Spring Meeting of the Downtowners is on Wednesday, April 30 from 8:30 – 9:30 AM at the Fairbanks Community Museum. Come to the 3rd floor of the Co-Op Plaza to hear about and discuss the latest downtown as we head into summer. Invited guests from Premier Alaska Tours, Holland America, the City of Fairbanks and the Borough. Pastries and coffee will be served. Send questions or comments to info@downtownfairbanks.com.
Midnight Sun Festival sponsorship opportunities are available at midnightsunfestivalfairbanks.com. We’re grateful to Title Sponsor Kinross Alaska, and our many financial sponsors City of Fairbanks, Explore Fairbanks, GOOD Cannabis, Kendall Auto Alaska, Midnite Mine, Rylieh the REALTOR, Confident by Olivia Yvonne, Verizon, Black Gold Transport, Denali State Bank and ConocoPhillips Alaska, Walsh, Kelliher & Sharp, Hale & Associates and Denali Industrial Supply. The Festival could not take physical form without various in-kind contributions from Big Ray’s, Exclusive Paving, Immaculate Conception Church, Mecca Bar, JL Properties, Springhill Suites, Mt. McKinley Bank, Alaska Court System, Lavery Transportation Center and Last Frontier Mediactive.
An Ordinance Incentivizing Residential and Commercial Development, Redevelopment and Renovation. The City of Fairbanks wants to hear from property owners, developers, investors and financial types. Please take this poll by April 25 to help the city council with measures local government can implement to induce development.
A Downtown Implementation Group. It took a working group 7 years to develop Downtown 2040, and the group was disbanded at the plan’s adoption. So we presumed to form the Downtown Implementation Group (DIG), an information-sharing and working group whose present topics include:
- Friendly Parking Pilot Project for after-hours off-street parking
- Free and reduced employee parking in the Lavery Transportation Center
- A Borough zoning ordinance to allow ground floor residential use in the Central Business District zone
- A City ordinance (discussed in article above)
- Activating streetsides – “streeteries” – throughout downtown like Lavelle’s Taphouse has done.
Contact info@downtownfairbanks.com to be added to the calendar invitation list.
A New Emergency Service Patrol (ESP). The city of Fairbanks chose Fairbanks Integrates Community Services to be the new Emergency Service Patrol. This contractor intends to depart from the old approach of taking chronically inebriated people into protective custody from a public place to an appropriate point of care only to see them again the next day. The new ESP’s patrols will “engage high-need individuals in assertive outreach to promote rehabilitation and connection to community resource and supports” to include “peer support and case management” to “elicit long-term substance abuse changes.” We support the new ESP’s potential and will soon ask the many long-time donors of the ESP if they will support this new paradigm.