What a main street wants

By CHARLIE BUTERBAUGH

Sullivan County’s 15 hamlets and villages met in trade-show fashion last week at Main Street Day, an event held to display the county’s recent redevelopment for investors and review the challenges ahead as each business community strives to make the most of a changing economy.

“Sullivan County is in a transition phase. The demographics are shifting,” said Helen Budrock, assistant director of the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development. She was the member of a panel discussing how further development of a varied complexion of small towns can happen.

Budrock said the county’s full-time community is growing. “More and more housing developments are geared towards full-time permanent residents and working families that will provide more of a stable population base to support business growth,” she said, referring specifically to the construction of 100 moderately priced homes near Main Street in Hurleyville, NY.

A central point stressed by the panel, however, was that each main street economy ought to work out a development plan by drawing input from the people who live, work and shop there.

Don DiMartini, executive director of the Village of Liberty Community Development Corporation, posited that Liberty, and urban, diverse small town, needs both attractive specialty shops and basic service businesses.

“We need the antiques stores that are great for weekend business, but I want a dry cleaner and a stationary store, and I’d like to see my True Value stay open and thrive,” he said.

Business owners and development leaders have begun to think of Liberty as the hub of five main streets, according to village Trustee Alan Berube. Equidistant from Liberty are Ferndale, Swan Lake, White Sulphur Springs and Parksville.

In a conversation with Michele Caltabellotta, owner of the Dead End Café in Parksville, Berube said, “What we’re trying to do in Liberty is not typical in any way. We don’t have a formula or a preconceived plan. We have to think about it building by building and make it as much of a community based development as possible.”

Driving through this county of 1,000 square miles, there is visible variation in the ways small towns have worked to attract consumers over the past decade. Michael Eurey of Narrowsburg Fine Wines and Spirits said he studied the local economy and opened his shop on Main Street because it would hold value in a niche market.

William Pammer, commissioner of the Sullivan County Division of Planning and Community Development, said the recent trend of main street revitalization is largely the result of investors taking risks.

“That kind of spirit needs to be galvanized more at a community level and in a strategic planning process, so you can begin to build some synergies in what you want to see your main street become,” Pammer said.

“I used to be an expert,” he began. “You know what I did with the word expert. I threw it in the garbage can. It isn’t experts, it’s collaboration.”

Sullivan County Partnership for Economic Development Vice President Heinrich Strauch said the county’s affordability will be “a great challenge in the next couple of years.”

“We should make sure that we don’t just replay the development that some villages in Dutchess, or Putnam or Westchester County went through. I think that would be unwise to repeat that and allow ourselves to be get out-priced out of our own markets,” Strauch said.

“I think the attraction is the diversity. Being healthy as an environment does not mean that you have to exclude large centers of the population,” he said.

About the local marketplace, Strauch said, “I think that Sullivan County is coming to a point in terms of population development and traffic patterns from weekenders and tourists where the sustainability of small businesses on main streets is becoming better and better. It’s still a struggle, and it probably will be for a couple years. But the basis is so much better now.”