Sam Galeotos, Chairman of the Downtown Development Authority, held a press conference today, Friday, September 8th, in the Asher Building to address the organization’s future. The organization has gone 8 months without an Executive Director and recently received a significant budget cut by the City of Cheyenne. Currently their Board of Directors is comprised of many freshmen members and addressed in the conference was the importance of focusing on the future and not the past.
During the press conference Galeotos stated, “Our downtown is going to be different and to make it vibrant is going to have to be way different than fixing a bunch of buildings. There’s going to have to be a lot of capital investment in it. We are going to have completely change it around. We have a great asset in the Depot Plaza but we are not going to just survive on the Depot Plaza. That effort and initiative needs to be taken to other parts of downtown. I feel we need to have a picture of what downtown is going to look like.”
He further shared that the Board will focus on 7 specific points.
- Clarification of the organization’s role in the defined downtown district
- Define success through metrics, measurements and milestones
- Reflect on organization’s programs and initiatives
- Review and identify key infrastructural issues and overall hurdles for the revitalization
- Developing and refreshing the organization’s vision and plan for downtown
- Align the organization to support the identified needs and initiatives of the organization
- Meet with stakeholders and City leadership to advance
Galeotos believes that “The downtown that we have today or had is not going to be the downtown of the future.”
The Downtown Development Authority Board of Directors will move forward on implementing this plan. They are currently 6 weeks into the initiative and they acknowledge they have many challenges ahead of them.
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