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Written by: LINGZI CHEN

Published: 14 October 2024

LAKEPORT, Calif. — The annual Business Walk program that aims to help the city of Lakeport understand and support businesses has kicked off its 2024 season.

The work officially started with a luncheon orientation hosted at Lakeport City Hall on Sept. 17.

Through mid-November, 10 city and police department staff, eight members of the Lakeport Economic Development Advisory Committee, or LEDAC, and seven volunteers will form teams of two to walk through 16 areas of the city, and knock on the doors of businesses to find out their concerns and needs, said LEDAC Chair Wilda Shock.

On Nov. 12, all of the participating team members will come back for another luncheon with their findings from the field, Lakeport City Manager Kevin Ingram explained at the luncheon.

“We’ll just compare them,” Ingram told Lake County News. “We’ll start finding trends and different things. What issues are confronting this area? Is it limited? Is that affecting everybody?”

The findings from the in-person surveys and conversations will inform the city’s decision making, Ingram said.

The police officer position assigned to patrol the city’s downtown business district and parks “came out specifically from the findings that we had in this Business Walk,” said Ingram.

Officer Katie Morfin, who joined the Lakeport Police Department at the start of 2021, was assigned to that position in May.

Morfin patrols the area every Tuesday through Friday, as a response to last year’s Business Walk findings on homelessness and public safety concerns.

“We don’t have a lot of money, so this helps us inform where we’re going to get that, where we can make the best bang for our buck,” said Ingram.

To have the best result from the walk, Ingram encouraged the teams to have organic and informal conversations in addition to formalized survey questions this year.

“You don’t always know where that conversation is going to go,” Igram said during the luncheon.

The 2023 findings

Last year, a total of 25 participants in the Business Walk — 10 city and police department staff, eight LEDAC members and seven volunteers — had in-person conversations with 76 businesses ranging from retail to healthcare, transport to lodging, food and beverage to nonprofits throughout Lakeport, Shock said during a presentation to the Lakeport City Council on Sept. 17.

“Overall and countywide, retail services are struggling. Not news to you,” Shock said.

“Concerns expressed in 2023 were primarily about the homeless population with related sanitation and crime problems,” she added.

The top three concerns were homelessness, competition and lack of business, and lack of staff, shown in the 2023 full report put together by William Eaton, a business mentor at SCORE and a longtime LEDAC member who’s been working on the Business Walk’s annual report since 2019.

The 2023 Business Walk found 47 businesses — 63% of the total businesses contacted — had been established in the community for over five years.

Eight businesses (11%) had been in business in Lakeport for one to two years and another eight under one year, a 2% increase in both categories from 2022, according to the report.

The 2023 report also shows for the next three-year period, 47 businesses said they would stay in the same location with no changes, 19 plan to stay in the same location and expand, and four expect to close down.

“I was almost surprised that you had 76 businesses,” commented Councilmember Kenny Parlet at the meeting.

Still, some business owners said that they have not been reached.

Jim Williams, owner for 18 years of the music store Strings & Things, told Lake County News that he is aware of the Business Walk program but has never talked to someone from it.

“Last year I saw a form at my door and it asked me to fill it up and they’ll come back,” he said. “I filled it up but they never came back to me.”

Jeff Warrenburg, co-owner of Skylark Shores Resort, said that he has heard about Business Walk for a couple of years but has not been reached.

The number of surveys collected from Business Walk has dropped from 150 in 2019, to 110 in 2022 to 76 in 2024, Eaton noted in the 2023 program report.

“This may be due to a difference in methodology from a ‘blitz’ approach in 2019 where almost all interviews were conducted on the same day to individually selected dates in 2023 which spread data collection over a period of three months,” Eaton wrote.

Lakeport has about 670 businesses with a business license and about 200 to 250 of them have a storefront, Ingram estimated in a followup phone interview with Lake County News.

This year, Business Walk teams are going to email the surveys to all 670 businesses for the first time, so that they can focus on a more “organic” discussion with the businesses rather than asking them “a series of mundane survey questions,” Ingram said.

Will that yield a bigger survey sample this year than last year’s 76?

“We could have more. I’m not really sure what to expect,” said Ingram.

Sharing information on city resources

In addition to gathering feedback from businesses, the Business Walk also plans to disseminate information about the city's resources on a range of topics from business loan program and business licensing to the signage ordinances — what you should know and do if you want a bigger signboard for your business, for example.

“A lot of the businesses were not even aware of these programs,” Bonnie Darling, a LEDAC member who has done the Business Walk for three years, told Lake County News. She said the teams will bring brochures and other materials that contain information essential to help businesses.

Darling believes in the importance of in-person communications. “They see us in-person, not through emails, not through phone calls.”

As Ingram was briefing the audience during the September luncheon, Darling asked if any business loans were made as a result of the Business Walk outreach.

“We’re in good shape to be able to expend our allocation,” said Ingram of the city’s loan program. “But I don’t know if any of them directly came out of that.”

“Not directly. No,” chimed in Andy Lucas of Community Development Services, a consulting firm partnered with the city to administer loan programs. “But the information was certainly shared out there.”

The data and results from the Business Walk is also helpful for the city to make decisions “in determining loan amounts, for instance, or the dollar amount that the city can apply for from the state of California,” Lucas later told Lake County News.

The city has until Dec. 29 to apply for funding from the state for the next three years’ loan programs, Lucas said.

“This year's survey results are going to be the most important, and the most up-to-date, the most current, the most critical,” said Lucas of the significance of the Business Walk report this year in helping the city’s application to secure more funding for the program.

When asked during the luncheon if the city had addressed the survey results, Eaton, the statistician, said and smiled, “With limits they have, yes.”

He added, “I mean, there’s several million dollars worth of things. We don’t have several millions of dollars. Yes, they do react. They don’t do everything. They can’t afford to.”

Eaton acknowledged the city’s effort as well as the limitations.

“Being a government, they tend to do things a little slowly and some of the stuff here really belongs to Sacramento and needs decisions from them,” he said. “That takes a long time.”

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