Business & Tech
With New Business Plan, La Grange Park Looks to Revitalize Commerce
The Village has approved a detailed schematic for bettering its relationship with its businesses, attracting new ones and improving business prospects overall.
A commercial revitalization plan passed by the La Grange Park Board of Trustees in January promises that the Village will begin taking a number of steps to make La Grange Park more commerce-friendly and to better serve the Village’s approximately 100 businesses.
The plan includes a list of nearly 40 action-items for the Village to take—some already completed, others extremely long-term—and levels them based on immediacy in an “implementation matrix.”
Items on the list range from the simple (hold more ribbon-cuttings and send press releases, attend Village meetings and industry events, better use e-briefs and the Rose Clippings newsletter to promote businesses) to the complex and far-off (develop a marketing campaign for Village businesses, run analyses on shopping habits and Village Market redevelopment possibilities, examine options for more parking on 31st Street).
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“There are a number of items within the plan that the Village is already doing, but we really felt that we needed a document that would serve as a framework for how we move forward with our economic redevelopment efforts,” said assistant Village manager Emily Rodman.
The matrix—a detailed checklist prioritizing certain initiatives—is intended to be regularly reviewed at the Revitalization committee’s quarterly meetings to ensure that an adequate number of the items are being put into place, to avoid having a plan that is merely discussed and never enacted.
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“It’s to make sure that we are proceeding through the plan, and we are successful in implementing the various items,” Rodman said. “It’s structured in a way that makes it very easy for the Village to implement the items… The intent is to be able to show progress.”
A few of the Village’s first initiatives are to revamp the La Grange Park website be more user-friendly and promote commerce, to create a resource guide for Village businesses (a sort of “how to do business in La Grange Park) and, most of all, to create a complete database of all Village businesses with contact information and profiles.
“We want to make sure we understand who our businesses are, and the next step is for us to be reaching out to them, meet our owners, talk to them, find out what they like about doing business in La Grange Park, find out what their challenges are and how we can assist them,” Rodman said of the database.
The plan is due to be re-presented at the televised Board of Trustees meeting on March 12. You can get a preview by reading the above PDF file.
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