County's Revitalization Board Seeks Extra Funding for Downtowns

At a time when Montgomery County is trying to find ways to , the county's Community Revitalization Board is hoping to increase its budget by several million dollars in an effort to pump more life into main street business hubs such as Bryn Mawr's Lancaster Avenue and its main feeder streets.

The Community Revitalization Board has granted more than $40 million to 24 different local municipalities over the past eleven years, in an effort to strengthen and stabilize some of the county's older communities for the foreseeable future. Half of the grants went to streetscape projects, with the rest of the funding going to cultural and arts facilities, parking and transportation improvements, and various other projects.

According to a report delivered last week by the Revitalization Board to the county's Board of Commissioners, the efforts have paid off in a big way. Many of the communities on the receiving end of the grants have seen new business growth, with Ambler, Narberth and West Marshall Street in Norristown showing the greatest improvements.

An extra $3 million, countywide, would go toward "transformative magnet projects ... to bring more visitors and customers to downtown streets."

While county property values have increased 63 percent over the past ten years, homes located within "revitalized" municipalities have seen an 81.6 percent increase in the value of their homes. Applying that 18.6 percent uptick across all residential properties within the revitalized areas would account for $1.1 billion in additional property value—far beyond the county's overall rate of increase.

The report states that demand for funding remains high, and the revitalization program has seen requests for funding double the amount actually awarded since the its inception. Due to the demand for funding and the positive effects that revitalization projects have shown, the board is requesting a total of $8 million in county funding for next year—broken down into two separate parts.

The first seeks $5 million to continue the current grants, to eligible municipalities, for infrastructure projects and economic development.

The second part would require an additional $3 million, and focus on "transformative magnet projects that have the ability to bring more visitors and customers to downtown streets." Under this program, all "downtowns" would be eligible to receive funding, but the board would request significant matching funds from the municipality.

As it stands, the revitalization program receives varying funding from year to year, which they would like to eliminate via a bond issue for five to 10 years. With a stable source of funding to base future projects on, the board believes they can build on its past successes.

The revitalization program's results speak for themselves, board members say. Whether or not it receives additional funding will greatly depend upon the choices made to balance the budget.