Steve Mensing, Editor
♦ A gauntlet exists for Downtown Salisbury Businesses, especially retail, which they face daily in their battle to survive and climb out of the red. There are powerful reasons why so many vacancies appear there especially on Main Street with its numbing blight and graffiti gang tags. Here is the enormous stacked deck against businesses remaining open for any length of time:
• The highest Downtown property taxes in the State of North Carolina. That Municipal tax is a killer for any business especially if they have to struggle with little pedestrian or auto traffic down there.
• A lack of important draws to the area. Without attractions like boutique sized chain stores (Kept out by the shop local monopoly, ludicrous taxes, Salisbury’s reputation for pilferage) or attractions like Discovery Place or a Trader Joes, people are not attracted to bric-a-brac and junktique stores. They can find them anywhere and far less pricier because they lack Downtown Salisbury’s killer overhead.
• A lack of basic business savvy and a well-thought out business plan. Raw business rookies, following their dream of owning a business in an area where its the “survival of the fittest”, is a recipe for failure. Get a heavy dose of mentoring from experienced business persons, avail yourself of the SBA, and develop a well-structured business plan.
• No real pedestrian or vehicular traffic down Main Street–nobody goes there except to eat or drink. Most peak hours finds the downtown area looking ghostly and much of it uninviting due to the excess of blight and vacancies. No traffic spells no business.
• Little parking available due to a scarcity of parking lots. Many parking slots taken up by shop owners.
• Anti-business historic codes. In a town with little tangible history (Save for older buildings lacking any real history taking place in them) Salisbury’s historic preservation groups exert excessive control over building and signage codes, crimping what businesses can do and making it more expensive to set up shop.
• Sheer unattractiveness of major parts of the downtown area such as the blighted and vacancy filled South Main Badlands.
• The coming “traffic calming” on East Innes that will hinder business access with useless medians and slow already congested traffic to a crawl. Bicycle lanes are supposed to be part of the plan to gum up traffic and ultimately drive people away from all parts of our downtown and Salisbury itself. If they want to protect human life on East Innes, near the Wilco-Hess Station, then start doing interventions with the jaywalker-junkies who stumble into traffic. Before you know it our noble city council they’ll make East Innes into an artery for the “Carolina Thread trail”.
• While it makes good sense for the merchants to lock up their stores and flee immediately home when darkness approaches due to the area’s high crime, the early 5 p.m. downtown closing harms businesses by limiting the amount hours they stay open.When people get off work they have no place to shop in the Main Street area.
• Gangs and panhandlers, roaming through downtown Salisbury, make it less inviting and scare off potential customers. No one wants to face a street stick-up or beat down. Or have to listen an insistent pleas for alms.
