About 30 downtown business owners and residents packed into Iola City Hall’s Municipal Courtroom Tuesday morning to hear Assistant City Manager Corey Schinstock address the U.S. 54 rebuild project.
His message? Hang on until Farm City Days in October.
“Segment one, which is basically Buckeye to State, is slated to be fully complete, traffic signals and the whole nine yards, by around October 10,” Schinstock told the crowd.
In the meantime, it’s going to get messy, he admitted. As crews progress on a full rebuild of both the highway and the sidewalk, as well as water line replacement, construction will likely go right up to within a foot of downtown buildings.
“The idea,” Schinstock said, “is not to have you shut down at all.” He said crews would likely put gravel down so that front entrances are still accessible. “Customers will be able to get to your door, but it’s going to be ugly.”
TUESDAY’S meeting provided a chance for local businesses to communicate directly with Schinstock about the project, which by all accounts, is significantly disrupting downtown commerce.
Several business owners pleaded for improved communication. It’s already hard enough to attract customers, they noted. Not knowing if their street will be open on a given day only makes it worse.
Myra Gleason, who with husband Gabe owns Wild Bloom Coffee, shared how South Washington Ave. was open in the morning, then closed without notice.
“All the cars were blocked in. My husband couldn’t get out. Cars by El Charro were blocked in,” Gleason said. “And because we didn’t have any information, we had customers who couldn’t get out. How do we go about communication when businesses don’t have information about what to expect?”
“A project like this is going to change on the fly,” Schinstock responded. “They’ll move barricades and change patterns, and honestly, half the time I won’t even know about it. I know it affects you guys. Unfortunately, I would say it’s best just to walk up to one of the contractors. They’ll let you out.”
Melissa Genoble of Deja-Nu pressed the point. “But what about a range?” she asked, suggesting a week-by-week update would be helpful.
City Administrator Matt Rehder said city staff “can work on something like that, if you all acknowledge that what we send out to you can be turned upside down the second we send it out. We can’t make guarantees.”
Any information is better than none, several reasoned.
“There should be no fear from the city about what businesses are going to do. In fact, I don’t think that’s a good position to take.
“We should be proactive, take responsibility and let businesses be able to understand what’s going on so that we can better support our customers,” Gleason told Rehder. “There needs to be respect between the city and businesses who are choosing to be here.”
Genoble echoed that sentiment, saying, “We understand that it could change, but it at least gives us some frame of reference.”
