Hello. I’m Christopher Pike, Commissioner for Ward 3, City of Albany. I also represent the downtown area which is something that I’ve been very passionate about. And we’ve been doing a lot of things in the City to really bring about economic development in our downtown area, and a lot of that has to do with some of the programs that we’re bringing about that help assist businesses who are trying to move downtown. There’s a lot of programs through the downtown Manager’s office that will help people as they get started; for example, like the Side Grant, which is money that can help revitalize the façade of your building. There’s also some rental assistance programs for people who are trying to bring certain types of businesses down here that will help them as they go through the process, just to kind of help give them a good footing and make sure that they’re business is successful.

And one of the programs that we just recently did is we changed our ordinance to make it less restrictive and less difficult to get signage put up on your building. As you know, in historic districts there’s a lot of what I call red tape that makes it difficult for you to get signage done in a timely manner. And so we were able with the other Commissioners to get that changed where the process—in essence, we took off about five weeks of waiting time to get a sign. So if businesses come to downtown and say listen, we need to be ready to roll in 30 days, we can make sure that they can really streamline that process and get their business up and running in the timeframe that they need it to be.

And so those are just some of the things that we’re looking at. And, of course, this is just an initial step. There will be some other things and we always like to get feedback from people as to what we can do to really make work downtown easy for people who want to bring businesses and be successful. And so we’ll be looking at those and other programs as time progresses in the future.