Date: 5/4/2021
NORTHAMPTON – During a public forum on April 27, Northampton residents received a progress update about the city’s involvement in the state’s Rapid Recovery Program (RRP).
To start the presentation, Northampton Mayor David Narkewicz explained that the program was originally set up by the state to help communities recover from COVID-19.
“The Rapid Recovery Program was designed by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to support our business community through actionable, project-based recovery recommendations unique to the individual economic challenges and COVID-19 related impacts in our downtown,” he said.
Civic Space Collaborative representative Karl Alexander said that the RRP split the project into three phases.
“Phase 1, which we are currently finishing up and will last through mid-May looks at diagnostics and that baseline assessment. Phase 2 will be the development of our project recommendations, which will take us through the end of June. Phase 3, the final plan, is currently scheduled for July and August,” he said.
Overall, Alexander said one of the primary goals of Phase 1 is to create a baseline of information for the rest of the project.
“It’s a current state assessment of downtown Northampton and how things currently are. To do this we categorized our research into four components, the first is customer base, then physical environment, then business environment, and then administrative capacity,” he said.
Alexander said that one of the biggest components of Phase 1 is a survey sent out to businesses in downtown Northampton.
“The key pieces of Phase 1 include the distribution of a survey to local businesses in order to understand economic impact and to understand matters related to economic development. We have also conducted field work to assess the current state of the public and private realm infrastructure and have also conducted a review of existing plans and resources critical to planning and policy in the city,” he said.
From the survey Alexander said that his team found out that many businesses had suffered revenue losses as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We received a really strong quality sample from the downtown business community on our survey. We had 82 respondents, which is a great sample size. On a more somber note, 96 percent of businesses reported impacts related to the pandemic, 82 percent reported less revenue in 2020 and 33 percent reported revenue losses greater than 75 percent,” he said.
In order to help drive downtown traffic, Alexander said many businesses want to do events and host larger marketing campaigns.
“The business survey showed a really strong interest in restarting events and implementing marketing strategies in and for the downtown area that will help embolden the work the Northampton Downtown Association has done,” he said.
With the project still in early stages, Alexander said there is still research to be done after the conclusion of Phase 1.
“We are just in the beginning of our process, upon completion of Phase 1 in mid-May we will be going forward to the development of our project recommendation, at which time we will continue to have one on one conversations with key organizations, and we will also be planning to conduct focus groups as well,” he said.
Northampton’s Rapid Recovery Program will host its next meeting after Phase 2, which is expected to be completed by the end of June.