there will always be another level of complexity when doing outdoor dining on a public sidewalk compared to private property.

    I think having that perspective, walking in to this, we need to make sure the small businessperson knows the difference between suburbia versus Downtown and private versus public. I think that we need to keep that in mind as we move forward with this process change. They may not know all of those nuances, so we need to make it easier for them to understand.

    Walker Evans: At Monday’s meeting, Blake Compton from the Hudson Street Hooligans, said very directly that sitting there and listening to folks like Jeff Mathes and Liz Lessner who have been operating multiple businesses over the past decade and hearing all of these problems made him think that opening a business in the City of Columbus is a bad idea.

    Patti Austin: I really think a lot of that is a customer service perspective. Really helping them more to understand the regulations. When I spoke privately to the businesses, they know they’ve got to follow the rules, and they don’t even care that much about following the rules. To them, it’s more they just need help doing it. That’s what I’ve heard overwhelmingly. They just need the help to do it. And if we can provide that help, I think we can bridge that gap. I really do.

    Click here to continue to Part 2 of our interview with the Department of Public Service.

    More info about the Columbus Department of Public Service can be found at publicservice.columbus.gov.

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