Historic downtown Kent is a place that matters | Guest Op

Historic downtown Kent is alive and doing quite well, thanks to a hard working board and volunteers.

If you haven’t been downtown lately, it might be a good time to visit and see some of the changes yourself.

The Kent Downtown Partnership continues to bring vitality to the historic area – between Central and Washington avenues and Willis and James streets – and we are doing this through several projects.

Some of the more visible projects are new planters, benches and hanging baskets.

We have been working with the city on a number of projects, one of which is parking.

Our street parking stalls have been painted and new parking signs installed. We continue to work with the city on creative ways to add parking. There may be some activity on First Avenue, north of Smith Street, probably sometime in March, to create more parking.

A little parking here and there, and it will begin to alleviate some of the stress of parking in downtown. We must remember that somebody is paying for this free parking, so it takes time to find the funding.

Isn’t it about time we had this problem in downtown? More people are coming downtown who want to park so they can walk around. Just what we ordered. I guess you could call it success and growing pains.

We are also working with the city on lighting. The city recently agreed to place LED lighting throughout the city, including downtown, as well as the Titus parking lot. The project has not been finished but already we can see a huge improvement with greater visibility.

We are pursuing efforts to light the rooflines of our buildings, create more attention to our downtown historic district and make it a more enjoyable experience. We can’t wait until the first phase of this project is completed, possibly by March.

We’ve had a flurry of what I call “large graffiti” in downtown recently and thanks to several of our board members and property owners, we were able to get it removed quickly.

Be sure to report any graffiti to our office if you are unable to cover it up right away. And be sure to let your neighbor know if you see it, so they can paint over it immediately.

Many of our vacancies in downtown have been filled. Our post office building should have new tenants in a couple of months. I know the owners are working hard on signing another lease with another business to go into their building. The actual post office is staying.

The building across from the post office building was sold. We haven’t heard who will be the happy new owners. It will be nice to have new neighbors.

The Platform Apartments are fully occupied. I guess those former Seattleites like our lower rents, so they are moving into downtown Kent. Also, the Dwell at Kent Station is keeping on schedule to open in early spring, so we will see more people running to Kent to lease these apartments.

We are blessed to have a variety of businesses in downtown. Some of the newer ones are Green Dog Grooming; Sapoche Vietnamese Restaurant; Rusty Raven Art Studio; The Purple Seed – she makes garments out of recycled clothing – and several more. We do have some vacancies but they fill much quicker than they used to.

There is still a lot of work to be done in our effort to make our downtown more vibrant, but we have made great strides to date. We are dedicated to making our downtown a place where you will want to come and bring your family and friends.

If you would like to donate items for our upcoming auction, attend the auction or just donate funds to keep us moving forward in our efforts to vitalize the downtown, please do so by either calling us or mailing us a check. You also can contact me.

We can always use a few more hands. If you would like to sit on one of our committees – economic development, design, promotions or marketing – please let us know.

Reach Barbara Smith, executive director of Kent Downtown Partnership, at 253-813-6976 or barbaras@kentdowntown.org. Kent Downtown Partnership’s mailing address is 202 W. Gowe St., Suite A, Kent, 98032