Helping Our Local Businesses
Please Volunteer to Join our Canvas
Community groups and the
Chamber of Commerce
need your help now
to canvas our neighborhood to see the needs of local businesses and to offer our help. There are two programs to help right now:
1)
Extended sidewalk Cafes:
We are pushing for a program that would allow restaurants and taverns to have sidewalk cafes that go beyond the limits of their own property. Here's how it would work:
A restaurant could have a cafe along the curb (like Nookies does, for example). The proposal would allow them to extend their sidewalk cafe further down the street, so long as it doesn't interfere with other businesses.
2)
The Expanded Outdoor Dining Permit
allows establishments with valid Retail Food Establishment Licenses to temporarily expand operations into the street or other private property (i.e. parking lots). This requires an agreement between a minimum of three food businesses within a contiguous block. And of course, this requires quite a bit of coordination with the City. At this point, we are just trying to gauge interest.
These are new concepts, and we need to get the word out to the many restaurants that operate in our ward. We are also working to obtain borrowed or low-cost sidewalk furniture to loan to businesses for the duration of the pandemic. We believe this is very doable.
You might think that our office has comprehensive lists of every business and can reach out on command to our businesses - that's partly true. We have some high turnover, and we also have many businesses that just operate as best they can without much contact with our office. But right now we need some fast action.
Our community groups have agreed to help us and our Chamber of Commerce to contact businesses to ask their interest and to collect feedback. We are asking you to participate in a personal canvass of our neighborhood's businesses.
Here's how:
1) Contact Your Community Group.
To see what community area you are in, click
here
.
2) Email your Community Group President and say you want to help.
Here are the presidents of our community groups
:
3) Tell your community group president what part of the streets in your area you will walk.
Even a block or two is fine.
4) Drop in on the businesses and hand them
this flyer
. Chat with them about the concepts available. Write down the name, phone number and email of your contact and email it to your Community President.
5) Let the community group president know who you talked to.
Thanks for volunteering - this is a critical way to quickly get the information we need.