First loan approved for downtown face lift

Jeffrey Libby

Tuesday, April 16, 2002 | 11:10 a.m.

It's been almost two years since Tom Foster and Moe Kazemeini opened their engineering firm in downtown Henderson at a poky one-story, white brick building with a rough-shingled mansard roof that catches pigeon fluff and the occasional plastic bag.

But customers of Southwest Gas still walk past the neighboring dirt lot, shuttered storefronts and scattering of ethnic restaurants, entering the front office hoping to pay home heating bills.

They're greeted by an easel and a sign that says, "This is not the gas company." A stack of handy photocopied maps directs them to the company's new address in Green Valley.

But the maps and the sign may soon come down, along with the old-fashioned gas lamp out front.

The city's redevelopment agency staff last week approved Foster's loan application for $30,000 to renovate the 49-year-old building. He plans to demolish the old roof and add a stone-clad tower, sun screens over the doors, a few trees and a sandstone color scheme.

The city money is the first of $200,000 that will be spent to help downtown business owners improve storefronts in an area that has seen mostly decline and neglect as hundreds of millions of dollars in new business investment poured into nearby Green Valley throughout the 1990s. The hope is that bright storefronts will increase foot traffic and spark more private business investment.

Unlike other investments the city redevelopment agency has made since forming in 1995, this relatively modest program already appears to be swaying a few staunch doubting Thomases.

Jeweler Mike Holland, who operates one of the oldest Water Street businesses, is one of them.

Often a critic of the city's slow progress and a defender of the small, friendly downtown community he has served since 1983, Holland is now singing the city's praises.

"The city people are doing just like they said and the (business) people are able to access that money, so that's great," Holland said. "I guess I'm optimistic. Otherwise I wouldn't have bought a property across the street."

Karen Elliott, a member of the redevelopment advisory commission who ran a downtown pharmacy in the 1970s, has also changed her tune from one of concern to one of cautious optimism.

"I'm certainly glad to see these people get assistance," Elliott said. "Businesses have really gone downhill since I was there, and this is what it will take to bring them back. Now at least businesses will know where they can put their money."

Foster said the $45,000 face lift -- the total includes $15,000 of his own money -- on his Market Street building also will incorporate some of the architectural elements featured on a recently renovated utilities building one street over, at the corner of Water Street and Pacific Avenue.

Another property owner across Pacific Avenue is putting together an application for city aid to dress up four storefronts similar in appearance to Foster's -- brick with corrugated tin roofs cut in a mansard style.

Those improvements should give incentive to others downtown, Foster said.

"I grew up in a little town in California with a five-and-ten (store), that kind of thing," he said. "It went the way most things do, I suppose. It went down a little. ... But they renovated and it came back. So I know it can happen."

"We're trying to put a good face on downtown Henderson," Kazemeini said. "We're trying to rebuild this downtown, you know. We have an atmosphere of a small community here, a small city. Everything is close by."

The city aid for storefronts is just one of several programs the city is working on to reverse the decline in its old downtown, Bob Wilson, manager of the redevelopment agency, said.

Applications are being taken for a $500,000 low-interest loan fund for new businesses, Wilson said, and the city has spent millions of dollars over the past several years assembling two parcels at key intersections that are planned for development as commercial centers.

The city is also planning roughly $10 million in upgrades to utilities along Water Street.

But Wilson said the positive reaction to the facade program caught him off-guard.

"We're getting a level of belief in the downtown that we'd wanted but hadn't had yet," Wilson said. "This is just the first one that's going to show up as the city helping the small businessman."