NOV 2012 – PRESIDENT’S ARTICLE

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Holiday Shopping is starting this month and your Chamber is planning a “Double Down Holiday” Shop Redlands First campaign.  The Shop Redlands First $100 dollar prize will be doubled in the months of  November and December, with two winners each month, so bring in your receipts of $25 or more (remember chamber member receipts count for two tickets). I hope chamber members will help make this the best season ever.

The local city council election will be decided before this article comes out. I would like to think that whoever wins will be business friendly. Your Chamber of Commerce will always promote our business and be your number one advocate.

If you are not a member of the Redlands Chamber of Commerce please join and add your voice to the other 600 hundred members that our business is good for our community and the economy.

Remember Shop Redlands First ……..and Happy Thanksgiving.

 

NOV 2012 – Shop Redlands First….It Pays!!!

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In an effort to encourage customers to Shop Redlands First through the year the Chamber has successfully administered a campaign that has been both fun and fruitful for all the businesses in Redlands especially Chamber members.

Each month the Chamber has offered a prize valued at $100 or more. Shoppers have been encouraged to bring original receipts from Redlands businesses showing purchases of $25 or more to the Chamber office, the date on the receipt reflecting the date of the month of the drawing. The receipts are signed by the Chamber staff and exchanged for a ticket… the customer fills out address and phone number and the ticket is placed in a basket to be a part of the month end drawing. If the receipt is from a Chamber member the customer gets two tickets (Chamber members can be found on the Chamber’s website).

At the end of each month a drawing takes place for the $100 prize and the winner is announced on the Chamber’s website, in an email blast and in the Redlands Quarterly Magazine Chamber page as well as the local press. Shoppers have flocked to the Chamber office each month with receipts vying for gift cards, cash cards, gas cards and more.

President of the Chamber Paul Barich, Barich & Associates Insurance, who originally brought the idea to the organization, said, “It’s a great program that hopefully makes people stop and think about shopping locally first. It’s important to keep the dollars local, to support our local businesses and to champion the small business owners of Redlands.”

Why shop local?

1. Protect Local Character and Prosperity

Redlands is unlike any other city in the world. By choosing to support locally owned businesses, you help maintain Redlands’ diversity and distinctive flavor.

2. Community Well-Being

Locally owned businesses build strong neighborhoods by sustaining communities, linking neighbors, and by contributing more to local causes.

3. Local Decision Making

Local ownership means that important decisions are made locally by people who live in the community and who will feel the impacts of those decisions.

4. Keeping Dollars in the Local Economy

Your dollars spent in locally-owned businesses have three times the impact on your community. When shopping locally, you simultaneously create jobs, fund more city services through sales tax, invest in neighborhood improvement and promote community development.

5. Job and Wages

Locally owned businesses create jobs.

6. Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship fuels America’s economic innovation and prosperity, and serves as a key means for families to move out of low-wage jobs and into the middle class.

7. Public Benefits and Costs

Local stores in town centers require comparatively little infrastructure and make more efficient use of public services.8. Environmental Sustainability

Local stores help to sustain vibrant, compact, walkable town centers-which in turn are essential to reducing sprawl, automobile use, and air pollution.

9. Competition

A marketplace of tens of thousands of small businesses is the best way to ensure innovation and low prices over the long-term.

10. Product Diversity

A multitude of small businesses, each selecting products based, not on a national sales plan, but on their own interests and the needs of their local customers, guarantees a much broader range of product choices.

 

NOV 2012 – City News by Council Member Jon Harrison

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Improving Redlands streets residents’ highest priority

By Council Member Jon Harrison

Among the most crucial factors to Redlands’ economic vitality and quality of life is the condition of the City’s infrastructure and especially its streets. In a survey conducted in 2010, Redlands residents by a wide margin identified improving the condition of the City’s streets as their highest priority.

Unfortunately, for the past several decades, the funding available for maintenance of the City’s streets has not kept up with the needs. A comprehensive engineering analysis performed this year to assess the overall condition of the City’s streets determined Redlands streets are among the worst in Southern California.  On a standard infrastructure rating scale known as Pavement Condition Index (PCI), that ranks the condition of pavement from 1 (failed) to 100 (excellent),Redlands streets averaged a “poor” ranking of 53. This ranks the City’s streets below those of the State ofCaliforniaaverage of 68 and the San Bernardino County average of 70.

Relying on limited Measure I half-cent sales tax funds from the county of approximately $800,000 a year and other miscellaneous sources, the City has been unable to perform even the basic infrastructure maintenance to keep up with the rate of degradation. And every year that the City’s streets fall into further disrepair, the cost simply to maintain the good streets we have increases exponentially.

Aside from the irritation toRedlands residents, bad roads are bad for business. Attracting quality businesses, retaining existing businesses and bringing new customers to Redlands’ retail and commercial areas depends in large part on quality roads.

Last month, the City Council approved an ambitious plan to repair two-thirds of Redlands streets, including those serving its shopping and commercial areas, within five years. The Pavement Accelerated Repair Implementation Strategy (PARIS), relies on scientific data and engineering and a matrix of various criteria to prioritize street repairs. Many of those criteria directly address the City’s business community. Some of those include:

  • Average Daily Traffic, which accounts for 15 percent of the matrix. Streets along the City’s business centers, retail and commercial areas, typically have a high ADT count;
  • Population centers, which account for 14 percent of the matrix;
  • Commercial/Business/Retail areas – 10 percent;
  • Bus routes and rail stops – 8 percent;

In addition, arterials and collector streets and those roads in poorer shape are also placed higher in the matrix.

All of these factors add up to put many of Redlands business areas high on the priority list for pavement rehabilitation and maintenance.

The money to fund these improvements will come from leveraging payments to the pavement program from utilities, including the City’s own Solid Waste fund, to offset the specific share of damage caused to the City’s streets. By issuing $21.5 million in debt and frontloading the repairs over five years, the streets will pay less for the pavement treatment, halt the continued degradation and reduce the overall cost of repairing the City’s streets by millions of dollars. The debt would be paid off within 10 years and the continuing resources would allow the City to maintain the streets and provide additional repairs into the foreseeable future.

The City Council will consider the first reading of a resolution to implement the PARIS plan at the Nov. 20 meeting.

For more information on the PARISprogram, please visit the City’s website at http://ci.redlands.ca.us/clerk/2012staffreports/120918L2.pdf.